Lever, CHARLES, a popular novelist, chiefly remembered for the rollicking fun of his Irish stories, was born in Dublin, 31st August 1806. He graduated at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1827, and then removed to Göttingen, where he studied medicine, and subsequently returned to Dublin to complete his academic career. His most popular work, Charles O'Malley, is a reflex of his own college life in Dublin, and many of the incidents in the novel, as in many of his late productions, are drawn from his own experiences of the world. Probably in 1824, and certainly at some time between 1827 and 1832, he spent a considerable time in the backwoods of Canada and North America, and subsequently embodied his experiences in Con Cregan and Arthur O'Leary. Returned to Ireland, he practised medicine first at Kilrush in County Galway, and afterwards at various other country towns, collecting material for his stories of Irish country life. Having married a Miss Baker, he went in 1837 to practise medicine at Brussels, and while there wrote Harry Lorrequer, and afterwards Charles O'Malley for the Dublin University Magazine, then recently started. Returning to Dublin, he published Jack Hinton in 1841, and from 1842 to 1845 acted as editor of the Dublin University Magazine, and wrote Nuts and Nutcrackers, Arthur O'Leary, Tom Burke of Ours, and The O'Donoghue. In 1845 he again went off to the Continent, going first to Brussels, then to Bonn and Carlsruhe, where he lived for some time, and published the Knight of Gwynne. He then moved on to Florence, and wrote Roland Cashel, and thence to Spezzia, where Luttrell of Arran, Con Cregan, Sir Jasper
Carcw, and The Dodd Family Abroad were produced in rapid succession. Then, suddenly and completely changing his style, he wrote the Fortunes of Glencore, followed by a truly Irish story, The Martins of Cro-Martin, and The Daltons, the hero of which is an Englishman travelling on the Continent. Lever was then, in 1852, appointed by Lord Derby to be British vice-consul at Spezzia, and continued to write, publishing Davenport Dunn, One of Them, Gerald Fitzgerald, Sir Brooke Fosbrooke, That Boy of Norcotts, and contributing some racy papers to Blackwood's Magazine under the sobriquet of 'Cornelius O'Dowd.' On May 2, 1867, he was promoted by his old patron Lord Derby to the consulschip at Trieste, where he died 1st June 1872. Lever's later books, though marked by greater care and more thought than those of the Lorrequer school, and even that strange and brilliant composition entitled A Day's Ride, are already dead; and it is only by his brilliant and racy sketches of a phase of Irish life which was passing away even as the sympathetic young chronicler caught its features that Lever still lives, and may continue to live when Ireland is as dull as Lincolnshire and as orderly as Clapham. Lever's wandering life on the continent of Europe, and especially in Belgium, where he fell in with a great number of Peninsular and Waterloo officers, and collected a vast store of traditions of the great battles and of those who fought them, gives an additional zest to many of his books. They are all something more than mere sketches of rollicking in Ireland, and their boisterous fun is relieved, and even refined, by constant changes of scene, the reflex of Lever's own wandering and wayward life, and of his own restless genius.
One unfortunate result of Lever's novels has been to create a false idea of Irish society, and still more of the Irish character. The Irish of to-day at least are singularly unlike those portrayed in the novels of the O'Malley type, and, much as the social conditions of the country have altered in the last sixty years, a great deal of what was carelessly dashed off by Lever, and which at any time was but brilliant caricature, has been curiously enough accepted by most of his readers as an accurate representation of life in Ireland. Apart from his powers as a writer, Lever was one of the most brilliant conversationalists and one of the most agreeable companions of his time; a striking personality, he was at home everywhere, knowing everybody, a welcome guest in all societies and in all countries. The only published authority for Lever's life is a poor memoir by Fitzpatrick (1879; new ed. 1896). See also Saturday Review, vol. lxix. p. 743.