Abstract
The chapter begins with the commonplace book in which Mary Meredith made extracts from her reading in the months during which her marriage was disintegrating. Mary was a novel reader, as was Meredith. It was one of the things, I suggest, that made them and their generation different from the generations that had come before them. They were people who came to understand themselves and their world through their reading quite as much as through their other experience. They found themselves in their reading, and, just as importantly, novels allowed them to live in their imaginations alternative lives, lives they might have lived had they made different choices or had they been different people. The chapter ends by pointing out the particular importance to Meredith of his reading of Stendhal.
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Notes
- 1.
George Gissing, The Whirlpool, chapter 6.
- 2.
George Gissing, The Whirlpool, chapter 9.
- 3.
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine , 166 (June 1887), p. 636.
- 4.
George Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, chapter 13.
- 5.
George Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, chapter 15.
- 6.
See Hammerton, 108. Meredith was invited after Carlyle, on Jane’s recommendation, read The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and concluded that Meredith was ‘nae fule’. Over tea he encouraged Meredith to give up the novel for ‘heestory’.
- 7.
The Wings of the Dove, Book Second, chapter 2.
- 8.
Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean, chapter 2.
- 9.
Ever since the eighteenth century, one important kind of novel, the kind invented by Cervantes in Don Quixote , had focused on characters who were readers. But these are people who misunderstand the real world because they confuse it with the world with which they are familiar from books. They are comic characters. Catherine Morland’s visit to Northanger Abbey ends so disastrously because she imagines it to be the kind of abbey that she has read about in the Gothic novels she enjoys. Edward Waverley, in Walter Scott’s first novel, is more violently discountenanced when he is persuaded to join the second Jacobite uprising in the foolish belief that Charles Stuart’s reckless bid for a throne was a chivalric enterprise of the kind that thrilled him in the knightly romances to which he was devoted. Catherine Morland and Edward Waverley learn by painful experience to recognise the difference between reality and fiction. They learn that life is not like the books that they had read. The late Victorians thought differently. They learned about life from their reading.
- 10.
Henry James, The Golden Bowl, chapter 42.
- 11.
Henry James, The Golden Bowl, chapter 39.
- 12.
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey , chapter 5.
- 13.
Mary Russell Mitford, Atherton, chapter 12, ‘A Young Lady’s Bookshelves’.
- 14.
Charlotte M. Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe, chapter 3.
- 15.
Mrs Henry Wood, East Lynne, chapter 16.
- 16.
Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd, chapter 15.
- 17.
George Gissing, In the Year of Jubilee, chapter 1.
- 18.
George Gissing, The Odd Women, chapters 2 and 6.
- 19.
George Gissing, The Odd Women , Part 4, chapter 1 and Part 6, chapter 5.
- 20.
Charlotte M. Yonge, Heartsease, or the Brother’s Wife, chapter 4.
- 21.
See Wilkie Collins, Man and Wife, chapter 17.
- 22.
George Gissing, The Odd Women , chapter 15.
- 23.
Caroline Norton, Lost and Saved, chapter 10.
- 24.
Rhoda Broughton, Alas!, chapter 8.
- 25.
Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up as a Flower , chapter 14.
- 26.
Mrs A. C. Steele, So Runs the World Away, chapter 3. Meredith read So Runs the World Away as it was serialised in Once a Week and gave Anna Steele his characteristically unsugared opinion of the novel. He allowed her ‘cleverness, literary faculty, glimpses of a power of humour’, and ‘the capacity for pathos, as well as a trained observation superior to that of many reputed good writers’, but accused her of writing a succession of ‘tableaux’ rather than a complete novel (the same might be said of almost all his own), and of writing too often with one eye on the reader: ‘don’t make points; it’s the same as the cocking of the eye in an actor.’ He particularly disliked the manner in which Anna Steele, after revealing the moral of her story, ‘pounded it on the head’ of her public (Letters, 1, 402–4). Meredith neglected to mention Steele’s evident debt to Rhoda Fleming. Steele’s ageing coquette, Lady Diana, is closely modelled on Meredith’s Mrs Lovell. Both women prompt duels in India: in Meredith’s novel the husband is killed, in Steele’s the lover.
- 27.
Le Côté de Guermantes, chapitre deuxième.
- 28.
