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Charles Lever and Ireland Thesis Submitted in Accordance with the Requirements of the University of Liverpool for the Degree Of Charles Lever and Ireland Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy by Anne Maria Skinner May 2019 Abstract Charles Lever and Ireland A. Maria Skinner Following imposition of the Act of Union, which came into force on 1 January (1801), a literary market developed amongst English readers who wanted to understand more about Ireland. The market for novels about Ireland flourished. Charles James Lever, a writer whose work too few are really familiar with today, and whose reputation deserves rescuing from obscurity, rose to tremendous popularity in the late 1830s. Charles Lever’s remarkable commercial success was initially established using some carelessly constructed clichés of Irishness, intended to amuse an increasingly lucrative English market. This is one of the reasons that his work has subsequently been overlooked. Critical neglect of Lever’s work can in part be attributed to Yeats’ failure to appreciate the value of his later work, particularly in terms of Lever’s post-1844 Irish historical fiction. Lever’s posthumous reputation has also suffered because too many scholars have relied upon regenerating the opinions of earlier critics who have, like Yeats, not really engaged with the breadth of Lever’s work. Lever’s contemporaries, Anthony Trollope and particularly William Makepeace Thackeray, drew inspiration from him, and sought to emulate Lever’s success with their own ‘Irish’ novels, based on the popularity of Irish subject matter in the early stage of their careers. But Catholic Emancipation, the Great Irish Famine, the struggle for Repeal of the Union, the Papal Aggression, and discourse in England regarding the ‘Irish Question’, all served to dampen the market for novels with an Irish setting, prompting Trollope and Lever to leave Irish subject matter alone by the mid-nineteenth century. Charles Lever’s continued insistence on chronicling Ireland’s historic explanations of contemporary issues, had to compete with increasingly negative constructions of Irish national identity in England. By the early 1850s, Lever had realised that the mythical vision of the landlord-tenant compact, that he had endorsed as a younger man, was no longer possible in light of the massive social upheaval manifested by the Famine, and his novels became increasingly complex, as he continued his mission to explain Ireland to an English market that was less inclined to want to understand. There is a discernible progression in Lever’s writing towards an Irish nationalist argument, for which Lever has never fully been credited. His misconstrued reputation as an enduring Tory-Unionist, has obscured the value of his contribution to the nineteenth-century Irish nationalist debate, and this thesis seeks to rectify misinformed judgements on Lever’s work. Table of Contents Page Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Life, Legacy and Rollicking 14 Chapter 2: William Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Charles Lever’s ‘Irelands’. 46 Chapter 3: Charles Lever, Dublin, Politics, and Religion 84 Chapter 4: Charles Lever in Europe 122 Chapter 5: Latter Years, Cornelius O’Dowd, and Lord Kilgobbin 166 Conclusion 201 INTRODUCTION Word Count: 4, 429 This study began to develop through an initial interest in Anthony Trollope, and why he followed his publisher’s advice against writing further novels with an Irish setting during the Great Irish Famine. In his Autobiography (1883), Trollope referred to Charles Lever three times; initially comparing him with his good friend George Henry Lewes, whom he called ‘Billy Russell’,1 then referring to Lever’s ‘rattling, jolly, joyous’ characters and admitting that he had not read Lever’s later books.2 Trollope’s final reference to Lever was in a list of the people who were contributing to St. Paul’s magazine during his time as editor.3 This list included Lever alongside George Henry Lewes, Sir Charles Trevelyan, and Margaret Oliphant. Lever was a writer I had not been familiar with when I first read Trollope’s Autobiography. So, it is thanks to Anthony Trollope that I discovered the writer whose work has come to be the focus of this thesis. Nearly twenty-one years ago, in March 1988, at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, a number of eminent scholars convened at a conference to deliver papers on the nineteenth- century Irish writer Charles James Lever. A number of those papers delivered at that conference were subsequently compiled into a collection of essays entitled Charles Lever: New Evaluations (1991). In his introduction to that volume, the editor Tony Bareham wrote: That phrase, ‘the famous Irish Lever’ is now likely to raise incredulity or incomprehension. The famous who? For fame and posterity have dealt harshly with Lever. First Carleton and then Yeats from among his literary compatriots gave him a bad press. Not one of the thirty-four novels is currently in print, several of the standard histories of Anglo-Irish literature barely mention him, and there has not been a full-length critical work on him for fifty-one years.4 1 Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1883; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 152. 