George Eliot (26 page)

As Spencer became increasingly wedded to his work, the narcissistic tendencies which had been apparent in his affair with Marian hardened into an impenetrable armour. The rigidity which had insisted during their trip to Kew that if the flowers didn’t fit in with his theories of evolution then there must be something wrong with the flowers now extended to every part of Spencer’s life and work. He was obsessed with establishing the priority of his ideas in an area where many were moving towards the same conclusions, or, as Gordon Haight, Eliot’s first modern biographer, puts it succinctly, ‘he believed in the evolution of everything except his own theories’. He started his autobiography years before he died, sending out drafts to friends, and rewriting furiously to take account of their comments. He wanted to create a perfect version of himself, in which he stood at the centre of every important intellectual movement of the mid and late nineteenth century. For instance, he claimed to have been the first person to suggest to Marian that she should write fiction – ‘I thought I saw in her many, if not all, of the needful qualifications in high degrees’ – despite the fact that she had been playing with the idea years earlier and that it was Lewes who was to push her into action.
⁷⁶
Naturally, he liked to stress the fact that it was he who had first brought her together with Lewes, overlooking the fact that it was Chapman who had made the introduction.

In the circumstances it is ironic that for all Spencer’s attention to what posterity might think of him, it was Marian’s reputation rather than his which lasted. Spencer’s desperation to prove the originality of his ideas is strangely prescient. Many of them were overshadowed by those of Darwin and later by Freud so that, in the late twentieth century, it is hard to isolate anything that belongs absolutely to him save for that famous phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’. Marian, however, turned a similar interest in the relationship between the mind and the body, and the organisation of society, into work whose originality and creativity still resonate today.

But it was not only his professional image which Spencer fretted over. If anything, he was even more concerned about how
people viewed his private life and, in particular, his failure to marry. During the retrospective gossip which followed Marian’s death in 1880, he was horrified to discover that there was a long-standing rumour to the effect that he had fallen in love with her during 1852 and that she had thrown him over in favour of Lewes. For a man who could not bear to be seen to need other people it would be hard to think of a more humiliating story. He thought about issuing a formal denial, but was dissuaded by sensible friends. Next he asked John Cross to put the matter right when Cross came to write his late wife’s biography. Three years later, with the
Life
nearing completion, Spencer again wrote to Cross and expressed his worry over the we-are-not-in-love letter of 27 April. He suggested Cross add a gloss along the lines of ‘The intimacy naturally led to rumours. It was said that Mr Spencer was in love with her. This however was not true. I have the best possible warrant for saying that his feeling did not pass the limits of friendship.’ Cross was not keen, believing that it simply stirred up matters. Spencer tried again with another wording, which again Cross rejected, suggesting a formula of his own. Spencer snapped back: ‘Much better no note at all than the one you propose.’ Cross took him at his literal word, but out of deference to his feelings deleted ‘we are not in love’, leaving it at, ‘We have agreed that there is no reason why we should not have as much of each other’s society as we like.’ Even this would not do for Spencer, who wrote huffily to Cross on publication: ‘As the account now stands it is not only consistent with the report that I was jilted for Lewes, but tends to confirm it. Such a fact as that I was anxious to visit the Brays when she was there, and such a fact as that my name quietly drops out as a companion while Lewes’ comes in, gives colour to the statement, and there is nothing I can see to negative it. I cannot say that I have been fairly used.’
⁷⁷

In Spencer’s support, it should be pointed out that he could, if he had wished, have made public the two desperate Broadstairs letters, which proved conclusively that he was the jilter and not the jilted. Instead, he sealed them up, together with a few others, and instructed that they should not be opened until 1985. For a man so vain about his public image it was a generous gesture. In effect he was allowing George Eliot’s reputation as a wise,
self-contained sibyl to continue at the cost of his own cherished sense of inviolability. It was the closest Herbert Spencer ever came to love.

