There are two references to Charles Lever in Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland (1995), one to ‘bad stage Irish melodrama’ and the other to ‘the ironies of master-servant relationship’. Cairns and Richards passed him by in Writing Ireland (1998) and Seamus Deane in Strange Country (1997). The notorious dismissive conjunction ‘Lever and Lover’ remains as effective for modern post-colonialism as it did for Romantic nationalism. Yet Lever is a novelist who is the direct heir of Edgeworth and Scott, who was seen by his contemporaries as a social critic comparable with Dickens and Trollope, and, as a regional novelist, he foreshadows the Romantic pessimism of Hardy. As an historical phenomenon his prolific output constitutes a massive cultural presence. His omission from cultural history is a speaking absence.

The importance of Luttrell of Arran (1865), at least, was recognised by W. J. McCormack in Ascendancy and Tradition (1985), and, thus, Lever's place in a ‘tradition’ of Burkean Romanticism (interpreted from the retrospective viewpoint of Yeats). But McCormack's context leads him ultimately to fit Luttrell of Arran into a proto-Yeatsian pattern of ‘Ascendancy’ landlordism and Gaelic peasantry, and he interprets the novel as an allegory of ‘ascendancy culpability’. Terry Eagleton subsequently, in Crazy John and the Bishop (1998), merely imbricates Luttrell of Arran in a pattern of cultural emigration (previously analysed by Deane, and Daniel Corkery before him) in which the Irish exile ‘remains at home but in a state of deep disaffection from it’.