Abstract
Beauchamp’s Career is a political novel but one of its most perceptive critics, David Howard, declines to treat it as such, on the grounds that ‘In one sense the political reality is never there, or never there nakedly. It is a novel of talk about politics, of conversation which includes politics.’ The impression that this is a naive response is immediately dispelled, but at the expense of making Howard’s decision to ignore the politics paradoxical: ‘This may be merely to say that the novel never forgets it is a novel, never forgets to justify within its fictional world (often very adroitly) the appearance of political statement and judgement.’1 Meredith, in other words, recognizes that ‘political reality’ can never be ‘there nakedly’ in a novel (even if that reality is conceived as something that exists at all ‘nakedly’ outside language). But politics is central to Beauchamp’s Career because the novel recognizes and exploits the fact that politics is language, or was increasingly becoming so in the age of the Second Reform Act.
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Notes
David Howard, ‘George Meredith: “Delicate” and “Epical” Fiction’, in John Lucas (ed.) Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, London, Methuen, 1971, p. 160.
George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Standard Edition, Edinburgh and London, Blackwood, vol. II, pp. 122–3. For a more extended comparison of Beauchamp’s Career and Felix Holt,
see Mohammad Shaheen, George Meredith: A Reappraisal of the Novels (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 57–63.
See Gayla S. McGlamery, ‘The Dialogic Meredith: Prefaces to the Novels of the 1880s’, Ph.D. dissertation, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984.
Margaret Harris, ‘Introduction’ to Beauchamp’s Career, World’s Classics paperback edition, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. xviii.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932, p. 9.
See Letters, vol. 1, pp. 474–5, 1 January 1873, to Frederick Greenwood, the conservative editor of the Pall Mall Gazette: ‘Fitzjames Stephen’s articles are fine outhitting and have judicial good sense.’ Morley complained to Frederic Harrison of an unnamed ‘very sensible man’ who wrote to him praising Stephen in similar terms: ‘How splendidly masculine! What noble common sense!’ (Edwin Mallard Everett, The Party of Humanity: The Fortnightly Review and its Contributors 1865–1874, New York, Russell and Russell, 1939, p. 286). Stephen’s complaint in his Dedication against ‘the commonplaces and the vein of sentiment’ in the press might be a presence in Cecilia’s silent criticism of Nevil for ‘allowing himself to appear moved by his own commonplace utterances’ (33, 376). An example of Stephen’s ‘fine outhitting’ might be his lampoon of Mill addressing a pimp: ‘Without offence to your better judgement, dear sir...’ set beside his own preferred style: ‘You dirty rascal...’, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 1873–4, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973, pp. 137–8). This is crude use of heteroglossia but may have appealed to Meredith as relief from Morley’s manner exemplified in the extract from On Compromise quoted below.
Norman Kelvin, A Troubled Eden: Nature and Society in the Works of George Meredith, Edinburgh and London, Oliver and Boyd, 1961, p. 87.
Benjamin Disraeli, ‘Preface to the Fifth Edition’ (1849) of Coningsby (first publ. 1844), London, Longman’s Green, 1923, p. vii. Arnold Kettle rightly remarks that ‘Meredith is very conscious — as conscious as Disraeli — of “forces” in the historical sense. But he tackles the problem of their representation in concrete terms on a far more serious artistic level than Disraeli had any conception of, Meredith Now, p. 191.
John Morley, ‘Byron’ (first publ. Fortnightly Review, 1870), Critical Miscellanies, London, Macmillan, 1886, vol. 1, p. 227.
Compare with this, and with Beauchamp’s thoughts about the press and starting a radical paper generally, Maxse’s The Causes of Social Revolt (London, Longman’s, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1872), pp. 32–44. Like Beauchamp, Maxse thinks there ‘is no comparison between the power of the weekly and the daily press’ (p. 42), but unlike Beauchamp he dismisses the notion of a ‘daily Radical organ’ as ‘impracticable’ (pp. 42–3). Among the papers that Maxse thought ‘have probably done more than any others to create distrust and hatred between classes’, and that he accused of ‘deal[ing] in cynical sneers at all earnest thought’ (p. 42n.) was the Pall Mall Gazette, for which a few years earlier Meredith was writing ‘almost every week’ (Letters, vol. 1, p. 375), and with whose editor, Frederick Greenwood, he was on friendly terms (see note 15). Maxse however distinguishes between the political and the literary articles of the PMG.
John Stuart Mill, ‘The Subjection of Women’, 1869, On Liberty, Representative Government, The Subjection of Women, London, Oxford University Press (World’s Classics), 1912, pp. 451–2. According to Morley, he took ‘The Subjection of Women’ when it was first published to Meredith who ‘could not be torn from it all day’.
John Morley, Recollections, London, Macmillan, 1917, vol. 1, p. 47;
quoted James S. Stone, George Meredith’s Politics, Port Credit, Ontario, P.D. Meany, 1986, p. 48. For Meredith’s admiration of Mill, see Letters, vol. 1, p. 139 and p. 408. Both these letters are to Maxse.
John Morley, On Compromise, 1874, London, Macmillan, 1886, p. 1.
Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, London, Routledge, New Accents, 1990, p. 88.
Frederick Maxse, A Plea for Intervention, London, E. Truelove, 1871, p. 8; Our Political Duty, London, Metchim and Son, 1869, p. 43.
The Hon. Grantley F. Berkeley, My Life and Recollections, London, Hurst and Blackett, 1865, vol. 1, p. 26. Incidentally, during Grantley Berkeley’s childhood the ‘janitor’ of Berkeley Castle was a former surgeon of his father’s regiment called Shrapnell (ibid., p. 22).
John W. Morris, ‘Beauchamp’s Career: Meredith’s Acknowledgement of his Debt to Carlyle’, Richard B. Davis and John L. Lievsay (eds), Studies in Honour of John C.Hodges and Alvin Thacker, Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1961, p. 106.
Gary Handwerk, ‘On Heroes and their Demise: Critical Liberalism in Beauchamp’s Career’, Studies in English Literature, vol. 27 no. 4, Autumn 1987, p. 665.
Lionel Stevenson, ‘Carlyle and Meredith’, in John Clubbe (ed.), Carlyle and his Contemporaries, Essays in Honor of Charles Richard Sanders, Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 1976, p. 276.
Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, Book 1, Chapter 2, Centenary Edition, London, Chapman and Hall, vol. 10, 1899, pp. 10–11.
Walter Bagehot, ‘The English Constitution’, 1867, in Norman St John Stevas (ed.). The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, London, The Economist, 1974, vol. 5, p. 314.
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Roberts, N. (1997). Beauchamp’s Career. In: Meredith and the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25464-4_5
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