 | |  |
The Publishing of Meredith's
Rhoda
Fleming
by
Richard B.
Hudson
The account of the publication of George Meredith's Rhoda Fleming that has been accepted universally is based on a letter from Meredith to his friend Canon Augustus Jessopp on April 24, 1865. "Tinsley offers £400 for Rhoda Fleming. . . I don't quite like to sell it for that sum. Chapman and Hall
The letter in my possession is dated simply "July 3rd," but the paper bears the water mark "Joynson 1867." Meredith asks Tinsley to make an overnight visit to Box Hill to see "MSS in progress to completion," and appoints a time for the visit.[4] Then there occurs this crucial sentence: "The debt has been left unsettled owing to my having kept back my work to perfect it more. It was honourably incurred by me out of consideration for your house, because I doubted the chances of the novel attaining popularity: but it must not the less be paid. . . ." Meredith has work in hand that will easily pay off the debt, in other words, whether Tinsley publishes it or not.[5] The debt, however, has arisen from a published work, which can only be Rhoda Fleming, since that is the only work of Meredith's Tinsley has published.
Typed copies of two other short letters to Tinsley and the original of a third are in the Yale University Library and refer to this debt; two of them add scraps of information, although one merely repeats the invitation to Box Hill in much the same terms as in my letter. The second is dated Oct. 18, 1870, five years after the publication of Rhoda Fleming. The date is important not only in dating the transaction but also in accounting for Tinsley's urgency, since he failed in that year.[6] The third tells us that the debt is in the form of a bill that has come due; Meredith asks Tinsley to take £40 and wait a couple of months for the rest.[7] But none states the reason for the debt.
There are, of course, many ways in which Meredith might have got himself
This sentence can only be explained, I think, if one starts with the assumption that Meredith's reluctance prevailed and that he did not accept Tinsley's offer for Rhoda Fleming. If Meredith incurred a debt to Tinsley because he doubted that Rhoda Fleming would become popular and was afraid Tinsley would lose money by the transaction, that debt must have been the production costs of the novel. Meredith must have published the work at his own expense— "on commission terms" as it was known. Meredith no doubt signed a note for all or the major part of the production costs—printing, paper, binding, advertising, and a commission to the publisher for acting as the author's agent.[8] Rhoda Fleming, according to Tinsley, "had a poor sale."[9] It probably failed to bring in enough to cover the amount of Meredith's note, and since Tinsley was in financial trouble, he pressed Meredith for payment.
The inference that Meredith published Rhoda Fleming at his own expense is reinforced by the fact that a year earlier he had, with high hopes of success, published Emilia in England on the same terms with Chapman and Hall. Of Emilia, he wrote Captain Maxse: "It's my undertaking—the risk mine and the uncounted profits. I told Chapman I should want a good sum and did not object to publish the book myself. He though the closing alternative best, and it may be for me."[10] There is no evidence as to how successful this venture was, but Emilia must have sold well enough to give Meredith confidence to undertake the risk again, a confidence that in this instance seems to have been misplaced.
So far, I have taken Meredith's statement in my letter at its face value: he went into debt to Tinsley to save Tinsley from a probable loss. That this debt represents the production costs of Rhoda Fleming, I have no doubt; but it does not follow that we have to accept the reason Meredith assigns for having undertaken the debt. If he was reluctant to accept £400 for Rhoda Fleming, he was reluctant because he did not think £400 enough. If he therefore undertook to publish the work himself, he did so in the hope of making more than £400, not out of gentlemanly concern for the fortunes of William Tinsley. The tone of his defence of himself is distinctly pious. Certainly his correspondence shows no such touching desire to indemnify Chapman and Hall from possible loss. Yet Meredith was Chapman's reader and a friend of the Chapman family and
Notes
Maurice Buxton Forman, A Bibliography of The Writings in Prose and Verse of George Meredith (1922), p. 40.
See, for example, Bertha Coolidge, A Catalogue of The Altschul Collection of George Meredith in the Yale University Library (privately printed, 1931), p. 88. Forman and others assume that the offer was accepted.
Tinsley records a visit to Box Hill in his Random Recollections of an Old Publisher (1900), pp. 136-137. He says nothing of the business that took him there and places the visit "thirty or more years back."
Depending on when Tinsley's visit took place, the work in progress could have been either The Adventures of Harry Richmond, which began its serial course in The Cornhill in Sept., 1870; or Beauchamp's Career, the first version of which was finished at the end of 1870.
Tinsley failed in 1870, although he recouped his fortune. See The Hardman Papers: A Further Selection (1865-1868) from the Letters and Papers of Sir William Hardman, ed. by S. M. Ellis (1930), p. 174 n.
The two letters in typescript are noted in Coolidge, p. 163, with the suggested date 1865. The dated A. L. S. was acquired after the publication of the catalogue. Too little information is given in the letters to put them in any wholly satisfactory order. Miss Marjorie Gray Wynne, of the Rare Book Room at Yale, has keen kind enough to furnish me copies of these letters.
| | |