1851–2
JOHN CHAPMAN LOVED and needed women as much as they loved and needed him. Unlike so many progressive middle-class men of the mid-century who espoused a programme of political, social and legal reform, Chapman actually believed that all women were his equals and some his superiors. He acknowledged and celebrated Marian’s intellect without the least condescension, humbly seeking and following her advice about the editorial side of his business. In private he asked her to teach him German and submitted his own half-baked attempts at essay-writing to her critical scrutiny. Dazzled by Marian’s mind, he felt not the slightest need to control or diminish it. Brabant, Bray and D’Albert Durade had all displayed similar intellectual generosity, and Chapman was to be the next link in a chain which was to lead Marian finally and happily to George Henry Lewes.
It was not only women’s minds which fascinated Chapman. When he eventually qualified as a medical doctor in 1857 he specialised in gynaecology, treating certain diseases of women by means of heat and cold applied along the spine.1 Every time his mistress Elisabeth Tilley had a period he marked the event in his diary, although this was not so much a signal to fuss around with hot-water bottles as to return to his wife’s bed. A few years later he courted Marian’s friend Barbara Leigh Smith with the peculiar suggestion that having sex with him, and perhaps even a baby, would sort out her menstrual cycle. Once again, the clinical noting down of the physical intimacies between them, this time in a series of explicit letters to Leigh Smith, seems to have been the crucial ingredient in Chapman’s enjoyment of their affair.2
Amongst the people who bought his books, there was nothing unusual about Chapman’s disregard for conventional sexual morality. The right of both sexes to form relationships unsanctioned by marriage had been part of the Utopian programme from the days of William Godwin at the end of the previous century. The Brays practised a version of polygamy whereby both were free to take other lovers. Their friends the Thornton Hunts lived with another couple in Bayswater, where it was rumoured they shared more than domestic expenses. But Chapman’s need for multiple partners had less to do with intellectual conviction and more with a craving for the excitement and chaos inevitably engendered. The slammed doors, tearful scenes and angry words made him feel alive in a way that the deep calm of monogamy never could. Whenever his personal life looked in danger of settling, he whipped up a storm by showing one lover a letter written by another. His habit of candour, so different from Brabant’s evasiveness, allowed him to pass on information, encourage confrontations and generally keep the drama at fever pitch. Then, when it seemed as though there was nothing more to savour, he lived the experience again in a series of anguished diary entries.3
The discovery of Chapman’s 1851 diary on a Nottingham bookstall in 1913 meant that John Cross’s official version of Marian’s life at The Strand had to be completely rewritten. Cross had always been extremely sensitive about the rumours which clung to his wife’s association with Chapman even years after her death. The worst of these, for which no evidence has ever been found, was that Marian had given birth to a son by Chapman and that the child had been smuggled away to Edinburgh. No wonder, then, that Cross felt it prudent virtually to exclude Chapman from George Eliot’s Life. Marian’s letters to Chapman are barely quoted and the good doctor was never asked for his recollections, perhaps because Cross was well aware that the appalling old man loved to boast that George Eliot had once been in love with him. Anyone reading Cross’s account of Marian’s years at the Westminster would assume that Chapman was a professional acquaintance of hers rather than her lover and the man who mediated her transition from provincial bluestocking to metropolitan intellectual.
Mindful of the letters she had received from Elisabeth Tilley over Christmas, Marian arrived at The Strand in January with every intention of steering clear of sexual involvement with Chapman. But he was a difficult man to resist, being engagingly naked in his desires. On the very morning of her arrival, in a gesture whose significance surely cannot entirely have escaped him, he searched the dawn skies with his telescope for a sighting of the planet Venus.4 A few days later he helped Marian choose a piano for her room and spent the morning listening to her play Mozart,5 much to the fury of Susanna, who immediately suggested getting a piano for the drawing-room. But the new instrument did not arrive in time and by the following weekend Chapman and Marian had become lovers. Chapman always took care to note in his diary whenever he had sex with Elisabeth, and over 18–19 January he used a similar code to suggest two sessions of love-making with Marian.6 That something beyond flirtation had occurred is suggested by the fact that Elisabeth and Susanna immediately responded by collapsing with bad pains in the head and leg respectively. By the following Wednesday the tension had become unbearable and a showdown inevitable. With pleasurable relish Chapman recorded the details in his diary.
Invited Miss Evans to go out after breakfast, did not get a decisive answer, E. afterwards said if I did go, she should be glad to go, – I then invited Miss Evans again telling her E. would go whereupon she declined rather rudely, Susanna being willing to go out, and neither E. nor S. wishing to walk far I proposed they should go a short distance without me, which E. considered an insult from me and reproached me in no measured terms accordingly, and heaped upon me suspicions and accusations I do not in any way deserve. I was very severe and harsh, said things I was sorry for afterwards, and we became reconciled in the Park.
Miss Evans apologized for her rudeness tonight, which roused all E’s jealousy again, and consequent bitterness. S. E. and Miss Evans are gone to spend the evening with Mr and Mrs Holland.7
Having a sexual interloper in the house at least had the effect of drawing Susanna and Elisabeth closer together. All it took was a little stirring on Elisabeth’s part for wife and mistress to reach the joint conclusion that Miss Evans and Chapman were, in the latter’s complacent phrase, ‘completely in love with each other’.8 This recognition laid the ground for some new and exciting scenes, in which the four main players spent their time flouncing out of rooms, having headaches and suing for uneasy peace.
It was ironic that this sexual melodrama was played out against Chapman’s increasing prissiness about his personal reputation. He had agreed to publish Eliza Lynn’s third novel, Realities, typically without having bothered to read it all the way through. Keen to break away from her reputation as a writer of turgid academic prose, Lynn had included a love scene which Susanna, who had done some preliminary editing of the book, considered risqué. Chapman, with his knack of mixing up his personal and public life to dire effect, now gave responsibility for the Lynn manuscript to Marian, a gesture that naturally succeeded in making Susanna even more jealous than before.
Eliza Lynn was also annoyed that her manuscript had been assigned to the new favourite. It is not certain whether she had ever been Chapman’s lover, but as a clever, free-thinking woman she had certainly enjoyed his attention during her time as his lodger in Clapton. Although she had taken care to gush affectionately to Marian at their first meeting, privately Eliza had her marked down as pretentious and provincial. To be asked to submit to her editorial judgement was the final insult. Before Marian had a chance to start work on the manuscript, Eliza Lynn appeared dramatically at The Strand and announced that she would agree to only one of the suggested changes.
There followed just the kind of titillating situation which Chapman loved. Eliza Lynn’s stubbornness in sticking by what he described as ‘a love scene which is warmly and vividly depicted, with a tone and tendency which I entirely disapprove’,9 gave him the chance to talk about sex with four women, setting one up against the other. In the course of the next few weeks he sided with Marian against Eliza, and with Eliza against Susanna. He got Elisabeth to read the dubious passage and was pleased when she agreed with Susanna that it should not be published. He then proceeded to get Marian to go with him to see Eliza, to whom he declaimed pompously that ‘as I am the publisher of works notable for the[ir] intellectual freedom it behoves me to be exceedingly careful of the moral tendency of all I issue’.10 As with most of the dramas which Chapman whipped up, events did not so much come to a head as trail off in embarrassment. In the end, and only after a lawyer had been called in, Realities was published elsewhere.
