Charles Lever
Encyclopedia
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
novelist.
Biography
Lever was born in Dublin, the second son of James Lever, an architect and builder, and was educated in private schools. His escapades at Trinity College, DublinTrinity College, Dublin
Trinity College, Dublin , formally known as the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, was founded in 1592 by letters patent from Queen Elizabeth I as the "mother of a university", Extracts from Letters Patent of Elizabeth I, 1592: "...we...found and...
(1823–1828), where he took the degree in medicine in 1831, are drawn on for the plots of some of his novels. The character Frank Webber in the novel Charles O'Malley was based on a college friend, Robert Boyle, who later became a clergyman. Lever and Boyle earned pocket-money singing ballads of their own composing in the streets of Dublin and played many other pranks which Lever embellished in the novels O'Malley, Con Cregan and Lord Kilgobbin. Before seriously embarking upon his medical studies, Lever visited Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
as an unqualified surgeon on an emigrant ship, and has drawn upon some of his experiences in Con Cregan, Arthur O'Leary and Roland Cashel. Arriving in Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, he journeyed into the backwoods, where he was affiliated to a tribe of Native Americans
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
but had to flee because his life was in danger, as later his character Bagenal Daly did in his novel The Knight of Gwynne.
Back in Europe, he pretended he was a student from the University of Göttingen and travelled to the University of Jena (where he saw Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a German writer, pictorial artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and polymath. He is considered the supreme genius of modern German literature. His works span the fields of poetry, drama, prose, philosophy, and science. His Faust has been called the greatest long...
), and then to Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
. He loved German student life, and several of his songs, such as "The Pope He Loved a Merry Life", are based on student-song models. His medical degree earned him an appointment to the Board of Health in County Clare and then as a dispensary doctor in Portstewart
Portstewart
Portstewart is a small town in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. It had a population of 7,803 people in the 2001 Census. It is a seaside resort neighbouring Portrush. Of the two towns, Portstewart is decidedly quieter with more sedate attractions. Its harbour and scenic coastal paths form an...
, County Londonderry, but his conduct as a country doctor earned him the censure of the authorities.
In 1833 he married his first wife, Catherine Baker, and in February 1837, after varied experiences, he began publishing The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer in the recently established Dublin University Magazine
Dublin University Magazine
The Dublin University Magazine was an independent literary cultural and political magazine published in Dublin from 1833 to 1882. It started out as a magazine of political commentary but increasingly became devoted to literature.-Early days:...
. During the previous seven years the popular taste had had turned toward the "service novel", examples of which are Frank Mildmay (1829) by Frederick Marryat
Frederick Marryat
Captain Frederick Marryat was an English Royal Navy officer, novelist, and a contemporary and acquaintance of Charles Dickens, noted today as an early pioneer of the sea story...
, Tom Cringle's Log (1895) by Michael Scott
Michael Scott (novelist)
Michael Scott , British author, was born at Cowlairs, near Glasgow, the son of a Glasgow merchant.In 1806 he went to Jamaica, first managing some estates, and afterwards joining a business firm in Kingston...
, The Subaltern (1825) by George Robert Gleig
George Robert Gleig
George Robert Gleig was a Scottish soldier and military writer.Gleig was born in Stirling. His parents were George Gleig , Bishop of Brechin from October 1808) and Janet, née Hamilton....
, Cyril Thornton (1827) by Thomas Hamilton
Thomas Hamilton
Thomas, Tommy or Tom Hamilton may refer to:Aristocracy*Thomas Hamilton, 1st Earl of Haddington , Scottish administrator; Lord Advocate; judge; Lord Lieutenant of Haddingtonshire*Thomas Hamilton, 6th Earl of Haddington Thomas, Tommy or Tom Hamilton may refer to:Aristocracy*Thomas Hamilton, 1st Earl...
, Stories of Waterloo (1833) by William Hamilton Maxwell
William Hamilton Maxwell
William Hamilton Maxwell was a Scots-Irish novelist.He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He claimed to have entered the British Army and seen service in the Peninsular War and the Battle of Waterloo, but this is generally believed to be untrue...
, Ben Brace (1840) by Frederick Chamier
Frederick Chamier
Frederick Chamier was a novelist and naval captain.He was the son of an Anglo-Indian official, John Ezechial Camier and his wife Georgiana, daughter of Vice-admiral Sir William Burnaby....
and The Bivouac (1837), also by Maxwell. Lever had met William Hamilton Maxwell, the titular founder of the genre. Before Harry Lorrequer appeared in volume form (1839), Lever had settled on the strength of a slight diplomatic connection as a fashionable physician in Brussels
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
(Hertogstraat 16).
