1854–6
ON 20 JULY 1854 Marian Evans left her lodgings in Cambridge Street and set off on a journey from which there could be no return. She got to St Katharine’s Dock, in the shadow of the Tower of London, at about eleven o’clock and ‘found myself on board the Ravensbourne, bound for Antwerp’. The way Marian records this momentous sequence in her journal – only the second entry to have survived John Cross’s censorship – is revealing. She describes herself involuntarily drifting on to the Ravensbourne, as if her conscious mind is unable to cope with the implications of what she is doing. It is exactly the state in which Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss allows Stephen Guest to lead her on to the boat that will carry her away to a new and irreversible phase of her life.
Nerves had made Marian arrive early ‘and in consequence I had 20 minutes of terrible fear lest something should have delayed G’. Underneath her anxieties about missed cabs and botched arrangements was the terror that her well-meaning friends had been right after all and that Lewes would abandon her just at the point when she had given up everything to be with him. But she need not have worried: ‘before long I saw his welcome face looking for me over the porter’s shoulder and all was well.’1
Too excited to sleep, Lewes and Marian sat up on deck all night, watching the red-black sky gradually lift over the Belgian coast. Over the following weeks their decision to come away together would attract the kind of quivering disgust that greeted Maggie Tulliver on her return to St Ogg’s. But while Maggie was away for just a few days, it would be eight months before Marian returned to London to face the chorus of disapproval. For now she could sit on deck with the man she loved and watch the far-away streaks of lightning show up the outlines of passing fishing boats. No one who glanced at the shabby middle-aged couple talking over their travel plans could have guessed they had stumbled on a scandal that would soon have the best and brightest of British tongues wagging in fascinated dismay.
The first person to spot them, still on board ship, was Robert Noel, brother of Cara’s lover Edward.2 Noel conducted his marriage to a German baroness on ‘Continental’ lines and was rumoured to have had many lovers. He lived, appropriately enough, in Bohemia, where he was heading after a fortnight’s visit to Rosehill. The encounter passed without embarrassment. Robert Noel was the last man to raise a disapproving finger at the unmarried couple, although he may have found it impossible not to gossip about them when he wrote to his large circle of friends in Britain.
The next old friend to pop up was Dr Brabant. After arriving in Belgium, Marian and Lewes had spent a few days sightseeing in Antwerp, Brussels and Liège, before catching a train to Germany. The good doctor materialised on the platform, invited himself into their carriage and talked solidly all the way to Cologne. On arrival he bustled around, setting up the stilted meeting between Marian and Strauss.3 Was it coincidence that Brabant reappeared in Marian’s life just as she was making an irrevocable commitment to another man? And did his insistence on producing Strauss like a rabbit out of a hat constitute a competitive and aggressive act towards Lewes? Marian’s letters and journal do not speculate.
Another familiar face was Arthur Helps, Lewes’s old friend, who made a detour to Weimar on his way home from Spain. He had known about Lewes’s plan to live with Marian in Germany and the fact that he had gone out of his way to visit was mentioned pointedly by Marian in her letters.4 Helps was a courtier and favourite of Queen Victoria, and his acceptance of the situation seemed significant. But this was Labassecour, not London. Back in Britain, Lewes continued to spend his Christmas holidays at Vernon Hill, Helps’s country house, to which Marian was pointedly not invited.
Meeting with the occasional kind face could not have prepared Marian and Lewes for the storm which was blowing up at home. Indeed, it sometimes seemed as if literary Britain put its pen down in the late summer of 1854 and spent the next few weeks gossiping about the liaison between its crown princess and court jester. Those who knew Marian and Lewes well, and others who thought they did, exchanged angry, eager judgements on the runaway couple. Letters flew between London, Coventry and Edinburgh. Speculation turned into rumour and rumour hardened into ‘fact’ in a process which Marian would describe in her accounts of parish pump chatter at both St Ogg’s and Middlemarch. And as summer gave way to autumn, word trickled back to Weimar that some of those people closest to Marian and Lewes considered themselves irrevocably betrayed.
Marian’s first letter to Rosehill was written on 16 August, a good month after she had arrived on the Continent. The tone is guarded, as if she is not sure what response she will receive. Addressed pointedly to Charles Bray alone, the closing ‘much love to all’ avoids mentioning Sara and Cara by name.5 The sisters wrote back separately and Sara subsequently maintained that these letters (now lost) were ‘full of affection’, despite the fact that she and her sister ‘strongly disapproved’ of Marian’s decision to live with Lewes.6 So it was tactless of Marian to continue to address her next letter, of 23 October, to Charles Bray alone. A clue to her insensitivity lies in its content, which is a spirited defence of Lewes’s behaviour towards his family, a subject to which she would return obsessively. As far as Marian was concerned, these were matters she had always discussed with Charles – a point she made to defend herself against Sara’s accusations that she had deliberately excluded her closest women friends from her correspondence. But it was the concluding paragraph of Marian’s letter which caused most offence:
I am ignorant how far Cara and Sara may be acquainted with the state of things, and how they may feel towards me. I am quite prepared to accept the consequences of a step which I have deliberately taken and to accept them without irritation or bitterness. The most painful consequence will, I know, be the loss of friends. If I do not write, therefore, understand that it is because I desire not to obtrude myself.7
Not to obtrude yourself,’ stormed Sara in reply, ‘when if you ever thought our friendship good for any thing, you must know how anxious we have been to hear from you!’8 For ten years Sara and Cara had been surrogate mothers to Marian. At a time when their own lives had not always been easy the Hennell sisters had guided their awkward young neighbour from morbid late adolescence, through the traumas of the holy war and the pain of various bad love affairs, to the watershed of her father’s death and something approaching maturity. They had presided over Marian’s transformation from a priggish schoolgirl into the cleverest woman in the land. The bear rug under Rosehill’s acacia tree had been the setting for one of the greatest intellectual and social educations of the century. And now she was telling them that they had probably never been very interested in her anyway.
Just as the holy war was the result of nearly a year of simmering family tension about power, precedence and accommodation, so the split from Rosehill, which never really healed, had been brewing for a couple of years. Soon after Marian arrived at the Westminster, Charles Bray had taken it upon himself to tell Sara that Marian’s feelings towards her had changed. Sara, deeply hurt, wrote demanding to know whether it was true, which in turn prompted a strangely ambiguous response from Marian. The letter starts, reassuringly enough, by declaring that, as far as Mary Ann is concerned, Charles Bray ‘was never more completely in error. If there is any change in my affection for you, it is that I love you more than ever, not less.’ Then the tone becomes heavy with hints. ‘I have admitted to Mr Bray that I perceived what it was in you that frequently repelled him and chilled his affection for you.’ Having planted seeds of doubt, Mary Ann then scampers back into declarations of continued affection along the lines of ‘I do believe in my love for you and that it will remain as long as I have my senses’.9 This crazy swing between snub and sugar exactly recalled Mary Ann’s letters to Maria Lewis, just at the point when she was suffocating under the older woman’s plea for reassurance. Now the newly named Marian, busy making friends and lovers in London, no longer felt that Sara understood her life or had any real place in it.
After another exchange of proud, clumsy letters between Weimar and Coventry in the autumn of 1854, Cara stopped writing. Sara, however, continued to try to make sense of their changed relationship. ‘I have a strange sort of feeling that I am writing to some one in a book and not the Marian that we have known and loved so many years’, she wrote in the ‘birthday’ letter of 15 November which she always sent around the time of their joint anniversaries. ‘Do not mistake me, I mean nothing unkind.’10 As a symbol of what had been lost, she stitched a small Ax into the letter, a tiny reminder that for so many years Marian had delighted to call her ‘Achates’, after the best friend of Virgil’s hero Aeneas.
