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

by Diane Johnson

  Lord Broughton, Peacock’s dear friend, does not notice the brief note on the back of a letter Peacock had written before the death, so he does not know that Mary Ellen is finally gone, and he sends no comforting words. He could have helped, as Peacock helped him when poor Julia died.

  At St. James’s, Weybridge, the vicar has gone into the room where the register is kept and enters the burial in form, but he does not, for some reason, mark on the chart the spot where Mary Ellen was buried. In a few years no one will be able to find her grave.

  He has left the churchyard, taking his Holy Bible with him, the thud of the shovel has ceased, and Mrs. Wells and Mrs. Bennet have been grandly taken away in a carriage arranged by someone. No sound in the chill autumn air, not even of birds, for the summer birds have mostly gone. A bluish haze of smoke from someone’s bonfire, and from sunlight and dust too—an autumn haze settles over the graves in the late afternoon. Now the ghosts approach, curious, a bit cautious, none of them much at home in churchyards. But they have always been interested in Mary Ellen.

  Mindful of decorum they first lead up to look upon the grave an old witless woman, who is weeping. She is glad, she sniffles, that her child is at least laid in holy ground. An older, taller woman compresses her lips, nods, leads her away with a backward glance, intelligent and sad. These are Mary Ellen’s mother, Jane, and her grandmother, Thomas’s mother, old Sarah Peacock, who raised Tom’s children and cared for their mother, too. Old Sarah, something of a literary woman herself, once wrote a poem for Mary Ellen’s birthday. It ended:

  And may thy later years be blest

  As thy sweet infancy has been.

  She is thinking of this now.

  Next, some grislier shades appear, wet, dripping, adorned with seaweed and starfish and other regalia of the drowned. Two are young men whose permanently resentful expressions, fixed so at their deaths, are mitigated here by looks of sorrow and of cosmic anger in their glaring dead eyes. The first is young Lieutenant Nicolls, Mary Ellen’s husband when she was twenty-two. They were married for three months before his drowning. For him she remains his beautiful bride. He weeps.

  The other is the poet Shelley. He had told Peacock that the “little stranger” was “introduced into a rough world.” He shrugs but his eyes sting. This Mary Ellen had been brave, but she was born in the wrong time. Like his contemporary, Poe, Shelley thought there was nothing in the world so sad as the death of a young and beautiful woman. He grasps the arm of Edward Nicolls. They had not known each other in life but they find a certain camaraderie now.

  Of no importance to Mary Ellen but of interest to us are two other drowned and ghastly figures, a discreet distance away, diffidently attending Shelley and Nicolls. The one, pale and bloated, is Harriet Shelley, and the other is a one-armed sailor whose name is not known. Seaweed decorates his dripping hair.

  Shrill and scolding voices, female voices, rustle of petticoats, brisk feet. Mary Shelley is the one in the wide skirt, and the woman in the high-waisted regency gown is her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. They have pretty, pointed faces and thin lips. They are angry on Mary Ellen’s behalf. Their impatient feet tap, they pace over the grave. Must it always be this way for women? Here was one they thought might persevere in woman’s name. She had promise. She had courage.

  The illness was just bad luck, Mary Shelley thinks, or maybe divine retribution. She had never been entirely sure there was no divine retribution; the facts of her life, indeed, had suggested otherwise.

  Men’s fault, and intolerable it is, too, her mother thinks. Mary Wollstonecraft, the great feminist, died of childbearing, with puppies sucking at her breasts to draw off the milk.

  Mary Shelley had known Mary Ellen Peacock since she was a tiny girl, and is thinking sentimentally of the child with long gold curls. Mary Wollstonecraft sniffs and sweeps away across the grass.

