 George Meredith Licensed by Creative Commons"Adieu. I trust you are well. Look to health. Run to no excess in writing or in anything. I hope you will feel that we expect much of you"
(Letter from Meredith to RLS on 4 June 1878 regarding An Inland Voyage. From Letters of George Meredith, ed. by C.L.Cline [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970], pp. 559-61).
George Meredith (1828-1909) was an English novelist and poet. He is best known for novels like The Egoist (1879) and Diana of the Crossways (1885). He was also a reader for the publishers Chapman and Hall, reading and suggesting manuscripts for publication. In this capacity he introduced the reading public to George Gissing (1857-1903) and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928).
In 1849 Meredith made an unhappy marriage to Mary Ellen Nicolls. The couple had one child, Arthur (1853-1890). Mary Ellen left Meredith in 1858 for the artist Henry Wallis (1830-1916) and died in 1861. In 1864, Meredith made a second, and more successful marriage. He and his new wife, Marie Vulliamy, settled in Flint Cottage, Box Hill, Dorking. They had two children, William (b. 1865) and Mariette (b. 1874). Marie died of cancer in 1885, and RLS sent the grieving Meredith a condolence letter.
RLS first met George Meredith in March 1878 at his home in Flint Cottage (Stevenson and his mother were staying in Box Hill from 15-19 March at the Burford Bridge Hotel). After this visit the authors stayed in touch, and RLS visited Meredith three more times: in early June 1879 (probably 1-8 June), from 12-17 May 1882, and from 4-8 August 1886. For more information about these visits to Box Hill, you can also see the section devoted to it in the Footsteps pages of the RLS Website.
Both writers exchanged and expressed their admiration for one another’s work. In an April 1882 letter to W.E. Henley Stevenson wrote: “George Meredith, the only man of genius of my acquaintance [. . .]. I have just re-read for the third and fourth time The Egoist. When I shall have read it the sixth or seventh, I begin to see I shall know about it. You will be astonished when you come to re-read it; I had no idea of the matter – human, red matter, he has contrived to plug and pack into that strange and admirable book” (The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol iii [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], p. 321).
Indeed, RLS read a great deal of Meredith, for example The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), Evan Harrington (1861), The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871), Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883), Diana of the Crossways (1885), and One of Our Conquerors (1891). In turn, Meredith read Stevenson’s work – for example he commented on An Inland Voyage (1878) and RLS sent him Ballads (1890) and Catriona (1893) from Samoa. RLS also dedicated the 1884 edition of Beau Austin to Meredith.
Meredith used RLS as the model for his character Gower Woodseer in The Amazing Marriage (1895). When RLS learned about Meredith’s intentions, he wrote: “I hear occasionally of The Amazing Marriage. It will be a brave day for me when I get hold of it. Gower Woodseer is now an ancient, lean, grim, exiled Scot, living and labouring for a wager in the tropics; still active, still with lots of fire in him, but the youth – ah, the youth where is it?”(Letter from RLS to George Meredith, 5 September 1893, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol viii [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], p. 163). Unfortunately, RLS was never to read how Meredith depicted him – he died a month before the novel began serialization in Scribner’s.
|