While the Rosehill women quietly tried to come to terms with Marian’s changed allegiances, Charles Bray was busy attempting to defend her reputation at large. As one of the two men to whom Marian had confided her plans – Chapman was the other – he was left explaining her behaviour to a spluttering George Combe. Bray’s first tactic was to suggest that Marian and Lewes were merely platonic travelling companions, and when this started to look thin he hastened to reassure Combe that ‘my wife and Miss Hennell are sadly troubled about all this and wish me to say that Miss E’s going had not their sanction, because they knew nothing at all about it’.11 Self-involved as ever, Combe was mortified to think that the woman whose skull he had pronounced perfect turned out to have a character which made a monkey out of phrenology, not to mention his own reputation. Desperate to reclaim the high ground for the practice of bump reading he asked Bray in an anguished letter whether there was ‘insanity in Miss Evans’s family; for her conduct, with her brain, seems to me to be like . . . morbid mental aberration’. Complacently sweeping aside Bray’s own irregular sexual life, which he knew included an illegitimate second family, Combe proceeded to quiz him about what would happen if Marian tried to return to Rosehill. ‘If you receive her into your family circle, while present appearances are unexplained,’ he wheedled, ‘pray consider whether you will do justice to your own female domestic circle, and how other ladies may feel about going into a circle which makes no distinction between those who act thus, and those who preserve their honour unspotted’.12
Bray’s response was a carefully judged attempt to distance himself from Marian’s behaviour, while preserving the integrity of phrenology as an accurate tool for predicting behaviour. ‘Mind I have no wish to defend the part she is taking – only I do not judge her,’ he told Combe hypocritically. ‘I don’t think she is mad. She had organically, all the intellectual strength of a man and . . . in feeling all the peculiar weaknesses of woman.’13
At the same time as she was writing to Charles Bray defending Lewes’s character and her decision to be with him, Marian was conducting a parallel correspondence with John Chapman. Her letter of 15 October starts with a rejection of the rumour that Lewes has abandoned his family before launching into the kind of martyrish set piece which had so offended the Coventry women: ‘I have counted the cost of the step that I have taken and am prepared to bear, without irritation or bitterness, renunciation by all my friends. I am not mistaken in the person to whom I have attached myself. He is worthy of the sacrifice I have incurred, and my only anxiety is that he should be rightly judged.’14
Luckily, Chapman was unoffendable. In any case, he was thoroughly enjoying being at the heart of the biggest scandal to hit London for years. Although, with the Westminster under so much pressure from the high-minded Unitarian lobby, it would have made sense to put distance between himself and Marian, he could not resist drawing attention to their earlier love affair. He frantically boasted to Robert Chambers that, far from being an innocent, Miss Evans had once thrown herself sexually at him. When this rumour spread too quickly and too fast, Chapman was left trying to backtrack, panicking to Chambers: ‘A word about Miss E[vans]. – I am very anxious that what I said to you about her especially, should be regarded as strictly confidential . . . I should be sorry . . . to be thought disposed to disparage her. I only dropped the word I did because I felt that Lewes was not as you imagined almost alone to blame.’ Then he continued with extraordinary hypocrisy, ‘Now I can only pray, against hope, that . . . [Lewes] may prove constant to her; otherwise she is utterly lost.’15
Those who spluttered loudest at Marian’s and Lewes’s departure for the Continent were defending their own personal and professional interests. Combe, for instance, had long disliked Lewes because of his rejection of phrenology as so much bunk. And he was as twitchy as ever about the bad publicity which would stick to the progressive cause in general. ‘T. Hunt, Lewes, and Miss Evans have, in my opinion, by their practical conduct, inflicted a great injury on the cause of religious freedom,’ he thundered to Charles Bray.16 And to make his point he gave up his subscription to the Leader. Joseph Parkes, too, received the news ‘in a white rage, as if on the verge of a paralytic stroke’, believing that the behaviour of his one-time favourite had put back the progressive cause by a hundred years.17 The fact that Parkes ran a mistress in tandem with a wife was apparently not the same thing at all.
Likewise, Harriet Martineau’s reaction to Marian’s ‘elopement’ was fuelled by her rivalry with Lewes over who was the greater authority on Auguste Comte. Stirred up by a flabby intervention from John Chapman, Martineau retreated into paranoid fantasy. She put around the story that Marian had written her an ‘insulting’ letter from Weimar, presumably crowing about her life with Lewes. Unlikely though this was, in London’s overheated atmosphere this scrap was sufficiently plausible to get repeated at the Reform Club. Martineau had always been pathologically jealous of women who acted on their sexuality: she fell out with Elizabeth Barrett when she went off with Browning and thought that her good friend Charlotte Brontë had spoiled Villette by going on too much about love. Now she became apoplectic at the thought that Miss Evans was enjoying sexual happiness with that little mountebank Lewes. Seldom nice about anyone, Martineau specialized in the long-held grudge. Her autobiography, written fifteen or so years before her death but published posthumously, was full of jibes, spites and rages against all those who had crossed her, particularly her brother James. Marian hated its score-keeping, but was perhaps relieved to find that she was not mentioned. So it was lucky that she never saw a letter which Martineau wrote to a friend during Lewes’s long decline: ‘Do you know that Lewes is likely to die? . . . What will . . . [Miss Evans] do? Take a successor, I shd expect.’18
News of the Harriet Martineau complication arrived in Weimar on 11 October in the form of ‘a painful letter from London [which] caused us both a bad night’.19 It had come from Thomas Carlyle, the veteran writer and Germanist who had been one of Lewes’s mentors ever since his arrival in London almost twenty years ago. In his letter Carlyle raised the more general accusation that Marian had taken Lewes away from his wife and family. Lewes’s response has been lost, but it seems to have done the trick, because Carlyle’s next letter is much more sympathetic. This in turn prompted Lewes to explode in a baroque expression of relieved thanks. ‘I sat at your feet when my mind was first awakening; I have honoured and loved you ever since both as teacher and friend, and now to find that you judge me rightly, and are not estranged by what has estranged so many from me, gives me strength to bear what yet must be borne!’ He then goes on to reassure Carlyle that ‘there is no foundation for the scandal as it runs. My separation was in nowise caused by the lady named, nor by any other lady.’ As for the whole Martineau business, he promises Carlyle that Marian ‘has not written to Miss Martineau at all – has had no communication with her for twelvemonths – has sent no message to her, or any one else – in short this letter is a pure, or impure, fabrication – the letter, the purport, the language, all fiction’.20
Although Carlyle was apparently appeased by this explanation – he knew just how odd Miss Martineau could be – a note which he added on the bottom of Lewes’s second letter suggests that he continued to disapprove of Marian, whom he sniggeringly dubbed ‘the strong-minded woman’. This was not out of any loyalty to Agnes – indeed, he had urged Lewes to part from her. But the idea that Miss Evans was now in Weimar working with Lewes on Goethe unsettled him. More than anyone, Carlyle had been responsible for introducing the great man’s life and work to Britain. He looked upon Lewes as his natural heir and was happy for him to write the first biography of Goethe in English. But it was quite a different matter to contemplate an interloper – albeit a supremely well-qualified one – admitted to the sacred cause. Having the Goethe biography dedicated to him may have gone a long way towards reconciling Carlyle to Lewes, but he never learned to like – or approve of – his strong-minded companion.
Painful though all this gossip was, it may have provided the necessary spur for Lewes to separate formally from Agnes. For it was on 23 October that Marian wrote her oblique letter to Bray in which she hinted that ‘circumstances with which I am not concerned, and which have arisen since he left England, have led him to determine on a separation from Mrs Lewes’.21 Could it be that those ‘circumstances’ were the surprising severity of London’s reaction to Lewes’s and Marian’s departure, including some nasty speculation that this might be a temporary arrangement? Was it at this point that Lewes realised that his strategy of acting with tact and discretion towards the two women in his life had only increased the scope for vicious rumours about them? Whatever the exact reasoning, it was now that George Henry Lewes told Marian Evans that his future lay with her alone.
Lewes was welcomed in Weimar with a respect and affection that would have surprised and annoyed literary London. His interest in German philosophy and literature went back to 1838 when he had spent nine months in Berlin and Vienna learning the language. Armed on that occasion with a letter of introduction from Carlyle, the young Lewes adopted his usual strategy of making contacts, flirting with women and reading frantically. With the Shelley biography abandoned, he had turned to Germany’s greatest poet and literary figure instead. Over the next ten years Lewes fitted bits and pieces of research on Goethe into his crazy schedule, but never managed to go beyond secondary sources. Now, finally, he was returning to Germany in an attempt to fill out and finish a book that lay close to his heart.
Marian recorded her impression of Weimar in three separate and overlapping accounts. As was to become her habit, she wrote up her journal retrospectively, organising ‘Recollections of Weimar 1854’ at a distance of a few weeks in Berlin, the city to which she and Lewes travelled next. From this seedbed she wrote two money-spinning articles about Weimar which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine in June and July 1855.22 The result is an unusually detailed account of the first three months of her full-time life with Lewes.
Marian’s first reaction to Weimar when she arrived on 2 August was: ‘how could Goethe live here in this dull, lifeless village?’ Although the sleepy atmosphere and old-fashioned buildings reminded her of an English market town, there was none of the plump prosperity she was used to in Warwickshire. The local sheep were ‘as dingy as London sheep and far more skinny’. Still, the lodgings which she and Lewes quickly found were comfortable, even if the landlady and her maid had the freakish features of pantomime peasants.23
Lewes, the accomplished networker, started making calls immediately. Armed with a letter of introduction from Strauss he contacted Gustav Scholl, director of the Art Institute, who had edited Goethe’s letters and essays. Scholl was at the heart of Weimarian society and through him Lewes and Marian met the resident intellectual community. No one, not even the two Englishmen who lived permanently in Weimar and almost certainly knew that Marian was not married, cared about her unusual situation. She was included in every invitation issued to Lewes and was soon absorbed in the kind of semi-public social life which was now closed to her in London.