2 Ibid, pp. 251-2. 3 Ibid, p. 286. 4 Tony Bareham, Charles Lever: New Evaluations (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991), p. 1. 1 That phrase, ‘the famous Irish Lever’ is attributed to Elizabeth Barrett Browning,5 who is obviously still famous, while Lever is decidedly not. Since the release of Charles Lever: New Evaluations, Stephen Haddelsey’s Charles Lever: The Lost Victorian (2000) then became the first full-length treatment of Lever’s work in over sixty years. The paucity of extended critical work on Lever’s writing brings into question distinct but inextricably linked strands of my argument. Charles Lever’s posthumous and consequent critical neglect stem, in a significant measure, from the fact that critical opinion on his work has been recycled to the extent that certain misperceptions have been presented and represented as being fact. Lever’s exclusion from the Irish canon owes much more to William Butler Yeats’ oversight of the value of Lever’s body of work, than any lack of merit on Lever’s part, particularly with reference to his post 1845 work. Furthermore, I argue that more recent suggestions that Lever’s work underwent a transition from rollicking to more serious representations of Ireland in 1845, had in fact begun earlier than is broadly contended. Most scholars who have written about Lever acknowledge an important transition in his work from the earlier ‘rollicking’ novels, into more sombre novels, dating from 1845 onward, with the publication of The O’Donoghue and St. Patrick’s Eve. But this was only one of Lever’s transitions. From Harry Lorrequer and Charles O’Malley onward, Charles Lever’s body of work developed through certain distinct transitions. The first noticeable transition came with Jack Hinton and Tom Burke. In the second transition, St. Patrick’s Eve was more of a failed experiment than a progression but The O’Donoghue is a better example of Lever’s development towards exploring Ireland through historical novels. Then came a transition back to the ‘rollicking’ formula following the disappointing sales of The Knight of Gwynne. His final transition came with his increasingly nationalist novels and culminated with what Bareham and delegates at the 1988 conference acknowledged as Lever’s masterpiece, Lord 5 Lionel Stevenson, Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever (London: Chapman and Hall, 1939), p. 170. 2 Kilgobbin. Bareham noted that ‘Lord Kilgobbin (1872) was the Conference text, and agreement was universal that here, in Lever’s last novel, was a work of genuine intelligence and quality, an imaginative achievement sadly neglected and ignored.’6 It was this novel in particular that demonstrated how Lever’s cosmopolitan perspective enabled him to set out the Irish question in a broader and European context, rather than framing it in the traditional position in relation to England. Finally, I will argue that Charles Lever’s reputation as a die-hard Tory Unionist is misplaced, and that there is significant evidence that Lever’s political stance had shifted to a more impartial position which was in fact much closer to Gladstonian Liberalism and the aims of Repeal movements than has traditionally been assumed. This thesis represents the second full-length treatment of Charles Lever’s work in eighty years. Its significance, beyond how it challenges misconceptions about Lever which have somehow been accepted and regenerated by those critics who could not have fully engaged with his work, lies in my use of unpublished archival material from the Edmund Downey collection at the National Library of Ireland, and most importantly, the Charles James Lever collection of letters and notebooks, held at the Huntington Library in California. Works on Charles Lever Whilst many contemporary scholars of Victorian literature will be aware of Charles Lever’s work, few of them will have read any of his novels and even fewer still will be familiar with all of his work. Since his death in 1872, a limited number of scholars have given the writer and his extensive body of work the attention it deserves. W. J. Fitzpatrick began his biography on Lever in 1872, but Lever’s eldest daughter Julia Nevill is said to have felt ‘most 6 Bareham, Lever: New Evaluations, p. 1. 3 intensely the utter inefficiency of Mr Fitzpatrick’s’ efforts.7 She subsequently invited Edmund Downey to produce a more extensive collection of Lever’s letters, which did not appear until 1906, after her untimely death. Edmund Downey was an Irish writer, journalist and publisher. His notes recalled: Although the ‘Life of Charles Lever,’ published in 1879, contains almost every scrap of information and gossip about the novelist which was then available it does not afford a satisfactory glimpse of the inner life of Lever.
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