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Charles (James) Lever |
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Now little read or critically studied, Charles Lever was for thirty years one of the most popular novelists in England. His career is a paradigm of Victorian novel publishing, demonstrating the varied problems of magazine serialization, monthly numbers, "three-decker" novels, and "library" editions. Lever is also significant because he dealt with subjects beyond the sphere of interest of other Victorian writers: the military; English expatriates and tourists on the Continent; and, most importantly, Ireland.
Born in Dublin to James Lever, a building contractor from Lancashire, and Julia Candler Lever, Charles James Lever was a member of the Anglo-Irish class, a fact which had great influence on his career. Charles attended various academies in Dublin starting at the age of three, and gained a reputation as a prankster. Pretending to help a slow-witted fellow student learn his lessons, for example, Lever would fill the boy's mind with outrageously altered versions of the material; this caused howls of laughter from the other students and even the teacher when the victim recited the nonsense he had been told.
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