Born, in Dublin, 31 Aug. 1806. Educated at private schools. To Trinity College, Dublin, 14 Oct. 1822; B.A., 1827. Visit to Holland and Germany, 1828; to Canada, 1829. Returned to Dublin, 1830; studied medicine. M.D., Trinity College, Dublin, 1831. Held various Board of Health appointments, 1831–33. Married Catherine Baker, 1832 or 1833. Contrib. fiction to “Dublin Univ. Mag.,” from May 1836. In Brussels, 1840–42; returned to Dublin, 1842. Editor of “Dublin Univ. Mag.,” 1842–45. In Belgium and Germany, 1845–47. In Florence, 1847–57. British Consul at Spezzia, 1857–67; at Trieste, 1867–72. Visit to Ireland, 1871. LL.D., Dublin, 1871. Died suddenly, at Trieste, 1 June 1872. Works: “The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer” (anon.), 1839; “Horace Templeton,” 1840[?]; “Charles O’Malley” (anon.), 1841; “Our Mess” (vol. i., “Jack Hinton, the Guardsman;” vols. ii., iii., “Tom Burke of Ours”), 1843; “Arthur O’Leary” (anon.), 1844; “St. Patrick’s Eve,” 1845; “Tales of the Trains” (under pseud.: “Tilbury Tramp”), 1845; “The O’Donoghue,” 1845; “The Knight of Gwynne,” 1847; “Diary and Notes of Horace Templeton” (anon.), 1848; “Confessions of Con Cregan (anon.), 1849–50; “Roland Cashel,” 1850; “The Daltons,” 1852; “The Dodd Family Abroad,” 1854; “Sir Jasper Carew” (anon.) [1855]; “The Fortunes of Glencore,” 1857; “The Martins of Cro’ Martin,” 1856; “Davenport Dunn” [1857–59]; “One of Them,” 1860; “Maurice Tiernay” (anon.), 1861; “Barrington” [1862]; “A Day’s Ride,” 1864; “Cornelius O’Dowd upon Men and Women” (anon.), 1864–65; “Luttrell of Arran,” 1865; “Tony Butler” (anon.), 1865; Sir Brook Fossbrooke,” 1866; “The Bramleighs of Bishop’s Folly,” 1868; “Paul Gosslett’s Confessions,” 1868; “That Boy of Norcott’s,” 1869; “A Rent in a Cloud, and St. Patrick’s Eve,” 1871; “Lord Kilgobbin,” 1872. Collected Novels: ed. by his daughter, 1897, etc. Life: by W. F. Fitzpatrick, 1879.

Personal

  Besides the chestnut woods and you, your ownselves, I should be delighted to see Mr. Lever. You know I have always had a mannish sort of fancy for those “Charles O’Malley” and “Jack Hinton” books, which always put me in good spirits and good humor (I wish he wrote so now); and I remember hearing from his illustrator, Mr. Browne, that he was exactly the “Harry Lorrequer” he describes—that is to say, full of life and glee, and all that is animating and agreeable. I remember, too, most gratefully the pleasure his books gave to my father.

  On our arrival here Mr. Lever called on us. A most cordial vivacious manner, a glowing countenance, with the animal spirits somewhat predominant over the intellect, yet the intellect by no means in default; you can’t help being surprised into being pleased with him, whatever your previous inclination may be. Natural too, and a gentleman past mistake. His eldest daughter is nearly grown up, and his youngest six months old. He has children of every sort of intermediate age almost, but he himself is young enough still. Not the slightest Irish accent. He seems to have spent nearly his whole life on the Continent and by no means to be tired of it.

  In his character were many different elements combined. He had the fearlessness of manhood, softened by woman’s sensibility and purity, with the exuberance of life belonging to a boy. He possessed marvellous powers of fascination, attracting to him, and straightway converting into friends for a lifetime, men of different stations and moulds. The peer, the fellow of college, the judge, the country squire, the parson, the doctor, the statesman, the lawyer, the littérateur, the lowly peasant both in Italy and at home, alike appreciated him.

