The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives

by Diane Johnson

  On another occasion, Johnson finds it necessary to make a few errant remarks about Meredith’s hated father. She tells us what she knows: “George’s father was neither good nor great. He went bankrupt in the tailoring business and took up with the servant girl, Matilda Bucket (how one longs to know more about Matilda Bucket).” That parenthesis! It dazzled me. Now I felt myself standing behind Johnson’s eyes, looking round, as she does, at this one and that one, and in my mind I began arguing with the prejudices of history and those angles of vision that obscure rather than clarify. Yes, I said (somewhat belligerently) to myself, I want to know more about Matilda Bucket, it’s important to know more about Matilda Bucket, Hardy would have wanted to know more about Matilda Bucket.

  I realized that repeatedly, while reading The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith, I’d been struck by these eccentric couplings of thought and feeling that are sprinkled throughout the text. In a dozen places where Johnson is relating an anecdote about the Merediths or the Peacocks or one of their many friends, she is suddenly, without even a sentence break, musing on the fate of some entirely peripheral creature. Finally, I understood that the social mix-up and the musing together form her project.

  And what is it she is musing about? She is musing on her own attraction, the writer’s attraction, to looking speculatively at all her characters (this is fanciful, I know), as though considering whether to leave this one or that one in place or move her or him to another location on a landscape in her imagination that now begins to resemble a board game—we’ll call it the game of life—in which any persona might be moved to a position on the board that might increase or decrease their point value and send the story spinning. But as I say, Johnson is only speculating. She is a writer very much at home with speculation: a thing critics of her sort of work frown upon.

  Most biographers are discouraged from writing sentences that attribute to the protagonist thoughts, feelings, motivations that cannot possibly be verified—“At that moment she thought. . . . Walking through the square he realized. . . . When Dennis left the room she assumed. . . .”—but in the case of this biography, where the entire project is interlaced with an equivalent of this rhetorical device—“how one longs to know more about Matilda Bucket”—the practice feels just right.

  Inspired conjecture is the book’s signature trait. Under its influence women and men whose existence is partly hearsay stand their ground remarkably well. The genius lies in Johnson’s decision to keep pulling people in to the story of Mary Ellen and George so that finally an age stands revealed; one in which all concerned only ever catch a glimpse of themselves in relation to one another, and always from an angle of vision determined by the social conventions that make whole classes of people unreal to one another. The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives measures, elegantly and with heart, the fallout from the lives that are put together on the basis of that glimpse, with especial attention paid to the fact that one day each of those lives will be designated major or minor, greater or lesser.

  —VIVIAN GORNICK

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  FRONTISPIECE: Mary Ellen at thirty-seven, drawing by Henry Wallis. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, UK/Bridgeman Images

  IMAGE SECTION:

  1Thomas Love Peacock as a boy; Sarah Peacock; Thomas Love Peacock at thirty-one. National Portrait Gallery, London

  2Peacock at seventy-three, painting by Henry Wallis. National Portrait Gallery, London

  3A previously unknown photograph of Peacock. Wallis Estate

  4“Fighting Nicolls,” General Sir Edward Nicolls, K.C.B. Royal Marines Historical Photo Library

  5The beautiful three-year-old George Meredith. Charles Scribner’s Sons

  6Peacock’s house along the Thames, where Mary Ellen grew up and Peacock lived till his death. Mr. and Mrs. Roberts

  Vine Cottage, where George Meredith and Mary Ellen lived after moving out of Peacock’s. Peter Hawkins

  7Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s portrait of Arthur Meredith. Charles Scribner’s Sons

  8George Meredith with his son Arthur. Charles Scribner’s Sons

  9Wallis’s original sketch of a portrait of Ant. Leisman (with handwritten notes by Wallis). It was said by Peacock to be a remarkable likeness of Shelley, superior to any portrait of Shelley himself. Wallis Estate

  10Mary Shelley in 1841, painting by Richard Rothwell. National Portrait Gallery, London

