The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

A baronet raises his son by a system that leaves no room for accident, and the boy meets a farmer's niece on the river. Meredith published his first major novel in 1859 and the libraries banned it; the marriage in it is the one his own first marriage had not been. The comedy is at the father's expense until the last fifty pages, when it stops being comedy altogether. Fifty-three plates of painting from 1775 to 1900, among them works by Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable, give a portrait gallery of the English world the novel moves through.