George Meredith, (Psycho)Analyst

Through his study of writer George Meredith, Jack Lindsay identifies the ways that bourgeois ideology affects the formation and behaviour of individual beings. Lindsay begins by exploring the personal and class background that positioned Meredith to write his novels of bourgeois life. In Meredith’s poetry and each of his novels Lindsay nominates an aspect of bourgeois life that he sees as the focus of the particular work and demonstrates how Meredith painstakingly and candidly reveals how it is embodied and enacted by individuals. Lindsay also notes Meredith’s lifelong love of the natural world expressed mostly in his lyrical poetry, arguing that even his earliest verse shows a keen awareness of the interconnectedness of human beings with nature.