T
HE
S
TRAND HAD
never seemed so dismal as it did on Marian’s return from Broadstairs in late August 1852. The magnificent weather of a seaside summer had given way to the thick wetness of a London autumn. Yet one more stab at love had gone wrong and there was nothing to look forward to except work, which was no longer new or exciting. The pile of review books had got higher in her absence, the contributors were as childishly demanding as ever and John Chapman’s finances seemed to get more perilous, if such a thing were possible. It was Marian’s dreary job to keep the whole precarious structure steady. It was not the editorial routine, which was necessarily frustrating, so much as the tangled business and social relationships which ran in tandem. There were famous contributors to keep sweet and would-be ones to be held at bay. Rich men had to be courted for their cash, then dissuaded from contributing long and boring articles on their hobby-horses. At times it felt as if, far from being the leading intellectual publication of the day, the
Westminster Review
was a kind of vanity publishing venture with Marian adjudicating between competing egos. The sky got darker, the fog thicker, the schedule more impossible. In a letter to Sara
Marian described a state of mind reminiscent of those dreadful weeks at St Leonards with her dying father. ‘I have felt something like the madness which imagines that the four walls are contracting and going to crush one.
¹

Just in time she decided on another break. It was a measure of Marian’s autonomy that, by this point, it was she and not John Chapman who decided when and for how long she could be spared from The Strand. With the October issue safely out, she headed north to stay with two old friends. The trip was significant because it was the last she would take as an anonymous woman. At this point her cleverness and independence made her unusual, but she was not yet notorious. In the next couple of years her life would undergo a convulsion that would leave the two people whom she was visiting – George Combe and Harriet Martineau – feeling deeply betrayed and determined not only never to see her again, but to make sure that no one else did either.

Both Combe and Martineau displayed that curious mixture of liberalism and narrowness, permissiveness and prudery which was a feature of the mid-Victorian avant-garde. Each had developed ways of understanding the material world – phrenology in the case of George Combe, Positivism and mesmerism (a variation of hypnosis) in the case of Martineau – which most people thought crackpot. Like John Chapman, both Combe and Martineau believed that to protect the integrity of their beliefs they had to be seen to lead conventionally moral lives. But unlike Chapman they more or less managed it, which is why when Marian Evans, princess of the progressive avant-garde, went off with a married man in 1854, they took it personally. Not only had she acted on the desires which they themselves found troublesome – Combe had married at forty-five a woman whose fortune bankrolled his business, while Martineau was currently making a fool of herself with a man twenty years younger – but she had given every Tory, every churchman, every pious lady tract writer, a good reason to damn the whole basket of liberal causes, from electoral reform to vegetarianism, as seditious and evil nonsense.

At this stage, though, George Combe was still delighted with Miss Evans. Examining her scalp during a visit to Rosehill in August 1851 he had come to the conclusion that she was, with the possible exception of the US abolitionist Lucretia Mott, ‘the
ablest woman whom I have seen’, and paid special homage to her ‘very large brain’ and her big organ of Concentrativeness.
²
During his subsequent stays at The Strand he was shrewd enough to notice that it was Marian who was responsible for the upturn in the
Westminster
’s reputation, and he used the language of phrenology to hint to Chapman that he should take her advice wherever possible: ‘She has certain organs large in her brain which are not so fully developed in yours, and she will judge more correctly of the influence upon other persons of what you write and do, than you will do yourself.’
³

Marian arrived in Edinburgh on 5 October 1852. Although she had spent the previous month feeling that her life was going nowhere, it was a kind of comfort to remember that the last time she had been in the city, seven years before, things had been even more dismal. It was on that occasion that she had been summoned home ‘with a heavy heart’ by her father’s broken leg. Life might seem limited now, but it was far removed from the hopelessness of that dreary time. What is more, the Combes’ household in elegant Melville Street turned out to be just the place to rest, recuperate, and ‘nourish sleek optimism’.
⁴
There were good fires and attractive views, even if her host did have a tendency to talk endlessly about himself, leaving Marian nothing to do but nod and grunt in agreement. If she seemed bored, Combe certainly didn’t notice. He was more delighted than ever with Miss Evans, noting approvingly in his diary that she was ‘thoroughly feminine, refined, and lady-like’.
⁵

