The Adventures of Harry Richmond

Abstract

In 1864, with Sandra Belloni just completed and Rhoda Fleming and Vittoria still to be written, Meredith announced among his plans ‘an Autobiography. The Adventures of Richmond Roy, and his friend Contrivance Jack: Being the History of Two Rising Men: — and to be a spanking bid for popularity on the part of this writer’.¹ Meredith intended this to be another attempt, after the disappointment with Evan Harrington, at popular success with the Once a Week reading public. An outline of fifteen chapters was submitted to the editor, Samuel Lucas, who was ‘charmed…but owing to certain changes going on in relation to O[nce] a W[eek] he has not yet sent word for me to start away’.² On the evidence of the surviving outline, Richmond Roy was to have been a straightforward regression to the eighteenth-century picaresque model, with adventures loosely hung on the relationship between poverty-stricken gentleman and resourceful rogue-servant, perhaps prompted by Lucas’s liking for Smollett.³ However, Lucas never did ‘send word’ and when, five years later, Meredith began work on The Adventures of Harry Richmond for publication in the Cornhill Magazine, it had become a very different work.