George Meredith and His Circle: Intellectual Communities and Literary Networks

List of Conference Abstracts (by panel)

Panel A: Meredith and Literary Circles

Tom Ue (University of Oxford & University College London, UK), ‘Gissing, Meredith, and the Intellectual’

“Tough” and “genius” are terms with which Meredith and his novels have been characterized by contemporary novelists and critics ranging as widely as Gissing and Conan Doyle. This paper will analyse Gissing’s writing on Meredith with the aim of exploring how Meredith’s difficulty and his intellectualism operate as an informing presence for Gissing and his contemporaries. The two writers met at the beginning of Gissing’s literary career when he had sent the manuscript to The Unclassed to Chapman & Hall: he was invited to discuss it with the publisher’s reader, and it was only later that evening when Gissing learns, from Frederic Harrison, that he had been discussing the novel with Meredith. Gissing values Meredith’s judgment in literary matters, and as he writes to his brother Algernon on 12 June 1884: “It is an excellent thing to have got his good word [about The Unclassed]. His own novels are of the superlatively tough species (almost matching Harbottle chops.) See, for instance, the beginning of ‘Diana’ in the current Fortnightly” (CL 2: 223). And on 23 June 1884: “And do not lose out of sight the fact that a man like Meredith can wholly praise this book [The Unclassed], a man whose own writing has nothing whatever ‘offensive’ in it, but yet is deeply intellectual” (CL 2: 228). With close attention to Gissing’s correspondence and his diary—their friendship last until the end of Gissing’s lifetime—this paper demonstrates how Meredith operates, paradoxically, as both a source of inspiration and a model from which Gissing ultimately moves away.

Adrian Tait (Independent Scholar, UK), ‘From ‘In a Wood’ to ‘The Woods of Westermain’: Hardy, Meredith, and ‘the sterner worship’ of Evolutionary Theory’

The literary ambitions and early career of Thomas Hardy owed a great deal to the influence of George Meredith, then a reader with Chapman & Hall, and Hardy always remembered him affectionately for a tone ‘trenchant, turning kind’, as he later memorialized the older man. Furthermore, and whilst Hardy was never in any direct way part of Meredith’s circle, they also formed part of an intellectual community that shared the same concerns and interests. The aim of this paper, then, is to explore the correspondences in the work of these two remarkable writers, and, in particular, to compare the way each responded to the specific – and specifically post-Darwinian – challenge of (re)writing ‘Nature’. For both, this was an important theme, and it is exemplified, if not encapsulated, in their differing depictions of woods and woodlanders, both human and non-human. For Hardy, the woods of a post-Darwinian world were a site of strife and struggle in which there was no lesson to be learnt but that of survival, and from that, the narrator of his short poem ‘In a Wood’ (1887; 1896) beats a hasty retreat. For Meredith, however, a post-Darwinian world was at once wonderful and terrifying. His woods – ‘The ‘Woods of Westermain’ (1883) – offer enchantment rather than estrangement, and a very Meredithian union of ‘blood, brain, and spirit’ that recalls Robert Pogue Harrison’s dictum: forests are places where ‘the logic of distinction goes astray’ and ‘subjective categories are confounded’. Yet Hardy’s own evocation of woods and woodland life – whether in Under the

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Greenwood Tree, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, or The Woodlanders – is itself more subtle and less schematic than this contrast suggests; and as I hope to show in this paper, the parallels between the two writers offer a fascinating insight into the emergence of new and, perhaps, equally compelling myths about the natural world.

Sean O’Toole (Baruch College, City University of New York, USA), ‘“Breaking his shins over his own wit”: Meredith, Wit, and Wilde’

Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate. Somebody in Shakespeare—Touchstone, I think—talks about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith’s method. But whatever he is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is a child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father.

