ANTHELIA: You have a better opinion of the understandings of women, Sir, than the generality of your lordly sex seems disposed to entertain.
MR. FORESTER: The conduct of men, in this respect, is much like that of a gardener who should plant a plot of ground with merely ornamental flowers, and then pass sentence on the soil for not bearing substantial fruit. If women are treated only as pretty dolls, and dressed in all the fripperies of irrational education; if the vanity of personal adornment and superficial accomplishments be made from their very earliest years to suppress all mental aspirations, and to supersede all thoughts of intellectual beauty, is it to be inferred that they are incapable of better things? But such is the usual logic of tyranny, which first places its extinguisher on the flame, and then argues that it cannot burn. . . .
The only points practically enforced in female education are sound, colour, and form,—music, dress, drawing, and dancing. The mind is left to take care of itself.
MR. FAX: And has as much chance of doing so as a horse in a pound, circumscribed in the narrowest limits, and studiously deprived of nourishment.
ANTHELIA: The simile is, I fear, too just. To think is one of the most unpardonable errors a woman can commit in the eyes of society. In our sex a taste for intellectual pleasures is almost equivalent to taking the veil; and though not absolutely a vow of perpetual celibacy, it has almost always the same practical tendency. . . .
•
Also, it must be kept in mind at all times that the women we are concerned with conducted their lives, had thoughts, went traveling, ate dinner, and fell in love while entirely encased beneath their gowns in the following articles of clothing: a chemise, a corset, a camisole over the corset, up to six petticoats—beginning with a short, stiff one, one or two flannel ones for warmth, a plain one and then some embroidered ones—a vest or undershirt, stockings, garters, and, depending on the decade, a whalebone crinoline or bustle. And all of these things were held on and together with strings, and tapes, and innumerable buttons and hooks.11
Whatever we are able to make of Mary Ellen’s adulterous behavior, we will not be able to excuse it on the grounds of impulse; there could hardly have been such a thing as an impulsive sexual irregularity for women so encumbered.
•
Real records of Mary Ellen’s childhood are few, but much may be inferred. Like Anthelia, Mary Ellen learned to read; she was allowed to read widely, pretty much what she wanted. Probably she was not started on Latin and Greek so early as Mill had started that boy of his, the impressive but peculiar John Stuart. And unlike John Stuart, Mary Ellen was given fiction and poetry, to develop the heart as well as the head. And Mary Ellen messed around in boats, like a boy, and learned to row and sail and swim. She grew up to be a fearless horsewoman, so she was probably given a pony early. The Peacock children spent most of their time outdoors.
When Mary Ellen was seven, a precocious, active little beauty, she would not have been a bit interested in the tailor’s baby born in this year, 1828, at Portsmouth. This was George Meredith, whom she would marry.
Little George’s parents were Welsh like Mary’s, and gave themselves airs about it. Like many Welshmen they thought themselves descended from kings, and they knew they were clever and beautiful. But George’s father and grandfather before him were tailors, and a tailor is a particularly ludicrous thing to an Englishman. This must have been confusing to the little, only child, George—to be simultaneously better and worse than other people in the town of Portsmouth. His mother dressed him in white dresses with blue ribbons, and he had splendid toys, and fifty people in to a “Tea and Ball” for his fourth or fifth birthday party. Inside, he was little and afraid. His nursemaid told him that the sound of the wind whistling through the key-hole was the ghosts of starved people. Ghosts dwelt right in his room, too, in the dark, everywhere.
George’s mother was also named Jane, like Mary’s, and when George was five she died. It was as if she suddenly went away. George “merely wondered” at the time, but when he grew up he wrote a lot of books in which women run away, or die, or otherwise desert little boys and leave them sad, as if women inevitably did that. And of course this happened all over again to George when he grew up, confirming his view. Whether by thinking that things will happen, you make them happen is a great question.
•
When Mary Ellen is ten she takes a trip with Papa to Wales. The other children have to stay at home with Grandmama. In Wales they get a letter from Grandmama. She sends her love to “dearest Ellen,” and feels “great happiness in knowing that she is happy.” It was Peacock’s birthday. “We are all well—and the whole family with the addition of little Betty drank health and happiness to you yesterday nor was dear Ellen forgotten.” Grandmama has a suggestion for something he should talk over with Mary Ellen: “I wish you could persuade her to love her Brother better, poor little boy he has had none of the advantages she has had—and therefore she should make allowance—he is a very amiable little fellow and would be very fond of her—if she would like him.” Mary Ellen, we see, is a real little girl, jealous of her next youngest sibling, impatient of his slowness, and Grandmama had to contend with the normal number of family squabbles and outbursts of temperament; perhaps with more than the usual number of outbursts from Mary Ellen, who was demanding, quick, hot-tempered.
