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

by Diane Johnson

  Because, of course, as every Victorian knew, if you have sinned you cannot, cannot possibly, expect to die surrounded by your family and friends. Victorians knew these things; they rearranged facts to fit with what they knew. Cousin Stewart tries to be handsome for George’s sake: “Thus ended the sad life of Mary Ellen Meredith. There is no condemnation for her, for, whatever her errors, they were blotted out by her tears. Meredith himself never blamed her, for he realized his own share in the mistakes and misunderstandings that finally led to ruin.”

  The Halliford Biographer says: “Early in 1858 Mary Meredith was alone at Seaford; she was in debt, and unhappy; Henry Wallis helped her, and before the year was far advanced, she fled with him to Capri. Her father apparently never saw her again. She returned to England without Wallis, in 1859, and died at Weybridge, after many wanderings, in 1861. . . . Peacock did not attend her funeral. . . . No monument was set up to mark her grave. . . .”

  This sad story sounds a bit like poor Lady Lowborough’s, who “eloped with another gallant to the Continent, where, having lived awhile in reckless gaiety and dissipation, they quarrelled and parted. She went dashing on for a season, but years came and money went; she sunk, at length, in difficulty and debt, disgrace and misery; and died at last, as I have heard, in penury, neglect, and utter wretchedness.” But Lady Lowborough is an imaginary lady in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, from which we can see how much biography owes to fiction.

  •

  For Mary Ellen, this was not a fictional event but a real one; her own death, to come to terms with in her own way.

  “Yet have I seen that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong: but time and chance happeneth to all men,” Mary Ellen had written in her Commonplace Book. And,

  “There is a dreary satisfaction in knowing one can lose no more. I bowed down my face on my hands and rested satisfied in that knowledge.”

  “He thought it might be better to flow away monotonously, like the river and to compound for its insensibility to happiness with its insensibility to pain,” she had written.

  That is how one dies from the disease that Mary Ellen had. One slips into a coma, like slipping into a river with the voices of the tired watchers growing fainter, blurring together like waves; and the light from the window strikes across the bed a dimmer beam, and darkness closes over, as the dark waters of the Shannon had closed around Eddy, or as the darkness of night closes around the bed of a small sleeper, and one flows away monotonously, insensible to pain, insensible to happiness.

  •

  Victorians knew death better than we. Many, like many who had lived before in other centuries, believed death was part of God’s plan. He took unto Him each soul when it was time. People sorrowed but they had that solace. Some Victorians did not have that solace because they did not believe in God, and these had to come to terms with death as best they could and in a way that we do not, because death entered their lives more often, and more capriciously. Today we do not often believe that God comes down for every soul when it is time, but we have explanations that seem, though painful, sufficient. The deranged cell strays through the bloodstream, the walls of the artery burst, or a bubble of oxygen bursts in the brain. We are sad but scientific.

  The Victorian father, watching his child sink into a fever, had no science. Capricious death could sometimes be routed by cool wet cloths or tea, you never knew. You hung on a pulse, on every shudder. The Dying himself was not protected from knowing his condition the way people often are today, if he was old enough to say his prayers and bid his family goodbye. Anne Brontë, dying, had been taken on a journey to behold a last beloved vista, and, feeling weaker, calmly asked the doctor if he thought she would live long enough to get home again, if they started right away. He did not think so, so she composed herself to die in lodgings; death had capriciously come a day or so early. Her brother, it is said, resolved to die standing up, and was indulged in this request by his family, who held the thin body upright until the light had gone out of its eyes. Death was a household event, since, of course, you died at home: pretty little neighbor children died, with their fat braids and sailor suits; young women at the height of their consumptive beauty; plump mothers left their big broods; promising, fine, manly young men were swept off suddenly by fevers; nice people you knew were every day taken off, unaccountably; capricious death might any day take you.

  This is still true, of course. But Victorians thought about death much more than we like to. Mary Ellen’s acquaintance no doubt concluded in their various ways that her death was: God’s will; tragic; regrettable; inevitable—a function of cosmic malice or retributive justice; a release; a relief.

  •

  George was afraid that Arthur had “cried a little,” when Mama died. George could not bear tears in a boy. Perhaps little Arthur cried in secret when his beautiful Mama died, or perhaps by blinking and biting his lips he could keep himself from crying, to please his Papa. Was he not eight years old now—a little man?

  •

  It is a funeral. George Meredith’s wife is dead. Almost no one is there. Papa is too stricken; his friend Henry Howes goes to the funeral to see that it is done properly. Harold’s nurse Mrs. Bennet is there, and the maid Jane Wells. The people she loved are not there. They are proud, intelligent people, mistrustful of easy, ritual comfort, resentful of death, and will not play death’s games.

  •

  But one day the lonely old man, Peacock, in his study sketched out an urn and a little epitaph, in Greek, and a Latin inscription:

  IN MEMORIAM

  MARIAE ELENAE

  CONJUGIS GEORGII

  MEREDITH

  Marya Elena

  Earthly love speedily becomes unmindful but love from heaven is mindful for ever more. . . .

