George Eliot (21 page)

It is not clear whether John Chapman did actually ever ‘have’ Eliza Lynn. What is certain is that irregular sexuality played as large a part in his life as it had in Charles Bray’s: not for nothing were both men known as ‘Don Juan’. The similarities between them were striking. Both came from outside the public school and university-educated élite. Enthusiastically self-taught, they moved lightly from subject to subject, unhampered by the specialist’s reverence for subject boundaries. More interested in the modern world than the ancient, they looked to French and German philosophy to make sense of the godless universe unfolding around them. Physical science, still largely excluded from the official syllabus and confined to the studies of butterfly-collecting clergy, seemed to them to hold the clues to man’s past and his future. Facilitators rather than original talents, their knack lay in publicising the ideas of those who had the temperament
and intellect to go deeply into these matters. Presided over by Chapman, 142 The Strand became the metropolitan equivalent of Rosehill, an unofficial headquarters of the progressive élite.

Chapman’s origins were, like Bray’s, provincial and commercial.
⁷¹
He was born in Nottingham in 1821 and apprenticed to a watchmaker in Worksop. Quick to latch on to any new idea from phrenology to the co-operative movement, he soon fell out with his master and ran away to Edinburgh, where his brother was studying medicine. From there, Chapman went to Adelaide where, in a typical boast, he claimed to have made a fortune as a watchseller. Whatever capital he had amassed was – his story – wiped out in a homecoming shipwreck. Unbowed, he nonchalantly declared his intention to try doctoring instead. Some training at St Bartholomew’s and possibly in Paris followed, but it came to a sudden end in 1843. Although he had not been lucky enough to inherit family money, the twenty-two-year-old Chapman was clever enough to marry it: Susanna Brewitt came with a large fortune, thanks to her father’s Nottingham lace business. No longer obliged to pursue the tedium of a training, Chapman moved with his new wife to London, where he used her fortune to buy a small publishing house devoted to the production of radical and progressive titles.

One of the books Chapman published was Mary Ann Evans’s translation of Strauss. Although there is no record of their first meeting, it must have been during one of her stays in Clapton with Sara during 1846. Her anxiety about whether the Strauss would ever get published probably skewed her first impression of Chapman. Still, he clearly made an impact. She had a plain woman’s defensiveness when it came to talking about desirable men. Expecting rejection, she was always quick to disclaim any attraction on her part. ‘Mr Chapman … was always too much of the
interesting
gentleman to please me,’ she wrote in a letter to Sara in February 1847 and, aware how unconvincing it sounded, immediately crossed it out.
⁷²

Their next meeting took place in the summer of 1850 when Chapman appeared at Rosehill where Mary Ann was staying after her return from Geneva. He came again in October 1850, this time bringing Robert Mackay, whose
The Progress of the Intellect
he had just published. Mackay’s work was a sure synthesis
of Strauss’s biblical demythologising, Hennell’s residual piety and Bray’s optimistic Necessitarianism. God still had a notional place as Prime Cause, but the emphasis was on man’s obligation to discern the moral laws which underpinned the universe as surely as physical ones. Chapman had already arranged that a critique of the book would appear in the
Westminster Review
and now he asked Mary Ann to write the piece. Although the
Review
could no longer claim the prestige it had enjoyed in its heyday, still it had great symbolic currency among liberal intellectuals. There was hardly anyone whose work had not appeared in its pages. Carlyle, Mill and Martineau were all contributors. For Mary Ann Evans, whose critical work had hitherto appeared only in the uneven and provincial
Coventry Herald
, it was a great chance.

Although completely unknown outside her immediate circle, Mary Ann was probably the person most qualified in Britain to assess Mackay’s book. Without any conscious manoeuvring on her part, she had found herself at the heart of the busy network of influences which had produced
The Progress of the Intellect
. Not only had she brought Strauss before an English audience, she also lodged with Charles Bray and was friends with his brother-in-law, Charles Hennell. She understood the intellectual trajectories of each man – if Bray can be said to have had any such thing – and saw how Mackay was situated in relation to each of them. Nor did she make the mistake of so many reviewers, then as now, of simply describing and amplifying the author’s arguments. She was confident enough to argue with Mackay’s interpretation of Greek myths and also to point out a few repetitions. The voice she employs is that of an embryonic George Eliot narrator – vast in scope, dizzyingly well-informed, able to show the connections between the tiniest details and the large frame.
⁷³

