Six Victorian marriages, part 3: Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls and George Meredith
Study of a Girl Sitting in a Chair (detail) by Henry Wallis, ca. 1855; the sitter is possibly Mary Ellen Meredith. Image source: Tate Britain
This is the third in a series of posts based on Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives (Knopf, 1984) and Diane Johnson's True History of the First Mrs. Meredith (NY Review Books, 2020).
Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls and George Meredith
Another writer, another disillusioned wife, another sexy artist.
When she met George Meredith in 1848 Mary Ellen Nicolls was a beautiful 27-year-old widow with a young daughter. George was 20 and had abandoned a legal career to become a writer. It was his literary aspirations that had brought him into contact with her. Mary's brother Edward collaborated with George on a privately circulated literary magazine, The Monthly Observer, to which Mary also contributed. Mary and Edward were the children of Thomas Love Peacock, who was famous as a friend of Shelley and the author of Nightmare Abbey (1818).
Thomas Love Peacock by Henry Wallis, 1858. Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London
Not only beautiful, Mary was witty, well-read, and "a dashing type of horsewoman who attracted much notice from the 'bloods' of the day." [1] George quickly became smitten with her. After he had gotten a poem published in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal (Number 288, 7 July 1849), it may have seemed to both of them that his literary career was launched. They married a month later.
But after their rapturous honeymoon (that one of the partners was sexually experienced probably helped) problems quickly arose. Mary and her father were adventurous cooks, but George had a delicate stomach, and often experienced nausea and indigestion. Two years after their marriage Mary wrote in a published review of Soyer's Modern Housewife, a cookbook,
The stomach, not the heart, as poets write, is the great centre of existence and feeling. . .When the stomach receives an antagonistic element, it revenges itself by sending up morbid impressions to the brain. . .[M]any 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. [2]The phrase "poetic misprisions" stands out in this passage. "Misprisions" is an unusual word; it can mean misunderstanding, but also has the sense of guilt by concealment. And the modifier "poetic" suggests that Mary may have been thinking about her poet husband.
Perhaps there was a guilty secret that George had been harboring: he had apparently led Mary, whose mother had Welsh ancestry, to believe that he was descended from Welsh nobility. (Far from being aristocratic, his deceased mother had been the daughter of an innkeeper, and his tailor father had recently emigrated to South Africa with his second wife, who had been his cook.) Mary later confided in a neighbor, Anne Bennett, who years after Mary's death wrote in "My Recollections of Mrs. G Meredith,"
Mrs Meredith's illusions respecting her husband were ere long destined to receive a rude check by discovering that he did not belong to the ancient Welsh family of which he represented himself to be a descendant for in point of fact she discovered from a letter addressed to him that his father was a tailor at Capetown in S Africa. . .Ardent lover of truth as Mrs Meredith was, the very soul of sincerity and frankness such a deception as this which had been practised upon her produced an entire revolution of her feelings and from that time forward the affection and esteem she had hitherto felt for her husband was changed into contempt and aversion. [3]This doesn't seem as though it can have been the whole story, and indeed there were other possible reasons for her growing disaffection. She had at least one, and probably more, miscarriages or stillbirths (only one child survived, a son born in 1853). George's literary career was hardly flourishing; his book Poems (1851) had been greeted with indifference. And by Meredith's own account, the couple was besieged by creditors; he claimed that his next book, the novel The Shaving of Shagpat: an Arabian Entertainment, published in 1856, had been "written. . .with duns at the door." [4] George also began to spend time apart from his family. In his later novel, The Egoist (1879), Meredith has a character describe a disenchanted couple after a few years of marriage as "staring wide awake. All their dreaming's done. They've emptied their bottle of elixir, or broken it." [5]
Enter Henry Wallis, a young painter (two years younger than George) on the fringes of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. George posed for Wallis's painting on the death of the poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), which, when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1856, made Wallis instantly famous. The painting was praised by no less a critic than John Ruskin as "faultless and wonderful" [6].
Chatterton by Henry Wallis, 1856. Image source: Tate Britain
Wallis's career now seemed to be made, although he was already financially independent (he was the stepson and heir of a well-to-do London architect and property owner). George's frequent absences, moroseness, poverty, and stalled literary career may have contrasted starkly for Mary with Wallis's attentiveness, genial charm, wealth and success. Judging by evidence presented in Johnson's True History, Mary and he may have became lovers in the winter or spring of 1857, sometime after Wallis's 27th birthday. In any case, by the summer Mary had separated from her husband, and was living on her own in Seaford, amid the spectacular white cliffs of the Seven Sisters (the children were probably left with relatives).
