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

by Diane Johnson

  The post office, then, and a letter from London. Would she have opened it immediately, or borne it home? Opened it, with a reluctant feeling of hopeful curiosity, read it with a sense of stunned wonder, a chilled sensation of the skin, and pounding heart. It would be more a bad than a good feeling, the sickened realization that something had happened, in a life she was mostly used to, to upset it. Something she would have to rise to, deal with. Putting the letter in her basket or pocket, trying not to think about it at all, until she could be at home to sit down by the fire and reread it. Her mother would perhaps remark, when she got home, that she was redder, or paler, than the short walk would warrant.

  There is no salutation. “It is more than eight years since I had the happiness of seeing you:” (She may have had to turn to the signature at this point to see who it was from.) Thomas Peacock, whom she had not forgotten, but not thought much about either.

  “I can scarcely hope that you have remembered me as I have remembered you: yet I feel confident that the simplicity and ingenuousness of your disposition will prompt you to answer me with the same candor with which I write to you.”

  Is this complimentary or not? In any case, she is not so simple and ingenuous at thirty as she was at twenty-one. She reads on.

  “I have long entertained the hope of returning to Merionethshire under better auspices than those under which I left it: but fortune always disappointed me, continually offering me prospects which receded as I approached them.” Is not, she must have wondered, is not that a fair description of life as it always is?

  “Recently she has made me amends for her past unkindness, and has given me much present good, and much promise of progressive prosperity, which leaves me nothing to desire in worldly advantage but to participate it with you. The greatest blessing this world could bestow on me would be to make you my wife: consider if your own feelings will allow you to constitute my happiness.” Her ears hum. She looks again at the signature. If she is still at the post office, she here puts the letter away and leaves so that she will not have to reply to anyone who remarks on her strange look. Walks along home with a feeling of suspendedness, and thinks about not slipping on the ice. Thomas Peacock, the atheist poet!

  He speaks of happiness. “I desire only to promote yours: and I desire only you: for your value is beyond fortune, of which I want no more than I have. The same circumstances which have given me prosperity confine me to London, and to the duties of the department with which the East India Company has entrusted me: yet I can absent myself for a few days once in every year: if you sanction my wishes, with what delight should I employ them in bringing you to my home! If this be but a baseless dream—if I am even no more in your estimation than the sands on the sea shore—yet I am sure, as I have already said, that you will answer me with the same candor with which I have written.” She is uncertain of the tone of this, especially the part about the sand on the shore—the only romantically dashed-off clause in a composition of colons: but one expects some rhetoric in a love letter; perhaps it is only that he is not good at it.

  The next part too is strangely ambiguous. “Whatever may be your sentiments, the feelings with which I now write to you, and which more than eight years of absence and silence have neither obliterated nor diminished, will convince you that I never can be otherwise than most sincerely and most affectionately your friend.” No rhetoric there at least—only negatives, and the neat avoidance of rhetoric, and the clever guardedness of feelings unspecified, which have been “neither obliterated nor diminished.” I think exactly as much of you now as I ever did. But it was a proposal of marriage. It must be entertained.

  Jane had read some history, and Scipio, and could talk about Hannibal and the Emperor Otho, but we do not know if theirs was a novel-reading parsonage. We do not know if she had read Mr. Peacock’s novels—it would seem she hadn’t—or if she had read Miss Austen’s novels, but if she had, then Charlotte Lucas might have come to Jane’s mind as she does to ours, not then but during the next agitated days. Charlotte agreed to marry the appalling Mr. Collins, though she knew that only a few days before he had proposed to and been rejected by Elizabeth Bennet. Elizabeth was astonished, but “Charlotte herself was tolerably composed . . . his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband. Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.” No doubt Jane Gryffydh must have entertained the eligible Mr. Peacock’s proposal more cheerfully, and been thankful that at least Mr. Peacock had not wound up his proposal with “and now nothing remains for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the violence of my affection.” But in other respects, a comparison of Mr. Peacock’s declaration with that of Mr. Collins shows a few uneasy parallels from which we learn what a decent proposal, in form, was supposed to contain. You begin by alluding to your circumstances in life, then to your wish to marry, then to your indifference to any money your prospective bride may or may not have, and finally you refer to your feelings. Altogether, Mr. Peacock’s proposal is more like Mr. Collins’s than one could wish.

  It must be entertained. Peacock had been, perhaps still was, a dashing and handsome man, full of wit and talent and ambition, a good catch—so in the days that followed the agitated Jane was compelled to think upon herself: what she had become, what the handsome man from London was expecting and would find. Peacock’s letter is dated November 20, 1819, and hers in reply, November 30th, though it was not mailed until the fourth of December. Allowing for several days in the mails each way, we may infer that Jane took her time about composing her letter. She may have composed a number of them. And then one sat four days on the mantelpiece before she took it up, boots and bonnet again, and with whatever feeling of trepidation or relief, consigned it to the post. On his side, Peacock had nearly two weeks to consider his hasty epistle, or reconsider, or to wait expectantly, or to put the whole thing out of his mind on the chance that his letter was misdirected, before receiving her reply.