  The shades departed, evening settles, then night. The grave is indistinguishable in darkness from all the other graves. In their different nurseries, her two little sad-eyed boys, Arthur and Felix, are tucked in by their respective nurses. They wonder at the silence. Henry Wallis comes in to kiss Felix. Arthur must go to bed alone. We do not know if they ever met each other, or whether, if they did, they spoke of this day to each other. Their sister Edith has tried to get Grandpapa to go to bed but he only sits, staring, in his armchair. George Meredith cheerfully jokes with some fellows at an inn, and Henry Wallis has a serious discussion with his mother about his new responsibility for Felix. To Mary Ellen, being dead, all this makes no difference, anyway. And now they are all dead and to the world they have made little difference.

  •

  The owner of a lesser life does not much survive a century of time, especially when the life was embarrassing to a major life or two. We can imagine the little fires in the various grates, the fervid comminution scenes as bits of paper—letters, recipes—turn to ash at the patient, feeding hands of shocked persons. Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls Meredith, dead now one hundred and eleven years, survives materially in a lock of hair, a book she owned (The Arabian Nights), a green satin dress, another of ecru embroidery, two parasols to match, a dozen letters, a few articles and poems she wrote, and a book of Extracts in which she copied out things that struck her as she read. She survives immaterially but somehow more vividly as a spirited, faithless kind of heroine who turns up in poems and novels by her husband George Meredith. She is remembered in a line here and there in occasional Victorian memoirs by serious gentlemen, who say she was a dashing horsewoman, or whom she teased about their stuffy taste in poetry, for she also had a reputation as a wit.1 A drawing by her lover shows a calm lady with great almond eyes, in a demure bonnet. Somewhere, in some British parlor, she looks out of a painting called Fireside Reverie, and the people who see her every day may wonder—or perhaps it has never occurred to them to wonder—whether the lady over the mantel was ever anyone real. A picture, some old dresses, and a few lines from her pen—from these some things can be known and some things can never be. We know where she got her book (“To Mary Peacock from her Father”). It is not known on what occasion she wore the green satin dress.2

  •

  It is usual in biographies to trace a family as far back as possible, to discern what is inevitable about the subject because of his forebears: the shape of his nose, say. Biographers of Shelley are fond of pointing out that an ancestor of Shelley’s was sent down from Oxford in 1567 for atheism; some fellow two centuries before can always be discovered by our genealogist aunt to have been just like us—same turn for music or thievery.

  We can trace Mary Ellen’s family for only a few generations, but from these generations alone we can infer that the Peacock women were forceful and literary, and that the men were forceful, literary, and nautical. These tendencies will affect Mary Ellen in unfortunate ways.

  It is hard to decide just where to begin a history. Can Shelley’s troubles be said to have started in 1567? If we can for a minute imagine a historical personage—Mary Ellen or ourselves, say—as a kind of puppet activated by a skein of threads, thousands and thousands of little strings of complicated determinism stretching off into an invisible infinity, held on the far ends by an infinitude of ancestors and unknown persons who, tugging them, account for our fondness for blackberry jam, or cause our hair to curl—we can see how complicated a proposition it is to try to disentangle one special, shining thread that will carry us back to the beginning. It is all a hopeless web.

  •

  And since the beginning is arbitrary, we will arbitrarily begin in the year 1788 when a woman named Sarah Peacock left her husband, Samuel, a glassmaker in London, took her little boy Thomas, and went home to her own mother and father, a Mr. and Mrs. Love, who lived in the small village of Chertsey, south of the river Thames in Surrey. No one knows what caused Sarah Peacock to do this. Wives did not leave their husbands in those days. It betokens, perhaps, a sinister strain of in
dependence, a want of docility.

  No doubt there was gossip in the village of Chertsey. Perhaps you would have expected this kind of unbecoming behavior from a daughter of the Loves, nice enough people in their way but eccentric and bookish. Another sort of family might have insisted Sarah uphold her duty to her husband Samuel and stay with him in London. Sarah Peacock, it is said, read Gibbon and other such highbrow books.

