Charles Lever, the Lost Victorian

At the peak of his career, Charles Lever (1806-1872) was one of the most successful novelists in the English language, and the only mid-nineteenth century Irish novelist to vie with Charles Dickens in popularity and earning potential. Yet, within three decades of his death, his works had sunk into uninterrupted obscurity. The light-heartedness of his earliest novels, The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer (1839) and Charles O’Malley - the Irish Dragoon (1841), brought condemnation from Nationalists who championed the serious and didactic purpose of literature in highlighting the desperate plight of Ireland’s indigenous population. It is in Lever’s positive and thoughtful reaction to these criticisms that his profound contribution to Irish literature in English is to be identified, most of all in his sensitive and ultimately pessimistic analysis of the role of the doomed Protestant ascendancy. In this incisive critical study, Stephen Haddelsey charts the rise and fall of this gifted and much-maligned commentator on Irish affairs, and calls for a reappraisal of his position in the canon of Irish literature. Using a selection from the thirty novels and five volumes of essays, he argues that Lever’s contribution is unique in its evolution from a Tory and non-separatist stance to the near-overt and despairing advocacy of Home Rule in his final and greatest novel, Lord Kilgobbin (1872).