It was against this chaotic background of comings and goings, tears and reconciliations, that Marian tried hard to establish the kind of life for which she had come to London. She dutifully took advantage of the cultural opportunities available to her, hearing Francis Newman lecture on geometry and Faraday on magnetism. At The Strand she continued to dine, debate and sing with the stream of clever men who passed through Mrs Chapman’s dining-room. But as she was painfully aware, intellectual hobbies and new friendships were no substitute for solid achievement. Getting the review of Mackay into the January edition of the Westminster was starting to look like a fluke. Her offer to do a follow-up piece and waive the fee was disappointingly turned down. Chapman fared no better when he tried to get the Edinburgh Review to commission her, even though he was careful to refer to her as a man throughout the negotiations.11 However, a newish weekly periodical called the Leader did accept a couple of pieces on Harriet Martineau’s and Henry Atkinson’s Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development.12
It was not the slow start to her literary career, however, which drove Marian from The Strand. By the end of February the tension between herself, Susanna and Elisabeth was so great that every encounter became an excuse for a row. On the 21 st Marian went to Chapman’s room to borrow a dictionary, found Elisabeth there, and the result was a confrontation that ‘increased [the] bitterness in both their minds’.13 The pages of Chapman’s diary for the next few days have been torn out, suggesting that the histrionics were reaching a pitch which was too painful, even for him. During this unrecorded week Susanna and Elisabeth appear to have combined forces to get Marian out of the house. When the diary entries resume they show Chapman taking Marian on a last, hectic round of visits to the theatre, opera and art galleries, before escorting her to Euston Square station on 24 March.14
In less than three months Marian’s launch into a life which was supposed to be financially independent and intellectually fulfilling had ground humiliatingly to a halt. To make matters even more painful, she was leaving behind a man for whom she felt deeply, a man with whom she had made physical love. In his usual complacent way Chapman recorded their anguished platform conversation in his diary:
She was very sad, and hence made me feel so. – She pressed me for some intimation of the state of my feelings – <I told her that I felt great affection for her, but that I loved E. and S. also, though each in a different way.> At this avowal she burst into tears. I tried to comfort her, and reminded [her] of the dear friends and pleasant home she was returning to, – but the train whirled her away very very sad.15
By now the Brays must have become used to Marian’s embarrassingly sudden departures from other people’s houses. They were probably too tactful to question her closely, although they would have been aware that letters still continued to travel regularly between Rosehill and The Strand. Marian had agreed to undertake two projects from Coventry for Chapman. The first was an analytical catalogue of his publications – in effect a list of all the titles and a summary of their contents. The second was an abridgement of Strauss, for which she was promised £100. In theory all should now have been quiet, with Marian at least a hundred miles from Elisabeth Tilley and even further from Susanna Chapman, who was on a family visit to the West Country. But quiet was the one thing Chapman could never stand: on his first night back in The Strand with only Elisabeth for company he found himself overwhelmed by ‘a sense of extreme loneliness’.16 So he cranked up the pitch by sending Marian a couple of spiteful letters which Susanna had written about her from Truro. Marian’s response – immediately forwarded to Susanna – was to declare angrily that she would continue with the catalogue only ‘on condition that you state or rather, I should hope re-state to Mrs. C. the fact that I am doing it, not because I “like” it, but in compliance with your request’.17
Over the next couple of weeks Marian’s mood softened, partly because she was removed from the scene, but also because the work she was doing for Chapman genuinely engaged her. In an attempt at reconciliation with Susanna she wrote ‘an able and excellent’ letter which Chapman forwarded to Truro.18 This seems to have done the trick, although Elisabeth Tilley remained implacable. A note which Marian sent to Chapman on 28 April made the governess fly into a frenzy and beg her lover never to speak to Miss Evans again.19
But Chapman was incapable of living without the painful complications of Marian’s presence. Within days of Elisabeth’s tearful request he was busy contriving a situation which would require Miss Evans to return to The Strand. Just as Bray had bought the Coventry Herald as a platform for his views, so Chapman had long dreamed of owning and editing a liberal journal in which the ideas that he and his business stood for might be more widely circulated. A few months previously he had talked about buying the ailing Westminster Review, but was unsure whether he could raise the money – a dilemma which was to dog his career. Now Edward Lombe, a wealthy and liberal eccentric who was already subsidising the Westminster, wrote to Chapman offering to help him set up a quarterly journal. With Lombe’s financial support, Chapman quickly agreed on a price for the magazine with the proprietor, W. E. Hickson.
Although he had long had fantasies about editing the Westminster, Chapman was just about realistic enough to know that he was not up to the job. If he were not to look ridiculous then he needed to find a right-hand man who had the intellectual scope and depth to shape a publication that only a decade previously had been put together by J. S. Mill. Luckily he already knew that man, who was living in Coventry and called Marian Evans. On 27 May he visited Marian at Rosehill to discuss her future involvement with the Westminster. He found her ‘shy calm and affectionate’,20 although this did not last when over the next few days he spelled out the terms of her return to The Strand. He made it clear that his first priority was to keep Elisabeth living with him, even if this meant giving up his sexual relationship with Marian. A couple of days later, during an excursion to Kenilworth Castle, he tried to expand on the way he felt about her. Clumsily, he moved the conversation round to ‘the wonderful and mysterious embodiment of all the elements characteristics and beauties of nature which man and woman jointly present. I dwelt also on the incomprehensible mystery and witchery of beauty.’ Quick to take the hint, Marian burst into tears and ‘wept bitterly’.21 In the gentlest way he knew, Chapman was telling Marian that she was not pretty enough to make him risk losing Elisabeth by continuing their affair.
Why did Marian agree to return to The Strand on such demeaning terms? There could be no question of her becoming the official assistant editor of the magazine. Advanced thinkers were not so advanced at mid-century that they were able to accept a woman at the head of a distinguished publication like the Westminster. Potential benefactors and contributors would shy away if they knew who was really in charge. In time, Marian’s identity was bound to leak out, but by then it was hoped that the reputation of the new Westminster Review would be sufficiently secure to withstand the gossip. At this delicate stage in the proceedings it was essential to be discreet. Which is why when Chapman went to see Thomas Carlyle on 10 October to persuade him to write a piece for the first issue, his assistant editor was obliged to walk up and down on the pavement outside.22
Odd though it might seem to anyone who saw Marian hovering outside Carlyle’s Chelsea home on that day, it felt quite natural to her. From the moment she had first taken up Vinet to translate under the direction of Francis Watts, she had been in training for just this kind of transparency. As the Westminster’s uncredited assistant editor she would once again become the medium through which a man might deliver his important message to the world. When she wrote to the Brays from Geneva about needing to find a vocation, she had talked about sweetening and easing the life of another. By agreeing to help Chapman she would be doing just that. The fact that she would receive neither his sexual love nor public acknowledgement nor any pay beyond her board and lodging appealed to Marian’s growing pleasure in resignation. Just as Maggie returns to face the censure of the townspeople after her apparent elopement with Stephen, so Marian embraced the opportunity to return to 142 The Strand and face Susanna’s and Elisabeth’s continuing suspicions. This time, noted Chapman in his ever-open diary, she was determined to come not as a combatant but as a penitent.
But there were more practical considerations pulling Marian back to The Strand. As an educated single woman of modest means she was no different from the 20,000 or so who worked as governesses, trading educational ‘accomplishments’ for a roof over their heads. She could not live with the Brays for ever and Chapman was offering board and lodgings in return for her editorial and administrative help. There would also be the chance to make extra money by contributing articles to the magazine.
Shortly after that miserable day at Kenilworth, Marian dried her tears and agreed to become Chapman’s ‘active co-operator’ in the Westminster.23 A couple of nights later, with a theatricality which had become the signature of this whole exhausting business, she and Chapman ‘made a solemn and holy vow which henceforth will bind us to the right’.24 Their affair, if it could be called that, was over. The mood of delicious sacrifice continued throughout Chapman’s stay at Rosehill. On her return from Kenilworth, Marian took up Thomas à Kempis’s De Imitatione Christi, which had been a comfort during her father’s last days, and recommended it to Chapman who scribbled down an extract about resignation in his diary.25 She was careful not to let anyone see her unhappiness, singing especially well during a musical evening with the Brays’ other guests, the Thornton Hunts, whose destiny was so strangely tangled with her own. The next night, 2 June, she went without dinner so that she might get on with the prospectus, a document that was part mission statement and part fund-raiser, aimed at potential benefactors of the new Westminster Review.
