The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith
and Other Lesser Lives
by Diane Johnson.
NYRB Classics, 2020,
$17.95 paper.
Initially published in 1972 and nominated for a National Book Award in 1973, Diane Johnson’s The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives is a gem: tart, canny, and unaccountably out of print for many years, but as fresh and wry and vital today as when it first appeared.
Partly it’s the story of Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls Meredith, the first wife of the novelist George Meredith. Though she was largely ignored in the Victorian biographies of her eminent husband, Mary Ellen had a hold on Meredith’s imagination. (For one thing, he wrote the sonnet cycle Modern Love, about the protracted end of a marriage—presumably theirs.) But he pretended she didn’t exist, or didn’t speak of her except now and then to say she was insane. His admirers followed suit, relegating her to a single page or to a footnote. After all, she’d committed the unpardonable sin: she’d run off with a painter, leaving behind a chap “clearly destined to be great,” as Johnson wryly notes. “How could anyone leave a man like that?”
Indeed—but Mary Ellen Meredith could and did. Worse, she didn’t even have the good sense to throw herself in the Thames, the only respectable recourse for such a woman. At least she was considerate enough to die young.
All that remained of the first Mrs. Meredith, except for some deriding remarks, were a lock of hair, a pink parasol, a green satin dress, and a few essays: not the stuff of biography, to be sure, and certainly not enough for the conscientious Victorian biographer, should he have been inclined to care. As a result, one of the pure pleasures of Johnson’s book is its firm but gentle sendup of the genre.
We might suppose that beneath all that bustle, the Victorians were really like us. But they weren’t, Johnson remarks in one of her many pungent asides: “People’s psyches conformed, as much as their manners did, to the peculiar notions they had created.” The same might be said of Victorian biography. Winking at the reader, Johnson invokes the specter of the Biographer, a “good man,” but a prim traditionalist who buttresses a very conservative genre. He’s constitutionally unable to imagine that grief is anything but exemplary; that Schadenfreude feels good, as does anger; or that real people, even historical ones, have bodies and actually embrace. “I am sometimes severe upon the Biog-rapher,” Johnson tells us, “for he is the purveyor of received attitudes and accepted traditions that often turn out to be misinformed or even willfully benighted.” (While the Biographer may have been imprisoned in a set of Victorian attitudes, Johnson observes, these notions also seem to plague modern biographers.)
When turning to her desired biographical approach, Diane Johnson sides with Virginia Woolf, who felt that life consists in personality as much as actions, words, or derring-do, and that biography would enlarge its scope, or, more to the point, deepen it, by hanging lanterns in odd corners to suss out cant or pretension. “The biographer,” Johnson notes, “must be a historian, but also a novelist and a snoop.” Her purpose, then, is aesthetic (hence the novelist) and ethical (hence the empathetic imagination that the novelist deploys). Every life has intrinsic value, and therefore biography is rightly concerned, or should be, with the lives of the obscure—the “lesser life,” which, as Johnson mordantly observes, “does not feel lesser to the person who leads one.”
Enter Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls Meredith, the forgotten woman who flouted convention and embarrassed her great husband. Born in 1821, she was raised to be independent-minded and fearless by her father, Thomas Love Peacock, who has himself become something of a lesser life. A friend of Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Peacock was both a satiric novelist and an official in the East India Company; by all accounts he was an amiable, amorous, intelligent, and worldly man who liked to eat well, enjoyed Greek poetry, and composed his own verses. But though he seemed unafraid of intelligent women, he married a provincial Welshwoman, Jane Gryffydh, who seemed not to share his interests. Such were the paradoxes of Victorian culture.
Within six years of the Peacock marriage, Jane Peacock would go mad, in the parlance of the day, or at least become debilitated by the strangling depression that followed the death of her second child. Her firstborn, Mary Ellen, was doted on by her father, and at Mary Ellen’s birth no one minded that she wasn’t a boy. Quite the reverse, it seems; her father kept her supplied with French novels and clever house guests. One such visitor was Lieutenant Edward Nicolls, dashing son of the ferocious “Fighting Nicolls” of the Royal Marines. Mary Ellen married Nicolls in early 1844, but just two months later the lieutenant drowned during a storm while trying to rescue a one-armed sailor. His young, pregnant wife was catapulted into widowhood.
