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One of Our Conquerors
George Meredith, OM, was born in Portsmouth, England on February 12th, 1828, a son and grandson of naval outfitters. His mother died when he was only five. As a fourteen year old teenager he was sent to a Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany, staying there for two years. After reading law he was articled as a solicitor, but quickly abandoned that career path for journalism and poetry. He collaborated with Edward Gryffydh Peacock, son of Thomas Love Peacock in publishing a privately circulated literary magazine, the Monthly Observer. At age twenty-one he married Mary Ellen Nicolls, Edward Peacock's beautiful widowed sister, and mother of a child, on August 8th, 1849. Mary Ellen was twenty-eight. The marriage produced one child; Arthur (1853-1890). Meredith collected his early writings, all previously published in periodicals, in an 1851 volume, Poems. In 1856 he posed as the model for The Death of Chatterton, a well-known picture by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis, which romantised the teenage Chatterton's demise. Although Meredith received some publicity for this his wife received rather more attention from Wallis because of it. Mary Ellen ran off with Wallis in 1858, shortly before giving birth to a child that all assumed to be Wallis. Tragically she died three years later. From that dreadful experience emerged a collection of sonnets entitled Modern Love in 1862 together with much of his first major novel; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Meredith married Marie Vulliamy on September 20th, 1864 and they settled in Surrey. Together they had two children; William (born in 1865) and Mariette (born in 1874). He continued writing novels and poetry, often inspired by nature. He had a keen understanding of comedy and his Essay on Comedy (1877) remains a reference work in the history of comic theory.During most of his career, he had difficulty crossing over from critical acclamation to popular success. It was only in 1885 that his first genuine commercial success appeared; Diana of the Crossways. The company that gave him this lifeline was Chapman & Hall (an eminent publishing house who could include Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Anthony Trollope on their roster). His advice to the company was very well received and made him influential in the world of letters. To this influence he was able to add a circle of friends that included William and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Cotter Morison, Leslie Stephen, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Gissing and J. M. Barrie. In 1868 Meredith was introduced to Thomas Hardy. Hardy had submitted his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady. Meredith felt the book was too bitter a satire on the rich and told Hardy to put it aside as it was likely it would be savaged by reviewers and destroy his nascent career. But these years, creatively, were very prolific and successful for Meredith. Novels and poems flowed from his pen including everything from The Adventures of Harry Richmond to Diana of the Crossways and many poetry volumes include The Lark Ascending (which later inspired the Vaughan Williams music). In 1886, tragedy struck the Meredith household when his second wife, Marie Vulliamy, died of cancer. Whilst his personal life was producing horrendous scars he was receiving many accolades. Oscar Wilde was a fan. In The Decay of Lying, (originally published in the January 1889 issue of The Nineteenth Century) he says of Meredith "Ah, Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning."" Before his death, Meredith was honoured from many he succeeded Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors; in 1905 he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII. George Meredith, aged 81, died at his home in Box Hill, Surrey on May 18th, 1909. He is buried in the cemetery at Dorking, Surrey.
- GenresVictorian
367 pages, Paperback
Published August 12, 2026
About the author
George Meredith
1,562 books102 followersGeorge Meredith of Britain wrote novels, such as
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
(1859), and poetic works, including
Modern Love
(1862).
During the Victorian era, Meredith read law, and people articled him as a solicitor, but shortly after marrying Mary Ellen Nicolls, a 30-year-old widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, in 1849 at 21 years of age, he abandoned that profession for journalism.
He collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, into Poems, which was published to some acclaim in 1851. His wife left him and their five-year old son in 1858; she died three years later. Her departure was the inspiration for The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), his first "major novel." It was considered a breakthrough novel, but its sexual frankness caused a scandal and prevented it from being widely read.
As an advisor to publishers, Meredith is credited with helping Thomas Hardy start his literary career, and was an early associate of J. M. Barrie. Before his death, Meredith was honored from many quarters: he succeeded Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors; in 1905 he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII.
His works include: The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), Farina (1857), Vittoria (1867) and The Egoist (1879). The Egoist is one of his most enduring works.
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
George^Meredith
During the Victorian era, Meredith read law, and people articled him as a solicitor, but shortly after marrying Mary Ellen Nicolls, a 30-year-old widowed daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, in 1849 at 21 years of age, he abandoned that profession for journalism.
He collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, into Poems, which was published to some acclaim in 1851. His wife left him and their five-year old son in 1858; she died three years later. Her departure was the inspiration for The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), his first "major novel." It was considered a breakthrough novel, but its sexual frankness caused a scandal and prevented it from being widely read.
As an advisor to publishers, Meredith is credited with helping Thomas Hardy start his literary career, and was an early associate of J. M. Barrie. Before his death, Meredith was honored from many quarters: he succeeded Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors; in 1905 he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII.