  With regard to the famous accusation of “lordolatry” which Thackeray is said to have brought against him, I think that the passage in the “Book of Snobs” has been somewhat misinterpreted. But nobody can read either his novels or his life without seeing that from the last infirmity of British minds he was not free. He gained plenty of money, but he got rid of it in all sorts of ways, to which it is difficult to apply any milder description than that which was applied to the extravagance of his greater countryman Goldsmith. If he did not exactly fling it away and hide it in holes and corners, like Lamb’s eccentric friend, he did what amounted to nearly the same thing. He was an inveterate gambler. He kept absurd numbers of horses, and gave unreasonable prices for them. To his lavish hospitality one feels less inclined to object, were it not that “wax candles and some of the best wine in Europe” are not wholly indispensable to literary fellowship. Like many other men of letters in our country, he could not be satisfied without meddling with politics, and endeavouring, though with no great success, to mingle in political society. His wild oats were not of a very atrocious wildness, but he never ceased sowing them. The consequence was that his literary work was not only an indispensable gagne-pain to him, but was also never anything else than a gagne-pain. It was always written in hot haste, and with hardly any attention to style, to arrangement, or even to such ordinary matters as the avoidance of repetitions, anachronisms, and such-like slovenliness.

  How shall I speak of my dear old friend Charles Lever, and his rattling, jolly, joyous, swearing Irishman. Surely never did a sense of vitality come so constantly from a man’s pen, nor from a man’s voice, as from his! I knew him well for many years, and whether in sickness or in health I have never come across him without finding him to be running over with wit and fun. Of all the men I have encountered, he was the surest fund of drollery. I have known many witty men, many who could say good things, many who would sometimes be ready to say them when wanted, though they would sometimes fail—but he never failed. Rouse him in the middle of the night, and wit would come from him before he was half awake. And yet he never monopolized the talk, was never a bore. He would take no more than his own share of the words spoken, and would yet seem to brighten all that was said during the night. His earlier novels—the later I have not read—are just like his conversation. The fun never flags, and to me, when I read them, they were never tedious. As to character, he can hardly be said to have produced it. Corney Delaney, the old manservant, may perhaps be named as an exception.

  Dr. Lever was at that time (1840) the only English physician in Brussels, and never perhaps was a physician less fitted for his calling. Although (possibly “pressed by hunger and request of friends”) he “practised,” he could not and did not inspire much confidence in his patients, for he made no secret of being a médecin malgré lui, loudly proclaiming, even among his clientèle, his hatred of the occupation, and taking every opportunity of practically proving his words. He used to come into his consulting-room in the most literary style of costume, wearing a black velvet dressing-gown, confined at the waist by a scarlet silk cord and tassels, and with the inevitable pen behind his ear, not for the convenience of inditing prescriptions, but to lose no time in getting back to his magazine articles as soon as he should have dispatched his patient.

Charles O’Malley, 1841

  It would, indeed, be difficult to convey to one who has not examined this production for himself, any idea of the exceedingly rough, clumsy, and inartistical manner in which even this bald conception is carried out. The stories are absolutely dragged in by the ears. So far from finding them result naturally or plausibly from the conversation of the interlocutor, even the blindest reader may perceive the author’s struggling and blundering effort to introduce them.

  Modern English literature has not produced a more Shakespearian—I might say a more original—comic character than Lever’s Major Monsoon in “Charles O’Malley.” But Major Monsoon is well known to be a minutely accurate portrait of the character, a faithful chronicle of the sayings and doings, of a real living person.

  The charm of the book is complete; and for break-neck, dashing narrative, for wit, sparkle, and genuine Irish drollery, interspersed here and there with tender touches of pathos and soft gray tones of sorrow, “Charles O’Malley” stands unrivalled, and will hold its own when hundreds of so-called Irish romances shall have returned to the dust out of which they should never have emerged, even into a spasmodic vitality.

  “O’Malley” is what you can recommend to a friend. Here is every species of diversion: duels and steeplechases, practical jokes at college (good practical jokes, not booby traps and apple-pie beds); here is fighting in the Peninsula. If any student is in doubt, let him turn chapter xiv.—the battle on the Douro. This is, indeed, excellent military writing, and need not fear comparison as art with Napier’s famous history. Lever has warmed to his work; his heart is in it; he had the best information from an eye-witness; and the brief beginning, on the peace of nature before the strife of men, is admirably poetical…. The critics may praise Lever’s thoughtful and careful later novels as they will, but “Charles O’Malley” will always be the pattern of a military romance. The anecdote of “a virtuous weakness” in O’Shaughnessy’s father’s character would alone make the fortune of many a story. The truth is, it is not easy to lay down “Charles O’Malley.”