Lorrequer was merely a string of Irish and other stories good, bad and indifferent, but mostly rollicking, and Lever, who strung together his anecdotes late at night after the serious business of the day was done, was astonished at its success. "If this sort of thing amuses them, I can go on for ever." Brussels was indeed a superb place for the observation of half-pay officers, such as Major Monsoon (Commissioner Meade), Captain Bubbleton and the like, who terrorized the taverns of the place with their endless peninsular stories, and of English society a little damaged, which it became the specialty of Lever to depict. He sketched with a free hand, wrote, as he lived, from hand to mouth, and the chief difficulty he experienced was that of getting rid of his characters who "hung about him like those tiresome people who never can make up their minds to bid you good night." Lever had never taken part in a battle himself, but his next three books, Charles O'Malley (1841), Jack Hinton and Tom Burke of Ours (1843), written under the spur of the writer's chronic extravagance, contain some splendid military writing and some of the most animated battle-pieces on record. In pages of O'Malley and Tom Burke Lever anticipates not a few of the best effects of Marbot, Thibaut, Lejeune, Griois, Seruzier, Burgoyne and the like. His account of the Douro need hardly fear comparison, it has been said, with Napier's. Condemned by the critics, Lever had completely won the general reader from the Iron Duke himself downwards.
In 1842 he returned to Dublin to edit the Dublin University Magazine, and gathered round him a typical coterie of Irish wits (including one or two hornets) such as the O'Suilivans, Archer Butler
William Archer Butler
William Archer Butler was an Irish historian of philosophy.-Life:He was born at Annerville, near Clonmel in Ireland. His father was a Protestant, his mother a Roman Catholic, and he was brought up as a Catholic. As a boy he was imaginative and poetical, and some of his early verses were...
, W Carleton
William Carleton
William Carleton was an Irish novelist.Carleton's father was a Roman Catholic tenant farmer, who supported fourteen children on as many acres, and young Carleton passed his early life among scenes similar to those he later described in his books...
, Sir William Wilde, Canon Hayman, DF McCarthy, McGlashan, Dr Kencaly and many others. In June 1842 he welcomed at Templeogue, 4 miles south-west of Dublin, the author of the Snob Papers on his Irish tour (the Sketch Book was, later, dedicated to Lever). Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society.-Biography:...
recognized the fund of Irish sadness beneath the surface merriment. "The author's character is not humour but sentiment. The spirits are mostly artificial, the fond is sadness, as appears to me to be that of most Irish writing and people." The Waterloo episode in Vanity Fair was in part an outcome of the talk between the two novelists. But the "Galway pace," the display he found it necessary to maintain at Templeogue, the stable full of horses, the cards, the friends to entertain, the quarrels to compose and the enormous rapidity with which he had to complete Tom Burke, The O'Donoghue and Arthur O'Leary (1845) made his native land an impossible place for Lever to continue in. Templeogue would soon have proved another Abbotsford.
Thackeray suggested London. But Lever required a new field of literary observation and anecdote. His sve originel was exhausted and he decided to renew it on the continent. In 1845 he resigned his editorship and went back to Brussels, whence he started upon an unlimited tour of central Europe in a family coach. Now and again he halted for a few months, and entertained to the limit of his resources in some ducal castle or other which he hired for an off season. Thus at Riedenburg, near Bregenz
Bregenz
-Culture:The annual summer music festival Bregenzer Festspiele is a world-famous festival which takes place on and around a stage on Lake Constance, where a different opera is performed every second year.-Sport:* A1 Bregenz HB is a handball team....
, in August 1846, he entertained Charles Dickens and his wife and other well-known people. Like his own Daltons or Dodd Family Abroad he travelled continentally, from Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe
The City of Karlsruhe is a city in the southwest of Germany, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, located near the French-German border.Karlsruhe was founded in 1715 as Karlsruhe Palace, when Germany was a series of principalities and city states...
to Como
Como
Como is a city and comune in Lombardy, Italy.It is the administrative capital of the Province of Como....
, from Como to Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
, from Florence to the Baths of Lucca
Lucca
Lucca is a city and comune in Tuscany, central Italy, situated on the river Serchio in a fertile plainnear the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Lucca...
and so on, and his letters home are the litany of the literary remittance man, his ambition now limited to driving a pair of novels abreast without a diminution of his standard price for serial work ("twenty pounds a sheet"). In the Knight of Gwynne, a story of the Union (1847), Con Cregan (1840), Roland Cashel (1850) and Maurice Tiernay (1852) we still have traces of his old manner; but he was beginning to lose his original joy in composition. His fond of sadness began to cloud the animal joyousness of his temperament. Formerly he had written for the happy world which is young and curly anti merry; now he grew fat and bald and grave. "After 38 or so what has life to offer but one universal declension. Let the crew pump as hard as they like, the leak gains every hour."
But, depressed in spirit as he was, his wit was unextinguished; he was still the delight of the salons with his stories, and in 1867, after a few years' experience of a similar kind at Spezia, he was cheered by a letter from Lord Derby offering him the more lucrative consulship of Trieste. "Here is six hundred a year for doing nothing, and you are just the man to do it." The six hundred could not atone to Lever for the lassitude of prolonged exile. Trieste
Trieste
Trieste is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is situated towards the end of a narrow strip of land lying between the Adriatic Sea and Italy's border with Slovenia, which lies almost immediately south and east of the city...
