LEVER, CHARLES JAMES (1806-1872), Irish novelist of English descent, second son of James Lever, a Dublin architect and builder, was born in the Irish capital on Aug. 31, 1806. His escapades at Trinity college, Dublin (1823-28), whence he took the degree of M.B. in 1831, form the basis of that vast cellarage of anecdote from which all the best vintages in his novels are derived. The inimitable Frank Webber in Charles O'Malley (spiritual ancestor of Foker and Mr. Bouncer) was a college friend, Robert Boyle, later on an Irish parson. Lever and Boyle sang ballads of their own composing in the streets of Dublin, after the manner of Fergusson or Goldsmith, filled their caps with cop pers and played many other pranks embellished in the pages of O'Malley, Con Cregan and Lord Kilgobbin. Before seriously embarking upon the medical studies for which he was designed, Lever visited Canada 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. Arrived in Canada he plunged into the backwoods, was affiliated to a tribe of Indians and had to escape at the risk of his life, like his own Bagenal Daly.
Back in Europe, he travelled in the guise of a student from Gottingen to Weimar (where he saw Goethe), thence to Vienna; he loved the German student life with its beer, its fighting and its fun, and several of his merry songs, such as "The pope he loved a merry life" (greatly envied by Titmarsh), are on Student-lied models. His medical degree admitted him to an appointment from the Board of Health in Co. Clare and then as dispensary doctor at Port Stewart, but the liveliness of his diversions as a country doc tor seems to have prejudiced the authorities against him. In 1833 he married his first love, Catherine Baker, and in Feb. 1837, after varied experiences, he began running The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer through the pages of the recently established Dublin University Magazine. Before Harry Lorrequer appeared in volume form (1839), Lever had settled on the strength of a slight diplomatic connection as a fashionable physician in Brus-. sels (16, Rue Ducale). 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 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 tavernes 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 him self, 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 of the most ani mated battle-pieces on record. Condemned by the critics, Lever had completely won the general reader from the Iron Duke him self 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'Sullivans, Archer Butler, W. Carleton, Sir William Wilde, Canon Hayman, D. F. McCarthy, McGlashan, Dr. Kenealy and many others. At his house at Templeogue he entertained Thackeray, and the Waterloo episode in Vanity Fair is said to have been suggested by the conversation there. 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 corn pose 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. 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, in Aug. 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 Carlsruhe to Como, from Como to Florence, from Florence to the Baths 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 (".120 a sheet"). In the Knight of Gwynne, a story of the Union Con Cregan (1849), 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 composi tion.