  High spirits and reckless adventure gave attractiveness to the early and most rollicking novels of Charles Lever; but even “Charles O’Malley,” the best of them, needs to be read very light-heartedly to be convincing.

General

  He has a large circle of readers, and many of them would say they prefer him to anybody else; but if you tried to elicit from them one good reason, they would have no better answer to give than “Oh! he’s a capital fellow!” What the French call material life, is the whole life he recognizes; and that life is a jest, and a very loud one, in his philosophy. The sense of beauty and love he does not recognize at all, except in our modern condition of social animals. To read him is like sitting in the next room to an orgie of gentlemen topers, with their noisy gentility and “hip! hip! hurras!” and the rattling din of plates and glasses. In his way, he is a very clever writer, nobody can deny; but he is contracted and conventional, and unrefined in his line of conventionality. His best descriptions are of military life. He is most at home in the mess-room. He has undoubted humour and a quick talent of invention of comic scenes, which generally end in broad farce. He does not represent fairly even the social and jovial side of men of much refinement, or, if he does he should not represent them as he does, on all sides thus social and jovial.

  O’Dowd’s anecdotes constitute his greatest charm; and his sketches of national character show minute and delicate portraiture.

  The “Prince of neck-or-nothing novelists,” as he is called…. What Horace demanded has been permitted to Lever, who has not only told the truth with a smiling face, but has brought the tears into many eyes, and with all his fun and frolic has never brought a blush to any cheek. He has not attempted to preach; he has not been either a stoic or a cynic. His philosophy is rather of the garden of Epicurus, and the enjoyment he teaches is that of manliness and reason, and for good, clean, wholesome reading, which will leave no headache or heartache, and no dregs within the mind, commend us to Charles Lever.

  As a delineator of the droll side of Irish life and character, and of army life in general, Lever is unequalled. The plot of his novels is usually weak, and the professed heroines are tame and conventional. But the other characters are all highly marked, and reveal a wealth of humor and fun that borders on the incredible. They are all excellent, and some of them, like Mickey Free and Major Monsoon, may be safely classed among the greatest literary creations. Lever’s later works are not so good as his early ones, because they treat of the same general themes, and are consequently lacking in freshness…. Of all care-dispelling, mirth-provoking books, “Charles O’Malley” is the most genial. It is one carnival of wit, humor, and revelry from end to end, with just enough of the shady side of life to temper the merriment, and prevent it from becoming monotonous, as is the case in “Verdant Green.”

  But a third name is wanting to complete the group of Irish novelists—that of the vivacious and delightful Lever. If judged by his later works, it is easy to think him superior to either of his predecessors [Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan], simply because he combines so much that is distinctive of them both. He partakes so largely the sagacious insight and practical purpose of the one, in union with the hearty buoyant, joyous temperament of the other. He traverses, in common with them, the higher and middle grades of life (he is less successful with the lower); but with an ampler knowledge of the world, and of the political history of his time. And if, as a Protestant and a Conservative, he seems less sensible of the national endurances and claims, he is alive to faults on all sides, can weigh excuses with offences, and, whatever his race’s failings, can as warmly and proudly as any one acknowledge all their offsets…. And the style of these narrations is quite on a par with their details. It positively gallops across the pages. It is literature on horseback riding down a capital joke. And as the style, so is the knowledge. These stories are as authoritative on horse flesh, on field sports, on claret, or on cookery, as they are a perfect vade mecum on that higher indulgence—an affair of honour. From the insult and the uproar, up to the loading of the pistols and putting the parties in position, nothing is wanting to complete the picture of this grand climax to a festivity.

  Besides his strange adventures, his battle-scenes, and romantic exploits, Mr. Lever has a rich, racy, national humour. His heroes have all strong love of adventure, a national proneness to blundering, and a tendency to get into scrapes and questionable situations. The author’s chief fault is his sometimes mistaking farce for comedy—mere animal spirits for wit or humour.

  It is with a pang of regret that we peruse the “Cornelius O’Dowd” papers. They are tinged with that abominable spirit which is sending Italy at the present hour to perdition, and we greatly fear that Mr. Lever wrote them for the London market. He was no bigot, however; on the contrary, his life was passed amongst Catholics, and his dearest and best friends were of the true church; consequently, the pain is intensified when we come to stand face to face with the fact that these papers were, if not the outcome of a pecuniary necessity, at least the result of a craving for money, and the hollow effusions of a hireling pen. His Italian sojourn led him gradually away from the more kindly tone towards Catholics which pervaded his earlier Irish novels.

