Daily Inspiration Quote by George Meredith

A Victorian novelist calling gossip "social sewage" is Meredith at his most weaponized, turning polite conversation into a sanitation crisis. The phrase is comic in its blunt physicality: you can practically smell it. "Poured" suggests deliberation and control, not an accidental slip. This is an act done to someone, a small cruelty disguised as intimacy. And "into his ears" makes the body the site of contamination, as if hearing is a kind of unguarded intake, like drinking bad water.

Meredith is also diagnosing a social ecosystem. Sewage is what a community produces and then tries not to think about; it has to go somewhere. In that sense, "social" isn’t a softening adjective but an indictment: the waste is communal, a byproduct of status games, resentment, and the need to manage reputations. The line implies that scandal and petty judgment aren’t deviations from civilized life; they are its runoff. The drawing rooms are clean because the filth is being routed through talk.

Subtextually, the "she" matters. Victorian fiction is crowded with scenes where women are deputized as gatekeepers of social knowledge while being punished for wielding it. Meredith’s phrasing catches that double bind: her power arrives as something debasing, her speech rendered dirty even when it’s effective.

Contextually, it’s a signature Meredith move: social realism with a satirical edge, exposing how refinement depends on quiet acts of moral dumping. The elegance of society survives by outsourcing its nastiness to conversation.