•
Woman’s Lot: we learn a little more of it from the replies to the advertisement, dozens of replies from the respectable widows of London, anxious, poor, obliged to let their drawing rooms (“watercloset on the same floor”); obliged to give their tenants “first-rate references” of their respectability. If you were poor it was essential to cling to your respectability; it was also necessary to hope for an extra thirty shillings a week, and if the Gentleman and Lady who came to rent it were not—you suspected—quite what they ought to be—if they seemed respectable, that would just have to do:
A gentleman and his Wife only, having a much larger House than they require would be happy to let the Drawing room with 2, 3 or more rooms Well furnished with use of Piano—good cooking and attendance with great attention to cleanliness, and all the comforts of a home can be offered—
Drawing room lofty with 2 Bedrooms and extra room if required 30l per week Watercloset on same floor—situated most central being
34 King Street
Bloomsbury Square
Can refer to a Lady and Gentleman who occupied the apartments until lately.
Sir
In reply to your Advertisement in the “Times” Paper of this Morning for furnished apartments I beg to offer you the same with every comfort and attention at the sum named should the situation be suitable.
My House is large, airy and genteelly furnished it is close to Lord Hollands Park and Kensington Gardens and the Omnibuses pass the Square to all parts every ten minutes, and having no family enables me to observe the greatest punctality [sic] in my establishment
To L.M.
Davis & Co
Advertising Agents
1 Finch Lane
Address
Mrs Holloway
3 Warwick Square West
Kensington
Feb 14th
A Lady who is about taking a House in the healthy and really beautiful neighbourhood of Highbury, also but a little distance from the railway which runs from thence to the City, Blackwall [& etc.?]—would be much gratified by an interview on the subject of their advertisement with L M—she thinks a negociation [sic] in the requirement of both parties—(one, wishing a pleasant residence, and the other side desiring to find respectable persons as permanent inmates) might be agreeably entertained; if the short time arrangements would take making would be of no particular object to the Gentleman and Lady seeking a permanent and congenial Home.
For making an appointment to enter into all particulars please address to
Mrs. Newbold
3 St Georges Terrace
Liverpool Road
Islington
Monday
Febry 14th, 1859
Sir
I beg to say in answer to your advertisement that you can be accomodated [sic] with the apartments you require, in my house which is well and comfortably Furnished There are no children or other Inmates and as I keep two Servants and there are only two in Family you would have very good attendance I am the Widow of an officer and can give first rate references as to my respectability Should the neighbourhood of Kensington suit you I shall be happy to show you the rooms Hoping you will favor me with a line
I remain
Sir
Yours obediently
Mrs L Hellens [?]
1 Cambridge Terrace
Holland Road
Kensington
•
One very bad thing had happened to complicate Mary Ellen’s life. When she set out for Capri she had left Arthur with her former mother-in-law, Lady Nicolls. She came back to find that George had got him. There is a scene in Meredith’s Harry Richmond where a father comes to claim his little son from the aristocratic parents of his former wife. In the book the wife, named Marian, is mad. The father storms up to the door in the night and insists on seeing his little boy. “Some minutes later the boy was taken out of his bed by his aunt Dorothy, who dressed him by the dark window-light, crying bitterly, while she said Hush, hush,: and fastened on his small garments between tender huggings of his body and kissings of his cheek. He was told that he had nothing to be afraid of. A gentleman wanted to see him; nothing more. Whether the gentleman was a good gentleman, and not a robber, he could not learn.” The little boy is taken up and shown by his grandpapa to a man whom he hardly knew. “‘Kiss the little chap and back to bed with him,’ growled the squire.
“The boy was heartily kissed and asked if he had forgotten his papa. He replied that he had no papa: he had a mama and a grandpapa. The stranger gave a deep groan. ‘You see what you have done; you have cut me off from my own,’ he said terribly to the squire; but tried immediately to soothe the urchin with nursery talk and the pats on the shoulder which encourage a little boy to grow fast and tall. . . .”
