ABSTRACT
Meredith published Beauchamp's Career in 1876. Like several of his novels, it is a deeply political book -- not merely in the more superficial sense that its main characters are politicians, but in the more important one that it is conceived in political terms: the human issues it discusses, even when they are personal and private in form, are presented as fundamentally political ones. The characters of the novel are all, though the setting is contemporary, seen as characters in history: they are individualized men and women, but they are always presented - consistently and insistently-as, in Aristotle's sense, political animals, social creatures inconceivable in any social setting save that of England of the 187os. And England itself is seen, as few nineteenth-century English novelists see it, as part of Europe: an eccentric part, no doubt, with the British Navy (in which Lieutenant Beauchamp serves) turning the Channel into something more than a moat, but concentric too, never wholly isolated by those fogs and mists with which Dickens and Emily Bronte only too plausibly shroud their more insular island.
