1869–72
THE DAY AFTER Thornie’s funeral – at Rosslyn Hill Unitarian chapel, the parish church for unbelievers – Lewes and Marian left London for the country. For three weeks they hid themselves and their grief away at a farmhouse in Limpsfield, Surrey. Lewes told Blackwood that Marian had taken the loss hardest, having ‘lavished almost a mother’s love on my dear boy, and felt almost a mother’s grief. I was better prepared, having never from the first held much hope of his recovery.’1
The next few months were scrappy and bleak. Christmas was subdued – dinner with Charles and Gertrude in Hampstead and a walk over the Heath to visit Thornie’s grave in Highgate Cemetery. In March they decided to try the cure of a trip to Germany, still their special place. But the magic was running out: ‘wandering to and fro upon the earth’, in Marian’s disenchanted phrase, no longer answered.2 The lionising was gratifying but wearing: in Berlin Marian was mobbed by a mass of women each wanting to have ‘a peck’ at her.3 Princes begged to be introduced, scientists threw open their laboratories and ambassadors queued up for an audience. By now, Lewes’s researches had moved to the fledgling discipline of psychiatry and he spent much time closeted with mad doctors, a preoccupation which struck Marian as macabre. Perhaps it was the dull ache of Thornie’s death, or maybe, as Marian maintained, Europe had become a tourist hell-hole, but these weeks away failed to take off. Tried and tested comforts, like a trip to the concert hall to tackle Wagner once again, resulted only in ‘hours of noise and weariness’.4
Marian’s writing life was likewise fitful. Ever since the publication of The Spanish Gypsy in the summer of 1868 she had been pottering on minor projects while cogitating big ones. The entry for 1 January 1869 laid out a confident new programme for the year ahead, comprising ‘A Novel called Middlemarch, a long poem on Timoleon, and several minor poems’.5 But although Marian did a lot of background reading in Greek history through the first half of 1869, Timoleon never materialised. This is lucky, because the subject and form threatened to produce another Spanish Gypsy – long, learned and dull.
But despite Marian’s declaration to Blackwood in February 1869 that ‘I mean to begin my novel at once, having already sketched the plan’, she stayed mainly with verse.6 In the first months of the year she produced two short poems, ‘Agatha’ and ‘How Lisa Loved the King’. The American publisher James Fields paid an extravagant £300 for the first, John Blackwood a more temperate £50 for the second. Returning from their Italian trip on 5 May, Marian again tried to settle to Middlemarch, but the usual despair about her capabilities was this time capped by agonies about Thornie. The experience of watching and waiting by a sickbed took her back to Griff, or maybe it was the meditations preliminary to Middlemarch that were stirring up memories. Whatever their precise reason for coming now, the eleven ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets which Marian wrote during July show her still ‘yearning in divorce’ for reconciliation with her brother.7
The intensity and compression of verse suited a writing life fragmented by nursing duties. As Thornie withered away, Marian started another poem, ‘The Legend of Jubal’.8 Less obviously autobiographical than the ‘Brother and Sister’ sequence, ‘Jubal’ none the less resonates with Marian’s increasing anxiety about her status as an artist. Jubal is an old man who returns to his people expecting their thanks for his great gift to them – the lyre. But while his memory is cherished, Jubal’s physical presence goes unrecognised to the point where he himself begins to wonder whether he exists at all. Marian, too, was struggling with the fact that while George Eliot’s stock had never been higher, her own creativity was at an all-time low. She was failing to make headway on Middlemarch and was haunted by the usual terror that her previous books had all been flukes. Like Jubal, she sometimes wondered whether she existed at all. Clearly Macmillan’s thought she did, for they paid a handsome £200 for the piece, while the Atlantic Monthly in America managed £50.
The next and final poem written during this creatively scrappy time was ‘Armgart’, put together during another break at Limpsfield in the late summer of 1870. Like ‘Jubal’, it deals with the subject of the musician whose music has fled, but this time Eliot turns to the particular problem of the female artist.9 Armgart is a supremely talented opera singer who has dedicated herself to public performance. Count Dornberg wants to marry her on condition that she gives up her vocation, since he believes that a woman is ‘royal’ only when she expresses ‘the fulness of her womanhood’.10 Armgart is not prepared to compromise – ‘I am an artist by my birth’ – and insists that ‘The man who marries me must wed my Art/Honour and cherish it, not tolerate’.11 When Armgart loses her voice permanently, her friends suggest that there is nothing now to stop her marrying. She, however, insists that she is still worth more than “ ‘The Woman’s Lot”: a Tale of Everyday’.12 It is only through her (female) cousin’s urging that she agrees eventually to follow the example of her old singing master and dedicate herself to a life of service, teaching others.
Armgart’s renunciation of a woman’s life in favour of that of the professional singer anticipates the choice made by Alcharisi in Daniel Deronda. But Marian was also considering her own situation as an artist who has been struck dumb. For two years now, she had been struggling with Middlemarch in one form or another and the result was still nothing more than a few chapters. If something did not change soon, then she too would be obliged to settle for ‘a Tale of Everyday’, a companionable life of financial ease but creative deadness. Unlike Armgart, she had not had to face the agonising choice between her man and her art, but that did not mean that she relished returning full circle to those Griff years when she had longed to write but could not. Was her life to be confined once again to housekeeping, sick-nursing and attendance on a much-loved man?
The death of a young person is the ultimate test for all shades of faith and Marian was no exception in finding it difficult. Although it would have been a comfort now to believe that there was a benevolent being who had planned Thornie’s end for some higher purpose, she refused to take refuge in that consoling delusion. Nor did she, like so many Victorian agnostics, try to fill the void by turning to spiritualism. As she made clear to a new correspondent, the American novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, the whole business of table rapping struck her as nothing but ‘the lowest charlatanerie’.13 Mrs Stowe, though, remained firmly convinced of the value of talking to the spirits and even suggested to Marian in June 1872 that she had managed to have a conversation with the long-dead Charlotte Brontë.
Marian was tactfully non-committal about Miss Brontë’s chatty ghost. She understood that in its most well-meaning form spiritualism offered as great a comfort to human yearning as any other variety of belief. She continued to attend Unitarian chapels in Hampstead and in Little Portland Street from time to time, went to hear the celebrated preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon (concluding that he was even more awful than she had anticipated) and followed with interest Barbara Bodichon’s increasing attachment to Catholicism, on one occasion even accompanying her to High Anglican mass.
But still Marian’s greatest wish was to move beyond the easy consolations of orthodox faith. What was needed now, she told Mrs Stowe, was a religion which would inculcate ‘a more deeply-awing sense of responsibility to man, springing from sympathy with . . . the difficulty of the human lot’.14 This was a restatement of the principles she had set before Clifford Allbutt the previous year, when she had urged upon him the need ‘Never to beat and bruise one’s wings against the inevitable but to throw the whole force of one’s soul towards the achievement of some possible better’.15 Agonising over the meaning of Thornie’s death would, in Marian’s stringent terms, be to give in to the endless demands of the ego. Her job now was to love more fully those who were left behind.
Marian’s posing and partial answering of the question ‘how shall we live now?’ brought her a status somewhere between savante and saint. Hundreds of people wrote to her with their religious difficulties; the lucky few got to pose their questions face to face. Always she told them the same thing: resign yourself to suffering, wean yourself off the hope of a future life and nourish your fellow feeling towards the men and women you encounter every day. Ever since Romola her work had been viewed as deeply moral: early disgust at Hetty’s bastard and Maggie’s flight with Stephen Guest had long dissolved. Improvement Societies put George Eliot on the syllabus and one enterprising lady suggested that extracts from her books should be displayed prominently in railway waiting-rooms instead of the usual Bible texts.16 Likewise, the whiff of infidelity, which had followed Marian ever since her translation of Strauss, no longer seemed to bother even the most orthodox. Clergymen were known to quote George Eliot from the pulpit and one pious visitor to the Priory confided that she had copied passages from Romola into her New Testament.
