What price George Meredith?

Another biography of Thomas Hardy, and, it seems a good one, by Claire Tomalin. But what is it about Hardy that so attracts biographers? There have been a good few of them, even in the last quarter century. Indeed Hardy (‘little Tommy Hardy’, as Henry James unkindly and not very sensibly called him) has survived rather well. His novels are regularly set for A-level and several have been filmed. His poetry too has lasted. What G. M. Young called its ‘ancient music . . . this gnarled and wintry phrasing’ endures, influencing, for instance, Philip Larkin.

And what of his contemporary rival poet-novelist, with whom his name was coupled, and to whom he was compared? What of Meredith? Down in the cellar with no takers. Meredith, Paul Johnson informed us recently, was ‘no good’. Others seem to agree. Moreover, though his life was at least as interesting as Hardy’s, he attracts no biographers.