George Meredith aet 68

George Meredith at 68

Mrs Seymour Trower

1896

Photograph

Source: Frontispiece, Vol. XXII of the Memorial Edition

The Seymour Trowers of Weybridge, Surrey, were close friends: Meredith's nickname for Mrs Henry Trower, who took this photograph, was "Lady Bytheway." He had been reluctant to sit for her, asking her if she really wished for "a portrait of a sick ancient, with a dead eye of the two under the crumbling brows" — he complained in other letters of suffering from ulcerated or inflamed eyelids (Letters II: 486).

Image obtained from the Internet Archive (see below), and text by Jacqueline Banerjee.

Meredith attended his last public function in the April of this year, a private view of a gallery, but even now he was a striking figure. He had "magnificent looks," said Lady Milner (daughter of Admiral Frederick Maxse, Meredith's close friend), reminiscing about him in a radio broadcast in 1937, "a noble head covered with grey curly hair; he wore a very well-kept beard, and was always exquisitely neat in his person. He dressed in rather light brown homespuns, and in the country wore a red tie. His manners were perfect, and he treated every one with the greatest courtesy" ("George Meredith," 21). Although he became increasingly frailer and less mobile, he never lost his enthusiasm for life or what he called, in his poem "The Thrush in February", "the rapture of the forward view."

Sources

"George Meredith: Lover of Youth and Laughter." The Times, 7 June 1937, p. 21.

Meredith, George. The House on the Beach, The Gentleman of Fifty, The Sentimentalists, Memorial Edition Vol. XXII. New York,: Scribner, 1910.

_____. Letters. Ed. William Meredith. New York: Scribner, 1912.

Last modified 15 December 2015