  •

  The Loves were nice enough in their way. Old Love had a lot of interesting sea stories. He was retired, and liked to sit around with the other old sailors and swap stories. Old Love had been a Master in the Royal Navy, and had lost his leg on board the ship Prothee in the vigorous action of the 12th of April, 1772. That was under Lord Rodney. And old Love’s son was beside him during the whole thing.

  Of the Loves not much else is known, except they were long-lived. Old Love lived to be eighty-one, and his wife outlived him. Their daughter Sarah had come home from London and looked after them. It is said she had been married in London, and she had a son Tom, a smart little fellow.

  •

  Samuel Peacock, glass merchant, whom nobody could ever quite remember, was left by his wife, a termagant and too clever by half; she took their little boy Tom and went to live with her parents. Her mother, old Mrs. Love, was too clever by half, too. Samuel Peacock, glass merchant, had done the best he could. Sarah was nice enough about it—just up and went—but it is bad when your wife leaves you; it reflects on a man.

  Or perhaps Samuel was of a bookish nature too, like his wife and son, and got a lot of reading done, or perhaps he took up with London wenches, what with the wife and boy out of the way down there in Chertsey.

  •

  Besides her real grandmothers, Mary Ellen had some spiritual grandmothers, whose influence was, if anything, destructive. Both her biological and spiritual ancestresses were eighteenth-century women and Mary Ellen was a Victorian.3 Victorians did not like or approve of such redoubtable eighteenth-century types as Mary Shelley, or her mother, the great feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft—immoral, intellectual, blue-stocking ladies, who had lovers and illegitimate babies, wrote novels and held strong beliefs. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, did not believe in marriage.

  It was somehow more possible to be a clever, strong-minded woman with beliefs in the eighteenth century than it was in the nineteenth; the stabler, eighteenth-century society was not so threatened by the notion, and the economics were different; wives were useful and pulled their weight. Unfortunately for Mary Ellen, her father, used to his mother, grandmother, and other intellectual ladies, grew up preferring their sort—grew up to become friends with Mary Shelley and with Claire Clairmont, the mistress of Byron. These women were well-intentioned godmothers whose influence was as destructive as a curse upon the cradle of an infant female born in a time when women had scarcely ever in history been more silly, passive, uninstructed, and suppressed.

  •

  Mary Ellen’s father, Thomas Love Peacock, was a beautiful little boy, so beautiful with his “mass of flaxen curls” that the queen, Queen Charlotte, once stopped her carriage to hold and kiss him. Only a very pessimistic mother would fail to take this as a fine omen for her boy: power, fame, art, love, perhaps. We may suppose that Sarah often told Thomas of it; his fortune sanctioned by the highest authority, and it came true, too, or most of it. Thomas Peacock grew up to be a writer of “minor classics,” and a powerful man of commerce, and he was popular and dined out; if he was cheated in one or two little respects, he had to remember that fortune is relative, and he was more fortunate than most.

  Peacock was a Victorian man but an eighteenth-century child, born just at the exciting part of the eighteenth century, when all manner of new, bad things had come into the world and were changing it in strange ways that at the time seemed to promise new, good things for mankind. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven,” Wordsworth said of it. Much good would come, it was felt, of the steam engine, invented ten years before Peacock’s birth, and the use of it in factories in 1785, the year of his birth. The factories grew, the economy grew, the cities, the middle classes, the number of pounds of cotton brought into England’s mills each year grew, and the population and the speed of travel and the wealth of England grew. It might have been the greatest time in history for England.

  But at the same time, off the farms the workers went, into the cities, into the factories, and grew wretched, more wretched than ever: poor, starved, crowded, dying, while merchants and industrialists got rich. British ships went forth in new numbers—now to India to conquer there—and the daughters of rich, middle class people learned to read and to grow idle, grew genteel; and Richard Arkwright discovered that little children, being suited in size to his machines, made fine workers for his steam-engined factories, and he filled his factories with little doomed children.

