Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (32 page)

Her reputation was enormously boosted by her bestseller,
John Halifax, Gentleman
(1856). A story of exemplary capitalist morality, it chronicles a hero who rises by his own virtuous efforts from poverty to business prosperity. It would become one of the great ‘gifts’ (improving books, given by well-meaning parents to children) of its era. Now wealthy herself and commanding up to £2,000 a novel, Mulock moved in 1859 to Hampstead, where she entertained on a modest scale, and expanded her range.
A Life for a Life
(1859), her most interesting novel, is written in the form of the intertwining diaries (‘His Story’, ‘Her Story’) of two sympathetically regarded ‘criminals’ who contrive to atone for their crimes and eventually marry.

In 1863, Mulock’s brother Ben died wretchedly, trying to escape from a lunatic
asylum. Dinah subsequently moved to Glasgow to recuperate from the shock. In 1865, now forty, Mulock married George Lillie Craik, eleven years her junior. The couple initially intended to live in Glasgow, but an offer to George Craik from Alexander Macmillan to become a partner in his publishing house brought the newly-weds in London. Dinah was past childbearing age, and the couple adopted an abandoned baby, Dorothy, in 1869. She proved, unsurprisingly, an exemplary mother. After marriage, Craik continued writing popular novels at a rapid rate. An overwhelmingly philanthropic woman, Mrs Craik seems to have lived by the virtues which her novels advocate. She died of heart failure during preparations for her daughter Dorothy’s wedding.

The Sage of Box Hill.

The Victorians took very little pleasure in difficult novels. ‘There ought to be no need of sitting down before the thing with tools and dynamite like burglars at a safe,’ wrote George Saintsbury: ‘It is the first duty of the novelist to let himself be read.’ He was clearly thinking of George Meredith. None the less Meredith was the writer who, as the era drew to an end, was the most honoured by discriminating Victorians. There was, they felt, something important inside that safe – if only they could crack the damn thing open.

Meredith was born in Portsmouth where his grandfather, Melchizedek, ran the town’s principal tailor and naval outfitters. The business was taken over by George’s less enterprising father, Augustus Armstrong Meredith (1797–1876). The Merediths’ background (‘trade’!) was later to figure centrally in the novelist’s most accessible (that is to say, least inaccessible) work,
Evan Harrington
(1861). The hero is the son of a preposterously aspirant provincial tailor, Melchisedec Harrington. Can Evan become a ‘gentleman’? Meredith’s background led to recurrent jibes against him. His style might be high, but his preoccupations were low – as was his subject matter. The scorn was not entirely unfair. There is, particularly in Meredith’s early fiction, an extraordinary interest in the degrading services which the petty bourgeoisie offer the upper classes in the form of barbering and tailoring.

Meredith’s first published work of fiction,
The Shaving of Shagpat
(1856), is a pastiche ‘Arabian Entertainment’, which combined both these obsessions. The hero, Shibli Bagarag, must affront oriental custom by shaving the shaggy-pated tailor-monarch Shagpat (‘shaggy pate’ – not a very brilliant pun). Thus will Shibli become ‘Master of the Event’. It is an indication of the gulf between Victorian and twenty-first-century sensibility that Mary Anne Evans, in a review written in 1856 before she was George Eliot the novelist, declared this dire effusion a ‘work of genius, and of a poetical genius’.

Meredith was an only child and his mother died when he was five years old. The family tailoring business had declined with peace, after Waterloo. Augustus was, in later life, to be a constant drain on his son’s finances. George left school at fourteen, then spent two formative years in Germany. In 1844 he returned to be articled as a solicitor. A year later, and very hard up, he began to write – initially poetry and higher journalism. In 1849 he married Thomas Peacock’s widowed daughter, Mary. The couple lived a semi-bohemian life at Weybridge and Meredith clearly came under the stylistic influence of his novel-writing, and eccentric, father-in-law. The marriage broke up painfully; the pains are recorded in Meredith’s fine sonnet sequence,
Modern Love
(1862) – a novel in verse. Having borne a son, Meredith’s wife ran off in 1858 and died, deserted by her lover, three years later. It was pure
East Lynne
.

