During the autumn of 1854 he submitted to M’Glashan a proposal for an interesting series of papers—“Stories of the Ruined Houses of Ireland.” Nothing came of this. Towards the end of the year he contributed some further papers on Italian politics to ‘The Dublin University.’ One upon Sardinia and Austria created some attention in Italy, and a translation was published in Turin. English politics and foreign politics, viewed from the British standpoint, were affording him keen interest, and he had the privilege of discussing them under his own roof with a very distinguished personage, the Lord President of the Council, Lord John Russell.
Thoughts of entering Parliament were again crossing Lever’s mind at this period; but his best friends, notably his brother John, sought to dissuade him from embarking upon a career which, for a man of his temperament, would be full of pitfalls, and would in all likelihood end in Nowhere.
XII. FLORENCE AND SPEZZIA 1855-1862
The story of young Charles Lever—such of it as may be evolved from his father’s letters and from other sources—is by no means uninteresting in itself, and it is intimately concerned, for a period, with the story of his father, who loved him dearly, and who looked forward to seeing the youth making a distinguished figure in the world. The profession of engineering did not hold him long. He was smitten with the military fever which had smitten his father before he had adopted medicine as a profession; but the novelist’s son was trained in a school which differed widely from the school in which the novelist had been trained. Everything that could conduce to unsettle a high-spirited youth fell to the lot of young Charles Lever. Moreover, he could, and did, imbibe from his father’s books a passion for military adventure. This in itself would have been nothing to cause uneasiness to a parent, but in addition to his longings for the adventurous career of a soldier, the novelist’s son had developed, at an early stage, a thorough contempt for “the simple life.” The only son of a father to whom reckless generosity was an easy virtue, who looked upon thrift—or anything resembling it—merely as a subject for ridicule, it would have been wellnigh impossible for young Lever to have regarded money except as a commodity difficult at times to obtain, but imperative to spend as quickly and as lavishly as possible. Early in 1855 the young engineer decided to abandon his civil profession; and seeing that there was no use in trying to keep him out of the army, his father purchased a commission for him, and he was gazetted to a cornetcy in the Royal Wilts Regiment, then stationed at Corfu. “I own to you,” Lever writes to Spencer, “I do not fancy the career, but he does not, and will not, settle down to anything else. We must only let him take his chance and try to be a Field Marshal, which in these times ought not to be so very difficult a matter, if one only thought of the competitorship.”
Having had his attention drawn to military affairs, Lever now conceived a literary project in connection with them—a work to be entitled ‘The Battlefields of Europe.’ He submitted the idea to M’Glashan, but the publisher was in no condition to offer advice or to enter into speculations off the regular track.
A serious attack of gout in the stomach prostrated the novelist in June, and for weeks he was unable to sit at his desk. He describes himself as being “covered with rugs and leeches, and warm-bathed to half his weight.” He was so ill and so depressed that he felt he was going to die. When he was able to hold a pen he wrote to M’Glashan imploring him to send sixty pounds for his life insurance premiums. “I had almost hoped,” he said, “that I was going to cheat the company and give them the slip.” He had now concluded a bargain—a somewhat loose one—for the new serial for ‘The Dublin University.’ The novel was entitled ‘The Fortunes of Glencore.’ Soon after he had despatched the first instalment, he was disturbed by receiving a letter from Dublin which contained ill news of M’Glashan.
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Florence, Casa Capponi, July 5, 1856.
“This is to thank you for so promptly answering Chapman. The delay was not his fault, but mine,—at least, so far as anything can be culpable which a man cannot help. Two feet of water would suffice to drown a baby; and though it takes a quarter of a million to smash Strahan & Paul, a very few hundreds would do all that mischief to Charles Lever.