George Eliot (27 page)

Not long after the move Marian told Chapman that she also wanted to quit her editorial duties at the
Review
, whereupon he flew into a characteristic panic and begged her ‘to continue the present state of things until April’.
¹⁷
Even after all this time, he was still incapable of managing the magazine’s most basic routine on his own. When Edward Clarke died just before Christmas 1852 Marian had left for Meriden without finishing the proofs of the January issue. As a result the magazine appeared full of careless mistakes. Marian had also had enough of trying to mediate between self-important contributors and the exasperatingly vague Chapman. At the end of 1853 she found herself caught in the middle of a particularly nasty scrap. George Combe had written an article on prison reform, maintaining that prison discipline should be based on phrenological principles. The piece was waffly, vague and not nearly good enough for the
Westminster
. Yet Combe was one of its main financial supporters and not to be offended. Chapman dithered, Combe got high-horsish and Marian, now semi-detached from the
Review
, begged Combe not to make her ‘a referee in any matters relating to Mr. Chapman, as I have nothing whatever to do with his affairs’.
¹⁸
Still, she could not escape having to edit Combe’s article twice over, first as an independent pamphlet, then as a much reduced, though no less boring, article for the April issue.

Giving up editorial work at the
Westminster
did not mean that Marian was finally free of Chapman’s chaotic embrace. As she moved into the next phase of her working life she became even more dependent on the work he was able to put her way. In June 1853, Marian had made an arrangement with Chapman to produce two books for his new Quarterly Series. The original advertisement for the series – which promised works ‘by learned and profound thinkers, embracing the subjects of theology, philosophy, Biblical criticism, and the history of opinion’ – mentioned two forthcoming titles by ‘the translator of Strauss’s
Life of Jesus’
. These were a translation of Feuerbach’s
The Essence of Christianity
, as well as an original work, ‘The Idea of a Future Life’.
¹⁹
So Marian was appalled when she learned that Chapman, scuppered by the lack of subscriptions to the series, had more or less decided not to publish either book. It was not the money which bothered her – profits were likely to be minimal – but the familiar embarrassment of the whole thing. On 2 December 1853 she wrote a stern letter to Chapman in which one senses the influence of that seasoned and tough negotiator, George Henry Lewes. Marian tells Chapman fiercely: ‘I bitterly regret that I allowed myself to be associated with your Series, but since I have done so, I am very anxious to fulfil my engagements both to you and the public.’ She explains that she is not bothered about the money, but ‘I don’t think you are sufficiently alive to the ignominy of advertising things, especially as part of a subscription series, which never appear.’ She ends by pressing him for a definitive answer on Feuerbach and reminds him that their combined honours are at stake.
²⁰
In the event, Chapman was shamed into going ahead with Feuerbach, although ‘The Idea of a Future Life’ never appeared. By June 1854, and with bankruptcy looming, the Chapman family, minus Elisabeth Tilley, had moved to Blandford Square and the publishing business to King William Street. The strange community at 142 The Strand was broken up for good.

When Chapman first introduced Marian to George Henry Lewes on 6 October 1851 at Jeff’s bookshop in Piccadilly, the omens were not good.
²¹
Marian, as always when meeting new people,
was defensive and critical. Only a few months earlier Chapman had delivered the appalling news that she was too ugly to love, so instinctively she was ready to kick out at other people’s homeliness. Lewes was one of the few people in London who was demonstrably plainer than herself. He was famously ugly, with wispy light-brown hair, a straggly moustache, pitted skin, a red, wet mouth and a head that looked too large for his small body. ‘A sort of miniature Mirabeau’ was how Marian described him soon afterwards, alluding to the notoriously plain French statesman.
²²
Most people were much ruder. Monkeys and dogs were what usually came to mind.