  11Henry Wallis in later years. John Freeman

  Photograph of Felix at age four or five. Wallis Estate

  12Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton, for which George Meredith was the model. Tate Gallery

  13George Meredith by George Frederic Watts. National Portrait Gallery, London

  14Photograph of George Meredith, again in profile, when he is old and eminent, by J. Thomson. Lebrecht Authors/Bridgeman Images

  15Drawing by Henry Wallis. Birmingham Museum

  Henry Wallis’s famous painting The Dead Stonebreaker. Birmingham Museum

  THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE FIRST MRS. MEREDITH

  for

  Kevin, Darcy, Amanda, and Simon

  Real creatures exquisitely fantastical strangely exposed to the world by a lurid catastrophe. . . .

  —GEORGE MEREDITH,

  preface to The Tragic Comedians

  PREFACE

  MANY PEOPLE have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table, in a clean neckcloth. He is famous; everybody remembers his remarks. He remembers his own remarks, being a writer, and notes them in his diary. We forget that there were other people at the table—a quiet person, now muffled by time, shadowy, whose heart pounded with love, perhaps, or rage, or fear when our writer shuffled in from his study; whose hands, white knuckled, twisted an apron, whose thoughts raced. Or someone who left the room with a full throat of sobs. Of course there is no way really to know the minds of Lizzie Rossetti, or the first Mrs. Milton, or all those silent Dickens children suffering the mad unkindness, the delirious pleasures of their terrifying father’s company—with little places of their own to put their small things away in, with small, terrified thoughts.

  But we know a lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one. His life is very real to him; he is not a minor figure in it. He looks out of his eyes at our poet, our chronicled statesman; he feels the tears within himself and down his cheeks. All the days of his life we do not know about but he was doing something, anyway—something happy or bitter or merely dull. And he is our real brother.

  It was sympathy, then, and curiosity that first sent me looking into the life of Mrs. Meredith. Subsequently I found a number of other, more respectable, historiographical, literary, even culinary reasons, to justify looking into her life, the people she and George Meredith knew, the things they did and thought.

  I mean, of course, the first Mrs. Meredith, Mary Ellen, the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock. The second Mrs. Meredith was a plain, quiet woman, evidently even-tempered, because Meredith said that to argue with her was like “firing broadsides into a mud fort.” The first Mrs. Meredith was argumentative and beautiful, and never let loose her hold on the imagination of the great novelist—even though she died early, and he had come to hate her, and rarely spoke of her after her death, and then told people she was mad.

  The life of Mary Ellen is always treated, in a paragraph or a page, as an episode in the lives of Peacock or Meredith. It was treated with a certain reserve in early biographies because it involves adultery and recrimination, and makes all the parties look ugly. More recent biographies of Meredith repeat the received version of the story with a certain brisk determination, a kind of feigned acceptance: we know that these things, regrettably, do indeed happen.

  Mrs. Meredith’s life can be looked upon, of course, as an episode in the lives of Meredith or Peacock, but it cannot have seemed that way to her.


  WE HAVE stopped, or we have pretended to stop, the flow of time, and all the lesser lives with which we are here concerned are collected for introduction. We must try to imagine an occasion, perhaps a ceremonial occasion, some one moment in which we can catch them all in characteristic attitudes. It is a fine autumn day in October 1861. The leaves are turning, smoke hangs in the air from bonfires somewhere. Little beech leaves lie like yellow coins over the dappled graves, over the browned grass and dried creepers. The tall headstones all around are banked with dead leaves but a few roses still blow in the hedge; the yew and cedar, of course, always are green. It is chilly except when you stand in the sun.

  The coffin, a plain one, has now been screwed down and lies in the grave. The sexton stands nearby with his shovel and an expression of most perfect rectitude: exactly combining in even proportion his decorous regret that a beautiful woman has died so young, his pious satisfaction that a sinful woman has been taken (one hopes) to a Better Home before she could sink any lower, and a professional impassivity calculated to speed the proceedings along. The young vicar of St. James’s, Weybridge, is reading from the book with congruent haste.