“No Mama yet,” Sarah adds. Perhaps they still had some hopes for Mama, that she would one day miraculously come back to her senses. Sarah Peacock hopes that Thomas will return from his trip to Wales “in better health and spirits,” suggesting that he had set out in ill health, ill spirits—and no wonder.
Peacock’s lot was worsened when Sarah died in 1833. His oldest child was only twelve, and there were three littler ones to manage, but beyond the practical disadvantages, Sarah’s death was a devastating personal blow to Thomas, who had been extraordinarily close to his mother in a way that would now occasion remark, but which presented to the Victorian eye only a charming record of unexceptionable sentiment. Peacock had found in his mother his best critic, encourager, and, of course, housekeeper and surrogate Mama to his motherless children.
Now Peacock did not write anything for a long time. He was busier than ever at India House, where he was rising, and he had to oversee his children, hire governesses and servants, commute from Lower Halliford to London daily by rail and cab. He seems to have moved Jane up to London, at least part of the time, possibly to spare the children the sight or care of her. Mary Ellen came to London often, too, and went to operas and plays and museums with Papa. “She is said often to have sat beside him in his usual place, the middle of the front row of the pit,” while he wrote operatic reviews, the Biographer tells us.
In 1835, when Mary Ellen was fourteen, Mary Shelley reports to Maria Gisbourne how things went with the Peacock ménage: “I have not seen Peacock for some time. His wife lives in town—she is quite mad—his children in the country all by themselves except for his weekly visits—his eldest girl educates herself and reads Paul de Kock’s novels in all innocence.”
Mary Ellen seems to have been given considerably more responsibility than most fourteen-year-old girls. For instance, when Peacock was ill that spring, it is to Mary that Mary Shelley writes:
I am much grieved to learn from Mr. Hogg that he had heard that your dear Papa was not quite so well again—the weather being unfavorable—You have been very good to answer my enquiries—but do, Dear Ellen, write by the earliest post—& tell me how he is now—I should be so glad to hear that he is again better—so be a good dear girl & let me know as soon as you can—& forgive me for troubling you—but I am sure you will—as your Papa is almost my oldest friend—and I cannot hear of his illness without feeling very unhappy—
I hope you & your brother & sister are well—
Ever affectionately yours
MW Shelley
Write me rather a longer note & tell me what the doct
or says—
Later letters show that by 1839, Mary Ellen often stayed in London with her Papa in Stamford Street, and that she acted rather as his secretary or agent in routine matters. “This letter is more for your Papa than you—but I want an answer and that is not to be hoped for from him and so I trespass on your good nature to make you read my letter and get you to answer me,” Mary Shelley, who was always after Peacock about matters relating to his administration of Shelley’s affairs, wrote to Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen is eighteen now, and goes out to dine at Mrs. Shelley’s, and visits with Thomas Jefferson Hogg—she is “in society.” Papa has risen to the post of Examiner, the highest position of the East India Company, which, since by then it was rather like a Department of Indian Affairs in the British government, made Peacock something like a highly-paid government official—a governor, perhaps, or a Secretary of Commerce. (Peacock succeeded the philosopher James Mill at this position and, when he retired twenty years later, was succeeded by John Stuart Mill.)
•
We do not know what sort of childhood Rosa Jane and Edward and May had—a different childhood, no doubt, for it is surely true that every child in a family has a different environment. Apparently they did not get to go to London with Papa; they did not travel to Wales with him. Perhaps they minded. Perhaps Mary Ellen was a kind big sister and perhaps not. We do not know if little May slipped off across the green to see her real mother, her real brothers, or whether she thought herself, when she was young, a spot too grand.
•
George Meredith’s grandfather had been a good tailor and a great character, but George’s father was neither good nor great. He went bankrupt in the tailoring business and took up with the servant girl, Matilda Bucket (how one longs to know more about Matilda Bucket), and finally, because he could not support his son, made George a “ward in Chancery,” a Dickensian-sounding fate that got him sent by dispassionate people to the sort of schools a person with only sixty-six pounds a year gets sent to—an English boarding school so déclassé that the grown-up George would never reveal its name. And when he was fourteen he was sent to a pleasant kind of school in Germany which seems to have combined piety with the inculcation of manly virtues in a more humane way than English schools usually did. So while Mary Ellen lay about reading French novels and “educating” herself, her future husband was being filled with outdoorsy German folk tales and a love of long walks. Later he was sent home to England again and his Guardians in Chancery worried over what to do with him. About the time of Mary Ellen’s first marriage, the Guardians decided to send the Meredith boy off to Hong Kong to learn to take daguerreotypes, and though we cannot feel it would have benefited English letters if they had carried through with this plan, things might have gone better for Mary Ellen.
