George Meredith (1828-1909)
From The Oxford Companion to English
Literature, 4th edition. Ed. Sir Paul Harvey. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983. 535-534.
"[Meredith] was privately educated at Portsmouth and Southsea and at the Moravian school at
Neuwied. In London, after being articled to a solicitor, he turned to journalism,
contributing to Household Words and Chamber's Journal....His first great novel,
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel appeared in 1859, and he became acquainted with
Swinburne, Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite group, and other notable people. But his book
did not sell well and for long his means were scanty and precarious. He contributed to
periodicals, and more especially to the Fortnightly Review, in which much of his
later work was first published....During 1861-2 he lodged for a time with Swinburn and
Rossetti in Chelsea, and in the latter year published his chief tragic poem Modern
Love. At the same time he became reader for Messrs. Chapman & Hall, a position
which he retained until 1894....He published Rhoda Fleming in 1865, Vittoria
in 1866, The Adventures of Harry Richmond...in 1871, Beauchamp's
Career...in 1876, and The Tale of Chloe and The Egoist in 1879. He
delivered in 1877 a characteristic lecture on 'The Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the
Comic Spirit' (separately published in 1897)....An edition de luxe of his collected works
appeared in 1896-1911 and a memorial edition in 1909-11. There is a portrait of Meredith
by Watts in the National Portrait Gallery."