But it was Lewes who came up with the introduction that meant most. During his 1839 stay in Vienna he had met Franz Liszt. Now the composer had been reincarnated as the Duke of Weimar’s kapellmeister, a post which had once been held by Bach. Marian approached the maestro with something approaching rapture. To Charles Bray she confided that Liszt was ‘the first really inspired man I ever saw’, while to Bessie Rayner Parkes she gushed, ‘he is a glorious creature in every way.’24
While Marian was partly responding to Liszt’s musicianship – ‘for the first time I heard the true tones of the piano’ – it was the parallels between the great man and her own dear Lewes which fired her imagination.25 Liszt was a plain man in whose ‘divine ugliness’ she insisted on seeing a great soul breaking through. This, she claimed unsurprisingly, ‘is my favourite kind of physique’ and went on to use it as a model for the musician Klesmer in Daniel Deronda.26 The similarities between Liszt and Lewes went further: the composer was living with a woman to whom he was not married. Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein had recently left her husband and, although in Russia her infidelity was punished by the confiscation of her estates, in Weimar she was treated with common sense and courtesy. Although Marian responded to the Princess with her usual defensiveness – ‘she is short and unbecomingly endowed with embonpoint’ – not to mention the ‘blackish’ teeth and ‘barbarian’ profile, the likeness in their situation soon softened her.27 Before long, Lewes and Marian were meeting Liszt and his princess every couple of days and through them were introduced to Clara Schumann and Anton Rubinstein, as well as to the work of Wagner. The first two they found interesting, the third – billed as ‘the music of the future’ – puzzling.
What shines through Marian’s accounts of this first month in Germany is her intense pleasure at finally being openly and fully close to the man she loved: ‘I am happier every day and find my domesticity more and more delightful and beneficial to me,’ she sang to John Chapman.28 For the first time since she had met Lewes she was enjoying the everyday intimacies of married life: waking up together, taking a picnic in the park, wandering to nowhere in particular. They even carved their initials in the little wooden hut where Goethe spent his summers. Lewes, his health better than at any time in the previous year, was back to his usual buoyant self, entertaining her with his impressions of Edmund Kean, recounting a dreadful night spent trying to lecture the working class of Hackney on Othello. Under the spell of their emotional and sexual compatibility, what had first seemed charmless and provincial about Weimarian culture now revealed itself as unpretentiously joyful. Marian noted with pleasure how the people flocked to the park in the evenings to take coffee and how they attended the nearby theatre without any fuss as to dress or etiquette. When she wrote up her recollections retrospectively, the park at Weimar became a symbol of the new freedom in her relationship with Lewes: ‘Dear Park of Weimar! In 1854, two loving, happy human beings spent many a delicious hour in wandering under your shade and in your sunshine, and to one of them at least you will be a “joy for ever” through all the sorrows that are to come.’29
But by the time she came to write these words these sorrows were more than distant phantoms. Marian and Lewes arrived in Berlin on 3 November in search of good libraries and new Goethe contacts. Under the charm of their love for one another the unpromising Duchy of Weimar had been turned into a little paradise full of kind-hearted friends and simple goodness.30 Their Weimarian friends had given them a touching send-off. Liszt had turned up the night before with a bag of sweets for the journey, Scholl had insisted on ‘kissing G again and again on the lips’. Even Lora, the ugly little maid, appeared on the station platform with a bouquet for Marian clutched in her grimy hand.
Berlin could not have been more different, with its modern buildings, expensive lodgings, bad beds and streets clogged with overdressed tourists. The season was on the turn and soon heavy snow would blast through the city, making even the short walk from their lodgings to the hotel where they took dinner a chilly ordeal. By this time the painful news from London had trickled in and Marian and Lewes were in the middle of their highly charged correspondences with Thomas Carlyle, John Chapman and Charles Bray. As the reality of their situation broke in upon their dreamy happiness, even the surrounding buildings and streets started to seem oppressive. Hordes of soldiers – ‘300,000 puppets in uniform’ – marched menacingly through the streets.31
Still, with George Henry Lewes around it was impossible to be gloomy for long. ‘The day seems too short for our happiness, and we both of us feel that we have begun life afresh – with new ambition and new powers,’ insisted Marian to John Chapman.32 On their first morning – a Sunday – they were walking along Unter den Linden when Lewes was accosted by Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, the Goethe scholar whom he had met on his first trip to Germany sixteen years ago. Varnhagen, though elderly, was still a key player in Berlin’s intelligentsia and through him Marian and Lewes found themselves with a ready-made social life. At a party which Varnhagen threw for them four days later Marian met Henriette von Solmar, a distinguished hostess who invited the couple to attend one of her near-nightly salons where intellectually minded Berlin gathered for conversation.
No one was bothered by the fact that Marian and Lewes were not married, not even Varnhagen, who had always taken an avuncular interest in Agnes. Likewise Fraülein von Solmar who, as Marian was quick to point out to Charles Bray, moved in ‘the best society of Berlin’.33 Painters, sculptors and scientists, both bachelors and family men, happily welcomed the couple without comment into their homes.
One of these homes, which particularly charmed Marian, belonged to Professor Otto Friedrich Gruppe, a man even more versatile than Lewes, who had written on everything from Greek drama to contemporary politics. In the short piece she wrote on Gruppe for the Leader in July 1855 Marian, clearly thinking of Lewes, took the opportunity to point out the advantages of this kind of easy facility. ‘Those who decry versatility . . . seem to forget the immense service rendered by the suggestiveness of versatile men, who come to the subject with fresh, unstrained minds.’34 But Marian also responded well to Gruppe the specialist, writing favourably of his latest book, The Future of German Philosophy, which rejected metaphysics in favour of solid empiricism. Yet more than anything else it was Gruppe’s domestic life which caught her imagination. He had married a woman thirty years younger than himself by whom he had two children, and his humble flat at the top of several flights of stairs seemed a perfect tableau of domestic contentment. By this time Marian and Lewes had probably reached the decision not to have children, which may account for Marian’s sometimes sentimental accounts of happy German families in her journal entries of these weeks.
Equally interesting was the relationship of Adolf Stahr, a scholar who specialised in Spinoza and Goethe. For the last nine years the still-married Stahr had been living with Fanny Lewald, a feminist and novelist whom Lewes had met during a second trip to Germany in 1845. Although Lewes and Marian had reservations about the pretentious, gossipy couple, they embarked on a cautious friendship with them. One day – 6 February – they arrived at the home they shared only to find that Stahr’s divorce had come through and he and Lewald had ‘gone to be married at last’.35 Was it with some wistfulness that Marian later noted that they ‘seemed the happier for it’?
Germany was never meant to be a holiday. Lewes and Marian were there to work. Agnes and her expanding brood gobbled up money, and Thornton was following in the Hunt family tradition of flagrant irresponsibility: his financial contributions were sketchy in the extreme. Despite having come to Germany to finish his book, Lewes still needed to generate short-term income. During these months he knocked off two translations of French farce and managed to keep his regular column on the Leader ticking over, arranging for his twenty-pound fee to be sent directly to Agnes.
But the main project was Goethe. Surprisingly, there was no good biography in either German or English. Lewes quickly set about gathering the primary material – mainly recollections from people who had known the poet – which would distinguish his book from the lacklustre versions that had gone before. He interviewed two frail old men who had worked as Goethe’s secretary before his death, as well as a woman who had been at the court when Goethe first came to Weimar. In Berlin he spoke to the sculptor Christian Rauch, who emphasised just how lovable the great man had been. In Weimar Goethe’s daughter-in-law Ottilie arranged for Lewes to see the poet’s study and bedroom. Together Marian and Lewes made day trips to the Duke’s summer residence, where Goethe had masterminded chamber-scale theatricals, and to Ilmenau, where his small wooden house was set in idyllic surroundings.36
Marian’s Dorothea-like wish to help a man with his work had at last been granted. Although when she had first met Lewes she was far from thinking anything about him great, observing him work at close quarters had changed her mind. His enthusiasm for Goethe was raw and real, with nothing of the ‘bread scholar’s’ careful calculation. Of course, identification played a part. The German writer’s ability to move elegantly between poetry and science helped Lewes find an authority for his own much-mocked versatility. And in Lewes’s account of why Goethe broke off his engagement to Frederika Brion – ‘he was perfectly right to draw back from an engagement which he felt his love was not strong enough to fulfil’ – one hears a coded justification of his ending of the marriage to Agnes.37
Although Marian was not instinctively drawn to Goethe, she naturally considered it her duty to become interested. Her insight into his two great novels, Wilhelm Meister and Elective Affinities – often dismissed as immoral and boring to boot – enriched Lewes’s treatment of them and became the basis of an important article she would write for the Leader on their return home.38 In addition she supplied the English translation for the passages that Lewes wanted to extract, as well as for the complicated genealogical tables that appear in the book. For all this she received a credit in the final footnotes as an ‘accomplished German translator’.
