Abstract
The Tragic Comedians is a unique case among Meredith’s novels. Although, as we have seen, intertextual elements are important in all of them, this alone is a detailed response to, indeed an alternative version of, a specific other narrative. This other narrative, moreover, purports to be factual, and its relation to Meredith’s text is not merely that of a ‘source’. In the Prefatory section of the novel Meredith informs us that his characters ‘belong to history’ and ‘breathed the stouter air than fiction’s’ (1). He goes on to maintain that nothing has been invented, ‘because an addition of fictitious incidents could never tell us how she came to do this, he to do that’ (2).
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Notes
J.M. Ludlow, ‘Ferdinand Lassalle, the German Social-Democrat’, Fortnightly Review, new series vol. 5, 1869, pp. 419–53.
Gillian Beer, ‘Meredith’s Revisions of The Tragic Comedians’, Review of English Studies, vol. 14 no. 3, 1963, pp. 35, 42, 36.
Helene von Racowitza, Meine Beziehungen zu Ferdinand Lassalle, Breslau und Leipzig, Schottlaender, 1880, p. 1.
Helene von Racowitza, An Autobiography, tr. Cecil Mar, London, Constable, 1910, p. 67.
Meine Beziehungen, pp. 111–12; tr. Autobiography, p. 122. Several critics have commented on the resemblance between Alvan and Willoughby, for example: Gillian Beer, ‘Meredith’s Idea of Comedy: 1876–1880’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, vol. 20, 1965, p. 172;
Gayla S. McGlamery, ‘The Dialogic Meredith: Prefaces to the Novels of the 1880s’, Ph.D., Ann Arbor, Mich. 1984, pp. 72–3.
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© 1997 Neil Roberts
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Roberts, N. (1997). The Tragic Comedians. In: Meredith and the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25464-4_7
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