Queer Places:
Flint Cottage, The Zigzag, Mickleham, Dorking RH5 6BN, UK
Dorking Cemetery
Dorking, Mole Valley District, Surrey, England
George
Meredith OM (12 February 1828 – 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and
poet of the Victorian era. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in
Literature seven times.[1]
Some novels in the XIX century presented relationship between women in
positive and central terms, such as that between Diana Warwick and Emma
Dunstane in George Meredith's Diana of the Crossways (1885). Set in the
1830s and 1840s, the novel was loosely based on the experiences of
Caroline Norton, a society
hostess whose husband tried and failed to diveroce her for an alleged
affair with Whig Prime Minister Lord Melbourne and who was subsequently
accused of passing a Cabinet secret, learned for an admirer, to The Times.
However, the central relationship in the novel is one between two women,
Diana Warwick (Caroline Norton) and Emma Dunstane.
The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery version, for which Meredith posed in 1856
Meredith was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire,
a son and grandson of naval outfitters.[2] His
mother died when he was five. At the age of 14 he was sent to a Moravian School
in Neuwied, Germany,
where he remained for two years. He read law and was articled as a
solicitor, but abandoned that profession for journalism and poetry. He
collaborated with Edward
Gryffydh Peacock, son of Thomas
Love Peacock, in publishing a privately circulated literary magazine,
the Monthly Observer.[3] He
married Edward Peacock's widowed sister Mary Ellen Nicolls in 1849 when he
was twenty-one years old and she was twenty-eight.[2]
Meredith collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, in
an 1851 volume, Poems. In 1856 he posed as the model for The
Death of Chatterton, a notable painting by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry
Wallis (1830–1916).[4] His
wife ran off with Wallis in 1858; she died three years later. The
collection of sonnets entitled Modern Love (1862) emerged from this
experience as did The
Ordeal of Richard Feverel, his first major novel.[2]
Meredith married Marie Vulliamy in 1864 and settled in Surrey,
first in Norbiton and
then, at the end of 1867, near Box
Hill. He continued writing novels and poetry, often inspired by
nature. He had a keen understanding of comedy and his Essay on
Comedy (1877) remains a reference work in the history of comic theory. In The
Egoist, published in 1879, he applies some of his theories of comedy
in one of his most enduring novels. Some of his writings, including The
Egoist, also highlight the subjugation of women during the Victorian
period. During most of his career, he had difficulty achieving popular
success. His first successful novel was Diana of the Crossways published
in 1885.[5]
Meredith supplemented his often uncertain writer's income with a job as a
publisher's reader. His advice to Chapman and Hall made him influential in
the world of letters. His friends in the literary world included, at
different times, William and Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon
Charles Swinburne, Cotter
Morison,[6] 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'.[7] His
contemporary Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle paid him homage in the short-story "The
Boscombe Valley Mystery", when 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 his dialogue "The
Decay of Lying", implies that Meredith, along with Balzac,
is his favourite novelist, saying "Ah, Meredith! Who can define him? His
style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning". In 1868 Meredith was
introduced to Thomas
Hardy by Frederic
Chapman of Chapman
& Hall the publishers. Hardy had submitted his first novel, The Poor
Man and the Lady. Meredith advised Hardy not to publish his book as it
would be attacked by reviewers and destroy his hopes of becoming a
novelist. Meredith felt the book was too bitter a satire on the rich and
counselled Hardy to put it aside and write another 'with a purely artistic
purpose' and more of a plot. Meredith spoke from experience; his first big
novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was judged so shocking that Mudie's
circulating library had cancelled an order of 300 copies. Hardy continued
in his attempts to publish the novel: however it remained unpublished,
though he clearly took Meredith's advice seriously.[8]
Meredith's politics were those of a Radical Liberal and
he was friends with other Radicals such as Frederick
Maxse and John
Morley.[9][10]
Meredith had two wives and three children. He outlived both wives and
one child. On 9 August 1849, Meredith married Mary Ellen Nicolls (née
Peacock), a beautiful widow with a daughter. They had one child, Arthur
(1853–1890). In 1858 she ran off with the painter Henry Wallis, shortly
before giving birth to a child assumed to be Wallis's. Mary Ellen died in
1861.[12][13]
On 20 September 1864, Meredith married Marie Vulliamy. She died of cancer
in 1886.[13]
Meredith had three children: with Mary Ellen, Arthur Gryffydh (1853–1890),
with Marie, William Maxse (1865–1937)[13]
and Marie Eveleen (known as Mariette) (1871–1933). She married Henry
Parkman Sturgis. Before
his death, Meredith was honoured from many quarters: he succeeded Lord
Tennyson as president of the Society
of Authors; in 1905 he was appointed to the Order
of Merit by King
Edward VII.[2]
In 1909, he died at his home in Box
Hill, Surrey.[2] He
is buried in the cemetery at Dorking,
Surrey, which his residence Flint Cottage overlooked.[11]
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