Abstract
The most significant review of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel was one that appeared, rather belatedly, in The Times on 14 October 1859. This was by Samuel Lucas, the editor of the new weekly magazine Once a Week, who had already agreed to serialize Meredith’s next novel. In a clear attempt to counteract the damage done by the Mudie ban, Lucas asserted that the novel ‘may be read by men and women with perfect impunity if they have no corrupt imaginations of their own to pervert the pure purpose of the author’.1 However, although Lucas’s review is generally laudatory, he strikes at the heart of the novel’s originality by saying that Richard is ‘untrue to his own nature’ when he is seduced by Bella, that the conclusion is ‘a catastrophe in defiance of poetical justice’, and describes the whole of the story after Richard’s marriage as ‘the faulty remnant, which spoils an effective story by inconsequential proceedings on the part of both father and son’.2 This was the judgement of the first and most important reader of Meredith’s next novel.
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Notes
John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, London, Longman, 1988, p. 676.
Letters, vol. 1, p. 57, [9 February 1860], to Samuel Lucas. For a detailed account of the serialization of Evan Harrington, see Royal A. Gettmann, ‘Serialization and Evan Harrington’, PMLA, 64, 1949, pp. 963–975.
It is noteworthy, however, that Lucas followed Evan Harrington with another ‘sensation’ novel, Shirley Brooks’s The Silver Cord, and that unlike Meredith’s novel this quickly went into a second edition (see L.T. Hergenhan, ‘The Reception of George Meredith’s Early Novels’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, vol. 19, no. 2, September 1964, p. 226 and n.).
Edward Clodd, Memories, London, Watts and Co., 1926, p. 156.
Natalie Cole Michta, ‘The Legitimate Self in George Meredith’s Evan Harrington’, Studies in the Novel, vol. 21, no. 1, 1989, p. 46.
Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885, London, Routledge; Toronto and Buffalo, University of Toronto Press, 1978, p. 74.
Donald D. Stone, Novelists in a Changing World: Meredith, James, and the Transformation of English Fiction in the 1880s, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1972, p. 103.
The other examples of foreign speech in the novel are strikingly different. Mr Pericles, the Greek musical connoisseur, Mrs Chump, the amorous Irish widow and Emilia’s father are given conventional markers of linguistic deviance and incompetence, which are both irritating and offensive. As Leech and Short say of so-called eye-dialect, ‘it is its non-standardness that strikes us, not the supposed phonetic reality behind it’ (Geoffrey N. Leech and Michael H. Short, Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, London and New York, Longman, 1981, p. 168). However, the grotesque effect of the representation of their speech, in contrast to the cultivated speech of the Poles, has an ironic function, since Mr Pericles is the guarantor (both for the Poles and for the reader) of Emilia’s musical genius, and Mrs Chump holds the key to the financial complications which threaten the collapse of the fortune on which the Poles’ cultivation is built.
See Robert Graves, The White Goddess, New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966, p. 176.
J.C. Jeaffreson, Athenaeum, no. 1981, 14 October 1865, Critical Heritage, p. 137.
See Jeanne Fahnestock, ‘Bigamy: The Rise and Fall of a Convention’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, vol. 36, no. 1, June 1981 pp. 47–71: ‘The peak years of the fashion are 1862, 1863, 1864, and 1865. By a very conservative estimate, twelve novels with bigamy as a plot element appeared in 1862, twelve in 1863, thirteen in 1864, and sixteen in 1865.…In 1866 the number dropped sharply to six. Perhaps the fashion peaked the week of 3 December 1864 when three of the four novels reviewed in the Athenaeum had plots constructed around bigamy’ (pp. 55–6). Fahnestock does not refer to Rhoda Fleming. Interestingly, Thomas Hardy employed a variant of bigamy as a device for resolution in Desperate Remedies, the novel that he wrote under the influence of Meredith’s advice, in 1869, to pay more attention to plot.
Jack Lindsay, George Meredith, his life and work, London, Bodley Head, 1956, p. 168.
Derek Beales, The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, London, George Allen and Unwin; New York, Barnes and Noble, 1971, p. 46.
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© 1997 Neil Roberts
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Roberts, N. (1997). The Novels of the 1860s. In: Meredith and the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25464-4_3
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