•
A teenage Mary Ellen, Papa’s favorite, spirited, beautiful, well-educated, and well-off, brought up along the sparkling Thames in a prosperous, big Victorian family, with famous men to dinner and Papa a lord of commerce, and everybody (Mama excepted) happy and prosperous. Was Mary Ellen happy? But adolescents are never happy. Mary Ellen, who loved to lie on the grass along the river with Italian poetry and French novels, now discovers her life to be like a French novel, full of love and hate and drama and death. Her own death, even. How sad not to be going to live to grow up. How everyone would miss her. How treacherous she felt herself to be, to die and make everyone sad. But she feels the end is near (she has a pneumonia, perhaps, or the impulse to hurl herself dramatically into the Thames). She writes a farewell epistle to Papa:12
My kind dear father
I cannot tell what I wish to say to you and My dear Mama—forget me, I will not speak of myself. Dear Rosa is very delicate, her cough is very very bad and if not looked to at once may become fatal, and dearest Papa, pray place her with Mrs. Jenkins, it is an unfortunate trial to leave a girl by herself. And now dear Papa you will I hope believe me, now when I can have no motive for deceit. Mary Ann has been the evil genius of my existence, do not let her be so to dear Rosa. Dearest Papa, pray let my Eddy have the letter I have written him by a safe channel, and dearest Papa do do pray promote him, get him on for my sake—you will dear Papa I know you will. God bless you My dear dear father—May Rosa and Edward render you that happiness I have taken.
Your unhappy
Mary
Papa keeps these letters; perhaps he will show Mary Ellen these letters when she grows older, and she will laugh and blush at what a silly child she had been. Darling May an evil genius? What a horrid, jealous child she had been. It is not known whether Peacock attended, then, to Rosa’s cough—dear Rosa, coughing patiently in some corner, seems to have needed her dying older sister as advocate. Mary has instructions for Eddy, too:
My own darling Eddy
You will grieve for me I know, but do not curse the memory of your Mary by leading a dissipated life, Eddy, dearest Eddy, do not, oh do not, do that. If spirits in the other world feel love and human feelings towards those whom they have left on earth, think dearest Eddy what mine must [be] feeling to know that I have been the wilful cause of your deriliction [sic] from the path of happiness and honour. I know your spirit and your heart my own best love, and I know that I cannot give you a greater proof of my confidence in your fond love for me than in entreating you, as I do darling Eddy, to bear my death as becomes a man.
I know not what more I would say, you will be happy with another partner, more worthy than I God bless you dearest be happy dearest and do not hate my memory.
Mary Peacock
Eddy one more request and I have done, if you would have my bones rest in peace, oh for the sake of all you hold dearest, do not quarrel or fight duels with any creature. I die in the hope your kindness will grant my soul felt request.
Mary
The phrasing and tone of this letter to Darling Eddy come from the lending-library fiction which her too-indulgent Papa had permitted her to read, but that was the Victorian style for these great occasions—deathbed requests and the like. When Mary Ellen grew older and learned to distinguish life from fiction her style became laconic, ironic, lifelike.
Were Eddy’s great vices—a propensity to quarrel and fight duels, to deviation from the path of happiness and honor, and (great heavens!) to dissipation—also drawn from a lending-library conception of young men, or was this really a wild young man whom Mary Ellen loved? Anyway, who was darling Eddy?
•
If we have heard of Mary Ellen at all, we have heard of her as the first wife of George Meredith, briefly adorning those pages of his autobiographical works that treat his youth. As if she were formed for George’s youth by some vaguely malign spirit seeking to try him—the Comic Spirit, perhaps, whose sole interest lay in providing George with those formative experiences so essential to a coming great writer. As if she had no past worth speaking of—was, perhaps, created simply for the occasion. But of course Mary Ellen, when she married George Meredith, had had a past already. Had already fallen in love, had already been married, had given birth to a child—all those life experiences that we normally expect to take place after the close of a Victorian novel, had taken place for Mary Ellen before the story with George began. The real drama of her life may have seemed to her to have nothing to do with George Meredith at all.
•
When Mary Ellen was about twelve, Papa became involved in a new venture. Always interested in ships, he now became interested in steamships. The Russians, rivals of the East India Company in some areas of Asia, had used steamships to navigate the Volga and the Caspian Sea, but Englishmen did not think them practical either for river navigation or for the long trip between England and India, and also did not think the Russians would bring steamships to the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers if the English did not. Peacock thought otherwise on all of these points.
