Samuel Lover was best known as a miniaturist painter and a dramatist, often performing his own written sketches and stories. Handy Andy remains his best-known novel, probably his only work to have remained palatable to later audiences.

Lover writes ironically in the novel’s “Address” of having been “accused, in certain quarters, of giving flattering portraits of my countrymen.” His punning reference to both his painting and his writing prepares the reader for the type of humor to follow. Openly shaping stereotypes, he notes that “the hero is a blundering servant” who no respectable Englishman would hire, and that his minor characters include two “Squires,” one good, one evil, meant to represent those universal types. He adds, “As a tale cannot get on without villains, I have given some touches of villainy, quite sufficient to prove my belief in Irish villains, though I do not wish it to be believed the Irish are all villains.”

The handy figure referred to in the title is Andy Rooney, a servant who does not know how to serve, that works for Squire Egan. Much of the novel’s action focuses on Egan’s conflict with his rival, the bad Squire O’Grady. Andy mostly interferes with his own squire due to his hopelessly inept actions, but in the novel’s conclusion is proved, in a parody of 18th-century novels of men of fortune, to be heir to the estate of Lord Scatterbrain.

From the opening page, Andy is a problem to everyone, including his mother, whose hair he pulls and whom he scratches until she bleeds. Nevertheless, she deems him “a darlin’,” and Andy himself seems unaware of his shortcomings. When he claims ability to ride a wild horse for his neighbor, the horse ends up falling through a bridge so that “half the saws, hatchets, ropes and poles in the parish” are required to free him. Still, Andy becomes a stable worker, then whipper of the hounds for Squire Egan.

He must face the ire of Dick Dawson, later Andy’s staunch supporter, from whom he hides under the bed of his mother, falling asleep there and later making her believe he is an Irish spirit come to murder her when he awakes and accidentally grabs her hand as she sleeps. His ineptness is so blatant that he tricks many into believing he pretends inefficiency as part of some intelligent plan.

When the local magistrate, Squire O’Grady, questions him about one mishap, Andy responds to his “string of questions” in such an “entangled” way that O’Grady was “as much puzzled as before, whether Andy was stupid and innocent, or too knowing to let himself be caught.” He decides the latter is true and hires Andy himself.

Squire O’Grady desires to marry his daughter to the present Lord Scatterbrain, and thus the association with that family begins. This allows the action, including Andy’s being implicated in a murder, to develop into the good fortune of Andy’s inheritance, his assuming the apt title of Lord Scatterbrain, and his marriage to the faithful and devoted Oonah.

The novel’s slapstick humor is continually showcased in scenes of mishap, such as one in which Andy is disguised as a girl by the local women for protection, then kidnapped in place of Oonah and almost “seduced” by the “blackguard” Shan Mor—a circumstance, along with Andy’s arrested emotional development and attachment to his mother, of interest to psychoanalytic critics. With audience demand for such bawdy and simplistic humor extended into the 21st century, many readers continue to appreciate Handy Andy.

Bibliography
Burke, Jerome H. The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture. New York: Vintage Books, 1964.
Orel, Harold, ed. The World of Victorian Humor. New York: Appleton, Century, Crofts, 1961.
Symington, Andrew. Samuel Lover, a Biographical Sketch with Selections from His Writings and Correspondence. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1880.

Categories: British Literature, Irish Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 19th-century comic novels, 19th-century Irish fiction, Analysis of Samuel Lover's Handy Andy, Andy Rooney character, comic misadventure fiction, comic novels, Handy Andy, Irish character tropes, Irish comedy novels, Irish inheritance trope, Irish literary tradition, Irish Literature, Irish servants in fiction, Irish stereotypes, Irish villain stereotypes, Lord Scatterbrain, psychoanalytic literary criticism, Samuel Lover, Samuel Lover biography, Samuel Lover dramatist, Samuel Lover Handy Andy analysis, Samuel Lover literary legacy, Samuel Lover painter, Samuel Lover's Handy Andy, satire in Irish fiction, slapstick humor, Squire Egan, Squire O’Grady, Victorian cultural studies, Victorian humor, Victorian novel parody