Over the next few weeks Marian stayed in Coventry, while Chapman negotiated her return to The Strand with Elisabeth and Susanna. The distance and stability afforded by Rosehill allowed Marian to come to terms with the changed nature of her relationship with Chapman. As she disengaged from him sexually, she found a new detachment and authority in her professional dealings with him. Her letters over the next weeks are restrained and practical, concerned mainly with Westminster business. Chapman, by contrast, had plunged straight back into the emotional maelstrom of 142 The Strand. On 15 June 1851 a row with Susanna about whether she could use three drawers in his desk ended up with her setting fire to her letters.26 The following day, Chapman’s birthday, was ‘made wretched by Elisabeth’s positive assurance that she will not live in The Strand after Miss Evans comes to London’.27 In the midst of this hysterical flap, Marian started to seem like a distant and cool oasis. A very ordinary letter she sent him on 20 June had him dizzy with rapture: ‘Miss Evans’ little note is inexpressibly charming, so quick, intelligent and overflowing with love and sweetness!’ And then, because he could never just enjoy things the way they were, ‘I feel her to be the living torment to my soul.’28
In a carefully stage-managed rapprochement with the ladies of The Strand, Marian arrived in London with the Brays in the middle of August. On the 15th Chapman spent the day with them at the Great Exhibition before bringing Marian home to ‘make a call’ on Susanna. From Chapman’s point of view it all went splendidly: after dinner he and Marian got through a great deal of Review business. Elisabeth and Susanna were less happy, predictably dissolving into headache and tears respectively.29 None the less, during that evening an emotional and social Rubicon was crossed. By the end of it, without anything specific being said, the way had been cleared for Miss Evans to return to The Strand.
The Prospectus for which Marian had gone without dinner on 2 June mapped out a brave future for the once great Westminster Review.30 Ever since the high water mark of John Stuart Mill’s editorship in the 1830s, the magazine’s performance and prestige had been in decline. Now Marian, writing as ‘the Editors’, promised a journal which would once again engage fully with the transforming intellectual landscape of mid-Victorian Britain. The guiding philosophy would be both gradualist and radical, advocating change, but insisting on its organic nature. Sharp scrutiny of ‘established creeds and systems’ would, it was maintained, lead not to their destruction but to their re-emergence in a stronger, refined form. For instance, although the implications of the new Biblical criticism would be pursued to their logical conclusion, the editors promised to ‘bear in mind the pre-eminent importance of a constructive religious philosophy, as connected with the development and activity of the moral nature’. Fearless and unsentimental assessment of the status quo would, it was hoped, reveal the wondrous connectedness of all things: ‘opposing systems may in the end prove complements of each other.’ And although they had no doubt that the best change was snail slow, the editors had no objections to helping things along. They were, announced the Prospectus, in favour of extending the suffrage, reforming the judiciary, ending religious discrimination and, in a restatement of the Westminster’s most hallowed principle, freeing trade from every kind of restriction.
Marian’s growing emotional detachment from Chapman allowed her to see clearly that if people thought he was the active editor of the Westminster they would dismiss it out of hand. But if it became known that he was relying on a woman to do the work, even if it was the clever lady translator of Strauss, then there would be even greater unease. Rightly convinced that Chapman was not fully aware of the delicacy of their situation, Marian nudged him towards discretion, suggesting a formula if anyone pressed for details: ‘With regard to the secret of the Editorship, it will perhaps be the best plan for you to state, that for the present you are to be regarded as the responsible person, but that you employ an Editor in whose literary and general ability you confide.’31
But even with the public relations sorted out, the Prospectus pleased no one. John Stuart Mill thought it too conservative. James Martineau, Harriet’s brother, Unitarian minister and long-time contributor, sneered that it was too low-brow and worried about its atheism – a charge which had dogged the magazine since the days of Bentham.32 And Hickson, who at this point still owned the Westminster, was naturally annoyed by Chapman publicising the coming changes so far in advance.33 It was left to Marian, still in exile in Coventry, to guide Chapman through the squalls that the Prospectus had created. With brisk authority, she substantially corrected the draft of his response to Mill, changing the punctuation and altering the phraseology. The fearsome James Martineau needed even more careful handling. Despite his grudging remarks about the Prospectus, Martineau had agreed to write a piece for the first issue on ‘Christian Ethics and Modern Civilisation’ and now wrote to Chapman asking for guidelines. Unable to respond confidently, Chapman went all the way to Coventry on 23 August to get Marian’s advice.34 She drafted a letter for him to send to Martineau in which she explained exactly what was wanted.
If Marian had not realised it before, the experience of supervising Chapman’s responses to Mill and Martineau made her see just how shaky was his grasp of intellectual detail. Chapman, however, seems still to have been labouring under the delightful illusion that his work was capable of standing alongside that of his most distinguished contributors. In September he started to make worrying noises about writing a piece on national representation for the first issue. Using blatant flattery, Marian persuaded him to stick to what he did best, which was being a figurehead. He was vain enough to swallow her argument, writing complacently in his diary on 21 September: ‘Miss Evans thinks I should lose power and influence by becoming a writer in the Westminster Review, and could not then maintain that dignified relation with the various contributors that she thinks I may do otherwise.’35
All the while that Marian was in charge of the Westminster she managed to keep Chapman out of its pages. But by 1855 he was once again chafing at the bit. One evening, after dining with her and Lewes, he produced an article which he said was intended for the July issue. Although the Westminster was no longer her responsibility, Marian found it hard to sound encouraging. The next day, 25 June 1855, having read his article, she wrote a careful letter in which she pointed out the continuing weaknesses in his writing style: ‘whenever you pass from narrative to dissertation, certain old faults reappear – inexactness of expression, triads and duads of verbs and adjectives, mixed metaphors and a sort of watery volume that requires to be reduced by evaporation.’36 As always, Chapman took Marian’s comments to heart. He dejectedly withdrew the article from the magazine and begged for general reassurance about his writing. She wrote back in the nicest way she knew how: ‘There is no reason for you to be desponding about your writing. You have made immense progress during the last few years, and you have so much force of mind and sincerity of purpose that you may work your way to a style which is free from vices, though perhaps you will never attain felicity – indeed, that is a free gift of Nature rather than a reward of labour.’37 Chapman revised the article along the lines she suggested and finally put it in the October 1855 issue of the Westminster.
After spending the summer of 1851 rearranging Chapman’s tangled thoughts and bad prose, it must have been exhilarating for Marian to see a piece of her own work in print. A late-September edition of the Leader carried her review of William Rathbone Greg’s The Creed of Christendom, which ironically had been turned down by the Westminster earlier in the year. She was broadly sympathetic to Greg’s work, which displayed exactly that kind of robust common sense she so admired. Chapman noted in his diary on 23 September that the Leader’s co-editor, George Henry Lewes, ‘called in the afternoon to express his high opinion of Miss Evans’ Article’.38
Lewes, who always seemed to be everywhere in literary London, was also a contributor to the January 1852 issue of the Westminster, the first for which Marian and Chapman were responsible. He was in excellent company. Although Mill and Carlyle had turned Chapman down, there was the Unitarian cleric William Johnson Fox on ‘Representative Reform’, Edward Forbes of King’s College on shellfish, Greg on labour relations, Francis Newman on suffrage, Froude on Mary Stuart and, of course, James Martineau on ‘The Ethics of Christendom’. Marian’s particular responsibility was the lengthy book review section for which the Westminster became celebrated. Every month she sifted through the huge number of books newly published in Britain, America, Germany and France, and selected about a hundred for review – a process which kept her keenly up to date with the latest developments in philosophy, literature and history. The review essays are composite efforts and although she occasionally contributed some copy herself – in the first issue she covered Carlyle’s The Life of John Sterling – Marian’s hand is seen mainly in the passages which link one contributor’s work to another’s. Anyone scouring the Westminster Review of 1852–4 for examples of George Eliot’s early writing will find only a handful of pieces and they, according to current practice, are anonymous. At this stage the bulk of Marian’s responsibilities consisted of coaxing and pruning the work of others. She came up with the topics, advised Chapman which writer to commission, proof-read the copy and followed its progress safely through the press.