While Lewes was welcomed in Germany as an old friend and distinguished scholar, Marian was (barely) known as the English translator of Feuerbach and Strauss. Their relative positions in London, with Miss Evans as the highly respected editor of the Westminster Review and Lewes as the pushy hack, had been reversed. On the surface this did not bother her. Love had made her temporarily content and happy to take dictation when Lewes’s headache stopped him from writing his regular pieces for the Leader. Yet only a few months earlier, while in the depths of her own headache, she had written to Cara from London of her ‘despair of achieving anything worth the doing’.39 How long would it be before that restless ambition, part of her nature since her very first day at school, would insist on making itself known once again?
The tensions in Marian’s position spilled out in a piece she wrote for the Westminster Review from Germany on Victor Cousin’s book on Madame de Sablé and other literary women of seventeenth-century France. It is an odd, uneven article, less a review than an essay which uses the three books it is supposed to be noticing as a peg on which to hang a bigger argument. Writing, as always, anonymously, Marian starts with the bold assertion that ‘our own feminine literature is made up of books which could have been better written by men.’40 The only country where this is not the case is France, where ‘if the writings of women were swept away, a serious gap would be made in the national history’.
What makes Frenchwomen so different from everyone else? Marian embarks on a strange (to us) physiological argument that the Frenchwoman’s ‘small brain and vivacious temperament’ is better for the business of literature than the English and German woman’s more ‘dreamy and passive’ constitution. She then shifts to ground that sounds familiar, which seems, in fact, like a defence of her own unusual experience of living and working among men. In seventeenth-century France, Marian explains, women ran salons into which they invited the cleverest men of art and science, and so gained a unique access ‘to a common fund of ideas, to common objects of interest with men’. The result was not simply beneficial to the women themselves, but allowed them to develop relations with men formed ‘in the maturity of thought and feeling, and grounded only on inherent fitness and mutual attraction’. This in turn had an enriching effect on the culture, allowing both men and women to develop their highest potential and write novels out of a sense of their own gendered fullness. Marian ends with a barely disguised plea for her kind of female, one who has used her access to high culture to turn herself into a woman whose intellectual and emotional difference delights the best kind of man. ‘Then we shall have that marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of human happiness.’
Chapman did not like the article, annoyed by the way his former assistant editor had hijacked a routine commission and turned it into a manifesto for her own scandalous position. Her heavy-handed distancing device – ‘heaven forbid that we should enter on a defence of French morals, most of all in relation to marriage!’ – was, in the circumstances, plain embarrassing.41 Chapman was currently under pressure from the high-minded Unitarians to distance himself from the scandalous atheism implied by Miss Evans’s decision to live with a man outside marriage. Although he paid her the agreed fifteen pounds for it, he did not write to thank her, nor did he ask her to do any more – a serious blow at a time when she desperately needed to make money. Chapman may also have been piqued by her revelation that she had revised her final draft along lines suggested by Lewes. Even when he was her lover, Chapman would never have presumed to offer Marian advice on her writing, nor would she have accepted it.
During these months in Germany Marian’s confidence as a writer fell in proportion as her personal happiness rose. At home the Feuerbach translation had been met either with stony silence or, from James Martineau writing in the Westminster, with sneering hostility. Now Marian was facing the realities of life as a free-lance writer, without the prestige of a leading publication behind her. She was dependent on Chapman for any commissions he put her way, a reverse of the previous power balance between them, which showed up in the gushing way she acknowledged his first letter to her at the beginning of August asking her to write the piece on Madame de Sablé. Chapman’s cool response to the finished piece made her wary of suggesting other topics, even though, as she told Sara, there were ‘plenty of subjects suggested by new German books which would be fresh and instructive in an English Review’.42 In January she finally plucked up courage to suggest ‘Ideals of Womanhood’ for the Westminster and, when that failed to take, ‘Woman in Germany’.43 Chapman turned this down too, perhaps sensing another strident manifesto on the way, and grudgingly agreed only to a piece on Eduard Vehse’s Memoirs of the Court of Austria, a cut-and-paste job which hardly stretched her, but did at least pay.
After six months in Germany, Marian had succeeded in producing only a handful of magazine articles. This was not going to be enough to keep her, let alone Lewes’s family in London. So when Lewes told her that he had an outstanding contract with a London publisher to produce a translation of Spinoza’s Ethics she leaped at the chance to do the work for him. ‘I cannot bring myself to run the risk of a refusal from an editor,’ she explained to Sara, ‘so I am working at what will ultimately yield something which is secured by agreement with Bohn [the publisher].’44 She started work on 8 November and although money was her prime motive, she was far from regarding this as routine work. She had long been interested in the philosopher’s clear, logical thought, which had had such an obvious impact on both Feuerbach and Strauss, not to mention Goethe. Almost ten years previously she had started translating Spinoza during a particularly unsettled time in her life and later while she was waiting for her father to die. Now she was to take him up again at a time of great happiness. There was something satisfactory about having come full circle.
Although Marian produced little finished work during these months, still she was reading more than ever before, soaking up material that would feed a burst of creativity once she returned to London. At their lodgings in Dorotheenstrasse Marian and Lewes set up the routine which they would follow for most of their lives. They wrote and translated in the morning, walked in the afternoon and either visited friends or read in the evening, working through Shakespeare, Heine, Lesser, Macaulay and the inevitable Goethe.
By the time Marian came to record her recollections of these evenings in the lodgings, made cosy with coffee, gingerbread and rolls, she was already back in England. After a final hectic week of cultural tourism, she and Lewes had set out for Calais on 11 March 1855, travelling via Brussels and Cologne. This return journey could not have been more different from the one they had made eight months before. On that occasion the Channel had been as smooth and perfect as glass. Now it was sufficiently choppy to make them both sick. On 13 March they got to Dover and spent a queasy night in a hotel before finding lodgings the next day for Marian in Sydney Place. She stayed here alone working on Spinoza, while Lewes went up to London to sort out his family affairs and make arrangements for their future life together.
As Marian reworked her experience of the past few months in her journal she became increasingly aware of how much she had lost by coming home. The Germans might be a coarse, vulgar people who put their knives in their mouths, told unfunny jokes and said what they thought, but they were ‘at least free from the bigotry and exclusiveness of their more refined cousins’.45 Just how bigoted and exclusive those cousins could be she was about to find out.
The month in Dover went miserably. After nearly a year of sociable living with a merry man it was hard to be alone. Marian had not been so isolated since those early years at Griff keeping house for her father and brother. Now once again in exile, she filled her days writing, reading and taking blustery walks over the cliffs.
Working on her journal recollections of Berlin allowed her to revisit the past for a while. But the moment she finished, on 27 March, migraine overwhelmed her. Three solid weeks on Spinoza provided a kind of cure, allowing her to follow the thread back to a more certain time. She continued, too, with the ambitious reading plan begun in the Dorotheenstrasse. Still, it was not enough. She was hankering for Labassecour, for anywhere but this dreary boardinghouse where, presumably, she had either to present herself as the spinster ‘Miss Marian Evans’ or as the married lady ‘Mrs George Lewes’, when in fact she was neither. Already she was planning a future far away from here, announcing to Bray that the moment Goethe and Spinoza were safely through the press, she and Lewes would take off on ‘a new flight to the south of Germany and Italy, for which we both yearn’.46
The uncertainty of these few weeks pressed on old and aching bruises. Abandonment was the black thread which ran through Marian’s life like a curse. First her mother, then Isaac, then Chapman, Brabant and Spencer had all rejected her demands for love. It was what she knew and what she dreaded. Only two and a half years earlier she had sat alone in a cottage in another south-coast town and begged Herbert Spencer to let her have a corner of his life. Over these recent months in Germany she had finally come to know the pleasure of a mutual love. It was exactly the kind of relationship which suited her: exclusive, isolated, rapt. Now that she was back in Britain, reality pressed down in the shape of other people and circumstances that she could not control. Had she known what London gossip was saying about her situation, she would have felt even greater despair. Speculation was mounting that Lewes would, in the words of Joseph Parkes, ‘tire of & put way Miss Evans – as he has done others’.47
On 9 April Marian received a ‘painful letter’ which for the next week made her ‘feverish and unable to fix my mind steadily on reading or writing’.48 Since none of the correspondence between Marian and Lewes has survived, it is impossible to know what it contained. Was Lewes trying to withdraw from Marian? Surely not. Whatever else he might have been, he was a man of his word. Gordon Haight suggests that the problem may have been Agnes, from whom Marian had asked for a definite undertaking that the marriage was over. But years later Cara Bray told Edith Simcox that, far from being tricky, Agnes had sent a message saying that she ‘would be very glad if he could marry Miss Evans’.49 The last time Marian had used the word ‘painful’ to describe a letter it had been from Thomas Carlyle, repeating Harriet Martineau’s wild babblings. Perhaps the April letter was not from Lewes at all, but from a third party repeating some hurtful gossip about her situation.
