Charles James Lever (31 August 1806 – 1 June 1872) was an Irish novelist and raconteur, whose novels, according to Anthony Trollope, were just like his conversation.
Biography
Early life
Lever was born in Amiens Street, Dublin, the second son of James Lever, an architect and builder, and was educated in private schools. His escapades at Trinity College, Dublin (1823–1828), where he took the degree in medicine in 1831, are drawn on for the plots of some of his novels. The character Frank Webber in the novel Charles O'Malley was based on a college friend, Robert Boyle, who later became a clergyman. Lever and Boyle earned pocket-money singing ballads of their own composing in the streets of Dublin and played many other pranks which Lever embellished in the novels O'Malley, Con Cregan and Lord Kilgobbin. Before seriously embarking upon his medical studies, 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. Arriving in Canada, he journeyed into the backwoods, where he was affiliated to a tribe of Native Americans but had to flee because his life was in danger, as later his character Bagenal Daly did in his novel The Knight of Gwynne.
Back in Europe, he pretended he was a student from the University of Göttingen and travelled to the University of Jena (where he saw Goethe), and then to Vienna. He loved German student life, and several of his songs, such as "The Pope He Loved a Merry Life", are based on student-song models. His medical degree earned him an appointment to the Board of Health in County Clare and then as a dispensary doctor in Portstewart, County Londonderry, but his conduct as a country doctor earned him the censure of the authorities.
Career
In 1833 he married his first love, Catherine Baker, and in February 1837, after varied experiences, he began publishing The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer in the recently established Dublin University Magazine. During the previous seven yearsو the popular taste had turned toward the "service novel", examples of which include Frank Mildmay (1829) by Frederick Marryat, Tom Cringle's Log (1829) by Michael Scott, The Subaltern (1825) by George Robert Gleig, Cyril Thornton (1827) by Thomas Hamilton, Stories of Waterloo (1833) by William Hamilton Maxwell, Ben Brace (1840) by Frederick Chamier and The Bivouac (1837), also by Maxwell. Lever had met William Hamilton Maxwell, the titular founder of the genre. Before Harry Lorrequer appeared in volume form (1839), Lever had settled - on the strength of a slight diplomatic connection - as a fashionable physician in Brussels (Hertogstraat 16).
Lorrequer was merely a string of Irish and other stories - good, bad and indifferent, but mostly rollicking. Lever, who strung together his anecdotes late at night after the serious business of his day, 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 terrorised the taverns of the place with their endless Peninsular stories, and of English society a little damaged, which it became the speciality 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 himself, but his next three books, Charles O'Malley (1841), Jack Hinton (1843), and Tom Burke of Ours (1844), written under the spur of the writer's chronic extravagance, contain some splendid military writing and some of the most animated battle-pieces on record. In pages of O'Malley and Tom Burke Lever anticipates not a few of the best effects of Marbot, Thibaut, Lejeune, Griois, Seruzier, Burgoyne and the like. His account of the Douro need hardly fear comparison, it has been said, with Napier's. Condemned by the critics, Lever had completely won the general reader - from the Iron Duke himself downwards.