Lewes and Marian already knew each other by reputation. Only a few weeks earlier Lewes had mentioned to Chapman that he liked Miss Evans’s piece on Greg’s
The Creed of Christendom
, which had just appeared in the
Leader
, the weekly magazine he co-edited. The compliment, however, was not returned. Marian was in the process of thinking carefully about which writers she wanted to use in the re-launched
Westminster
and Lewes was not one of them. His journalistic versatility, fuelled by the need to provide for a tribe of children, meant that his articles appeared everywhere: he once boasted that there wasn’t a periodical in London he didn’t have access to except the
Quarterly
. He had a journeyman’s ability to get quickly to the heart of any subject from philosophy to theatre, opera to zoology, and turn in the required number of words tailored exactly to his audience. In addition he translated plays for the stage, sometimes acted in them himself and had written a couple of novels. In an age which increasingly valued the work of the specialist, Lewes’s facility across a range of media seemed not only old-fashioned but superficial. Marian wanted the best people writing in the
Westminster
, and she did not consider Lewes to be up there with Mill, Froude and Carlyle. Backed by Chapman, who sneeringly referred to Lewes as ‘a bread scholar’, she used his work grudgingly and only when she absolutely had to: ‘Defective as his articles are, they are the best we can get
of the kind
.’
²¹

But Lewes’s dubious reputation was built on more than his slapdash working methods. Over the past few years his name had become synonymous with a long-running sex scandal which intrigued literary London. Since 1849, and possibly well before,
his wife Agnes had been conducting an affair with his friend and co-editor at the
Leader
, Thornton Hunt. At least four of the nine children Agnes was to bear were actually little Hunts and had their natural father’s distinctively dark skin to prove it.

Lewes, in the meantime, was rumoured to have taken comfort with many different women. The details are vague, pieced together from retrospective gossip, but one persistent story had him getting a young girl pregnant, then asking Mrs Gaskell to find a foster-mother for the child. Another garbled source, a heavy-handed
roman-à-clef
published as late as 1945, had him seducing a maidservant on his honeymoon and fathering a bastard.
²⁴
None of these revelations was any more shocking than those that circulated about other free-thinking couples, but the point was that Lewes made no attempt to hide who he was or what he was doing. Unlike Charles Bray and John Chapman, he did not bother to negotiate with conventional sensibilities by constructing a respectable façade. Thanks to a childhood spent partly abroad, he felt and acted like a man of the world. His dress was dandyish, his conversation knowing, his manner familiar. A letter written to a close male friend in 1853 gives the flavour of the man. He talks, nudgingly, of his friend’s ‘private adventures’, implies that his own news is too sexy to put in a letter and drops into French to describe the progress of his affair with Marian:

Marian was too much the provincial puritan to have been impressed or titillated by Lewes when she met him at Jeff’s. In any case, her heart and mind were about to be taken over by the painful Spencer business. Lewes, by contrast, was sufficiently detached to notice Miss Evans. Over the next few weeks he made
certain that he bumped into her again. It was hardly difficult. He was a close friend of Herbert Spencer’s; the
Leader
’s office was just over the road from The Strand; and, of course, he was interested in working for Chapman’s re-launched
Westminster
. In his retrospective tweaking of events Spencer maintained to Cross in 1884 that it was not until nearly a year later that Lewes started to visit Miss Evans of his own accord, without needing Spencer’s presence as an excuse. But in fact as little as six weeks after the introduction in Jeff’s Lewes seems to have been calling unchaperoned at the
Westminster
.

