George Eliot (42 page)

Other characters, too, seem drawn from Marian’s earliest past. Mrs Poyser, the fretful, bustling farmer’s wife, fits some of what
we know of Marian’s own mother, Christiana. The dairy, which is Mrs Poyser’s pride and joy, was likewise the centre of Mrs Evans’s prestige and influence at Griff House. The stream of pithy sayings which pour from Mrs Poyser’s mouth are not, as Marian was quickly indignant to point out to Blackwood, local and general turns of phrase: ‘there is not one thing put into Mrs Poyser’s mouth that is not fresh from my own mint.’
⁹⁰
But while the specifics may have been her own, it is hard to imagine where else she could have got that voice except from sharp-tongued Christiana Evans and her trio of formidable Pearson sisters.

Still, Marian was right to be annoyed by the naïve assumption that her art consisted simply of transferring family members and recollections straight into print. In her journal she insisted: ‘Indeed, there is not a single
portrait
in “Adam Bede”; only the suggestions of experience “wrought up into new combinations”.’
⁹¹
It was from those scraps of experience that she built the people who walk through her books. Her characters have intricate psychologies, made up of the constant interplay between inherited personality and social environment, nature and nurture. ‘Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a man’s critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character.’
⁹²
The best example of Eliot’s psychological sophistication comes with Mrs Poyser who, in the hands of Charles Dickens, would be reduced to a two-dimensional character memorable only for a series of catch-phrases. Eliot, by contrast, is able to extract the pithy humour from Mrs Poyser – one of her sayings was even quoted during a Commons debate in March 1859 – while still making her a fully rounded character capable of emotional growth. Eliot places the Poysers in a specific social context, among those hard-working tenant farmers who dread social disgrace as much as a curdled cheese. When her niece Hetty is exposed as sexually incontinent and a murderess, Mrs Poyser feels the shame acutely and personally. By the end of the book she has changed from a self-righteous scold into a reflective woman, demonstrating something approaching pity for the poor girl. In a Dickens novel she would simply be repeating her best one-liners.

Arthur Donnithorne, too, is a masterly study of ‘mixed and erring humanity’, to use Marian’s favourite quotation from Goethe. The attractive young squire of Hayslope starts the story as fresh as a daisy, with a natural benevolence, which means that he does not have to work very hard to be good. He genuinely wants the best for his tenants, his family and his friends. Most of all he wants the best for himself. His ideas of right behaviour are hazy and lazy, and never involve any personal discomfort. When he does someone a wrong he is quick to make amends, but in a manner so self-serving that it fails to mean much: ‘if he should unfortunately break a man’s legs in his rash driving, [he] will be able to pension him handsomely; or if he should happen to spoil a woman’s existence for her, will make it up to her with expensive
bon-bons
, packed up and directed by his own hand’.
⁹³
Essentially narcissistic, Arthur never empathises sufficiently to wonder about his effect on others. He has his way – literally, with Hetty – then feels sorry for himself, and for her, when the liaison threatens to disrupt his life. Well-meaning and kind, he is also selfish, thoughtless and weak.

Hetty, too, is psychologically true, and the narrator’s (and the reader’s) response to her correspondingly complex. She is as beautiful as the kitten, baby and canary to which she is often compared, and her rosy charms hold everyone’s attention. In chapter 7, ‘The Dairy’, Arthur, the narrator and the reader watch while the self-conscious cherub pats and moulds the butter in such a way as to show off her best side and her prettiest dimples. She is not a bad girl, we are told later, simply a ‘trivial’ one. But she commits one of the biggest sins possible in George Eliot’s moral world, that of being discontented with the circumstances of her everyday life. She finds farmwork boring and hates looking after her small cousins. The local suitors who present themselves, including Adam Bede, seem dull and ploddy alongside the dashing figure of Arthur Donnithorne, who showers her with kisses and pearl ear-rings. She feels hot surges of frustration that her bonnet is faded, her shoes clumpy, her handkerchief unscented. All she thinks about is how marriage to Arthur will turn her into a lady.

Hetty’s problem is that she has no real relationship with the physical or human landscape around her. ‘There are some plants
that have hardly any roots: you may tear them from their native nook of rock or wall, and just lay them over your ornamental flower-pot, and they blossom none the worse. Hetty could have cast all her past life behind her and never cared to be reminded of it again.’
⁹⁴
Dinah Morris, by contrast, has ‘grown deep’ into her native county and cannot easily transplant herself to Hayslope from native Stonyshire. What keeps her properly attached to her birthplace is not so much the bleak, treeless uplands as the rough miners and factory workers whose lives she understands and to whose souls she ministers. Hetty, by contrast, hates the witless farmers, artisans and servants who make up her social world. In the end her crime is not that of having sex before marriage, or even murdering her baby, but of wanting to upend the social order by escaping from who and what she is.

