The Cockney in Ireland, 1842

Abstract

From W. J. Fitzpatrick, Life of Charles Lever (1879) ii, 396–7, 405–20. In the summer and autumn of 1842, Thackeray was in Ireland to work on his Irish Sketch Book, published the following year, and he visited the popular Irish novelist Charles Lever (1806–72), then also Editor of the Dublin University Magazine, at his country house outside Dublin. He ‘made himself very agreeable during his stay’, writes Fitzpatrick (Life of Lever, i, 337), ‘and was a favourite with the children’. The Sketch Book was dedicated to Lever — ‘who, I fear, must disapprove ofa great deal which it contains’ — and indeed Lever suffered from this association with a book which offended Irish suscep-tibilities. He reviewed it favourably, however, and was thus the more incensed when Thackeray a few years later reviewed him coolly and lampooned his work; Lever riposted by accusing Thackeray, with some justice, of viewing Ireland or any other country through complacently Cockney eyes (see next item). Thackeray’s certainty that England and London were best appears in an account of their conversations which Lever soon afterwards gave to his cousin Harry Innes, in whose opinion Lever’s moving to London in 1845 was much influenced by Thackeray’s arguments.