In part, this devotional atmosphere was created by Lewes, who was delighted to see Marian treated with reverence after years of ostracism. He increasingly called her ‘Madonna’, liked the conceit that they lived at the ‘Priory’ and enjoyed Charles Dickens’s joke that the regular Sunday gathering was nothing less than a ‘service’.17 But no amount of stage management by ‘the mercurial little showman’ could have sustained an image based only on word play. There was something about Marian’s combination of rigorous intellectual analysis and warm empathy that drew men and women to confide the state of their troubled souls. On her first meeting with Marian at the Priory in March 1873, the Hon. Mrs Henry Frederick Ponsonby, wife of Queen Victoria’s Private Secretary, found herself compelled first to drop a deep curtsy (a style of greeting which was going out of fashion) and then to confide ‘all that was lying deepest in one’s heart and mind without reserve’. Listened to in the ‘kindest and most sympathetic way’, Mrs Ponsonby followed up her audience with a twenty-four-page letter to Marian detailing her religious difficulties. The courtier’s wife was convinced that the farmer’s daughter was ‘in possession of some secret’ about how to live a good life at a time when science was reducing humanity to a bundle of selfish impulses.18 It was the beginning of a correspondence which lasted until Marian’s death.
Marian’s status as the Sage of Unbelief was further boosted by the publication of a volume of her Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings in 1871. The idea for the book came from her newest and most adoring fan, a young Scotsman called Alexander Main. Main had written to her in the summer asking for confirmation that the proper way to pronounce Romola was with the stress on the first syllable. Marian was delighted with his detailed and thoughtful response to this most difficult of her novels, and quickly wrote back to tell him so, falling naturally into the role of confessor: ‘I shall always be glad to hear from you when you have anything in your mind which it will be a solace to you to say to me.’19 Main did not need to be told twice and immediately sent off two long letters on The Spanish Gypsy, which Marian said made her cry because: ‘You have thoroughly understood me . . . you have put your finger on the true key.’20 Two weeks later Main sent a sample of extracts from Marian’s work suggesting that they would make a good separate publication, along the lines of a commonplace book. If it had been left to Marian she probably would not have agreed: her novels grew organically out of her moral vision and to reduce them to a series of platitudes, even striking ones, ran counter to the way she wanted her work to be understood. But Lewes could see the boost that Main’s adoration was giving to Marian’s tottering confidence as she struggled with Middlemarch. So he asked Blackwood to meet the young man and see if he could consent to let the book go ahead. For several reasons Blackwood was not keen. First there was the matter of the copyrights, which still belonged to the firm. Then there was Main’s fervent devotion to Marian. Meeting Main in person at the Edinburgh office did nothing to dispel the impression that there was something repellent about him: the young man revealed that he was thirty years old, lived with his mother and liked to walk the sea shore reading aloud from the works of George Eliot.21 In private, Blackwood dubbed Main ‘the Gusher’, but agreed to bring out the book in time for Christmas 1871. Marian declared herself delighted with the selected texts which Main forwarded for her approval, but secretly disliked the oleaginous Preface which went through without either her or Lewes having the chance to veto it.
It was probably lucky that the Gusher never got South to meet Marian – he would probably have bubbled over with the excitement. The Sunday At Homes had begun again on the Leweses’ return from the Continent in May 1870. As befitted a household frequented by the great and the good, the Priory was currently being upgraded under the discriminating eye of Owen Jones. The interior was to be repainted and a new bathroom installed. Not only did this cost the Leweses a massive £500, it also involved them moving into a cottage in the country for several months while the work was being completed. But this wasn’t the only change. In September 1871 the old servants, Amelia and Grace, gave notice. Although Marian had always counted on them seeing out their days with her, their departure was a great relief.22 The grumpy sisters had refused to let her hire a much-needed third servant and had made life very difficult for the woman employed to nurse Thornie. Now they were gone, Marian was able to start again from scratch, hiring three excellent employees of Mrs Call, the former Rufa Hennell. Later an extra parlourmaid was added, bringing the indoor staff to a highly prosperous four.
Luckily callers at the Priory were grand enough to justify the magnificent new lavatory. ‘Lords and Ladies, poets and cabinet ministers, artists and men of science, crowd upon us,’ crowed Lewes to Main.23 And these days they were bringing their wives with them. Marian and Lewes had been together for so long now that it was an effort to remember that they were not married. In fact, even they often seemed confused: when writing to Alexander Main in January 1873 Lewes maintained that he had lived with his mother until he had ‘married’ Marian, with absolutely no mention of Agnes and the children.24 Marian continued in her usual and, for those in the know embarrassing, custom of referring to Lewes as ‘my husband’. No wonder, then, that it was often rumoured that there had been a quiet divorce and remarriage on the Continent. When Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, and his wife Lady Augusta met Marian at dinner at the Lockers in 1871 they were blithely unaware that ‘Mrs Lewes’ was still legally ‘Miss Evans’.25 And even though the Stanleys were later upset to learn the true state of affairs, it is unlikely that they dissolved in a froth of righteous indignation. The times were changing and just as a reluctance to believe in God no longer constituted a bar to good society, long-term cohabitation was no longer exactly the scandal it used to be. Even Queen Victoria, writing to her daughter Vicky in Germany in 1870, conceded that in those cases where it was too expensive or difficult to divorce, long-term unmarried partnership must surely be ‘holy and right’.26
There was still the occasional priggish objection, but this usually came from someone with a personal axe to grind, like Charles Norton. The Bostonian and his wife visited the Priory in the early weeks of 1869 having, so he maintained, been begged to attend by Lewes. Just like his friend Henry James, Norton seems to have been engaged in an Oedipal struggle with these representatives of an older intellectual generation. In a letter home, Norton assured his correspondent that no decent woman ever went near the Priory: while Mrs Lewes was generally agreed to be ‘a good woman in her present life’, society still looked askance at the bad example she had set. Indeed, Norton maintained that he knew of one infamous case where a ‘poor weak woman’ went to live with her lover, taking Marian Lewes as her precedent.
More spiteful altogether was Norton’s contempt for the Leweses’ aesthetic taste. He described the Priory as hideously vulgar, stuffed with bad paintings, including the portrait of Marian by Burton. Lewes, in a phrase much repeated down the years, was ‘like an old-fashioned French barber or dancing master’ while Marian was extraordinarily plain, of ‘dull complexion, dull eye, heavy features’. Moreover, she had an unpleasantly self-conscious manner, as if accustomed ‘to the adoring flattery of a coterie of not undistinguished admirers’. This, said Norton, showed up in her theatrical adoption of a ‘very low and eager’ speaking voice, which required her to lean over ‘till her face is close to yours’.27 Although Norton loftily maintained that he and his wife had no intention of extending their friendship with the Leweses, a few weeks later they invited both of them to lunch at the house they had taken in Queen’s Gate Terrace. Shortly afterwards Mrs Norton brought her young children to the Priory, which suggests that she hardly saw it as the haunt of the demimonde which her husband’s letter had blusteringly implied.
The question remains why Marian and Lewes went through the strain of hosting a party for twenty or so people every single week. They were both in fragile health and Marian was always fretting about her failure to push ahead with work. For Lewes the reason was simple: socialising with congenial people always had a magically reviving effect. There was hardly any headache or bilious attack which could not be improved by companionable chat over dinner (the food was not important, his tastes were plain). But Marian had always had more ambivalent feelings about the clatter of forced conversation, finding it an emotional and physical drain. What made the Priory At Homes different was that she was rarely subjected to unwanted chat. Lewes picked the lucky ones who were to have an audience and there was a tacit understanding that no one was there to talk about the weather. Conversation was carefully channelled into areas preselected by Marian: religion, painting, literature, her most recent trip abroad. When she grew tired, bored or offended, a hovering Lewes was at hand to whisk the tedious or impertinent guest away.
But the single most important reason why the Leweses continued their weekly entertainment of the great and the good was to show that they could. After years of Marian dining at home alone, it was sweet to watch while the most famous names in the country and on the Continent – Turgenev was a new guest – hovered in the hope of a few minutes’ conversation with Mrs Lewes.
