Birthday: Not one for gossip was George Meredith, who wrote of one character, "She poured a little social sewage into his ears."

George Meredith (1828-1909)

Novelist, poet, essayist

Meredith’s family made a living, of sorts, in naval supplies, but, thinking themselves above the grubbiness of trade, ran their businesses into the ground while living well above their means. They were especially bad about collecting their accounts, which made them popular with a certain type of customer who, in large numbers, invariably dooms any business.

His father tried to apprentice him to a bookseller. Meredith thought the man an idiot and got a job in a lawyer's’ office before eventually following the mid-19th-century English writer’s course of becoming a solicitor and not practicing.

A longtime friendship with the son of author Thomas Love Peacock turned Meredith’s life into a black comedy for a decade. The two edited a literary magazine for a time; then Meredith fell in love with Peacock’s widowed sister- eight years older than he- and they married in 1849.

The marriage was a trainwreck. Mary Ellen had a series of miscarriages and stillbirths. George developed odd digestive problems requiring a special diet.

The lack of money made life complicated, and cold. Mary Ellen published a successful cookbook based on George’s bum tum, but by 1853 things were so tight, the couple moved in with her father, Thomas Love Peacock.

Nearing seventy, Peacock had lost the taste for irregular domestic arrangements that characterized his wild youth in Shelley’s posse, and grew so frustrated that he moved out of his house and took rooms nearby.

Enter the painter Henry Wallis, a pre-Raphaelite hotshot. For a large canvas of The Death of Chatterton (a poet and medieval document forger who took arsenic at seventeen, becoming a beau ideal of the Romantic Era), Meredith posed as the doomed teen poet.

The painting was a huge success at the Royal Academy show of 1856, and a timely one for Wallis, then living in a garret barely big enough to hold the Chatterton canvas.

Mary Ellen decamped in 1858 with Henry Wallis, leaving the child, Arthur, behind. Meredith, who was unnaturally secretive about his embarrassing family even by the standards of the day, had spun her a narrative of social standing he did not possess, and she found out.

Meredith self-published his first collection of poetry in 1857, and a couple of poorly-received novels. In 1860 he landed a job as a manuscript reader for the publishers Chapman & Hall, remaining there for thirty-five years.

He lived alone, or with male friends, for several years, though he found sharing digs with Swinburne and Rossetti too exotic to be borne, and probably, too close to Wallis.

Mary Ellen died in 1861, and Meredith worked out his lost decade in an 1862 novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.

The book was a shocker. Meredith envisioned a world in which “The System”- a scientific method for raising children- ensured they would grow up with the right thoughts, and live the right way, with the right other people. Of course, it didn't work out that way at all. A three-volume novel in the heyday of the private circulation libraries as tastemakers, Feverel was doomed after Mudie’s canceled a big order. Meredith’s reputation was tainted for years.

At Chapman & Hall, he put his experience to good use, advising the young Thomas Hardy his first novel would meet the same fate. Put it aside, he urged, and write something that will sell. You can shock people when your reputation is secure.

Hardy did just that.

Meredith continued to publish his own books, though with little commercial success, through the mid-1870s. He constantly tinkered with his style and subjects, reacting to the public response to his last book, trying to find the sweet spot of Victorian taste and missing it every time.

He finally blew up and published an article denouncing the low tastes of the public and declaring he would, henceforth, write what pleased him.

Meredith’s public tantrum was just what he needed. His 1879 novel, The Egoist, highlighted his social concerns- the subjugation of women by English law loomed large- and his talent for comedies of manners (an 1877 essay on comedy remains a standard reference in search for the philosopher’s stone of what makes things funny).

Meredith relentlessly mocked the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, particularly his idea that personal freedom meant doing whatever one liked, as long as it didn’t harm others (the notion was later refined by Ayn Rand, whose characters- and followers in real life, don’t give a damn who their actions hurt; callousness often proved an aphrodisiac).

Dora of the Crossways (1885) was a commercial hit, and Meredith spent the last two decades of his life a Grand Old Man of English Literature. He was an officer of The London Library, and succeeded Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors in 1892. King Edward VII granted him the Order of Merit in 1905.

Meredith’s style was often complex and by no means straightforward; he relied on shifting, multiple and often unreliable points of view in his plots. Virginia Woolf wrote of him,

He makes no attempt to preserve the sober reality of Trollope and Jane Austen; he has destroyed all the usual staircases by which we have learnt to climb. And what is done so deliberately is done with a purpose. This defiance of the ordinary, these airs and graces, the formality of the dialogue with its Sirs and Madams are all there to create an atmosphere that is unlike that of daily life, to prepare the way for a new and an original sense of the human scene.

The book is cracked through and through with those fissures which come when the author seems to be of twenty minds at the same time. Yet it succeeds in holding miraculously together, not certainly by the depths and originality of its character drawing but by the vigour of its intellectual power and by its lyrical intensity.

J.B. Priestley called Meredith the father of the modern novel. For him, human motives are often concealed and self-deceiving; the consequences of action are often disastrous and irreparable. Like Iris Murdoch a century later, Meredith was a writer of the mind. Not much happens in his books; as a sibling said after pressed yet another Murdoch novel on her, “All they do is talk and scheme.” His rich, allusive language can be demanding for modern readers, rather like that of Henry James, but has often been praised for its lyrical flow.

After remarrying in 1864, Meredith moved to the country. He and his wife had two children; she died in 1886. Flint Cottage, in Surrey, became a place of pilgrimage for writers. Stevenson, George Gissing, Henry James and J.M. Barrie were regulars. Max Beerbohm, a refugee from his home in France, lived there during World War II.

Meredith’s collected works run to some forty volumes, and his life and work have been the subject of as many books since his death in 1909. His work lives on, most popularly, as the basis for the orchestral piece by Ralph Vaughan Williams, “The Lark Ascending.” Inspired by Meredith’s 1881 poem and premiered in 1921, the work won praise from a reviewer for The Times, who commented,

It showed serene disregard of the fashions of today or yesterday. It dreamed itself along.

The work remains one of the most popular of the classical repertoire to this day.

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