Meredith’s first full-length novel,
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
(1859) was banned by the circulating library ‘leviathan’, Charles Mudie. The great librarian’s Calvinist susceptibilities were affronted by the seduction scene in
Chapter 38
, in which the married hero succumbs to the wiles of the seductive Bella Mount:

as he looked down on her haggard loveliness, not divine sorrow but a devouring jealousy sprang like fire in his breast, and set him rocking with horrid pain. He bent closer to her pale beseeching face. Her eyes still drew him down.

‘Bella! No! no! promise me! swear it!’

‘Lost, Richard! lost for ever! give me up!’

He cried: ‘I never will!’ and strained her in his arms, and kissed her passionately on the lips.

Mudie helped kill this novel at whose heart is a still-relevant debate over the education of the young child. Should it be based on ‘system’ or should the child be left to range freely?

In 1862, Meredith took on the position of literary adviser to Chapman and Hall, a culturally dictatorial post he was to hold for the rest of his life. In his role as ‘reader’, he was to assist the early careers of, among others, George Gissing, Olive
Schreiner, Ouida and Thomas Hardy. Doubtless there were hopeful talents one has never heard of whose careers were killed in the womb by him. In 1864 his life took a distinct turn for the better. He produced a florid romance,
Sandra Belloni
which hit the public taste; he was elected to the Garrick Club, and he remarried. His wife was Marie Vulliamy, whose family was of Swiss Huguenot extraction. She, unlike her predecessor, did not run away. A son, William Maxse, was born in 1865, named after Meredith’s close friend (and original of Beauchamp, in
Beauchamp’s Career
), the man of action, Frederick Augustus Maxse.

Meredith’s reputation grew as his fiction became more and more idiosyncratic. His
Bildungsroman The Adventures of Harry Richmond
(1871), which centres on a boy’s longing for his father’s admiration, and
The Egoist
(1879), which embodies the author’s theory of comedy, have their modern admirers. But, as with all his fiction, there have been insufficient readers to keep the novels consistently in print. It was an early reading of
Evan Harrington
which inspired Henry James to become a novelist. Thirty-four years later, James slammed shut ‘with a final furious bang’,
Lord Ormont and His Aminta
(1894) – one of Meredith’s many ‘eloping wives’ novels – which he had been grinding through at the rate of ‘ten insufferable and unprofitable’ pages a day. ‘I doubt’, James confided to Edmund Gosse, ‘if any quantity of extravagant verbiage, of airs, and graces, of phrases and attitudes, of obscurities and alembications, ever started less their subject, ever contributed less of a statement – told the reader less of what the reader needs to know.’ A snippet, describing the exodus of the high-born from the capital (including the hero, Lord Ormont, in search of a wife) after the ‘season’ will give some idea of what infuriated James:

There was no counting now on Lord Ormont’s presence in the British gathering seasons, when wheatears wing across our fields or swallows return to their eaves. He forsook the hunt to roam the Continent, one of the vulgar band of tourists, honouring town only when Mayflies had flown, and London’s indiscriminate people went about without their volatile heads.

In other, and fewer, words: ‘It was summer and he left London.’ What Meredith does with that narrative fact verges on cruelty to the English novel.

From 1885 he was increasingly disabled by a spinal complaint and was, for the last sixteen years of his life virtually paraplegic – although, to the end, it is recorded, ‘conspicuously handsome’. On Tennyson’s death he was elected President of the Society of Authors. In 1905 he received the Order of Merit and his last days were passed in the unchallenged glory of being the nation’s Grandest Old Man of Letters. Largely unread letters today, alas.

Rather a failure.
Mrs Oliphant’s verdict on herself

One of the most prolific Victorian novelists and, like Trollope (whom she in point of fact outwrote two-to-one), Margaret Wilson was an author who contrived to combine mass production with a commendable degree of artistry. She was born in Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, and, although she lived most of her adult life in London, always retained a pronounced Scottishness in her manner and personality.

