These essays comprise the first extensive reappraisal of Charles Lever for over 50 years. Once regarded as the equal of Dickens, Trollope and Thackeray, Lever's public turned their backs on him when he changed style and genre after making his name with comic military tales. He never captured his early popularity, but his later novels in fact manifest a much more serious and crafted approach to fiction and richly deserve revival. Lever's own turbulent and often unhappy life of social and cultural exile in Europe provides the hidden theme of many of his better novels. Continental and Irish settings and preoccupations are juxtaposed, making his contribution to the Anglo-Irish novel an unusual and challenging one. Lever is a shrewd observer of characteróparticularly of female character; few of his better-remembered contemporaries write with more insight about women; old, young, rich, poor; loving, hating, dominating, subjected. His eye for place is acute; Scott is his model, but Lever's ability to correlate character with environment is finely developed. His political observations are shrewd and balanced.

First published in 1994, these two volumes are intended as a supplement to the four-volume edition edited by Gordon N. Ray in 1945-46. In writing to his broad range of correspondents, Thackeray produced a varied body of letters that will help readers to better understand his nineteenth-century society as well as his professional and private life — especially his relationships with women. These volumes contain 1713 letters: 1464 to and from Thackeray that were not included in the earlier volumes, and 249 with texts that have been edited from newly available manuscripts, and that thereby replace texts that were printed in Ray from incomplete sources.

One of the most enduring tropes of modern Irish history is the MOPE thesis, the idea that the Irish were the Most Oppressed People Ever. Political oppression, forced emigration and endemic poverty have been central to the historiography of nineteenth-century Ireland. This volume problematises the assumption of generalised misery and suggests the many different, and often surprising, ways in which Irish people sought out, expressed and wrote about happiness. Bringing together an international group of established and emerging scholars, this volume considers the emerging field of the history of emotion and what a history of happiness in Ireland might look like. During the nineteenth century the concept of happiness denoted a degree of luck or good fortune, but equally was associated with the positive feelings produced from living a good and moral life. Happiness could be found in achieving wealth, fame or political success, but also in the relief of lulling a crying baby to sleep. Reading happiness in historical context indicates more than a simple expression of contentment. In personal correspondence, diaries and novels, the expression of happiness was laden with the expectations of audience and author and informed by cultural ideas about what one could or should be happy about. This volume explores how the idea of happiness shaped social, literary, architectural and aesthetic aspirations across the century. CONTRIBUTORS: Ian d'Alton, Shannon Devlin, Anne Dolan, Simon Gallaher, Paul Huddie, Kerron Ó Luain, David McCready, Ciara Thompson, Andrew Tierney, Kristina Varade, Mai Yatani

Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland is the first book-length study of the great Victorian novelist's relationship with Ireland, the country which became his second home and was the location of his first personal and professional success. It offers an in-depth exploration of Trollope's time in Ireland as a rising Post Office official, contextualising his considerable output of Irish novels and short stories and his ongoing interest in the country, its people, and its always complicated relationship with Britain. Trollope's Irish novels were long neglected but are vital to any understanding of his entire oeuvre and when given their just place alter our overall view of the writer and his take on the world. Uniquely among his fellow English novelists, Trollope consciously occupied a mediating position, believing he knew Ireland better than any other Englishman and better than most Irishmen and used his novels to represent that Ireland to an English public. Trollope's Irish works constitute a vital and distinct group of works, add significantly to our vision of the writer, change the prevalent view that he is always safe and "English", and represent a rich and underestimated contribution to the canon of the nineteenth century Irish novel tout court, complicating the sometimes arbitrary divisions that are drawn between the English and the Irish traditions.