George Meredith's Politics as Seen in His Life, Friendships, and Works

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

George Meredith (1828-1909) was an “eminent Victorian” in his time, respected (though never popular) for his novels and, to a lesser extent, for his poetry. Now he is little read except by specialists. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and The Egoist are both titles that cultivated general readers will recognize, and he may be best known for his remarkable sequence of not-quite-sonnets entitled Modern Love, in which the decay of a marriage is presented with a frank bitterness. In this book, James S. Stone wants to present him as a political thinker with a leftish-liberal position, especially concerned about international politics and women’s rights.

If Stone had not referred in a prefatory note to his first Meredith article published in 1952, I might well have assumed that this was a revised Ph.D. thesis, since it has all the hallmarks of a good (though not, I think, an exceptional) dissertation. Stone works his way with great care through Meredith’s life and letters, weighing all references that have even passing reference to Meredith’s political opinions. He is careful and thorough, but the task has its difficulties.

First, Meredith resolutely insisted that, within fiction, politics had to take second place to art, so his political convictions are rarely obvious in his novels. (His “public” poetry is another matter, but this is for the most part dismal stuff.) Second, he was often in need of money, and not above writing bread-and-butter articles for periodicals whose politics he did not share. Many of his friends were Radicals, and Stone dutifully recounts their opinions. Direct evidence, however, is often slim. For example, we are told that Meredith’s Radical friends occasionally took him “for short tramps around the Surrey downs,” and Stone comments rather desperately: “Politics must have had an airing on these jaunts.”

Stone makes his point, but it is a fairly obvious one. Meredith was, as we might have expected, a man with decided political convictions, and these are discernible but not especially conspicuous in his life and work. This is a solid book, then, but hardly exciting; it will be of interest to few besides Meredith enthusiasts.