Accordingly, he began to organize, to prove, approve, testify, correspond, converse, write arti
cles, first in support of steam communication with India and secondarily to promote the exploration of the Indian rivers. These matters were somewhat controversial, and they were expensive. The East India Company was now effectively a department of the British Government, so there were parliamentary committees, secret and select, for him to convince. He collected a great scrapbook about the Euphrates, in which, characteristically, he had entered every notice, from Gibbon and everywhere, from which he would quote. He talked to people like the explorer F. R. Chesney and corresponded with him. A stream of inventors with gadgets for steamships beat a path to his door, knowing it would be Peacock who would approve or disapprove all steamship gadget patents. Papa went on little steam voyages in the Channel, trying out his “iron chickens.” Possibly the children went along.
Peacock’s interest may have arisen as a consequence of his friendship with Macgregor Laird, or possibly the other way round. Macgregor Laird had married Ellen Nicolls, whose father, then Captain Edward Nicolls of the Royal Marines, was in the middle of a distinguished career of exploring and island-governing. Captain (later General) Nicolls was at this time interested in the control of slave trading on the African coasts, and was active in promoting the use of steamships there. Laird manufactured steamships. It was all very tidy. How pleased everyone must have been when Mary Ellen and Captain Nicolls’s elder boy, Edward, took to each other, making even tidier the correspondence among interests—interest and profit all round.
If Darling Eddy was a wild young man, he got it from his fierce father, who was known as “fighting Nicolls.” The Globe and Laurel, a journal of the Royal Marines, summarizes his career as follows:
Sir Edward Nicolls was in action with the enemies of his country 107 times, and it is not too much to say of him “a more distinguished soldier never lived,” for certainly no man ever saw more service than he did, and he has left behind him a name and a fame unequalled in the page of history. . . . He was constantly employed in boat and battery actions, and in most desperate cutting out expeditions. . . . He commanded the Royal Marines at the siege of Curaçao, in February, 1804, where he stormed and took Fort Piscadero of 10 guns, and drove the Dutch troops from the heights. He served also in the trenches, and for 28 consecutive days had to repel three or four attacks of the enemy daily. He also defeated an allied force of 500 men, and destroyed Fort Piscadero. He served at the forcing of the Dardanelles in 1807, when he captured the Turkish commodore’s flag, and assisted in the destruction of his ship. He also captured and destroyed the redoubt on Point Pesquies and spiked the guns therein. He was present at the blockade of Corfu in 1807, and with the expedition to Egypt in the same year, when he rendered very important services in charge of a station in the desert, and was taken prisoner. On the 26th June, 1808, with a boat’s crew only, he boarded and captured the Italian gunboat Volpe, near Corfu, after a chase of two hours. On the 18th May, 1809, he landed with two lieutenants and 120 Royal Marines on the Island of Anholt, defeated with the bayonet a force of 200 Danish troops, captured the island, and took upwards of 500 prisoners; for this service he received a letter of thanks, and was appointed governor of the island. He served in North America during the war in that country, and raised and commanded a large force of Indians, rendering incalculable service to the British arms by continually harassing the United States army. He co-operated in the siege of Fort Bowyer in 1814 in command of a regiment of Greek Indians [sic], and was three times wounded during the bombardment, he having insisted on being carried to the post of honour, although unable from sickness to walk. He was the senior major of all the force before New Orleans in 1815, and as such urged his right to lead the battalion of Royal Marines in the assault; this honour was refused him on the ground that if he fell, there would be no officer competent to command his army of Indians. He also performed other very important services during the war, and was specially mentioned in the gazette in 1807, 1808, and 1809. During the above brilliant career he had his left leg broken, his right leg severely wounded, was shot through the body and right arm, received a terrible sabre cut on the head, was bayonetted in the chest, and lost the sight of an eye in his last, or 107th action. In December, 1815, he was awarded a pension of £250 a year for these wounds, and received a second sword of honour. He retired on full pay 15th May, 1835; was awarded a good service pension of £150 a year on 30th June, 1842; and was made a K. C. B. on the 5th July, 1855. The heart of every member of the corps may well glow with pride when he claims Sir Edward Nicolls as a brother in arms, for had the Royal Marines no other hero to boast of, his career alone might well suffice to entitle them to a world-wide reputation for gallantry. No better history of the corps—during the half century of his service—can be found than the glorious record of his brilliant exploits, and in the long catalogue of its achievements it is impossible to read a nobler page.
The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives Page 7