The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives

by Diane Johnson

  His own volume of poetry, Poems, appeared in May 1851, a simple little book dedicated to Peacock, whose friend Parker had published it, and, possibly, whose fifty pounds had financed it. The reviews were encouraging. The Reverend Charles Kingsley found it full of health and sweetness; the Church of England thought the “studied and amplified voluptuousness” of two of the poems was worse than anything in Ovid; George Henry Lewes and William Michael Rossetti both praised it; and the real Laureate, Tennyson, wrote to say he wished that he had written one of the poems (“Love in the Valley”), and invited George to visit him. No doubt George and Mary’s happiness was quite complete in 1851.

  •

  But there were ominous notes. Peacock and Mary Ellen were great cooks and great gourmets.19 George had indigestion. At the age of twenty-two or so he seems rather young to have had indigestion, but he did. “The Dyspeptic,” old Hogg called him—surely an unpleasant thing to be, and to be called. Perhaps he was one of those ostentatious sufferers, pointedly refusing rich dishes and leaving the table in obvious pain, since everyone was so aware of his affliction. Or perhaps Mary Ellen had written Hogg bemoaning it, for they were still fast friends and good correspondents. Hogg could be expected to sympathize with a woman who had to cook for a dyspeptic; Hogg was a gourmet too, and Peacock’s companion at the glorious annual Whitebait Dinners that Mary Ellen helped with. “The predisposition to indigestion with which all the children of this generation come into the world, and the stomach disease which commercial anxiety, literary irritation and moral vexation are tending to produce in all classes of men, may both be ameliorated or prevented by a true understanding of the principles and applications of diet and cookery,” Mary Ellen wrote in her review of Soyer, but she apparently found George a difficult case.20

  For a dyspeptic to be married to a gourmet—and great cooks were conspicuously rare in England—was surely an ironic thing, but possibly no coincidence. Ill-suited couples often seem to develop these mutually punitive neuroses: the dog-lover’s wife is inevitably allergic to dogs. It is perhaps to George’s credit that he maintained a lifelong posture of a roistering drinker and diner, when he was really so delicate that he couldn’t bear to see Rossetti eat eggs in the morning; and was obliged by the sight to leave off lodging with Rossetti and Swinburne. But this was later.

  “The stomach, not the heart, as poets write, is the great centre of existence and feeling,” Mary Ellen wrote in her article on Soyer:

  It is the first organ to sympathise with an affection of the heart, and the first to endeavour to alleviate it, by reminding the lover, through the pressing admonitions of hunger, of other duties and pleasures. When the stomach receives an antagonistic element, it revenges itself by sending up morbid impressions to the brain. Many are the blue devils which a vulgar rich dinner has raised, and scattered on evil missions amongst the children of men; many a childish disobedience is concocted in a soda-cake; and many a lover’s quarrel lies in ambush at the bottom of a tureen of soup, where it jostles with matrimonial squabbles, morbid creeds, and poetic misprisions. Of course these influences are more or less potent according to the strength or weakness of the stomach and the brain.

  •

  And babies came, as babies always came, as the natural consequence of marriage, to the Victorian woman. Indeed, the Victorian woman does not seem to question that babies must come. The endless series of confinements she had to expect—twenty was not an uncommon number, though of course very few of this number survived—does much to explain her contentment with the notion that she ought not to like sex. It would certainly explain why that may have actually been the case—a husband’s embraces were fraught with consequences. The fecundity of Mrs. Grundy does much to explain her resolute refusal to allow prostitution to be discussed—or abolished.

  Little is said about the extraordinary biological martyrs of the Victorian age: Mrs. Dickens comes to mind as one, or Queen Victoria herself, who had nine children. The wonder is that women then were so meek about their burden of relentless childbearing, and that even very nice, sensitive men were notoriously “inconsiderate” about exercising their “marital rights” when it meant an enormous family to support.

  In any case, Mary Ellen began to be more or less continuously pregnant, and bore “more than one child” to George between 1850 and 1852. But they were born dead, or died very soon after. This was disheartening but not calamitous, for Victorian women knew that it often happened. Perhaps they did not let their maternal feelings come in with a rush, like milk, but made themselves wait a little while before they allowed themselves to love a new baby. One thinks, for example, of Mary Shelley’s pathetic letter to Hogg, years earlier:

  My dearest Hogg my baby is dead—will you come to me as soon as you can—I wish to see you—It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to [be] sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it—it was dead then but we did not find that out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions—

  Will you come—you are so calm a creature & Shelley is afraid of a fever from the milk—for I am no longer a mother now

  Mary

  It is probable that these pregnancies caused, or made much worse, Mary Ellen’s disease of the kidneys. But Victorians did not make such simple medical connections, or if they did, they did not complain.

  •

  Christmas of 1851. Thomas Love Peacock is visiting his friend Lord Broughton—John Cam Hobhouse, who was Byron’s friend. Peacock enjoys these visits. He likes Broughton’s pretty daughters, and the other people whom he meets here. He is a gay and worldly guest. Another guest, Disraeli, his great admirer, was excited to meet him; Thackeray met him there (and thought Peacock too worldly). Between visits, Peacock and Broughton correspond, with family news and scholarly questions, but now Peacock has gotten away from town for a while and is peacefully expansive, and it is Christmas.