While the Leweses’ contradictory feelings about other people were contained by the strict format of Priory Sundays, once they stepped outside the door their ambivalence led to some baffling behaviour. In April 1869 they were visiting Florence when they were asked to dine by the American ambassador and his wife. They accepted on condition that no one except Isa Blagdon, an old friend of Robert Browning’s, should be asked as well. So when the American poet Longfellow heard that they were in town and begged for an invitation he was turned down. Confusingly, when the Leweses heard about this they announced themselves disappointed, whereupon their hostess sent a note to the poet’s lodgings asking him to present himself immediately. But he was out.28
The fact was that although they insisted that they despised celebrity friendships, whenever a famous face hove into view the Leweses could not resist adding it to their collection. In the summer of 1871 when they were staying for a few months at the little village of Shottermill in Surrey, they were clearly intrigued by the fact that the Tennysons lived at nearby Aldworth. On 14 July Lewes bumped into the Laureate on the train from London and lost no time in bringing him home to meet Marian. Formal visits were duly exchanged and by the end of August the two households were on sufficiently familiar terms for Tennyson to round off a neighbourly evening by reading from his work. Both sides, however, indulged in a little post hoc tweaking to make it seem as though the other household had made all the running. Marian affected a world-weary tone when she mentioned to John Blackwood that it was Tennyson who had hunted her down, rather than the other way round.29 Meanwhile Mrs, later Lady, Tennyson was careful to make sure that posterity did not know just how hard she had pushed to meet the notorious George Eliot. Although a few copies of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s memoir contain an entry from his wife’s diary which makes it clear that she had received and called on Mrs Lewes, in most copies the incriminating passage has been reworked to imply that the poet visited Shottermill alone.30
In the ancient cities of Oxford and Cambridge there was no such suburban squeamishness. Lewes had long been building links with the scientific men at the universities and Marian had taken great interest in the many young men she knew who had been obliged to give up their fellowships when they lost their faith. In May 1870 the Leweses spent three days with Mark Pattison, the Rector of Lincoln College, and his wife Emilia. For two entirely self-taught people, it was gratifying to be treated as honoured guests by the most obviously educated people in Britain. Distinguished scientists opened their laboratories and Benjamin Jowett, the next Master of Balliol, came to dinner. The Leweses also went to hear Emanuel Deutsch deliver his fearsomely learned paper on the Moabite Stone at the Sheldonian.31
On their first evening in Oxford the Leweses dined at Lincoln College, where among the guests was the eighteen-year-old Mary Arnold, niece of Matthew Arnold. The young girl was naturally agog to meet George Eliot, especially since she had literary aspirations, in later life becoming the novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward. Mary’s first reaction was one of disappointment at Mrs Lewes’s quietness, which amounted almost to silence. But with her usual perception Marian spotted the girl’s hunger and sought her out for special attention. Knowing that Mary was interested in Spain, Marian started to talk about her recent stay there, ‘with perfect ease and finish, without misplacing a word or dropping a sentence,’ remembered Mrs Ward much later, ‘and I realised at last that I was in the presence of a great writer.’32
Cambridge was equally welcoming. In February 1868 Oscar Browning and William Clark, fellows of Kings and Trinity respectively, invited the Leweses to see round the place. There was something about the aura of moral seriousness combined with the pedagogic tradition which always brought out the prig in Marian. Browning recalled how during dinner at Trinity ‘she talked to me solemnly about the duties of life, about the shallow immorality of believing that all things would turn out for the best, and the danger of fixing our attention too much on the life to come, as likely to distract us from doing our duty in this world’.33 On another visit to Cambridge, by now revelling in her status as sage, Marian returned to her favourite subjects as she walked round the Fellows’ Garden at Trinity with Frederic Myers: ‘she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiriting trumpet-calls of men, – the words, God, Immortality, Duty, – pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.’34 The staginess of this often repeated anecdote is partly explained by the fact that Myers was writing years later and well after Marian’s death. Elsewhere in his essay he refers to her as a ‘Sibyl’, a tag which unfortunately caught on and contributed to the doomy image of a massive, mythic figurehead, given to spouting riddles. But Marian also contributed to this impression herself when, in 1878, she published a ponderous poem called ‘The College Breakfast-Party’, probably based on an actual conversation at Trinity, which discusses the conflict between duty to others and the desire for self-fulfilment.35
During these years Marian had increasingly engineered her life so that she was always speaking to a rapt and sympathetic audience. Spontaneous utterance in front of neutral and unknown people was to be avoided at all costs. In 1871 she was invited to Edinburgh to take part in the celebration of the centenary of Scott’s birth.36 Although she was destined to sit on the top table alongside other worthies, including John Blackwood, the prospect of unscripted conversation and public scrutiny terrified her. After initially agreeing to attend out of gratitude for the comfort which Scott had brought to her dying father, Marian panicked and got Lewes to write and withdraw her name using her usual excuse of ill-health.
Beneath the public image of sage and sibyl there remained a woman intensely involved with the details of domestic life. Gertrude Lewes’s delivery of a baby girl in 1872 after two miscarriages was greeted with delight. When two more girls followed in 1874 and 1877, Marian allowed herself the luxury of joining in with Lewes’s moan that they had wanted a grandson. She remained as interested as she ever had been in Bertie, who had stayed on in Africa after Thornie’s death. In August 1870 Lewes and Marian had received a letter from the twenty-three-year-old in Natal announcing that he had become engaged to a ‘well-educated young lady, Eliza Stevenson Harrison’, the daughter of a long-time settler.37 But there was a hitch: the girl’s father objected to the match, on the grounds that the boy’s father did not have a penny. Luckily, a substantial injection of cash into the equation seems to have made the difference, for the couple were married in August 1871. In gratitude for the help they had received from the Leweses, Bertie and Eliza named their first child Marian and the second George.
Nor, despite her wealth and status, did Marian lose her grasp on the daily details of housekeeping. Moving into rented accommodation at Shottermill in the summer of 1871 prompted her to write detailed letters to the landlady about blinds, keys and the failure of the butcher to deliver meat. The experience of running Griff, particularly the hiring and managing of the servants, had never left her. As mistress of the Priory she drew up an exact schedule of the housemaid’s daily and weekly duties, including the when and where of carpet-beating and brass-polishing.38 On 11 November 1872 she wrote to Frederic Harrison’s new young wife recommending the daughter of the Priory’s cook as a housemaid. She assures Mrs Harrison that Mary Dowling left her last post only because she was not quick enough at some of the fancier aspects of the job. Marian also believes that the rest of the servants took against the girl because ‘her underclothing was thought arrogantly good’ and her attitude towards the male staff ‘had a little too much dignity’. It is hard to imagine Dickens, Thackeray or Trollope taking such a detailed interest in their footmen’s underpants.39
Marian was aware that her need to watch over others sometimes gushed out of control. On 10 August 1869 she wrote to Emilia Pattison apologising for her effusiveness during the latter’s visit to the Priory, which was not ‘warranted by the short time we had known each other’. Touchingly, she put this down to the fact that she had never given birth and was therefore ‘conscious of having an unused stock of motherly tenderness, which sometimes overflows’.40 Perhaps watching her stepson’s life slip away had also added to Marian’s need to reach out to young people. Between now and the end of her life all the new relationships she formed were with people of an age to be her children. She adopted the Greek model of friendship for her own purposes, talking often of how much she valued the idea that ‘the most satisfactory of all ties is this effective invisible intercourse of an elder mind with a younger.’41 But beneath the rationalisation there was something far more powerful at work. Until she was thirty Marian had spent her time falling in love with teachers of either sex. Now that she was of an age to inhabit that role herself, she found it natural to draw adoring acolytes towards her.
Marian was particularly drawn to young people who were already involved in a family structure into which she could be incorporated as an honorary senior member. She enjoyed the idea that she and Lewes were ‘grandparents’ to a host of her friends’ children, especially Philip and Margaret Burne-Jones. Another household where she fitted in easily belonged to the Cross family. Lewes had first been introduced to the widow Mrs William Cross by Herbert Spencer when they stopped off at Weybridge during a walking tour in October 1867. Eighteen months later the Leweses were in Rome when they bumped into Mrs Cross, her eldest daughter Mrs Bullock and her son, the twenty-nine-year-old banker John Walter Cross. Back in Britain the friendship flourished, partly because both the Leweses and the Crosses spent a lot of time in Surrey and partly because the Cross clan fulfilled the crucial criterion that it ‘worshipped’ the work of George Eliot. Marian and Lewes spent New Year’s Day 1872 in Weybridge being made a fuss of by their new friends, and the following September they celebrated Marian’s finishing of Middlemarch by visiting the family on the country estate, Six Mile Bottom, near Newmarket, recently inherited by Mrs Cross’s son-in-law, Henry Bullock-Hall. Exhausted by the past year’s tight writing schedule, which, Marian confided to Mrs Cross, was ‘a sort of nightmare in which I have been scrambling on the slippery bank of a pool, just keeping my head above water’, she plunged into reviving country conversations about livestock and crops.42 Tantalisingly, John Cross was present during this weekend, along with several of his sisters, but there is no suggestion that he had caught Mrs Lewes’s eye as a future lover. At this point she was more entranced with the family as a whole, and it was now that she started to call Johnny ‘nephew’.