His works include: The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), Farina (1857), Vittoria (1867) and The Egoist (1879). The Egoist is one of his most enduring works.
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
George^Meredith
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 3, 2024
What a disappointment! One of my favorite novelists, and the author of my favorite novel, deals me this! It wasn’t my first flop of Meredith’s, to be fair, and on the basis of it and others, I gather that his later years were not his most artful. The Amazing Marriage, which I had thought was his last novel, although it appears to be his penultimate one, was so distasteful as to have been unceremoniously removed from my shelves, and I expect fate has the same in store for One of Our Conquerors, engraved title plate notwithstanding (my copy hails from 1902 and the deaccessioned offloads of the Michigan State Library).
This book had few of the strengths of the prose for which I adore Meredith. There was budding interest here, in the unraveling of the characters of Nesta Radnor, Dudley Sowerby, and Nataly Dreighton in the second half of the book, but this came much too late and did not go far enough. I had no sympathy for any of the characters – hardly a care, really – by the time their motivations and ruminations gained traction, and these inner workings hardly approached the psychological depths sounded in Meredith’s better-known fiction. Strangely to say, because uncharacteristically, here his prose afforded skimming! Entire chunks of it I skated over, passages without aesthetic drive or thematic momentum, not to speak of meaning for character or plot. Here, above perhaps anywhere else in Meredith’s fiction, that I recall, the sense was uppermost at times of Meredith writing to hear his own thoughts, for his own sake, as opposed to that of his characters, and their world, and its value (this being the metonymic route to writing for the sake of others). Perhaps my patience was simply greater when I read The Amazing Marriage, but, repugnantly tendentious as that was, I at least plodded valiantly through. My biggest reason for finishing this was divided between determination to see a thing to the end, unless it were viscerally detestable, and refusal to abandon a work of Meredith’s, devoted as I am to him.
Here I must interject that hardly has Meredith’s star dimmed in my personal pantheon of worshipped authors. Coincidentally, I read around in Max Beerbohm’s Christmas Garland at the time of finishing this, lighting on a superb parody of Meredith’s writing (for a mark of which penetration, witness the title: “Euphemia Clashthought”) (A Christmas Garland, by the way, secures Beerbohm as a master of mimicry, so much so that it outshone, for me, his original composition – but I do digress), prefaced by the following note: “It were not, as a general rule, well to republish after a man's death the skit you made of his work while he lived. Meredith, however, was so transcendent that such skits must ever be harmless, and so lasting will his fame be that they can never lose what freshness they may have had at first. […]” While Meredith’s fame has, sadly, never recovered its early-twentieth-century ascendancy, his brilliance is as unassailable as Beerbohm attests. If it stands on the merit of The Egoist and Beauchamp’s Career alone, it warrants that Meredith be read from first to last cover. Henry James, despite having rather deflated my hopes for Lord Ormont in his disparaging remarks on it, reputedly said of Meredith that “he did the best things best,” and this is a judgment that could hardly ring more true.
And yet, One of Our Conquerors is unfortunately but streaked with gold, flashes of which shoot through haphazard passages. See, for example, how “mademoiselle rippled her shoulders” – an electric way of saying, she shrugged – occurs within a few lines of “a feminine look was trailed across the eyes of mademoiselle” – lots of words to say…what exactly? – and “she left the ground where maternal meditations are serious,” which last is a waste of metaphor on likewise imprecise meaning. Take, also, Meredith’s description of the Thames in the vicinity of London Bridge, in which exhilaration at “curling to volume” and “variously undulated” competes with exasperation at piecing together a coherent scene:
“Down went the twirling horizontal pillars of a strong tide from the arches of the bridge, breaking to wild water at a remove; and a reddish Northern cheek of curdling pipeing East, at shrilly puffs between the Tower and the Custom House, encountered it to whip and ridge the flood against descending tug and long tail of stern-ajerk empty barges; with a steamer slowly noseing round off the wharf-cranes, preparing to swirl the screw; and half-bottom-upward boats dancing harpooner beside their whale; along an avenue, not fabulously golden, of the deputy masts of all nations, a wintry woodland, every rag aloft curling to volume; and here the spouts and the mounds of steam, and rolls of brown smoke there, variously undulated, curved to vanish; cold blue sky ashift with the whirl and dash of a very Tartar cavalry of cloud overhead.”
