She needs to earn some money and is trying to think up some scheme to do so. “Don’t be alarmed, it is nothing of the genius business, I abominate writing and would much rather scrub floors,” she writes to Henry, apropos, evidently, of her attempt to write something. “But I indulge in visions of ‘a cottage near a wood,’ with one north room which I propose to let to ‘a Nartis,’ a cow of my own, which will be the terror and pride of my life, a pig that shall be transformed into strengthening bacon, fowls that supply the whole household with New Loid Heggs.” She evidently expects to support this bucolic existence, however ironically described, in part by her own efforts, with a little revenue derived, perhaps, from rent paid by the Nartis.
Henry, off painting as usual, is expected. His painting was going well. Earlier in the spring he had finished his Montaigne picture, begun in the two hours stolen by moral force from the “wretched slave” who guarded Montaigne’s room. Montaigne had hung in the Royal Academy exhibition, and Ruskin said of it: “Not, I think, quite so successful as the ‘Chatterton’ of last year; but it contends with greater difficulties, and is full of marvellous painting. It is terribly hurt by its frame, and by the surrounding colours and lights; seen through the hand, the effect is almost like reality. That is a beautifully characteristic fragment of homely French architecture seen through the window. I should think this picture required long looking at, and that it is seen to greater disadvantage by careless passers by than almost any of its neighbors.”
“I have laid in nine gallons of tonic medicine for you, but such is my good nature that I will help you through with it,” Mary Ellen tells him. (Wine?) Mary Ellen was evidently feeling enough better to enjoy the active outdoor things she was accustomed to. “I propose one or two excursions [in a boat, probably], and that we may return safe therefrom I beseech you to invest in a compass.”
Henry must have arrived not long after this because before the end of the month she had become pregnant again.
•
Later in the summer she and Henry go to Wales. Papa writes to her, sends her a Morning Post and an answer to something she had asked about a passage in Horace: “Sat. L. II. 6. v. 53: Numquid de Dacis audisti?” [Have you heard anything about the Dacians?] In the Morning Post he recommends an article on Mr. Spurgeon “under the head of Transpontine Preachments.”
Mary Ellen is evidently exploring the scenery around her mother’s birthplace. Papa recommends “the finest waterfalls in North Wales are those of Cain, Mawddach, and Dolymelynllyn, between Dolgelly, and Maentwrog: the latter five miles from Dolgelly, and close to the road: the two former about two miles further, very near each other, but quite away from the road: Rhaiader Du, two or three miles from Maentwrog towards Harlech: Rhaiader y Wennol, near Capel Curig.” Mary Ellen has sent Papa a little Welsh plant which he has set in stonework and hopes will thrive.
Her “affectionate father” continues in this chatty vein, and makes no mention of George. George’s new book comes out in this month, August: Farina, A Legend of Cologne. Neither a success nor a failure. George has moved to London, and lives at 7 Hobury Street, Chelsea, and is writing Richard Feverel. Arthur’s whereabouts are not clear, but he is not with George, so he is probably being looked after by Aunt May, while Mama vacations, or perhaps he is with his sister Edith at her Grandmama Nicolls’s in Blackheath.
•
“Sacred to the most dear and blessed memory of the wife and children of Henry Collinson Esq. Rt. Hon. Sec. of the Middle Temple London. First of Richard Vyse Collinson born 29th May 1856 died 27 March 1857 aged 11 mounthes. Secondly of Margaret Ellen Collinson Born 3rd March 1854, Died 10th June 1857, Aged 3 years and 3 mounthes. Thirdly of Rosa Jane Collinson Mother of the Above. Born 19th September 1827 Died 5th October 1857. Aged 30 years. ‘Blessed are the Pure in heart for they shall see God.’ Matt. ch 5 v 8. ‘But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.’ Luke ch 2 v 19.”