The weeks leading up to the first issue were fraught. Writing to Cara, Marian describes her bedroom table groaning with books ‘all to be digested by the editorial maw’ and predicts ‘terribly hard work for the next 6 weeks’.39 A few weeks on, with publication looming, she is racked with headaches ‘just when I ought to have been working the hardest.’40 Three days later, on 23 December, she reports to the Brays that work is ‘so heavy just for the next three days – all the revises being yet to come in and the proof of my own article – and Mr. Chapman is so overwhelmed with matters of detail that he has earnestly requested me to stay till Saturday’.41 In the event she agreed, staying in London over Christmas Day, before returning to Rosehill on 27 December.
Although the first issue received a mixed response, within nine months the Westminster Review had re-established itself as the leading intellectual quarterly of the day. The phrenologist George Combe, admittedly a huge fan of Marian’s at this point, praised her to the skies. Marian delightedly repeated to the Brays: ‘he says, he thinks the Westminster, under my management the most important means of enlightenment of a literary nature in existence – the Edinburgh, under Jeffrey, nothing to it etc. etc.!!!’42 Lewes, not yet Marian’s lover, also told the readers of his periodical the Leader that ‘It is now a Review that people talk about, ask for at the clubs, and read with respect. The variety and general excellence of its articles are not surpassed by any Review.’43 To read the ten issues for which Marian Evans was responsible is to be presented with a snapshot of the best progressive thought at mid-century. The way forward in education, industry and penal reform is mapped out. Science is well covered, especially those pathways which lead inexorably towards Darwin – geology, botany, biology. Herbert Spencer introduces his theory of evolution over four issues. Theology, philosophy and history provide the heart of the magazine, the most notable success, with hindsight, being a piece on the hitherto unknown Schopenhauer. Apart from the long review section, there are articles on Shelley, Thackeray, Balzac and many others. Foreign affairs are covered with pieces on British policy in Europe and Russia. The difficult problem of Ireland, currently in the grip of a famine, is returned to again and again.
As the stature of the magazine grew, so did Marian’s confidence in her ability to run it. Although her role was still formally unacknowledged, it was increasingly clear that she was the driving force. The dowdy woman from Nuneaton was now in her element, picking and choosing between some of Britain’s and Europe’s finest minds who offered their work to the Westminster. William Hale White, who worked as a sub-editor, remembered a woman in her absolute element: ‘I can see her now, with her hair over her shoulders, the easy chair half sideways to the fire, her feet over the arms, and a proof in her hands, in that dark room at the back of No 142.’44 A letter Marian wrote to Chapman during a holiday in Broadstairs in August 1852 shows just how familiar she had become with the foibles of different contributors and how confident she was in dealing with their squabbles, demands and small vanities. Briefing Chapman on the October 1852 issue, she briskly instructs him to give Froude twenty-six pages, warns that Mill and Martineau will inevitably clash and suggests he forward a note to Charlotte Brontë. Then she turns her attention to future issues, throwing out comments which would not sound out of place from a magazine editor today. ‘Don’t suggest “Fashion” as a subject to any one else – I should like to keep it.’ And, again, ‘I have noticed the advertisement of the British Q[uarterl]y this morning. Its list of subjects is excellent. I wish you could contrive to let me see the number when it comes out. They have one subject of which I am jealous – “Pre-Raphaelism in Painting and Literature”. We have no good writer on such subjects on our staff. Ought we not, too, to try and enlist David Masson, who is one of the Br[itish] Q[uarterly] set?’ She then adds a few funny remarks about James Martineau’s endless complaint about the Westminster not toeing the Unitarian party line, before going on to make the serious point that it is precisely this heterodoxy which is the magazine’s greatest strength.
Martineau writes much that we can agree with and admire. Newman ditto, JS Mill still more, Froude a little less and so on. These men can write more openly in the Westminster than anywhere else. They are amongst the world’s vanguard, though not all in the foremost line; it is good for the world, therefore, that they should have every facility for speaking out. Ergo, since each can’t have a periodical to himself, it is good that there should be one which is common to them – id est, the Westminster.45
But it was not simply the editorial content of the Westminster which concerned Marian. At many points it looked as if the magazine was about to fold. In part, this was because Chapman was a hopeless financial manager, mixing up the accounts of his various different businesses into a giant tangle. But even an immaculate administrator would have found it hard to make the figures add up. The Westminster sold only 650 copies every quarter, which did not bring in nearly enough to cover the £250 contributors’ bill. To make matters worse, Lombe, the chief backer, had died in March 1852, while Dr Brabant had been forced to call in a loan to Chapman of £800. The magazine continued thanks only to Chapman’s uncanny luck in getting other people to bail him out. The Westminster Review still had a symbolic presence in the nation’s intellectual landscape and men of a progressive persuasion felt uneasy about letting it fade away without making some kind of effort. Donations dribbled in, topped up by substantial loans from the Unitarian brewer Flower and the wealthy manufacturer Samuel Courtauld.
Chapman did not help himself by the combative approach he adopted towards the rest of the publishing industry. In 1852 he protested against the Booksellers Association’s right to fix book prices and found himself outlawed as a result. The majority of publishers now refused to supply him with their books. Loving every minute of his notoriety, Chapman ran a piece in the April issue on the whole sorry business, and organised a meeting of well-known authors to gather at The Strand on 4 May. Dickens was in the chair, and intellectual stars like Wilkie Collins, F. W. Newman, Lewes, Spencer, Henry Crabb Robinson and Richard Owen were there to hear the excellent speeches. Letters from Mill, Cobden and Carlyle were read out. The meeting went off splendidly and at midnight Marian struck up ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ on the piano to acknowledge Chapman’s genius at having turned the difficult situation into some kind of triumph. But the greatest achievement of all that night belonged to her. For in a room containing the cleverest, most influential people in Britain, she was the only person wearing a dress.46
No amount of intellectual excitement and professional fulfilment could make up for the fact that, for the first time since spring 1851, Marian’s life was devoid of sexual affection. Her short infatuation with Froude had been followed by six months with D’Albert Durade over the winter of 1849–50, which in turn had been succeeded by the exhausting Chapman affair. Now there was no one. Terrified of provoking a situation whereby his assistant editor would once again be sent to Coventry, Chapman had been scrupulous in sticking to the terms of their ‘holy vow’. Although Marian did nothing to try to make him change his mind, she could not help feeling flat, plain, loveless. Was this how the life of a professional woman had to be? As she established herself at the Westminster, she realised that the chance of achieving the satisfactions of ordinary womanhood – a husband, a family – were becoming increasingly remote. Her anxiety about how her life might be continued in overwrought identifications with other women in similar situations. For instance, after reading a memoir of Margaret Fuller, an American feminist who came late to family life, she wrote to a friend, ‘You know how sad one feels when a great procession has swept by one, and the last notes of its music have died away, leaving one alone with the fields and sky. I feel so about life sometimes. It is a help to read such a life as Margaret Fuller’s. How inexpressibly touching that passage from her journal – “I shall always reign through the intellect, but the life! the life! O my God! shall that never be sweet?” ’47
On various occasions these identifications with other professional women provoked angry denials. Thus, when the distinguished fifty-year-old Swedish novelist and feminist Frederika Bremer turned up at The Strand, Marian recognised her as a possible future model for her life and lashed out in dismay. Bremer was, according to Marian, ‘extremely ugly, and deformed. . . . Her eyes are sore – her teeth horrid . . . She is to me a repulsive person, equally unprepossessing to eye and ear.’48 Harriet Martineau, whom she had met before and who had been the catalyst for this move to London, was also taken to task for the ‘vulgarity’ of her looks and gestures.49
But if it was hard to draw inspiration from the handful of older women who lived by their wits, Marian found herself increasingly becoming a role model to a new generation of younger girls. Bessie Rayner Parkes was a member of the Rosehill–Strand circuit by virtue of her father, the Radical Midlands MP Joseph Parkes who had bankrolled Marian’s Strauss translation. Hugely cosseted yet ardently feminist, Bessie developed a crush on the clever, independent Miss Evans, who thrillingly answered to neither husband nor father. Marian, in turn, seems to have been less taken with Bessie, who was ten years younger than her, especially when she pestered for advice on her competent but derivative poetry. Marian responded as she increasingly would when forced to read someone’s work – refusing easy praise and insisting that Bessie practise, practise, practise: ‘Work on and on and do better things still’.50 Chapman proved a softer, more politic touch: later that year he published Bessie’s poems to tepid reviews.