  A bitter irony.

  •

  After Mary Ellen died, Papa fell into the deepest of depressions, broke off his correspondence, would not see people, could not bring himself to leave his home at Lower Halliford. When Mary Ellen had been dead a month, he brought himself to write to Lord Broughton: “I have struggled in vain against the double weight of mental depression and physical fatigue. A few quiet days with you and your daughters present, not merely the greatest, but the only attraction the external world can offer me: but I am totally unable to avail myself of your kindness. I have been too long, perhaps, in bringing my self to the conclusion, but you will pardon me in consideration of my extreme reluctance to admit it.”

  By Christmas he is no better. On Christmas Eve he writes, “I have not written a line since the last I wrote to you. I have striven from day to day to throw off the weight of physical and mental depression; but in vain: and I thought and felt that I must acquiesce under it for awhile, and await the natural reaction which comes in all cases soon or later. For I had always in my mind the words of Wallenstein:

  This anguish will be wearied down, I know:

  What pang is permanent with man?—

  From the highest,

  As from the meanest thing of every day

  He learns to wean himself: for the strong hours

  Conquer him.”

  He clung to his family now—to May and Edith, and to Cousin Harriet, who is a kindly old spinster, living with her brother Henry, who, she worries, finds it dull living with an old-maid sister. “You, are far better off with May, and ‘the young lady who sings’! I am glad to hear she is still with you, for nothing is more delightful than the society of those who are cheerful, and light-hearted. If we are gloomy ourselves, we are unwilling that they should be so, and often imperceptibly recover our own lost spirits, by communion with theirs. I sincerely hope this will be your case, and that you will yet accomplish a visit to Lord Broughton.”

  But he never did. He withdrew further and further into sorrow and solitude. Edith was scolded for admitting Thackeray, who called one da
y. Robert Buchanan was caught smoking and was turned away forever, for Peacock’s dread of fire, always intense, grew pathological.

  Towards the close of his life [says little Edith] he grew much depressed in spirits; the loss of his two daughters was a terrible grief to him, and a very short time before his death he was greatly shaken by a fire breaking out in the roof of his bedroom. He was taken to his library, which, being at the other end of the house, was away from the danger and the water. At one time it was feared the fire was gaining ground, and that it would be needful to move him into some one of the houses in the neighborhood, but he refused to move. The curate who came kindly to beg my grandfather to take shelter in his house, received rather a rough and startling reception, for in answer to the invitation, my grandfather exclaimed with great warmth and energy, “By the immortal gods, I will not move!”

  He would not leave his books; and fortunately the danger passed. He never recovered that fire; he had been weak and ailing all the winter, and he took to his bedroom almost entirely after that; he died in a few weeks, in his eighty-first year.

  That which you fear will always overtake you in the end; the fire raged through his safe and loved place. Those whom you love will be taken from you. The gods whom you serve are no better than the cruel Nazarene, whom you despise; and when Peacock began to die, Edith heard him calling upon these gods with reproaches, “because they persisted in tormenting one who had served them for a lifetime and never wavered in the service.”

  Cousin Harriet and Cousin Henry arranged for his tombstone:

  SACRED

  To The Dearly Loved

  Memory of

  THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK, Esq.

  Late of the East India

  Company’s Home Service

  Born at Weymouth

  October 18, 1785

  Died at Lower Halliford

  January 23, 1866

  Evidently, they did not take his writing too seriously.

  •

  Peacock brooded on death. The last thing he published was his solution to the famous enigma of Aelia Laelia Crispis:

  TO THE GODS OF THE DEAD

  Aelia Laelia Crispis

  Not man, nor woman, nor hermaphrodite:

  Not girl, nor youth, nor old woman:

  Not chaste, nor unchaste, nor modest:

  But all:

  Carried off,

  Not by hunger, nor by sword, nor by poison:

  But by all:

  Lies,

  Not in air, not in earth, not in the waters:

  But everywhere.

  Lucius Agatho Priscus,

  Not her husband, nor her lover, nor her friend:

  Not sorrowing, nor rejoicing, nor weeping:

  Erecting

  This, not a stone-pile, nor a pyramid,

  Nor a sepulchre:

  But all:

  Knows, and knows not,

  To whom he erects it.

  I believe this aenigma to consist entirely in the contrast, between the general and particular consideration of the human body, and its accidents of death and burial. Abstracting from it all but what is common to all human bodies, it has neither age nor sex; it has no morals, good or bad: it dies from no specific cause: lies in no specific place: is the subject of neither joy nor grief to the survivor. . . .

  But considered in particular, that is, distinctively and individually, we see, in succession, man and woman, young and old, good and bad; we see some buried in earth, some in sea, some in polar ice, some in mountain snow. We see a funeral superintended, here by one who rejoices, there by one who mourns. . . .

