Synopsis
Sir Austin Feverel's wife deserts him to run away with a poet, leaving her husband to raise their son Richard. Believing schools to be corrupt, Sir Austin, a scientific humanist, educates the boy at home with a plan of his own devising known as "the System". This involves strict authoritarian supervision of every aspect of the boy's life, and in particular the prevention of any meeting between Richard and girls of his own age. Richard nevertheless meets and falls in love with Lucy Desborough, the niece of a neighboring farmer. Sir Austin finds out and, disapproving of her humble birth, forbids them to meet again, but they secretly marry. Sir Austin now tries to retrieve the situation by sending Richard to London. Here, however, Sir Austin's friend Lord Mountfalcon successfully sets a courtesan to seduce Richard, hoping that this will leave Lucy open to seduction by himself. Ashamed of his own conduct, Richard flees abroad where he at length hears that Lucy has given birth to a baby and has been reconciled to Sir Austin. He returns to England and, hearing about Lord Mountfalcon's villainy, challenges him to a duel. But this goes badly: Richard is seriously wounded. Lucy is so overcome by this turn of events that she loses her mind and dies.
Reception
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel was first published in 1859 by Chapman & Hall in three volumes. The book received generally respectful reviews, though critics were often puzzled by Meredith's rather dense style, and did not all agree in their reading of the book's message, or their estimation of the author's success in presenting it. [4] The book's commercial success, as with all Victorian novels, depended in large measure on the number of copies bought by the various commercial lending libraries, but the largest of them all, Mudie's, took fright at the sexual frankness of the novel and refused to stock it, casting a taint of unrespectability over Meredith's name that lasted for many years. "I am tabooed from all decent drawing-room tables", Meredith wrote, but he refused to tone down the offending passages. [5] Chapman & Hall left the book unreprinted for nearly twenty years, and when, in 1878, Meredith produced a revised (but not bowdlerized) version, it was published by another firm, Kegan Paul. From the mid-1880s onward Meredith's reputation as a serious novelist reached such a level as to ensure a stream of reprints. [6] For the past hundred years Richard Feverel, with all its faults, has been considered one of Meredith's finest works, its status as a forerunner of many later developments in the novel being widely recognized. Arnold Bennett wrote, "In Richard Feverel, what a loosening of the bonds! What a renaissance!…It was the announcer of a sort of dawn", while acknowledging that "It is a weak book, full of episodic power and overloaded with wit." [7] J. B. Priestley wrote that "So far as English fiction is concerned...there can be no doubt that the modern novel began with the publication of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel." [8] Virginia Woolf's assessment was that:
He makes no attempt to preserve the sober reality of Trollope and Jane Austen; he has destroyed all the usual staircases by which we have learnt to climb. And what is done so deliberately is done with a purpose. This defiance of the ordinary, these airs and graces, the formality of the dialogue with its Sirs and Madams are all there to create an atmosphere that is unlike that of daily life, to prepare the way for a new and an original sense of the human scene.
And again:
The book is cracked through and through with those fissures which come when the author seems to be of twenty minds at the same time. Yet it succeeds in holding miraculously together, not certainly by the depths and originality of its character drawing but by the vigour of its intellectual power and by its lyrical intensity. [9]
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This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1957.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1859.
George Meredith was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. At first, his focus was poetry, influenced by John Keats among others, but Meredith gradually established a reputation as a novelist. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) briefly scandalised Victorian literary circles. Of his later novels, the most enduring is The Egoist (1879), though in his lifetime his greatest success was Diana of the Crossways (1885). His novels were innovative in their attention to characters' psychology, and also portrayed social change. His style, in both poetry and prose, was noted for its syntactic complexity; Oscar Wilde likened it to "chaos illumined by brilliant flashes of lightning". Meredith was an encourager of other novelists, as well as an influence on them; among those to benefit were Robert Louis Stevenson and George Gissing. Meredith was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times.
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Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
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English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world. The English language has developed over more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon invaders in the fifth century, are called Old English. Beowulf is the most famous work in Old English. Despite being set in Scandinavia, it has achieved national epic status in England. However, following the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language became less common. Under the influence of the new aristocracy, French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society. The English spoken after the Normans came is known as Middle English. This form of English lasted until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a London-based form of English, became widespread. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400), author of The Canterbury Tales, was a significant figure developing the legitimacy of vernacular Middle English at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were still French and Latin. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 also helped to standardise the language, as did the King James Bible (1611), and the Great Vowel Shift.
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The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is a 1964 British period television series which originally aired on BBC 2 in four episodes from 12 September to 3 October 1964. It is an adaptation of the 1859 novel of the same title by George Meredith.
