SIR BROOK FOSSBROOKE

First edition, first printing in book form (previously serialised in Blackwood's Magazine). Three volumes. Finely bound in nineteenth century full dark green morocco, the spines uniformly faded to lighter brown, with five raised bands, gilt decorated compartments (lettered in gilt to two), front and rear boards triple-ruled in gilt, inner dentelles elaborately decorated in gilt. Burgundy endpapers. Upper edges gilt. Half titles to each volume, as per Sadleir. Publisher's catalogue bound to the rear of Vol. III. In near fine condition, the bindings square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Very lightly spotted to fore- and lower page block edges, occasionally to the margins of a few pages, and to the binder's blanks front and rear. A handsome set.

Although, as Stephen J. M. Browne notes, 'Sir Brooke Fossbrooke' picks up "the humour and frolic of [Lever's] earlier tales", the opening "mess-room scene in the officers' quarters in Dublin, recalling "the sprightly comedy of [the early] Harry Lorrequer", A. Norman Jeffares points to the novel's "searching analysis of [...] Anglo-Irish Decline [and] English misrule, [...] to be developed even further in his final novel 'Lord Kilgobbin' (1872), noting in passing that it was published in 1866, the year of W. B. Yeats' birth (Yeats later read Lever carefully, sustaining a complex and ambivalent relationship with the novels). Charles James Lever was born in Dublin, and like Wilde and Beckett after him, attended Trinity College (1823–1828), taking his degree in medicine in 1831. He practised as a physician in Brussels before returning to Dublin to edit the Dublin University Magazine (1842-5). Acquainted with and respected by Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray, the latter, while noting the energy of Lever's humour, describes his salient tone as "not humour but sentiment. The spirits are mostly artificial, the fond is sadness, as appears to me to be that of most Irish writing and people." Lever died in Trieste (Joyce's home for fifteen years) in 1872, aged 65. (Stephen J. M. Brown, 'Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances, and Folk-lore', Dublin: 1916; A. Norman Jeffares, 'Reading Lever', in 'Charles Lever: New Evaluations', edited by Tony Barham, New York: 1991; Sadleir 1418).