Look, too, at Meredith’s portrait of London shortly after:
“For the pinched are here, the dinnerless, the weedy, the gutter-growths, the forces repressing them. That grand tongue of the giant City inspires none human to Bardic eulogy while we let those discords be. An embittered Muse of Reason prompts her victims to the composition of the adulatory Essay and of the Leading Article, that she may satiate an angry irony ‘upon those who pay fee for their filling with the stuff. Song of praise she does not permit. A moment of satisfaction in a striking picture is accorded, and no more. For this London, this England, Europe, world, but especially this London, is rather a thing for hospital operations than for poetic rhapsody; in aspect, too, streaked scarlet and pock-pitted under the most cumbrous of jewelled tiaras; a Titanic work of long-tolerated pygmies; of whom the leaders, until sorely discomforted in body and doubtful in soul, will give gold and labour, will impose restrictions upon activity, to maintain a conservatism of diseases. Mind is absent, or somewhere so low down beneath material accumulations that it is inexpressive, powerless to drive the ponderous bulk to such excisings, purgeings, purifyings as might—as may, we will suppose, render it acceptable, for a theme of panegyric, to the Muse of Reason; ultimately, with her consent, to the Spirit of Song.”
There is luminous meaning here, exemplified by that arresting first line, but it is encumbered by allegory, which gets in the way of a fine and unconditional appreciation of Meredith’s insight. Something similar could be said at the introduction of Victor Radnor’s aunts, the Duvidney ladies, whose combination of sophistication and haughtiness furnishes an indictment of the aristocracy at Meredith’s hand. It’s an admirably subtle maneuver, on his part, between approval and admonishment, character and class, but it could have been better, were it a little less involuted and abstruse.
So I’d say of the entire novel, ultimately and overall – that it could have been better executed with the same, or similar, materials. It just “wasn’t there”: it was uneven, brackish, and this registered on the level of style – noticeably stiff, and jarring where long sentences gave way to short, to long, – as of substance. I omit mention of how nauseating was the fate-of-England question as treated here, likewise of the sexual politics (but actually that – I don’t brandish that phrase) embodied in Nesta’s launch into the world. As for Skepsey’s character, which had me drawing a blank when not a grimace…let’s not go there either. Onwards to my next Meredith title, in due course, instead! I think I’ll make for the novellas next, for a change.
This book had few of the strengths of the prose for which I adore Meredith. There was budding interest here, in the unraveling of the characters of Nesta Radnor, Dudley Sowerby, and Nataly Dreighton in the second half of the book, but this came much too late and did not go far enough. I had no sympathy for any of the characters – hardly a care, really – by the time their motivations and ruminations gained traction, and these inner workings hardly approached the psychological depths sounded in Meredith’s better-known fiction. Strangely to say, because uncharacteristically, here his prose afforded skimming! Entire chunks of it I skated over, passages without aesthetic drive or thematic momentum, not to speak of meaning for character or plot. Here, above perhaps anywhere else in Meredith’s fiction, that I recall, the sense was uppermost at times of Meredith writing to hear his own thoughts, for his own sake, as opposed to that of his characters, and their world, and its value (this being the metonymic route to writing for the sake of others). Perhaps my patience was simply greater when I read The Amazing Marriage, but, repugnantly tendentious as that was, I at least plodded valiantly through. My biggest reason for finishing this was divided between determination to see a thing to the end, unless it were viscerally detestable, and refusal to abandon a work of Meredith’s, devoted as I am to him.
Here I must interject that hardly has Meredith’s star dimmed in my personal pantheon of worshipped authors. Coincidentally, I read around in Max Beerbohm’s Christmas Garland at the time of finishing this, lighting on a superb parody of Meredith’s writing (for a mark of which penetration, witness the title: “Euphemia Clashthought”) (A Christmas Garland, by the way, secures Beerbohm as a master of mimicry, so much so that it outshone, for me, his original composition – but I do digress), prefaced by the following note: “It were not, as a general rule, well to republish after a man's death the skit you made of his work while he lived. Meredith, however, was so transcendent that such skits must ever be harmless, and so lasting will his fame be that they can never lose what freshness they may have had at first. […]” While Meredith’s fame has, sadly, never recovered its early-twentieth-century ascendancy, his brilliance is as unassailable as Beerbohm attests. If it stands on the merit of The Egoist and Beauchamp’s Career alone, it warrants that Meredith be read from first to last cover. Henry James, despite having rather deflated my hopes for Lord Ormont in his disparaging remarks on it, reputedly said of Meredith that “he did the best things best,” and this is a judgment that could hardly ring more true.
