I FOUND Mary Ellen Meredith’s letters to her lover Henry Wallis hidden in a paint box under a bed at Vera and Cliff Whiting’s house in Purley, Surrey, in 1970 or so. The Whitings had only recently moved in; they had inherited the house intact with all its jumble in the box room. “Go ahead and look in there,” Vera said. “I have no idea what’s there, among all that junk. I really haven’t had time to look at it, we just piled it there to go through later.”
In the box room were cartons and papers and rolls of things she’d inherited from an aunt who had worked for Mary Ellen and Henry’s son, Harold (who was called Felix). Vera had seen Felix in his old age, and she thought she might have a distant childhood memory of old Henry himself, who died in 1916. There was also a sideboard that had belonged to Henry, and the table and candlestick we see in his most famous painting, The Death of Chatterton, for which George Meredith had been the model. The Whitings had planned to clean out the box room but hadn’t done it yet. Luckily.
Since 1968, on brief visits to England, I had been looking for traces of Mary Ellen Peacock Nicolls Meredith, resenting on her behalf the way she was always dismissed in biographies of George Meredith: the unhappy wife who left him and, of course, died, as if death were the deserved fate for Victorian wives who broke the rules. Now I had tracked her down, via wills and deeds in Somerset House, to the Whitings, who now had Harold’s house in the suburb of Purley, and its contents.
When I shook the paint box and heard a muted thump I had an excited sense of certitude, of something within that would reveal her at last. The packet consisted of tiny envelopes tied with red string, a half dozen letters from Mary Ellen to Henry, which he’d saved all his life. Frantically I copied them out. I’m not sure where the originals are now. Were they sold? Thrown out? Does her grandniece Sally have them? Such is the fate of letters, which surface, sink, are all too often the fuel of a bonfire. These letters, so small, in a tiny hand, would only be a moment’s flame.
Vera Whiting was a beautiful woman in her seventies when I met her. In her youth she had sat for Augustus John and other artists; this was her only connection to the art world. Cliff, her second husband, an RAF pilot, had been wounded in World War II and, when I knew them, was cheerfully retired, in his comfortable chair, pensively smoking tiny cigarettes he rolled himself. Their life was a quiet one, in the little house in Purley where I found the letters. Vera would often invite my children to tea and give them excellent cookies, so their affectionate memories match mine.
What luck for me that Vera and Cliff hadn’t consigned all the papers to the removal man, for as an inheritance it didn’t look promising: a lot of old papers and a few folders of watercolors, property deeds, letters to museum directors. (Wallis in his later years was a collector of ceramics and had donated valuable pots and tiles to the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert.) And it was good luck that Wallis was himself an artist, had a painter’s eye, and had painters as friends.* Under the bed were drawings by Rossetti, Beardsley, Burne-Jones; a Meredith manuscript page with the little doodles reproduced on the cover of this book; a few dozen small watercolors, charcoals, and oils by Wallis himself; Mary Ellen’s lapis lazuli drop earrings (Vera gave these to me) and her pink parasol.
I was able to suggest that the Whitings sell their valuable paintings and drawings. They were naturally delighted at the unexpected windfall, more than 50,000 pounds at the time, the equivalent of 750,000 pounds today, from sales at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s. They also donated a number of pieces to the Tate Britain, which owns The Death of Chatterton, and to other public collections, an entirely happy denouement. For me, it was an experience of friendship, for the Whitings and I remained close until their deaths in the 1980s. I cannot remember their reaction to this work when it was first published in 1972, but it must have been approval, as they loaned me the beautiful drawing of Mary Ellen and the other things to reproduce in the original edition of this book.
—DIANE JOHNSON
2020
*Wallis’s life and works are described in the impressive book Henry Wallis: From Pre-Raphaelite Painter to Collector/Connoisseur, by Ronald Lessens and Dennis T. Lanigan. Lessens and Lanigan establish the breadth of the accomplishments of this unfairly forgotten Victorian painter.