Oscar Wilde’s well-known assessment of George Meredith’s style in “The Decay of Lying” (1889) gestures ironically in two opposing directions at once: toward an overweening excess—‘everything’ that Meredith has mastered, can do, is—as well as toward a crippling lack—‘everything except’ those qualities usually associated with literary style. If ‘breaking his shins over his own wit’ provides a keenly perceptive and memorably witty phrase capturing a crucial aspect of Meredith’s writing in a single stroke—indeed, as one of his own characters might do—Wilde’s most biting criticism comes in the form of a mocking comment on and imitation of his predecessor’s unusual style and syntax: ‘By its means he has planted round his garden a hedge full of thorns, and red with wonderful roses’ (1076). In ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1890), Wilde would offer a somewhat more positive valuation of Meredith’s style in comparing it with that of Robert Browning, at the latter’s expense: ‘Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning’ (1111). What do Wilde’s various assessments reveal about Meredith’s style, and what do they reveal about Wilde? What does it mean that both of these witticisms appear in the form of a dialogic essay? Wilde describes Meredith as ‘a child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father’: how might this turn of phrase be seen to betray both an inheritance and an anxious relation between Wilde himself and his Victorian forebear George Meredith?

In this paper, I explore lines of connection between Meredith and Wilde by reading Meredith’s wit back through Wilde’s. I suggest that the beginnings of the camp tradition and the epigrammatic epicene style that have since become so closely associated with Wilde are already clearly on display in Meredith: most notably, in his grand dame of The Egoist (1879), Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, but also in the very serious thought that Meredith gives, like Wilde after him, to concepts of sincerity and frivolity, nature and artifice, and surface and depth, more generally. In looking forward to and harnessing more market-friendly forms, Wilde outlasted Meredith, but the debt is as evident as it is mutually revealing.

Work Cited Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. London: Collins, 2003. Print.

Panel B: Meredith: Masculinity and Sexuality

Melissa Jenkins (Wake Forest University, USA), ‘George Meredith and the Dark Body’

George Meredith is most well-known for his devastating sonnet series Modern Love (1862), which begins with the startling image of estranged spouses lying side-by-side in bed, paralyzed with rage and regret. His first full-length realist novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), elicited critical discussions of his unflinching look at the sexualized male body, including the queer body. This presentation turns to Meredith’s understudied first work, The Shaving of Shagpat: An Arabian

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Entertainment (1855), a work that George Eliot called “a work of genius” and that was wildly popular in its time but has been largely ignored by modern critics. The fantasy joins Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1831) in using the clothed and unclothed male body as part of a spiritual allegory. It also draws on Victorian Orientalism to figure the exoticized male body, including, often, the “black” body. The plot is simple: a hungry barber longs to shave a well-fed tailor. The dramatic, sensual execution offers much to our understanding of how Eastern traditions allowed the Victorians, as well as the Romantics, to safely narrate the erotic and aesthetic dimensions of the male form. Victorian reviews of the novel denounce its neglect by critics but underscore its popularity with general readers. For example, The Edinburgh Review says that Meredith’s “Arabian Entertainment” displays “the luxuriant exuberance of a glowing imagination,” in a tour-de-force “grotesque parod[y]” of the “discursive art of Oriental-storytelling.” A Time reviewer (1887) describes the text itself as a male body on the brink, “overflowing,” “rush[ing] on with a slackened bridle, swiftly and recklessly.” This chapter places George Meredith’s fantasy text where it belongs, in a literary tradition that drew from Biblical and Eastern poetic models not only in poetry, as in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát (1859-1889), but also in prose. As with the Song of Songs, Meredith’s fable finds the divine in the erotic, and vice versa. Where it differs is in its focus on the exotic male body, in all of its extremities, as a locus for both.

Alice Crossley (Bishop Grosseteste University, UK), ‘The Erotic Dynamics of Male Adolescence in George Meredith’

In his mid-Victorian novels, George Meredith adopts the figure of the adolescent in order to reflect and explore diverse cultural anxieties. This is particularly true of the young men whose sexual initiations and early transgressions are recorded in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and Rhoda Fleming (1865). In each text, sexual consciousness and (unlicensed) youthful desires are examined at some length. The associative relationship between adolescence and sexuality is such that the two are inextricably linked.