As it became increasingly clear throughout the summer of 1852 that Herbert Spencer would never be able to offer her a fulfilling relationship, Marian allowed his friend Lewes to come further and further into her awareness. It might seem strange that at the very time she was writing anguished letters to Spencer begging for his love she was contemplating a relationship with his friend. But more than any other novelist then or now, Marian Evans was able to understand the ambivalence that allows one to love two people at once: it is the dilemma that Dorothea, Gwendolen and Maggie all face. By the middle of September Marian was mentioning Lewes in her letters in a way that suggests he was becoming an integral part of her life, rather than an occasional feature. On 22 November, her thirty-third birthday, she casually tells Charles Bray how she had settled down to work in the late afternoon, ‘thinking that I had two clear hours before dinner [when] – rap at the door – Mr. Lewes – who of course sits talking till the second bell rings’.
²⁶

Spencer was hurt by this shift in Marian’s attention from himself to his friend, which is why he later became obsessed with proving to the world that she had not thrown him over for Lewes. Seeing Lewes build the kind of relationship with her which he had been unable to manage himself, he took refuge not only in psychosomatic illness but also in a nasty carping, which continued down the years. Both Marian and Lewes eventually developed the insight to understand and neutralise the effect of his behaviour on them. Marian dealt with his hypochondria by making a joke of it, while Lewes came to recognise that Spencer ‘always tells us the disagreeable things he hears or reads of us and never the agreeable things’, althougn he put it down to
professional rather than personal jealousy.
²⁷
To be fair, this remark was made during a tense time, when Marian held Spencer responsible for leaking the truth about her authorship of
Adam Bede
. It is a testimony to all three players that the friendship eventually settled and endured. Spencer became a regular at the Priory, introduced the Leweses to John Cross and was Marian’s final visitor a few days before her death in 1880.

Marian was slow to let the Brays know about her changing emotional allegiances. During the first half of 1852, Lewes appears in her letters in the guise of Spencer’s shadow. Yoking Lewes to Spencer was a way for Marian to mention a man who increasingly interested her without upsetting the sensibilities of Rosehill. The Brays’ own living arrangements may have been unorthodox, and they were certainly good friends with the Thornton Hunts, but they were unlikely to be enthusiastic about Marian’s new attachment. The fact that Lewes was married, combined with his reputation as a womaniser, were exactly the factors which always made Marian’s love affairs so traumatic. Although it was years since she had taken conventional opinion into account, she still looked to the Brays, Cara especially, to be her guiding conscience. She wanted their approval of the jaunty, naughty little man and knew she was not likely to get it.

But despite herself, Marian could not resist dropping delighted hints to the Brays about her growing happiness. In March 1853 she tells Sara that the ‘genial and amusing’ Lewes ‘has quite won my liking, in spite of myself’.
²⁸
The following month she casually mentions to the Brays that ‘Lewes has been quite a pleasant friend to me lately’ – and then immediately crosses it out.
²⁹
That same month she took care to write to Cara that she had discovered that Lewes was ‘a man of heart and conscience wearing a mask of flippancy’.
³⁰
By now the two were probably lovers and it was during these quiet, dark months of early 1853 that Marian began to learn the true story behind one of London’s most talked-about men.

George Henry Lewes had been born in April 1817, the son of John Lee Lewes and Elizabeth Ashweek.
³¹
He did not know – and never found out – that he was illegitimate. Setting an uncanny precedent, John Lee Lewes was already married, to a woman called Elizabeth Pownall, by whom he had four children. In
1811 John Lee Lewes left his first family in Liverpool to set up home with Elizabeth Ashweek in London. Together they had three boys, of whom George was the youngest.

The Lewes family was steeped in unorthodoxy. John Lee Lewes’s father had been the middlingly well-known comic actor Charles Lee Lewes, who managed to get married three times. Something less than a gentleman and thoroughly provocative in his beliefs, Lewes
grandpère
loved to shock. During a run in Aberdeen of an adaptation of Molière’s
Tartuffe
, he clashed pens with a local Methodist minister who had denounced him from the pulpit. Other literary productions included those typical eighteenth-century forms – memoirs, sketches, satirical bits and pieces, all thoroughly knock-about in tone. John Lee Lewes followed his father into print, but anaemically. He edited the great man’s work as well as producing some plodding patriotic poetry. Shortly before George’s birth he disappeared to Bermuda, never to be seen again. Elizabeth told the boys their father was dead.