1852–4
THE STRAND HAD never seemed so dismal as it did on Marian’s return from Broadstairs in late August 1852. The magnificent weather of a seaside summer had given way to the thick wetness of a London autumn. Yet one more stab at love had gone wrong and there was nothing to look forward to except work, which was no longer new or exciting. The pile of review books had got higher in her absence, the contributors were as childishly demanding as ever and John Chapman’s finances seemed to get more perilous, if such a thing were possible. It was Marian’s dreary job to keep the whole precarious structure steady. It was not the editorial routine, which was necessarily frustrating, so much as the tangled business and social relationships which ran in tandem. There were famous contributors to keep sweet and would-be ones to be held at bay. Rich men had to be courted for their cash, then dissuaded from contributing long and boring articles on their hobby-horses. At times it felt as if, far from being the leading intellectual publication of the day, the Westminster Review was a kind of vanity publishing venture with Marian adjudicating between competing egos. The sky got darker, the fog thicker, the schedule more impossible. In a letter to Sara Marian described a state of mind reminiscent of those dreadful weeks at St Leonards with her dying father. ‘I have felt something like the madness which imagines that the four walls are contracting and going to crush one.’1
Just in time she decided on another break. It was a measure of Marian’s autonomy that, by this point, it was she and not John Chapman who decided when and for how long she could be spared from The Strand. With the October issue safely out, she headed north to stay with two old friends. The trip was significant because it was the last she would take as an anonymous woman. At this point her cleverness and independence made her unusual, but she was not yet notorious. In the next couple of years her life would undergo a convulsion that would leave the two people whom she was visiting – George Combe and Harriet Martineau – feeling deeply betrayed and determined not only never to see her again, but to make sure that no one else did either.
Both Combe and Martineau displayed that curious mixture of liberalism and narrowness, permissiveness and prudery which was a feature of the mid-Victorian avant-garde. Each had developed ways of understanding the material world – phrenology in the case of George Combe, Positivism and mesmerism (a variation of hypnosis) in the case of Martineau – which most people thought crackpot. Like John Chapman, both Combe and Martineau believed that to protect the integrity of their beliefs they had to be seen to lead conventionally moral lives. But unlike Chapman they more or less managed it, which is why when Marian Evans, princess of the progressive avant-garde, went off with a married man in 1854, they took it personally. Not only had she acted on the desires which they themselves found troublesome – Combe had married at forty-five a woman whose fortune bankrolled his business, while Martineau was currently making a fool of herself with a man twenty years younger – but she had given every Tory, every churchman, every pious lady tract writer, a good reason to damn the whole basket of liberal causes, from electoral reform to vegetarianism, as seditious and evil nonsense.
At this stage, though, George Combe was still delighted with Miss Evans. Examining her scalp during a visit to Rosehill in August 1851 he had come to the conclusion that she was, with the possible exception of the US abolitionist Lucretia Mott, ‘the ablest woman whom I have seen’, and paid special homage to her ‘very large brain’ and her big organ of Concentrativeness.2 During his subsequent stays at The Strand he was shrewd enough to notice that it was Marian who was responsible for the upturn in the Westminster’s reputation, and he used the language of phrenology to hint to Chapman that he should take her advice wherever possible: ‘She has certain organs large in her brain which are not so fully developed in yours, and she will judge more correctly of the influence upon other persons of what you write and do, than you will do yourself.’3
Marian arrived in Edinburgh on 5 October 1852. Although she had spent the previous month feeling that her life was going nowhere, it was a kind of comfort to remember that the last time she had been in the city, seven years before, things had been even more dismal. It was on that occasion that she had been summoned home ‘with a heavy heart’ by her father’s broken leg. Life might seem limited now, but it was far removed from the hopelessness of that dreary time. What is more, the Combes’ household in elegant Melville Street turned out to be just the place to rest, recuperate, and ‘nourish sleek optimism’.4 There were good fires and attractive views, even if her host did have a tendency to talk endlessly about himself, leaving Marian nothing to do but nod and grunt in agreement. If she seemed bored, Combe certainly didn’t notice. He was more delighted than ever with Miss Evans, noting approvingly in his diary that she was ‘thoroughly feminine, refined, and lady-like’.5
Meanwhile, Harriet Martineau, ensconced in the Lake District, was getting deafer, shouting more than ever and increasingly entranced with her own thoughts, schemes and habits. Long since absent from London and surrounded by adoring acolytes, she was isolated from the rough and tumble of intellectual debate, which would have kept her flexible, sharp and open to other ways of thinking. Those who dared to disagree with her – especially her brother James – increasingly found themselves dragged into feuds, which snaked poisonously down the years.
On 20 October Marian left Edinburgh for Martineau’s lakeside cottage at Ambleside. As usual, she had long since revised her initially harsh assessment of the veteran writer and now found the older woman ‘quite handsome from her animation and intelligence. She came behind me, put her hands round me, and kissed me in the prettiest way this evening.’6 With Martineau’s constant and much younger companion Henry Atkinson in tow, the two women walked and drove around the spectacular Windermere landscape, stopping to inspect the model cottages which were Martineau’s latest passion.
Fresh air, good scenery and the charm of being made a fuss of did Marian a deal of good. The holiday was rounded off with ten days at Rosehill, from where she announced in a letter to Bessie Rayner Parkes that she now felt ‘brave for anything that is to come after’.7 And what came after was indeed grim. Barely had Marian taken up the reins again at The Strand than the news came that Chrissey’s husband, Edward Clarke, was dead. Never robust, he had been ground down by having to support too many children and a medical practice that failed to flourish. Succumbing finally to the TB which had already killed his brother, the gentlemanly Clarke left Chrissey with six children under fifteen and an income, once everything was sold up, of £100 a year – about the same as Marian scraped by on in London.
Passive as ever, and now made helpless by grief, Chrissey invited her younger brother and sister to arrange her future as they thought best. Isaac grudgingly suggested Chrissey move back to live rent free in the house at Attleborough that had once belonged to her, before Clarke had sold it to Robert Evans to raise cash. Increasingly recognisable as Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, whose hard brand of charity had been learned from his Dodson aunts, Isaac was not prepared to do more for Chrissey than he absolutely had to. She would not be allowed to starve, but nor would she be rescued from the consequences of her disastrous marriage choice.
Marian, meanwhile, had dropped the January proofs to be at Meriden over Christmas. But there were limits, too, to what she was able to give. After only a few days cooped up with the six young Clarkes she came to the unsurprising conclusion that she would be more help back in London, ‘the dear creatures here will be a constant motive for work and economy’.8 But she had not counted on Isaac’s reaction to her failure to consult him first. The scars from the holy war had never fully healed. Isaac still deeply resented his younger sister for acting in ways which affected the internal economy of the family. Now here she was again, putting her own eccentric needs over those of the Evans clan. Maiden aunts with small legacies were expected to come home to support their widowed sisters, not to continue their self-indulgent ways in London. Furious that his wilful sister had once again evaded his control, the increasingly patriarchal Isaac shouted at her never to ask him for a favour in the future, ‘which, seeing that I never have done so,’ pointed out Marian wryly in a letter to the Brays, ‘was almost as superfluous as if I had said I would never receive a kindness from him.’9
At the beginning of February Marian was back in Warwickshire trying to decide what to do next. Crammed into the tiny Attleborough house the children had become noisy and out-of-hand. No amount of ‘romping and doll dressing’ with ‘Aunt Pollie’ was going to solve the problem of their long-term future.10 Concerned friends had suggested putting some of them in the orphanage, a reminder of the grim fate that even the most respectable of families could face in the economically volatile early 1850s. Another suggestion came from an old patient of Clarke’s who offered to fund the eldest boy’s passage to Australia. Although these were the kind of practical, unsentimental solutions which appealed to Isaac, Chrissey would not hear of splitting up the family. Still, the idea of emigrating had caught Marian’s imagination. ‘What do you think of my going to Australia with Chrissey and all her family? – to settle them and then come back?’ she asked the Brays in a letter of 11 April 1853.11 The Brays’ response is unrecorded, but the bizarre notion of George Eliot in the Antipodes came to nothing.