The earlier novel, which notoriously shocked Meredith’s contemporary readership (exemplified by the fact that Mudie’s Circulating Library refused to stock it), narrates in some detail the development and systematic education of the protagonist with an emphasis on Richard Feverel’s sensual impulses. Through reference to pseudo-scientific discourses, the novel reproduces and interrogates mid- Victorian hysteria about youth succumbing to sexual temptation before marriage. Instead, Meredith cautiously articulates a more positive understanding of sexual ‘precocity’ as a healthy aspect of masculine identity. The novel also, however, engages with the possibilities of eroticism beyond the regulatory constraints of heteronormative behaviour. The queer instability of adolescence, in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, is articulated not just through Richard’s youthful passion for his young bride Lucy, for example, but also through unlicensed opportunities of gender misidentification, cross-dressing, and auto-erotic impulses.

This paper will demonstrate that such queering of adolescence is also apparent in Rhoda Fleming, in which the transference of sexual interest across characters is particularly pronounced, so that two of the central female characters (Rhoda herself and Peggy Lovell) are repeatedly figured as objects of attraction that mediate fascination between male characters. This is repeated to such an extent in the novel that the heteronormative imperative of Victorian male adolescence (as the period during which patriarchal attitudes and behaviours must be learned in order to perform the habits of received manliness in adulthood) is constantly challenged. While the promise of heterosexual union pervades the novel, whose central theme is seduction, the homoerotic sibling relationship between the sisters Dahlia and Rhoda finds suggestive parallels in the companionate friendships and erotic rivalries conducted between the young male characters of the novel.

Keynote Address

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Sally Shuttleworth (University of Oxford, UK), ‘Diseases of City Life, and One of Our Conquerors’

Panel C: Meredith in his Time

Matthew Fellion (St. Francis Xavier University, Canada), ‘Realism, Comedy, and Philosophy in George Meredith’s Fiction’

This paper attempts to draw out George Meredith’s thoughts about his own use of genre, looking to the “Essay on Comedy and on the Uses of the Comic Spirit” and the explicit commentary of Meredith’s narrators, as well as the implicit principles that shape his novels. I will argue that Meredith’s mutually informing categories of comedy and realism exclude the possibility of wholly authoritative speech about reality by subjecting individual wisdom to correction within a larger, comic social consciousness. For Meredith, the realist novel is the product of an individual artistic vision—life in Meredith’s representations looks quite different from life in George Eliot’s, for instance—yet the realist novel also has a social dimension, so that it cannot be a merely eccentric flight of fancy, but must imply, albeit illusorily, a reality shared between the characters and the narrator, and extended to the reader. The realist novel is a condensed representation of this reality, condensed through abstraction and the mediations of consciousness, language, and genre. Meredith’s comic and realist compressions of social and individual life are intimately related, and his fanciful comic machinery, including personified abstractions like the Comic Spirit, the Comic Muse, and a horde of imps, are also mechanisms of his realism. As Meredith writes in his “Essay on Comedy,” comedy is “an interpretation of the general mind”: this phrase connects comedy to both aspects of what I argue to be Meredith’s realist method—the singular perspective of the interpreting narrator and the general social condition that is both the object of interpretation and the reason why individual interpretation is limited. Understanding the relationship between Meredith’s comedy and realism also involves identifying in what sense he can correctly be called realist, since Meredith is apt to denigrate realism as the equally misguided antithesis of sentimentalism—the “dirty drab.” However, when Meredith is using “realism” in a negative sense, he is referring to what eventually coalesced as naturalism. When Meredith speaks of realism positively, it shares the aims of comedy. These aims can, finally, be best understood through Meredith’s concept of “philosophy,” a complex word that he uses, among other senses, to designate the uncertain process by which one attempts to interpret, and thereby endure, the condition and contradictions of life.

