George Meredith(1828–1909)

George Meredith was born at the upper-storey rooms at 73 High Street, Portsmouth, on 12 February 1828, son of Augustus Urmston Meredith, a tailor of small means who ran the family naval-tailoring business in Portsmouth High Street, and Jane Eliza Macnamara. The Meredith family had come down the previous century from the Welsh-border country of mid-Wales; the grandfather Melchizedek Meredith had moved to Portsmouth in the 1790s on the English naval-tailoring contract market, prospered through the Napoleonic War years, and left the small house and business to Augustus on his death in 1814. The household was lower-middle-class Anglican Portsmouth of the post-Trafalgar generation. The mother died of consumption when the boy was five. He was schooled at the local St Paul's Portsmouth grammar school and then in 1842 at fourteen was sent to the Moravian Brothers school at Neuwied on the Rhine in Germany for two years of senior continental schooling that his father had saved for from the naval-tailoring inheritance.

He came home to Portsmouth in 1844 at sixteen, was articled at his uncle's London solicitor's office at Cheapside for two years, and at eighteen abandoned the legal apprenticeship to write. The next decade was the apprenticeship. He published *Poems* (1851) at twenty-three on the small advance of his father-in-law (he had married, at twenty-one, the widowed Mary Ellen Nicolls, daughter of Thomas Love Peacock the Romantic-period novelist, six years older than himself), worked as a journalist on the *Ipswich Journal* and the *Morning Post*, and wrote his first prose romance *The Shaving of Shagpat* (1855) in the Eastern-Persian-fairy-tale register that was the fashion of the late-Romantic period. Mary Ellen Nicolls bore him a son Arthur in 1853, left him for the painter Henry Wallis in 1858, and died in October 1861 of complications from a third pregnancy by Wallis. The seven years of the failed first marriage produced the foundational personal material of his subsequent writing career.

*The Ordeal of Richard Feverel* (1859), the long novel on the destruction of a young English gentleman's first love by his father's well-intentioned educational system, was the first major book. Mudie's Circulating Library, the senior commercial-lending library of Victorian fiction publishing, refused to stock the book on the grounds of the scene of the young Richard's encounter with the prostitute Bella Mount in London; the senior commercial consequence of the Mudie refusal was that the book sold poorly in the conventional commercial circulation of the lending-library system and never reached the popular-fiction readership of the Victorian period. The same fate met *Evan Harrington* (1861), *Modern Love* (1862, the long sonnet sequence of fifty sixteen-line poems on the breakdown of his first marriage, which has been continuously in print since), *Sandra Belloni* (1864), and *Rhoda Fleming* (1865). He earned his living through the 1860s and 1870s as the senior literary reader at the publisher Chapman & Hall (the post he held from 1860 to 1894, in which capacity he read for the press the manuscripts of every major late-Victorian English novelist of the next thirty years and was the first reader to recognise Thomas Hardy's first manuscript), as the leader-writer at the *Ipswich Journal*, and as a slow-selling novelist of the critical reputation.

*The Egoist* (1879), the comic novel on the destruction of the priggish Sir Willoughby Patterne's marital plans by the intellectual resistance of the heroine Clara Middleton, was the breakout book. The critical reception was a substantial upward revision of his standing across the literary establishment: the *Athenaeum*, the *Spectator* and the *Saturday Review* all printed long admiring reviews; Robert Louis Stevenson's 1887 *Memories and Portraits* called *The Egoist* one of the half-dozen great English novels of the century; and Henry James's 1903 *George Meredith* essay called him the foundational English-comic-novel figure of the post-Dickens generation. The contemporary readership of the book remained small (the English-novel-reading market continued to find his prose style at the same time elliptical, allusive and obscure; Oscar Wilde's 1891 quip that *as for living, our servants will do that for us* was a parody of the Meredithian elliptical mode), but the critical reputation was settled.

He lived at Flint Cottage at the foot of Box Hill on the Surrey downs, a small house he had taken in 1864 on the rent of a small annual payment to the Sheridan estate, for the last forty-five years of his life. The senior late-Victorian English literary establishment came down to him at Box Hill across the period: Stevenson, Hardy, J. M. Barrie, Henry James, Leslie Stephen, the senior figures of the Fortnightly Review and the Saturday Review. He married Marie Vulliamy, daughter of a French Huguenot Englishman, in 1864; the second marriage was the long settled one of his adult life and lasted twenty-one years until Marie's death in 1885. He was elected President of the Society of Authors in 1892 on the resignation of Alfred Tennyson, was awarded the Order of Merit on its founding by Edward VII in 1905 (one of the founding twelve members), and died at Flint Cottage on 18 May 1909, eighty-one years old. He is buried at Dorking Cemetery in Surrey. The Meredith name in the Welsh-side catalogue is the patronymic of *ap Maredudd* (son of Maredudd, the Welsh kingly name), the foundational mid-Wales surname of the Powys-borderland country; the Portsmouth tailor's branch of it carried him into the late-Victorian English-novel canon.