Beauchamp's Career is an 1876 novel by George Meredith which portrays life and love in upper-class Radical circles and satirises the Conservative establishment.

"[2] Nevil Beauchamp is a young naval officer with high ideals of honour and public service who, having been wounded in the Crimean War, recovers his health in Venice.

The poet James Thomson, writing in The Secularist, complained ironically: As if he were not sufficiently offensive in being original, he dares to be wayward and wilful, not theatrically or overweeningly like Charles Reade, but freakishly and humoristically, to the open-eyed disgust of our prim public.

[4]The Times said that Meredith did not have the knack of stooping to the tastes of his readers…His books are over-charged with brilliancy of thought, and overdone with epigram and sarcasm and dry shrewd humour.

It is, therefore, perhaps, scarcely to be wondered at that the bulk of novel readers, who only read to be amused, or to "kill time", as the phrase is, should be evilly disposed towards this brilliant writer who takes a keen pleasure in wielding his rapier, and hitting society deftly under the fifth rib.