Anna Enrichetta Soccio (University G. d’Annunzio, Italy), ‘Meredith and the Idea of History’

In a letter dated 27 February 1871 George Meredith wrote: “I am European and Cosmopolitan – for humanity!” That same year Europe saw the end of the Franco-Prussian war and the rise of two united powers, Italy and Germany. The European political framework was changing fast under the pressure of new economic and social interests which were embodied by the movements and the parties that had taken part in the processes of unification of those countries. Unsurprisingly, Meredith’s words reveal that he was a progressive and liberal writer whose understanding of the changes in Europe was the result of a long reflection on the political situation as well as on his education and remarkable intuition. Meredith’s interest in contemporary matters is well-known. He had an intimate familiarity and a profound affection for the Continent. After spending some years in Germany as a young student, he travelled a lot through France, Switzerland and Italy as a journalist and tourist. Not only could he testify to the difficult situations of the Italian Risorgimento, but he also followed the process leading to the making of the German empire. My paper will investigate the ways in which Meredith dramatizes some important events of the nineteenth century, their protagonists and the ideas pervading such a difficult time for the Old Continent. In particular, I will focus on the Italian novels, Vittoria and Sandra Belloni, and on The Tragic Comedians that, despite the fact that

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they are not considered among Meredith’s best novels, are extremely interesting because they show the writer’s understanding of the recent past in terms of a modern view of the political organization of Europe.

Patrick Fessenbecker (Bilkent University, Turkey), ‘George Meredith on Egoism: Two Interpretations’

There are two ways one can understand George Meredith's portrayal of the psychology of egoism. First, one can see egoism as an alienation from a moral agent's core emotions and beliefs: in this way, egoism is a failure of authenticity. Second, one can see egoism as an inability or refusal to take a third-person perspective on one's own actions, and an insistence on privileging one's own perspective; in this way, egoism is a failure of rationality. Meredith at various moments seems to suggest both views. Particularly in his reflective descriptions of egoism, he describes it as a sort of deviation from nature, and thus as a kind of inauthenticity. However, in his detailed and sustained representations of egoism in "The Egoist" and other novels, Meredith suggests that egoism as a kind of irrationality is really the problem he is most concerned with. Drawing on the analysis of egoism in Henry Sidgwick and other Victorian philosophers, this paper attempts to characterize the relationship between these two accounts of egoism in Meredith's work.

Panel D: Meredith and the Arts

Lucy Ella Rose (University of Surrey, UK), ‘George Meredith and Mary Watts: His Feminist Ideas in her Diaries’

Britain’s ‘premier portrait-painter’ George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) and his creative wife Mary Seton Watts (1849-1938) formed a close friendship with George Meredith, whose ideas had a profound effect particularly on Mary. While Meredith sat for his portrait to be painted by G. F. Watts for the ‘Hall of Fame’ – a collection of portraits of famous Victorians bequeathed to the nation – he discussed philosophical and socio-political issues with Mary, and read his poetry to her. Mary recorded her reflections on Meredith’s texts and her private discussions with him in her diaries, directly quoting him. The Wattses were intensely interested in Meredith’s works, and in one of her diaries Mary praises Meredith’s great thought, delicate description and ability to ‘paint men and women in flesh and blood’ in his New Woman novel Diana of the Crossways. She also praises his subtle observations on women in his novel The Egoist, writing that he seems to understand women better than any other man and has blown the trumpet of greater female freedom for many years; she calls him a ‘leader of his times’. Mary shared Meredith’s strong sympathies with women. Her most explicit expression of her progressive position in relation to early feminism is documented in one of her diaries in which she recalls the powerful feelings she experienced during a discussion with Meredith. Mary was deeply inspired and influenced by his revolutionary vision of gender equality and female liberation, and she documents this discussion – during which Meredith urges women to be more ‘naked’ or rather ‘themselves’ – in significant detail. This paper explores Mary’s passionate diary entries which explicitly express her strong emotional connection and affiliation with Meredith’s notion of a post-patriarchal and even utopian world of ‘perfect gender equality’. Mary’s hitherto untranscribed and unpublished diaries provide new perspectives on Meredith and his circle.