Francis Wilson, Margaret’s father, was an ineffectual figure employed in the excise service: his work necessitated several unsettling household moves. The domestic atmosphere in the Wilson home was strenuously moral and the dominant influence on the children was the resourceful mother of the family. Margaret, whose subsequent life was dogged by tragedy, was to need her mother’s firmness of character in full measure herself. The Wilsons were Presbyterian and strongly affected by the ‘Disruption’ of 1843 which led to a schism and the subsequent formation of the independent Free Church of Scotland. But Margaret, when she had discretion in the matter, chose to be Anglican – she was her own woman.

Her career in writing began when her brother Willie filched the novel she had written,
Passages in the Life of Mrs. Margaret Maitland
(1849), and sent the manuscript off to the London publisher, Henry Colburn. The story, told by herself, of a God-fearing lowland Scottish spinster (‘a quiet woman of discreet years and small riches’) earned the author £150 – and the publisher much more when it went into three editions as a three-decker for the library market, propelled on its way by praise from Charlotte Brontë. Aged only twenty-one her career was launched and over 100 books were to follow. Wilson did a couple more novels for Colburn, but the critical professional relationship of her career was formed in 1853 when with
Katie Stewart
(a domestic-historical romance of the 1745 uprising) she became a ‘Blackwood’s author’.

In the early 1850s she moved to London, and in 1852 (against her mother’s wish, evidently) she married her cousin, Francis Wilson Oliphant, and settled in Harrington Square. He was an artist specialising in stained glass who worked with Pugin
on the remodelling of the Houses of Parliament. Meanwhile, in between child-bearing, Margaret continued writing a string of successful novels for the library market. ‘Mrs Oliphant’, as she renamed herself, professionally, was happier at this stage of her life than she would ever be again. There were children. She was earning around £400 for every novel she wrote, and she was a minor celebrity – and fondly regarded – in London literary life. She is one of that corps of Victorian novelists, who, to the despair of modern feminists, chose to be identified by the chattel prefix (Mrs Gore, Mrs Gaskell, Mrs Humphry Ward, Mrs Henry Wood). There were, however, already things to vex Mrs Oliphant. Her husband ‘Frank’ was talented but a poor provider. Margaret, additionally, was obliged to support her alcoholic brother William. But, as ever, she threw herself into the task.

In 1859 disasters struck which tested even her stoical ability to cope. Her husband contracted galloping consumption and died within a few months after a nightmarish journey to Italy. The young widow had two surviving children, was pregnant with a third, and running short of money. Her suffering at this period is recalled in two representatively lachrymose novels, written five years later.
Agnes
(1865) tells the story of the daughter of a blacksmith who marries the heir to a baronet but is left a penniless widow with three young children.
A Son of the Soil
(1865) tells the similarly gloomy tale of Colin Campbell, born to poor Scottish parents, who wins a scholarship to Balliol. He returns idealistically to take charge of his local kirk but discovers his flock is immune to his brilliance and Christian enthusiasm. And his childhood sweetheart, Alice, whom he nobly marries, is now beneath him in mind and spirit. He reconciles himself to a life of reduced fulfilments and hard unrewarding work. While not exact transcriptions of the author’s tribulations, these works, and others like them, convey the bleak wretchedness of her early widowhood.

To make things worse for Oliphant, her fiction, of which she had produced an over-supply, no longer appealed as it once had to the library market. Resourcefully, having returned to England from Italy in 1860 to live with her brother Frank, she fought to win back her place at the top of the tree with the enduringly popular seven-volume ‘Chronicles of Carlingford’. The series got off to a successful start with
Salem Chapel
(1863). Her payments from Blackwood, in this second phase of her career, soared to £1,000 a title. ‘Carlingford’ was clearly influenced by Trollope’s ‘Barsetshire’ sequence, but Oliphant’s narratives were less ambitious in their social scope and more theological in their content, with a nagging preoccupation with the problems of religious vocation in the modern world. Trollope’s clergymen always tend to be civil servants in dog collars. The church is where they happen to work.