As a matter of pride Marian did not let her agony seep into her letters. To Sara she maintained that she was ‘well and calmly happy’ and to Bessie Rayner Parkes she said her mind was ‘deliciously calm and untroubled so far as my own lot is concerned’. She repeated her warning to ‘believe no one’s representations about me, for there is not a single person who is in a position to make a true representation’.50 As ever, she told herself – and her correspondents – that she did not give a fig what they thought about her. Yet she remained acutely attuned to every nuance in their letters, getting pettish with Charles Bray when she thought she detected a cool note.51
In the end, Lewes did prove true and Agnes generously straightforward. By mid-April Marian had the undertaking she wanted and Lewes had made the best financial arrangements in the circumstances. On the 18th she went up to town and joined him at lodgings in Bayswater. This may not have been the first time they had described themselves as ‘Mr and Mrs Lewes’, but it was certainly the beginning of what they referred to as their marriage. It worried feminists, then and now, that when Marian Evans went to live with George Henry Lewes she insisted on being known as his ‘wife’ and calling herself ‘Mrs Lewes’. It looked as if Marian Evans, that ‘strong-minded woman’, was cowering behind the formal conventions of suburban womanhood.
In a way she was. Landladies, those sharp-eyed Mrs Grundys who had loomed so large in her adult life, would almost certainly have turned away any couple who announced themselves as Mr Lewes and Miss Evans. But there was a principle at stake too, even if it was one which some found hard to understand. Marian had never been anything but a believer in marriage, a point which she made graphically when she married John Cross at the end of her life. Both through the voice of Feuerbach, and in her own words in the ‘Woman in France’ essay, she had written of the need for a true marriage, which brings a whole man and a whole woman together in voluntary association. What appalled her about legal marriage was its shackling of men and women who hardly knew one another in relationships that were almost bound to fail. Once love had died the two parties were condemned, like Rochester and Bertha, or Lewes and Agnes, or Goethe and Frederika, to a dreary wasteland where incompatibility turned to indifference or worse. For as long as Marian felt that she and Lewes had a truly moral marriage she would claim the right to be known as Mrs Lewes.
No matter how many times Marian explained her position, some friends continued to refer to her as ‘Miss Evans’. Bessie Rayner Parkes was the worst culprit, her ‘forgetfulness’ a measure of the confusion she felt about her own future. Increasingly absorbed in campaigns to improve education and employment opportunities for single women, Bessie had by now embarked on her half-hearted ten-year engagement to Sam Blackwell. This was also the time when she was receiving bullying letters from her adulterous father warning her to stay away from Miss Evans and her ‘vice’. In the circumstances it was hardly surprising that Bessie started to become anxious about what the institution of marriage meant for women and what it might have in store for her. Writing to her fiancé during the height of the gossip about Marian in the autumn of 1854, she declared with preachy nervousness, ‘Now when we remember the men who form illegal connexions sub rosâ – who do vile & bad things, & keep up a white washed character, I feel more lenient to that little Weimar home than others do.’52 Was this a hint to her fiancé that she would not countenance the kind of marriage which her mother had endured? In any event, the engagement with Blackwell was finally broken off in 1866. The following year, at the age of thirty-seven, she married Louis Belloc, by whom she had a son, Hilaire, and a daughter.
On 30 April Bessie defied her father’s ban and called on the Leweses. The next day Marian wrote to her – by way of Barbara Leigh Smith – with a reminder to send any letters ‘care of G. H. Lewes Esq’. But a year later Bessie was still addressing Marian by her maiden name, for which she received a sharp rebuke: ‘Your address to me as Miss Evans was unfortunate, as I am not known under that name here. We find it indispensable to our comfort that I should bear Mr. Lewes’s name while we occupy lodgings, and we are now with so excellent a woman that any cause of removal would be a misfortune. If you have occasion to write to me again, please to bear this in mind.’53
Part of Bessie’s reluctance to acknowledge Marian’s ‘marriage’ came from the scandalous things she had heard about Lewes from her father. It was not until her close friend Barbara Leigh Smith spent some time with the couple a year later that Bessie really began to accept the arrangement. In August 1856 Barbara joined Lewes and Marian for a few days at Tenby where they were on an extended holiday. She had come to see Marian and at this point merely tolerated Lewes, whom she considered in that snobbish way of which the Victorian avant-garde were quite capable to be not quite a ‘gentleman’. She left Wales, however, with a completely different view, writing to Bessie, ‘I do wish, my dear, that you would revise your view of Lewes. I have quite revised mine. Like you, I thought him an extremely sensual man. Marian tells me that in their intimate marital relationship he is unsensual, extremely considerate. His manner to her is delightful. It is plain to me that he makes her extremely happy.’54
Although Bessie’s and Barbara’s visits went well, Marian was far from relaxed when the rest of her friends made that first symbolic call to see the new Mrs Lewes. For women like Rufa Hennell, widowed in 1850 and not to remarry until 1857, it was a bold decision. For the mid-Victorians sin, especially female sexual sin, was a contaminating mist, which could envelop bystanders who got too close. Marian was flummoxed to see Rufa on 28 April, but blamed her panic lamely on a lack of fresh air: ‘I was so stupified and heated by having sat in-doors writing all day, that she must have carried away anything but a charming image of me.’55
Charles Bray’s visit was even more tense. He did not come and see the Leweses until 10 July, by which time they had moved to accommodation in East Sheen, near Richmond. It was the first time that he had ever seen them together and he probably felt as odd about it as they did. Knowing how much Bray disliked Lewes, Marian was clearly terrified that he would try to make mischief. A short while before, she had written to him begging him not to repeat a cutting remark she had made about Lewes two or three years earlier.56 Bray refrained from such obvious tactics during his visit, but when he found Marian taking her ‘husband’s’ side in yet another argument about phrenology he dressed up his jealousy as high-minded disappointment. Lewes was down with a cold and a face abscess, and so unable to work his distracting magic on what sounds like a leaden evening. Writing a few days later to Bray, Marian excused ‘the fact of my having been ill as some apology for the very imperfect companionship and entertainment I gave you’.57
When Sara Hennell came to visit in early September the fates were equally unhelpful. She called without warning and found the Leweses out on a river trip.58 Perhaps this was part of a bridge-building exercise by the Hennell sisters, because around the same time as Sara’s letter explaining about the aborted visit came one from Cara, framed as a query about what Marian wanted done with some bed linen stored at Rosehill. Cara was too conscientious a woman simply to drop her objections to Marian’s relationship. This was the first Marian had heard from her since Weimar. But although she seems to have repeated her disapproval in her letter, there was something about it that made Marian sense she would be open to a reply. On 4 September Marian sat down and wrote the most cogent and considered statement of her actions to date. She reassures Cara that ‘if there is any one action or relation of my life which is and always has been profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr Lewes . . . Light and easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done – they obtain what they desire and are still invited to dinner.’ The haughty, martyrish tone which had given so much offence over the past year is now gone. Instead, Marian dwells with gratitude on the love she has received from Cara: ‘I think not one of the endless words and deeds of kindness and forbearance you have ever shewn me has vanished from my memory.’59
The letter – sweet, dignified – got Cara and Marian writing again, although it would be another four years before they met. Both sides remained jumpy. Only four months later, at New Year 1856, Marian wrote to Charles Bray to tell him how humiliated she felt by the fact that an invitation to visit Rosehill had been issued by him alone.
I have never answered your note in which you invited me to call at your house on my way to my sister’s [where she was staying over Christmas]. I am sure that note was written with the kindest intentions, but if you had thought twice you would have seen that I was not likely to take a journey twice as long as necessary and walk all through Coventry in order to make a call where I had only the invitation of the master of the house.60
The rudeness of the note suggests Marian’s hypersensitivity about how she was treated and the roots of her growing social isolation. Ever attentive to the slightest snub, she made it a rule never to accept invitations from even her most well-meaning friends. There was a danger that she might visit their home only to find some fellow guest or high-minded servant taking offence. Even the most fleeting contact with an acquaintance in the street ran the risk of a cold shoulder. For that reason Marian barely went to London: during her first year in south-west London she made the journey only a couple of times, giving the awful smokiness as her reason for staying away. Any errands or business was done by Lewes, who made a weekly trip to see Agnes and the children at Bedford Place.
For the same reason Marian shunned her neighbours in Park Shot, Richmond, to which they had moved in October 1855. Her letters and journals never mention the kind of casual socialising that was supposed to be one of the great advantages of this new kind of semi-rural living. There was no bumping into a friendly face in the park, no gossiping in a shop. Terrified of the cut which would follow once rumour got around of her ‘unfortunate position’ Marian kept herself to herself, avoiding all but the most necessary and anonymous contact with others.