‘Il aimait encore en effet à voir en sa femme un Botticelli’, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs.
- 29.
A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs.
- 30.
The trees have for him ‘la réalité qu’on retrouve en levant les yeux de dessus le livre qu’on était en train de lire’, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs.
- 31.
Andrée tells him that ‘ses meilleures heures étaient celles où elle traduisait un roman de George Eliot’, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs.
- 32.
‘Nom de pays, le nom’, Du côté de chez Swann.
- 33.
Alexandre Dumas, La Dame aux camélias, chapter 27.
- 34.
Alexandre Dumas, La Dame aux camélias, chapter 3.
- 35.
Edel, 167.
- 36.
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, Book 6, chapter 1.
- 37.
Leon Edel, Henry James, 5 vols (London: Hart Davis, 1953–72), 1, 159.
- 38.
Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, chapter 17.
- 39.
Henry James, Princess Casamassima, chapter 15.
- 40.
Henry James, Princess Casamassima, chapter 20.
- 41.
Henry James, Princess Casamassima, chapters 29 and 22.
- 42.
Henry James, Princess Casamassima, chapter 25.
- 43.
Henry James, The Europeans, chapter 5.
- 44.
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, Book 4, chapter 2.
- 45.
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, Book 4, chapter 3.
- 46.
Letters, 1, 227.
- 47.
Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus, chapter 10.
- 48.
Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus, chapter 17.
- 49.
Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus, chapter 22.
- 50.
Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus, chapter 28.
- 51.
Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus, Introduction.
- 52.
Letters, 3, 1321.
- 53.
Letters, 2, 894.
- 54.
Clodd, Memories, 153.
- 55.
The Letters of Thomas Love Peacock, ed. Nicholas A. Joukovsky (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 1, 57. For a discussion of Peacock’s most virulently anti-Christian poem, once thought to have been destroyed by Mary Ellen’s daughter, Edith, see Nicholas A. Joukovsky, ‘The Lost Greek Anapaests of Thomas Love Peacock’, Modern Philology, 89, iii (1992), 363–74.
- 56.
See ‘This Year’s Song-Crop’, Fraser’s Magazine, 44 (December 1851), 618–31.
- 57.
Charles Kingsley, Yeast: A Problem, chapter 14.
- 58.
Charles Kingsley, Yeast: A Problem, chapter 5.
- 59.
Charles Kingsley, Yeast: A Problem, chapter 3.
- 60.
Charles Kingsley, Yeast: A Problem, chapter 17.
- 61.
Letters, 1, 14.
- 62.
Charles Kingsley, Yeast: A Problem, chapter 2.
- 63.
The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 1, 390.
- 64.
See Johnson, 106–13.
- 65.
Notebooks, 74.
- 66.
The Amazing Marriage, chapter 6.
- 67.
Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Temple, Book 5, chapter 1.
- 68.
George Sand, Mauprat, chapter 21.
- 69.
George Sand, Mauprat, chapter 11.
- 70.
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, chapter 16.
- 71.
See ‘Saul of Tarsus’, Edinburgh Review, 97 (January 1853), 87–118.
- 72.
Charlotte M. Yonge, Heartsease, or the Brother’s Wife, chapter 5.
- 73.
Chapters 13 and 20 have epigraphs taken from Shakespeare’s play.
- 74.
Charlotte M. Yonge, Heartsease, or the Brother’s Wife, chapter 20.
- 75.
Charlotte M. Yonge, Heartsease, or the Brother’s Wife, chapter 16.
- 76.
Peacock was far more accepting of his daughter’s situation than most Victorian fathers would have been, with good reason. It seems probable that he had at least one illegitimate child himself, a woman with whom Meredith corresponded. See Nicholas A. Joukovsky, ‘“Dearest Susie Pye”: New Meredith Letters to Peacock’s Natural Daughter’, Studies in Philology, 111.3 (2014), 591–629.
- 77.
Letters, 1, 33.
- 78.
Max Műller, German Love: from the Papers of an Alien, trans. Susanna Winkworth (London: Chapman and Gall, 1858), ‘Last Memory’.
- 79.
Letters, 1, 33.
- 80.
See Meredith’s review of recent ‘Belles Lettres and Art’, Westminster Review, 68 (October 1857), 585–604. Meredith includes in his review a moderately favourable notice of his own Farina.