Marian was reluctant to encourage Bessie’s ardent friendship because she knew perfectly well that the Parkeses worried about the amount of time their daughter was spending at The Strand. A reputation for godlessness would not harm a girl who moved in Bessie’s circles, but a hint of sexual scandal could. Marian was known not just for being clever, and ‘advanced’ in her religious views, but also for quite possibly having slept with Bray, Brabant and Chapman. And while all this doubtless only added to her glamour in Bessie’s eyes, Marian was anxious that she should not be accused of leading anyone astray. Adopting the tone she had once used in similar circumstances to Mary Sibree, she admonished Bessie, ‘Now, dear child, don’t be playing pranks and shocking people, because I am told they lay it all to me and my bad influence over you.’51 She understood better than Bessie that while no one cared if Joseph Parkes lived a sexually irregular life – and he did – it was quite another thing for his daughter to be suspected of doing the same. Her experience of seeing how avant-garde households like the Brays, the Chapmans and now the Parkeses organised these matters provided a vital foretaste of how she would herself be treated once she went to live with Lewes. While male writers, intellectuals, academics, doctors and politicians were increasingly happy to visit the unofficial ‘Mrs Lewes’, they felt quite differently about allowing their wives and daughters to do the same. Even at the end of her life, conventional matrons stayed away.
Marian no longer felt the need to match Bessie’s anxious ardour. The days of leaning heavily on another woman as if she were a kindred spirit, a husband, were gone for good. From now on a different pattern emerged in her relationships. It would be she who decided how close to allow a younger, admiring woman to come. A letter Bessie wrote to her friend, Barbara Leigh Smith, on 12 February 1853 shows the kind of reverential awe which Marian’s reputation for moral wisdom was already capable of inspiring in others.
George Eliot’s father, Robert Evans: ‘the one deep strong love I have ever known.’
‘He was the elder and a little man,’ explains Eliot in the ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets, written in 1869, in which she recalled her close childhood attachment to her brother Isaac.
South Farm, Arbury, where George Eliot was born on 22 November 1819.
Griff House, the farmhouse to which George Eliot and her family moved when she was four months old. Set in 280 acres, Griff represented the high noon of Robert Evans’s status and influence.
Cara Bray, Eliot’s Coventry neighbour, gave her young friend a blend of sympathy and intellectual rigour that was lacking in the Evans household.
‘My beloved spouse’ was how Eliot frequently addressed Sara Hennell, Cara’s sister, during the height of their passionate friendship in the 1840s.
‘Everyone who was supposed to be a “little cracked” was sent up to Rosehill,’ said Charles Bray, Cara’s husband. The Brays’ Coventry home became an essential stopping-off place for any liberal intellectual passing through Coventry.
Charles Bray, ‘The Don Juan of Coventry’, had six children by his mistress and affairs with several other women, including his wife’s sister and possibly George Eliot.
A phrenological bust. Many serious mid-Victorians believed that reading head bumps was the key to understanding personality. In 1844 Charles Bray had a cast made of George Eliot’s skull and later analysed it. ‘The social feelings were very active, particularly the adhesiveness.’
George Eliot wrote of this portrait of her by Cara Bray (1842): ‘Her benevolence extends to the hiding of faults in my visage.’
George Eliot by François D’Albert Durade. ‘You will be amused to hear that I am sitting for my portrait – at M. D’Albert’s request – not mine,’ wrote Eliot to the Brays in February 1850.
An early photograph of Eliot, precise date unknown.
Charles Christian Hennell, the beloved brother of Sara Hennell and Cara Bray. Eliot greatly admired his ground-breaking investigation into the origins of the New Testament and may have had hopes of marrying him.
‘I am in a little heaven here, Dr Brabant being its archangel,’ wrote Eliot when she went to stay with Dr Robert Brabant in 1843. The sixty-two-year-old man and the twenty-four-year-old girl read German together and went for long walks.
‘He is not more than four feet high with a deformed spine . . . but on this little body is placed a finely formed head,’ explained Eliot of François D’Albert Durade, with whom she lodged during her stay in Geneva in 1849–50.
John Chapman, editor of the Westminster Review, was another mid-Victorian liberal intellectual known as ‘Don Juan’. As well as employing her, Chapman had a brief affair with Eliot.
Eliot fell in love with Herbert Spencer in 1852 and hoped that they would marry. When he rejected her on the grounds that she was too ugly, she mourned: ‘If you become attached to someone else, then I must die.’
Samuel Laurence’s sketch for his portrait of Eliot (misdated 1857, actually 1860). Lewes hated this portrait of Eliot at forty, believing it made her look miserable.
Lewes was ‘in raptures’ with this painting by Frederic Burton (1865) which Eliot herself declared would be ‘positively’ the last time she would be painted.
To those correspondents who wrote asking for a picture, Eliot always pretended she had ‘no photograph of myself, having always avoided having one taken’. This one of 1858, by Mayall of Regent Street, explains why.
Do you know, Marian Evans has changed to me lately, has seemed to have finally made up her mind to love me . . . She said the other day, having made me sit close to her, and looking full into my eyes: ‘I thought when I first knew you, you had a great deal of self-esteem in the sense of putting forth your own opinions, but I have quite lost the impression. I suppose when we love people, we lose the sense of their faults.’ I was inexpressibly touched. I nearly cried. The odd mixture of truth and fondness in Marian is so great. She never spares, but expresses every opinion, good and bad, with the most unflinching plainness, and yet she seems able to see faults without losing tenderness.52
Barbara Leigh Smith was to become an even greater friend of Marian’s, and perhaps the only one whom she looked upon as her intellectual and moral equal. Her background was as sophisticated and progressive as Marian’s was provincial and conventional. Like Bessie, Barbara came from a distinguished family of Unitarian reformers, men and women who had been at the forefront of virtually every progressive campaign and good cause since the beginning of the century. What made her odd was her illegitimacy. Her father, Benjamin Leigh Smith, a Radical MP, felt unable to marry her mother because she was a milliner. None the less he looked after her, and the five children they had together, with generous tenderness. Although the Leigh Smith tribe would always be tainted with illegitimacy – even their progressive Bonham Carter and Nightingale cousins steered clear – they were furnished with a privileged, enlightened childhood. Following her father’s and grandfather’s great interest in art, Barbara had taken lessons from William Henry Hunt. Unlike many another ‘young lady painter’ of her generation, she was not a dabbler, but persevered to become a fine artist. When she came of age in 1848 she was provided with £300 a year which, unlike Marian’s ninety pounds, was enough to release her from having to earn a living. She spent her time and money usefully, continuing her artistic training and, together with Bessie, working energetically to open up educational and job opportunities to women.53
These friendships with Barbara and Bessie opened up a new kind of social life to Marian. For the past ten years she had been used to sitting down to supper with clever men, but the atmosphere had always been informal, bohemian, even chaotic. Susanna Chapman was usually in such a muddle that it was not unusual for the dinner to arrive an hour late. The conversation at the Leigh Smiths and the Parkeses was no less intellectual, but it was set on an entirely different scale. At the Parkes mansion in Savile Row and the Leigh Smiths’ establishment in Blandford Square there were huge rooms, fine china and a flock of servants. The Parkes mansion was big enough to hold huge balls, to which Marian was twice invited. On these occasions she refused, knowing that this was not an environment in which she did well. The dancing, the flirtation, the quick repartee made her feel like the plain teenager who had brought the party to a stop with her hysterics all those years ago in Warwickshire. She made her scrappy wardrobe the excuse for not going. ‘It would be a crucifixion of my own taste as well as other people’s to appear like a withered cabbage in a flower garden.’ What she liked and where she shone was in the intimacy of a dinner party where ‘people think only of conversation, [and] one doesn’t mind being a dowdy’.54 She dined regularly at both the Parkeses’ and the Leigh Smiths’, becoming a particular favourite of Joseph Parkes. Writing years later, Bessie remembered how
from 1851 to 1855, she used to wear black velvet, then seldom adopted by unmarried ladies. I can see her descending the great staircase of our house in Savile Row (afterwards the Stafford Club), on my father’s arm, the only lady, except my mother, among the group of remarkable men, politicians, and authors of the first literary rank. She would talk and laugh softly, and look up into my father’s face respectfully, while the light of the great hall-lamp shone on the waving masses of her hair, and the black velvet fell in folds about her feet.55
Here was Marian in her element. Released from the need to compete with other women on grounds of dress or beauty, she used her intellect and her intensity to captivate whichever man she had set her heart on.
