University of Pisa
Department of English

&

Comune di Bagni di Lucca

Charles Lever: a two hundredth anniversary symposium

August 31st – September 1st , 2006

An International Conference celebrating the Irish novelist
CHARLES LEVER
will open in the Aula Magna
of the Facoltà di Lingue e Letterature Straniere
Via Santa Maria 85 Pisa

 

      Charles Lever (1806-1872), raised by English parents in Dublin, where he graduated from Trinity College, lived in Tuscany and Liguria for much of his creative life, several novels have in fact overtly Tuscan settings. For instance, One of Them, written at his cottage in La Spezia, opens at Café Doney in Florence, moves to the Baths at Lucca, and hence to Marlia.

      During the 2006 Pisa Conference, time will be allowed for visits to nearby Florence, La Spezia, and Bagni di Lucca. Lever lived nominally in La Spezia from 1851, and was British vice-Consul there from 1858 to 1867. He wrote: “Since my arrival here we have lived on the water, the delicious blue waves of the Gulf. Of all the spots I have ever seen, Spezzia [sic] is the most beautiful.” He was an inveterate gambler and a frequent patron of the Casino in Bagni di Lucca, where local authorities have done him the honour of a commemorative plaque on the wall of the house he lived in. His writing was assisted by the picturesque beauty of Bagni: “The saunter after tea time… generally along that little river that tumbles through the valley of the Bagni di Lucca, was the usual preparation for my night’s work…” Elsewhere he describes Bagni di Lucca as “a village… set in sweet, pretty country.”

      Lever, who spent his last years as British Consul in Trieste (where he died in 1872), was acquainted with many of the leading figures in contemporary Italian politics. Breakfasting with Garibaldi at La Spezia he tried to make his guest less enthusiastic about the excesses of Irish Fenianism. Lever was a brilliant essayist and several of his essays deal with the struggle for Italian independence. This strand of his political involvement should be a subject of the forthcoming Pisa Conference, dedicated to Lever’s two hundredth anniversary (the actual birth date is August 31 st, 1806).

On August 31 st, 2006, the inaugural lecture will be given in Pisa by

John Sutherland

(retired Lord Northcliffe Professor of English, University College, London), author of many books, including, most recently, Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (1996), Can Jane Eyre be Happy? (1997), Where was Rebecca Shot (1998), and, with Cedric Watts, Henry V, War Criminal? & Other Shakespeare Puzzles (2000).

      Some other well-known scholars and researchers already committed are: Tony Bareham, Conference co-organiser and editor of Charles Lever: New Evaluations, Valerie Lester, author of Phiz: The Man who Drew Dickens, Stephen Haddelsey, author of Charles Lever:The Lost Victorian, George Boyce, Professor of Economic History, University of Wales (author of Charles Lever among the Landlords), and other prominent critics, e.g. Donnell Deeny, Franco Marucci, and Tom Stark, who have published book-length studies or essays on Lever in international journals.

 

ABSTRACTS

John Sutherland: The Double Decline of Charles Lever

      For the discriminating reader of new fiction in the late 1830s, early 1840s, it would have been hard to predict which a quartet of newly emergent novelists would "last". The authors of Pickwick Papers, Harry Lorrequer, Jack Sheppard, and Barry Lyndon would have seemed equally promising contenders. Now the field has spaced out and Charles Lever will, for the discriminating reader of Victorian fiction in 2006, be lucky to get third place.
      In fact, the discriminating reader in 1872, might well have made the same assessment.
      Lever has undergone two critical devaluations. One during his lifetime, the other posthumously. As a result the dust lies thicker on him than even Ainsworth. Unworthily, in my view.

      The reasons for what I've called the double decline are worth disentangling---particularly for those interested in the sociology of literature. During his lifetime, a number of factors suggest themselves. (1) The decline of the Irish publishing industry, along with the metropolitan culture of Dublin, in the 1840s. (2) Lever's disastrous entanglement with the publisher Curry. (3) The poisonous feud which (with the "no Irish need apply" controversy, and Thackeray's anti-Leverian campaign) spattered Lever with the contempt of opinion-forming elements in the London literary world, as similar feuds had with Bulwer (4) a failure to "feel" the subtly changing styles of fiction during the 1840s.
      The posthumous decline requires a somewhat longer perspective. It would have been interesting if, in the dentist's waiting room, Stanley Kubrick had picked up a copy of Charles O'Malley rather than Barry Lyndon. Lever had no such luck. The pedagogic, and research focus, compression on what is called "Victorian Fiction", which has reduced and refined discussable texts to a handful has had two unfortunate effects. It has dropped Lever off the list and it has discouraged the kind of reading which his fiction---the early works at least---require. Excommunication from the canon is as severe as that from the church.
      I'll try, in passing, to explain what I feel is the best way to read, approach, Lever. The general thrust will be directed to the two areas I know best. The publishing history of the works (e.g. Chapman and Hall's failure with The Knight of Gwynne) and the quarrel with Thackeray.