After further argument the father steals the little boy off into the night. He is a wonderful, fantastic father, with candy and extravagant tales; it has usually been assumed that it was George’s own father he was recreating in his book. But perhaps “The Great Mel” is the sort of father George wished to be, too, wooing with his verbal brilliance the little boy in whom there might just possibly remain some residual affection for his mother.
•
For George, things were looking up. He had taken Arthur to a place at Esher, near Weybridge, where he and Mary Ellen had lived when they were first married. He had a housekeeper, and an altogether more settled life now, and took up again with their old neighbors, the Duff Gordons, whose sixteen-year-old daughter Janet he was in love with. He was writing a novel, Evan Harrington, about a young man with origins in tailordom and how he got on with fancy people (like the Duff Gordons). He made the tailors seem ridiculous and the aristocrats pleasant, so he, Meredith, got on very well. The novel began to run in the February issue of Once a Week, and he had gotten a reader’s job at the publishing firm of Chapman and Hall, so there was steady money at last.
In fact there was just one problem in his life: Mary Ellen. Instead of considerately throwing herself into the Thames or coming to some other conclusion, as an erring wife should do—and an old one at that, nearly forty, so different from the blooming Janet—Mary Ellen was around. She even saw people George knew, and they spoke to her, perhaps even called on her at her shabby place at Twickenham, or had she moved to Richmond Hill by now? George hated the idea that for others Mary existed. For him, she did not.
She had the appalling nerve to visit him once, about Arthur, for a brief moment—“the space of two minutes only,” he assured his future father-in-law, anxious to convince him of his inflexible rectitude. He must have turned her out. No, she could not have Arthur; she could not even see Arthur. Like the sanctimonious villain in a satire on Victorian life, George knew his moral rights, and he was supported in them—he must have known, must have felt her silent approval and encouragement and support—by Mrs. Grundy, that representative of British mid-Victorian respectability, whom he already affected to despise. Mrs. Grundy and George knew that a woman who left her husband should not even wish to corrupt her child by her company. British law took a similar view; mothers were rarely given custody of their children even in cases where it was the father who was the adulterer. George, with the Crown and Mrs. Grundy on his side, was adamant.
The real people they knew, of course, were more graceful. Every Victorian did not behave like Victorians in a play—some conspired to help Mary Ellen. They would sneak Arthur out for little furtive visits with her in London, “or at Petersham, in the avenue leading to Ham House,” says the Biographer. Perhaps Mary Ellen would bring him toys; perhaps she brought sweets, or maybe she brought his little brother for him to see. Arthur could not talk about these visits to Papa. Mama could not even be mentioned. It was very strange for Arthur.
•
1860. Mary Ellen now had a tiny cottage in Oatlands Park, a few miles from Lower Halliford and Papa, and Edith,
when she came home on holidays from school. Harold and his nurse, Mrs. Bennet, were with her or nearby, for Mary Ellen was not really strong enough any longer to care for a lively two-year-old by herself. The old illness was worse: she would swell and ache; her head would pound pitilessly. She grew weaker, paler. Then she would feel more herself again, and try to work, and see her friends, and put things in order. She had set her face toward the future with, as it were, existential fortitude, as though there were going to be a future.
In the summer of 1860 she writes a graceful little letter to Edward Chapman, but beneath the surface cordiality there is growing desperation—debt, and her sense that her illness might be fatal:
My dear Mr. Chapman,
Can you lend me £ 10 till Michaelmas. In the event of my death between this and that Papa will repay it to you. I have no other security to you except my own assertion that I have never yet borrowed a penny without returning it at the specified time. If you can oblige me please send me a check here. I have let my house to Parker and taken a little cottage for boating at Weybridge so that what I have had to buy for that and the moving spare things from Richmond has taken up my loose cash and I never get in debt.
