Character Biography: Ian Hennessey

Daily Diary, May 10, 2023 Day 981

Hope you all enjoy this biography, as many of you did the one on Jamie Hewitt. Also, thanks to those of you who have gone on to buy Tides of Acerba. I just saw it got one of those #1 New Release banners on Amazon. I grabbed a screen shot here. Between you and me, one doesn’t need to sell a whole lot of ebooks to get this for a small category, but its still nice to get!

Ian Hennessey:

Ian, whose older sister is Kathleen Hennessey, the servant in the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse, was born November 1869. In Dandy and the Dognappers, he is in the eighth grade, attending Clement Grammar, and about to turn thirteen. He has been living in the boardinghouse, sharing an attic room with Jamie Hewitt, for over a year and a half.

Physical description: Ian “was small-boned like Kathleen, with black untidy hair and a twinkle of mischief in his dark blue eyes.”

Personality: Orphaned at a very young age, brought up in poverty, Ian is nevertheless quite resilient. Generally, he exhibits a light-hearted, carefree demeanor, but this can hide deeper feelings, especially his sense of responsibility to protect those younger or weaker than himself.

Ian Hennessey is Kathleen’s youngest brother, and he was only five when the four Hennessey children were separated at their father’s death. Their mother had died a year earlier in childbirth. Kathleen, the oldest and only thirteen, was sent out to work as a scullery maid. Her three younger brothers were divided up between three different uncles to raise.

Kathleen, worried about Ian because of his youth, does what she can to look out after him. She sent most of her wages to the uncle who has taken him, hoping Ian will stay in school and not be apprenticed out at a young age like his older brothers.

The reader is first introduced to Ian in the second novel, Uneasy Spirits, when he comes to the Halloween party at the boardinghouse. That is the night when he and Jamie Hewutt first become friends. Frankly, I initially introduced Ian as a way to expand on Kathleen’s back story and provide a foil to the more serious and shy Jamie.

In the third book, Bloody Lessons, set the next fall, the two boys have started hanging out together, and I was able to develop Ian a little more as his own person.

However, like Jamie Hewitt, it is in the novella, Dandy Delivers, that we really get to know Ian, and it is this story that explains how and why he ends up living in the boardinghouse.

Here is the introduction to Ian in this novella:

“And Ian liked school…was especially good at math. But this fall, he’d started working as a newsboy in the afternoons and weekends so he’d been having trouble finding the time to study the way he should. Even though Ian was a year older and a grade ahead of Jamie, they’d discovered that the teacher in Ian’s seventh-grade class had his students working out of some old sixth-grade textbooks that were the same as the texts that Jamie used at his school. As a result, Jamie was able to help when his friend got stumped.”

Ian’s experience working as a newsie, selling papers, is central to Dandy Delivers. The reader gets to see how difficult his life has been, something he had been stubbornly hiding from everyone, and this will have very serious consequences in his life that are life-changing.

The ebook edition of Dandy Delivers is only $2.99 and for the month of May, the audiobook is also $2.99 on selected retailers.