Although Marian was prepared to brave a three-month sea journey for the sake of her sister, she was not, however, going to give up the independent life which had been so painfully won over the last four years. The idea of going home to ‘that hideous neighbourhood amongst ignorant bigots is impossible to me’. She would rather commit suicide and ‘leave my money, perhaps more acceptable than my labour and affection’. Nor was she prepared to take responsibility for moving Chrissey out of the house while staying on herself in London. The curiously oblique explanation she offered in her letter to Cara was: ‘My health might fail and other things might happen to make her, as well as me, regret the change.’12 Was this a hint at her growing hope that she might one day live with Lewes? In the circumstances the only feasible solution was for Chrissey to carry on living in Attleborough under Isaac’s grudging protection, while Marian sent her what extra money she could manage from London.
Unfortunately, this was not likely to amount to much. The financial affairs of the Westminster Review were now in such a dire state that it was difficult to pay the contributors. Over the last few years Chapman had managed to hobble on, but by the spring of 1854 his usual tactic of borrowing money to pay off existing loans was catching up with him. His total debt was now a massive £9000. ‘The way he [Chapman] is behaving is, between ourselves, generally the prelude to bankruptcy,’ Joseph Parkes confided to his daughter Bessie.13 But this time there was a new, and saving, twist to the crisis. One of Chapman’s largest creditors, James Martineau, now saw his chance to carry out what he had been itching to do for ages: take over the godless Westminster and turn it into a platform for his particular brand of Unitarianism. But he had reckoned without the slow, cold spite of his sister Harriet. Following a savage review he had given her dreadful Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development of 1851, Harriet Martineau was looking for revenge. Saving the Westminster from bankruptcy would allow her the delightful possibility of stopping her brother from getting what he wanted. In June 1854 she lent Chapman £500 which, along with other loans, was enough to pull him out of his current hole.14 Yet again he had wriggled away from disaster.
But Marian had other reasons for wanting to move away from The Strand. Now that it was clear that Chapman would never be able to pay her a salary, she needed to work towards becoming a free-lance writer, independent of the Westminster. The first step was to find accommodation elsewhere. Although the arrangement would bring practical difficulties – for as long as she was involved in editing the Westminster there would be much to-ing and fro-ing – it was a way of flagging the fact that she had intentions, hopes and interests which lay beyond John Chapman’s tottering empire. In January 1853 she wrote to Charles Bray declaring, ‘At last I have determined to leave this house and get another home for myself.’15 Chapman, however, seems to have bribed her to stay, for by March she was telling Bray, ‘Instead of changing my street, I have changed my room only, and am now installed in Mr. Chapman’s. It is very light and pleasant, and I suppose I must be content for a few months longer.’16 But over the next few months her growing intimacy with Lewes shook her out of her apathy and compelled her to change her situation. Although the Chapmans would probably have been delighted to welcome Lewes as a nightly visitor to Miss Evans’s room, Marian did not want to conduct her new relationship under their over-interested gaze. Chapman was a notorious blabber-mouth who was bound to spread news of this intriguing situation. By the middle of October Marian was installed in rooms at 21 Cambridge Street, Hyde Park, made homey by some pictures lent by Barbara Leigh Smith. Five months earlier Lewes had left his family home and was living in a borrowed flat off Piccadilly. The two addresses were a convenient fifteen minutes apart and far enough away from The Strand to minimise the chances of bumping into any loose-tongued Westminster contributors.
Not long after the move Marian told Chapman that she also wanted to quit her editorial duties at the Review, whereupon he flew into a characteristic panic and begged her ‘to continue the present state of things until April.’17 Even after all this time, he was still incapable of managing the magazine’s most basic routine on his own. When Edward Clarke died just before Christmas 1852 Marian had left for Meriden without finishing the proofs of the January issue. As a result the magazine appeared full of careless mistakes. Marian had also had enough of trying to mediate between self-important contributors and the exasperatingly vague Chapman. At the end of 1853 she found herself caught in the middle of a particularly nasty scrap. George Combe had written an article on prison reform, maintaining that prison discipline should be based on phrenological principles. The piece was waffly, vague and not nearly good enough for the Westminster. Yet Combe was one of its main financial supporters and not to be offended. Chapman dithered, Combe got high-horsish and Marian, now semi-detached from the Review, begged Combe not to make her ‘a referee in any matters relating to Mr. Chapman, as I have nothing whatever to do with his affairs’.18 Still, she could not escape having to edit Combe’s article twice over, first as an independent pamphlet, then as a much reduced, though no less boring, article for the April issue.
Giving up editorial work at the Westminster did not mean that Marian was finally free of Chapman’s chaotic embrace. As she moved into the next phase of her working life she became even more dependent on the work he was able to put her way. In June 1853, Marian had made an arrangement with Chapman to produce two books for his new Quarterly Series. The original advertisement for the series – which promised works ‘by learned and profound thinkers, embracing the subjects of theology, philosophy, Biblical criticism, and the history of opinion’ – mentioned two forthcoming titles by ‘the translator of Strauss’s Life of Jesus’. These were a translation of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, as well as an original work, ‘The Idea of a Future Life’.19 So Marian was appalled when she learned that Chapman, scuppered by the lack of subscriptions to the series, had more or less decided not to publish either book. It was not the money which bothered her – profits were likely to be minimal – but the familiar embarrassment of the whole thing. On 2 December 1853 she wrote a stern letter to Chapman in which one senses the influence of that seasoned and tough negotiator, George Henry Lewes. Marian tells Chapman fiercely: ‘I bitterly regret that I allowed myself to be associated with your Series, but since I have done so, I am very anxious to fulfil my engagements both to you and the public.’ She explains that she is not bothered about the money, but ‘I don’t think you are sufficiently alive to the ignominy of advertising things, especially as part of a subscription series, which never appear’. She ends by pressing him for a definitive answer on Feuerbach and reminds him that their combined honours are at stake.20 In the event, Chapman was shamed into going ahead with Feuerbach, although ‘The Idea of a Future Life’ never appeared. By June 1854, and with bankruptcy looming, the Chapman family, minus Elisabeth Tilley, had moved to Blandford Square and the publishing business to King William Street. The strange community at 142 The Strand was broken up for good.
When Chapman first introduced Marian to George Henry Lewes on 6 October 1851 at Jeff’s bookshop in Piccadilly, the omens were not good.21 Marian, as always when meeting new people, was defensive and critical. Only a few months earlier Chapman had delivered the appalling news that she was too ugly to love, so instinctively she was ready to kick out at other people’s homeliness. Lewes was one of the few people in London who was demonstrably plainer than herself. He was famously ugly, with wispy light-brown hair, a straggly moustache, pitted skin, a red, wet mouth and a head that looked too large for his small body. ‘A sort of miniature Mirabeau’ was how Marian described him soon afterwards, alluding to the notoriously plain French statesman.22 Most people were much ruder. Monkeys and dogs were what usually came to mind.