What started as a protective strategy became, over time, a preferred option. Once Marian became famous through her writing and her irregular relationship achieved some kind of respectability through its longevity, she began to receive an increasing number of invitations – to dinner, to the theatre, to parties. But still she refused, proudly insisting that people had to come to her. This reached its apogee with the Sunday afternoons at the Priory from the late 1860s, that salon-type arrangement which Marian had praised in her essay ‘Woman in France’. By this time she had reached iconic status and every week twenty or more men – and it was mainly men – filed into the drawing-room for an audience. It was an arrangement which suited her psychologically. By controlling whom she came into contact with, Lewes ensured that no snigger, snub or critical remark ever reached her ears to upset her frail equilibrium.
Later there would be criticism that Marian’s by now self-imposed isolation led her to become cut off from the feedback which would have disciplined her work, stopping her falling into the self-indulgence of Romola and The Spanish Gypsy. But at this stage in her career it had the opposite effect, allowing her to concentrate all her energies on her writing. The creative drought which had hit in Germany, perhaps as a result of too many invitations to dinner, disappeared. Now under pressure to earn money to support Agnes Lewes, Marian found a new energy for her work. Chapman had written to her at Dover, offering the ‘Belles Lettres’ section of the magazine. Although the twelve pounds a quarter were extremely welcome, the benefits were far more than financial. Over the next two years Marian read and reviewed 166 books, which amounted to an intensive course in contemporary literature, particularly fiction. In the process she noticed what worked and what did not, what she liked and what seemed stale and contrived. As her desire to write fiction pushed further to the front of her mind, she started to think seriously about the kind of novel she wanted to write. Thus when she read Westward Ho!, Charles Kingsley’s Elizabethan romance, she warmed to the bold, vivid adventure, but hated the bossy, priggish narrator who sounded like a parson giving a sermon. Kingsley had a nasty habit of pulling at the reader’s sleeve, telling her whom to like, and whom to reject as utterly awful: ‘he can never trust to the impression that scene itself will make on you, but, true to his cloth, must always “improve the occasion”,’ wrote Marian in the review which appeared in the July 1855 edition.61
It was this nursery-rhyme morality which Marian also objected to in Geraldine Jewsbury’s Constance Herbert. Here the three good-as-gold heroines renounce marriage because they fear passing on the strain of inherited madness which snakes through their family. But over time it becomes clear that in each case the fiancé they gave up was a bad lot anyway. In her review Marian railed against this ‘notion that duty looks stern, but all the while has her hand full of sugar-plums, with which she will reward us by and by’.62
This plea for fiction which represented life as it is, not life as it ought to be, continued in the articles which Marian wrote for the Leader. In the eighteen months following her return from the Continent she wrote thirty-one articles for the weekly, for which she got about a guinea apiece. Control of the magazine had passed from Lewes and Hunt – who had left to edit the Telegraph – to Edward Pigott, a delightful man who visited the new couple on their holiday in Tenby and was one of the few friends of Lewes to write John Cross a letter of congratulation when he married Marian. Pigott was happy to let Marian write a piece on Goethe as a pre-publication puff for Lewes’s forthcoming biography. She chose to write a piece defending the detached stance Goethe takes in Wilhelm Meister towards his characters, a practice which was customarily viewed as ‘destitute of moral bias’. Unlike Kingsley and Jewsbury, Goethe lets his people work out their own destiny, rewarding them with neither torment nor bliss, but with a mixed bag of indifferent outcomes. And this, points out Marian, is not only because life has a way of dishing out deserts randomly but because it is impossible, truly, to know who is good or bad. ‘Everywhere he [Goethe] brings us into the presence of living, generous humanity – mixed and erring, and self-deluding,’ she explains with obvious approval, ‘but saved from utter corruption by the salt of some noble impulse, some disinterested effort, some beam of good nature, even though grotesque or homely.’63
In the event, the Goethe biography needed no pre-publication push from Marian. It was a magnificent book, showing Lewes at his best: lucid, humane, agile. It would be hard to think of anyone better able to follow Goethe through every aspect of his versatile life, from the stage to science, from poetry to philosophy. Lewes’s Goethe did more than any other book of the century to bring German culture to the middling mass of Britons. A popular and critical success, it sold quickly and garnered admiring reviews from the quality press. It turned out to be a major money-spinner, too, bringing Lewes a significant income for the rest of his life. But this was not why Marian thought so highly of the book. ‘I can’t tell you how I value it’, she wrote to Bray, ‘as the best product of a mind which I have every day more reason to admire and love.’64
Goethe was one of those people whom the subject of Marian’s next Westminster piece would have consigned to the everlasting flames. Dr John Cumming was a minister of the Scottish National Church whose hell-fire-and-brimstone sermons typified the rigid, ungenerous version of Protestant Christianity which Marian had embraced in her youth.65 Cumming concentrated his attention lovingly on what hell would feel like, and little time on what a life dedicated to Christ would entail. He disregarded the small virtues of everyday life – a conjugal kindness, a voluntary honesty – in favour of an all-embracing duty to give one’s life to the Lord. Instead of reaching the divine through loving her husband, a wife should be careful that she was not distracted from her love of God. It would be hard to imagine a greater antithesis to Feuerbach.
Cumming’s hell was kept alight not only with Puseyites who had gone over to Rome but with the souls of doubters, those men and women like Marian who wanted to believe, but who wrestled daily with the implications of revealed religion. Instead of a helping hand, Cumming offered them only gleeful spite. ‘Nowhere in his pages have we found a humble, candid, sympathetic attempt to meet the difficulties that may be felt by an ingenious mind,’ reported Marian. ‘Everywhere he supposes that the doubter is hardened, conceited, consciously shutting his eyes to the light.’66
The piece is confident, probably because Marian had only to think herself back into the ‘dogmatic perversions’ of her youth to experience the kind of mind which could have produced such an unlovely doctrine: small, hard, frightened. Lewes was stunned by its fluency, and during a walk in Richmond Park told her that he was convinced ‘of the true genius in her writing’.67 Others thought so too. Back in Coventry, Mary Sibree, now Mrs John Cash, whose life had been so profoundly touched by the holy war, read the piece out to the Brays, who all agreed that ‘it must be yours . . . No one else could do it.’68
It was fortunate that Marian scored such a success so soon after coming back from Germany, because only five months later she experienced her first major publishing set-back. With Lewes’s ‘big book’ now safely through the press, it was time to pay attention to Marian’s. She finished translating Spinoza’s Ethics in February 1856 and looked forward to her reward. ‘You don’t know what a severely practical person I am become, and what a sharp eye I have to the main chance,’ she wrote to Bray. It was probably money matters which lay behind her request to him in the same letter to ‘be so good as not to mention my name in connection with . . . [Spinoza]. I particularly wish not to be known as the translator of the Ethics.’69 It was Lewes, after all, who had the contract with the publisher, not she. As far as we know, his plan was to fudge the issue of authorship when he presented the finished work to Bohn.
But it never got that far. Since 1854, when the arrangement had been made, Bohn senior had grown lukewarm about publishing Spinoza and used the fact that Lewes had made an oral contract with his son as a justification for renegotiating the price. Writing to Lewes, he asked him to come and see him with the manuscript ‘and we will then enter into a proper agreement’. At this Lewes took great offence and dashed off an angry letter: ‘I altogether decline to have transactions with a man who shows such wonderful facility in forgetting . . . I beg you will send back my m.s. and consider the whole business at an end between us.’70 Punch-drunk on his success with Goethe, Lewes may have believed that he could afford to swagger. But despite approaching another publisher, he failed to get the Ethics published.
It was an extraordinary episode. In the Westminster–Leader circle, there were plenty of pompous men only too ready to huff and puff when they considered themselves insulted. But Lewes was not one of them. Nimble and pragmatic, he was used to dealing with publishers and editors who played it less than straight. So why did he fly off the handle at a little sharp practice? Guilt may have been part of it, the recognition that he himself was going to effect a sleight of hand by implying that Marian’s work was his own. But he may also have taken offence at the implication that Bohn was not keen to publish a book about ethics from London’s most notorious adulterer.
If it had been any other man in Marian’s life who had sabotaged fifteen months’ solid work it would be tempting to see envy at work. But in their twenty-five years together Lewes never said or did a nasty thing towards Marian. He honoured her talent as the greater, but refused to feel dwarfed by comparison. He had lived long and hard enough to be simply grateful when her work turned out to generate sufficient income to allow him to give up journalism and turn to the kind of serious scientific work he had so longed to do. Perhaps in these post-Germany months he had grown as touchy as Marian about imagined slights. Never in the least protective of his own reputation, he none the less felt responsible for hers. If he had the faintest suspicion that Bohn knew that the translation was by Marian and had rejected it because of her ‘unfortunate’ situation he would have rushed into the fray like the shaggy Skye terrier he physically resembled.
For Marian the Spinoza incident must have seemed like a bad omen for her new life with Lewes, which she had always envisaged as a blending of personal affection and shared intellectual endeavour. She had published two translations without the help of a ‘husband’, and must surely have wondered what lesson could be learned from Lewes’s failure to complete on a deal which had seemed so certain.
