Meredith, George
Meredith, George ( 1828 – 1909 ).He had a precarious childhood in Portsmouth as the son of an indigent, but flamboyant and extravagant, tailor who was early a widower—a background which Meredith was later at pains to conceal, although he made use of it in several of his novels. He was intermittently educated in Portsmouth and Southsea, and then with much success at the unusual school of the Moravians at Neuwied in Germany. In London, after a period with a solicitor, he began his long literary career with ‘Chillianwallah’, a poem published in 1849 . In the same year he married Mary Ellen Nicholls , the widowed daughter of T. L. Peacock , and in 1851 paid for the publication of his own Poems, a volume he later disowned but which was praised by Tennyson and C. Kingsley . The Shaving of Shagpat ( 1856 for 1855 ), a series of Oriental fantasies about a vain, bewhiskered enchanter whose...
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