Study Guide to The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645421672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, published in 1859 and regarded as his best work. As a philosophical novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel tells the story of an abusive father and his son who fell in love with a girl of a lower social class. Moreover, Meredith uses intellectualism, satire, and poetry to explore human motive and rationalization. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Meredith’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO GEORGE MEREDITH

Meredith was, during his lifetime, very reticent about his origins and family, and this is understandable, given his particular outlook and orientation. He actually portrayed his hidden biography in his works, especially in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, in Evan Harrington, and in the great sequence of fifty sonnet-like poems, Modern Love. The first and third of these, discussed at some length in the light of the biographical data now available to us, deal with Meredith’s frightfully unhappy marriage to Mary Ellen Peacock. The second, the most autobiographical of all, deals with Meredith’s childhood and with his family background.

SOCIAL BACKGROUND

Meredith, who became the chronicler of the English Country Establishment - the half-million (at most) favored people who were members of landed gentry and agricultural upper-class or upper-middle-class families, and who lived on comfortable country estates in nineteenth-century England with incomes derived from inheritances, from agriculture, from rents - indeed, from anything other than manufacturing or trade - was by no means of this class himself. This is the first fact to be noted in his biography. He was not, in the cheap sense, a social snob; rather, he valued certain traits and qualities in the English aristocracy and landed gentry so highly that he attributed to some, but by no means all, of this group the very highest qualities of human perfection. The aristocracy came to stand for the best in all men; the highest development of the race. Now, there is much to be said against the Meredithian outlook, but before one can criticize - if criticism is indeed indicated - one must understand what Meredith was saying in his sometimes aphoristic and obscure poetic language. And to understand what he was saying, one must understand him, to whatever degree it is possible.

George Meredith was born at Portsmouth, the English naval port, on February 12, 1828; he claimed later royal Welsh ancestry, but the truth was that both his father, Augustus Armstrong Meredith, born in 1797, and his grandfather, Melchisedek Meredith, were tailors. His grandfather built up an excellent business in Portsmouth during the Napoleonic Wars as a naval outfitter, tailoring uniforms for naval officers. Unfortunately, however, the business fell off because of the advent of peace in 1815, and also because Augustus was never much of a tailor or businessman; so George simply did not have a wealthy or even a comfortably well-off upbringing. He was a tailor’s son, and an unsuccessful tailor’s at that. Although this is certainly no crime, a consideration which may simply not occur to many readers of Meredith’s works is that there were two trades or occupations in the England of the nineteenth and earlier centuries which had somehow become invested with a peculiar contempt on the part of society; that of the tinker, and that of the tailor.

Why this contempt should be present is complicated; perhaps the tinker, as a repairer of damaged pots and pans, was likely to be an itinerant workman, with the hint of something disreputable about him. The case of the tailor is even more complicated. A tailor is a “tradesman” of relatively low status in the England of the period; perhaps it may hinge on nothing more than the reputation of tailors for being underpaid and exploited. One can read documents of both Thomas Carlyle and Charles Kingsley, Meredith’s literary contemporaries, to see some horrific doings in the clothing sweatshops of London. At any rate, Meredith did his best during his lifetime to conceal his actual origins, knowing instinctively that the classes he worshipped from afar - or near - would never be able to bring themselves to accept him if the simple two-word phrase: “tailor’s son” were whispered.

In one of the books about Meredith published during his lifetime, E. J. Bailey’s The Novels of George Meredith (London, 1908: Unwin), appears this interesting passage, at the beginning of Chapter Two:

“The first decade of Meredith’s literary career was the third of his life-time. Born in Hampshire, February 12, 1828, he lost during his childhood his Welsh father and Irish mother, and thereupon becoming a ward in chancery was sent to Germany for his education.”

The only trouble with this passage is that at least two important facts in it are purely figments of someone’s imagination, whether Meredith’s or Mr. Bailey’s, but ultimately probably the former. The truth is that Meredith’s father, while he became estranged from his son in the same manner, without the dramatic circumstances, as did Sir Austin Feverel become estranged from Richard, lived for a number of years after George was grown, and having married again, eventually left England for Cape Town.