Lewes and Marian already knew each other by reputation. Only a few weeks earlier Lewes had mentioned to Chapman that he liked Miss Evans’s piece on Greg’s The Creed of Christendom, which had just appeared in the Leader, the weekly magazine he co-edited. The compliment, however, was not returned. Marian was in the process of thinking carefully about which writers she wanted to use in the re-launched Westminster and Lewes was not one of them. His journalistic versatility, fuelled by the need to provide for a tribe of children, meant that his articles appeared everywhere: he once boasted that there wasn’t a periodical in London he didn’t have access to except the Quarterly. He had a journeyman’s ability to get quickly to the heart of any subject from philosophy to theatre, opera to zoology, and turn in the required number of words tailored exactly to his audience. In addition he translated plays for the stage, sometimes acted in them himself and had written a couple of novels. In an age which increasingly valued the work of the specialist, Lewes’s facility across a range of media seemed not only old-fashioned but superficial. Marian wanted the best people writing in the Westminster, and she did not consider Lewes to be up there with Mill, Froude and Carlyle. Backed by Chapman, who sneeringly referred to Lewes as ‘a bread scholar’, she used his work grudgingly and only when she absolutely had to: ‘Defective as his articles are, they are the best we can get of the kind.’23
But Lewes’s dubious reputation was built on more than his slapdash working methods. Over the past few years his name had become synonymous with a long-running sex scandal which intrigued literary London. Since 1849, and possibly well before, his wife Agnes had been conducting an affair with his friend and co-editor at the Leader, Thornton Hunt. At least four of the nine children Agnes was to bear were actually little Hunts and had their natural father’s distinctively dark skin to prove it.
Lewes, in the meantime, was rumoured to have taken comfort with many different women. The details are vague, pieced together from retrospective gossip, but one persistent story had him getting a young girl pregnant, then asking Mrs Gaskell to find a foster-mother for the child. Another garbled source, a heavy-handed roman-à-clef published as late as 1945, had him seducing a maidservant on his honeymoon and fathering a bastard.24 None of these revelations was any more shocking than those that circulated about other free-thinking couples, but the point was that Lewes made no attempt to hide who he was or what he was doing. Unlike Charles Bray and John Chapman, he did not bother to negotiate with conventional sensibilities by constructing a respectable façade. Thanks to a childhood spent partly abroad, he felt and acted like a man of the world. His dress was dandyish, his conversation knowing, his manner familiar. A letter written to a close male friend in 1853 gives the flavour of the man. He talks, nudgingly, of his friend’s ‘private adventures’, implies that his own news is too sexy to put in a letter and drops into French to describe the progress of his affair with Marian:
Of all your public doings in Labassecour I have heard. Your private adventures I hope to hear over snug cigarettes in Cork St. Profitez en, mon ami! . . .
Of news I dont know that there is any – at least not writable . . . May one ask when is Ward coming back? & Brussels answers When?
For myself I have been furiously occupied dissecting Fishes and carrying a torch into unexplored regions of Biology tant bien que mal. I must now set to work & write a play to get some money. L’amour va son train.25
Marian was too much the provincial puritan to have been impressed or titillated by Lewes when she met him at Jeff’s. In any case, her heart and mind were about to be taken over by the painful Spencer business. Lewes, by contrast, was sufficiently detached to notice Miss Evans. Over the next few weeks he made certain that he bumped into her again. It was hardly difficult. He was a close friend of Herbert Spencer’s; the Leader’s office was just over the road from The Strand; and, of course, he was interested in working for Chapman’s re-launched Westminster. In his retrospective tweaking of events Spencer maintained to Cross in 1884 that it was not until nearly a year later that Lewes started to visit Miss Evans of his own accord, without needing Spencer’s presence as an excuse. But in fact as little as six weeks after the introduction in Jeff’s Lewes seems to have been calling unchaperoned at the Westminster.
As it became increasingly clear throughout the summer of 1852 that Herbert Spencer would never be able to offer her a fulfilling relationship, Marian allowed his friend Lewes to come further and further into her awareness. It might seem strange that at the very time she was writing anguished letters to Spencer begging for his love she was contemplating a relationship with his friend. But more than any other novelist then or now, Marian Evans was able to understand the ambivalence that allows one to love two people at once: it is the dilemma that Dorothea, Gwendolen and Maggie all face. By the middle of September Marian was mentioning Lewes in her letters in a way that suggests he was becoming an integral part of her life, rather than an occasional feature. On 22 November, her thirty-third birthday, she casually tells Charles Bray how she had settled down to work in the late afternoon, ‘thinking that I had two clear hours before dinner [when] – rap at the door – Mr. Lewes – who of course sits talking till the second bell rings’.26
Spencer was hurt by this shift in Marian’s attention from himself to his friend, which is why he later became obsessed with proving to the world that she had not thrown him over for Lewes. Seeing Lewes build the kind of relationship with her which he had been unable to manage himself, he took refuge not only in psychosomatic illness but also in a nasty carping, which continued down the years. Both Marian and Lewes eventually developed the insight to understand and neutralise the effect of his behaviour on them. Marian dealt with his hypochondria by making a joke of it, while Lewes came to recognise that Spencer ‘always tells us the disagreeable things he hears or reads of us and never the agreeable things’, although he put it down to professional rather than personal jealousy.27 To be fair, this remark was made during a tense time, when Marian held Spencer responsible for leaking the truth about her authorship of Adam Bede. It is a testimony to all three players that the friendship eventually settled and endured. Spencer became a regular at the Priory, introduced the Leweses to John Cross and was Marian’s final visitor a few days before her death in 1880.
Marian was slow to let the Brays know about her changing emotional allegiances. During the first half of 1852, Lewes appears in her letters in the guise of Spencer’s shadow. Yoking Lewes to Spencer was a way for Marian to mention a man who increasingly interested her without upsetting the sensibilities of Rosehill. The Brays’ own living arrangements may have been unorthodox, and they were certainly good friends with the Thornton Hunts, but they were unlikely to be enthusiastic about Marian’s new attachment. The fact that Lewes was married, combined with his reputation as a womaniser, were exactly the factors which always made Marian’s love affairs so traumatic. Although it was years since she had taken conventional opinion into account, she still looked to the Brays, Cara especially, to be her guiding conscience. She wanted their approval of the jaunty, naughty little man and knew she was not likely to get it.
But despite herself, Marian could not resist dropping delighted hints to the Brays about her growing happiness. In March 1853 she tells Sara that the ‘genial and amusing’ Lewes ‘has quite won my liking, in spite of myself’.28 The following month she casually mentions to the Brays that ‘Lewes has been quite a pleasant friend to me lately’ – and then immediately crosses it out.29 That same month she took care to write to Cara that she had discovered that Lewes was ‘a man of heart and conscience wearing a mask of flippancy’.30 By now the two were probably lovers and it was during these quiet, dark months of early 1853 that Marian began to learn the true story behind one of London’s most talked-about men.
George Henry Lewes had been born in April 1817, the son of John Lee Lewes and Elizabeth Ashweek.31 He did not know – and never found out – that he was illegitimate. Setting an uncanny precedent, John Lee Lewes was already married, to a woman called Elizabeth Pownall, by whom he had four children. In 1811 John Lee Lewes left his first family in Liverpool to set up home with Elizabeth Ashweek in London. Together they had three boys, of whom George was the youngest.
The Lewes family was steeped in unorthodoxy. John Lee Lewes’s father had been the middlingly well-known comic actor Charles Lee Lewes, who managed to get married three times. Something less than a gentleman and thoroughly provocative in his beliefs, Lewes grandpère loved to shock. During a run in Aberdeen of an adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe, he clashed pens with a local Methodist minister who had denounced him from the pulpit. Other literary productions included those typical eighteenth-century forms – memoirs, sketches, satirical bits and pieces, all thoroughly knock-about in tone. John Lee Lewes followed his father into print, but anaemically. He edited the great man’s work as well as producing some plodding patriotic poetry. Shortly before George’s birth he disappeared to Bermuda, never to be seen again. Elizabeth told the boys their father was dead.
