Later victorian novelists

2 George Meredith
Meredith was born at 73 High Street, Portsmouth, Hampshire, the only child of Augustus Urmston Meredith and his wife Jane Eliza (née Macnamara). The name Meredith is Welsh, and he would describe himself as "half Irish and half Welsh" (on his mother's and father's sides, respectively). He was proud of his Welsh origins, and such pride is evident in his novels. His biographer Lionel Stevenson explains that Meredith's paternal grandfather, Melchizedek, would sometimes "boast eloquently of his princely forebears", but "between his immediate forebears and the legendary Welsh princes of seven centuries before, the history of the family remains obscure."
Augustus Meredith was, as Melchizedek Meredith had been before him, a naval outfitter, and among his employees was James Watson Gieve. Jane died when her son was five, and the outfitting business failed, with Augustus declared bankrupt in November 1838. He moved to London and in July 1839 remarried – his second wife being the family's former housekeeper, Matilda Buckett.¹¹
George Meredith was educated in Southsea until 1840, when a legacy from his mother's sister, Anna, made it possible for him to attend a boarding school in Lowestoft, Suffolk. In August 1842 he was sent to the Moravian School in Neuwied, near Coblenz, where he remained until the spring of 1844; Lionel Stevenson argues that the experience instilled his "impatience towards sham and servility, contempt for conceit, admiration for courage, and devotion to candid and rational forthrightness".
By 1845 it was planned that he would be articled to a solicitor, Richard Charnock of Paternoster Row, and he was duly articled in February 1846, shortly before his eighteenth birthday. But he abandoned the legal profession for journalism and poetry, taking lodgings in Pimlico.¹²
Drawn to literary circles, Meredith collaborated with Edward Gryffydh Peacock, son of Thomas Love Peacock, in publishing a privately circulated literary magazine, the Monthly Observer. One of the contributors was Edward Peacock's sister Mary Ellen Nicolls. Described by the artist William Holman Hunt as "a dashing type of horsewoman who attracted much notice", Mary was the widow of a naval officer, Lieutenant Edward Nicolls, who in 1844 had drowned while attempting to rescue a man under his command.
In August 1849 Meredith married Mary, at St George's, Hanover Square. At the time of the marriage, Meredith was twenty-one years old; she was twenty-eight and had a five-year-old daughter by Lieutenant Nicolls (born after his death). Augustus Meredith was not present at the wedding, having emigrated to South Africa in April of that year.Meredith collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, in an 1851 volume, Poems. Dedicated to his father-in-law Thomas Love Peacock, "with the profound admiration and affectionate respect of his son-in-law", it attracted the interest of Tennyson, who wrote Meredith an admiring letter, expressing the desire to meet, though their first encounter was awkward and left Meredith convinced of the elder poet's "conceit". A review by William Michael Rossetti likened Meredith to "a kind of limited Keats", "a seeing or sensuous poet" possessing "warmth of emotion".
The Merediths' circumstances were precarious, and Mary had more than one miscarriage before in 1853 giving birth to a son, Arthur Gryffydh. At the time the couple were living with her father in Lower
Halliford (today part of Shepperton). Following the birth, Peacock rented a house for them, across the village green from his home.
Fatherhood heightened Meredith's belief that he must press ahead with his writing career, resulting in what would eventually be his first substantial work of prose fiction, The Shaving of Shagpat. An allegorical Arabian fantasy, it was written in imitation of "the style and manner of the Oriental story-tellers", but sprang "from no Eastern source". The book attracted little notice when published, in 1856, though it was praised by George Eliot for its "poetical genius".[15] The following year he published Farina, subtitled "A Legend of Cologne", a work in the comic-grotesque vein that was described by The Athenaeum's critic as "a full-blooded specimen of the nonsense of Genius" and a "lively, audacious piece of extravaganza". George Eliot, in The Westminster Review, called it "an original and an entertaining book", but it inevitably suffered from her reviewing it alongside Madame Bovary and Barchester Towers.Meredith supplemented his often uncertain writer's income with a job as a publisher's reader. His advice to Chapman & Hall made him influential in the world of letters, and he was capable of reading as many as ten manuscripts a week, though his judgement was not always reliable; Ellen Wood's novel East Lynne was rejected by Chapman & Hall on his say-so yet went on, when published by Richard Bentley, to be a bestseller.¹³ His friends in the literary world included, at different times, William and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Cotter Morison, Leslie Stephen, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Gissing and J. M. Barrie.
Gissing wrote in a letter to his brother Algernon that Meredith's novels were "of the superlatively tough species". His contemporary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle paid tribute to him in the short story "The Boscombe Valley Mystery", in which Sherlock Holmes says to Dr. Watson, during the discussion of the case, "And now let us talk about George Meredith, if you please, and we shall leave all minor matters until to-morrow." Oscar Wilde in "The Art of Novel-Writing" reflected, "Ah, Meredith! Who can define him? ... As a writer he has mastered everything, except language ... Too strange to be popular, too individual to have imitators, ... stands absolutely alone."
Nine of his novels were republished in 1885–6, priced at six shillings each, which made them accessible to a wider audience, and from 1889 they appeared in an edition priced 3s. 6d.. Meredith was moved to joke to James Payn, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, that his "submerged head [was] strangely appearing above the waters in England".
He continued to publish new novels, including One of our Conquerors (1891), an experimental portrait of a troubled marriage, and Lord Ormont and his Aminta (1894), which depicts a woman breaking free from a humiliating marriage and re-establishing her self-worth through a new relationship. The latter contains a sketch of a school that resembles the one he attended in Neuwied. The Amazing Marriage (1895), melodramatic yet closely concerned with modern questions of psychology and gender, was the last of his novels to be published in his lifetime; Celt and Saxon, an unfinished early work which took a keen interest in the relationship between race and ideology, appeared posthumously in 1910.
Marie died of throat cancer in 1885, lauded by Meredith as "the most unpretending, brave and steadfast friend ever given for a mate".In later life he was troubled by ailments which restricted his mobility. Explanations for this have included locomotor ataxia and osteoarthritis.
Before his death, Meredith was honoured from many quarters: in 1892 he succeeded Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors; that year there was an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews; and at a dinner in his honour in 1895 Thomas Hardy and George Gissing paid tribute to his achievements and his influence on them. Max Beerbohm's caricature for Vanity Fair, published in 1896 and captioned "Our First Novelist", was an indication of Meredith's standing at that time; Beerbohm thought him, Shakespeare apart, the greatest English literary figure.
In 1905 he was appointed to the Order of Merit, which had recently been established by King Edward VII.He was invested with the Order at Flint Cottage in December of that year, at a small ceremony performed by the King's representative, Sir Arthur Ellis. In 1909, he died at home in Box Hill. His ashes were buried alongside Marie's in the cemetery at Dorking, Surrey.¹⁴