There was some small inheritance which Meredith received from his mother, who died when he was five; it was not over a thousand pounds, which of course was more than the majority of the population ever saw then, but was in no way a fortune. And this money was tied up in trust for George, with his father unable to touch it, especially as his father had gone into bankruptcy in the tailoring establishment in Portsmouth when George was ten - this was in 1838. Soon thereafter, the Meredith family had moved to London, where Augustus Meredith became a journeyman-tailor in someone else’s tailoring shop, a comedown for one who had had his own business and who was the son of a successful proprietor.

SCHOOLING

Meredith was sent to a rather atypical school - atypical, that is, of the class pretensions which seemed already to be his. During 1842-44, he attended a school at the German town of Neuwied, on the Rhine River between Bonn and Coblentz - and this school, among the fantastically scenic and historic surroundings, with visions of Seigfried’s Rhine Journey, was to have a permanent effect on Meredith’s thought and personality. Nature along the Rhine is, and more surely was, impressive, and some of this rather wild and lofty scenery would be with Meredith for the rest of his life, as evidenced from his unique descriptions of nature in such novels as The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. As poet and novelist, he could portray both the gentle and the stern aspects of nature, and at Neuwied the latter predominated. But the education he received was in advance of what he might have acquired at an equivalent school in England, for the Moravian Brothers developed in their students a general tolerance and detachment, and, what is more, there is no evidence that there was at that school the kind of corporal punishment which Meredith would undoubtedly have undergone at an English Public School of the time. The Moravian, or Bohemian, Brethren, were a Reforming Protestant Christian sect which, originally established in 1467 in what is now Czechoslovakia, may have had a considerable influence on Meredith’s thought, not theologically, because after a time he dropped most belief in orthodox Christian theology, but rather in his view that some considerable reforms were necessary in the manner of living a life - if that life was to be at all satisfactory in terms of both the individual’s well-being and in the progress of the human race on the evolutionary scale or ladder.

INFLUENCES

Meredith also, during this two year educational sojourn in Germany, came to know something of German philosophy and the German literary romantic movement - as did Carlyle earlier. Returning from Germany, where the noble self-abnegation and philosophy of service to one’s fellow-man of Goethe had influenced him in a fundamental way, which he was to embody in his writing later, he became apprenticed to a lawyer. The young man, George Meredith, now eighteen, was destined for the profession of the Law upon his return from Germany and, in February 1846, was articled (apprenticed, without pay but with the chance to learn) to a solicitor, one Mr. Charnock, in London. Charnock himself was a young man, not more than thirty, and he seems to have been more interested in literature than in applying himself to his profession. Charnock had a far-reaching influence on Meredith’s life and work, all out of proportion to his own abilities as a man of letters (apparently slight). For the lawyer introduced his articled clerk to the son of the well-known English satirist and novelist, Thomas Love Peacock.

Peacock (1785-1866) had been very friendly with Shelley before the death of that great poet in 1822; he wrote witty novels with very little plot, fantastic and poetic dialogue, and a satiric tone. The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829) is a fair representative of his work. Peacock, as was Shelley, was most interested in Zoroastrianism, in the eternal warfare between the principle of light, Ormuzd, and that of darkness, Ahriman, the evil deity - and it will be noted that The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is simply filled with expressed or implied Zoroastrian references, explained in the Commentary below. Meredith, in other words, got his Zoroastrianism, at least as a metaphor, from Peacock. Edward Peacock, the novelist’s son, became friendly with Meredith, and introduced him not only to his father, but also to his widowed sister, Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls. Mrs. Nicolls was nine years older than Meredith, and the mother of a three-year-old daughter at the time of their meeting; she had lost her husband, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, rather tragically. And she became interested in the exuberant Meredith and he in her, disregarding the difference in age and the more considerable difference in temperament; they were married on August 9, 1849, after Meredith’s father and stepmother had left England for Cape Town, South Africa, to make a new start there. Meredith was now legally of age, twenty-one; he had a wife, a stepdaughter, and an inheritance of a thousand pounds from his mother, an amount which was quickly spent on the support of the family. But Meredith had begun his writing career; he published Poems, in 1851, and two rather ephemeral prose fantasies, The Shaving of Shagpat (1855), and Farina (1857).

