‘The Fortunes of Glencore’ was out of hand early in 1857. It was published in three volumes by Chapman & Hall—the first work (bearing the author’s name on the title-page) by Lever which was issued in three-volume form. Of Glencore’ he says: “I am unwilling to suffer this tale to leave my hands without a word of explanation.... If I have always had before me the fact that to movement and action, to the stir of incident, and to a certain light-heartedness and gaiety of temperament (more easy to impart to others than to repress in one’s self), I have owned much, if not all, of whatever popularity I enjoyed, I have felt (or fancied I felt) that it would be in the delineation of very different scenes, and in the portraiture of very different emotions, that I should reap what I would reckon as a real success. This conviction—or impression, if you will—has become stronger with years and with fuller knowledge of life; and time has confirmed me in the notion that any skill I possess lies in the detection of character and in the unravelment of that tangled skein which makes up human motives.” Opportunities of beholding the game played by Society (he further declares), as well as his inclination to study the game, helped him to give a picture of the manners, and to describe the modes and moods, of the age he lived in. If he had often grinned because of the narrow fortune which had prevented him from “cutting in,” he was able to console himself with the thought that he might have risen from the table a loser. He goes on to say that though the incidents which are noticeable in the world of the well-bred are fewer, because the friction is less than in classes where vicissitudes of fortune are more frequent, yet the play of passion, though shadowed by polished conventionalities, is often more highly developed.
To trace and to mark these developments was, he assures us, one of the great pleasures of his life. “Certain details, certain characteristics, I have of course borrowed—as he who would mould a human face must needs have copied an eye, a nose, a chin from some existent model,—but beyond this I have not gone; nor indeed have I ever found, in all my experiences of life, that fiction ever suggests what has not been implanted unconsciously by memory—originality in the delineation of character being little more than a new combination of old materials derived from that source.”
‘Glencore’ being disposed of, its author planned out a new tale, going again to Ireland for his scenery and his characters. He took for his hero, or leading villain, John Sadlier,* the once famous banker and politician, who put an end to his own career in 1856 by committing suicide on Hampstead Heath. Lever did not attempt to keep closely to the true story of Sadlier, or to depict the man as he had lived and moved: he merely used incidents in his career and traits in his character, and as he warmed to his work Davenport Dunn bore but a slight resemblance to John Sadlier. By this time the novelist had all but abandoned the portrayal of comic personages,—‘Glencore’ harboured Billy Traynor, but Billy was only a faint echo of Mickey Free or Darby the Blast,—and ‘Davenport Dunn,’ though it was full of spirit, bristled with character sketches, and was packed with adventure, was on the whole a much graver and possibly a stronger performance than anything which had preceded it. The story appeared in the monthly part form, Phiz’s illustrations embellishing it.
* It is said that Sadlier was one of the models for
Dickens’s Mr Merdle.—E. D.
Lever paid another visit to London in the spring of 1857: it was chiefly a business visit He wished to discuss his forthcoming novel with Chapman & Hall and with Phiz. While he was in London he received some disturbing news of his son (who was still idling in Ireland), and he was half inclined to cross the Irish Sea, but he found he had lingered too long in London—a city in which he always managed to accomplish more card-playing than was good for his health or his pocket,—so he hurried back to Florence and ‘Davenport Dunn.’ Although there is no evidence to bear out the conjecture, it is most likely that he endeavoured during this visit to England to further his cause as a prospective diplomatist. On the whole, 1857 was a comparatively uneventful year.
Again—early in 1858—did the pressure of his financial affairs stir him to the exertion of “working double tides,” and, looking around him for a subject, it occurred to him that a highly romantic tale could be woven out of the adventures of a supposititious son and heir of Charles Edward Stuart, the offspring of a secret marriage with a daughter of the Geraldines. He found a sufficiently plausible groundwork for the theory of this marriage and its consequences in the letters of Sir Horace Mann.*
* He quotes Sir Horace as his authority for the pitiful
tragedy which concludes the adventures of his ‘Chevalier’:
“Any anxiety we might ever have felt on the score of a
certain individual alleged to have been the legitimately
born son of Charles Edward is now over. He was murdered last
week.... Many doubted that there was any, even the
slightest, claim on his part to Stuart blood, but Mr Pitt
was not of this number. He had taken the greatest pains to
obtain information on the subject, and had, I am told, in
his possession copies of all the documents which
substantiated the youth’s rights.”—E. D.
Poor M’Glashan died in 1858, and ‘The Dublin University’ passed into the hands of Mr Digby Starkey and Mr Cheyne Brady. They proposed to Lever that he should renew his relations with the Magazine, and he arranged with them to contribute to it the adventures of ‘Gerald Fitzgerald the Chevalier.’
To Mr Alexander Spencer.
“Casa Capponi, Florence, July 4, 1858