  The works of Charles Lever, while possessing considerable interest for most mature minds, are much more popular with the young…. The style is bold, dashing and careless. There is no attempt at close analysis of motives or balancing of probabilities. The hero relates his own adventures, and leaves his audience to guess at the motives which actuated those with whom he came in contact. Incidents follow each other in rapid succession. When one danger is escaped by the hero, he immediately gets into another scrape of some kind. We are kept in a state of constant concern for him. Either his liberty is threatened by the machinations of enemies, his life endangered by duels, or his hope of winning the one woman who can make him happy on the point of being changed to despair by his temporary yielding to the fascinations of pretty women, with whom he is brought into contact. He is no monster of perfection, like many heroes who are popular with the young, but endowed with a fair share of human weaknesses.

  Perhaps a word ought to be said of the rattling romances of Irish electioneering, love-making, and fighting which set people reading “Charles O’Malley” and “Jack Hinton,” even when “Pickwick” was still a novelty. Charles Lever had wonderful animal spirits and a broad, bright humor. He was quite genuine in his way. He afterwards changed his style completely, and with much success; and will be found in the later part of the period holding just the same relative place as in the earlier, just behind the foremost men, but in manner so different that he might be a new writer who had never read a line of the roystering adventures of Light Dragoons which were popular when Charles Lever first gave them to the world. There was nothing great about Lever, but the literature of the Victorian period would not be quite all that we know it without him.

  Although it is only a few years since Lever died, his popularity as a novelist had been at the time so long waning that his death had not the effect, as in the case of Thackeray and Dickens, of bringing to an abrupt termination a brilliant career; but rather of reviving for a brief time a reputation already almost extinct. And yet there was a time when instalments of a new novel by the author of “Harry Lorrequer” were almost as eagerly awaited as those of the authors of “Vanity Fair” or “Oliver Twist,” and there was never a period during his long literary activity when Lever’s ready wit and fertile imagination were not equal to the task of producing fiction far more deserving of attention than nine-tenths of the successful novels of the present time.

  In our opinion his best work was done in his latter years, when in a series of novels, wanting, indeed, the fire and dash of his early performances, but infinitely more accurate as delineations of life and character, he gave to the world the mellowed experience of an acute observer who had seen many phases of existence, and could comment on them with shrewdness and accuracy.

  Lever’s novels will not live long, even if they may be said to be alive now…. What was his manner of working I do not know, but I should think it must have been very quick, and that he never troubled himself on the subject, except when he was seated with a pen in his hand.

  The “first edition craze” shows no signs of abatement. Indeed, it is impossible to say where the extravagance of this latest form of bibliographical madness will end. At a recent sale at Sotheby’s there were some good first editions of Thackeray, Dickens, and Charles Lever. The author of “Harry Lorrequer,” however, seemed to be the favorite. A complete set of the first edition of Lever fetched the extraordinary price of £275.

  He never worked on a definite plan nor was at any pains to contrive a plot; he depended on the morning’s impressions for the evening’s task, and wrote “Con Cregan” under the immediate influence of a travelled Austrian, who used to talk to him every night ere he sat down to his story. But he was a wonderful improvisatore. He had imagination—(even romantic imagination: as the episode of Menelaus Crick in “Con Cregan” will show)—a keen, sure eye for character, incomparable facility in composition, an inexhaustible fund of shrewdness, whimsicality, high spirits, an admirable knack of dialogue; and as consul at Spezzia and at Trieste, as a fashionable practitioner at Brussels, as dispensary doctor of the wild Ulster coast, he was excellently placed for the kind of literature it was in him to produce. Writing at random and always under the spur of necessity, he managed to inform his work with extraordinary vitality and charm. His books were only made to sell, but it is like enough that they will also live, for they are yet well nigh as readable as at first, and Nina and Kate O’Donoghue—(for instance)—seem destined to go down to posterity as typical and representative.

  Had great ability as a story-teller, but little of the novelist’s art. His stories are a collection of fragments.

