Victorian Review

Not many people would choose George Meredith as their favourite Victorian author. John Sutherland called him "the least read major novelist of the period" (429), and anyone who has encountered his fiction is likely to have done so only through The Egoist (1879). Sir Willoughby Patterne, the egoist of the title, is such fun to hate, and his downfall is so satisfying. Quite possibly, as Diane Johnson implies (140), Meredith was mocking himself there. But my own favourite is The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1877). The emphasis in this bildungsroman is on Harry, who searches for the father who deserted him, and the love that eludes him. His father, Roy Richmond, is the larger-than-life figure who implodes here—or, rather, explodes. In a theatrical denouement, he dies in a blaze of fireworks that he was letting off to welcome Harry and his new bride home. Fundamentally, what Harry has had to find (and has, by now, found) is himself. The need for the almost phantasmagoric father has gone, and the title character seems well equipped to face the future now, with his staunch and well-balanced cousin, Janet Ilchester, by his side.

The Adventures of Harry Richmond drew me into its world immediately. It starts with a dramatic encounter, as Roy Richmond comes to Riversley Grange at night and reclaims his young son from his father-in-law, Squire Beltham. The standoff between the two fiery figures is mesmerizing, and so is the sequel. The child is snatched from his warm bed and transported, as if on a magic carpet, into a kaleidoscopic sequence of travels. I first wrote about Harry Richmond in a book about childhood and growing up in British fiction. Here, I compared the way Meredith captures the young Harry's developing consciousness with the way Dickens presents young David Copperfield's. "We are back in a world where nothing connects, everything rushes at us unexpectedly, and evokes some new and surprising sensation," I wrote, trying at the same time to see both authors as expressing "the entirely naturalistic distorting mirror of memory" (Through the Northern Gate 196–97). The implied paradox fascinated me then, and I still feel that Meredith had the earlier novel in mind here. Few of Dickens's major works are in the first person, and, as it happens, Harry Richmond is the only one of Meredith's told in this way. The narrators in such cases are by no means guides to their authors' pasts or characters, let alone reliable ones. But the approach in a first-person narrative may depend on and reveal more introspective, or even confessional, impulses.

Certainly, if Meredith gives away something of himself in The Egoist, he gives away more of it in Harry Richmond. His own mother died when he was five, and when he was eleven, his father went bankrupt, moved away, and [End Page 196] remarried, apparently leaving his son with relatives on a farm. The abrupt change would neither be talked of nor forgotten. It lurks behind Harry's pitiful disorientation at school, after Richmond Roy leaves him again. Here, he exists largely in a daydream world, pursuing his father in his mind, asking himself as he is startled back into classroom life, "why I was there and he absent" (51). He begins living "systematically" out of himself, "in extreme flights of the imagination" (70), attaching himself to the dashing head boy, Heriot, developing an intermittent interest in girls, but finally setting off with a friend in physical pursuit of his lost father. He seems to realize that this relationship is the one that must be resolved before he can feel grounded in himself and move on confidently—or, as Dickens puts it at the beginning of David Copperfield (1849–50), become the hero of his own life (13).

As it happened, when I first read Harry Richmond, I was engaged in a similar search. Like so many others of my generation, I had a father who (so I was told as a child) died in the war. But I...