[7] In his 1891 bibliographical reprint of Meredith's poem, however, what seemed significant to Thomas Bird Mosher was that it had followed shortly after mediaevalising works like William Morris's The Defence of Guinevere (1858), Algernon Charles Swinburne's verse dramas The Queen-Mother and Rosamond (1860) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translations of The Early Italian Poets (1861).
It was suggested to Meredith at the time that the form was modelled on the Italian caudate sonnet and, although he was dismissive of this attempt to find an orthodox ancestry for his work, the possibility continues to be discussed.
In the third quatrain of sonnet 50, for example, the archaic word 'dole' in the line "Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole," is followed immediately by the alliterating colloquialism of "Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul": a prosaic response to the poetic.
[12] The sequence is an early example of mid-Victorian questioning of the values of its time, in this case by examining the interpersonal tensions of a loveless marriage from which the partners cannot escape because of the contemporary legal restrictions on divorce.
In his poetical treatment of the subject, with its ironical echoes of older works of the "and they lived happily ever after" kind, his focus is upon the mismatch between the idealised expectations of marriage founded on such literature and having to dissimulate disappointment in them in order to meet societal conventions.
The husband has to face this when, in sonnet 7, he sees his wife as the attractive woman that others may find her through an imaginative reconstruction of his own mental habits, yet falls back on the demand on her, not simply for social prudence in behaviour but for emotional faithfulness to himself in addition.
Modern love, in this new context, is a hypocritical keeping up of appearances in the face of Darwinian pressures to act otherwise: Meredith is examining what is essentially an insoluble problem and by the end of the sequence comes to no certain conclusion.