  It is a funeral. George Meredith’s first wife has died. No one is there.

  This embarrasses the young vicar. It is awkward to be saying these “comfortable words” in a loud, deep, feeling voice when nobody is there but two drab servant women and a middle-aged man not of this parish, and so doubtless connected with the sinful, London part of her life. This man, who has a military air, peers into the open grave. His head is bowed but his eyes are open. The two women have eyes decently closed and they press handkerchiefs to their noses. Their faces are sorrowful but not surprised. Each has fixed opinions about the human condition and finds nothing here to surprise her. The open eyes of the big, military gentleman do not seem to accept explanation. His glances press the open grave for clues.

  “Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay,” the vicar reads, and reads a little more and steps back. The sexton steps forward. The ladies walk away together up the path past the church, talking to each other in their high, unpleasant, servants’ voices. The middle-aged man lingers, hoping perhaps to pronounce or to hear some reliable summation, hears or delivers none, shakes the vicar’s hand, and strides off. Surely a military man, by his walk.

  We do not need to attend much further to these few mourners. The first of the two women is Jane Wells, Mary Ellen’s maid. She will find another place, a good one, with Lady Blessington of Tunbridge Wells, and will marry a man named Purdue. We do not know if she was fond of Mary Ellen but she was faithful, and conventional about funerals; it was “a blessing someone was, poor creature, for all that her family turned up to lay her to rest.” That was Mrs. Bennet’s view too, and they exchanged this opinion as they walked. Mrs. Bennet would have brought her charge, little Felix, to see his mother off to her reward, but the father, an Atheist, wouldn’t hear of it, and maybe it was just as well (she remarks to Jane Wells), for the sight of his mama’s open grave and no one there to mourn her could not help but be a sorrow to him when he was old enough to understand why.

  The military gentleman is Captain Henry Howes, just someone she used to know. He is of no importance, except, of course, to himself. We do not know why he turned up at the funeral of this forlorn lady: some remembered affection, some prompting of propriety, some promise to her father, perhaps. He was remembering, as he looked upon the coffin, as people will on such occasions, happier days, when she and her brother, and Hilary St. Croix, and Peter Daniel, and George Meredith—all of them so anxiously literary—all lived in London and were happy. And of them, only Meredith was going to make his mark, that seemed certain already. Well, well. Off he walks, and whether he lives or dies, a matter of utmost consequence to him, we cannot say.

  As for the others, since they did not come to her funeral, we shall have to look around for them. Mary Ann Rosewell, called May, is on her way home after making the last of the funeral arrangements. She always gets stuck with attending to these family things, funerals and lyings-in, as though the rest of them thought that because she was of peasant stock her sensibilities were cruder and better able to bear up. She is the adopted daughter of Thomas Love Peacock.

  Peacock himself, and his granddaughter, Mary Ellen’s oldest child Edith, a girl of seventeen, have stayed at home in Lower Halliford, only a few miles from the churchyard. Edith is with her grandfather when May arrives. Peacock likes to have her near; she is his pet, student, confidante, even allowed in his library. May goes directly to the kitchen to attend to something there, thinking, with a certain hardness of heart, about Edith and about the dead Mary Ellen. Well, she is sorry for them all. May is nearly forty, an aging Cinderella; her emotions are complex but she does not discuss them.

  Little Edith inherits Grandpapa’s prejudice against funerals and stays home from Mama’s funeral out of principle, not because she is unfeeling. And Grandpapa needs her more now than poor Mama can. Edith, born a Victorian, is intensely sad, and weeps more easily than anyone we have yet met, but she weeps secretly, where Grandpapa and May do not see. In their company she is quiet and staunch. She will get a medal from the Queen when she grows up.