  Soon after, the news comes that his wife Jane is dead. Poor Jane, who had been crazy for a quarter century. “It can hardly have been other than a release,” remarks the Biographer, “but his care of her throughout had been devoted, and his grief was bitter. He shut himself up in his study, sought consolation from his books, and for some weeks hardly emerged except to attend at the India House.” The Biographer is a good man, unwilling to imagine that the bitterness derived from anything but the most exemplary grief, unable to see that an ironical, passionate, gay, and cynical man could feel anything beside grief at being thus tied for a quarter century to a madwoman.

  Then, or some time, Peacock sat in his study and with a bitter heart wrote something very horrid that shocked little Edith, and even, perhaps, the Biographer, who left it out of the collected edition of his works:

  TRANSLATION OF AN ANAPESTIC ODE TO CHRIST: MATTHEW X, 3421

  Oh! all ye who use your utmost exertions to avoid all false worship, and to hate all teachers of falsehood, if truthlovingly and unremittingly ye lift up your mind to wisdom, come now in a body and dash in pieces, strike, shake, beat, cut down, chop in pieces and overthrow the cursed imposter, the people-destroying son of Erebos, a false prophet, who, a causer of death, like a THIEF at midnight, came to throw on the sad Earth “Not Peace But a Sword”—not peace—but a sword defiled with blood newly shed: and to make hateful what is dearest to all mortals, and to all delights.—Break in pieces, hurl down him who is a seller of marvels, him who is hostile to the Graces, and him who is abominable to Aphrodite, the hater of the marriage-bed, this mischievous wonder-worker, this destroyer of the world, CHRIST.

  The parson’s daughter and Peacock had been ill-suited, it is easy to see in retrospect.

  •

  Other events shadowed the end of 1851. George and Mary Ellen left The Limes for Southend on Sea, where Mary Peacock, Edward’s wife, was staying. George and Mary Ellen were very poor, their babies were dead, debt loomed, they were too proud to ask Papa
for help. Hogg, with an odd foreboding, wrote Mary Ellen, “I am glad you are so pleasantly landed at the Wharf; but keep the Bunk in repair, or it is all over with you!”

  Then Mary Ellen’s Mama died, the poor ghost Jane, and they came back to Weybridge, and after the burial settled in a shabby cottage by the Parish Schools. Here George, who had resisted the notion of gainful employment, accepted the notion of putting his pen to something that at least might pay: prose instead of poetry. And he began an “Arabian Tale,” which would become The Shaving of Shagpat. In September 1852, Mary Ellen became pregnant again. But they were cheerful; they were still cheerful.

  MARIAN

  She can be as wise as we,

  And wiser when she wishes;

  She can knit with cunning wit,

  And dress her husband’s dishes.

  She can flourish staff or pen,

  And deal a wound that lingers;

  She can talk the talk of men,

  And touch with thrilling fingers.

  •

  1853. By now their financial situation was dire and Papa rescued them. Probably Mary Ellen liked this no better than she had liked everyone’s solicitude after Eddy’s death. Leave her to manage, she had said. Now they had to move in with Papa.

  It was not a success. Papa was sixty-eight, and set in his ways. And he could not stand George—could not stand his smoking, his finicky diet, or his literary talk. George was undeterred—still smoked, and tried earnestly to engage his august parent-in-law in discussions about books: Tennyson, whom he admired and Peacock didn’t; German literature, which he loved and Peacock didn’t.

  And Papa was bothered by the baby, when he came, for babies are noisy and attended by a lot of commotion. After Arthur was born, in June, Peacock rented them a cottage, Vine Cottage, across the green from him; moved them out and felt relieved. Is this the cottage “with tiny rooms?” Hogg asks. “May it prove commodious, and above all things, Lucky! And, I hope the dyspepsy is less difficult; I would that the Patient were well placed, in E.I.H. or elsewhere; how can we help him?”

  But the patient would not accept the sort of help that meant dull employment at the East India House or elsewhere; this must have been hard for Peacock, and perhaps Mary Ellen too, to understand. There was a strain on this point . . .

  Hogg cheers up Mary Ellen, housebound with her new baby, by writing of a French novel they were all reading: “I have heard it discussed formerly, with great vehemence amongst Ladies, whether the Chevalier had ever crossed the Rubicon with her? [The heroine.] The question was to be determined not extrinsically, but by the internal evidence of her letters. Passages were adduced whch were thought to prove the affirmative; others equally decisive were cited to demonstrate the negative.—a man of course can know no more of such matters than what he is told: the poor benighted creature comprehends only so much, as has been revealed to him. When you read the Letters you will decide the vexed Question, without appeal. Unless perchance they shd take it up to the House of Lords, whither Love, doubtless because he is blind sometimes strays; & what the Law-Lords & Bishops will make of it is hard to say: probably what they too often make, a Sad Hash!”

