By the early 1840s, Charles Lever (1806-1872) was at the peak of his popularity. Applauded by a public ravenous for the easy-going, rollicking and essentially undisciplined fictions which he produced with such facility, he also enjoyed an abundance of laudatory critical notices which compared him favourably with his chief rival, Charles Dickens.

And yet, within a few short decades of his death, the most successful and popular Anglo-Irish novelist of the mid-nineteenth century had experienced a marginalisation so pronounced as to result in his total exclusion from the canon of popular literature.

In his new book, Charles Lever: The Lost Victorian (published by Colin Smythe Ltd), S. P. Haddelsey charts Lever's meteoric rise and fall, and calls for a reappraisal of his very significant contribution to Irish literature in English.

But what does Lever offer to the modern reader that better known Victorian novelists cannot? The answer > is a view of the Victorian world from a peculiarly Anglo-Irish perspective. No other mid-nineteenth century author captures so accurately and so comprehensively the anxieties, the beliefs and the prejudices of this element of society. But Lever refused to deal in platitudes or simplifications and by the end of his career, a joyous and whole-hearted sympathy with the Ascendancy's irresponsible high-living had converted to an unyielding condemnation of its effete and suicidal self-indulgence.

It is these internal struggles, fought throughout Lever's maturity as a writer, that can be seen as a precursor to the current attempt in Ireland as a whole to achieve an all-embracing political, religious and social compromise.

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