I am so vexed that the first letter I greet you with after your perilous journey to ‘Foreign Parts’ should be about money that I will not write to answer Mrs. Chapman’s last kind letter now but shall do so by-and-bye on a sheet unalloyed by Mammon.
I should be glad to hear however how you like the place and how you performed the journey.
And with kindest love to all your family, believe me
Faithfully yours,
Mary Meredith
Evidently Mr. Chapman obliged, because four days later, July 8, 1860, she writes to thank him:
My dear Mr. Chapman,
Many thanks for your kindness: the first two halves came safely. Never having written or seen an I.O.U., I think it better to send it now so that if not right you can send it to me to be corrected with the other half notes.
I am hard at work getting my boating cottage in order, in a few days I shall write to Mrs. Chapman. I am very glad you all like the place.
With love to all, believe me
Faithfully yours,
Mary Meredith
I have said October 1, because though I shall have the money on the 29th of September I may not be able to transfer it to you by that time.
We cannot be sure of the mysteries of Mary Ellen’s finances now. Where did she get the Richmond house which she had let to Parker? From whence did she expect the money in September to repay to Chapman?
To her old friend Hogg, who had recently lost an old friend, she wrote a letter of condolence in December, and to him must have allowed a glimpse of her true despair. Hogg replies: “You treat life somewhat cynically as ‘une froide plaisanterie’: if you are justified by the authority of Voltaire in considering the dispensation of weather as a pleasantry, certainly it is a cold one at present. At this season it is the custom to say to a friend, A Happy New Year!: it is superfluous to offer the accustomed wish to you, because you have enough of talent and originality to make for yourself, under any circumstances, Many Happy New Years!”
But of course this was not true. She had talent and originality but could not live to see another New Year. Perhaps life really is une froide plaisanterie. She had not liked to worry old Hogg with the news that she was dying, but she seems to have known it herself.
•
Oatlands Park had been the grounds of the house of the Duke of York: beautiful formal gardens, wild woods, ponds. By 1861 the house had been converted into a hotel owned by a Mr. Peppercorn, but the grounds had not changed much. There was a strange grotto made of shells, a broadwater, seventy acres of land and wood. Near the grotto was Grotto Cottage, formerly the home of some retainer, and now of Mary Ellen. Grotto Cottage is tiny, almost like a playhouse, a little pitch-roofed playhouse with mud walls and small windows.33
You could not long stay indoors in Grotto Cottage, but Mary Ellen wanted always to be outdoors anyway. And the spring of 1861 was no doubt beautiful, like all English springs. The snow melted in the Oatlands woods, wild flowers sprang up all over the valley of the Thames. There were walks and walls to sit on in the warming sun; you could look at the birds returning, ripples of bud along the twig. Along the walls at Oatlands, urns are positioned, supported by cast nymphs who, with time and hard winters, have lost their arms and heads. Maimed nymphs supporting funereal urns. Perhaps Mary Ellen, accustomed to them, did not think about the maimed nymphs, the mocking gargoyles that served for garden ornament.
Mary Ellen could walk among the beautiful trees, among moss and roses, or sit on a stone bench to do her sewing. She made a little suit of gray flannel for Harold, with braid on the sleeves, and a red cloak lined in oiled cloth for waterproofing. No doubt she read the latest of George’s books, Evan Harrington, if she had not already read it in serial. Henry hung two lovely pictures, Gondomar and Elaine, in the Royal Academy Exhibition. Perhaps, as at other times, she tried to do her writing; she had her living to get, if she was to be a long time dying.
In the summer, she spent some time with Papa. Perhaps she spent her birthday there. This was her fortieth birthday, one to cause introspection in the most cheerful of celebrants. She had not had long enough—she must have thought—not nearly long enough to do all the things she had planned to do. She had been true to herself, in a way. “Will that young girl be true to herself?” was a question she had written once in her book.