The Mackay review was Mary Ann’s calling-card to a different kind of life. She delivered it to Chapman in person in November and stayed on for two weeks to see whether lodging at The Strand might suit her permanently. The experiment went well. She had long passed her adolescent shyness and was by now used to fitting into other people’s groups. Musical evenings and literary chat were where she excelled. On the last Friday of her stay she met Eliza Lynn, Chapman’s former lodger. Lynn, secure in the
achievement of already being a published novelist, was very happy to patronise the slightly older girl from the provinces. She chirruped that Mary Ann was ‘such a lovable person’ and maintained that she was ‘never so attracted to a woman before’.
⁷⁴
Mary Ann, in return, was impressed with Eliza Lynn’s intellectual-looking spectacles and the fact that she had the appearance of a bona fide ‘literary lady’. But Mary Ann was not all uncritical gush. She was sharp enough to notice that Eliza Lynn, for all her stodgily paraded learning, was not a great or original intellect. If Miss Lynn could support herself in London by her pen, then so surely could she.

The two weeks Mary Ann spent at The Strand before returning temporarily to Coventry for Christmas gave her the chance to familiarise herself with the strange dramas and intrigues of this unhappy household. The Chapmans’ marriage was not a good one. Susanna’s useful fortune did not offset her fourteen years’ seniority to her husband. Although she had been able to give him two fine children, Beatrice and Ernest, there was also a deformed, backward boy who was boarded out with relatives. Never a pretty woman, by the time of the move to The Strand she was already over forty to her husband’s handsome twenty-eight and beginning to slow down. On 10 August 1851 Chapman wrote in his diary, ‘Susanna’s incapability of walking far or fast, and general debility presses upon me how much she has aged latterly, and makes the future look sad.’
⁷⁵

Perhaps what depressed Chapman most was that Susanna’s physical stodginess reflected her mental capacity. She was conventional, stubborn and sloppy, instinctively opposed to the new ideas which gripped Chapman like a fever. She took it personally if people held opinions that were different from her own and her idea of intellectual debate was to repeat her point more loudly than before. ‘Her chief reading is novels,’
⁷⁶
Chapman told his diary sadly in July 1860, revealing just how low was the status of fiction until George Eliot had started to elevate it the previous year with the publication of
Adam Bede
.

One can hardly blame Susanna for not finding the time to improve herself physically or mentally. She ran the ramshackle enterprise which was 142 The Strand with only the minimum of domestic help. Chapman’s finances were generally in a muddle
and he expected his wife to perform miracles on a shoestring. In many marriages one partner develops skills and qualities to compensate for the other’s lack of them. This was not the case with the Chapmans. Susanna was just as chaotic and histrionic as her husband, which allowed him to spend a great deal of time criticising her for the very qualities which many of his clients and friends found so exasperating in himself. In 1860, a particularly bad year for their marriage, he noted: ‘while the fuss and bustle of … [Susanna’s] management is a continual disturbance, all is orderly and quiet in her absence’.
⁷⁷
Many would have said exactly the same of him.

In any case, some of Susanna’s intrusive bluster was surely due to her resentment that Chapman had installed his mistress in the house bought with her money. Technically, thirty-year-old Elisabeth Tilley was governess to young Beatrice and Ernest. But her patchy education and general unsuitability for the job signposted to anyone who cared to think about it that she was actually Chapman’s lover. Eliot’s biographers have long differed over whether Susanna Chapman was aware of what was going on between her husband and Elisabeth Tilley. Chapman’s diary – never the most reliable witness to anything but his own internal fantasies – suggests that an unstable and largely unspoken arrangement operated whereby Susanna tolerated Chapman’s relationship with Elisabeth, but insisted on a continuing precedence in the social organisation of the household. This was hardly a recipe for a tranquil life, which was probably just as well since all the participants in this triangle loved kicking up a fuss. On 30 July 1851 Chapman recorded a typical incident:

What further heightened the drama was that Chapman’s and Elisabeth’s relationship was by no means a secure shadow marriage. Chapman spent a lot of time wondering out loud whether he loved her quite as much as he used to, to which Elisabeth responded hysterically by giving notice. The news that the clever Miss Evans from Coventry would be coming back permanently after Christmas was enough to make Elisabeth doubly jumpy about her position. She fired off a couple of letters to Rosehill over the holidays, in which she probably warned Mary Ann not to get too close to her lover. As a consequence, when Mary Ann turned up at Euston Square station on the afternoon of 8 January her manner was ‘formal and studied’ towards Chapman, who had come to meet her.
⁷⁹
Elisabeth’s attitude, by contrast, was anything but restrained. The very next day she laid into Chapman about bringing Miss Evans to The Strand. In a diary entry which he later deleted Chapman recorded: ‘Had a very painful altercation with Elisabeth the result of her groundless suspicions hence I have been in a state of unhealthy excitement all day. – She gave notice at the dinner table that she intended to leave in the Autumn.’
⁸⁰

Far from groundless, Elisabeth’s suspicions about her lover’s intentions towards the plain, clever lodger from the Midlands were spot on. It was Chapman, after all, who had encouraged Mary Ann to come to London, by setting her up with her first bit of prestigious journalism. During his two meetings with her at Rosehill the previous year he had also told her what a help she could be to him in his publishing business. While he had the contacts and the enthusiasm to keep the business expanding, he needed someone with her deep, scholarly knowledge to guide him away from the false trails and spectacular blunders which happened whenever he got out of his intellectual depth. Neither Susanna nor Elisabeth was suitable soulmate material, although Susanna did occasionally help with proof-reading. Miss Evans, with her extraordinary gifts, was exactly the person Chapman needed both to stir up and sustain the regime at 142 The Strand.

For Mary Ann, becoming John Chapman’s right-hand woman represented the kind of vocation which had seemed so out of reach when she wrote her last despairing letter to the Brays from Geneva. Now, within weeks of returning to dull, indifferent
Coventry, here was a handsome man asking her to join with him in a glorious project to change the world. What is more, he had promised to help her break into free-lance journalism and, as earnest of his good faith, had placed her first piece in the
Westminster Review
. The fact that Chapman was not only married but had a mistress would not have deterred her, just as it had made no difference with Dr Brabant, M. D’Albert and, in the early days, Charles Bray. It was not that she was cruel, exactly, or indifferent to other women’s situations, but her own deep needs for intellectual and emotional intensity were still incapable of being schooled. Or almost. For Chapman’s observation that she was ‘formal and studied’ at Euston Square suggests that this time Mary Ann was determined at least to try to avoid the turmoil which had followed in her wake at Devizes and Geneva.

As a signal that this was to be a new phase in her life, Miss Evans announced to the Strand-dwellers that from now on she would like to be known as ‘Marian’. She had played with the idea ever since she was a schoolgirl learning French, trying out ‘Marianne’ in her exercise book. But now the time felt right for a radical change. ‘Mary Anns’ were two-a-penny in rural Warwickshire. ‘Marian’ sounded much more suitable for a woman who intended to take London by storm.

J
OHN CHAPMAN LOVED
and needed women as much as they loved and needed him. Unlike so many progressive middle-class men of the mid-century who espoused a programme of political, social and legal reform, Chapman actually believed that all women were his equals and some his superiors. He acknowledged and celebrated Marian’s intellect without the least condescension, humbly seeking and following her advice about the editorial side of his business. In private he asked her to teach him German and submitted his own half-baked attempts at essay-writing to her critical scrutiny. Dazzled by Marian’s mind, he felt not the slightest need to control or diminish it. Brabant, Bray and D’Albert Durade had all displayed similar intellectual generosity, and Chapman was to be the next link in a chain which was to lead Marian finally and happily to George Henry Lewes.

It was not only women’s minds which fascinated Chapman. When he eventually qualified as a medical doctor in 1857 he specialised in gynaecology, treating certain diseases of women
by means of heat and cold applied along the spine.
¹
Every time his mistress Elisabeth Tilley had a period he marked the event in his diary, although this was not so much a signal to fuss around with hot-water bottles as to return to his wife’s bed. A few years later he courted Marian’s friend Barbara Leigh Smith with the peculiar suggestion that having sex with him, and perhaps even a baby, would sort out her menstrual cycle. Once again, the clinical noting down of the physical intimacies between them, this time in a series of explicit letters to Leigh Smith, seems to have been the crucial ingredient in Chapman’s enjoyment of their affair.
²

Amongst the people who bought his books, there was nothing unusual about Chapman’s disregard for conventional sexual morality. The right of both sexes to form relationships unsanctioned by marriage had been part of the Utopian programme from the days of William Godwin at the end of the previous century. The Brays practised a version of polygamy whereby both were free to take other lovers. Their friends the Thornton Hunts lived with another couple in Bayswater, where it was rumoured they shared more than domestic expenses. But Chapman’s need for multiple partners had less to do with intellectual conviction and more with a craving for the excitement and chaos inevitably engendered. The slammed doors, tearful scenes and angry words made him feel alive in a way that the deep calm of monogamy never could. Whenever his personal life looked in danger of settling, he whipped up a storm by showing one lover a letter written by another. His habit of candour, so different from Brabant’s evasiveness, allowed him to pass on information, encourage confrontations and generally keep the drama at fever pitch. Then, when it seemed as though there was nothing more to savour, he lived the experience again in a series of anguished diary entries.
³

The discovery of Chapman’s 1851 diary on a Nottingham bookstall in 1913 meant that John Cross’s official version of Marian’s life at The Strand had to be completely rewritten. Cross had always been extremely sensitive about the rumours which clung to his wife’s association with Chapman even years after her death. The worst of these, for which no evidence has ever been found, was that Marian had given birth to a son by Chapman and that the child had been smuggled away to Edinburgh. No wonder, then, that Cross felt it prudent virtually to exclude Chapman from
George Eliot’s Life
. Marian’s letters to Chapman are barely quoted and the good doctor was never asked for his recollections, perhaps because Cross was well aware that the appalling old man loved to boast that George Eliot had once been in love with him. Anyone reading Cross’s account of Marian’s years at the
Westminster
would assume that Chapman was a professional acquaintance of hers rather than her lover and the man who mediated her transition from provincial bluestocking to metropolitan intellectual.

Mindful of the letters she had received from Elisabeth Tilley over Christmas, Marian arrived at The Strand in January with every intention of steering clear of sexual involvement with Chapman. But he was a difficult man to resist, being engagingly naked in his desires. On the very morning of her arrival, in a gesture whose significance surely cannot entirely have escaped him, he searched the dawn skies with his telescope for a sighting of the planet Venus.
⁴
A few days later he helped Marian choose a piano for her room and spent the morning listening to her play Mozart,
⁵
much to the fury of Susanna, who immediately suggested getting a piano for the drawing-room. But the new instrument did not arrive in time and by the following weekend Chapman and Marian had become lovers. Chapman always took care to note in his diary whenever he had sex with Elisabeth, and over 18–19 January he used a similar code to suggest two sessions of love-making with Marian.
⁶
That something beyond flirtation had occurred is suggested by the fact that Elisabeth and Susanna immediately responded by collapsing with bad pains in the head and leg respectively. By the following Wednesday the tension had become unbearable and a showdown inevitable. With pleasurable relish Chapman recorded the details in his diary.

Having a sexual interloper in the house at least had the effect of drawing Susanna and Elisabeth closer together. All it took was a little stirring on Elisabeth’s part for wife and mistress to reach the joint conclusion that Miss Evans and Chapman were, in the latter’s complacent phrase, ‘completely in love with each other’.
⁸
This recognition laid the ground for some new and exciting scenes, in which the four main players spent their time flouncing out of rooms, having headaches and suing for uneasy peace.

It was ironic that this sexual melodrama was played out against Chapman’s increasing prissiness about his personal reputation. He had agreed to publish Eliza Lynn’s third novel,
Realities
, typically without having bothered to read it all the way through. Keen to break away from her reputation as a writer of turgid academic prose, Lynn had included a love scene which Susanna, who had done some preliminary editing of the book, considered
risqué
. Chapman, with his knack of mixing up his personal and public life to dire effect, now gave responsibility for the Lynn manuscript to Marian, a gesture that naturally succeeded in making Susanna even more jealous than before.

Eliza Lynn was also annoyed that her manuscript had been assigned to the new favourite. It is not certain whether she had ever been Chapman’s lover, but as a clever, free-thinking woman she had certainly enjoyed his attention during her time as his lodger in Clapton. Although she had taken care to gush affectionately to Marian at their first meeting, privately Eliza had her marked down as pretentious and provincial. To be asked to submit to her editorial judgement was the final insult. Before Marian had a chance to start work on the manuscript, Eliza Lynn
appeared dramatically at The Strand and announced that she would agree to only one of the suggested changes.

There followed just the kind of titillating situation which Chapman loved. Eliza Lynn’s stubbornness in sticking by what he described as ‘a love scene which is warmly and vividly depicted, with a tone and tendency which I entirely disapprove’,
⁹
gave him the chance to talk about sex with four women, setting one up against the other. In the course of the next few weeks he sided with Marian against Eliza, and with Eliza against Susanna. He got Elisabeth to read the dubious passage and was pleased when she agreed with Susanna that it should not be published. He then proceeded to get Marian to go with him to see Eliza, to whom he declaimed pompously that ‘as I am the publisher of works notable for the[ir] intellectual freedom it behoves me to be exceedingly careful of the
moral
tendency of all I issue’.
¹⁰
As with most of the dramas which Chapman whipped up, events did not so much come to a head as trail off in embarrassment. In the end, and only after a lawyer had been called in,
Realities
was published elsewhere.

It was against this chaotic background of comings and goings, tears and reconciliations, that Marian tried hard to establish the kind of life for which she had come to London. She dutifully took advantage of the cultural opportunities available to her, hearing Francis Newman lecture on geometry and Faraday on magnetism. At The Strand she continued to dine, debate and sing with the stream of clever men who passed through Mrs Chapman’s dining-room. But as she was painfully aware, intellectual hobbies and new friendships were no substitute for solid achievement. Getting the review of Mackay into the January edition of the
Westminster
was starting to look like a fluke. Her offer to do a follow-up piece and waive the fee was disappointingly turned down. Chapman fared no better when he tried to get the
Edinburgh Review
to commission her, even though he was careful to refer to her as a man throughout the negotiations.
¹¹
However, a newish weekly periodical called the
Leader
did accept a couple of pieces on Harriet Martineau’s and Henry Atkinson’s
Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development
.
¹²

It was not the slow start to her literary career, however, which drove Marian from The Strand. By the end of February the
tension between herself, Susanna and Elisabeth was so great that every encounter became an excuse for a row. On the 21st Marian went to Chapman’s room to borrow a dictionary, found Elisabeth there, and the result was a confrontation that ‘increased [the] bitterness in both their minds’.
¹³
The pages of Chapman’s diary for the next few days have been torn out, suggesting that the histrionics were reaching a pitch which was too painful, even for him. During this unrecorded week Susanna and Elisabeth appear to have combined forces to get Marian out of the house. When the diary entries resume they show Chapman taking Marian on a last, hectic round of visits to the theatre, opera and art galleries, before escorting her to Euston Square station on 24 March.
¹⁴

In less than three months Marian’s launch into a life which was supposed to be financially independent and intellectually fulfilling had ground humiliatingly to a halt. To make matters even more painful, she was leaving behind a man for whom she felt deeply, a man with whom she had made physical love. In his usual complacent way Chapman recorded their anguished platform conversation in his diary:

By now the Brays must have become used to Marian’s embarrassingly sudden departures from other people’s houses. They were probably too tactful to question her closely, although they would have been aware that letters still continued to travel regularly between Rosehill and The Strand. Marian had agreed to undertake two projects from Coventry for Chapman. The first was an analytical catalogue of his publications – in effect a list of all the titles and a summary of their contents. The second was an abridgement of Strauss, for which she was promised £100. In theory all should now have been quiet, with Marian at least a hundred miles from Elisabeth Tilley and even further from Susanna Chapman, who was on a family visit to the West
Country. But quiet was the one thing Chapman could never stand: on his first night back in The Strand with only Elisabeth for company he found himself overwhelmed by ‘a sense of extreme loneliness’.
¹⁶
So he cranked up the pitch by sending Marian a couple of spiteful letters which Susanna had written about her from Truro. Marian’s response – immediately forwarded to Susanna – was to declare angrily that she would continue with the catalogue only ‘on condition that you state or rather, I should hope re-state to Mrs. C. the fact that I am doing it, not because I “like” it, but in compliance with your request’.
¹⁷

Over the next couple of weeks Marian’s mood softened, partly because she was removed from the scene, but also because the work she was doing for Chapman genuinely engaged her. In an attempt at reconciliation with Susanna she wrote ‘an able and excellent’ letter which Chapman forwarded to Truro.
¹⁸
This seems to have done the trick, although Elisabeth Tilley remained implacable. A note which Marian sent to Chapman on 28 April made the governess fly into a frenzy and beg her lover never to speak to Miss Evans again.
¹⁹