George Meredith

“Ah! Meredith! Who can define him?” asked Oscar Wilde in his essay “The Decay of Lying.” Highly influential in his own time, George Meredith (b. 1828–d. 1909) was a larger-than-life figure. Novelist, poet, occasional essayist, journalist, and dramatist, he was also, for over three decades, a reader for the great London publishing house, Chapman and Hall. As a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, he even cut a figure in the art world, modeling for Henry Wallis’s well-known The Death of Chatterton. He voiced his opinions on many issues that exercised the Victorians, from evolution to feminism. Through all these avenues Meredith made an immense contribution to the literature of the age, and to its broader cultural context. Seen at the time as the last Victorian sage, in 1905 he was among the second batch of those appointed to the Order of Merit, becoming the first literary figure to receive this honor. By then his work had inspired the succeeding generation of writers. Yet his reputation with the wider public had grown slowly and was already waning. The major barrier to popular recognition had always been his self-consciously condensed and figurative style; now its experimental nature marked him as an early modernist. Nevertheless, during the early twentieth century, only the confessional sonnets of his “Modern Love” sequence (1862), and a few of his novels, principally The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), The Egoist (1879), and Diana of the Crossways (1885), along with his Essay in Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit (1877), continued to be read and studied. In the 1950s, however, signs of new interest appeared, followed by a more significant surge in the 1970s. Important critics were now discovering why, in another of his essays (“The Critic as Artist”), Wilde had described Meredith as the one “incomparable novelist” of his time. The twenty-first century has brought Meredith to the forefront again, with recent scholars finding fresh points of entry into his work. In particular, they have been bringing new critical theories to bear on his innovative narrative techniques, and demonstrating that his unique style was much more than a reflection of his energetic, opinionated cast of mind: it expresses with rare immediacy and subtlety the workings of the psyche, and its engagement with others, with society, and with the larger world. Studying Meredith today is exhilarating, and enriches our understanding not only of the Victorian age, but of ourselves.