  Grandpapa is seventy-six, an old man, and his health has suffered through the long weeks since August. He is exhausted from watching his most beloved child, Mary Ellen, slowly die. Now he sits weakly grieving, and in his soul the iron, always present, has seized such hold there is no expression for it. The iron seizes his whole being. He cannot write it off or walk it off. He has about him a kind of pale glitter, mounds of silver hair, sad pallor, still-blue eyes that reveal a bitter, bitter knowledge. The world praises him for his sweet mockery, his charm, his witty books, his well-mannered classicism, his joie de vivre. But he has lived for thirty years with a madwoman for a wife. He has seen all his daughters die, and some of their children, and his friends. He is a tall man, sitting very straight in his chair. He looks out over the river, the beautiful Thames that runs in front of his house, on whose banks his children played. He never goes to funerals.

  It is possible that Mr. Wallis calls. Mr. Wallis has acted rather well; the family do not think as ill of him as the world does, or at least as the Meredith half of the world does. The Meredith half sees him as a seducer and a villain. It will suppress him; it will pretend he does not exist and though it will continue to admire his paintings, it will leave him out of biographical dictionaries. Poor Mr. Wallis is left with the baby to raise, dear little Felix, christened Harold Meredith, despite Mr. Wallis being his father. Awkward.

  May Rosewell, now or sometime, gives Mr. Wallis some of Mary Ellen’s clothes, and a watch, and some jewelry and her books, and a little picture of her. They had decided it was fitting that he have these things to pass down to Harold. (Somehow, something would have to be done about changing Harold’s last name.)

  Mr. Wallis goes for a walk in Oatlands Park, past the cottage where she died. Oatlands is beautiful and somber in autumn. Mr. Wallis is sad and a little bewildered. He is young, and he still hopes to become a great painter, and now he has a baby to raise.

  Her husband, George Meredith, we see vacationing over in Suffolk, in “a dumpling state,” doing some reading and taking brisk walks. He is eating a cold steak-and-kidney pie, but we must not think him insensitive. It is just that he has not yet heard the news of his wife’s death. When he does he will be sad; he will be more than sensitive. He will never be free of her. In later years the memory will become so burdensome that he will strike out. “She was mad,” he will say, and, “she was nine years older than I” (though she was but six-and-a-half). Surlily, he will refuse to discuss her at all. But now he is cheerful, drinking ale in a public house on the wayside.

  Their son Arthur, a small, pale, frightened boy, has been pulled her
e and put there, and wept over by his dying mother to whom he was carried by excited ladies in carriages in the night, and taken from by his angry, tight-lipped father, and left with all manner of people—friends, publishers, Edith’s grandmama in her big mansion. Now he does not know what to think at all. It is Meredith’s belief that Arthur does “not feel the blow,” but Arthur, of course, feels it, though he has not seen much of his beautiful Mama for several years; she was ill, she was confined, she was ill again, had fled the country. Arthur was not sure where she had been. He was not allowed to speak of Mama. She could not be thought of. She was cloaked, she was shrouded, something awful, shame, disgrace. Arthur, a polite little boy, is given cake by Mrs. Parker, who marvels at his solemn good manners.

  Peacock’s cousin, Harriet Love, is cheerfully rocking and chatting to her old brother, knowing she is boring him, but enjoying one of the privileges of being an old maid sister; it is a kind of revenge. They have not heard of Mary Ellen’s death, so they do not have to decide how to feel. If they did know, they would not mention the matter to their neighbor, Lord Tennyson, who pays them a call and leaves them a Review, as is his habit. How Lord Tennyson felt about such subjects as adultery is very clear. He would have regarded Mary Ellen’s death as quite just.

  Old Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Peacock’s friend from the Shelley days, hears the news from someone in London, but he is too old and near death to care; dying seems suitable to him now. No one tells Claire Clairmont. She would have been interested. She had always been interested in the Peacocks, and sometimes wished she had married Tom Peacock. The fleeting embraces of Lord Byron, whose memory had seemed urgent and ineradicable in her youth, were now so distant they were almost indistinguishable from the embraces of Peacock, which she (perhaps) had never experienced. Claire Clairmont had nearly twenty more years to live, and people would think her an incredible anachronism, though it cannot have seemed so to her.