The next five or so years must have been bleak for the family. It is unclear how Elizabeth Lewes, as she styled herself, survived in something approaching respectability. It was probably desperation which drove her in November 1823 to marry Captain John Willim. A former captain in the East India Company, the forty-six-year-old Willim was now retired on half-pay. While this was better than nothing, it was hardly a fortune. In any case, Willim and his wife got on badly, and the boys seem to have regarded him as a tetchy nuisance. It is quite possible that for periods of the marriage the Captain actually lived apart from his ready-made and probably unwanted family. Even towards the end of his life he was causing trouble, refusing to let anyone into the London home, which he was again sharing with his wife. Lewes, by now the only surviving son, knew enough of the Captain to take his mother’s complaints seriously. ‘I told her to tell him that unless he could treat her better she should come and live with us,’ he recorded in his journal.32 When Willim died in 1864 Lewes dutifully sorted out the estate but confided to the publisher Blackwood that he was hardly sad about the removal of the man who had made his mother’s life a misery.33
So Lewes’s childhood was edgy and restless. The family circled southern England and northern France looking for somewhere cheap to live. From Stroud in Gloucestershire they moved to Southampton and by 1827 they were in Plymouth, staying with Mrs Willim’s sister. The following year the Lewes–Willim household was on the move again, this time crossing the channel for a stay in Nantes. Living economically and anonymously in France was a popular option for impoverished middle-class British families who found it impossible to keep up standards at home. It was now that George began to learn the French language and manners which were to become such a remarked-on part of his adult persona. When the American feminist Margaret Fuller met him at the Carlyles’ she reported that he was a ‘witty, French, flippant sort of man’.34 Henry James recalled another dinner party, in the last year of Lewes’s life, where the little man told a string of funny stories in colloquial French. James was unusual in approving of Lewes’s gay cosmopolitanism.35 Most commentators followed Margaret Fuller in inferring that there was a ‘sparkling shallowness’ in Lewes’s ability to straddle cultures and sensibilities. This suspicion was part of a more general xenophobia, which looked upon foreigners, Frenchmen particularly, as upstarts and bounders. It was a prejudice that was to dog Lewes all his life.
Yet Lewes’s unusual familiarity with French culture – deepened when the family moved the following year to the Channel Isles – had more important results than an ability to wave his hands around and tell risqué jokes. As Marian had begun to discover, beneath the jauntiness was a man of passionate intellectual engagement. He may have written for money – and who did not? – but he also had a genuine desire to introduce his English readers to the best of French thought, writing and philosophy. Without George Henry Lewes, the work of Auguste Comte and George Sand would have taken far longer to become known outside a tiny privileged circle.
What made this achievement so extraordinary was that Lewes’s formal education had been patchy and short. Returning to England from Jersey, he attended Dr Charles Parr Burney’s seminary in Greenwich, which had a fine academic reputation, but was as cold and cruel as any attended by English boys during this period before public school reform. There was no money for university and so, just like all the other men in Marian’s life, Lewes left school before he was sixteen and set to work, reading voraciously in his spare time. Unencumbered by the traditional syllabus, the young Lewes had the freedom to roam through the ‘new’ subjects, which were currently transforming the intellectual landscape. He believed that the living languages were more important than dead ones, science more relevant than the classics, literature more revealing than history. In only a few years the curricula at the great public schools and ancient universities would be reformed in line with this kind of thinking, but in the 1830s it was young men from humble backgrounds like Lewes, Bray, Spencer and even Chapman who built and disseminated the knowledge that would transform the way people understood their world. Mostly Lewes delighted in his intellectual modernism, but occasionally the taunts of Oxford men like Froude hit home. Once Lewes was freed from the need to write for the market by Marian’s growing wealth, his lingering sense of insecurity meant that he was always in danger of weighing down his light, pliable text with too many footnotes.
After a stint in a lawyer’s office Lewes moved to a Russian merchant’s before deciding that he wanted to be a doctor. He attended lectures, probably at University College, but was turned off clinical work because he could not bear to witness the patients’ pain. This might sound like a face-saving formula for a young man who lacked the ability or sticking-power to finish a long training, but in Lewes’s case it may have been true. Certainly, he remained fascinated by physiology all his life. In the 1860s he settled down to concentrate his work on the connection between the mind and the body, puzzling away at those areas from which psychoanalysis would emerge at the end of the century. The result was his monumental book Problems of Life and Mind, which Marian completed from his notes after his death.
Unlike Marian, Lewes had no orthodoxy from which to rebel, no belief system against which to struggle. The mid-Victorian story of agonised doubt, Orders abandoned, and fellowships discarded had no place in his life. His rackety, atheistic upbringing had inclined him from the start to the new rational ideas which were coming off the Continent. As a nineteen-year-old it was quite natural for him to gravitate to a group of ‘students’ which met in Red Lion Square ‘whose sole object was the amiable collision of contending views, on subjects which, at one time or another, perplex and stimulate all reflecting minds’.36 One of the members, a Jewish watchmaker named Cohn, introduced Lewes to the ideas of Spinoza, whose work was almost unknown in Britain. With characteristic enthusiasm, Lewes set about translating Spinoza’s Ethics from the Latin and with equally characteristic impatience he gave it up. But he never abandoned his interest in the philosopher, writing an article on him for the Westminster in May 1843, at around the time when Marian started translating an unspecified text of Spinoza’s in an attempt to distract herself from the stormy aftermath of the Brabant affair. This was just one of the uncanny coincidences in their early lives which, in knowing hindsight, seem to have made it inevitable that they would be drawn together in early middle age. As Marian and Lewes moved closer during 1852 and 1853 they surely talked about this outcast philosopher from two centuries before who had played such an important part in both their intellectual lives. Spinoza had called upon man to dismantle the elaborate frameworks through which he viewed the world and to accept things clear-sightedly as they are. This meant giving up the fantasy of a Divine presence and concentrating on smaller, closer truths. For instance, the philosopher suggested that man must author his own morality, using healthy self-regard as the foundation for loving others. Feuerbach had developed these ideas in The Essence of Christianity, where Marian, naturally, would have spotted them during her work on its translation. Lewes, in the meantime, found himself in sympathy with Spinoza’s insistence that the mind constructs its own meaning and was to develop this point over five volumes in Problems of Life and Mind.
Having abandoned medicine, Lewes decided with characteristic nerve to become a ‘philosopher and poet’.37 Given his unorthodox background and constitutional irreverence, it was inevitable that he would be drawn towards the raggle-taggle end of literary society. And in the context of the 1830s that meant becoming a member of the circle which surrounded the bohemian poet Leigh Hunt. Hunt, by now in his fifties, had been a member of the Byron–Shelley set, imbibing with them a kind of romantic communism, which he tried to live out even in the depths of Chelsea. He affected a saintly innocence, which concealed a cunning, pragmatic side. Charles Dickens quickly got the measure of the man, caricaturing him in Bleak House as Harold Skimpole, a guileful romantic poet who declares himself too daft to understand the workings of the world, but canny enough to accept the gift of a sovereign. Leigh Hunt’s chief attraction for Lewes was that he had been an intimate of Shelley’s. For Lewes, like every other young man of restless disposition and romantic spirit, worshipped the poet. To ‘right-minded’ people ‘Shelley’ was a word to be whispered quietly, a dark synonym for the worst kind of atheistic loose-living. But to Lewes and his like the man was a visionary who preached a life of absolute integrity. ‘If one quality might be supposed to distinguish him preeminently,’ he declared in an early essay in the Westminster in 1840, ‘it was that highest of all qualities – truthfulness, an unyielding worship of truth.’38
Ostensibly Lewes wanted to get close to Hunt because he knew the silly grand old man had contacts, memories and papers which would help in his cherished scheme of writing a biography of Shelley. But he was also shrewd enough to have spotted that Hunt had gathered around himself an interesting group of young men who might prove useful. Lewes cultivated them nakedly. He wrote to one of them, the artist William Bell Scott, describing himself as ‘a student living a quiet life, but have a great gusto for intellectual acquaintance’.39 Scott agreed to be his friend and his later recollections of Lewes are the only ones we have from this time. According to Scott, young Lewes was ‘an exuberant but not very reliable or exact talker, a promising man of parts, a mixture of the man of the world and the boy’.40 He was also, Scott hinted, sexually promiscuous. Certainly, Lewes’s letters from this time suggest a likeable, cocky, restless young man, desperate to get himself noticed by all the right people – especially female ones. From Germany, where he stayed for nine months in 1838 to learn the language, literature and philosophy, he trumpeted to Leigh Hunt, ‘I am intimate here with a great many of the first families and am considerably petted, especially by my best friends ever, the ladies.’41
Lewes was too clever not to marry well. On his return from Germany he met Agnes Jervis, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Swynfen Jervis, a Radical MP for Bridport in Dorset. Jervis was a fussy, grubby little man with a genuine love of literature and the classics. Lewes, now armed with fluent German, may have been been employed to tutor Agnes’s brothers at Darlaston Hall, the family’s house near Stoke-on-Trent. Alternatively, he may have been working as Jervis’s secretary. Another theory has him meeting Agnes in London through the Hunt circle. In light of the way the marriage turned out, there was later gossip about Lewes eloping with the under-age Agnes, pursued by her infuriated father. But in fact Jervis was far from being a heavy-handed Victorian papa. A devotee of Godwin and Shelley, he shared with his future son-in-law the view that emotional attachments could not be trammelled by legal forms. If the young couple were in love, he was certainly not going to interfere. He gave written permission for Agnes to marry and on 18 February 1841 stood witness at her wedding to the twenty-three-year-old George Henry Lewes.