  •

  Jane Gryffydh was now thirty, poor, a disappointed provincial person, alone with her old mother, and the brother off at Oxford. She could now relieve them “from their apprehension of [her] dying an old maid,” as Charlotte Lucas had relieved her family. People who belittle Jane Austen’s preoccupation with husband-catching forget the realities of nineteenth-century life, in which a young woman’s marriage search was not only a metaphorical but an actual exercise in survival. She must marry. If she had money there was no question but what she would; if she had no money the case was more desperate. If her father was poor, the peril was boundless, and it was greater in proportion as her father was also genteel. The daughter of a working man could go into “service,” could take some kind of job, could even, stereotypes notwithstanding, go on the streets, and retain a certain rough-and-ready expectation of some day settling down with a sturdy husband or a steady job.

  But if you were educated, you would have to become a governess, or an old maid aunt, and in either case that would mean living off the charity of others, at the chilliest perimeter of somebody else’s family circle: diffident and neglected, unpaid, marginally appreciated, sewing patiently for other people’s children. You could never go anywhere, you had no money or station; as time went on, the old maid aunt just dwindled into nothing, and the governess was dispatched to some pensioner’s cottage when her usefulness in the schoolroom was over. It was with customary British calculation that the first university for women was opened in the nineteenth century, to assure a gentleman that the Miss Jones (or Miss Eyre) who came to teach his children would be worth the fifty pounds or so he would pay her each year. And there were even Homes for old, failing ones, whose charges were grown up.

  If you could not become a governess, things went very hard with you indeed
, so that anticipating and preventing this calamity was the major concern of nineteenth-century mothers and their daughters. And a lot of women had rather marry anyone than no one—even a Mr. Collins. Even Elizabeth Bennet might have married him (though we cannot feel she would), had she been older with a few disappointments behind her, and her father dead.

  •

  To marry well and go to live in London had long been beyond Jane’s expectations but it cannot have been beyond her hopes. She must surely have nursed some “baseless dreams” of her own. But when a wish is granted long after it is conceived, the wisher gains a certain perspective on it, and on himself. The wish is still there, witnessed by the stir of blood, the quickened breath, and mocked too by the intervention of reality—the mirror, the years spent sitting at genteel tasks in the small parlor, self-knowledge. One thinks of the faded Laetitia Dale, in Meredith’s The Egoist, when her great girlhood passion, Sir Willoughby, finally proposes: “‘I am tired,’ she said. ‘It is late, I would rather not hear more. I am sorry if I have caused you pain. I suppose you to have spoken with candor. I defend neither my sex nor myself. I can only say, I am a woman as good as dead—happy to be made happy in my way, but so little alive that I cannot realize any other way. As for love, I am thankful to have broken a spell. You have a younger woman in your mind, I am an old one. I have a purely physical desire of life, I have no strength to swim. Such a woman is not the wife for you. . . .’ ”

  Jane Gryffydh wrote to Peacock with more irony, but the sadness, the fatigue underneath are the same:

  My dear Sir.

  The gratification to hear of your Welfare has very often since you left Merionethshire been much my Wish. But I cannot say I have remembered you as I feel gratified to find you have remembered me—for I could not flatter myself that your Sentiments warranted such a remembrance on my part—which knowledge, as well as every expression of generosity your very handsome Epistle contains, claims my highest gratitude. I fear you very much over-rate my worth, and I must tell you that I am less calculated to be your Companion than I even was at the period you knew me: Fortune pouring on my defenceless head an unceasing succession of her Evils, thereby enervating my mind and disabling it from receiving its due cultivation: this consideration will I hope dispose you to pardon want of presicion [sic] of style and all imperfections.

  I will not, however, disappoint you in Truth and Candor. Your Sentiments on the awful subject of Religion I trust are changed; that is, if they required that change, which I understood you induced some of your acquaintance here to suppose they did, but which was never my firm opinion.

  I possess none of the good things of this World. I shall say no more at present than beg you will believe me, with every sentiment of Esteem and a most grateful sense of your good opinion, etc.,

  Yours with the greatest sincerity

  Jane Gryffydh.

  The irony is gentle, the underscorings breathe the faintest hopefulness, the remark about religion warns of the ingenuousness Peacock had remembered. But we do not see, Peacock could not have seen—there is nothing in it to warn us—that within six years this woman will be mad.

  •

  Family tradition had it that Peacock expended a few days of his vacation on a trip to Wales to have a look at the lady. She was persuaded.

  They were married nearly four months later in Eglwysfach Chapel, Cardiganshire, and Peacock took his bride back to his handsome house in Stamford Street, where he and his mother and Cousin Harriet had been living since his prosperous appointment with the East India Company.