In any case Marian’s interest in young men was in the process of being superseded by her involvement with young women. Much has been written and even more hinted about Marian’s friendships with the group of girls who hung around her during the last decade of her life. These relationships were certainly intense, but to pronounce on whether or not they were ‘lesbian’ is to impose a sensibility which belongs to the late twentieth century. Certainly some Victorian women had physical relationships with other women, even more organised their emotional lives around best friends and sisters, while others combined marriage to a man they loved with enduring friendships with other women. But it would be anachronistic to describe any of these situations as ‘lesbian’ (or not) because lesbianism had not been defined in the way we understand it today. Certainly Harriet Martineau lived lovingly and jealously with her niece, Henry James’s sister Alice had what was described as a ‘Boston marriage’ with a woman friend, and Barbara Bodichon’s sister Annie, also known as Nanny, set up home in Rome with a fellow female artist.
Likewise, the conventions of language and tone which Victorian women observed in their friendships with one another might suggest to us meanings that were never intended. Women frequently used the language of love – calling each other ‘darling’ and ‘dearest’ and swearing undying loyalty – without wishing to express more than warm affection. On other occasions they used phrases which hinted at an attachment which perhaps neither fully understood. For instance, how are we to read those professions of love between Sara Hennell and her ‘unfaithful husband’ Mary Ann Evans during the 1840s? As a submerged ‘lesbian’ enchantment or as a metaphor for the strength of the platonic love between them? The impossibility of knowing suggests the futility of trying to guess.
It is certainly true that those young women who developed a passion for Marian were either enduringly single or stuck in a disappointing marriage. Just like Marian herself, they had an ‘unused stock’ of feelings which were looking for expression. For instance, Georgiana Burne-Jones’s feelings for Marian Lewes grew more intense as her husband’s interest in her waned, reaching a climax when he started an affair with another woman. In June 1870 Georgie arranged to take the children to Whitby to coincide with the Leweses’ arrival in the resort following a tour of health-giving Cromer and Harrogate. Over the two weeks of sandy walks and dinner discussions that followed, Georgie, minus Edward, developed a passionate attachment to Marian. Her first letter to the Priory on Marian’s return to town suggests how profoundly she had been moved:
Dearest Mrs Lewes,
Don’t laugh if I say that my impulse is to address you as ‘Honoured Madame’ – I wish you wouldn’t think it ludicrous and would allow me to do so – it so exactly says what I mean . . .
I think much of you, and of your kindness to me during this past fortnight, and my heart smites me that I have somewhat resembled those friends who talk only of themselves to you . . . Forgive me if it has been so, and reflect upon what a trap for egotism your unselfishness and tender thought for others is. The only atonement I can make is a resolve that what you have said to me in advice and warning shall not be lost.43
Another of Marian’s honorary daughters was Emilia Pattison, the much younger wife of the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. Like Georgie, Emilia was unhappy with her husband, a man whose vast learning and advanced years made many think that he must be the model for Edward Casaubon. There were certain details about Emilia’s intense Anglo-Catholic adolescence which found their way into the description of the Evangelical Dorothea Brooke, including a propensity to fast and to pray spontaneously for the souls of the astonished poor. Following the successful visit to Lincoln College in 1870, the friendship deepened and Marian started to fall naturally into calling Emilia ‘Daughter’, and signing herself ‘Madre’.
But Georgie’s and Emilia’s sentimental devotion was nothing compared with that of Elma Stuart, a soldier’s widow living in Dinan, France, with her small son. She initially wrote to Marian in January 1872, enclosing an oak book-slide which she had carved herself. It was the first of a stream of presents which arrived at the Priory over the years. There were other examples of the dextrous Elma’s craft – an elaborately carved table, mirror and writing board – as well as the more conventional sweets and photographs. Mrs Stuart was obsessed with Marian’s physical comfort – as was Marian – and put a great deal of time and energy into designing knickers, shirts and slippers which might suit her beloved’s increasingly fragile body. But it was the accompanying letters which capped anything that had gone before. The first one set the tone: ‘What for years, you have been to me, how you have comforted my sorrows, peopled my loneliness, added to my happiness, and bettered in every way my whole nature, you can never know.’44 Over the next few years Mrs Stuart offered, among many other things, to be Marian’s servant and kiss the hem of her garment. On Marian’s death she booked the plot next to her beloved’s grave in Highgate so that she could be sure of lying alongside her. The headstone, erected in 1903, was boastfully devoted, describing Mrs Stuart as one ‘whom for 8½ blessed years George Eliot called by the sweet name of “Daughter” ’45
Lewes was not threatened by these intense attachments between Marian and other, younger women. He saw the effect which their adoration had on her shaky confidence and was happy to encourage them to keep writing and visiting. This, of course, ran counter to his declared strategy of not allowing Marian to see or hear anything about her work. In practice, he increasingly allowed anyone whose reaction Marian found pleasing to have controlled access to her. Undiscriminating gush still offended her by its failure to see the difference between her own work and the run-of-the-mill pot-boiler. But these new young female fans gave her the kind of response she wanted, an intensely personal testimony to the way their own lives had been morally uplifted by their encounters with Romola, Fedalma or Esther Lyon.
Women were drawn to Marian for the same reasons as men. Just as Mrs Ponsonby said, George Eliot seemed to understand how to live a good life in a godless universe. And then there was her famous empathy which, as Georgie Burne-Jones had discovered in Whitby, encouraged people to give up their most intimate secrets. It would be naïve to suggest that as Marian leaned eagerly towards some young man or woman, drawing out their inner life, she was consciously trawling material for her next set of characters. By now she was far beyond lifting people from real life and transplanting them into her books. But the understanding of human frailty which at this very moment was feeding her construction of Dorothea, Lydgate and Rosamond was also at work in the drawing-room of the Priory. Her great skill, as young Mary Arnold had noted, was to listen intently to what she was being told, leaving the speaker feeling that, for once, she had been properly heard. A decade before Freud and a century before the counselling boom, Marian Lewes had stumbled upon the power of attentive listening.
There were other things which Marian offered specifically to women who found themselves both excited and confused by the intensifying debate around ‘The Woman Question’. Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, Emily Faithful, Bessie Rayner Parkes and their many friends were beginning to see results for their years of dedicated work. Throughout the fifties and sixties they had campaigned for better schools and jobs for women, and set up a whole range of initiatives, from Girton College to the English Woman’s Journal and an all-women printing business. Now others were beginning to listen: in 1869, following his failure to get women included in the franchise, the mighty John Stuart Mill published his influential The Subjection of Women; the following year Barbara’s dream was realised when the Married Women’s Property Act went through. For the group known as the ‘Langham Place Ladies’, after their headquarters, these were triumphs. But for many other middle-class women the issues were less clear. They might feel restricted in their marriages and frustrated by their lack of publicly recognised achievements, but that did not mean they necessarily wanted to go down the path laid out by liberal trail blazers like Barbara Bodichon. For these women Marian Lewes offered an alternative model of educated, effective womanhood. Unlike Barbara and Bessie, she had not been raised in the tradition of Bentham and the Mills. She did not trust the free market to deliver solutions to cultural and historic tangles. In January 1871, with obvious approbation she quoted the story of a woman who had taken back her drunken husband again and again ‘and at last nursed and watched him into penitence and decency’. This for Marian was not ‘mere animal constancy. It is duty and human pity.’46 While Barbara had worked hard for nearly twenty years to ensure that such a woman need not be shackled to her husband, Marian saw something admirable in the fact that she had stayed.
When Marian started to write Middlemarch at the beginning of 1869 she was already steeped in the medical history which feeds the background to the book. From her recollections of Chrissey’s husband Edward Clarke, she knew all about the difficulties faced by a ‘gentleman’ entering what was still as much a trade as a profession. From Lewes’s ward-walking days as a medical student in the 1830s she got information about basic anatomy, the pathologies of prevalent illnesses including typhoid and cholera, not to mention the scare stories about the infamous Burke and Hare. For the details he was not able to supply she had a host of other sources close at hand. Gertrude Lewes had material about her grandfather, the illustrious medical reformer Thomas Southwood Smith, which fitted nicely with the profile Marian wanted for her hero Tertius Lydgate. Dr Clifford Allbutt was able to answer questions about the organisation and practice of provincial hospitals, which Maria Congreve, daughter of a doctor, supplemented with more research. In addition, Marian did her usual detailed reading on all aspects of the development of medicine.