  George had published only two or three poems this year. He worked on his “Arabian Tale.” They lived in their tiny cottage, and like most couples with a baby they were less cheerful than they had been, though Arthur flourished beautifully, and Hogg writes of him, “I am quite converted by him to babies, that is to all babies like him. He is a wonderfully good and intelligent little mite [?]; and sometimes he looks very pretty: his mother manages him perfectly!” Of this period George remarked in later years, “When I was young, had there been given me a little sunshine of encouragement, what an impetus to do better work would have been mine. I had thoughts, ideas, ravishment; but all fell on a frosty soil, and a little sunshine would have been so helpful to me.” Perhaps he minded that Mary Ellen was busy with the baby.

  Mary Ellen took care of the baby, and prepared special diets for George’s difficult stomach, and read Constant’s Adolphe.

  Adolphe is about a young man and an older mistress, and it is full of terrible wisdom, things Mary Ellen must have liked, and yet not quite liked, to read. It tells the story, first of the death of love, and then of poor Ellenore, with odd prescience:

  The moment some secret exists between two loving hearts, the moment one of them can decide to conceal one single thought from the other, the spell is broken and the bliss destroyed. Anger, injustice, even wandering affections can be put right again, but dissimulation brings into love a foreign element which perverts and withers it even in its own eyes. . . .

  It is a dreadful misfortune not to be loved when we are in love, but it is a very great one to be loved passionately when we have ceased to love. . . .

  “ . . . She is ten years older than you, and you are twenty-six; you will look after her another ten years and she will be old whilst you will have reached the prime of life with nothing satisfying either begun or finished. . . .”

  And so I watched her slowly moving towards her end; I saw the warning signs of death stamp themselves upon her noble and expressive features. I saw, and what a humiliating and dreadful sight it was, that proud, forceful character of hers suffer a thousand confused and incoherent transformations through bodily pain as though at this awful moment her soul, crushed by her physical being, was changing its shape in countless ways in order to adapt itself the less painfully to the dissolution of her body.

  •

  1854. The happy couple—are they still happy?—remained most of this year in the cottage across from Papa in Lower Halliford. Hogg writes, rather crossly, on the anniversary of their wedding day, “May it ever be a cause of Joy!—You told me some time ago that I am not to have the pleasure of visiting you this summer. The house of Socrates was small, but it was large enough, he said, he could fill it with friends. You are still more independent than Socrates, for you are satisfied with a house that will not admit a single friend. Do you find it pleasant and commodious for yourselves? How are you? How are the dear Children? How is George the Fifth; is he less dyspeptic? Not to digest your delicate meats is to insult your art!”

  But they evidently did find room for a friend now and then, for it was in this year that their friend, the promising young painter Henry Wallis, painted Mary Ellen in a pensive attitude before the fire: Fireside Reverie, and accompanied it with part of a little poem of George’s:

  is she . . .

  She, . . .

  In evening’s lulling stillness, while the ray

  Tints her soft cheek, like sunset on fair streams?

  Is she the star of one that is away;

  She, that by the fire so gravely dreams?

  Toward the end of the year they spent some time at Dover, but Mary Ellen was “unwell, Arthur but poorly,” so the visit was not restorative, and not pleasant for George. He writes to a friend that he is thinking of going into the East India House the following year. They were more greatly in debt than ever.

  •

  1855. They were again at Lower Halliford for most of this year, George still working on his “Arabian Tale,” The Shaving of Shagpat. They had now been married for seven years; they did not seem to be so often in one another’s company. George, desperate for literary recognition, grew more difficult. Mary Ellen grew more independent, or rather fell back into the independent ways of her widowhood—would join George in town or not join him, as she pleased, or take Arthur and go to the seaside. She too busied herself with the launching of Shagpat, about which they were hopeful. A successful novel could mitigate their worsening debts. Debts were always a serious worry to Mary Ellen, who did not like them. They did not always like each other’s friends. We do not know what they talked of long evenings in the cottage at Lower Halliford, now that Mary Ellen was not so solicitous of George’s stomachache, and George less full of effusions of love.
One thinks of Colonel De Craye’s description of marriage in Meredith’s The Egoist, in answer to the question, “What is to rescue the pair from a monotony multiplied by two?” “Our poor couple are staring wide awake. All their dreaming’s done. They’ve emptied their bottle of elixir, or broken it; and she has a thirst for the use of the tongue, and he to yawn with a crony. And they may converse, they’re not aware of it, more than the desert that has drunk a shower. So as soon as possible she’s away to the ladies, and he puts on his Club.”

  •

  The Merediths had a friend named Henry Wallis, a painter. Sometime during 1855, George and Henry went around to Peter Daniel’s rooms, where poor Chatterton, it is said, had killed himself; and George posed as Chatterton, lying half off a sofa in a deathly stupor, the poisonous draught nearby. The painting was hung in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1856, and Ruskin said of it: “Faultless and wonderful: a most noble example of the great school. Examine it well inch by inch, it is one of the pictures which intend, and accomplish, the entire placing before your eyes of an actual fact—and that a solemn one. Give it much time. . . .”