  •

  Mary Ellen’s death came, of course, as a great relief to George. He was momentarily afflicted, the way people are who find that people have died before they have made themselves understood, or said they were sorry, or been forgiven, or somehow straightened accounts so that no bad thoughts will creep in some future sleepless night. George had an unfinished feeling about Mary Ellen. He writes to his friend Hardman, “when I entered the world again,” from a “dumpling state” of vacation, “I found that one had quitted it who bore my name: and this filled my mind with melancholy recollections which I rarely give way to. My dear boy, fortunately, will not feel the blow as he might have under different circumstances.”

  From this unfinished feeling his greatest books and poems were to come. But even though he attained in them a kind of perspective, this was never so in his life; he could never, his whole life long, speak graciously of this experience, or refrain from saying something defensive and rude.34

  Mary Ellen was to cause him one bit more of worldly trouble. When, in 1864, he fell in love with a pleasant girl named Marie Vulliamy, her father insisted on a few explanations about his “antecedents in the matrimonial way,” as Sir William Hardman put it in his memoirs. Meredith enlisted Hardman, whom he had previously told nothing, to talk to Mr. Vulliamy. Meredith “is and always has been very taciturn on all matters relating to his personal history, and consequently he had now a great deal to tell me. It is a curious and painful story. . . .” “To have been separated from his wife, who afterwards had a child by another man, is not a cheerful matter for contemplation by a prospective father-in-law.”

  So thought Marie’s Papa, and enquired into the minutest details—the date and “mode” of the separation, where Mary Ellen lived after it, “at whose cost was she maintained?” “Whether after the separation she continued to be known and called by your name.” Poor George answers all these questions as best he can by letter, and sends Hardman to answer the rest. The puzzled papa, Mr. Vulliamy, annotates George’s letter:

  1849–53: 4 years of affection.

  53–57: Indifference increasing into mutual (I suppose) dislike and ending in separation from bed and board at the instigation of the wife. Up to this time [muses Mr. Vulliamy,] he does not admit that he entertained any suspicion of conjugal infidelity on her part so the separation was not considered by him to be final until he became convinced of her adultery.

  1857–61. . . . After the Institution of Sir C. Creswell’s Court in 1859, why did he not seek the Remedy which was now open to him? It seems very strange he should suffer this woman to bear his name and unaccountable that she lived partly with her father. Was her mother still living? What is her father? and where does he reside?

  Here speaks the good Victorian. That such a woman might be accepted home into her family seems to him nothing less than completely “unaccountable.”

  •

  The Biographer assures us that little Arthur had every advantage of exemplary training from George:

  One day when his son had gone to play out of doors, Meredith heard a ring at the bell and went down to open the door. On the step stood a beautiful girl in riding-costume, holding her horse with one hand and a disheveled Arthur with the other.

  “Your little boy fell in the road, just in front of my horse,” she explained. “But he didn’t cry at all, because he told me that ‘Papa says little men ought not to cry.’”

  Arthur was a good little man.

  •

  Another time, when Arthur was nine, George writes his friend Hardman “to chronicle the sudden and unexpected descent of a small man from a height of 17 feet to the ground. Poor Sons little intended the feat, and therefore performed it satisfactorily. In the crypt here [at Arthur’s school], there is a gymnasium, fitted up under a regular professor, who is 5th master, one Reinecke. He did this and that, he went in and out and around and over, and his pupils did the like. Apparently Sons had their emulation violently excited, for while we were all engaged in other wonders, Sons must mount a ladder by himself, and from the top of it make a catch at a pole from whence to slip down naturally. Instead of which he came plump to the floor. I felt him tugging gently at my hand and couldn’t make out what was the matter with him. He ha
d come to tell me he felt queer, and ‘what he had gone and done.’ I took him up and his nerves gave way just a moment (not noisily). Then we rubbed him a bit and discovered him to be sound. He was jolly and ready for fresh adventures in a quarter of an hour: wiser Sons, as we trust. My parental heart beat fast under its mask.”

  •

  Arthur was Papa’s little man, his brave little man who mustn’t cry. How people admired Papa for being so good to Arthur. So brave a man to raise a little boy alone, with only a housekeeper to help, and all the wives of all his friends. Rossetti painted a picture of the sweet little fellow. The beautiful Janet rescued him when he fell from his pony. How brave George Meredith is, they must have said (and have you heard about the mother?). George nobly raised his “darling little man” and worked at his writing and at his rising in the world.

  Arthur was a little in the way, though. About a year after Mary Ellen’s death, Arthur then being nine, George decided it was high time to send him off to school. It is not uncommon for English boys, of course, to be sent away so young. Papa understands that Arthur will not entirely like it; had not he too been put in a school—an awful school at that—when he was a little boy?

  Papa understands Arthur. Had not Papa’s mother died too when he was a little boy?

  George writes to the Reverend Mr. Jessop, headmaster of the school where Arthur will go, in September 1862: “This is Arthur’s character. It is based upon sensitiveness, I am sorry to say. He is healthy, and therefore not moody. His nature is chaste: his disposition at present passively good. He reflects: and he has real and just ideas. He will not learn readily. He is obedient: brave: sensible. His brain is fine and subtle, not capacious. His blood must move quickly to spur it, and also his heart.”