From which we see that in this year, 1857, poor little Rosa Jane has died. Of her cough, no doubt. She dies before we have had much time to notice her. Her two little children have died too, and Papa has had them all buried at the cemetery at Shepperton. Why have they come home? What happened to Mr. Collinson, whom Rosa married? Who was Mr. Collinson? Had Papa forgiven poor Rosa Jane for marrying him? Her life may have been even more sad and eventful than Mary Ellen’s, if we knew about it, but nobody, nobody at all, has kept any track of Rosa Jane. Nobody has mentioned her in letters and she has left nothing behind. Papa has much to grieve for, between Rosa Jane’s death and Mary Ellen’s carryings-on.
Careful attention to the account on her tombstone reveals that Circumstance, with characteristic malice, preserved Rosa Jane alive long enough to make her endure the deaths of her two babies, before killing her off too.
•
1858. Everyone reassembled at Lower Halliford. Papa seemed to like Henry. In January he sat to him for the little portrait that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery—a picture that Edith never liked, always feeling that it made his face too red. But those were the days when it was not considered nice to have too red a face. Peacock, bearing in mind Henry’s historical inclinations, supplied ideas for paintings. His imagination, as usual, was caught by fathers and daughters. He writes to Henry:
The most illustrious lady of Voltaire’s intimacy was La Marquise du Chatelet. It was to her he addressed that beautiful little poem, “Si vous voulez que j’aime encore,” and many others. Many of his works have relation to her. Her death was the greatest sorrow of his life.
His latest domestic companion was his niece, Madame Denis.
One of the most striking instances of his kindness of heart was his providing for Mademoiselle Corneille, serving her as a father when she was all but destitute. She was educated at Ferney. He settled an income on her, and gave her a dowry on her marriage: of which he says: 24th Jan 1763: Nous marions Mademoiselle Corneille à un gentilhomme du voisinage, officier de dragons, Sage, doux, brave, d’une jolie figure, aimant la service du roi et sa femme, possédant dix mille livres de rente, à peu près, à la porte de Ferney. Je les loge tous deux. Nous sommes tous heureux. Je finis en patriarche. . . .
Le nom de notre futur est Dapuits. Frère Thiériot doit être fort aise [?] de la fortune de Mlle. Corneille. Elle la mérite. Savez-vous bien que cette enfant a nourri long-temps son pere et sa mere du travail de ses petites mains? La voilà recompensée. Sa vie est un roman.
I should prefer Mlle. Corneille as the heroine of a picture of Voltaire. She may be associated, in the character of a daughter, with every phase of his domestic life.29
•
In early April, Mary Ellen, her confinement approaching, left Arthur in the care of a Mrs. Chapman, perhaps Mrs. Edward Chapman, wife of the publisher, and, Edith being then away at school, went with her sister May to an Elm Cottage at Clifton, near Bristol, to await the birth of Henry’s baby. The baby was born later that month, a little boy, and because the legal format of birth certificates of this period left no space for odd contingencies or embarrassing exactitudes, in the place for “Father,” was entered “George Meredith, Author.” The baby was called Harold Meredith.
Although the shame of infidelity and seduction and illegitimacy was powerful in those days, there seems in Mary Ellen’s family to have been no particular secrecy, or only a little, surrounding this event. Peacock writes cheerfully to Claire Clairmont: “May has been more than three weeks with Mary Ellen, at a place near Bristol. She comes home tomorrow. Mary Ellen has a fine boy whom she calls Harry Agincourt.” Agincourt—a victory, against overwhelming odds, and owing to Henry. “Agincourt” was not really Harold’s name, of course, but just a joke Mary Ellen has made up, and Peacock passes it along to Claire.
It is just conceivable, but highly unlikely, that Peacock did not realize that the father was not George; he certainly knew that George and Mary Ellen had not lived together recently enough for this
to be possible. It is likely that Peacock regarded Harold as a regrettable but natural consequence of the whole catastrophe that had issued from Mary Ellen’s wedding to the Dyspeptic. And Claire, who had had a baby out of wedlock herself, Lord Byron’s child, Allegra, could scarcely have been shocked.