Meanwhile, Harriet Martineau, ensconced in the Lake District, was getting deafer, shouting more than ever and increasingly entranced with her own thoughts, schemes and habits. Long since absent from London and surrounded by adoring acolytes, she was isolated from the rough and tumble of intellectual debate, which would have kept her flexible, sharp and open to other ways of thinking. Those who dared to disagree with her – especially her brother James – increasingly found themselves dragged into feuds, which snaked poisonously down the years.

On 20 October Marian left Edinburgh for Martineau’s lakeside cottage at Ambleside. As usual, she had long since revised her initially harsh assessment of the veteran writer and now found the older woman ‘quite handsome from her animation and intelli
gence. She came behind me, put her hands round me, and kissed me in the prettiest way this evening.’
⁶
With Martineau’s constant and much younger companion Henry Atkinson in tow, the two women walked and drove around the spectacular Windermere landscape, stopping to inspect the model cottages which were Martineau’s latest passion.

Fresh air, good scenery and the charm of being made a fuss of did Marian a deal of good. The holiday was rounded off with ten days at Rosehill, from where she announced in a letter to Bessie Rayner Parkes that she now felt ‘brave for anything that is to come after’.
⁷
And what came after was indeed grim. Barely had Marian taken up the reins again at The Strand than the news came that Chrissey’s husband, Edward Clarke, was dead. Never robust, he had been ground down by having to support too many children and a medical practice that failed to flourish. Succumbing finally to the TB which had already killed his brother, the gentlemanly Clarke left Chrissey with six children under fifteen and an income, once everything was sold up, of £100 a year – about the same as Marian scraped by on in London.

Passive as ever, and now made helpless by grief, Chrissey invited her younger brother and sister to arrange her future as they thought best. Isaac grudgingly suggested Chrissey move back to live rent free in the house at Attleborough that had once belonged to her, before Clarke had sold it to Robert Evans to raise cash. Increasingly recognisable as Tom Tulliver in
The Mill on the Floss
, whose hard brand of charity had been learned from his Dodson aunts, Isaac was not prepared to do more for Chrissey than he absolutely had to. She would not be allowed to starve, but nor would she be rescued from the consequences of her disastrous marriage choice.

Marian, meanwhile, had dropped the January proofs to be at Meriden over Christmas. But there were limits, too, to what she was able to give. After only a few days cooped up with the six young Clarkes she came to the unsurprising conclusion that she would be more help back in London, ‘the dear creatures here will be a constant motive for work and economy’.
⁸
But she had not counted on Isaac’s reaction to her failure to consult him first. The scars from the holy war had never fully healed. Isaac still deeply resented his younger sister for acting in ways which affec
ted the internal economy of the family. Now here she was again, putting her own eccentric needs over those of the Evans clan. Maiden aunts with small legacies were expected to come home to support their widowed sisters, not to continue their self-indulgent ways in London. Furious that his wilful sister had once again evaded his control, the increasingly patriarchal Isaac shouted at her never to ask him for a favour in the future, ‘which, seeing that I never have done so,’ pointed out Marian wryly in a letter to the Brays, ‘was almost as superfluous as if I had said I would never receive a kindness from him.’
⁹

At the beginning of February Marian was back in Warwickshire trying to decide what to do next. Crammed into the tiny Attleborough house the children had become noisy and out-of-hand. No amount of ‘romping and doll dressing’ with ‘Aunt Pollie’ was going to solve the problem of their long-term future.
¹⁰
Concerned friends had suggested putting some of them in the orphanage, a reminder of the grim fate that even the most respectable of families could face in the economically volatile early 1850s. Another suggestion came from an old patient of Clarke’s who offered to fund the eldest boy’s passage to Australia. Although these were the kind of practical, unsentimental solutions which appealed to Isaac, Chrissey would not hear of splitting up the family. Still, the idea of emigrating had caught Marian’s imagination. ‘What do you think of my going to Australia with Chrissey and all her family? – to settle them and then come back?’ she asked the Brays in a letter of 11 April 1853.
¹¹
The Brays’ response is unrecorded, but the bizarre notion of George Eliot in the Antipodes came to nothing.