One of those men was Herbert Spencer, to whom she had been introduced during her visit to London in the August of 1851. As sub-editor of The Economist, Spencer lived and worked just over the road from the Westminster. The previous year Chapman had published Spencer’s Social Statics, a hugely influential book, which applied the concept of evolution and adaptation to questions of social organisation. Spencer believed that the human race was moving slowly towards political freedom, which he defined as the right of every man ‘to do whatsoever he wills provided he does not infringe the equal freedom of any other man’. Despite the excluding pronoun, Spencer believed that both sexes should share in this freedom, since ‘no woman of truly noble mind will submit to be dictated to’. However, he was sufficiently a man of his time to balk at giving the vote to women, no matter how noble-minded they might be.56
Like so many other significant people in her life – Chapman and Bessie especially – Spencer also came from the Midlands, in this case Derby. He was the only child of an intelligent, energetic Wesleyan couple. His uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer, was a clergyman who used the pulpit to campaign for the abolition of the Corn Laws and the ending of slavery. The Revd Spencer also believed that the English working class would never be free from their masters while they stayed muddle-headed with drink. In 1845, during a visit to Coventry, he had spoken so passionately for teetotalism that Marian had to be restrained by Cara from running up to the front of the hall and adding her name to the pledge.
Despite coaching from his Cambridge-educated uncle, Herbert Spencer did not shine at classics, taking more naturally to mathematics and science. At seventeen he joined the railways as a civil engineer, before gravitating to London where he fiddled with mechanical inventions and tried his hand at periodical writing. Gradually his interest broadened from technical subjects to social ones, or rather he applied his ‘scientific’ discipline to the study of man’s social organisation, out of which emerged the new discipline of sociology. By the time Marian met him, the thirty-one-year-old Spencer was recognised as one of the cleverest men in London, a genuinely original mind among the synthesisers. Over the next fifty-two years of his long life there was hardly a subject which he did not colonise, including philosophy, biology, statistics and ethics. He was, as Social Statics demonstrated, an enthusiastic believer in evolution well before Origin of Species appeared in 1859, and it was he rather than Darwin who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’.
Although his modern, non-university education was typical of the men with whom Marian was involved throughout her life, Spencer’s emotional make-up could not have been more different from Bray’s, Chapman’s or Lewes’s. Celibate where they were sexual, cold where they were warm, detailed where they were broad, he had a rigid, chilly personality. Perhaps it was the result of being the only surviving child of a brood of nine, but Spencer saw danger in everything. Emotional attachment spelled chaos, and whenever a love affair threatened the loss of his carefully composed self, he scuttled back into the intricate theoretical world, which was the shape and content of his working life. Rather than pursuing relationships with real women, he postulated endlessly about the conditions necessary for an ideal love. Although he worried about his bachelor status, whenever a suitable partner presented herself he came up with perfectly good reasons why it would never work. Either he did not have enough money to marry, or he was too busy, or the woman in question was unsuitable. The fact was that although Herbert Spencer loved to study humanity, his self-engrossment made any kind of real contact with another human being impossible.
But if he was incapable of emotional closeness, there was nothing Spencer liked more than intellectual contact. Miss Evans was a delightful person with whom to spend time, being not only cleverer than many of his friends, but female to boot. Spencer’s preoccupation with his bachelorhood meant that he was keen to be seen around town with a woman. The possibility of having a lover, and having others witness that possibility, was enough to take the edge off his fearful recognition that he would never marry. As arts critic for The Economist he received free press tickets for the theatre and the opera, and he often invited Marian to accompany him to Covent Garden. As the evenings lengthened, their friendship moved from the semi-professional to something which passed for intimacy. By April they were meeting regularly for long, sunshiny chats on the terrace of Somerset House, to which Chapman had a private key.
But if Marian was busy falling in love, Spencer was already retreating into cold calculation. On 23 April he wrote to his friend Edward Lott, carefully setting out the terms of his new attachment: ‘Miss Evans, whom you have heard me mention as the translatress of Strauss and as the most admirable woman, mentally, I ever met. We have been for some time past on very intimate terms. I am frequently at Chapman’s, and the greatness of her intellect conjoined with her womanly qualities and manner, generally keep me at her side most of the evening.’57
Marian’s affection for Spencer was characteristically ardent. For the first time in her life she was involved with a man who, on the face of it, was entirely suitable. Not only was he free to marry, but his background was close to hers. Like her, he was an original thinker in areas where Bray, Chapman and Brabant were second-rate. She was perceptive enough to know that his intellectual rigidity – trimming empirical evidence to fit prearranged theories – would clash with her growing respect for the integrity of the specific and individual. But her need for a soulmate, never deeply buried, had resurfaced with a vengeance, leading her to sexualise this most unsexual of men. Old emotional patterns were reanimated as she rushed into love with a man who could not return her affection.
By the time Spencer wrote to Lott praising Marian’s virtues, he had already told her that there could be no question of romance between them. In a letter to another friend, written after her death, he reported what happened next.
After a time I began to have qualms as to what might result from this constant companionship. Great as was my admiration for her, considered both morally and intellectually, and decided as was my feeling of friendship, I could not perceive in myself any indications of a warmer feeling, and it occurred to me that mischief would possibly follow if our relations continued. Those qualms led me to take a strange step – an absurd step in one sense. I wrote to her indicating, as delicately as I could, my fears. Then afterwards, perceiving how insulting to her was the suggestion that while I felt in no danger of falling in love with her, she was in danger of falling in love with me, I wrote a second letter, apologising for my unintended insult. She took it all smilingly, quite understanding my motive and forgiving my rudeness. The consequence was that our intimacy continued as before. And then, by and by, just that which I had feared might take place, did take place. Her feelings became involved and mine did not. The lack of physical attraction was fatal. Strongly as my judgement prompted, my instincts would not respond.58
When Marian received her first rejection from Spencer in April she did indeed take it ‘smilingly’ – at least on the surface. Her reply to him, on the 21st, makes a self-deprecating joke about how it had never crossed her mind that his intentions might be other than platonic. ‘I felt disappointed rather than “hurt” ’, she wrote with forced lightness, ‘that you should not have sufficiently divined my character to perceive how remote it is from my habitual state of mind to imagine that any one is falling in love with me.’59 Nothing could be further from the truth. On 30 March, just before Spencer declared himself, Marian had revealed in a heavy-handed joke to Cara just where her hopes were heading: ‘I had two offers last night – not of marriage, but of music – which I find it impossible to resist.’60
Once Spencer’s intentions became clear, Marian back-pedalled with the Brays to hide her humiliation. On 27 April she wrote a dishonest letter to Coventry in which she made out that Spencer’s desire to keep the friendship platonic was a joint one: ‘We have agreed that we are not in love with each other, and that there is no reason why we should not have as much of each other’s society as we like.’61 By agreeing to be friends with the man whom she wanted as her lover, Marian was ensuring that their daily intimacy continued. In time, once the pressure of the situation had eased, she hoped that the jumpy Spencer might move slowly towards her. And indeed, over the late spring, they did continue to meet regularly. More trips to Covent Garden and roof-top chats were followed, in June, by a trip to Kew to examine the flowers for signs of evolutionary adaptation.62
The Brays knew well by now that the more studiedly casual Marian’s tone when talking about a man, the more deeply she was involved with him. As keen as ever to foster a romance which might lead to an offer of marriage, they suggested inviting Spencer up to Rosehill when she was there, hoping that the bear rug under the acacia tree might do the trick. Marian’s response to the suggestion was a tangle of denied desire and defensive posturing.