Nor was Agnes the unwitting victim of two men’s libidinous conniving. Well educated and clever, she was clear-eyed about her own future. All the evidence suggests that, young as she was, Agnes understood and approved of what she was going into. Throughout her long life – she died in 1902 – she never once complained about Lewes or begrudged his relationship with Marian. True, she was careless and demanding about money, expecting her husband to support her tribe of children by another man, but she never gave the slightest suggestion that she considered herself the victim of the piece.
But in 1841 these marital post-mortems were a long way off. Agnes was a strikingly pretty girl and Lewes, everyone agreed, was a lucky man. W. B. Scott described Agnes as ‘one of the loveliest creatures in the world’, while Jane Carlyle, who along with her husband took a strangely proprietorial interest in the Leweses’ marriage, called her a ‘charming little wife’.42 Agnes was clever, too, a good enough linguist to take on some translating work to boost their meagre funds. Despite being the great-niece of an earl, Agnes does not seem to have brought much of a dowry with her and the young couple were obliged to live in a series of rooms in Kensington, more often than not with his mother. Still, they were happy. Thomas Carlyle remembered how ‘They used to come down of an evening to us [in Chelsea] through the lanes from Kensington, and were as merry as two birds’.43 There may have been some casual infidelity on Lewes’s part, but nothing serious. In time, four baby boys appeared: Charles Lee (1842), Thornton Arnott (1844) (named after Hunt), Herbert Arthur (1846) and St Vincent Arthy (1848).
Domestic happiness did not so much mellow Lewes as make him more determined to succeed. While his pushiness annoyed some, others were charmed in spite of themselves. Macvey Napier, editor of the stuffily prestigious Edinburgh Review, dismissed him as a ‘coxcomb’ although the chilly John Stuart Mill, still influential at the Westminster, put up a defence for the young man on the grounds that ‘he is confident but not at all conceited, for he will bear to be told anything however unflattering about what he writes’.44 Napier, however, took a lot of convincing and it was not until October 1843 that he accepted one of the articles with which Lewes had been pestering him for the last three years. Mill, however, made sure that his protégé’s pieces appeared regularly in the Westminster, including the article on Shelley, all that remained of the original project of publishing a biography of the great man. He also gave Lewes detailed notes on articles that were intended for publication elsewhere. Whenever he wrote about his favourite subject of German philosophy Lewes had a habit of trying to out-Carlyle Carlyle, slipping into the ranting, rhetorical style that had burst into print in Sartor Resartus. Mill sensibly and gently steered Lewes towards a more authentic voice for the pieces he was now contributing regularly to the British and Foreign Review, the Foreign Quarterly Review and the Monthly Magazine.
In 1845–6 snide comments about Lewes’s showy versatility escalated with the publication of his Biographical History of Philosophy. Aimed at the layman, the history consisted of four little volumes, tracing the development of Western philosophy from the Greeks to Auguste Comte. Lewes, undeniably biased, emphasised the contribution of empiricists like Aristotle, Locke and Hume over the metaphysicians Plato, Descartes and Leibnitz. He saw philosophy culminating in the near-contemporary work of Auguste Comte, whom he designated ‘the Bacon of the nineteenth century’ and on whom he would write in more detail later. Academic critics sneered at the way the Biographical History cantered through the centuries on a sightseeing tour of esoteric thought. None the less, its brisk, clear tone made it a best-seller among the people for whom it was intended and even those for whom it was not. In 1853 Marian reported proudly to Sara that Lewes had visited Cambridge and discovered ‘a knot of devotees there who make his history of Philosophy a private text-book’.45 As late as the 1930s the book was still popular among London University students who used it as a crib.46
During the first nine years of the marriage domestic happiness seems to have fuelled Lewes’s astonishing productivity. But by 1849 it was becoming clear that growing disillusionment lay behind his increasingly hectic and fragmented schedule. The roots of the distress went back to the free-living culture in which the marriage had been contracted. Right from the start, Lewes and Agnes had agreed that monogamy was an unnatural obligation and one which, in all conscience, they could not follow. As rational free-thinkers they gave each other permission to follow their sexual desire wherever it might lead. But what neither had ever considered was what would happen if one of them fell in love with someone else.
Thornton Hunt was Leigh Hunt’s eldest son and had known Lewes from before his marriage. The two young men had knocked around London together, edited a magazine and sent each other crude, slangy letters which were not as funny as they thought. Hunt took after his father, being careless, grasping and a free-thinker. Inspired not only by Shelley, but also by the French socialist Fourier, Hunt and his wife Kate were enthused by the idea of communal living. Together with two other couples – Hunt’s sister, who was conveniently married to Kate’s brother, and the painter Samuel Laurence who was married to Kate’s cousin – they set up home together in Bayswater. In addition they were joined by some single women, probably relatives. Officially, the inhabitants of the house in Queen’s Road were pooling material resources. In time, it became apparent that they were sharing sexual partners too.
Despite much retrospective gossip, it is fairly clear that Agnes and Lewes never lived in Queen’s Road, although they were frequent visitors during the time when the ‘phalanstery’ was at its most notorious. Sly references to the community pop up again and again in disguised – and distorted – recollections of the period, often written decades later. Eliza Lynn, speaking through the male narrator of her autobiographical novel Christopher Kirkland, remembered how, arriving as a youngster in London, ‘I fell in with that notorious group of Free-lovers, whose ultimate transaction was the most notable example of matrimony void of contract of our day.’
Exactly what Lynn meant by this is not clear. Much of the gossip surrounding the community in Queen’s Road was fuelled by the fantasies of fascinated onlookers. Were the Hunts engaged in wife-swapping? And could that perhaps, by extension, include group sex? In actual fact, the Hunts’ domestic arrangements seem to have involved nothing more titillating than an agreement that they need not be faithful to one another. Although Lynn was keen to point out that Lewes was ‘the most pronounced Free-lover of the group, and openly took for himself the liberty he expressly sanctioned in his wife’, there is no suggestion that Lewes completed the symmetry by becoming sexually involved with Kate Hunt.47 Instead, he seems to have confined himself to short-term liaisons far beyond the confines of the commune.