  In France, knowing that they could not prosper while the landed aristocracy held power, the people rose up and slaughtered the rich aristocrats, slaughtered priests, kings, queens, little children, each other. Out of this turmoil, twenty-six miles off England’s shores, nearly visible from England, the mighty Napoleon rose up to frighten everyone in his bed, and to jeopardize seriously that English money, and those English markets, the whole mercantile Empire; and he might have succeeded, but for Nelson, but for Wellington. It was a strange time to grow up, during twenty years of war with France, with the threat of “Boney” lurking off-shore the whole time, and a lot of people in England itself thinking that the Revolution ought to come to England on account of the little doomed children. Rich Englishmen made their money right along, of course. In Russia, 50,000 French soldiers—England’s enemies—marched to Moscow in British overcoats and British-made boots.

  Little Peacock would come to understand all that when he grew up, since he became a lord of commerce as well as a famous writer, but as a little boy he rejoiced in the glorious aspects of the war, like all stout-hearted English boys who grew up with it. He talked with his grandfather (the old, one-legged sailor), and sat at the feet of his uncle and their friends, and listened to stories of naval battles and ships, though he lived near the banks of the river Thames he dreamed about the open sea, and “our brave Nelson” and the odious French.

  He wrote about them to amuse his grandfather:

  There is one thing indeed, it has always been held

  In which British sailors by French are excelled:—

  Their skill in this instance their valourous Fleet

  Never fail to display when our squadrons they meet:—

  And Justice must surely compel us to say

  They are far our superiors in—running away!!!—

  It was apparently an idyllic childhood. Its documents—letters, poems—emanate affection, humor, security. Though the big world was changing and there were wars, his was a little world at home in Chertsey, at school in Englefield Green, with kind Mama, kind Grandmother, kind, romantic, old sea-going Grandfather, the good schoolmaster, John Wicks, and his sovereign, who kissed him.

  Little Tom seems to have had a lively sense of professionalism about his writing from an early age. When he was nine, for instance, he wrote a verse letter to his mother from school:

  So doleful’s the news, I am going to tell ye:

  Poor Wade! my schoolfellow, lies low in the gravel;

  One month ere fifteen, put an end to his travel:

  Harmless, and mild, and remark’d for goodnature:

  The cause of his death, was his overgrown stature:

  His epitaph I wrote, as inserted below;

  What tribute more friendly, could I on him bestow.

  The bard craves one shilling, of his own dear Mother;

  And if you think proper, add to it another.

  Thomas was not allowed a very long childhood, as we count childhoods. He was sent away to school when he was six, and
stayed away for about six years, but when he was not yet thirteen he left school and moved with Sarah to London (Samuel Peacock now being dead), for it was time for him to begin work. It was now nearly the nineteenth century, and he became, of course, that ubiquitous nineteenth-century figure: a clerk. He and his mother lived at 4 Angel Court, Throgmorton Street, which for some reason sounds peculiarly awful, but if it was there is no way to tell. Peacock, a dutiful boy, worked like a man at a job, studied in his spare time, and, remembering that his queen had kissed him, worked hard on the poetry that was, they were all sure, to make him famous. Either at the British Museum, or perhaps at the library of the India House where he would later rule, he “commenced a line of study . . . where he devoted his whole time to reading the authors of ancient Greece and Rome, studying at the same time the architectural remains—the statues, bas reliefs, etc.” He won a prize at the age of fifteen for an essay in verse on the subject, “Is History or Biography the more Improving Study?”

  Before he was twenty he had published, probably at his own expense, a pamphlet poem, and in 1805, a book of poems—romantic poems, since this was the fashion in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Back in Chertsey in the same year, 1805, his grandfather, Old Love, died, and Sarah left London to look after Mrs. Love. Thomas must have felt that his poetical career was well launched because soon after this he left his job to roam around and write poems, and to absorb life as a man of letters should. He was working on what he hoped would be a great poem about the beautiful river Thames that had run through his childhood. He seems to have roamed for about five years, so we must suppose that Sarah was an indulgent mother.