The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

Tim Burton should film this. Okay, I know I am bringing down the level of discourse here, but, really, isn't this one of the greatest Victorian novels not to have a definitive film version? Movies always make a hash of things, but they bring in new readers, which is a net gain. Burton, meanwhile, showed a surprising hand for treating 19th Century melodrama with respect in his recent Sweeney Todd, and he might do this justice -- and even finally win his elusive Oscar. I am being totally silly. Or am I?

This is one of the greatest English novels. Even when it was first published, all the reviewers agreed it was hard to read, so see if you like the wit and sarcasm of a page or two before you start it. If you like one page, you'll like them all. The story is not so much about how the father's educational system fails his son, as it is about how every uncle, aunt, and cousin Richard Feverel has, along with his father, loves him and tries to bring him up well, but finally fails because of life's unpredictability, the power of sex, and their own deadly prejudices. The ending is a little bit less melodramatic than THE GREAT GATSBY's, and the two books are similar in showing what happens to a rich rebel against the values of the very rich. It mixes comedy and tragedy, which was a first, and Meredith apologised for boring his readers. He was a pro. But if you're lucky enough not to be bored by this book, you'll get deeper into the Victorian upper class than any other book can take you, or even dares to take you.

I started reading George Meredith in an English class at Hunter College, where a brilliant professor assigned us *The Egoist.* Although not as great as that novel, The Ordeal is quite rewarding on its own terms. The story begins with the tale of a comically embittered misogynist who responds to his wife's adulterous romance (with poet and best friend "Diaper Sandoe") by rejecting women *en toto* and deciding to raise his son Richard in isolation from society. Well, "we shall see how the experiment turned out." Richard, needless to say, reaches the age of 15 and discovers that contra his father, girls have their charms. Things go from there. The book is filled with funny, quirky and brilliant characters rendered in delightfully elaborate prose. It isn't, contrary to one reviewer's remark, Dickensian at all; for unlike Dickens, Meredith has something to say. He is not so much periphrastic as he is precise. I found The Ordeal quite funny -- I've read it three times -- as well as heartbreaking and wise. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys Victorian fiction. I would start here and then go on to *The Egoist*, possibly the wittiest novel ever written.