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Excerpt from Handy Andy: A Tale of Irish Life
After a while, Andy became a source of worry to the author. The progress of the story shows that Lover did not know what to do with that odd personage. Clearly, it would never do to let him end his days as a waiter or servant. So apparently thought Lover. It would have been better, no doubt, had Andy been left in his original station, for his elevation to the peerage and final rationalisation (if such a term is permissible) are artistic blunders from one point of view, but Lover was confronted with the eternal question of giving people value for their money, and to write a novel in less than four or five hundred pages seemed in those days a kind of crime, a sort of nefarious attempt to cheat the novel-reading public of its full measure. Consequently, we may assume that Lover, in sheer desperation, caught at any idea which helped out the matter, and made Andy heir to the Scatterbrain estates. He was also obliged to introduce, for a similar reason, several excrescences into the work which could very well be dispensed with. The incubus of Shan's sister might easily have been avoided. Lover evidently forgot, at the end, the earlier marriage of Andy; and some other inconsistencies might be pointed out. It is curious too, how the story becomes coarser as it proceeds. Lover's love-songs and other poems are so very refined that it becomes matter for surprise that he should write the occasional coarse passages which occur here and there in Handy Andy and others of his stories.
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