The family may have been a little reticent with some of their more prudish London acquaintance, though. Mary Ellen writes anxiously to Henry from Elm Cottage: “I hear no word of Arthur now—I cannot write to Mrs. Chapman without mentioning Baby. Do you think I may venture to do so? I must have Arthur for Edith’s holidays.” This also suggests that Arthur had not yet fallen into George’s hands.
•
Henry had remained in London for the opening of the annual Royal Academy Show. He was unhappy that his pictures were badly exhibited. Mary was reassuring: “They are too grand to be much injured by any such stupidity, and will shine like the sun through clouds. Send me Ruskin’s pamphlet when you have read it. You see even The Spectator speaks of The Stonebreaker as the best of the best.” She was right—Ruskin acclaimed The Stonebreaker, though in qualified terms, as “Picture of the Year.”
562. Thou wert our Conscript. (H. Wallis)
On the whole, to my mind, the picture of the year; and but narrowly missing being a first-rate of any year. It is entirely pathetic and beautiful in purpose and colour; its only fault being a somewhat too heavy laying of the body of paint, more especially in the distant sky, which has no joy nor clearness when it is looked close into, and in the blue of the hills that rise against it, which is also too uniform and dead. All perfect painting is light painting—light at some point of the touch at all events; no half inch of a good picture but tells, when it is looked at, “None but my master could have laid me so.”
The ivy, ferns, &c., seem to me somewhat hastily painted, but they are lovely in colour, and may pass blameless, as I think it would have been in false taste to elaborate this subject further. The death quietness given by the action of the startled weasel is very striking.
•
Mary Ellen, who had always been maternal, was delighted with her new little baby, the love child whom they called Felix, which means happiness.30 “The darling baby keeps as good as ever, never cries, coos and laughs, sleeps and feeds and so his innocent life flows sweetly on.”
She chats of inconsequential things: “Some day when you are passing a silk-shop see if you can match me this. I want two or three yards according to the price—two will do if more than 4s a yard. . . .”
But there is one ominous note: “I am not suffering from anything and am getting on well but I am very weak, as I have never been before, dragging pains in my limbs, and swelled ancles [sic], but I have no doubt caution and rest will remove these, and if it does not I shall apply to Dr. Kidd. Unless Baby and I are quite well when we leave this I shall be afraid to go any very uncivilized place and I positively will not miss strawberries this year.” The swelled “ancles” and dragging pains are symptoms of yet another attack of the renal disease she could not really ever recover from.
Hers are on the whole rather laconic and undemanding letters from a Victorian mistress to her lover, especially a mistress who has just given birth to an illegitimate child. She no longer writes like a Victorian heroine, as she had when a girl, in exclamation points and effusions of “Oh.” Now her tone is equable and independent, though her position is precarious. Her letters are pleasantly free from any flights of ingratiating tact in a day when the love letters of the securest women were often doubly stifled by decorum and insecurity.
It is probable that Mary Ellen’s comfortable tone here, hard to reconcile with Meredith’s description of her as a “madwoman,” was both a matter of temperament and a consequence of an understanding between herself and Henry, in which they were fond, affectionate, and not bound to each other. They could not marry, and Mary Ellen was too realistic to expect Romantic Adventure; her pleasures were to be in her children, in strawberries, and probably, when she got to feeling better, in her writing.
George, meanwhile, was in lodgings in London, “ill, over-worked, vexed,” as he wrote to Eyre Crowe. Their friends had strangely polarized since his breakup with Mary Ellen. “I have seen none of the set but Dan, and him not for a fortnight.” Dan was Peter Austin Daniel, ultimately Henry’s oldest friend and executor, just as Eyre Crowe was ultimately to sponsor the new little Harold in his future career. George must have felt uncertain where people’s loyalties lay, and he was a man who needed loyalty, “sunshine,” bland approval.
George was afraid of the world. He knew he was; he despised in himself this fear of what people, what the World, would say but he could not help fearing it. He dreaded to have the World find out about his humiliation.
