The Ordeal of Richard Feverel: A History of Father and Son is the earliest full-length novel by George Meredith, published in 1859; its subject is the inability of systems of education to control human passions.

Here, however, Sir Austin's friend Lord Mountfalcon successfully sets a courtesan to seduce Richard, hoping that this will leave Lucy open to seduction by himself.

[5] Chapman & Hall left the book unreprinted for nearly twenty years, and when, in 1878, Meredith produced a revised (but not bowdlerized) version, it was published by another firm, Kegan Paul.

[6] For the past hundred years Richard Feverel, with all its faults, has been considered one of Meredith's finest works, its status as a forerunner of many later developments in the novel being widely recognized.

"[8] Virginia Woolf's assessment was that: He makes no attempt to preserve the sober reality of Trollope and Jane Austen; he has destroyed all the usual staircases by which we have learnt to climb.

This defiance of the ordinary, these airs and graces, the formality of the dialogue with its Sirs and Madams are all there to create an atmosphere that is unlike that of daily life, to prepare the way for a new and an original sense of the human scene.And again: The book is cracked through and through with those fissures which come when the author seems to be of twenty minds at the same time.

The aspirational character Leonard Bast mentions that it inspired him to leave London and take an all-night walk into the countryside, because he "wanted to get back to the earth...like Richard does in the end.

"[10] It was referred to again in the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Howards End, in which Leonard discreetly reads a passage from Richard Feverel at his work and dreams of walking in a bluebell wood.