FAMILY LIFE

The difficulty was that Meredith was financially as unsuccessful at this point as his father had been. He and his wife moved in with Peacock, who did not appreciate this gesture as they were living on his bounty. The couple, both highly intelligent and emotional, quarreled bitterly, and ultimately, in 1858, Meredith’s wife eloped to Italy with an artist named Wallis, who seems to have been the original of Denzil Somers in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and to have evinced the same lack of personal force as Somers. Meredith was left with a young son, while Mrs. Meredith went to Capri with Wallis. A year later, she was to return to England, deserted by her lover and with a child which was not her husband’s. Meredith, evidently, out of his injured pride, behaved with exceptional severity toward her. He refused to let her visit him or even see their son, until just before her premature death in 1861.

In his behavior towards his wife, Meredith showed himself to be hard and vindictive. But the event left such scars that he was to write about it twice, converting torment into art, first in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, and subsequently in Modern Love. We have discussed in great detail this symbolic re-living and re-examination of his disastrous marriage by Meredith in these works, in the critical essays below, but it should be noted that this was the central fact of Meredith’s earlier life and career, and that it led directly to The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.

Meredith wrote that novel during the year after his wife and her lover had gone. Both the stylistic innovations and the philosophy, as well as the plot and situation and the aphoristic method of commentary upon character, may be accounted for by Meredith’s background, his associations (especially with Thomas Love Peacock), and his desire to write something which should be at once a tragicomedy and a tragedy of young love crushed by worldly values and considerations. It is worthy of note that Meredith, who wrote the novel at top speed to establish himself as a writer and to win fame and wealth, as well as to “write out” and therefore destroy the tremendous feeling of suppressed guilt over his conduct toward his estranged wife, which may have been affecting him at the time, revised the novel in 1878, or in the period of his maturity, some twenty years after the writing of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. In the revision, many of the anti-feminist remarks made by Meredith earlier were toned down or eliminated, and the account of the System was changed. In general, the revision, representing second thoughts on Meredith’s part about a number of matters, is much less successful or moving than was the original novel.

LITERARY CAREER

Meredith’s literary career progressed after 1859 to the point where, by his death a half-century later, he was regarded as one of the greatest English novelists and poets of his age. He was never very widely read; Dickens, for example, certainly had a much wider following, as did Trollope. Meredith’s style was too elliptical, his philosophy too profoundly accepting of the newly - discovered hardness and impersonality of nature, his satire too sophisticated and aristocratic, to win general acceptance - though in his treatment of romantic love and his idealization of women he was closer to the main line of the Victorian tradition than many realize today. While he had to proceed by indirection, he was still more frank and honest in most things, including his acceptance of the findings of nineteenth-century science, than many of his contemporaries. Only in his treatment of his personal life was he understandably quite vague and reticent, personally. In his writing, that was another story. Everything is there: his grandfather, his father, his first wife and her lover, his three sisters, who all married well and into social stations much beyond their own by birth. Lionel Stevenson’s relatively recent book, The Ordeal of George Meredith, is an important study which helps to show the relationship between Meredith’s earlier life and his work, and while in some ways it is not definitive, it is still more useful than such earlier works on Meredith as the one by Bailey cited above, which is simply inaccurate.

Meredith published Evan Harrington in 1860 - the most autobiographical of all his novels, even more so than Richard Feverel. His poetry is described separately in the general essay on the relationship of his poetry to his fiction, below, and the dates of the various collections and volumes of poetry are given. In 1864, Meredith’s life turned a kind of spiritual corner, for after his second marriage, to Marie Vulliamy, he underwent a change in outlook reflected in his fiction, though to attribute this change solely to his personal happiness, which was greatly increased by this marriage, as happy as the first had been unhappy, would be naive and simplistic. Meredith was a poet and an artist, and his art could never be totally determined by his experiences.

Sandra Belloni, his third important novel, appeared in 1864. Rhoda Fleming came in the next year, and Vittoria, a sequel to Sandra Belloni, in 1866, dealt with the Italian revolutionary uprising in 1848 against the Austrians. Meredith, incidentally, had strong political interests, and covered the Austro-Italian war of 1866 as a war correspondent for the Morning Post, and later was an editor and staff writer on political as well as literary subjects for several magazines and newspapers.

The Adventures of Harry Richmond was published in 1871, and in the story of a father told by his son one can see the burning theme of family and descent still operating in Meredith’s mind. Beauchamp’s Career appeared in 1875, and in this novel the political interest is strong. While Meredith’s interests seemed to be turning more to society in mass and to the seats of political power, as is also evidenced by one of his very stronges...