I told Herbert Spencer of your invitation, Mr Bray, not mentioning that you asked him with me. He said he should like to accept it – but I think it would be better for him to go down when I am with you. We certainly could not go together, for all the world is setting us down as engaged – a most disagreeable thing if one chose to make oneself uncomfortable. ‘Tell it not in Gath’ however – that is to say, please to avoid mentioning our names together, and pray burn this note, that it may not lie on the chimney piece for general inspection.63
While she clearly loved the fact that literary London had her down as almost married, Marian was careful to feign irritation. The last thing she wanted now was for Spencer to think that she was anything but loftily disinterested in his friendship. Yet as the summer progressed it became clear that no amount of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring and tight-lipped discretion was ever going to bring Herbert Spencer to the altar. By the time he did spend a while with Marian at Rosehill in late October, the possibility of romance had long since passed.
If only Marian had realised that Spencer was never going to marry anyone – he died a bachelor at eighty-three – she would have been spared a summer of humiliation and despair. In order to avoid the painful recognition that he could not be close to anyone, Spencer rationalised his rejection of Marian on the cruel grounds that she was too ugly to marry. Cruel because not only did he give this reason to her, but also circulated it publicly. In his autobiography, published posthumously in 1904, he hinted heavily: ‘Physical beauty is a sine qua non with me; as was once unhappily proved where the intellectual traits and the emotional traits were of the highest.’64 But this was clearly rubbish, since he was on record as having rejected two other women who were perfectly pretty but who, naturally, failed in some other respect. In 1854, around the time that Marian eloped with Lewes, Spencer wrote two articles on ‘Personal Beauty’ for the Leader in which he cited examples of ugliness that are suspiciously reminiscent of Marian’s physiognomy – heavy jaw, large mouth, big nose.65 Her failure to display conventional female characteristics did not, as one might imagine, delight and liberate him, an effeminate man himself. Rather, it threatened his own precarious sense of masculinity. The timing of these nasty articles is particularly telling, appearing just as Marian was beginning a loving and fulfilling relationship with George Henry Lewes. Hating himself for not being able to respond to her love, Spencer kicked out and punished Marian instead.
The question of George Eliot’s ugliness has always embarrassed her biographers who at times seem almost unable to bear the truth. In this they are no different from many of Marian’s friends at the time whose solution was to rewrite or redraw the heavy, horsy features. Bessie Rayner Parkes, writing in 1894, typically maintained that ‘In daily life the brow, the blue eyes, and the upper part of the face had a great charm. The lower half was disproportionately long. Abundant brown hair framed a countenance which was certainly not in any sense unpleasing, noble in its general outline, and very sweet and kind in expression. Her height was good, her figure remarkably supple; at moments it had an almost serpentine grace.’66
D’Albert Durade, meanwhile, did the equivalent in paint, his portrait of Marian in 1850 showing her with neat, inoffensive features, which bore no relation to the photograph taken only a few years later. While there can be no doubt that charisma goes a long way to offsetting a big nose, there is a danger that downplaying Marian’s plainness obscures the quality of her relationships with men and other women. To be pretty was not simply a delightful bonus for the middle-class Victorian woman, but an integral part of her social and sexual status. A bewitching face could go a long way towards making a bachelor overlook a lack of fortune or even education in his prospective bride. Of course, in the circles in which Marian moved one might expect that wit, erudition and wisdom would offset the need for regular features. But Charles Hennell, John Chapman and Herbert Spencer were sufficiently men of their time to want their women to be both beautiful and accomplished. By the time she was thirty-five Marian had been obliged to watch on several occasions while pretty women like Rufa Brabant and Elisabeth Tilley claimed the men she wanted for herself.
Spencer’s rejection of Marian on the grounds of ugliness, following so soon after Chapman’s little speech on beauty at Kenilworth Castle, plunged her into a pit of self-loathing. Even at the beginning of the friendship she had been telling the Brays, ‘See what a fine thing it is to pick up people who are short-sighted enough to like one.’67 By the end of April the self-accusations had become vicious: she describes herself as ‘a hideous hag, sad and wizened’, ‘an old witch’ and even a jellyfish.68 At thirty-three she feared that she was a Frederika Bremer in the making, destined to become an ugly old bluestocking seeking intimacy in a commercial boarding-house.
Once Marian had wrapped up the July 1852 issue of the Westminster, she fled the sultry heat of London’s summer – one of the hottest for years – and headed for the seaside town of Broadstairs, where she took a cottage for two months. Her life as an independent yet respectable woman required an intricate negotiation of the social proprieties of a small provincial town. It was highly unusual for a woman to take a holiday on her own and the Chapmans felt it important that they should both escort her down to Broadstairs and see her settled. Perhaps in this way they hoped to make it clear to the landlady of Chandos Cottage that while Miss Evans might be eccentric, she was not immoral. This was the first of many occasions in which worrying about what landladies thought became a major preoccupation.
The first letter Marian wrote to Spencer from Broadstairs, on 8 July, is tentative with desire and doubt. She wants him to come and visit her, but is ruefully aware that her need does not match his.
Dear Friend
No credit to me for my virtues as a refrigerant. I owe them all to a few lumps of ice which I carried away with me from that tremendous glacier of yours. I am glad that Nemesis, lame as she is, has already made you feel a little uneasy in my absence, whether from the state of the thermometer or aught else. We will not inquire too curiously whether you long most for my society or for the sea-breezes. If you decided that I was not worth coming to see, it would only be of a piece with that generally exasperating perspicacity of yours which will not allow one to humbug you.69
So she was thrilled when Spencer booked into a local hotel on 10 July, boasting coyly in a letter to Charles Bray, ‘I am obliged to write very hurriedly, as I am not alone.’70 In between sea-shore walks and shared meals she pressed for a resolution to their ambiguous situation. Miserably cornered, Spencer had no choice but to make it clear for a second and definitive time that he was not in love. In that painful moment Marian was forced to give up the fantasy that his aloofness was a nervous prelude to deeper commitment. In the anguished hours which followed his departure she panicked at the possibility that her boldness had lost Spencer not only as a husband, but also as a friend. The thought of resuming the drudgery of life at The Strand unleavened by his companionship was bleak beyond belief. In despair she sat down and wrote, pleading to be allowed to claw back some of what she believed she had lost.
I know this letter will make you very angry with me, but wait a little, and don’t say anything to me while you are angry. I promise not to sin any more in the same way.
My ill health is caused by the hopeless wretchedness which weighs upon me. I do not say this to pain you, but because it is the simple truth which you must know in order to understand why I am obliged to seek relief.
I want to know if you can assure me that you will not forsake me, and that you will always be with me as much as you can and share your thoughts and feelings with me. If you become attached to some one else, then I must die, but until then I could gather courage to work and make life valuable, if only I had you near me. I do not ask you to sacrifice anything – I would be very good and cheerful and never annoy you. But I find it impossible to contemplate life under any other conditions . . . Those who have known me best have always said, that if ever I loved any one thoroughly my whole life must turn upon that feeling, and I find they said truly. You curse the destiny which has made the feeling concentrate itself on you – but if you will only have patience with me you shall not curse it long. You will find that I can be satisfied with very little, if I am delivered from the dread of losing it.
