“Gout is overcoming me completely! Isn’t it too hard to realise both Dives and Lazarus in oneself at once?”
To Mr John Blackwood.
“Villa Morelli, Sept. 19.
“I send you the last chap, for the November ‘Tony,’ and I want all your most critical comment on the Envoy, because, as the book draws to the end, I desire to avoid the crying sin of all my stories, a huddled-up conclusion. Be sure you tell me all my shortcomings, for even if I cannot amend them I’ll bear in mind the impression they must create, and, so far as I can, deprecate my reader’s wrath. You have not answered me as to the advisability of a name or no name,—a matter of little moment, but I’d like your counsel on it. My notion is this. If ‘Tony’ be likely to have success as a novel when published entire, a name might be useful for future publication, and as to that, I mean futurity, what would you say to a Stuart story, taking the last days of Charles Edward in Florence, and bringing in the great reforming Grand Duke, Pietro-Leopoldo and Horace Mann, &c.?*
* Lever must have intended to recast and to rewrite the
adventures of “Gerald Fitzgerald, the Chevalier,” the story
which appeared as a serial in ‘The Dublin University’ in
1869.—E. D.
“I have been mooning over this for the last week. The fact is, when I draw towards the close of a story I can’t help hammering at another: like the alderman who said, ‘I am always, during the second course, imagining what will come with the woodcocks.’ Mind above all that no thought of me personally is to interfere with other Magazine arrangements, for it is merely as the outpouring of a confession that I speak now of a story, and if you don’t want me, or don’t want so much of me, you will say so.
“As I told you once before, I believe I am, or rather was—for there is very little ‘am’ left—better at other things than story-writing, and certainly I like any other pen labour more. But this shall be as you determine....
“Give me some hints as to the grievances of the ‘Limited Liability Schemes.’ What are the weak points? Brief me!
“I have a notion that a course of O’Dowd lectures on Men and Women would be a success, orally given. What think you?”
To Mr John Blackwood.