Although Marian was prepared to brave a three-month sea journey for the sake of her sister, she was not, however, going to give up the independent life which had been so painfully won over the last four years. The idea of going home to ‘that hideous neighbourhood amongst ignorant bigots is impossible to me’. She would rather commit suicide and ‘leave my money, perhaps more acceptable than my labour and affection’. Nor was she prepared to take responsibility for moving Chrissey out of the house while staying on herself in London. The curiously oblique explanation she offered in her letter to Cara was: ‘My health might fail and other things might happen to make her, as well as me, regret the
change.’
¹²
Was this a hint at her growing hope that she might one day live with Lewes? In the circumstances the only feasible solution was for Chrissey to carry on living in Attleborough under Isaac’s grudging protection, while Marian sent her what extra money she could manage from London.

Unfortunately, this was not likely to amount to much. The financial affairs of the
Westminster Review
were now in such a dire state that it was difficult to pay the contributors. Over the last few years Chapman had managed to hobble on, but by the spring of 1854 his usual tactic of borrowing money to pay off existing loans was catching up with him. His total debt was now a massive £9000. ‘The way he [Chapman] is behaving is, between ourselves, generally the prelude to bankruptcy,’ Joseph Parkes confided to his daughter Bessie.
¹³
But this time there was a new, and saving, twist to the crisis. One of Chapman’s largest creditors, James Martineau, now saw his chance to carry out what he had been itching to do for ages: take over the godless
Westminster
and turn it into a platform for his particular brand of Unitarianism. But he had reckoned without the slow, cold spite of his sister Harriet. Following a savage review he had given her dreadful
Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development
of 1851, Harriet Martineau was looking for revenge. Saving the
Westminster
from bankruptcy would allow her the delightful possibility of stopping her brother from getting what he wanted. In June 1854 she lent Chapman £500 which, along with other loans, was enough to pull him out of his current hole.
¹⁴
Yet again he had wriggled away from disaster.

But Marian had other reasons for wanting to move away from The Strand. Now that it was clear that Chapman would never be able to pay her a salary, she needed to work towards becoming a free-lance writer, independent of the
Westminster
. The first step was to find accommodation elsewhere. Although the arrangement would bring practical difficulties – for as long as she was involved in editing the
Westminster
there would be much to-ing and fro-ing – it was a way of flagging the fact that she had intentions, hopes and interests which lay beyond John Chapman’s tottering empire. In January 1853 she wrote to Charles Bray declaring, ‘At last I have determined to leave this house and get another home for myself.’
¹⁵
Chapman, however, seems to have bribed her to stay,
for by March she was telling Bray, ‘Instead of changing my street, I have changed my room only, and am now installed in Mr. Chapman’s. It is very light and pleasant, and I suppose I must be content for a few months longer.’
¹⁶
But over the next few months her growing intimacy with Lewes shook her out of her apathy and compelled her to change her situation. Although the Chapmans would probably have been delighted to welcome Lewes as a nightly visitor to Miss Evans’s room, Marian did not want to conduct her new relationship under their over-interested gaze. Chapman was a notorious blabber-mouth who was bound to spread news of this intriguing situation. By the middle of October Marian was installed in rooms at 21 Cambridge Street, Hyde Park, made homey by some pictures lent by Barbara Leigh Smith. Five months earlier Lewes had left his family home and was living in a borrowed flat off Piccadilly. The two addresses were a convenient fifteen minutes apart and far enough away from The Strand to minimise the chances of bumping into any loose-tongued
Westminster
contributors.