Charles Lever: An Irish Writer in Italy

Abstract

Victorian Irish novelist Charles Lever spent much of his adult life
living in Italy and in the partly Italian city of Trieste, serving as
British Vice-Consul in La Spezia and later as Consul in Trieste. He
used his experience and knowledge of Italy as the source for many
articles and as raw material for the Italian sections of his novels. He
is one of the most acute observers of Italian life at the time of the
unification of Italy but his experience in il bel paese also played a key
role in forming his views about the Ireland that continued to be the
central interest of his fiction.