The only firm bit of evidence we have specifically about the emerging relationship between Hunt and Agnes is a pencil sketch done by the novelist Thackeray in 1848. It shows Agnes sitting at the piano with Lewes standing by her, either singing or ready to turn the pages. A few feet behind, watching them intently, is Thornton Hunt. He is more lightly sketched than the other figures, but his presence dominates the group.48 By now it was clear that Thornton Hunt had become a ghostly third party in the Leweses’ marriage.
The situation was not helped by the fact that Lewes had never given up his bachelor habit of spending a great deal of time on the Continent, gathering research for his articles and books. In 1842, armed with letters of introduction from J. S. Mill, he went to Paris to seek out Comte, de Tocqueville and Michelet. Three years later he was in Berlin, looking for Friedrich Schelling, August Boeckh and Ludwig Tieck. In 1846 he returned to Paris to force an introduction to George Sand, the scandalous novelist whom he admired most in the world and about whom he wrote with passionate conviction. It was, coincidentally, just at this time that Marian Evans was having to defend her admiration for George Sand to a disapproving Sara Hennell.
Even back home in Britain Lewes could not sit still. At the beginning of 1849 he lectured at the Liverpool Mechanics Institute on the history of philosophy, before moving on to Manchester where he not only reprised the lectures but also appeared at the theatre as Shylock in the The Merchant of Venice. He found time, too, to take the leading role in his own play, The Noble Heart. Lewes had greasepaint in his blood and had always toyed with the idea of a stage career. He had spent the 1840s performing in various companies, including Dickens’s celebrated amateur troupe. But the experience of playing Shylock again late in 1849, this time in Edinburgh, finally convinced him that he was never going to succeed as a professional actor. His bright sparkle and facile wit might dominate any drawing-room, but on a cavernous stage his small body and light voice were easily swamped. From now on Lewes confined himself to writing for and about the theatre. Under the name of ‘Slingsby Lawrence’ he continued to translate so-so French farces for money. More important, he became a theatre critic in the form of ‘Vivian’, the loud, louche bachelor-ish persona which he adopted for his review work at the Leader.
It is impossible to know whether Lewes’s continual absences were the cause or the result of the marriage breakdown. Certainly his habit of raving to Agnes about the beautiful women whom he had met on the road cannot have helped. Either way, by April 1849 sharp-eyed Jane Carlyle had noticed a definite change in Agnes towards her husband. ‘I used to think these Leweses a perfect pair of love-birds, always cuddling together on the same perch – to speak figuratively,’ she told her cousin in a letter, ‘but the female love-bird appears to have hopped off to some distance and to be now taking a somewhat critical view of her little shaggy mate!’49 We cannot know, either, why Hunt appealed to Agnes. He was not as funny or as clever as Lewes and he was almost as ugly. Perhaps it simply came down to the fact that he was there. Only three months later Agnes became pregnant by her lover. Edmund Alfred was born on 16 April 1850, just a fortnight after the first issue of the Leader, co-edited by Hunt and Lewes, appeared.
Although Lewes had sanctioned Agnes’s affair with Thornton on condition that no child was born from the liaison, he still took the fateful step of registering the child as his own. As the law stood, by giving Hunt’s child his name Lewes was condoning Agnes’s adultery and relinquishing the right to sue at any point for divorce. By this one administrative act he would condemn Marian Evans to a life as a sexual and social outcast. Although it would be eighteen months before he would meet her, the puzzle remains as to why at the age of thirty-three he closed off so many options for his future life. A clue may lie in the fact that only two weeks previously his youngest son St Vincent Arthy had died of whooping cough. In the midst of despair it may have been that the joy of a new child, even another man’s, went some of the way towards filling the void. Then again, the Leader had just been launched after months of agonised fund-raising, and it might have seemed pointlessly destructive to create tension between the two co-editors at their moment of triumph. But perhaps, after all, the real explanation is that, despite the façade of moral flippancy which offended so many, Lewes was a man of integrity. Having agreed with Agnes on the rules of their relationship, he was not about go back on them just because his pride had been hurt. He accepted that this situation, publicly humiliating though it might be, was the result of an agreement into which he had entered willingly.
Agnes’s feelings for Hunt turned out to be deep and lasting. Eighteen months later, on 21 October 1851, she gave birth to another of his children, this time a girl called Rose Agnes. By now Lewes ceased to think of himself as her husband and had moved out of Bedford Place. Throughout the upheaval Thornton Hunt remained his usual complacent self. Around this time he intoned sententiously in the Leader that ‘Human beings are born with passions; you will not discipline those passions by ignoring them’ and continued to argue for a reform of the marriage and divorce laws.50 True to his word, Hunt generously went on sleeping with his wife right through his affair with Agnes. Kate Hunt had ten children in all, two of them born within weeks of two produced by Agnes. Hunt’s liaison with Agnes produced another two babies and continued at least until 1857, when Mildred Jane Lewes was born.
No matter how amicable their feelings for one another and how rational their personal choices, it was inevitable that the Lewes–Hunt friendship would eventually buckle under the strain. For a time the excitement of producing a new and highly regarded weekly magazine carried them through their differences. Their responsibilities, in any case, were distinct: Hunt was in charge of the political coverage, Lewes the arts and cultural side. But over the following months odd hints and nudges in the magazine suggest that Lewes was finding it increasingly hard to work alongside the man who was publicly cuckolding him. Shortly after the birth of Agnes’s daughter Ethel Isabel in October 1853 Lewes used his Vivian persona to reveal his unhappy situation. Reviewing a farce called How to Make Home Happy, he heavy-handedly informed his readers, ‘As I have no home, and that home is not happy, I really stand in need of [the author’s] secret.’51
But on this occasion the normally nimble Vivian was lagging behind events. By the time he made the remark his alter ego Lewes had already moved out of the family home and was well into his relationship with Marian Evans, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. At first glance it might not seem clear why this affair should last any longer than the countless others Lewes had already enjoyed: this, indeed, was the substance of the Brays’ objections to him as a partner for Marian. But at thirty-five, homeless and alone, Lewes had had enough of the free love that had brought him to what he later called this ‘dreary, wasted period of my life’.52 Despair had burned away his ideological certainties and prepared him to try something, anything, to bring stability into his life.
Whether he was always faithful to Marian is not clear. Their odd situation meant that throughout most of their life together he continued to receive invitations, while she did not. In effect, this left him free to play the merry bachelor, sauntering around clubland, turning up at the theatre, attending dinner parties. But by then his careful pose as a ladies’ man was just that, a bit of play-acting. He might flirt and tell risqué stories in French, but mostly he came home to her as soon as he could. There is a story that after Lewes’s death Marian discovered from reading his papers that he had been unfaithful to her. According to this account her hurt and anger turned to loathing, and shortly afterwards she accepted John Cross’s unlikely proposal.53 Sober-minded biographers have been quick to point out that the evidence is malign and slight. Yet, it is hard to believe that a man who from his earliest adult years had been a parallel lover should, merely by an effort of will, change himself into an uncompromising monogamist.
But the possibility of Lewes’s occasional infidelity should not be taken as a comment on the quality of his love for Marian. In a brief journal entry of January 1859 he recalled with great tenderness the moment when they were first introduced: ‘to know her was to love her, and since then my life has been a new birth.’54 Although he had always been sexually involved with women, Lewes’s interest in them extended far beyond their bodies. He liked clever women. Indeed, he had married one. His articles on female novelists are, save for a few stray conventionalities, full of admiration for their particular skills and sensibilities. At a time when many thought Charlotte Brontë’s work scandalous, he wrote publicly and privately of his admiration for her. Back in the late 1840s he had published two bad novels and was quick to spot when others, whatever their sex, could do things which he could not. It was he, not Spencer, who first suggested that Marian should write fiction and he was characteristically generous when she succeeded. He recognised that she was cleverer and more talented than he, and never felt the need to punish her for it. As for the fact that Marian was plain – well, he had already married a pretty girl and it had not brought him happiness.
