YOUTH

Meredith's comparatively lowly origins both drove him to invention, and afforded him material for his novels. Born on 12 February 1828, he was the first and only child of a tailor and naval outfitter, Augustus Meredith, and his wife Jane, née Macnamara. He would offer different accounts of his place of birth, but it was probably the family home on Portsmouth High Street. His parents’ surnames suggest that he was of Welsh and Irish stock, which gave him something else to play with later. He would always have a soft spot for the Celt – for example, he evokes a lyrically Welsh background for the beautiful, selfsacrificing heroine of ‘The Tale of Chloe’ (Chloe 9; 254). But both sides of his own family had been in Hampshire for generations. Augustus had inherited the business from his locally-born father Melchizidec, an almost legendary figure who later loomed large in Meredith's imaginative life. The chief outfitter to a dashing clientele, Melchizidec, like his namesake ‘The Great Mel’ in Evan Harrington, had considered himself a gentleman and lived accordingly. When he died at 51 he passed on his debts to his wife Anne and only surviving son. Then on track for a career in medicine, Augustus was hopelessly ill-suited to rescuing the family's finances, even with his mother's help. Shortly after his marriage to Jane and the birth of their son George, ‘Mrs Mel’, who was ten years her husband's senior, died too, and the business slid inexorably towards bankruptcy.

Worse was to come. Jane herself died when the boy was 5. Soon after being declared bankrupt, Augustus set off to try to improve his fortunes in London, once there marrying the young woman who had come to keep house for him in the Portsmouth establishment. ‘Housekeeper; yes, I remember hearing housekeeper. I think so. Housekeeper? yes, oh yes’, says Lord Palmet, reporting a remark that would have far-reaching consequences in Beauchamp's Career (BC 31; 351). Young ‘Gentleman Georgy’, who already liked to cut a bit of a dash, was withdrawn from his first school, St Paul's in Southsea, and left to the care of relatives with a farm in the Petersfield area. From here he was probably shunted off to a boarding-school outside Hampshire, in Lowestoft.