The loss of income from fifteen months’ worth of work could not have come at a worse time. While Marian and Lewes had been in Germany Agnes Lewes had run up a big debt. Her emotional generosity towards her husband and his new partner was part and parcel of an optimistic personality, which assumed that there would always be enough to go round – with some to spare. This contrasted sharply with Marian, who had grown up in a household where love and money were carefully measured out. Even at her wealthiest she kept a sharp eye on her accounts. Still, she never took refuge in the resentful carping of a second wife, nor in the farmer’s daughter’s disapproval of the feckless gentry. Even after Lewes’s death she continued to pay Agnes an annual allowance.
In the circumstances it was easier for Marian and Lewes to focus their angry feelings on Thornton Hunt. Despite the fact that he now had a regular wage from his post at the Telegraph, Hunt showed little inclination to provide for the three children he had so far fathered by Agnes. Lewes remained legally responsible for the support of all the offspring who bore his name, as well as Agnes’s outstanding debt. To tide him over he took out a loan, but continued to press Hunt to fulfil his responsibilities. Finally, on 16 December 1856 Hunt panicked, snapped and responded with a display of injured innocence and a challenge to a duel. It was a silly, flamboyant gesture, typical of the whole self-dramatising Hunt clan.
Concentrating his resentment on Hunt allowed Lewes to remain on cordial, if occasionally exasperated, terms with Agnes. He visited his three sons once a week and until 1859 kept some of his books at Bedford Place, a point which has sometimes puzzled biographers. Although the children were old enough, at thirteen, eleven and nine, to wonder why their father lived apart from their mother, they seem to have inherited his constitutional gaiety and determination never to be a drag on others. Lewes had not spoken about his new domestic situation to the boys and the occasional surviving letter to them makes no mention of Marian. When he took them to the beach at Margate for a week in 1855 she stayed behind in Richmond. As far as the boys were concerned, life went on much the same with Mama, their nurse Martha Baker (‘Nursie’), a string of new babies and regular visits from Uncle Thornton and Papa.
It is a credit to Lewes that he remained an active, loving father to his sons. His letters to them are affectionate, playful and respectful, quite unlike anybody’s idea of a remote Victorian papa. From Germany he wrote: ‘Here I am in the capital of the Grand duchy of Weimar, about which you, Thornie, know something already, I have no doubt – or soon will. It is a very queer little place although called the “Athens of Germany” on account of the great poets who have lived here; one of them, the greatest of all, you know already by the portraits and little bust in our house – I mean Goethe.’71
But jolly letters from a glamorous father were not going to constitute a sufficient education for the Lewes boys. The problem of where to send them to school was looming. Charles and Thornie were presently at Bayswater Grammar, but Lewes did not think it would do for much longer. Marian was clearly involved in the discussion too, for in April 1856 she wrote to Charles Bray asking if he thought her old friend John Sibree would be prepared to tutor the boys.72 Having given up the ministry, Sibree now made his living by that precarious mix of tutoring and translation. His free-thinking credentials were impeccable and his published work on Hegel well regarded. It would be hard to think of a more erudite, sceptical, authentic man in whom to place the education of the sons of G. H. Lewes.
But Sibree said no, perhaps out of a reluctance to become involved once more with the woman whom his parents blamed for ruining his life. Sara Hennell stepped in with details of Hofwyl, a Swiss school run along Pestalozzian lines which the Noel brothers had attended. It was perfect for the Lewes boys, offering the kind of liberal, wide-ranging and above all European education which had so distinctively shaped their father. It was also far enough away from London to keep them clear of painful gossip about their parents’ situation. On 25 August 1855 Lewes picked up his sons at London Bridge station and took them via Paris to Berne. He stayed for three days to settle them in at the school, before returning to a toothachy Marian who always found separation from Lewes painful, especially when it was caused by his previous life.
Besides paying the school fees, Lewes gave Agnes an annual allowance which was never less than £250. In 1855, a good year thanks to Goethe, his income was only £430 13s. This meant that he and Marian had to live in an extremely modest way. The house at Richmond was small, and Marian later recalled how difficult it was to concentrate on her writing with Lewes’s pen scratching away on the other side of the room. Their diet was meagre to the point where they often felt faint. Marian’s early experience as a housekeeper enabled her to budget effectively and with a certain grim pleasure she told Bray, ‘I keep the purse and dole out sovereigns with all the pangs of a miser.’73 Holiday plans were often changed at the last minute because of a lack of funds. In Germany, for instance, the original idea had been to go to Dresden from Weimar, but the money would not stretch to it and they travelled straight to Berlin instead. Staying in Ilfracombe for seven weeks in early summer 1856, Marian rationed them to just two trips up the Tor, because the threepence-a-head charge was too expensive to allow for any more visits.74
Money and family were equally entwined in Marian’s life, and had been ever since that day in 1841 when Isaac had shouted that her odd behaviour was draining her father’s capital. As a woman she did not have direct access to her own income and depended on her brother to deliver her twice-yearly interest payments. Disapproving of what he knew of her life in London, Isaac did his best to make things difficult. Preparing to leave for Weimar, she had asked him to make sure that her next instalment was paid to Charles Bray promptly on the due date, 1 December. Isaac, reluctant to write letters, or at least to write them to Marian, sent a message via Chrissey that he would pay the interest when he received it and no sooner.75 This put her in an awkward situation with Charles Bray, who was no longer wealthy enough to accommodate a shortfall, and who had already kindly advanced her December payment. So when some months later, now in anxious exile in Dover, Marian wrote to Isaac to ask him from now on to pay her income straight into the Coventry and Warwickshire Bank, she had little confidence that he would do as she asked since, as she told Bray, ‘he is not precise in answering letters (mine at least) [so] it is difficult to know what he will do.’76 This time, though, he seems to have done as she requested and the arrangement held for the next two years, until her momentous decision to tell him of her ‘marriage’ and consequent request to pay her money directly to Lewes.
Out of her late-arriving and thinly stretched income Marian sent occasional gifts of five or ten pounds to Chrissey, to help with the school fees for the eldest girl, Emily. They were much needed. The good news that the two eldest Clarke boys had been found ‘situations’ – as what we don’t know – was spoiled by hearing later that the eldest, Robert, had proved ‘so naughty that he has had to leave his situation and they are determined to send him to sea’.77 Six months later, while they were preparing to leave Weimar, the sad news came that ‘naughty’ Robert had drowned.78
When Marian went to visit Chrissey over Christmas and New Year 1855–6, it looks as if neither Isaac nor Fanny made the short journey to see her. Although Marian had not told them that she was living with Lewes, it is impossible to believe that the news had not filtered back. Isaac and Fanny might not have been part of the Rosehill circle, but they were intelligent and sophisticated people. Marian’s changing instructions about where to send her money must have alerted him to a shift in her circumstances. And, anyway, Charles Bray was incapable of keeping a secret. Something more than indifference had surely kept Isaac and Fanny away from Attleborough that Christmas. Either way, this was the last time that Marian would set foot in the place that she was about to bring so vividly alive in her novels.
Under the influence of Herbert Spencer, whom he had met back in 1851 during that ‘dreary wasted time’ of his life, Lewes rediscovered his early interest in biological science. Working on the multi-faceted Goethe had pushed him further along this path and he had begun to read seriously in areas not tackled since he was a medical student tramping the wards. The result of this renewed interest had been an article in the October 1852 issue of the Westminster on ‘Goethe as a Man of Science’, as well as a chapter on the same subject in the 1855 book.
But Huxley’s 1854 sneer that Lewes was nothing but a ‘book scientist’ still stung. To remedy the situation Lewes borrowed a microscope from Arthur Helps, determined to turn himself into a practitioner. A near neighbour in Richmond was Professor Richard Owen, one of the country’s leading academic scientists, who welcomed Lewes’s friendship, as well as encouraging his interest. Instead of reading about other men’s experiments, Lewes now began to do his own, albeit in a small way. During an expedition to see Goethe’s little wooden house at Ilmenau in the summer of 1854, he had cut a caterpillar in two and watched, fascinated, while the head began to eat the tail. Marian had made a little box in order to carry the insect back to their lodgings and observe further. Believing, as always, that it was her duty to support a great man in his work, she naturally followed this new direction in Lewes’s life with enthusiasm, helping him search for polyps during their week’s holiday in Worthing in September 1855. Back home in Richmond, science now played a part equal to literature in their lives and a typical day involved ‘reading Homer and science and rearing tadpoles’79, not to mention a stint with William Whewell’s heavy-going History of the Inductive Sciences.