Marian, for her part, responded to Lewes’s breadth of intellect. Initially she had assumed that his versatility was a cynical ploy to exploit the periodical market, but gradually she came to realise that his interest in these subjects – and in the many more that would follow – was genuine and, when given an opportunity, deep. As for his womanising, she had several times been drawn to men who were polygamists. One explanation might be that she felt that she did not deserve a man of her own and so continually found herself forced to share. But another possibility was that these men – Bray, Chapman, even Brabant and now Lewes – were unusual in being able to relate to women in an easy, intimate way. As gender codes formalised during the first decades of Victoria’s reign, men and women found themselves leading increasingly segregated lives. Marian Evans, unusual in spending her working life among men, was drawn to partners who could match her ability to transcend limited ideas about what it meant to be a man or a woman.
As the uncanny similarities between Lewes’s intellectual history and her own became clear during the winter of 1852–3, Marian must have felt as if she had found her soulmate. Her family history, in particular her abbreviated relationship with her mother, left her always hungry for that rapt merging. At first she found it with Isaac, and later in her intense friendships with Maria Lewis and Sara Hennell. Her early relationships with men outside the family were likewise marked by this intensity: losing Chapman and Spencer had sent her into a numb slump from which only this new attachment roused her. But with Lewes she finally found a man who was able to give her the kind of reassurance, attention, support – in fact, the mothering – which she craved. Far from frustrating her, their isolated life provided the exclusivity and intensity which she desired so badly and which had evaded her for so long. When she talked of herself and Lewes as ‘Siamese twins’, it was with pride and complacency in her voice.
There were sufficient contrasts, too, in Marian’s and Lewes’s backgrounds to ensure that tedium did not set in. Friends noticed how Marian listened with rapt attention to Lewes’s funny, unlikely tales of theatrical life. Tom Trollope, a close friend of both, suggested: ‘It must have offered so piquant a contrast with the middle-class surroundings of her early life.’55 Lewes’s sparkling gaiety had a well-attested capacity to enchant those who found it hard to be lighthearted. The solemn Herbert Spencer described Lewes as ‘full of various anecdote; and an admirable mimic; it was impossible to be dull in his company’.56 Even Eliza Lynn, who bore Lewes and Eliot a strange, pointless grudge, acknowledged that ‘wherever he went there was a patch of intellectual sunshine in the room’.57 Now Marian Evans, that intense and serious woman, had also fallen under the spell of the man who would famously be described as ‘the mercurial little showman’.
By the summer of 1853 Lewes was, for those in the know, a highly visible fixture in Marian’s life. Coventry still got the coded version, but nevertheless it is possible to work out from Marian’s letters to Rosehill that Lewes visited her during her six-week holiday on the south coast. Marian’s mood in St Leonards could not have been more different from the one in Broadstairs the previous year. On that earlier occasion Herbert Spencer had been a reluctant and chilly visitor, bringing final confirmation of his lack of sexual feeling for her. Her letters to him had been beseeching, to Coventry watchful and resigned. But twelve months on there has been a transformation. Her happiness spills out of her letters to the Brays. There are the usual little hints and nudges that Lewes has come down from town to see her. But the main evidence comes in her warm descriptions of her surroundings. From her cottage at St Leonards she describes ‘a vast expanse of sea and sky for my only view . . . The bright weather and genial air – so different from what I have had for a year before – make me feel as happy and stupid as a well-conditioned cow. I sit looking at the sea and the sleepy ships with a purely animal bien-être.’58
Away from London’s prying eyes and blessed with weather that was almost Continental, it was quite possibly now that Marian and Lewes began to discuss the possibility that one day they might live together. It would be hard to overestimate the seriousness of this decision. The Fallen Woman was a figure which haunted the mid-Victorian imagination. Not a prostitute exactly, she was conceived as a woman who had allowed herself to become sexually intimate with a man who could not or would not marry her. Cast out from society, her only way of living was quietly and anonymously. Either she could become the man’s common-law wife, take his name, and hope that no one found out about the true nature of her situation. Or she could move to a new neighbourhood and start again, claiming either to be a widow (if there was a child) or else a spinster of the parish. But none of these options was open to Marian. She and Lewes needed to live in London for their work, and they were too notorious to be able simply to disappear to a new part of town. If they decided to cohabit, the price they would pay would be utter notoriety and the effective ending of any public life for Marian.
For this reason it made sense to have a trial run abroad where they – and their status – were either not known or not bothered about. Germany was an obvious destination, since Marian had already translated two of its most important theological works and Lewes was preparing a biography of its greatest intellectual figure, Goethe. In addition, Germany had the practical advantage of being cheap – an important consideration, as Lewes would still be responsible for supporting Agnes and her family financially.
Viewed retrospectively, it looks as if Marian and G. H. Lewes were destined to be together. But such a happy ending was hardly certain as they lived through these first eighteen months of their relationship. Although he was separated from his wife, Lewes did not yet consider the arrangement permanent. Indeed, it was not until the autumn of 1854 that it seems to have become quite clear that Agnes did not want him back. In a letter to Charles Bray from Weimar Marian wrote mysteriously, ‘Circumstances, with which I am not concerned, and which have arisen since . . . [Mr Lewes] left England [my italics], have led him to determine on a separation from Mrs Lewes.’59 We do not know what these circumstances were, nor why their timing was so significant. But it is a shock to realise that it was only at this late stage that Marian considered herself able to make permanent plans to be with Lewes.
Although it would always be crucially important to Marian’s self-image that she had not carried off another woman’s husband, this odd letter to Bray makes it clear that when she left for Germany Lewes did not yet know if he would at some point return to his wife. Far from being an informal honeymoon to confirm the new ‘marriage’, this Continental holiday appears more in the light of a trial cohabitation. The fact that it went well pushed Lewes into making a final and decisive break from his wife. Although in the years that followed Agnes would never accuse Marian of breaking up her marriage, there would be plenty who would do just that. Marian Evans became known not just as the woman who lived with a man without being his wife, but as one who took another woman’s husband.
Given that Lewes did not make a final commitment to the relationship until they were already in Weimar, Marian’s decision to travel with him to Germany was extremely brave. Agnes might change her mind and want Lewes back, or the relationship might simply run its course. While Marian did not doubt Lewes’s sincerity, she knew that those who had her best interests at heart worried that he would tire of her as he had of so many before. Since the holy war she had learned to live with the censure of conventional society, but it was one thing to do so with the man she loved beside her and quite another to live the rest of her life as a jilted, untouchable woman. Once the news was out that she had spent the summer living as Lewes’s ‘wife’, she would never be allowed to return to her status as an unusual but respectable woman. ‘Spent Christmas Day alone at Cambridge St,’ she wrote in her journal in December 1853,60 the only entry from this time to survive Cross’s savage pruning. It was a glimpse of what life might be like if the coming gamble did not pay off.
During the months when Marian was deciding whether to risk making her relationship with Lewes public she was sustained by her work on Feuerbach, which Chapman was finally committed to publishing. Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity) (1841) was an attempt to salvage the spirit of Christianity in an intellectual landscape for ever changed by Strauss. If the Bible was no longer a literal account of faith, then what was left? Feuerbach suggested that religion was a psychological necessity for man, who projected the best of himself upon God and then proceeded to worship his own magnificence. Far from resulting in an arid solipsism, Feuerbach’s Christianity was a warm and generous humanism, which saw acts of love between men as the building blocks of faith: ‘Love is God himself, and apart from it there is no God’.61 Most relevantly for Marian, Feuerbach included sexual love in his definition of the sacred. What mattered was not the legal forms which contained that love, but the quality of the attachment. According to Feuerbach the only ‘religious’ marriage was one which was ‘spontaneously concluded, spontaneously willed, self-sufficing.’ A marriage ‘the bond of which is merely an external restriction . . . is not a true marriage, and therefore not a truly moral marriage.’62 It was the clearest theological justification Marian would find for her coming decision to live with Lewes.