, at first "all that I could desire," became with characteristic abruptness "detestable and damnable." "Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, no one to speak to." "Of all the dreary places it has been my lot to sojourn in this is the worst" (some references to Trieste will be found in That Boy of Norcott's, 1869). He could never be alone and was almost morbidly dependent upon literary encouragement. Fortunately, like Scott, he had unscrupulous friends who assured him that his last efforts were his best. They include The Fortunes of Glencore (1857), Tony Butler (1865), Luthell of Arran (1865), Sir Brooke Fosbrooke (1866), Lord Kilgobbin (1872) and the table-talk of Cornelius O'Dowd, originally contributed to Blackwood.
His depression, partly due to incipient heart disease, partly to the growing conviction that he was the victim of literary and critical conspiracy, was confirmed by the death of his wife (April 23, 1870), to whom he was tenderly attached. He visited Ireland in the following year and seemed alternately in very high and very low spirits. Death had already given him one or two runaway knocks, and, after his return to Trieste, he failed gradually, dying suddenly, however, and almost painlessly, from failure of the heart's action on 1 June 1872 at Villa Gasteiger. His daughters, one of whom, Sydney, is believed to have been the real author of The Rent in a Cloud (1869), were well provided for.
Writing
Trollope praised Lever's novels highly when he said that they were just like his conversation. He was a born raconteur, and had in perfection that easy flow of light description which without tedium or hurry leads up to the point of the good stories of which in earlier days his supply seemed inexhaustible. With little respect for unity of action or conventional novel structure, his brightest books, such as Lorrequer, O'Malley and Tom Burke, are in fact little more than recitals of scenes in the life of a particular "hero," unconnected by any continuous intrigue. The type of character he depicted is for the most part elementary. His women are mostly roués, romps or XanthippeXanthippe
Xanthippe was the wife of Socrates and mother of their three sons: Lamprocles, Sophroniscus, and Menexenus. There are far more stories about her than there are facts. She was likely much younger than Socrates, perhaps by as much as forty years.-Name:...
s; his heroes have too much of the Pickle temper about them and fail an easy prey to the serious attacks of Poe or to the more playful gibes of Thackeray in Phil Fogarty or Bret Harte in Terence Deuville. This last is a perfect bit of burlesque. Terence exchanges nineteen shots with the Hon. Captain Henry Somerset in the glen. "At each fire I shot away a button from his uniform. As, my last bullet shot off the last button from his sleeve, I remarked quietly, "You seem now, my lord, to be almost as ragged as the gentry you sneered at," and rode haughtily away." And yet these careless sketches contain such haunting creations as Frank Webber, Major Monsoon and Micky Free, "the Sam Weller of Ireland".
Superior, it is sometimes claimed, in construction and style, the later books lack the panache of Lever's untamed youth. Where else shall we find the equals of the military scenes in O'Malley and Torn Burke, or the military episodes in Jack Hinton, Arthur O'Leary (the story of Aubuisson) or Maurice Tiernay (nothing he ever did is finer than the chapter introducing "A remnant of Fontenoy")? It is here that his true genius lies, even more than in his talent for conviviality and fun, which makes an early copy of an early Lever (with Phix's illustrations) seem literally to exhale an atmosphere of past and present entertainment it is here that he is a true romancist, not for boys only, but also for men.
Lever's lack of artistry and of sympathy with the deeper traits of the Irish character have been stumbling-blocks to his reputation among the critics. Except to some extent in The Martins of CroMartin (1856) it may be admitted that his portraits of Irish are drawn too exclusively from the type, depicted in Sir Jonah Barrington's
Jonah Barrington (judge)
Sir Jonah Barrington , was one of no less than sixteen children, six at least, and probably seven were sons of John Barrington, a landowner in County Laois...
Memoirs and already well known on the English stage. He certainly had no deliberate intention of "lowering the national character." Quite the reverse. Yet his posthumous reputation seems to have suffered in consequence, in spite of all his Gallic sympathies and not unsuccessful endeavours to apotheosize the "Irish Brigade."
A library edition of the novels in 37 volumes appeared 1897 to 1899 under the superintendence of Lever's daughter, Julie Kate Neville.
See also
- Dr Quicksilver, The Life of Charles Lever, Lionel Stevenson, London 1939.
- Charles Lever: New Evaluations, Edited Tony Bareham, Ulster Editions and Monographs 3. 1991.
- Charles Lever, The Lost Victorian, S.P Haddelsey, Ulster Editions and Monographs 8. 2000.
Further reading
- Life, by WJ Fitzpatrick (1879).
- Letters, ed. in 2 vols. by Edmund Downey (1906).
- Richard GarnettRichard GarnettRichard Garnett C.B. was a scholar, librarian, biographer and poet. He was son of Richard Garnett, an author, philologist and assistant keeper of printed books in the British Museum....
in the Dictionary of National BiographyDictionary of National BiographyThe Dictionary of National Biography is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published from 1885...
. - Dublin Univ. Mag. (1880), 465 and 570.
- Anthony Trollope's Autobiography; Blackwood (August 1862).
- Fortnightly Review, vol. xxxii.
- Andrew Lang's Essays in Little (1892).
- Henley's Views and Reviews.
- Hugh Walker's Literature of the Victorian Era (1910).
- The Bookman History of English Literature (1906) p. 467.
- Bookman (June 1906; portraits).
External links
- Works by Charles Lever at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
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