William Carleton was the son of Irish novelist William Carleton.
David J. O'Donoghue's biography, The Life of William Carleton (1896), includes several pages on the younger Carleton and his career in Dublin and Australia (pp. 251-254, 308-309). O'Donoghue writes that Carleton had a 'hail fellow well met air about him which made him popular in many quarters'. O'Donoghue also quotes from a letter by Carleton's father in which the older man says: 'My eldest son, William, went to Australia with his family, where he published some beautiful poems in the Melbourne Argus and the Australasian, signed William Carleton, junior. The public were struck and delighted with them, and the Minister of Mines asked was he the son of the celebrated William Carleton, the distinguished Irish novelist. When satisfied of this fact, he sent for my son, and gave him a public appointment of two hundred a year, at a place called Heathcote, with a rising salary. The duties were merely nominal, and my son having taken to literature, is at this moment the most distinguished literary man in Australia ... He is courted and sought after by the highest people in Melbourne, who ask him a thousand questions about his father' (308-309).
In addition to works indexed on AustLit, Carleton also wrote about William Buckley, and was one of the earlier colonial writers to depict an Australian bushfire.
