The Late Charles Lever
1872
Engraving
Source: The Illustrated London News (15 June 1872): 581.
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Charles James Lever: Forgotten Anglo-Irish Novelist (1806-72)
Today the only readers who recognize the name Charles Lever are devotees of Dickens's novels who recall that the greatest of Victorian novelists was forced to publish Great Expectations (1861) as a weekly serial because Charles Lever’s A Day’s Ride was causing a disastrous drop in the circulation of Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round. Sad that a once-popular novelist should be known only for a comparative failure, and that his best work (The Daltons, Roland Cashel, Harry Lorrequer, Charles O’Malley, Davenport Dunn, and Barrington).
Lever, born in Dublin on 31 August 1806, had died on the 1st of June 1872, aged 65, in Trieste, Italy. The authoritative collection of his thirty novels in thirty-seven volumes appeared between 1897 and 1899, superintended through the press by his daughter, Julie Kate Neville. Prior to that, the only complete uniform edition of his works was that published by Chapman and Hall, London, in sixteen octavo volumes with all of Phiz's original illustrations in 1872.
Bibliography
Downey, Edmund. Charles Lever: His Life in Letters. 2 vols. Edinburgh & London: William Blackwood, 1906. Vol. I.
Fitzpatrick, W. J. The Life of Charles Lever. London: Downey, 1901.
Haddelsey, S. P. Charles Lever: The Lost Victorian — A Critical Vindication. London: Colin Smythe, 2000.
Stevenson, Lionel. Dr. Quicksilver: The Life of Charles Lever. New York: Russell & Russell, 1939, rpt. 1969.
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Created 13 December 2015 Last modified 10 April 2023