The Ordeal of Richard Feverel by George Meredith (1859)

Meredith now has an unenviable reputation. His collapse began with the Great War blowing apart his more structured world and continued with Virginia Woolf and company and their (admittedly thoughtful) dismissal of him. By now of course he is virtually gone, a fate which would have been unthinkable at this time last century, with the heated support of the Aesthetes particularly bolstering him. This novel of human frailty was published in the mid-nineteenth century but, for me, has the eighteenth strongly stamped upon it. The fact that many of the characters have a humorous philosophy to underpin them and then scrape them into farcical situations reminds me very much of Smollett and what I suspect of Fielding. He is strong on metaphor, and references them tangentially, drawing them out in strong curls of words on several levels of understanding - it is this insistence on poetic literacy, and on the patience it requires, that I imagine seals his fate, which is to be regarded as 'difficult', or 'an author's author'. Very occasionally in this novel it does make for fuzziness, and sometimes he can be accused of silliness (Mrs Berry's babblings in the penultimate chapter), but most of the time this reads like a vital message from the age of erudition, a pure pleasure.