George Meredith and His Circle: Intellectual Communities and Literary Networks

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 1 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 2 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.

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