Marian followed the same system with Feuerbach as she had used with Strauss. As soon as she had finished a passage she sent it to Sara in Coventry, who checked her work against the original. The process was less painful this time, partly because the German was easier and partly because she was in greater sympathy with Feuerbach than she had been with Strauss. This time there were no letters about her being ‘Feuerbach-sick’. The translation was published in mid-July and for the first and only time in her career she allowed her real name ‘Marian Evans’ to appear on the flyleaf. In this way she publicly identified the moral basis of the extraordinary step she was about to take of starting her own ‘marriage’ to G. H. Lewes.
There were other less esoteric sources to which Marian turned in an attempt to find justification for the pandemonium she was about to create. On 10 July she wrote to Sara to prepare her for her departure, declaring, ‘I shall soon send you a good bye, for I am preparing to go to “Labassecour”.’63 Labassecour was Charlotte Brontë’s name for Brussels, the country to which Lucy Snowe travels in Villette in an attempt to find a richer, more authentic life. She also finds Paul Emanuel, the difficult and unsuitable man with whom she falls in love. The unconventional passion of Brontë’s third book was far more to Marian’s taste than Jane Eyre, which she had read in 1847 during the ghastly holiday at St Leonards. In Villette, equally admired by Lewes, Marian found the endorsement she had been looking for. She would have been even more intrigued to learn that Lucy Snowe’s highly charged relationship with M. Emanuel was based on Brontë’s own love for a married man, her employer Constantin Heger.
As the time approached when they would have to reach a decision about whether to make the relationship public or abandon it as impossible, both Marian’s and Lewes’s health gave way. The strain of keeping her intentions secret from Cara and Sara, not to mention the prospect of losing their friendship, brought Marian the usual cycle of nervous and physical symptoms. In a letter written to Sara she touched directly on the isolation she was feeling and the even greater isolation which she feared was to come: ‘I am terribly out of spirits just now and the pleasantest thought I have is that whatever I may feel affects no one else – happens in a little “island cut off from other lands”.’64 These remarks rang warning bells with Sara, who thought she sensed a return to the intense morbidity of the Geneva letters. She alerted her sister, who immediately wrote to Marian asking how on earth she could consider herself an island when she had so many good friends. In replying carefully to Cara, Marian moved from her own circumstances to a consideration of the general human condition in a way which prefigures the wise narrator of her novels.
When I spoke of myself as an island, I did not mean that I was so exceptionally. We are all islands . . . and this seclusion is sometimes the most intensely felt at the very moment your friend is caressing you or consoling you. But this gradually becomes a source of satisfaction instead of repining. When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business – that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time. But we begin at last to understand that these things are important only to one’s own consciousness, which is but as a globule of dew on a rose-leaf that at mid-day there will be no trace of. This is no high-flown sentimentality, but a simple reflection which I find useful to me every day.65
Lewes was in an even worse state. In April he had collapsed with dizziness, headaches and ringing in the ears. It might seem as if he had less to lose than Marian, having no good name to impugn. None the less, it was a huge step for him to separate publicly from Agnes and the children whom he loved. The responsibility of providing for them would not stop and it was hard to see how he could afford to set up a separate home with a new partner. And careless though he often was about these things, he was aware that he was asking Marian to give up a great deal by coming with him to Germany. At some point they would be obliged to return to London and face the fact that she was now a social exile. If his feelings for her faded after a year or two then he would be forced to bear the hideous knowledge that the world held him responsible for ruining the reputation of London’s cleverest woman. Under the strain of these considerations, Lewes eventually ground to a halt and was ordered to the country for a month by his doctor. This, however, did not do the trick because, explained Marian, ‘His poor head – his only fortune – is not well yet.’66 He was soon sent off again, this time to try the famous water cure at Malvern.
While Lewes languished in the country, Marian undertook to do his Leader work for him. Several of the pieces which appeared in the magazine during these weeks have her stamp on them. Given that she was still struggling with the Feuerbach proofs, it confirms that by now she thought of herself and Lewes as a unit. Six months earlier she had sprung to his defence like a terrier when Chapman proposed to publish a review by T. H. Huxley of Lewes’s translation of Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences and Harriet Martineau’s abridged translation of Positivist Philosophy. Comte’s attempt to study mankind by taking God out of the picture and seeing what was left was guaranteed to appeal to those two stringent atheists George Henry Lewes and Harriet Martineau. Positivism, as Comte’s philosophy was called, concerned itself with classifying and describing the social organisation of human life along lines which Herbert Spencer had already found highly suggestive when writing his Social Statics. In other words, Positivism was an embryonic sociology which promised to reveal the new, secular secrets of Man’s existence.
While Huxley was complimentary about Martineau’s treatment of Comte, which was published by Chapman, he dismissed Lewes as having ‘mere book-knowledge’ of science. Here was the same old accusation about Lewes being nothing more than a hack, dressed up in a slightly different way. Still at this point acting as editor of the Westminster, Marian did everything she could to make sure that the review was pulled. First she pointed out to Chapman that it would look ridiculous for a book published by him to be so obviously puffed in the Westminster. When this tactic failed she wrote him a letter marked ‘Private’ in which she defended Lewes’s right to make a serious contribution to scientific debate. She warns Chapman ‘that the editors of the Review will disgrace themselves by inserting an utterly worthless & unworthy notice of a work by one of their own writers’ and goes on to describe Lewes as Huxley’s superior in intellect and fame.67
But Chapman for once refused to take her advice and the review appeared in the January 1854 edition. Was he punishing Marian because she was about to leave him to run the magazine on his own? Or was he punishing Lewes for taking away a woman whom he had loved and whom he still needed? If Marian was aware that there was something more than editorial impartiality behind Chapman’s decision to run the review, she did not hold a grudge. As her resolve to go to Germany with Lewes strengthened, she was keen that the Chapmans would not be inconvenienced. Now that they had moved to new accommodation they were making noises about having Miss Evans as their boarder once again, but ‘I could not feel at liberty to leave them after causing them to make arrangements on my account, and it is quite possible that I may wish to go to the continent or twenty other things’.68
Pressure was coming from the Combes, too, who were pushing Marian to spend her summer with them on the Continent. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of Miss Evans. She would not be able to hold them off much longer.
On 11 June Charles Bray came to visit Marian in London and she told him of her intention to live with Lewes. Perhaps it was then that they agreed she would not tell Cara and Sara of her plans when she came to visit them at Rosehill a week later. She had always taken pains to keep the nature of her relationship with Lewes secret from Cara – on one occasion putting her off coming to visit her at her lodgings in Cambridge Street in case there might be some sign of Lewes’s habitual presence.
With her London friends Barbara and Bessie she may have been more confiding. According to Bessie’s daughter, Marian ‘asked my mother to walk round Hyde Park with her, and in the course of that walk she told her what she meant to do. My mother reminded her that she, Marian, had not liked Lewes at all when she first met him, and she told her the infinitely more serious fact that Mrs Gaskell knew a girl whom he had seduced, but that made no difference. She had quite made up her mind.’69
She had indeed. During her mid-June holiday in Coventry Marian spent three weeks sitting on the bear rug under the acacia tree and keeping her counsel. The next the Brays heard of her was when they received a breathless note dated 19 July:
Dear Friends – all three
I have only time to say good bye and God bless you. Poste Restante, Weimar for the next six weeks, and afterwards Berlin.
Ever your loving and grateful
Marian.70