George Eliot (41 page)

In any case, it was vital for publisher and author to be able to communicate freely without an intermediary, since Marian was by now six months into her new full-length novel. On the evening when she revealed her identity to Blackwood she had sweetened what was probably a bitter though expected pill by giving him the first thirteen chapters of
Adam Bede
which, she had already promised, would be ‘a country story – full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay’.
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Blackwood glanced at the first page, smiled, told her, ‘This will do’, then settled down to read as much as he could on his way back to Edinburgh, feeling ‘very savage when the waning light stopped me as we neared the Scottish Border’.
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Logistically there was no reason why the second part of
Adam Bede
could not be written abroad. Lewes wanted to go to Munich, a place which, Marian told Sara, ‘swarms with professors of all
sorts’.
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Buoyed up by the success of ‘Sea-Side Studies’, Lewes was determined to continue his transformation from a journalist who wrote about science into a professional scientist. He had already started work on
The Physiology of Common Life
, a serious and, as it turned out, hugely influential book which would be very different in tone from the chatty rock-pool amateurism of ‘Sea-Side Studies’.

They left London on 7 April and the trip out, which included a two-day stop at Nürnberg, gave Marian new material for her ‘naturalising’ eye. ‘Every house differed from its neighbour, and had a physiognomy of its own,’ she told her journal, ‘though a beautiful family likeness ran through them all, as if the burghers of that old city were of one heart and soul.’ These careful descriptions of the professional observer were cut across by more urgent splashes. At Bamberg she noticed an elderly couple in the train who ‘spoke to each other and looked so affectionately, that we said directly “Shall we be so when we are old?”’
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In many ways being in Munich was like a replay of the German trip of 1854. They even bumped into Strauss again, though this time the meeting flowed more smoothly. Once again, the weather was unsettled, which sent Marian into a grim cycle of headache and shivers. A stream of invitations – to dinner, the opera, the theatre – cut into the working day, slowing down progress on
Adam Bede
. Lewes’s fantasies about being acknowledged as a professional intellectual rather than a pushy huckster were more than fulfilled. The Goethe book had made his name in Germany, and every scientist, historian and writer who clustered round the first-rate University of Munich was eager to make his acquaintance. Laboratories were thrown open, books lent, introductions made and a steady supply of live frogs provided for his experiments.

Just as during her previous stay in Germany, no one seemed to know, or care, that Marian was technically unmarried. But the pleasure of being able to go out and about with Lewes was soon spoiled by being obliged to play a role to which she was not accustomed – that of wife. Instead of being able to join in discussions with men of the calibre of the anatomist Karl von Siebold and the chemist Justus von Liebig, Marian was obliged to sit on the sofa at the other end of the room, listening to their wives spout what she contemptuously called ‘stupidities’.
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It was a
timely reminder of how little she had lost by her exclusion from a conventional social life in England, a point she was to make often over the years.

Marian’s response to orthodox gender roles would always be contradictory. For while she was happy to have escaped the usual duties assigned to women, she was keen to celebrate them in others. She needed and wanted women to be gentle, nurturing and domestic. She was still hungry for a mother, especially when Lewes departed for a week to Hofwyl on 18 June leaving her feeling edgy and abandoned. Frau von Siebold obligingly stepped into the role by bringing Marian flowers, taking her to the theatre and sweeping her off to meet her sister.
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In her comments on German life and art Marian increasingly picked out the mundane – which for women meant the domestic – as worthy of attention. In her journal she notes with pleasure several little family scenes where the women are absorbed in domestic work, looking after children and keeping their cottages clean. Even professors’ wives get more approval if they are doing homey things. And at the local art gallery it was Rubens’s ability to capture the energy of the everyday which delighted her: ‘What a grand, glowing, forceful thing life looks in his pictures – the men such grand bearded grappling beings fit to do the work of the world, the women such real mothers.’
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In Dresden, where the Leweses travelled next, it was examples of the Dutch realist school by Dou and Terborch, complete with placid housewives and calm grandmothers, which enthralled her.

Here is the puzzle about Marian which bothered critics then and now. While in her most intimate and habitual life she flouted orthodox social roles, her politics and her novels dealt with the
status quo
, with life how it is rather than how it might be. At the very time that she was sneering at dumpy German Fraus who expected her to chat about women’s things, she was writing that famous chapter 17 in
Adam Bede
– ‘In Which the Story Pauses a Little’ – which demands the reader celebrate a world of embedded custom and habit – a world which includes women in all their frumpy domesticity. In this chapter she – or perhaps it should be ‘he’ since the voice is that of Eliot’s omniscient narrator – takes issue with the lady reader who wants pretty people and a romantic plot far removed from daily realities.

After six merry weeks in Munich, Marian and Lewes moved on to a rainy stay in the Tyrol, a nostalgic trip (for Lewes) to Vienna and an important stop (for Marian) in Prague. It was here that she saw the Jewish synagogue that would figure in her short story ‘The Lifted Veil’. On 17 July they reached Dresden and settled for six hard-working weeks. By swearing off society – ‘we live like Hermits here,’ said Lewes – and getting up at six every morning, Marian managed almost to complete the second half of the second volume of
Adam Bede.
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It was only once they were on their way back home through Leipzig that they relaxed their regime to accept dinner invitations from the usual mix of publishers, professors and scientists. On 2 September they arrived home in Richmond.