And yet, One of Our Conquerors is unfortunately but streaked with gold, flashes of which shoot through haphazard passages. See, for example, how “mademoiselle rippled her shoulders” – an electric way of saying, she shrugged – occurs within a few lines of “a feminine look was trailed across the eyes of mademoiselle” – lots of words to say…what exactly? – and “she left the ground where maternal meditations are serious,” which last is a waste of metaphor on likewise imprecise meaning. Take, also, Meredith’s description of the Thames in the vicinity of London Bridge, in which exhilaration at “curling to volume” and “variously undulated” competes with exasperation at piecing together a coherent scene:
“Down went the twirling horizontal pillars of a strong tide from the arches of the bridge, breaking to wild water at a remove; and a reddish Northern cheek of curdling pipeing East, at shrilly puffs between the Tower and the Custom House, encountered it to whip and ridge the flood against descending tug and long tail of stern-ajerk empty barges; with a steamer slowly noseing round off the wharf-cranes, preparing to swirl the screw; and half-bottom-upward boats dancing harpooner beside their whale; along an avenue, not fabulously golden, of the deputy masts of all nations, a wintry woodland, every rag aloft curling to volume; and here the spouts and the mounds of steam, and rolls of brown smoke there, variously undulated, curved to vanish; cold blue sky ashift with the whirl and dash of a very Tartar cavalry of cloud overhead.”
Look, too, at Meredith’s portrait of London shortly after:
“For the pinched are here, the dinnerless, the weedy, the gutter-growths, the forces repressing them. That grand tongue of the giant City inspires none human to Bardic eulogy while we let those discords be. An embittered Muse of Reason prompts her victims to the composition of the adulatory Essay and of the Leading Article, that she may satiate an angry irony ‘upon those who pay fee for their filling with the stuff. Song of praise she does not permit. A moment of satisfaction in a striking picture is accorded, and no more. For this London, this England, Europe, world, but especially this London, is rather a thing for hospital operations than for poetic rhapsody; in aspect, too, streaked scarlet and pock-pitted under the most cumbrous of jewelled tiaras; a Titanic work of long-tolerated pygmies; of whom the leaders, until sorely discomforted in body and doubtful in soul, will give gold and labour, will impose restrictions upon activity, to maintain a conservatism of diseases. Mind is absent, or somewhere so low down beneath material accumulations that it is inexpressive, powerless to drive the ponderous bulk to such excisings, purgeings, purifyings as might—as may, we will suppose, render it acceptable, for a theme of panegyric, to the Muse of Reason; ultimately, with her consent, to the Spirit of Song.”
There is luminous meaning here, exemplified by that arresting first line, but it is encumbered by allegory, which gets in the way of a fine and unconditional appreciation of Meredith’s insight. Something similar could be said at the introduction of Victor Radnor’s aunts, the Duvidney ladies, whose combination of sophistication and haughtiness furnishes an indictment of the aristocracy at Meredith’s hand. It’s an admirably subtle maneuver, on his part, between approval and admonishment, character and class, but it could have been better, were it a little less involuted and abstruse.
So I’d say of the entire novel, ultimately and overall – that it could have been better executed with the same, or similar, materials. It just “wasn’t there”: it was uneven, brackish, and this registered on the level of style – noticeably stiff, and jarring where long sentences gave way to short, to long, – as of substance. I omit mention of how nauseating was the fate-of-England question as treated here, likewise of the sexual politics (but actually that – I don’t brandish that phrase) embodied in Nesta’s launch into the world. As for Skepsey’s character, which had me drawing a blank when not a grimace…let’s not go there either. Onwards to my next Meredith title, in due course, instead! I think I’ll make for the novellas next, for a change.
May 15, 2017
Well, I love the novels of George Meredith, especially the later ones. This one took some stamina to get through but is worth it, there are some fine characters. There is a particularly wonderful opening chapter too.
June 12, 2020
Unul dintre cuceritorii nostri de George Meredith
Editura: Minerva; Colectia: Biblioteca pentru toti
Data aparitie: 1986
Limba: Romana
Coperta: Brosata (paperback)
Numar volume: 2; Numar pagini: 254; 320
Dimensiuni: 162 x 125 x 18 mm; Greutate: 0.37 kg
Traducator: Antoaneta Ralian
Editura: Minerva; Colectia: Biblioteca pentru toti
Data aparitie: 1986
Limba: Romana
Coperta: Brosata (paperback)
Numar volume: 2; Numar pagini: 254; 320
Dimensiuni: 162 x 125 x 18 mm; Greutate: 0.37 kg
Traducator: Antoaneta Ralian
July 14, 2023
Lectura obligatorie.
i-want-money
August 1, 2013Someone somewhere said "One of Our Conquerors by George Meredith." Would seem not many of my Friends know that man, and no one knows that book. BURIED? eh...I'll let you nineteenthcentrarians figure on that one; penguin publishes two but what remains does sorta have a certain aroma about them {gems? --he asked}. Looks like his portion of the database here resembles a librarian's nightmare -- can't even get a series of five to be five(!); but again, someone more profession can look in on that one.
Project Gutenberg's got some files on Meredith, including Conquerors ::
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/autho...
Project Gutenberg's got some files on Meredith, including Conquerors ::
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/autho...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews