George Eliot (2 page)

While disenchantment with Victorianism led readers to George Eliot, George Eliot’s advice to them was that they should remain Victorians. Despite the ruptures of the speedy present, Eliot believed that it was possible, indeed essential, that her readers stay within the parameters of the ‘working-day world’ – a phrase that would stand at the heart of her philosophy. She would not champion an oppositional culture, in which people put themselves outside the ordinary social and human networks which both nurtured and frustrated them. From Darwin she took not just the radical implications (we are all monkeys, there is probably no God), but the conservative ones too. Societies evolve over
thousands of years; change – if it is to work – must come gradually and from within. Opting out into political, religious or feminist Utopias will not do. Eliot’s novels show people how they can deal with the pain of being a Victorian by remaining one. Hence all those low-key endings which have embarrassed feminists and radicals for over a century. Dorothea’s ardent nature is pressed into small and localised service as an MP’s wife, Romola’s phenomenal erudition is set aside for her duties as a sick-nurse, Dinah gives up her lay preaching to become a mother.

Eliot’s insistence on making her characters stay inside the community, acknowledge the
status quo
, give up fantasies about the ballot, behave as if there is a God (even if there isn’t) bewildered her peers. Feminist and radical friends assumed that a woman who lived with a married man, who had broken with her family over religion, who was one of the highest-earning women in Britain, must surely be encouraging others to do the same. And when they found that she did not want the vote for women, that she felt remote from Girton and that she sometimes even went to church, they felt baffled and betrayed.

What Eliot’s critics missed was that she was no reactionary, desperately trying to hold back the moment when High Victorianism would crumble. Right from her earliest fictions, from the days of
Adam Bede
in 1859, she had understood her culture’s fragility, as well as its enduring strengths. None the less, she believed in the Victorian project, that it was possible for mankind to move forward towards a place or time that was in some way better. This would only happen by a slow process of development during which men and women embraced their doubts, accepted that there would be loss as well as gain, and took their enlarged vision and diminished expectations back into the everyday struggle. In
Daniel Deronda
, Eliot’s penultimate book and last proper novel, she shows how this new Victorianism, projected on to a Palestinian Jewish homeland, might look and sound. Although it will cohere around a particular social, geographic and religious culture, it will acknowledge other centres and identities. It will know and honour its own past, while anticipating a future which is radically different. By being sure of its own voice, it will be able to listen attentively to those of others.

It was Eliot’s adult reading of Wordsworth and Scott that instilled in her the conviction that ‘A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land … a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection.’
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But it was during her earliest years, as she accompanied her father around the Arbury estate in his pony trap, that she fell deeply in love with the Midlands countryside. Her ‘spot’ was Warwickshire, the midmost county of England. Uniquely, the landscape was neither agricultural nor industrial, but a patchwork of both. In a stunning Introduction to
Felix Holt, The Radical
, George Eliot used the device of a stagecoach thundering across the Midlands on the eve of the 1832 Reform Act to describe a countryside where the old and new sit companionably side by side.

Mary Anne’s early life, contained within the four walls of Griff farmhouse, where her family moved early in 1820, still belonged securely to the agricultural ‘phase of English life’ and was pegged to the daily and seasonal demands of a mixed dairy and arable farm. Although there were male labourers to do the heavy work and female servants to help in the house, much of the responsibility was shouldered by the Evans family itself. Like many of the farmers’ wives who appear in Eliot’s books, Mrs Evans took particular pride in her dairy, running it as carefully as Mrs Poyser in
Adam Bede
, who continually frets about low milk yields and late churnings. Like the wealthy but practical Nancy Lammeter in
Silas Marner
, too, Mrs Evans and her two daughters had bulky, well-developed hands which ‘bore the traces of butter-making, cheese-crushing, and even still coarser work’.
⁷
Some years after
George Eliot’s death, a rumour circulated in literary London that one of her hands was bigger than the other, thanks to years of turning the churn. It was a story which her brother Isaac, now gentrified by a fancy education, good marriage and several decades of high agricultural prices, hated to hear repeated.

The rhythms of agricultural life made themselves felt right through Mary Anne’s young adulthood. As a prickly, bookish seventeen-year-old left to run the farmhouse after her mother’s death, she railed against the fuss and bother of harvest supper and the hiring of new servants each Michaelmas. And yet the very depth of her adolescent alienation from this repetitive, witless way of life reveals how deeply it remained embedded in her. Thirty years on and established in a villa in London’s Regent’s Park, her first thought about the weather was always how it would affect the crops.

But life on the Arbury estate was no bucolic idyll. The Newdigate lands contained some of the richest coal deposits in the county. As she grew older, the fields in which Mary Anne played had names like Engine Close and Coal-pit Field. Lumps of coal lay casually amid the grass. At night the girl was kept awake by the chug-chug of the Newcomen engine pumping water out of the mine less than a mile from her home. The canal in which she and Isaac fished was busy with barges taking the coal to Coventry. And when Mary Anne accompanied her father on his regular visits to Mr Newdigate at Arbury Hall, she would have noticed the huge crack which cut across the gold-and-white ceiling of the magnificent great hall. Subsidence caused by the mine-working had dramatically marked a building whose elaborate refashioning only a generation before had come to stand for everything that was elegantly Arcadian about aristocratic life.

Nor did Mary Anne have to look very far to fit the uneven textures of the Arbury estate into the wider landscape. Most of the people in the scrappy hamlet of Griff were not farm labourers but miners. In the nearby villages people were mainly employed in cottage industries like nail making, ribbon weaving and framework knitting. The pale faces and twisted bodies of the handloom weavers struck Mary Anne as absolutely different from the Arbury farmers, a contrast she was to use later in suggesting
the weaver Silas Marner’s alienation from his ruddy Raveloe neighbours.

Only a few miles along the road was Nuneaton, the market town where Mary Anne was soon to go to school. In her very first piece of fiction she describes the town – renamed Milby – as a place where intensive homeworking had already left its grimy mark: ‘The roads are black with coal-dust, the brick houses dingy with smoke; and at that time – the time of handloom weavers – every other cottage had a loom at its window, where you might see a pale, sickly-looking man or woman pressing a narrow chest against a board, and doing a sort of treadmill work with legs and arms.’
⁸

As Eliot’s description of hard labour and pinched surroundings suggests, these were not prosperous times for the Midlands. Victory over Napoleon in 1815 had meant an end to protection against imports of French and Swiss ribbon. A couple of months before Mary Anne’s birth, a cut in the rate paid to silk weavers brought an angry crowd out on to the street. There was jeering and jostling, and a man accused of working under-price was tied backwards on a donkey and led through the streets.
⁹
Later, as a schoolgirl in Nuneaton, she was to see hunger-fuelled rioting at first hand.

As Mary Anne followed her father from miner’s cottage to farmhouse to Arbury Hall itself, she learned to place herself within this complex social landscape. She noted that while tenant farmers might nod respectfully at her, when she got to Arbury Hall, she was left in the housekeeper’s room while her father went to speak to the great man. She observed a whole range of accents, dress, customs and manners against which her own must be measured and adjusted. In this way she built up a library of visual and aural references to which she could return in her imagination when she was sitting, years later, in Richmond trying to recapture the way a gardener or a clergyman spoke. It was this faithfulness to the actual past, rather than a greetings-card version of it, which was to become a plank in her demand for a new kind of realism in fiction. In
Adam Bede
she breaks off in the middle of describing the young squire’s coming-of-age party to ask her sentimental, suburban reader: ‘Have you ever seen a real English rustic perform a solo dance? Perhaps you have only
seen a ballet rustic, smiling like a merry countryman in crockery, with graceful turns of the haunch and insinuating movements of the head. That is as much like the real thing as the “Bird Waltz” is like the song of the birds.’
¹⁰
Mary Anne Evans had not only seen labourers dancing, she had watched them getting drunk, making love, milking and shearing. She had been patronised by the gentry and petted by their servants. And while these pictures were neither charming nor quaint, they sustained her sense of being rooted in a community which was to carry her through the long years of urban exile. She knew every field, every hedgerow and every clump of trees. In later life, she had only to close her eyes and she could conjure up the smell of cows’ breath, hay and fresh rain. But she also knew the way the muddy canal absorbed the sunlight and the noise the looms made as the weavers worked into the night. Looking at the world through her father’s expert eyes, she learned to see that these two strands of life were not conflicting, but that they represented a particular moment in the development of English life. The rural community had not been destroyed, but it was being radically regeared towards technology, profit and the power of the individual to manage his own life. And no one had benefited more from these changes than Robert Evans.

Evans had been born in Roston Common, Derbyshire, in 1773, one of eight children. There were the usual family romances about gentry stock, but by the time Robert arrived any grand connections were nothing more than stories. His father, George, was a carpenter and his mother was called Mary Leech. The five Evans boys were determined to ride the wave of social and economic expansion unleashed by the first phase of industrialisation. Second son William rose to be a wealthy builder, while Thomas overcame a shaky start to become county surveyor for Dorset. Even dreamy Samuel, who turned Methodist and kept his eye on the future world, ran a ribbon factory. Only the eldest boy, George, was unsteady. He boycotted the family’s carpentry business and there was talk of heavy drinking. When he died, the Evans clan turned its collective and implacable back on his young children.

Mary Anne was to experience both sides of this Evans legacy. Like her father and his brothers, she rose out of the class into
which she was born by dint of hard work and talent. She left behind the farm, the dairy and the brown canal, and fashioned herself into one of the leading intellectual and literary artists of the day. But just like her Uncle George – was it coincidence that she took his name as the first half of her writing pseudonym? – she learned what it was like to belong to a family which regularly excluded those of whom it did not approve. When, at the age of twenty-two, she announced that she did not believe in God, her father sent her away from home. Fifteen years later, when she was living with a man to whom she was not married, her brother Isaac instructed her sisters never to speak or write to her again. The Evanses, like thousands of other ambitious families at that time, demanded that its members forge their individual destinies while skirting nonconformity.

In the case of the Evans boys, those destinies were forged in the workshop rather than the classroom. When they did attend school – run by Bartle Massey, a name which would crop up in
Adam Bede
– it was to learn accounting, ‘mechanics’ and ‘to write a plain hand’. Robert’s hand did indeed remain plain all his adult life, but despite almost daily entries in his journal and a constant correspondence with his employers, he was never to become comfortable with the pen. Reading his papers remains a tricky business, thanks to patchy punctuation, haphazard spelling and a whimsical use of capitals and italics. ‘Balance’ becomes ‘ballance’, ‘laughed’ is ‘laph’d’, while ‘their’ and ‘there’ are constantly confused. Despite a career of forty years spent note-taking and report-making, Robert Evans remained uneasy with the written word, finding, like Mr Tulliver in
The Mill on the Floss
, ‘the relation between spoken and written language, briefly known as spelling, one of the most puzzling things in this puzzling world’.
¹¹

Evans preferred to dwell in the stable and particular. As a young carpenter he had learned how to turn the elms and ash of Derbyshire and Staffordshire into windows, tables and doors. And as he walked through the forest on his way to the farmhouses where he was employed, he looked around at the trees that ended up on his work-bench. He took note of the conditions under which the best wood flourished. He saw when a stand was ready to be cut and when it should be left for a few weeks more. Later
in his career it was said that he had only to look at a tree to know exactly how much timber it would yield.