George Meredith and the Westminster Review

Abstract

The biographies of Meredith are almost blank for the years 1857 and 1858, when the collapse of his marriage gave him more than the usual reasons for reticence. Though he must have earned a living somehow, his Poems (1851), The Shaving of Shagpat (1856) and Farina (1857) could hardly have supported him. Late in life, when John Lane asked whether he had been ‘responsible for any anonymous or pseudonymous volume or contributions to periodical literature’, Meredith replied: ‘Nothing anonymous, except political leaders & short essays, chiefly to the Pall Mall Gazette under F. Greenwood. Let them lie.’¹ However, it is now known that from April 1857 until January 1858 Meredith wrote the Belles Lettres and Art section of the Westminster Review. In the Parrish Collection at Princeton there is a receipt given to the editor John Chapman for £12.12s., ‘being payment for an Article forming Section 4 of the Contemporary Literature published in the Westminster Review for April 1857’, signed George Meredith; a similar receipt for October 1857 is owned by Professor R. L. Purdy of Yale. From internal evidence it is clear that Meredith also wrote the articles for July 1857 and January 1858. Altogether nearly 40,000 words are now added to the canon of his works.