Rebecca Mitchell (University of Birmingham, UK), ‘Meredith on Art in the Westminster Review’

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From April 1857 to January 1858, George Meredith wrote the ‘Belles Lettres and Art’ column for John Chapman’s Westminster Review, producing four articles that have received scant critical attention. Gordon Haight’s foundational 1958 article on the topic, ‘George Meredith and the Westminster Review’, introduced the pieces, documented their provenance, and excerpted extended quotations, but otherwise offered precious little discussion.

Perhaps one reason for the scholarly reticence is the sense that Meredith’s contributions to the Westminster Review were not his best work. George Eliot, who held the post prior to Meredith, certainly felt as much, writing to Chapman in January 1858 that she wished he ‘could get the Belles Lettres better done’ as she felt their ‘tone [was] so flippant and journalistic’, a complaint that Haight acknowledges, even if he does not fully agree. But dismissing the works out of hand risks overlooking telling evidence of Meredith’s developing critical faculties at a relatively early stage of his career.

Yet the Westminster pieces are particularly compelling because they feature the author’s ventures into art criticism. In a recent Branch article on the Moxon Tennyson, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra fruitfully turned to Meredith’s Westminster review of that volume to consider the ways that ‘a reader could inscribe contemporary ideologies of race and gender’ in the illustrations.

In this talk, I offer a more sustained discussion of Meredith’s engagement with art criticism, especially his accounts of works by John Ruskin, which feature in three of the four ‘Belles Lettres’ articles. The timing of Meredith’s articles and his choice of texts ensured that he could address the pre-Raphaelites, the realism/idealism debate, the intersection of visuality and verse, and even the paintings of Henry Wallis, encounters all freighted with personal as well as aesthetic intensity.

Alana West (Queen’s University, Canada), ‘Laughing Scorn: The Idea of Comparing a Poem and a Photograph’

Photographer Frederick H. Evans (British, 1853-1943) is best known for his exquisite platinum photographs of English and French cathedrals. Less known as a Meredithian, Evans collected George Meredith’s work and corresponded with him beginning in the 1880s, lamenting the general “neglect of the public” for his work. In 1909 Evans took a series of photographs for The Works of George Meredith Memorial Edition. The photographs are, on the one hand, topographical and, on the other, interpretive. This dual approach to the subject matter allowed Evans to illustrate key places in Meredith’s life, while also providing him with a creative means to depict the landscape in relation to the writer. The photographs were produced as photogravures within the book, but Evans printed several of the more interpretive images as platinum prints that were exhibited and given to friends and acquaintances. For the most part, photo-historians and curators have ignored this body of work.

In 1915 an unknown writer for the upscale weekly, Country Life wrote in relation to this work: “It is very likely that Mr. Meredith would have flung laughing scorn on the idea of comparing a poem and a photograph, but the two are not so very far apart.”1 Evans not only compared the two, but he went one step further titling his photographs with quotes or titles from various poems. He even mounted letterpress poems by Meredith on to the mounts of photographs wanting the viewer to experience the work together. Evans fully believed in the comparison of poetry and photography, and saw them as equal forms of creative expression. This paper examines Evans’s Memorial Edition photographs in relation to Meredith’s poetry, and discusses the issues surrounding the making, presenting, and reception of the work, specifically in relation to the combination of the two mediums.

1 Anonymous, “George Meredith as a Woodland Poet,” Country Life 38, no. 987 (December 4, 1915): 748.

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Panel E: Meredith and Women

Akemi Yoshida (Kinki University, Japan), ‘A Comparative Reading of George Sand’s Consuelo, George Meredith’s Sandra Belloni and George Gissing’s Thyrza’

This paper attempts to explore the possible influential relationship among George Sand’s Consuelo (1842-3), George Meredith’s Sandra Belloni (originally published in 1864 under the title Emilia in England) and George Gissing’s Thyrza (1887).