  It [“Harry Lorrequer”] is merely a string of Irish and other stories, good, bad, and indifferent—a picture gallery full of portraits of priests, soldiers, peasants and odd characters. The plot is of no importance; we are not interested in Harry’s love affairs, but in his scrapes, adventures, duels at home and abroad. He fights people by mistake whom he does not know by sight, he appears on parade with his face blackened, he wins large piles at trente et quarante, he disposes of coopers of claret and bowls of punch, and the sheep on a thousand hills provide him with deviled kidneys. The critics and the authors thought little of the merry medley, but the public enjoyed it, and defied the reviewers. One paper preferred the book to a wilderness of “Pickwicks.”

  The latter part of his life Lever spent chiefly on the continent as a consul at Spezza, Trieste, etc., and his later works were more elaborate, full of diplomacy and intrigue, full, too, of the speculations and devices of that special figure, the Irishman abroad, but failing considerably in the racy wit and fun of his earlier works. His plots become too intricate, and the various threads of his story so irretrievably mixed that the author himself often seemed to forget what his original intention had been, and merely sought the quickest way out of the labyrinth in which he had involved himself.

  An author without sufficient literary vocation. Had his circumstances been easy, he probably would not have written at all. His earliest and most popular writings can hardly rank as literature, though their vigour and gaiety, and the excellent anecdotes and spirited songs with which they are interspersed, will always render them attractive. He is almost destitute of invention or imagination, his personages are generally transcripts from the life, and his incidents stories told at second hand. At a later period in his career he awoke in some measure to the claims of art, and exhibited more proficiency as a writer, with less damage to his character as a humorist, than might have been expected.

  The convivial spirit is one that, setting law and order at defiance, often shows too little respect for technique; and Lever’s verse, like his prose, is popular more for its spirit than its form.

  Although Lever died so recently as 1872, his biography contains much that is doubtful or obscure; many works are credited, or perhaps debited to him, which probably never issued from his pen, and for this reason the compilation of a correct, and at the same time a complete bibliography, which has never yet been attempted, would be an exceptionally difficult task…. In March 1889, Messrs. Sotheby disposed of the collection of Lever’s works formed by Mr. John Mansfield Mackenzie of Edinburgh, and it is worthy of note that the catalogue contained the items mentioned below, and no others. The collection realised £275, an exceptional price, for the books were uniformly bound in Rivière’s best manner, and were often extra illustrated with Browne’s original drawings and many extra plates. So far as I know, no other collection can claim to approach this in point of perfection and beauty of appearance, the cardinal points that regulate the course of every advanced collector of early editions.

  Lever represents the world before the Revolution, before education, refinement, birth, respect for things old, were swamped in democracy…. We really cannot decorously request the Ibsenite to share our pleasure in Lever. An old fellow reading him again, remembers his early youth, when the Great Duke was his hero, when Charles O’Malley was his love, when, being a very idle little boy, he read Scott, Thackeray, Harry Lorrequer, Dickens, Marryat, Captain Mayne Reid, indiscriminately and assiduously, neglecting Cæsar’s valuable commentaries “De Bello Gallico.” We were not critical then, and we enjoyed a romance in the London Journal—a romance about the wicked Muscovites and the cruel Duke Constantine—almost as much as “Old Mortality.” These uncritical days do not return, but time cannot shake our affection for Lever. As it was then, so it is yet with boys, one presumes…. It is undeniable that a more refined and self-conscious manner has arisen in fiction; and it is pretty certain that Lever is not at present widely read by men professionally engaged in literature. But the mere aspect of his books in a library shows that they have been well and duly thumbed by that large majority of readers who “read for human pleasure,” and like a story for the story’s sake. He aimed at no higher or more distant goal and what he aimed at he attained. He was sensitive, but he was not vain; and as to his achievements, he had not an atom of conceit or self-consciousness. To be the most popular romancer of his country, beyond all question the most widely read, sufficed for Charles Lever. In literature, as in life, he was an unsophisticated example of the natural man; and while we cannot place him among the six or seven great novelists of the world—with Cervantes, Lesage, Fielding, Scott, Dumas, Thackeray, Tolstoi—we owe him a great deal of gratitude and liking.

  Lever at different times of his life manifested almost all the gifts which the novelist requires, though unfortunately he never quite managed to exhibit them all together.

  Lever’s characters though lively are never subtle—the constant anecdotes interspersed in his stories were often second-hand—but he had a zest and spirit withal that carried him into popular favor.