If she was unhappy now it was because she could not live as long as she had planned, had not been as wise as she ought, or as strong. She and Papa walked along the river, and May and Edith were there; no doubt they did not talk of death. A beautiful, clear summer. Perhaps they had a picnic on her birthday. Perhaps when Papa looked at her, his beautiful Mary Ellen so ill, he would have to look away quickly or she would see his tears.
A few days after her last visit to Papa she fell more ill than she ever had before, more quickly. Intimations of mortality. She sends for Papa, who writes his friend Lord Broughton on August 16: “Day after day, I have tried to [write to?] you, but always in vain. It seemed as if I could not trace the letters for what I had to say. At the same time with your last kind letter, I received a message from my eldest, and only surviving daughter, that she was extremely ill, and earnestly wished to see me. She lives two miles from me in Oatlands Park. She had been here, and had left only three days before: not well, but with no symptoms of serious illness. I have never seen such a fearful change in so short a time. I have been with her every day. She seems to grow rapidly worse. But while there is life, there is hope.”
False hope. Mary Ellen was dying. With the scrupulous Victorian sense of decorum about death, her friends worried about Arthur. Arthur ought to see his mother before she was gone. One night, when it seemed nearly too late, Lady Hornby—who used to be little Emilia Macirone, their landlady’s daughter at The Limes—came flying to George at Copsham Cottage in Weybridge to beg him to send Arthur now, before it was too late. The hour was inconvenient. George got up and lit the lamp and heard Lady Hornby out and searched his heart and said, No. And returned to bed. Shaken, Lady Hornby went away again.
George must have seen, in the clear autumnal morning, that this was carrying bitterness beyond the bounds of decency. He eventually relented and sent Arthur to Oatlands, but too late to save himself from opprobrium. Even his dear friends were distant and reproachful about this. Janet Duff-Gordon (now Ross), whom he still loved, thought enough of him to write reproachfully, or perhaps inquiringly, hoping it wasn’t true that George had been unable to forgive a dying woman.
“Your letter was based on false intelligence, my dear,” George replied. “It was perfectly right of you to take up the case as you did. I am glad you like me well enough to do so. Be sure I would not miss your friendship for much; and would stoop my pride for
it, even if that stood in the way. As it is there is no feeling of the sort. God bless you. . . . Arthur is now at Weybridge seeing his mother daily.”
This hypocritical passage was suppressed by Meredith’s first editor, his son Will, except for the last line. Similarly, his first biographer, Cousin Stewart, was at a loss to excuse George’s behavior in refusing to go, or to allow Arthur to go, to Mary Ellen: “He had that horror of illness and the circumstances of death which is generally found in a man of imaginative temperament: that is the only excuse that can be offered in mitigation of censure.”
•
Early October. Mary Ellen seems for a while to be getting better, and Papa writes to Lord Broughton that, “Yesterday gave the first ray of hope I have seen for many days. It may be fallacious: but it enables me to write under something like a cheerful influence. Still there neither is, nor has been since the beginning of August, a day on which I could say to myself ‘I can now leave home with a quiet mind.’”
And George writes to Maxse, “My darling boy is quite well. He has cried a little, I am told. I am afraid his feelings have been a trifle worked on, though not by his mother so much as the servants and friends in her house.”
Were little boys then not supposed to cry—Arthur was just eight—when their mamas were dying?
It is nice to know that Mary Ellen did not try to sentimentalize the forthcoming event—though she did send a lock of her hair, a long, shining, light-brown tress, to Harold’s nurse, for Harold to keep as he grew up. It is the hair of a young woman, with no trace of gray.
We are startled at George’s allusion to servants and friends in Mary Ellen’s house. The earliest and widely accepted account is that she died quite alone. For a long time people said that Papa—even Papa—had never laid eyes on her since her dereliction with Henry. Cousin Stewart, for instance, wrote that “Mrs. Meredith died alone, and her only mourners were a Mr. Howse, and a Miss Bennet, and her former maid, Jane Wells. No tombstone has ever been placed over her grave, and the spot . . . is not marked even by a grass mound.”
The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives Page 15