George Meredith(1828–1909)

George Meredith was born at Portsmouth on 12 February 1828, son of a naval tailor whose Welsh-border family had come down from mid-Wales the previous century. He was schooled at Portsmouth and, from fourteen, for two years at the Moravian Brothers school at Neuwied on the Rhine.

He came home at sixteen, was briefly articled to a London solicitor, and at eighteen abandoned the law to write. He published Poems (1851) at twenty-three, 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-fairy-tale register of the late-Romantic period. The Modern Love sonnet sequence of 1862, fifty sixteen-line poems on the breakdown of a first marriage, has been continuously in print since.

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), the novel on the destruction of a young gentleman's first love by his father's educational system, was the first major book. Mudie's Circulating Library declined to stock it and the conventional Victorian readership never reached it; the same was true of Evan Harrington (1861) 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 to 1894, in which he was the first reader to recognise Thomas Hardy's first manuscript.

The Egoist (1879), the comic novel of Sir Willoughby Patterne and the intellectual resistance of Clara Middleton, was the breakout book. The Athenaeum, the Spectator and the Saturday Review printed long admiring reviews; Robert Louis Stevenson called it one of the half-dozen great English novels of the century, and Henry James called Meredith the foundational English-comic-novel figure of the post-Dickens generation. The critical reputation was settled even where the readership stayed small.

He lived at Flint Cottage at the foot of Box Hill on the Surrey downs for the last forty-five years of his life, where the senior late-Victorian literary establishment came down to him: Stevenson, Hardy, Barrie, Henry James, Leslie Stephen. He married Marie Vulliamy in 1864, the long settled marriage of his adult life. He was elected President of the Society of Authors in 1892 on Tennyson's resignation, was a founding member of the Order of Merit in 1905, and died at Flint Cottage on 18 May 1909, eighty-one years old. He is buried at Dorking. The Meredith name, the Welsh patronymic ap Maredudd, the Portsmouth tailor's branch carried into the late-Victorian English-novel canon.