Donnell Deeny: The Education of Charles Lever

  1. Lever attended school at Wrights Academy, Great Denmark Street, Dublin. The building still exists (but not the school). It was then next door to the home of the “hanging judge” Lord Norbury. It is a few doors from Belvedere College, which the writer James Joyce attended.
  2. His university was Trinity College Dublin, widely regarded as the finest group of buildings in Ireland and the oldest university. I will describe the state of the university in the 1820s when Lever was there (from McDowell & Webb Academic History of TCD etalia). Lever’s own experiences are described to some extent in the biographies of him by Stevenson and Fitzpatrick from which I will quote. He turned these to fictional effect, particularly in his early novel Charles O’Malley, from Chapter 16 of which I would propose to quote fairly extensively, with shorter quotations from Chapter 28 of The O’Donoghue and from Lord Kilgobbin which will serve to illustrate both his education and his wit.
  3. After an Arts degree Lever stayed at Trinity to read medicine. I will deal with that from the biographies, but also say something about the state of medical education in the late 1820s.
  4. I would complete his education with some reference to his clinical training as a doctor, such as it was, and the much later award of an LL.D from Trinity.

Lever's house at Ponte al Serraglio

Tom Stark: Lever’s Ireland – Fiction as Fact

      This paper compares the scant evidence available of the economic condition of people in Lever’s Ireland of 1830’s to that outlined in his 1845 novel St.Patrick’s Eve. We argue that there were two Irelands – Ulster and The East on the one hand and The West and Munster on the other. St. Patrick’s Eve is set in the latter. Living standards not only were unequal within each area but also notably between them. We use budget expenditure data extracted from the 1836 Third Report of the Commissioners for Inquiring into the condition of the Poorer classes in Ireland, supplemented by wage and price data. We show that Lever was correct when he wrote that his hero Owen Connor was better off than most rural dwellers. However the 1830’s was a period of growing prosperity in Ireland despite the setbacks such as the European wide 1832 Cholera epidemic. Real wages were much lower than those in Great Britain, which was by far the most prosperous nation in the world at that time. Comparisons of GDP per capita later in the century indicate that Ireland may have had a slightly higher standard of living than most European countries including Italy and France. Tentative back projections suggest that even in the 1830’s the country was far from underdeveloped by non- British European standards. Finally, as an economist, and by way of an anecdote, I am forced to conclude with a comparison of Lever’s and Adam Smith’s perception of the role of ‘self –interest’.

 

George Boyce: Lever, Landlords, and the Protestant Nation

      Charles Lever lived through a time when Ireland was transformed from a Protestant to a Catholic nation, and when the foundation of that nation in the eighteenth century---the landlord class---was being undermined not only by Irish critics, but by the British political establishment. This paper will explore aspects of Lever's response to these momentous changes, and also reflect on his nostalgia for the golden age of the Protestant Nation, and especially his admiration for its cultural life. It will argue that, like many such admirers, Lever was not hostile to the rising Catholic nation, but (as Professor J.C. Beckett put it ), his novels reveal that Lever's “Roman Catholic characters, however favourably and sympathetically treated, still remain in some measure external to him---they represent the friendly Protestant's conception of good and amiable Catholics.” But there was also the underlying fear of the undermining of the Protestant landlords, and their own foolish inability to adapt to the crisis that threatened them. Unlike other adherents to the belief that Ireland needed its Protestants to remain in the front rank of the nation, Lever realised that cultural brilliance was no substitute for political, social and economic power ; and his last years were spent in unhappy contemplation of the draining away of the power of the Protestant nation, and his conviction that this loss must be to the detriment of the whole of Ireland.

The Casinò

The Anglican Church (present Library)

Valerie Lester: Lever Phizzes

      Hablot Knight Browne (1815-1882), better known by his pseudonym Phiz, illustrated 16 of Charles Lever's novels (a total that tops the 10 he illustrated for Charles Dickens). Browne and Lever had an unusually congenial relationship and worked together for 26 years. In this slide lecture I will present a thumbnail sketch of Phiz's history and talk about early influences on his work. I will describe his first hilarious encounters with Lever, followed by a detailed look at some of his more captivating (and sometimes downright peculiar) images for Lever.

      Including early forays into the "dark plate" technique in Roland Cashel. I shall pay particular attention to the work Lever produced while living in Europe, to the difficulties incurred by having author and artist in different countries while working on the same book, and to the easygoing nature of the relationship between the two men, as seen in the few remaining letters between them.

Bob Barnard: Lever's "The Martins of Cro'Martin".

Bob Barnard offers a short appreciation of The Martins of Cro'Martin, with a discussion of its special distinction in Lever's output. This will concentrate on Lever's special attitude to plot, how it marks him off from other Victorians, and how he transcends it in The Martins.

Tony Bareham: Rebels and reactionaries.

      I have shown elsewhere -  ("Charles Lever and The Outsider" in Charles Lever: New Evaluations) - how Lever was drawn to peripheral and self-isolated characters.  It is equally true that men at the political extremes fascinated him. His often covertly sympathetic studies of  social and political rebels - Tom Burke,  Mark O'Donoghue,  Daniel Donogan, for example -  are surprising in an author often accused of too heavy an Establishment bias, whilst his trenchant studies of the cold-blooded and calculating figures who represent English political and social power make Lever's narrative standpoint even more interesting.

     My lecture will consider the strength of character drawing and the even-handed sympathy  with  which Lever presents some of his  social and political misfits, and will contrast these characters with representative studies of how brilliantly he could pillory the vicious and heartless scions of established race and power.


For their financial support thanks are due to Pisa University, Comune di Bagni di Lucca, Coleraine Borough Council, the owners of Villa Mansi, Tourism Ireland and Lynchpin Tours.

Facoltà di Lingue

85, via S.Maria

 

For further information please contact

Tony Bareham
Mario Curreli
Wendy Doherty

program

Here you can find some hotel information