I suppose no woman ever before wrote such a letter as this – but I am not ashamed of it, for I am conscious that in the light of reason and true refinement I am worthy of your respect and tenderness, whatever gross men or vulgar-minded women might think of me.71
This was the last and most desperate time in her life that Marian would beg for affection. The longing of the past ten years, of loving men who loved other women, climaxed in the agony of these few paragraphs. She was prepared to settle, as she had settled before, for a love which was partial, conditional, shared. What she had not fully realised, nor would for many years, was that Spencer needed her as much as she needed him. Far from wanting to break off contact, nothing suited him more than continuing to enjoy the companionship of the cleverest woman in London without the burden of commitment. He responded to her desperate letter with a cautious offer of friendship, to which she immediately and gratefully agreed, writing this time more formally to ‘Mr Spencer’:
It would be ungenerous in me to allow you to suffer even a slight uneasiness on my account which I am able to remove . . . The fact is, all sorrows sink into insignificance before the one great sorrow – my own miserable imperfections, and any outward hap is welcome if it will only serve to rouse my energies and make me less unworthy of my better self . . .
If, as you intimated in your last letter, you feel that my friendship is of value to you for its own sake – mind on no other ground – it is yours. Let us, if you will, forget the past, except in so far as it may have brought us to trust in and feel for each other, and let us help to make life beautiful to each other as far as fate and the world will permit us. Whenever you like to come to me again, to see the golden corn before it is reaped, I can promise you such companionship as there is in me, untroubled by painful emotions.72
It is not clear whether Spencer did come down again to Broadstairs towards the end of August. Certainly he and Marian spent some time together at Rosehill in October. But from this low point of summer 1852 their lives took different paths. For while at this point it was Marian who was racked with psychosomatic headaches and the agonies of opportunities lost, it was Spencer whose life was to be taken over and destroyed by them. In January 1853 the Revd Spencer died, leaving his nephew a legacy of £500. Spencer immediately gave up The Economist and set out on his first trip to Europe. What should have been an exquisite experience turned into a flat, debilitating one. The landscape of the Rhine and the Alps failed to impress, and at Frankfurt he was laid low with toothache. When he returned to London in the autumn his general malaise combined with odd panicky pains was diagnosed as a weak heart. Whether this weakness was a literal or metaphorical one is not clear. Spencer’s symptoms seem to have been more nervous than physical. He wandered around town unable to sleep, getting progressively seedier. A few months recuperating at home in Derby set him up for a trip to Wales, where he intended to finish the book he was writing called Psychology. Symbolically, he had just completed the chapter on Feelings and was on to Reason when he suffered an emotional and physical collapse, which took the form of a ‘sensation in the head – not pain nor heat nor fulness nor tension, but simply a sensation, bearable enough but abnormal’.73 He never fully recovered, becoming a semi-invalid and a permanent hypochondriac. For the rest of his life he fussed over his pulse rate, plugged his ears when the outside world got too exciting, and dealt with insomnia by wrapping his head in a towel soaked in salt water and topped it with a ludicrous rubber cap.
It is no coincidence that around the time of this nervous collapse, Marian was becoming intimate with George Henry Lewes who was, ironically, Spencer’s best friend. As he watched Marian strike out into a sexually and emotionally fulfilling relationship, Spencer was obliged to confront the fact that there would be no similar happy ending for him. He became even more obsessed with his failure to marry, constantly initiating conversations on the subject with friends and then rejecting the proposed solutions. When one female acquaintance suggested acutely that getting married might relieve some of his neurotic symptoms, he argued: ‘I labour under the double difficulty that my choice is very limited and that I am not easy to please. Moral and intellectual beauties do not by themselves suffice to attract me; and owing to the stupidity of our educational system it is rare to find them united to a good physique. Moreover there is the pecuniary difficulty.’74
It is hard to believe that there were no beautiful, clever and good women available to marry (although perhaps there were none who wanted to marry him). Likewise, the old excuse about money no longer applied, thanks to his uncle’s legacy. Later on, as he moved into middle age, Spencer used the excuse of his work as the reason why he could not sustain a relationship. ‘Habitually before I have yet finished rejoicing over my emancipation from a work which has long played the tyrant over me, I make myself the slave of another. The truth is, I suppose, that in the absence of wife and children to care for, the carrying out of my undertakings is the one thing that makes life worth living – even though, by it, life is continually perturbed.’75
As Spencer became increasingly wedded to his work, the narcissistic tendencies which had been apparent in his affair with Marian hardened into an impenetrable armour. The rigidity which had insisted during their trip to Kew that if the flowers didn’t fit in with his theories of evolution then there must be something wrong with the flowers now extended to every part of Spencer’s life and work. He was obsessed with establishing the priority of his ideas in an area where many were moving towards the same conclusions, or, as Gordon Haight, Eliot’s first modern biographer, puts it succinctly, ‘he believed in the evolution of everything except his own theories’. He started his autobiography years before he died, sending out drafts to friends, and rewriting furiously to take account of their comments. He wanted to create a perfect version of himself, in which he stood at the centre of every important intellectual movement of the mid and late nineteenth century. For instance, he claimed to have been the first person to suggest to Marian that she should write fiction – ‘I thought I saw in her many, if not all, of the needful qualifications in high degrees’ – despite the fact that she had been playing with the idea years earlier and that it was Lewes who was to push her into action.76 Naturally, he liked to stress the fact that it was he who had first brought her together with Lewes, overlooking the fact that it was Chapman who had made the introduction.
In the circumstances it is ironic that for all Spencer’s attention to what posterity might think of him, it was Marian’s reputation rather than his which lasted. Spencer’s desperation to prove the originality of his ideas is strangely prescient. Many of them were overshadowed by those of Darwin and later by Freud so that, in the late twentieth century, it is hard to isolate anything that belongs absolutely to him save for that famous phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’. Marian, however, turned a similar interest in the relationship between the mind and the body, and the organisation of society, into work whose originality and creativity still resonate today.
But it was not only his professional image which Spencer fretted over. If anything, he was even more concerned about how people viewed his private life and, in particular, his failure to marry. During the retrospective gossip which followed Marian’s death in 1880, he was horrified to discover that there was a long-standing rumour to the effect that he had fallen in love with her during 1852 and that she had thrown him over in favour of Lewes. For a man who could not bear to be seen to need other people it would be hard to think of a more humiliating story. He thought about issuing a formal denial, but was dissuaded by sensible friends. Next he asked John Cross to put the matter right when Cross came to write his late wife’s biography. Three years later, with the Life nearing completion, Spencer again wrote to Cross and expressed his worry over the we-are-not-in-love letter of 27 April. He suggested Cross add a gloss along the lines of ‘The intimacy naturally led to rumours. It was said that Mr Spencer was in love with her. This however was not true. I have the best possible warrant for saying that his feeling did not pass the limits of friendship.’ Cross was not keen, believing that it simply stirred up matters. Spencer tried again with another wording, which again Cross rejected, suggesting a formula of his own. Spencer snapped back: ‘Much better no note at all than the one you propose.’ Cross took him at his literal word, but out of deference to his feelings deleted the ‘we are not in love’ sentence, leaving it at, ‘We have agreed that there is no reason why we should not have as much of each other’s society as we like.’ Even this would not do for Spencer, who wrote huffily to Cross on publication: ‘As the account now stands it is not only consistent with the report that I was jilted for Lewes, but tends to confirm it. Such a fact as that I was anxious to visit the Brays when she was there, and such a fact as that my name quietly drops out as a companion while Lewes’ comes in, gives colour to the statement, and there is nothing I can see to negative it. I cannot say that I have been fairly used.’77
In Spencer’s support, it should be pointed out that he could, if he had wished, have made public the two desperate Broadstairs letters, which proved conclusively that he was the jilter and not the jilted. Instead, he sealed them up, together with a few others, and instructed that they should not be opened until 1985. For a man so vain about his public image it was a generous gesture. In effect he was allowing George Eliot’s reputation as a wise, self-contained sibyl to continue at the cost of his own cherished sense of inviolability. It was the closest Herbert Spencer ever came to love.