- 81.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, chapters 13 and 14.
- 82.
D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 186.
- 83.
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, chapter 3.
- 84.
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, chapter 6.
- 85.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles , chapter 55.
- 86.
Letters, 1, 332 and 152.
- 87.
Letters, 1, 323.
- 88.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Volume 2, Book 1, chapter 16.
- 89.
Letters, 1, 322–3.
- 90.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Volume 2, Book 1, chapter 14.
- 91.
Beauchamp’s Career, chapter 3.
- 92.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Volume 5, Book 7, chapter 1.
- 93.
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Volume 1, Book 8, chapter 3.
- 94.
F. W. H. Myers, Essays Classical and Modern (London: Macmillan, 1921), 494–5.
- 95.
George Gissing, In the Year of Jubilee, Part 5, chapter 5.
- 96.
William James, ‘A World of Pure Experience’, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1 (September 29, 1904), 533–43, p. 536.
- 97.
Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up as a Flower, chapter 9.
- 98.
George Gissing, Isabel Clarendon, Volume 1, chapter 10.
- 99.
Coustillas, 2, 212.
- 100.
W. Robertson Nicoll, A Bookman’s Letters (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1913), 14.
- 101.
Letters, 3, 1431–2.
- 102.
The Amazing Marriage, chapter 28.
- 103.
Evan Harrington, chapter 6.
- 104.
Diana of the Crossways, chapter 13.
- 105.
Emilia in England, chapter 38.
- 106.
Rhoda Fleming, chapter 16.
- 107.
Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean, Book 3, chapter 4.
- 108.
Letters, 1, 235: ‘Of course, this is a secret.’
- 109.
Letters, 2, 654.
- 110.
Emilia in England, chapter 21.
- 111.
The visitor was John A. Steuart. His account is recorded by Hammerton, 126.
- 112.
The Adventures of Harry Richmond, chapters 34 and 35.
- 113.
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, chapters 12 and 15.
- 114.
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, chapter 6.
- 115.
Letters, 2, 676.
- 116.
The Egoist, chapter 14.
- 117.
The Amazing Marriage, chapter 3.
- 118.
Letters, 1, 121.
- 119.
The dedication that concludes La Chartreuse de Parme.
- 120.
Henry James, Roderick Hudson, chapter 7.
- 121.
Letters, 1, 296.
- 122.
Letters, 1, 404.
- 123.
Letters, 3, 1540.
- 124.
Letters, 3, 1553.
- 125.
Stendhal, Armance, ou quelque scènes d’un salon de Paris, chapter 2.
- 126.
Letters, 1, 247.
- 127.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 3.
- 128.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 25.
- 129.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 21.
- 130.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 29.
- 131.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 31.
- 132.
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, chapter 45.
- 133.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 9, and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, chapter 13.
- 134.
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, chapter 37.
- 135.
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, chapter 38.
- 136.
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, chapter 38.
- 137.
At least, this is how I understand her remark: ‘Oh my! oh my! … and I just now thinkin’ they was so happy!’, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, chapter 44. Before 1885 Mrs Berry imagined that the young couple were ‘so happy that was a gender’, which is obscurely expressed, but may make her meaning clearer.
- 138.
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, chapter 45.
- 139.
New Monthly Magazine, 18 (January 1826), 211–2.
- 140.
Stendhal, Correspondance (Paris, Le Divan, 1934), 6, 174–80.
- 141.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 16.
- 142.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 9.
- 143.
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, chapter 15.
- 144.
The Amazing Marriage, chapters 12 and 13.
- 145.
The Amazing Marriage, chapter 18.
- 146.
Ellis, 303.
- 147.
The Amazing Marriage, chapter 38.
- 148.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 29.
- 149.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 6.
- 150.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 24.
- 151.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 29.
- 152.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 1.
- 153.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime (Lausanne, Ēditionsl’Age d’Homme, 1994), 12, 476.
- 154.
Stendhal, Armance, chapter 1.
- 155.
Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir, chapter 7.
- 156.
Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir, chapter 7.
- 157.
Letters, 3, 1553. See Revue des deux mondes, 31 (1906), 334–61 and 651–79.
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Cronin, R. (2019). Novel People. In: George Meredith. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32448-3_5
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