The Seven Sisters from cottages at Seaford Head. Image source: Wikimedia Commons
Separation was a huge step for a Victorian wife to take. Her husband controlled their property (including any money she had brought to the marriage) and retained legal custody of the children. Any woman living on her own immediately became the object of gossip and scandal, and would also quickly need to find ways to support herself. This was not easy; when Charles Dickens discovered that Mary had apparently not been paid for writing she had done for his magazine Household Words, he directed that George be contacted to find out whether he wanted the money. Most women would leave their husbands only in the most dire circumstances (see Six Victorian marriages, part 2: Effie Gray and John Ruskin).
But Mary was not a typical Victorian wife. Johnson writes, Mary "refused to accept a condition of life that bound people together in loveless chains. . .Mary Ellen thought of herself as a person, as Victorian women [or, perhaps we should rather say 'Victorian men'] often did not." [7]
Whether or not Mary and Wallis had become lovers before she separated from George (which seems highly probable), they certainly had by July, when she became pregnant. Their son, Harold, was born in April 1858 (although, since Mary was still officially married, "George Meredith, Author" was listed as the father on the birth certificate).
Mary Ellen Meredith by Henry Wallis, 1858. Image source: Ashmolean Museum Oxford
Soon after the birth Mary began to exhibit symptoms of illness, writing to Wallis in London that "I am very weak, as I have never been before, dragging pains in my limbs, and swelled ancles [sic]." [8] Later in the year Wallis took Mary and the baby to Capri, a small island off the coast of Naples, where he liked to spend winters and where they thought the climate might improve her health.
In the spring of 1859 Mary returned to England with Harold but without Wallis. By the summer of 1860 she was living with Harold in a house near her father, but was in declining health and financial straits. She died, probably of kidney failure, in October 1861; she was only 40 years old. Only three mourners attended her funeral: her maid Jane Wells, her neighbor Mrs. Bennett, and an old friend (probably of her first husband), Captain Henry Howe. Her children were kept away, and her father, her lover and her husband were all absent. Her father was aged and had a "detestation of anything disagreeable"; her lover (almost certainly by this time her former lover) could hardly appear at her graveside without scandal; and her husband remained implacably hostile.
George's bitterness towards Mary provided the subject that enabled him to finally attain literary fame. Both the novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) and the 50-sonnet sequence Modern Love (1862) were, in the words of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, "fuelled by the trauma of sexual betrayal," and they made Meredith's (somewhat scandalous) reputation. [9] He would go on to become a major literary figure in the late 19th century, dying at age 81 in 1909.
George Meredith aet. [at the age of] 35 (1863).
Image source: The Kissed Mouth: Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian Art for all!
Modern Love, Sonnet II
It ended, and the morrow brought the task.Her eyes were guilty gates, that let him in
By shutting all too zealous for their sin:
Each sucked a secret, and each wore a mask.
But, oh, the bitter taste her beauty had!
He sickened as at breath of poison-flowers:
A languid humour stole among the hours,
And if their smiles encountered, he went mad,
And raged deep inward, till the light was brown
Before his vision, and the world, forgot,
Looked wicked as some old dull murder-spot.
A star with lurid beams, she seemed to crown
The pit of infamy: and then again
He fainted on his vengefulness, and strove
To ape the magnanimity of love,
And smote himself, a shuddering heap of pain. [10]
- The painter William Holman Hunt, quoted in Margaret Harris, "Meredith, George, novelist and poet," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/34991
- Quoted in Diane Johnson, The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, New York Review Books, 2020, p. 80.
- Nicholas A. Joukovsky, "According to Mrs Bennett," Times Literary Supplement, Issue 5297, 8 Oct. 2004, p. 13-15.
- Quoted in Harris, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- Quoted in Johnson, The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith, p. 87.
- Quoted in Johnson, p. 88.
- Johnson, p. 125.
- Johnson, p. 137.
- Harris, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- George Meredith, Modern Love, Sonnet II. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44704/modern-love-ii
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