In Consuelo, Sand presents an opera singer of genius as the heroine, whose artistic gift is associated with her strong individuality and ethical spirituality. In her Germaine de Stael, George sand and the Victorian Woman Artist, Linda M. Lewis argues that Consuelo by Sand, together with Corinne by Mme de Stael, originated the dominant myth of female genius in the nineteenth century. Till then, according to Lewis, artistic creators in Western myths had exclusively been males. Sand’s works were widely read by the Victorians and had a great influence, and Lewis has explored how Sand’s Consuelo has enabled Victorian female writers to be aware of the possibility of a female genius. “According to an 1877 essay by Matthew Arnold, it remained the most popular literary work in England more than three decades after its 1842 publication” (Lewis, 42) The titular heroine Consuelo is an unconventional, subversive figure, who always is in harmony with nature and detests artificiality. Her musical gift allows her to cross not only national borders but also class boundaries.

A reader of Sand, Meredith also has created a heroine whose divine singing voice is a proof of her pure and natural personality. And in Thyrza, in which Gissing has employed a musically talented heroine who possesses a revolutionary “artist’s soul,” there can be found some scenes and elements intriguingly similar to Consuelo and Sandra Belloni. An analysis of similarities and also differentiations among these novels would reveal the sympathy and also disparity in the ideas and world views among respective authors.

Claudia Capancioni (Bishop Grosseteste University, UK), ‘“Can I ever forget my dearest and best womanfriend?” George Meredith’s Friendship with Janet Ross’

For the scholar researching Janet Ross (1842-1927), George Meredith is an author of extreme importance. Not only does he immortalise Ross fictionally in his work, but he also kept a life-long correspondence with her, which helps to identify significant moments in her literary career, as well as in his. When they first met at Weybridge, Ross was a child who loved listening to Meredith’s ‘wild tales, out of his wonderful book, The Shaving of Shagpat.’ (Ross 1891: 76) From 1858, their acquaintance developed into a trusted friendship: Ross became Meredith’s ‘dearest and best womanfriend’ (Meredith in Ross 1912: 149), while Ross referred to Meredith as ‘my Poet’. (Ross, 1912: 19)

The ways in which Janet Ross inspired Meredith’s work were revealed by the Victorian author himself; hence, biographical and academic work on Meredith at the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, have acknowledged the intrinsic link between these two Victorian figures. The interest remains biographical and often ends by asking: ‘[w]as George Meredith in love with Janet Duff Gordon, and would he have asked her to marry him had he been free and wealthy?’ (Waterfield 1962: 34) This is not a question that interests me. It is their distinctive friendship as a uniquely influential mentoring experience that assisted Ross’s own literary and artistic choices that matters to this paper. Their correspondence captures their literary work from initial ideas and proposals to publication enhancing our understanding of their friendship as an intellectual exchange sustained by networks of common acquaintances, such as Lord Alfred Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Caroline Norton, Alexander William Kinglake, George Frederick Watts, and John Addington Symonds.

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Final Plenary Paper

Margaret Harris (University of Sydney, Australia), ‘Meredithian Circles’

Meredith has always aroused extreme reactions, whether writing in prose or verse. For much of his writing life he was criticised for the difficulty and obscurity of his style, though in the latter part of his career his support for women gained him new followers, while younger writers found inspiration in his work. Evidence of the esteem in which he was held in his later years includes his being one of the earliest members inducted into Edward VII’s new Order of Merit. At his death in 2009, his standing was recognised by the fact that the Liberal Prime Minister Asquith attended his funeral. A century on, Meredith is once again better known for his place among a particular intelligentsia than for his novels, poetry, and work as a publisher’s reader.

This paper will trace and attempt to account for the ebbs and flows of Meredith’s reputation over his long life, and after.

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