  Peacock had not mentioned his coming marriage to his friends, and wrote to Shelley only when it was done. Shelley replied, “I was very much amused by your laconic account of the affair. It is altogether extremely like the dénouement of one of your own novels.” We do not know if for Jane Gryffydh it was an awkward or a pleasant time, or how she liked the house on Stamford Street, or her mother-in-law, or Peacock’s real views on religion when she discovered them, or his clever friends.

  His clever friends were not impressed, but neither were they hostile. “Mrs. Peacock seems to be a very good-natured, simple, unaffected, untaught, prettyish Welsh girl,” Maria Gisbourne wrote to Mary Shelley, who was still in Italy and hadn’t had a look at her yet. Thomas Jefferson Hogg told Shelley that Peacock had married “judiciously.”

  •

  What, besides pique, Peacock’s motive can have been for his impulsive proposal to an almost unknown person, is very hard to say. And it is hard to infer from his books his real attitudes to things. On the one hand, Anthelia, a character in Melincourt, says to Mrs. Pinmoney, who had married Mr. Pinmoney with less than seven weeks’ acquaintance, “‘I should have been afraid that so short an acquaintance would scarcely have been sufficient to acquire that mutual knowledge of each other’s tastes, feelings and character, which I should think the only sure basis of matrimonial happiness.’”

  And on the other hand, Mr. Glowry says, in Nightmare Abbey, that marriage is a lottery, “‘and the less choice and selection a man bestows on his ticket the better; for, if he has incurred considerable pains and expense to obtain a lucky number, and his lucky number proves a blank, he experiences not a simple, but a complicated disappointment; the loss of labour and money being superadded to the disappointment of drawing a blank, which, constituting simply and entirely the grievance of him who has chosen his ticket at random, is, from its simplicity, the more endurable.’”

  •

  Things must have gone along well enough with the newlyweds at first, though Peacock’s behavior confirmed the old saying about bachelors getting set in their ways and never giving up their old friends and habits. In May, just two months after the wedding, when Hogg wrote Shelley that Peacock had married “judiciously,” we learn that “notwithstanding his various occupations, we sometimes find time for noctes atticae; or long walks.” About a year later they were taking such long walks that they would be gone for days at a time, without premeditation, which may have been trying to his wife. On June 15, 1821, Peacock and Hogg began a “little stroll” that lasted three days and took them eighty miles.

  The next month, July 1821, Mary Ellen was born, at home in Stamford Street. Peacock had wanted to let the house and take his wife to the country, where the atmosphere was less “fumose and cinereous,” but he did not, and so Mary Ellen was born in summer, in London, and all went well anyway. Sarah Peacock was there to help, as was a doctor or midwife. Everyone was pleased that Mary Ellen was a girl; no one minded that she was not a boy; there were no dynastic considerations, fortunes, or titles to prejudice the arrival of a female child, and Peacock, anyway, liked females.

  Shelley, with horrid, prophetic gift, wrote from Italy, about the time he knew the baby was to arrive, “I congratulate you—I hope I ought to do so—on your expected stranger. He is introduced into a rough world.” Shelley had reason to know this with three dead children and the drowned Harriet to remind him. “And how is your little star?” he writes another day. “Our little star is cloudless,” Peacock replies. It was an auspicious beginning, but, as in the fairy tale, a glance at the characters of the grandmother Sarah, and the spiritual godmothers, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont—restless, intellectual women—might give the thoughtful observer some pause.

  A new baby, certain to be the first of many, was a pleasant but not remarkable event; Peacock went on his usual vacation in September, without Jane. He wrote to Shelley, “we have a charming little girl, now eleven weeks old, who grows and flourishes delightfully. . . . She prevented Jane from accompanying me in my rustication.” That is, he went off by himself, but he wrote Jane some pleasant letters, which have struck everybody by their affectionate tone, vastly unlike the correct address Victorian husbands would employ. “My dearest love,” they all begin, and say such things as, “I think of you night and day and long so much to be with you that I do not think I shall ever pass three week
s from you again. I shall be home either on Saturday Sunday or Monday: on which day I cannot exactly say: it will depend on weather and the opportunities of conveyance,”—in which one may hear both a fond husband and a slightly guilty one. “Love to Mother and Darling,” he unfailingly adds. Darling was Mary Ellen.

  The next year, Jane and Darling went on the summer rustication with Peacock to a cottage in the Chiltern Hills. Mary Ellen’s first sister, Margaret, was born the following March, when Mary Ellen was twenty months old. In that same year the family moved to Lower Halliford, a charming village on the Thames in Surrey, south of London. Here Peacock had taken a cottage first for his mother, then, with the family growing, he took the adjoining cottage; the two were made into one house, a rambling, two-story affair with French doors opening onto the Thames, a low, eighteenth-century kitchen (where Mary Ellen and Peacock would later oversee their cookery experiments), and deep casements to gaze out of upon the lawns and across the river and into the tall shady trees that grow there. None of the Peacocks ever liked to leave this beautiful place for very long.