More than any of Marian’s previous books Middlemarch was concerned with national political and economic life. While in Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner Eliot mentions high grain prices, the far-away French War and the Emancipation of Catholics, the communities she writes about remain aloof from wider political and commercial pressures. In Felix Holt we take a step towards the larger world, as the conflicts surrounding the Great Reform Bill are explored through their impact on one provincial community. But while Eliot had famously maintained in Felix Holt that there is no individual life which is not shaped by wider circumstance, it is in Middlemarch that she shows this process fully at work.
This wider grasp of the relationship between town and country, province and metropolis, country and state was fed by Marian’s continued growing interest in politics and political history. The very week after finishing Felix Holt she had gone to the Houses of Parliament to hear the debate over Abyssinia – something which it would be hard to imagine her doing five years earlier.47 The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870 had her devouring The Times and the Daily News in a way which, given her previous indifference to newspapers, even she found strange.48 Marian had started out on the side of the Prussians, warrior guardians of that German culture which had fed and shaped so much of her life. But as the extent of Junker cruelty became clear, especially during the siege of Paris in December 1870, she began to feel increasing sympathy with the French and a general abhorrence of the brutalising effects of the war. Never noted for her political insight, Marian made an extraordinarily prophetic remark to Sara Hennell on 12 August 1870 when she declared, ‘We have entered into the period which will be marked in future historical charts as “The period of German ascendency”.’49
Middlemarch, of course, is not concerned with the Franco-Prussian War. The novel begins in the late 1820s, and its main political focus is the agitation leading up to the 1832 Great Reform Act. This material was already familiar to Marian from her work on Felix Holt. But her new and wider understanding of economic and social history allowed her to deal in detail with such matters as the coming of the railway to Middlemarch, Ladislaw’s Polish heritage as well as her more expected analysis of the state of agriculture during the post-war depression.
The opening chapters of Middlemarch were not the first which Marian actually wrote. During that scrappy, painful year of 1869 she started work on the story of the young doctor, Lydgate, who arrives in the provincial town of Middlemarch ambitious for himself and for his profession. But only a few weeks into the New Year Marian acknowledged to Blackwood that the work was not going fast: ‘between the beginning and the middle of a book I am like the lazy Scheldt; between the middle and end I am like the arrowy Rhône.’50 Thornie’s illness throughout the summer was a further drag on her work, making her even more doubtful about the novel’s progress: on 11 September she wrote, ‘I do not feel very confident that I can make anything satisfactory of Middlemarch.’51 By the end of the year she had completed fifty pages, but Thornie’s death made further progress impossible. The next we hear of the book is in March 1870 when Marian tells Blackwood despondingly, ‘My novel, I suppose, will be finished some day.’52 But by May she was feeling sufficiently positive to give him a sketch of the book, which left him feeling that ‘It promises to be something wonderful – English provincial life’.53 Then at the beginning of December she paused again and started on a different story altogether. This was called ‘Miss Brooke’ and, according to her journal, ‘is a subject which has been recorded among my possible themes ever since I began to write fiction’.54 Quite possibly this was the germ for ‘The Clerical Tutor’, which had once been mentioned as a possible addition to Scenes of Clerical Life. By the end of the month she had managed a brisk and promising one hundred pages. But it was only at the beginning of the third year, 1871, that she had the idea of joining the Lydgate and Dorothea fragments together to produce the book which we know now as Middlemarch.
It would be strange if from this point Marian had charged ahead. By March 1871 she was already tormented by the fact that languor and illness had produced a disappointing total of only 236 (print equivalent) pages. Typically, too, she despaired of the book’s structure, believing that she had ‘too much matter, too many “momenti” ’.55
By May, however, she was feeling sufficiently positive to let Lewes start making provisional arrangements with Blackwood for publication. Both men had good reasons for wanting to depart from the usual way of doing things. Blackwood’s profits had long suffered from the hold which Mudie and the other circulating libraries had on the reading public: people were reluctant to buy a book which, if they waited a few weeks, they could borrow. The Leweses were shocked to note how even the wealthy Mary Cash, formerly Sibree, refused to part with her money if she thought there was a good chance of getting a book from the library. If there was a way of publishing which weakened the grip of Mudie and W. H. Smith on the market, Blackwood was keen to consider it. Lewes, for his part, had always been intrigued by the idea that bringing out Marian’s books in instalments would make her fortune. On 7 May he sketched out a plan for Middlemarch to Blackwood, based on the precedent of Victor Hugo’s massive Les Misérables. Middlemarch was already heading for four volumes instead of the more usual three, so it made sense to divide the material up in a completely new way. Lewes proposed that the book should appear in eight instalments published every two months. Each would cost five shillings and Marian was to get a royalty of two shillings on every copy sold. The high royalty reflected the fact that Marian was gambling on the success of her work, having waived her claim to the more usual lump sum.56
Blackwood did not jump immediately. Years before, he had rejected a similar plan for Bulwer-Lytton’s monumental My Novel. He knew that this kind of bold scheme would only be profitable if the book was a huge popular success. And in his usual tactless way Lewes had already made the proposal less attractive by concluding a parallel arrangement with the American publisher Osgood & Co. to bring out the book there in weekly instalments. Despite the fact that Marian hated to be read in such small parts, the price of £1200 was too good to let pass. Blackwood was naturally worried that advance extracts might cross the Atlantic and reach London in time to spoil the full impact of Middlemarch. But if he was tempted to make a fuss, his first taste of the manuscript on 31 May made him determined not to scare the Leweses into the arms of another George Smith. To Marian, Blackwood wrote that Book One was ‘filled to overflowing with touches of nature and character that could not be surpassed’, while to his clerk George Simpson he confided that he ‘would willingly be content with a moderate gain to ourselves rather than let it go past us’.57
Both the Leweses and the Blackwoods were acutely aware of what was at stake and moved softly to avoid conflict. At the dinner celebrating Scott which Marian should have attended on 15 August, Blackwood gave a speech in which he emphasised that he had always delighted in making friends of his authors. Lewes, in turn, made a point of letting Edinburgh know how moved Marian had been when she had reached this part of the transcript, remarking that she was sure that any author who was not friends with Blackwood had only him- or herself to blame.58
In the end Middlemarch came out in eight parts, the last three appearing at monthly intervals instead of every two months. Lewes’s hunch that this method of publication would extend the swell of interest in the novel proved correct. People felt more intensely involved with Middlemarch than they had with any of the previous books. Marian, too, liked the idea that readers were more likely to give each instalment greater attention than if they had swallowed the book whole. The only unhappy effect of this new arrangement was the paper wrapper designed for each section. It was fussy, very green, and appalled those like Owen Jones or Barbara Bodichon who had an eye for these things.
As it turned out, Middlemarch marked a return to the high-water days of Marian’s relationship with Blackwood. Not since Adam Bede had she brought out a book with such large profits and so little fuss. This was all the luckier because her attitude to money was as confused as it had been at the beginning of her writing career. She was as haughty as ever about people who wrote ‘trash’ for money, maintaining that she felt ‘quite oppressed with the quantity of second rate art everywhere about’.59 To the many correspondents, from schoolgirls to published authors, who asked for advice about their writing, she was nearly always coolly discouraging, suggesting they try something else. This went even for Anthony Trollope, about whom she commented that it was a bad idea for him to give up the Post Office because he had written quite enough novels already.60
Yet more than any of her books, Middlemarch was written for money. Marian had not had a really significant income from a new work since Felix Holt, five years before. Her outgoings were continuing to rise. The Priory gobbled cash and both the Leweses had been poor for long enough to believe that charity began at home. There were Mrs Willim, Agnes Lewes, Emily Clarke and Nursie to support, not to mention Bertie and Charlie, and the growing brood of grandchildren. Lewes was not bringing in much money, so the whole burden fell on Marian. It is no coincidence that it was now that she decided to return to the provincial English landscape, which had always proved most popular with her readers. And despite the extra pressure which came with serialisation – including having to rejig her narrative so that the books came out in equal parts – she was happy to fall in with an arrangement that promised to make her absolutely secure for the rest of her life.
Much of Book Two of Middlemarch–‘Old and Young’–was written down in Shottermill, a little village near Haslemere, Surrey. The Leweses moved there temporarily in May 1871 while the Priory was being refitted. They were, as always, picky about their surroundings, rejecting at least five cottages suggested by helpful friends before they found Brookbank. They stayed there from 2 May until 1 August, when they were obliged to move out for another tenant. Luckily the cottage opposite was free and they took Cherrimans for a further month before returning to London on 1 September.
