Charles Lever's Italy in the Risorgimento

Abstract

This contribution focuses on Charles Lever, a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish novelist (Dublin 1806–Trieste 1872), who in his early career in the 1840s became as famous as Thackeray and Dickens, but whose fame progressively declined as the quality of his work improved. A Protestant doctor who became a diplomat, consul and deputy consul in Italy, first in La Spezia and Bagni di Lucca, then in Trieste, Lever was a cosmopolitan intellectual and a prolific narrator who authored more than 40 novels. It was mainly in three works of the 1860s – a collection of essays, Cornelius O'Dowd (1864), the novel Tony Butler (1865) and a collection of short stories, Paul Gosslett's Confessions in Love, Law, and the Civil Service (1868) – that he partly staged his stories in contemporary Italy and drew on the political turmoil and diplomatic intrigues in which the British Foreign office was involved in Southern Italy. He considered some aspects of the “Southern question” such as brigandage, Camorra and their political entanglements, and featured the Garibaldian enterprise in Tony Butler. This chapter aims to contribute a case study focused on an idiosyncratic perspective on the centrality of Italy in the age of nation-building contained in some literary narratives targeted at a mainstream readership.