1841 Charles O'Malley The Irish Dragoon Edited by Harry Lorrequer

Description

First Edition, Leather Binding

Lovely copy in a great binding but only volume one. A half leather hardback with marbled paper backed boards and gilt lettering and decoration on the spine. Volume one only. A first edition of Charles Lever's Charles O'Malley, illustrated by phiz. Hablot Knight Browne was an English artist, famous as Phiz, the illustrator of the best-known books by Charles Dickens, Charles Lever and Harrison Ainsworth in their original editions. Charles James Lever (31 August, 1806 - 1 June, 1872) was an Irish novelist and a prolific writer much influenced in his early years by Maria Edgeworth and Sir Walter Scott. Lever produced thirty novels and five volumes of short stories and essays; he is best remembered for his farcical, lighthearted picaresque novels of Irish military life, notably Harry Lorrequer (1839), Charles O'Malley (1841), Jack Hinton (1843), and Tom Burke (1844). In February 1837 Charles Lever began running The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer through the pages of the recently established Dublin University Magazine. Lorrequer was merely a string of Irish and other stories good, bad and indifferent, but mostly rollicking, and Lever, who strung together his anecdotes late at night after the serious business of the day was done, was astonished at its success. Lever had never taken part in a battle himself, but his next three books, Charles O'Malley (1841), Jack Kimton and Tom Burke of Ours (1843), written under the spur of the writer's chronic extravagance, contain some splendid military writing and some of the most animated battle-pieces on record.