In the quiet of the country Marian wrote fluently and well. Disturbed only by an occasional visit from Barbara Bodichon, the Calls and the Tennysons, she spent her mornings working and her afternoons walking with Lewes. Blackwood was increasingly enthusiastic about the instalments which were arriving in Edinburgh, remarking after reading Book Two, ‘You are like a great giant walking about among us.’61
Once Book One of Middlemarch appeared in print in December, new voices were raised in admiration. James Paget refused to believe that Mrs Lewes had never known a doctor intimately, since her portrayal of Lydgate was so exact. Lawyers expressed surprise that a layperson could get the details about Featherstone’s will so right. ‘And all of us’, concluded a triumphant Lewes writing to Main, ‘wonder at the insight into Soul!’62
By this time Marian needed to hear every little bit of praise which Lewes could soak up. A week after her return to the Priory on 1 September she had suddenly become ‘depressed in spirits and in liver’. Lewes had no doubt that this was linked to the creative process, writing hopefully to Blackwood that ‘perhaps gestation is more favourable when so much emotion accompanies it’.63 But a week later Marian took a turn for the worse, falling seriously ill for five days with gastric fever which left her, she told Sara, ‘as thin as a mediaeval Christ’.64 Sensing that he had a full-scale crisis on his hands, Lewes now urged Blackwood to sanction Alexander Main’s tribute of a commonplace-style selection from Eliot’s published work in the hope that good Christmas sales and some nice reviews would boost Marian’s tottering confidence.
Over 1872, which saw the publication of the remaining seven parts of Middlemarch, Marian’s spirits rose and fell almost daily. She held a small party at the Priory on 30 November 1871 to celebrate the publication of Book One and enjoyed the fun of sending out presentation copies to very close friends, among whom she now counted ‘the Gusher’. Two months later, on 27 January, the Leweses held a large dinner party and musical evening at the Priory, the biggest of its kind since the death of Thornie. But even in the midst of this returning buoyancy Marian could not help focusing on the dark side, writing gloomily to Blackwood, ‘I am thoroughly comforted as to the half of the work which is already written – but there remains the terror about the unwritten.’65 Only a few weeks later she was back in deep despair. Rereading her previous book, Felix Holt, she declared to Lewes that she ‘could never write like that again and that what is now in hand is rinsings of the cask!’66
From this low point Marian’s health and spirits gradually began to rise. In order to give her a chance to work concentratedly on Book Six of Middlemarch, in May 1872 the Leweses tried the trick of moving once again to the country, this time choosing Redhill. They kept their address secret even from close friends and were rewarded with nothing more disruptive than the occasional noisy hen or dog. The magic did not work straight away, for Marian found herself in severe agony from aching teeth and sore gums – a trouble spot with her which would get worse over the years. But the combination of attention from the dentist and visits from James Paget – who presumably was given the address – gradually eased the problem and Book Six was finished in a record five weeks. Encouraged by Marian’s characteristic late burst of speed, Lewes now suggested to Blackwood that he bring out Books Seven and Eight at monthly intervals. By 17 September 1872 Marian had finished correcting the proofs of Book Eight, and the very next day she and Lewes set out for Germany.
‘Why always Dorothea?’ asks Eliot famously at the beginning of chapter 29 of Middlemarch, making the point that while her heroine might be one of the principal centres of consciousness in the novel, her elderly, unappealing husband Casaubon also has an internal life, as vivid to him as Dorothea’s is to her. One could say the same of Marian and Lewes. For all the time that Marian was battling with fading inspiration, depressed liver and grief over Thornie, Lewes was tackling parallel pressures in his own life.
The letter from Thornie in October 1868 telling of his terrible health had rattled Lewes dreadfully. Although there was nothing which could be done immediately, aside from sending off the money the boy had asked for, he felt restless with responsibility. He was committed to spending the spring in Italy with Marian, but appeared distracted and tetchy throughout the holiday. This time it was sciatica which made things difficult, although never enough to stop him visiting the people he wanted to see. In Florence, staying once again at the Villino Trollope, Lewes made an excursion to Professor Schiff’s laboratory to see a machine which, it was claimed, could measure the speed of thought.
Naples turned out to be wet and Rome unpleasantly crowded. Normally the cheeriest of souls, Lewes seemed perpetually irritated by those things that he usually found charming: lazy trains, tricky cabbies and other people. He could not be bothered to remember his fifty-second birthday on 18 April, and fretted constantly to be home and ‘at work again’. When he did finally get back to the Priory on 5 May, he was shocked to find a skeletal Thornie waiting for him.
Despite Lewes’s suggestion to Blackwood that he had never held out any hope of recovery for Thornie, the death hit him very hard. Usually able to work through anything, he was forced to put aside his monumental Problems of Life and Mind, in which he was trying to find a physiological basis for human psychology. His constant companions of headache and ringing in the ears now intensified and on one frightening evening in February 1870 he fainted in bed, waking the next morning to find his hands and feet numb and tingling. If this was a minor stroke, it remained undiagnosed and a couple of weeks later Lewes was just able to drag himself off to the Isle of Wight for a convalescent break with the hypochondriacal but supremely robust Herbert Spencer.67
The trip to Germany the following month, in March 1870, did a fair amount for Lewes’s ego, if nothing for his health. In Europe he had long been treated as a great man of both Science and Letters, rather than a versatile hack. In Berlin he talked as an equal with leading researchers in neurology and attended a University Festival in honour of the King’s birthday, where he was ‘seated apart from the public among the Princes, Professors, Ambassadors, and persons covered with stars and decorations’.68 Invited to dinner by the American ambassador, he was delighted to meet the distinguished chemist Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. Prince Frederick VIII, the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, spotted him in a bookshop and ‘begged to be introduced’.69 This was the kind of thing Lewes loved. Unlike Marian, who genuinely preferred not to be recognised by the public, Lewes had been known to drop hints about his identity to fellow hotel guests, especially if they were female, young and pretty.
With progress on Problems still stalled, Lewes consulted yet another doctor. Following Dr Reynolds’ advice on phosphates, cod liver oil and plenty of rest by the sea, the Leweses duly set out for a tour of east-coast health spots in June 1870, taking in Cromer and Harrogate before meeting up with Georgie Burne-Jones in Whitby. From this low point Lewes’s health gradually improved. It may have been the happy news of Bertie’s engagement, or the peaceful death of Mrs Willim on 10 December 1870, which allowed him to release a little of the heavy responsibility he always carried for his clan. On the other hand it is possible that Marian’s descent into nausea and toothache while writing Middlemarch required him to vacate the role of invalid. In the ceaseless dance of sickness that the Leweses performed down the years, the jobs of nurse and patient were swapped several times. Now it was Lewes’s turn to fuss around Marian, summoning Paget from town and making sure there was a steady supply of pain-relieving quinine. Marian reported that Lewes was now ‘in an altogether flourishing condition, enjoying all things from his breakfast to the highest problems in statics and dynamics’.70 She had not seen him so well for many years.
The Leweses’ continued devotion to one another sometimes baffled onlookers. On the last day of 1870 Marian wrote in her journal: ‘In my private lot I am unspeakably happy, loving and beloved,’ while Lewes maintained to a friend that the experience of being Marian’s partner ‘is a perpetual Banquet to which that of Plato would present but a flat rival’.71 What puzzled people who met the Leweses at dinner or who came to the Priory was how this vulgar, obnoxious little man could enthral a woman as morally refined as Marian. Even the unsophisticated and prepared-to-be-impressed Mary Arnold had taken ‘a prompt and active dislike’ when she met Lewes at Lincoln College and had wondered how the great George Eliot could bear to fall silent in order to hang on every word that issued from the big, wet lips of her companion.72 Charles Norton was more specific about his dislike. Although he grudgingly conceded that Lewes’s talents ‘seem equal to anything’, he went on to point out that ‘his moral perceptions are not acute and he consequently often fails in social tact and taste’.73
Norton had a point. Over Christmas 1870 the Leweses went to stay at a High Church parsonage on the Isle of Wight with Barbara Bodichon. Lewes was highly amused to find a scourge hanging in the priest’s study and organised a little trick which, mindful of Barbara’s growing interest in Roman Catholicism, seems extremely tasteless. He arranged with the parlour maid that she would present the scourge on a covered plate during dinner. When Barbara removed the lid the thongs of the scourge gave a little jump ‘as if a live eel or so were there’.74 Reporting the incident to Charlie and Gertrude, Lewes maintained that there was ‘Immense laughter!’ from the assembled company. Did Marian, with her great empathy for other people’s religious faith, really find this funny? If so, it means that her love and need for Lewes were powerful enough to send her carefully calibrated moral compass swinging wildly off course.
