A Manuscript Essay on ‘Political Rights’ (1848) by Mary Ellen Nicolls (Afterwards Meredith)

Surprisingly little is known about the life or writings of Thomas Love Peacock's eldest daughter Mary Ellen in the interval between the death of her first husband, Lieutenant Edward Nicolls, RN, on 11 March 1844 and her second marriage to George Meredith on 9 August 1849.: During the first two years of her widowhood, she and her daughter Edith appear to have lived much of the time with Edward's parents, General Sir Edward and Lady Nicolls, at Shooter's Hill, in Kent. In a letter of 8 October 1847, she told her father's friend Sir John Cam Hobhouse that she had then spent more than a year at Avranches, in Normandy,2 but it is not clear what she was doing there, other than improving her knowledge of French.