The World, of course, found out. It found out about the baby and it found out that Mary Ellen had gone off with Henry Wallis. It gossiped. Dickens, who was down on George anyway for allying himself with a new periodical, Once a Week, and deserting the Dickensian camp, writes smugly to his editor Wills the gossip he has heard from the actor Macready:
Friday, Twenty-Second October, 1858
My Dear Wills:
—If you look at the passage in Macready’s letter, which refers to Mrs. Meredith, you will see what I mean when I ask you if you will write to him [George], and enquire whether he will receive the money for the paper, or what is to be done with it; telling him at the same time how much the sum is.
This evidently refers to some things Mary Ellen had written; it is typical of the times (as well as of Dickens), that an editor would not dream of asking a woman what she wanted done with her own money, as long as she had a husband. One longs to know whether George accepted the money for Mary Ellen’s writing, and how much it was. Dickens adds, “Was she paid for her former paper or papers? That passage in her note looks to me as if she never had been paid.”31
All this gossip was an unalloyed horror to George, though posterity may feel grateful if his brilliant portrayal of Willoughby Patterne’s desperate stratagems to conceal his personal humiliations from the world owe anything to this experience. George’s own desperate stratagems now were to plunge into his equally brilliant but face-saving poem Modern Love, and to make some new friends who didn’t know anything of his “matrimonial antecedents.”
The errant lovers, Mary Ellen and Henry, had not, of course, dashed off romantically to Capri, as tradition has held. They did go there, but in quite another spirit.32 Henry solicitously took Mary Ellen there for the winter, hoping she would regain her still failing health. It is not clear whether little Harold went with them, but probably he did. Henry always felt Capri to be a most salutary place, and good for painting too. Edith was again at school, and Arthur was left with General Sir Edward and Lady Nicolls at Blackheath. They had become nearly as fond of him as they were of their real grandchild, Edith.
How George suffered. Like Willoughby, he “was in the jaws of the world. We have the phrase, that a man is himself, under certain trying circumstances. There is no need to say it of Sir Willoughby: he was thrice himself when danger menaced: himself inspired him. He could read at a single glance the Polyphemus eye in the general head of a company.” His whole acquaintance “had a similarity in the variety of their expressions that made up one giant eye for him, perfectly, if awfully, legible. He discerned the fact that his demon secret was abroad, universal. He ascribed it to fate. He was in the jaws of the world, on the world’s teeth. . . . His ears tingled. He and his whole story discussed in public! Himself unroofed! And the marvel that he of all men should be in such a tangle, naked and blown on, condemned to use his cunningest arts to unwind and cover himself, struck him as though the lord of his kind were running the gauntlet of a legion of imps. He felt their lashes.”
•
1859. Early in the year Mary Ellen came back from Capri, apparently alone, giving rise to the traditional view that she and Henry had quarreled and parted o
r—to put it more strongly—that he had deserted her. This, it is true, is what inevitably happened to heroines in novels who were imprudent enough to run away with men. The circumstances are somewhat clouded now, but it seems more likely that Mary Ellen and Henry did not part at all. They just went underground, to provide for an undisturbed and scandal-free future. That this was so is testified to by the lifelong cordial relations between Henry and the Peacock family. Mary Ellen’s few little things were given to him when she died. He corresponded with and called upon Edith as long as he lived, and contributed to the Halliford edition of Peacock’s works. Also, among Henry’s things is a packet of letters, replies to an advertisement placed in The Times, Monday, February 14, 1859—about the time he and Mary Ellen were both back in England:
WANTED, for a permanency, by a gentleman and his wife, without children, in a house where there are no other lodgers, FURNISHED APARTMENTS, consisting of one or two sitting rooms and two bed rooms, with attendance, &c. Terms not to exceed £2.5s per week, all extras inclusive. A short distance from town, and of easy access by rail, not objected to. Address L.M., care of Messrs. Davies and Co., advertising agents, Finch-lane, E.C.
L.M. would be the agent who then passes replies on to his client. It all sounds very much as if Henry was setting up that fine Victorian institution, the Love Nest. Meanwhile, Mary Ellen went off to spend Easter vacation at Seaford with Edith, and Henry took rooms at 62 Great Russell Street, in respectable separation.
The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives Page 14