Middlemarch represents George Eliot’s most comprehensive and finely rendered view of human experience. It is a vast, inclusive ‘Study of Provincial Life’, setting out her beliefs about how society works, how it supports and thwarts the individuals who compose it, and how an accommodation can be made between the two. It is, in effect, an answer to all those correspondents and callers who entreated Marian Lewes: ‘how must I live now?’
Middlemarch represents that literal and metaphoric middling part of Britain. In 1829, when the book opens, it is a thriving market town with some light industry, of which Mr Vincy’s silk factory is the prominent example, and enduring connections to the surrounding agricultural estates, owned by county families like the Brookes and the Chettams. Eliot uses the image of the web over and over to reinforce the idea that all parts of the community are intimately interwoven, and becoming more so as the time of political reform approaches. In chapter 10 the landowner Brooke invites the professional and manufacturing men of Middlemarch to dinner, already half aware that in the coming years his interests will increasingly be meshed with theirs.75 These ‘fresh threads of connection’ between the agricultural and urban communities call the hitherto unstoppable Brooke to a new kind of account.76 During his campaign to be returned as a reforming MP, the Middlemarch mob taunt him with his record as a stingy, careless landlord who allows his tenants to languish in unnecessary poverty. In embarrassment and confusion Brooke withdraws from the election.
In her handling of Brooke’s changing relationship with the men of Middlemarch, Eliot’s determination to show the ‘stealthy convergence of human lots’ is perfectly grounded in the changes in social and political power which took place in Britain from the late twenties. Other attempts to show this shifting interconnectedness between one life and another result in some fantastic coincidences of plot, which seem to go against everything Eliot once sketched out as vital to her kind of realism. The narrative thread which reveals that Will Ladislaw, already in the neighbourhood to visit his second cousin Casaubon, is also the grandson of the banker Bulstrode’s first wife, would not be out of place in a novel by Scott or Dickens. It is in these dense, stringy corners of the plot that Henry James’s comment that Middlemarch ‘sets a limit, we think to the development of the old-fashioned English novel’ starts to seem less of a competitive barb by the Young Pretender and more of a valid assessment of the limits to literary realism.77
In other respects, though, Eliot manages her material magnificently. When Blackwood made the remark about her being a giant he was referring not so much to her status in the literary world as to her ability to stride through her fictional landscape, eavesdropping on every kind of life. In the earliest days of ‘Amos Barton’ Blackwood had wondered at his new author’s ability to describe the conversation of a group of clerics; twenty-five years later he was marvelling at the way she managed to get the slangy talk of ‘those horsy men’ who fleece Fred Vincy exactly right.78
There seemed no end to the lives Eliot was able to inhabit. Drawing on her own priggish adolescence she could imagine the Evangelical banker Bulstrode, rigid with spiritual pride. Her schoolgirl pleasure ‘On Being Called a Saint’ was transferred to the late-middle-aged man whose overweening ambition is to be seen to be good. When revelations made by the scurrilous stranger Raffles mean that Bulstrode is about to be unmasked as a swindler, the banker’s refusal to admit the full extent of his sin to himself or to God captures exactly the agony of the narcissistic soul. It is an agony which the adolescent Mary Ann Evans, caught in her own relationship with an unforgiving Deity, knew only too well.
‘She never forgets anything which comes within the curl of her eyelash,’ Lewes had said to Mary Cash, formerly Sibree, in answer to her reverential query in 1873 about the source of George Eliot’s power.79 The political infighting on Middlemarch’s Board of Health over the new fever hospital was probably suggested by some story Robert Evans carried home from one of the committees that increasingly occupied him during the last decade at Griff. Fred Vincy’s listless assumption that he will go into the Church is possibly based on what Marian had picked up about her nephew, Fred Evans. Just like Mr Vincy, Isaac Evans had educated his children with an eye to social advancement. His son Fred had been sent to Exeter College, Oxford, where he managed a lacklustre third before becoming ordained and taking up a post in the parish of Bedworth, the little industrial village where Mary Ann had once busied herself providing second-hand clothing for the coal-miners. Here is a fine example of what Marian hated most: young men and women aiming for ‘the highest work’ without any regard to talent or calling. Luckily Fred Vincy is redeemed by his childhood sweetheart, Mary Garth, who refuses to marry him unless he finds a career for which he is more honestly suited.
There are more marvels in Middlemarch. Although she had not been born into the gentry, young Mary Anne’s ladylike ways had elevated her from agent’s daughter to the favourite of Mrs Maria Newdegate, mistress of Arbury Hall. And Robert Evans’s increasing reputation as a clever land agent not only now provided the model for Caleb Garth, but had given the adolescent Mary Ann some access to the local county families. Whatever her exact sources, Eliot was able to write about the gentry as if she knew them intimately. There is Sir James Chettam, a well-meaning, slightly stupid baronet who wants to marry Dorothea Brooke, but ends up as her protective brother-in-law. Unlike his blustery neighbour Brooke, Chettam treats his tenants well, engaging Caleb Garth to make sure the land is farmed along the most modern and effective lines. There is Mrs Cadwallader, an impoverished gentlewoman and rector’s wife, whose snobbish adherence to the old country ways is saved by a sharp wit and her loathing of the dusty Casaubon. And finally there is Mr Brooke, a pompous, windy old fool who likes the idea of being at the cutting edge of art, music and politics, but lives in horror of ‘going too far’ in anything. His promiscuous activities, which include becoming proprietor of the local newspaper in order to influence local politics, recall Charles Bray’s ubiquitous presence in the public life of Coventry.
While the town and county families in Middlemarch muddle through, being ordinarily kind and cutting to one another, there are two young people, one from each side, who are resolved to do better. Mr Brooke’s nineteen-year-old niece Dorothea is impatient with the privileges of her position, and spends her time designing cottages for the poor and praying enthusiastically for them when they fall ill. Noble-hearted and ‘ardent’, she longs for a great cause to shape her life. Unimpressed by Sir James Chettam’s courtship, which promises to turn her into nothing more special than a liberal baronet’s wife, she insists upon marrying the middle-aged scholar and cleric Edward Casaubon. By becoming her husband’s amanuensis and helpmate on his monumental life-work, the ‘Key to All Mythologies’, Dorothea hopes to find the key which will unlock the meaning of her own life.
The twenty-seven-year-old Tertius Lydgate shares Dorothea’s hunger to improve the lot of the people around him. Unlike her, he has a clear arena in which to realise his ambitions. Although a gentleman by birth, he has qualified in medicine from the prestigious universities of Edinburgh and Paris. Armed with the new tools of stethoscope and microscope, he plans to combine an effective modern practice with a continued interest in pure scientific research, ‘to do good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world’.80
Lydgate’s first step is to practise a general medicine which is rigorous and effective. This means refusing to follow what family doctors have been doing for centuries – making money by sending out drugs which would be better obtained from the apothecary or the dispensary. Although willing to attend anyone who asks to see him, Lydgate has a horror of appearing to court favour and wears his independence with more than a hint of pride. He believes his energies will be best used introducing up-to-date procedures at the fever hospital or persuading bereaved relatives to allow him to carry out the novel procedure of an autopsy.
Eliot uses one of her stunning scientific metaphors to explain the disabling egotism of her major characters. She imagines a lighted candle held against a piece of polished steel and points out that the random scratches on the surface will appear to fall ‘in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun’. These things, she tells us, are a parable. The scratches are events and the candle is the powerfully distorting centre of an individual consciousness.81
Dorothea is so short-sighted that she falls over small dogs and bumps into furniture. Her need to see Casaubon as a great and subtle thinker requires her to ignore all the evidence that he is actually a frigid pedant, paralysed by a fear of failure and unable to start on what will certainly be a second-rate work. Lydgate is likewise flawed by his ‘spots of commonness’, which means that he is unable to perceive that the delightfully mild and pretty Rosamond Vincy will not make the docile wife of his lazy dreams. Miss Vincy, a manufacturer’s daughter, wants to marry a gentlemanly doctor, not an ardent reformer. Her ambitions are the natural ones of a girl who has been given the most pretentious of provincial educations. She thinks about houses, dresses and the fact that Lydgate’s uncle is a baronet, while Lydgate’s own mind runs on the improvements he can make to the practice of general medicine. The result is a ‘total missing of each other’s mental track, which is too evidently possible even between persons who are continually thinking of each other’.82
These two dreadful marriages – of the Casaubons and the Lydgates – are among the best of the many wonderful things Eliot ever did. Given that her own partnership with Lewes was mutually sustaining, it is a testimony to her art that she was able to portray the excruciating pain of an incompatible marriage. The confidences of Emilia Pattison and Georgie Burne-Jones about their difficult relationships may have provided the kind of intimate detail that she could not get elsewhere. In the same way, the letters she had received from two idealistic young men, Frederic Harrison and Clifford Allbutt, about the expectations of marriage they had forged during long engagements, gave her an insight into the impact which Lydgate’s alliance with a narrow-minded woman might have on his desire to dedicate himself to the service of mankind.