The Leweses’ holiday at Ilfracombe in May 1856 continued this same fine-grained blend of science and art, vacation and work. Just as Goethe had been the raison d’être for the trip to Germany, so the focus for this trip was a series of articles Lewes had planned called ‘Sea-Side Studies’ which were to appear in Blackwood’s Magazine. They were not heavy pieces – Huxley would not have approved – but they were hugely popular and reflected the new passion of Victorians for skimming rock pools, tapping away at fossils and scooping up bits of foliage. Marian and Lewes spent their first mornings in Devonshire scrambling over the rocks at low tide, looking for various kinds of anemones. It soon became clear that they were inexperienced and ill-equipped: the tall thin jars which they had brought all the way from London did not seem to agree with the anemones, which insisted on floating upside down. It was Marian’s job to roll up her sleeve, plunge her arm into the jar and turn the stubborn creatures the right way up.80
To get some expert advice, Lewes made a call on the local curate George Tugwell, a small young man who was an experienced naturalist. Tugwell not only lent them the right sort of jar for their specimens, but joined them on their expeditions. Dressed in old coats and big hats, the trio spent their mornings chipping away at fossils and filling their jars with rock-pool finds. In the late afternoon and evening Lewes examined the day’s takings under the microscope, before carefully classifying and recording them. Marian, who was meant to be absorbed in two big pieces for the Westminster, found herself becoming more and more interested and ‘every day I gleaned some little bit of naturalistic experience’.81 Once liberated from her journalism on 17 June, she gave her full attention to the range of beautiful seaweeds to be found in the local rock pools, reading up about them in the evening so that she could get ‘a little more light on their structure and history’.82
This new experience of close observation, description and categorisation had a massive impact on Marian’s writing. ‘I never before longed so much to know the names of things as during this visit to Ilfracombe,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘The desire is part of the tendency that is now constantly growing in me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct, vivid ideas.’83 On the long walks she took with Lewes in the afternoons, Marian began to see the connections between the natural history of the landscape and that of man. ‘When one sees a house stuck on the side of a great hill, and still more a number of houses looking like a few barnacles clustered on the side of a great rock,’ she wrote, ‘we begin to think of the strong family likeness between ourselves and all other building, burrowing house-appropriating and shell-secreting animals.’84
These Ilfracombe observations were, in part, an attempt by Marian to see whether she could do for the British countryside what Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl had done for the German. One of the Westminster pieces she was currently working on concerned von Riehl’s attempts to study German peasant life as if he were a naturalist looking at an animal species.85 Drawing on her knowledge of evolutionary science – Darwin might not yet have published, but others like Herbert Spencer certainly had – Marian quotes with obvious approval von Riehl’s conclusion that social change among the peasant classes must always be snail slow.
What has grown up historically can only die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws. The external conditions which society has inherited from the past are but the manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human beings who compose it; the internal conditions and the external are related to each other as the organism and its medium, and development can take place only by the gradual consentaneous development of both.86
Von Riehl’s conclusions exactly suited Marian’s conservative temperament. Apart from her brief flirtation with radicalism in 1848, she had always discounted political solutions imposed from above in favour of slow, gradual change pushing up from below. Primed by her father’s stories of the French Revolution and nourished by her own observations of the slow-changing Warwickshire countryside, she believed that ‘a wise social policy must be based not simply on abstract social science, but on the Natural History of social bodies’.87
This plea for an acceptance of things as they are leads Marian into making a case for a new kind of realism in art. In the article, which appears in the July 1856 issue of the Westminster, Marian turns aside temporarily from von Riehl as she endorses Ruskin’s complaint that all too often peasants are portrayed as straight out of a picture postcard or an opera chorus – all rosy-cheeked honesty. Instead, she asks for a new accuracy in painting, drama and literature that would show peasants as they are, neither touched up nor toned down. This request comes not from a pedantic desire for detail, but from a powerful belief that it is art’s duty to make us aware of realities which are not our own: ‘We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness.’88
Eager to practise what she preached, Marian now tried her hand at a couple of bits of description of local life in her journal. The first was a report of the celebrations which Ilfracombe put on to mark the end of the Crimean War. With minute attention to detail she described the yards of bunting, an unconvincing reconstruction of the allied armies, a half-hearted race for village boys and, after dark, a row of fires along the tors. The second piece of writing was a description of two local ‘cockle women’ whom she saw at Swansea, their next destination.
One of them was the grandest woman I ever saw [wrote Marian in her journal] – six feet high, carrying herself like a Greek Warrior, and treading the earth with unconscious majesty. They wore large woollen shawls of a rich brown, doubled lengthwise, with the end thrown back again over the left shoulder so as to fall behind in graceful folds. The grander of the two carried a great pitcher in her hand, and wore a quaint little bonnet set upright on her head. Her face was weather beaten and wizened, but her eyes were bright and piercing and the lines of her face, with its high cheek-bones strong and characteristic.89
From Swansea the Leweses moved to Tenby, a place to stir up memories for Marian. Sara Hennell was unpleasantly quick to remind her by letter of their visit there thirteen years ago. Unpleasant because it was then that Rufa Brabant had announced her engagement to Charles Hennell and, by way of painful compensation, had taken Marian to a dance at the assembly rooms to try and find her a man. It was strange for Marian to contrast that uncertain time with the security of the present. Now she had a partner she loved and a new best woman friend to take the place of envious Sara. On 12 July Barbara Leigh Smith joined the Leweses at Tenby. She was looking and feeling exhausted by the traumas of the previous year. John Chapman had been urging her to become his mistress and have his baby on the strange grounds that it would sort out her irregular periods. He even pointed to Marian and Lewes as a happy example of how well these things could work out.90 Barbara’s father, although he had not been married to her mother, was outraged by the proposition and had thundered that his elder daughter had better go to America if she wanted to go in for that sort of thing. In the end, Barbara had decided against setting up a liaison with Chapman and had come to Tenby to recover from the relationship. She arrived ready to pitch in and immediately set about using her skills as an artist to record various specimens for Lewes. Predisposed to dislike the little man, she left Tenby a few days later believing that he was a good, dear creature who made Marian happy. Fresh from her relationship with Chapman, Barbara was in the mood to discuss sex. During the long sandy days at Tenby she drew from Marian the confidence that Lewes was a considerate lover and that they practised birth control, having made the decision not to have children. If Marian went into details about her preferred method of contraception, Barbara did not pass them on to Bessie, who in turn reported the conversation to her daughter. Condoms, of a reusable variety, were available by now and the rhythm method was also practised in an ad hoc way by those who understood it. Lewes, as a one-time medical student and physiologist, may be assumed to have been one of the initiated few who had grasped the fact that pregnancy was most likely to happen in the middle of a woman’s cycle.
On the surface, Marian was less productive in Tenby than she had been in Ilfracombe. Since finishing the piece on von Riehl she recorded that she had ‘done no visible work’ but added, ‘I have absorbed many ideas and much bodily strength; indeed, I do not remember ever feeling so strong in mind and body as I feel at this moment.’ Then she admitted to herself what had been brewing for ten years: ‘I am anxious to begin my fiction writing.’91
It was a momentous psychological breakthrough. Until now Marian had approached the realisation that she wanted to be a novelist crab-like, from the side. There must have been a bit of talk about her ambitions back in Coventry because in 1846 Sara had spotted that, newly released from the dreary Strauss, Mary Ann was looking ‘very brilliant just now – we fancy she must be writing her novel’.92 This was perhaps the point at which Marian wrote the description of the Staffordshire farmhouse and its neighbours which, according to her journal entry of 6 December 1857, ‘How I Came to Write Fiction’, had come to nothing and, ‘I lost any hope that I should ever be able to write a novel, just as I desponded about everything else in my future life.’93 But one night during their stay in Berlin she had plucked up courage to show these yellowing pages to Lewes who, although liking them, confirmed her fears that ‘he disbelieved in my possession of any dramatic power’.94
The words cut deep, seeming to confirm Marian’s own low opinion of what she might achieve as a fiction writer. Even when Lewes managed to sell her journal recollections of Weimar in the form of two essays for Fraser’s in the June and July 1855 issues, she was defensively aware that they too were almost wholly descriptive. Retreating to the high ground, she told Bray not to mention her name in connection with the essays ‘for to people who do not enjoy description of scenery it will seem very tame and stupid, and I really think a taste for descriptive writing is the rarest of all tastes among ordinary people’.95
It was a shame. Lewes had not meant the comment nastily. He truly admired her descriptive writing, and scholars have been quick to spot the passages from her unpublished journals which he lifted – with her permission – and put straight into his own work. He was keen for her to write fiction, not least because it paid better than essay writing and they were, as always, looking for ‘the main chance’. He had been genuinely impressed by the Cumming essay and kept up a gentle pressure that she should try to write fiction. Now, in Tenby, he suggested it again. ‘You have wit, description and philosophy – those go a good way towards the production of a novel. It is worth while for you to try the experiment.’96
Marian takes up the story: ‘one morning [in Tenby] as I was lying in bed, thinking what should be the subject of my first story, my thoughts merged themselves into a dreamy doze, and I imagined myself writing a story of which the title was – “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton”.’ Excited, she woke herself properly and immediately told Lewes of her idea. ‘He said “O, what a capital title!” and from that time I had settled in my mind that this should be my first story.’97