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What ordeal does Harry Richmond face in his relationship with his father?
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George Meredith
George Meredith, detail of an oil painting by G.F. Watts, 1893; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
In George Meredith’s 1871 novel The Adventures of Harry Richmond, the protagonist’s ordeal stems from his father, who is an impostor living in a world of fantasy and harboring the persistent belief that his fortune will eventually "turn up."
To achieve maturity, Harry must undergo the painful experience of perceiving and rejecting this illusory world created by his father.1
It is important to note that while the title of another of Meredith's works, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, also centers on a father-son dynamic, that story involves a different set of circumstances, specifically a cruelly manipulative father and a son’s conflict regarding his love for a girl of a lower social class.2