Unlike the Queen, Mary Nicolls would not dress in black for the rest of her life. She stayed active, and by 1848 was involved with a literary magazine, the Monthly Observer, which she and several friends were editing. Among them was a callow George Meredith, seven years her junior. Handsome and already desperate for fame, Meredith fell hopelessly in love, though in later years he hinted that he’d been somehow “ensnared.” That’s hard to be-lieve, since Meredith proposed marriage to Mary Ellen six times before she relented. Her father wasn’t pleased. It seems young George wasn’t likeable or willing to bend in any way, particularly when it came to making money. (Peacock had to rescue the couple and put them up in his home.) Plus, Meredith smoked, and he liked Tennyson’s poetry. He was also a finicky eater with a nervous stomach. A friend of the Peacock family dubbed him “The Dyspeptic.”
Mary Ellen, a gourmet cook, catered to George’s unhappy digestion, retaining for a time her sense of humor while she prepared his special diet. Johnson wonders, though, if perhaps Mary Ellen was alluding to domestic difficulties when she reviewed a recently published cookbook. “Many are the blue devils which a vulgar rich dinner has raised, and scattered on evil missions amongst the children of men,” Mary Ellen wrote, “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.”
Mary Ellen was also pregnant “more or less continuously,” as Johnson notes, speculating that the multiple pregnancies may have caused or made worse the renal disease that would later kill her. Certainly she was seldom well, and there were miscarriages and debts. She and George had a son, Arthur, who flourished, but Mary Ellen kept falling ill. More and more George was traveling. Marriage to The Dyspeptic was falling apart.
Now enter Henry Wallis, another lesser life. The son of a prosperous architect, and a “pre-Raphaelite brother in the second degree,” as Johnson remarks, he was a minor celebrity when he and Mary Ellen began their affair. His recent painting The Death of Chatterton had been shown in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1856 and praised by John Ruskin. (Today the painting hangs in the Tate.) In later life Wallis was also known as an authority on Far Eastern ceramics and all-round decent fellow, but he too was relegated to a footnote, if that. Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father and a friend of George Meredith, excluded Wallis from his Dictionary of National Biography, as if to make sure he stayed lesser or, preferably, nonexistent.
The model for that painted Chatter-ton happened to have been George Meredith, which likely made Mary Ellen’s affair with Wallis even more galling. But Thomas Peacock seems to have been unruffled by his daughter’s behavior, and when Mary Ellen and Henry Wallis had a child, whom they called Felix, he seemed nonplussed. George was not quite so sanguine. He grabbed Arthur and refused to give him back.
By then Mary Ellen was desperately ill, and when she died in 1861, Arthur was eight. The next year, Johnson tells us, when the boy was nine, George Meredith packed him off to boarding school and soon to Germany. As Arthur grew older, he would have little to do with George, who surmised that his son did not like him much. (And apparently he didn’t, Johnson drily tells us.) Mary Ellen’s daughter Edith, the child of her first marriage to Edward Nicolls, was very kind to her half-brother Arthur when he became stricken with tuberculosis, and she took care of him during the last months of his life. Edith had lived with her grandfather Thomas Peacock until his death and had then begun to write his biography. Another “lesser” life, she later became principal of the National Training School of Cookery, having learned quite a bit from her mother and grandfather, and she remained head of the school until she was seventy-five. She married, published notable cookbooks, earned a gold medal from the Royal Society of the Arts, and was made a Member of the British Empire; she was something of a chip off her mother’s block, but luckier.
Felix was only three when his mother died. But his father, Henry Wallis, was devoted to him and raised him in full view of his acquaintances, even though Felix was “illegitimate.” He took Felix on his travels and was careful about his education, keeping him in England rather than dispatching him to the Continent. Felix became a businessman, married, and had children.
As for George Meredith, he seems to have portrayed Mary Ellen as “fretful” in novels like The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, while accusing her, in his self-exonerating Modern Love, of “faithlessness of heart.” Presumably, though, he was more just in his proto-feminist novel Diana of the Crossways, written more than twenty-five years after their marriage ended. Though Meredith was nominated for a Nobel Prize several times, he never won, and remarkably few people read him now, despite his acknowledged virtues as a novelist.
Henry Wallis would outlive Meredith by seven years. After he died, museums began to squabble over his collection of rare pots and vases, some of which he had already donated to the Victoria and Albert. In “Brief Lives,” the appendix to her book, Johnson wittily identifies Wallis as “the villain—or hero—of this work.” As for Mary Ellen Meredith, Johnson describes her as unfortunate but courageous. To my mind, Mary Ellen has actually been quite lucky in a critical way: the brilliant Diane Johnson has freed her.
Brenda Wineapple’s latest book is The Impeachers. She teaches at Columbia University.