Eliot makes the point repeatedly that both Lydgate and Dorothea are trapped in hells of their own making. While their respective spouses fail to understand them, they too have failed to see that Rosamond and Casaubon have wishes, fears and desires which exist quite independently of them. Having asked at the beginning of chapter 29 why Dorothea’s consciousness should dominate the account of her marriage, Eliot makes us see Casaubon in all his sad completeness. Despite his thin calves, white moles and noisy soup-eating, he is ‘spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us’, disappointed that the marriage he has entered in good faith is dissolving into the dull ache of mutual misunderstanding.83 Having picked Dorothea for her ignorance and assumed pliability, Casaubon is confronted by an intelligent woman who in a matter of months has stumbled upon the fact that his life’s work is misconceived and redundant. Dorothea’s gentle questioning chimes with the critical voices already installed in his head to produce a drowning chorus of accusation and mockery. In the circumstances Casaubon does the only thing he knows how to: withdraws to the library.
Harriet Peirce, gushy wife of a Harvard philosophy lecturer, implored Marian after The Spanish Gypsy: ‘the poetry was so beautiful, but must noble women always fail? Is there no sumptious [sic] flower of happiness for us?’84 It is a question which women were to ask even more wistfully about Dorothea Brooke. From the first page of the Preface to Middlemarch, Eliot sets up the ardent girl to fail in her yearning to find an ‘epic life’. Unlike St Teresa of Avila who lived at a time which could use and sanction her extraordinary spirit, Dorothea is destined to flounder around in a society which allows her only the diminished scope of small, private acts. She ends the book as we have been promised that she will, not as a great social reformer or inspiring religious figure, but as the wife of a forward-looking MP. Her young adult life has been a painful education in the limits of self-determination. Claiming Casaubon as her ticket to a great destiny has resulted only in suffering. Now she must submit to the less than perfect circumstances in which she finds herself. But the very last paragraph of the book makes it clear that Dorothea’s fine spirit will never be completely buried. In the tiny ‘unhistoric acts’ of goodness which she performs within her limited circle a ripple of influence has been set in motion which may eventually lap the edge of the world.85
Lydgate is given an even less heroic ending. In his keenness to reform the standards of medical practice in Middlemarch he fails to understand the strength of attachment to the old ways of doing things. While some patients pronounce themselves delighted with his work, there are others who remain suspicious of his refusal to send out medicine and his indecent desire to cut up the bodies of the dead. These are the ones who renew their loyalty to Messrs Minchin and Sprague, two old-time practitioners who display none of Lydgate’s gentlemanly indifference to profit.
Sucked into debt by Rosamond’s refusal to honour his principled ambition, Lydgate ends up by becoming what he always most despised, a society doctor supported by a pack of rich patients. Instead of the paper he had longed to write on the structures of the origins of tissue, he produces only a treatise on gout. He dies early, a broken man, regarding himself as a failure because ‘he had not done what he once meant to do’.86 Starting out with the fire and spirit of Dorothea, he ends with the choked despair of Casaubon.
Critical reaction to Middlemarch came in several waves and different registers, from Henry James’s concern about where it stood in the development of the English novel, to Oscar Browning’s unlikely boast that he was the model for Lydgate. The leading papers and periodicals loved it, with the Telegraph declaring that it was ‘almost profane to speak of ordinary novels in the same breath with George Eliot’s’.87 Edith Simcox, who was to become the last and most intense of George Eliot’s women fans, pointed out in her review in the Academy that what made Middlemarch so different was the way it drew its drama from the inner psychological life of its characters.88
Marian and Lewes, as usual, played that odd game in which he filtered through to her a few of the best reviews, while she pretended not to be bothered about them at all. She was disappointed with the little she read, believing that no critic had offered her ‘the word which is the refle[ction] of one’s own aim and delight in writing’.89 Private readers, however, fell over themselves to supply this lack. Even Harriet Martineau, who always did her best to think of something nasty to say about the Leweses, had to admit that ‘The Casaubons set me dreaming all night’, although she added pointedly to her correspondent, ‘Do you ever hear anything of Lewes and Miss Evans?’ Emily Dickinson, part of that New England circle which had claimed Eliot as spiritually one of its own, said, ‘What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?’ while Barbara Bodichon thought it ‘a beautiful book’, though unbearably sad.90
There were, as usual, the oddly determined people who loved to point out little mistakes. The good thing about serialisation was that, if the complaint arrived in time, Marian could try to accommodate it in the next instalment. This happened over an inevitable querying of the legal procedure by which Featherstone tries to revive his first will by destroying the second. Other mistakes had to wait until the revised one-volume edition which came out in 1874. These included the exact appearance of Lydgate’s eyes during his brief experience with opium and the Finale’s assertion that society had smiled on Dorothea’s engagement to Casaubon, when in fact it had done no such thing.
It was this 1874 edition which made Marian her fortune. Sales of each of the eight instalments had been a little disappointing, around 5000 copies instead of the 8000 Lewes had hoped for. The lending libraries of Mudie and W. H. Smith were obliged to take between 1000 and 1500 copies of each part. The four-volume edition of 1873 accounted for another 3000 copies, but it was the one-volume edition which followed in 1874 which really took off. By 1879 nearly 30,000 copies of the book had been sold world-wide, bringing Marian a profit of about £9000.91
Some of the most intense excitement generated by Middlemarch concerned that intriguing issue of real-life models. People queued up either to claim that they were the original Lydgate, or to point to someone who they felt sure was the model for Casaubon (no one, unsurprisingly, nominated himself for this honour). Robert Chambers, a fussy bachelor from the Westminster Review days who had made the mistake of marrying at the age of forty-eight, was one candidate for the ageing scholar. The futile, flapping Dr Brabant, whose much-vaunted preliminary work on the Strauss translation turned out to be nothing more than a few notes, was the theory put forward by Eliza Lynn. This would certainly tie in with the young Mary Ann’s desire to dedicate herself to helping him in his work. But the most talked-about option was Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, who had married the much younger Emilia Strong when he was middle-aged. The fact that in the early 1870s Pattison was working on a Life of Isaac Casaubon, the French scholar, seemed to fit, as did the fact that the marriage was obviously ill-fated. However, both the Pattisons continued to be cheerful friends of Eliot, talking unselfconsciously about the Rector’s book on Casaubon, which suggests that they, at least, could not see the similarities.
Where once upon a time the sport of matching real people to characters in her books appalled Marian, these days she was able to take it lightly. This was partly the freedom of a clear conscience since, unlike with Adam Bede and Scenes, she had no buried half-awareness of her guilt as a plagiarist. What she had said in those early days was now actually true – her characters were creations of her own imagining. So when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote and asked her if Dorothea’s marriage was based on her relationship with Lewes, Marian replied, ‘Impossible to conceive of any creature less like Mr Casaubon than my warm, enthusiastic husband,’ before admitting that ‘I fear that the Casaubon-tints are not quite foreign to my own mental complexion’.92 In truth, she knew all about the clamourings of what she had earlier described to Maria Congreve as ‘a fastidious yet hungry ambition’, which had condemned her until the age of nearly forty to an endless loop of journalism, translation and editing.93 No surprise that when on another occasion someone asked her from what source she had drawn Casaubon, she pointed silently to her own heart.94
But Lewes would have none of it. He told Blackwood that if Marian was like anyone, it was Dorothea. By this he presumably meant that she too had learned to bring her ardent nature in line with petty circumstance, to concentrate on the small good instead of the great deed. But perhaps what he also half recognised is that there is a kind of ambitious fantasy here too. Dorothea Brooke was the strikingly beautiful daughter of a gentleman, in possession of an independent fortune of £700 a year and the inheritor of a country estate. Marian Evans Lewes was the notoriously plain daughter of a land agent, who had ninety pounds a year and no other assets. While it is often remarked that George Eliot would not allow Dorothea the social freedoms she claimed for herself, it is less frequently noticed that by identifying with Dorothea she created just that fantasy of social advancement which she had always been so quick to condemn in others.