Shortly afterwards, Marian completed volume two and sent Blackwood the next helping of
Adam Bede
. Writing to her as ‘My Dear Sir’ he had already commented favourably on the chapters he had taken away with him back in February. ‘The story is altogether very novel and I cannot recollect anything at all like it. I find myself constantly thinking of the characters as real personages, which is a capital sign.’ Of course, he had made the usual worried noises about those bits which seemed rude or
risqué:
the proverb describing one of the village girls seemed to imply more than it should and he hoped (in vain, as it turned out) that Arthur Donnithorne’s secret meetings with Hetty ‘will not come to the usual sad catastrophe!’ He warmed to Dinah’s relentless Methodist piety and hoped that the easygoing clergyman Mr Irwine might get more godly as the story went on. Having regret
ted accepting ‘Mr Gilfil’ and ‘Janet’s Repentance’ for serialisation before he had been able to read them through, Blackwood was careful to ask this time for ‘a sketch of the rest of the story’.
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Marian refused, knowing perfectly well that if she told him about her plan for a plot which included premarital sex, an illegitimate baby and infanticide Blackwood was bound to panic. She explained that there was no point in her submitting a synopsis, believing that her story could not be ‘judged apart from my
treatment
, which alone determines the moral quality of art’.
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Her point was this: the most anodyne plot could turn out to be deeply immoral, a scandalous story might illustrate profound truths. What mattered was the way it was done. Sensing that
Adam Bede
probably contained strong stuff, Blackwood decided that it should go straight into book form, bypassing serialisation in
Maga
.

Even now Blackwood was nervous about just what it was he had on his hands. Despite his support for George Eliot, he never seems entirely to have understood the genius of what he was reading. Once again, he gave a muted response to the second part of
Adam Bede
and had to be nudged into enthusiasm by Lewes. On 4 October he writes to congratulate Marian on Hetty Sorrel – ‘One seems to
see
the little villain’ – and confesses that he finds it hard to feel as sympathetic as he should for stern, unbending Adam when he discovers that Hetty has been having an affair with Arthur. He warns Marian that ‘the degree of success will depend very much upon the third volume’ and says that he will wait until he has seen it before he decides how many copies to print.
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In the event, the third volume moved Blackwood to unusual superlatives. ‘I am happy to tell you that I think it capital,’ he wrote on 3 November and made immediate arrangements to start setting up the type.
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Blackwood’s hostile (in Marian’s eyes) response to ‘Janet’s Repentance’ had effectively stopped
Scenes of Clerical Life
and made her determined to start over, this time taking a larger canvas. The story of
Adam Bede
is famously knitted together from two sources which date from her youth. First there is the anecdote her Methodist Aunt Elizabeth Evans had told her about the time, before her marriage, when she was a lay Methodist
preacher. Elizabeth Tomlinson, as she was then, had befriended a young girl condemned to hang for murdering her illegitimate baby. In a state of extreme distress and denial, Mary Voce refused to admit her crime to either herself or the authorities. Elizabeth prayed with her overnight in her prison cell, finally obtaining a last-minute confession before accompanying her to the gallows. Lewes had been struck by the incident when Marian had mentioned it to him in December 1856, suggesting that it would make a good story. From this little seed Marian spun the story of Hetty Sorrel, a farmgirl who becomes pregnant by the young squire and tries to hide the evidence by murdering the baby. Condemned to hang, Hetty is comforted by her kinswoman Dinah Morris, a Methodist lay preacher, who stays with her in prison and finally coaxes a confession from her.

The second source for the novel was the stories Robert Evans had told Marian about his youth as a carpenter, forester and bailiff on the Newdigates’ Derbyshire and Staffordshire estates at the turn of the century, the period in which
Adam Bede
is set. By the time Marian came to write her retrospective journal account of the ‘History of
Adam Bede
’ she was in the middle of an embarrassing crisis, which suggested that she had simply ‘lifted’ characters from real life and put them straight into print. In the circumstances she was defensively quick to maintain that ‘Adam is not my father any more than Dinah is my aunt’.
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None the less Adam’s physical and moral uprightness, the sense of his having been hewn from a massive piece of English oak, recall everything that we know about Robert Evans.

We meet Adam in the opening scene, at the end of a long and hard day. He is the foreman in a carpentry business which serves the local farming community, building doors, windows and wainscoting. Already we are in the middle of the ‘working-day world’, familiar from the Dutch interior scenes which Marian admired so much. Adam, too, is described in a way which makes him sound as if he has come straight out of a Rubens painting. He is monumental yet precise, his brawny arm ‘likely to win the prize for feats of strength; yet the long supple hand, with its broad finger-tips, looked ready for works of skill’.
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Adam’s attitude to his work is informed by a reverence for his fellow man. Unlike his Methodist brother Seth – shades of
Robert’s younger brother Samuel – he is not interested in textual disputation or elaborate piety. Prompted by the workmen’s talk about the girl preacher who is due to talk on the common that night, Adam argues for a worship more integrated with the everyday, affirming that ‘there’s the sperrit o’ God in all things and all times – weekday as well as Sunday – and i’ the great works and inventions, and i’ the figuring and the mechanics’. Sounding like a Feuerbachian he argues: ‘if a man does bits o’ jobs out o’ working hours – builds a oven for’s wife to save her from going to the bakehouse, or scrats at his bit o’ garden and makes two potatoes grow istead o’ one, he’s doing more good, and he’s just as near to God, as if he was running after some preacher and a-praying and a-groaning’.
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Adam’s powerful integrity brings him to the notice of the gentry, towards whom he is naturally deferential. A long-time favourite of the squire’s grandson, Arthur Donnithorne, he is appointed overseer of the estate’s considerable woodland. Clearly Adam is destined to rise, just like Robert Evans, to a position of importance and influence in the local community. When the narrator pauses at the end of chapter 19 to deliver an oration on the quiet, honourable virtues of Adam Bede it is impossible not to hear also a tribute from Marian Evans to her father.