It is the landscape, then, which is the major character in
Adam Bede
. Although Marian researched details of local flora from secondary sources, she based her portrait of the agricultural year on her own memories. In chapter 22, ‘Going to the Birthday Feast’, she describes the tail end of July as ‘a time of leisure on the farm – that pause between hay and corn-harvest’ – a point which would surely be missed by any town-born writer working in the library. The flowers are all over, the animals have lost their baby prettiness, the woods ‘are all one dark monotonous green’.
⁹⁵
The precision of the details owes a great deal to those ‘naturalising’ practice runs in Marian’s journal.

Human life in Hayslope is plotted with equal precision. On Sunday mornings the farmers huddle outside the church door discussing business before rushing in to the service at the last minute. The tenants who sit down at Arthur’s coming-of-age are ranked carefully according to the size of their land. When Wiry Ben dances at the party he does so earnestly and with none of the elegance of what the narrator calls ‘a ballet rustic’.
⁹⁶
This is the real countryside, where village girls get pregnant, cheeses curdle and local farmers can’t help being pleased when the crops in a neighbouring county fail.

It is odd to see Marian celebrating the rituals of agricultural life as the social glue which binds individuals into complex moral relationships with one another. For just like Hetty, the teenage Mary Ann Evans had often found herself bored and repulsed by
the coarseness of the people around her. The preparations for Isaac’s twenty-third birthday party had made her grumpy; Michaelmas, with its servant hirings, were so ‘nauseating’ to her.
⁹⁷
Her town-bred Evangelicalism had made the beery chat and loud laughter of farm life seem coarse and disgusting. But now she found in these old rituals and formulaic responses a consolidation of the ties which for centuries had bound men and women together in mutual obligation.

Religion is valued in
Adam Bede
for the way in which it supports humane values. The local clergyman is the Revd Irwine, a cheerful Anglican who preaches poorly but loves the people among whom he lives. A gentleman and a scholar, he is also something of a pagan, preferring a quotation from Sophocles over one from Isaiah. He is not good at biblical disputation, but the names of the young men and women he christened twenty years ago remain as fresh as ever. Crucially, he perceives no threat from Dinah Morris, the young woman who preaches extempore from a cart on the common. Methodism had been set up by John Wesley to fill the void left by exactly that lax Anglicanism which Irwine represents. Dinah’s mission is to reach those who feel themselves unmoved by the tepid rituals of Sunday church service. But just as she behaves gracefully towards Irwine, so he takes a keenly benign interest in her work. The young girl and the middle-aged man refuse to condemn one another, but instead seek the value in an approach so different from their own. Both Irwine’s good-natured paternalism and Dinah’s intense soul-searching are manifested in the acts of practical charity of which the Feuerbachian narrator so obviously approves.

There had always been a question mark in Lewes’s and Marian’s minds, if not in Blackwood’s, about her ability to ‘do’ drama.
Adam Bede
was not a ‘Scene’ but a novel, and no amount of delightful descriptions of butter-making or country dancing was going to sustain a story over 600 pages. In her journal account of the ‘History of
Adam Bede
’, Marian says that when she began to write the only elements she had decided on besides the character of Dinah were the character of Adam, his relation to Arthur and their mutual relation to Hetty. It was Lewes who provided the two key suggestions. From the earliest chapters he became convinced that Dinah would be a popular character – possibly
true for contemporary readers, surely not for us – and suggested that ultimately she should marry Adam. More successfully, he suggested that Arthur and Adam should have a fight in the woods over their competing attentions for Hetty.
⁹⁸

While Marian did manage to sustain dramatic tension for three-quarters of the book, the last part is an anticlimax. For writers of realism, endings are always difficult, a point Marian made to Blackwood when he complained that the conclusions of ‘Amos’ and ‘Gilfil’ were too huddled up: ‘Conclusions are the weak point of most authors, but some of the fault lies in the very nature of a conclusion, which is at best a negation.’
⁹⁹
Hetty is not hanged in the end, but gets a pardon, which Arthur delivers at the very last minute – a device taken from Scott’s
Heart of Midlothian
. Next Marian has to devise a way for Adam and Dinah to come together, a tedious business. In particular, Marian has to work hard to get Dinah, who has previously turned down Seth on the grounds that she wants to devote herself to her ministry, to accept Adam. Marian’s solution – a carefully researched one – is to use the 1803 ban on women remaining as Methodist preachers to have Dinah give up the ministry. Now the way is free for her to move to Hayslope and become a wife and mother.

Dinah’s destiny has always attracted much criticism from feminist critics, who see it as the first in a line of compromised endings for Eliot heroines, those energetic girls like Esther and Dorothea who are given nothing more exciting to do than become some man’s wife. What makes it all the more difficult in Dinah’s case is that, historically, her fate could have been different. Just like Marian’s Aunt Elizabeth, she could have joined another Methodist congregation and continued to preach, even combining her ministry with family life. But Marian was not writing campaigning, Utopian fiction. The fact was that around 1800 very few middle-class women – which is what Dinah becomes through her marriage to the upwardly mobile Adam – did work outside their husband’s business.

What has bothered critics is not so much that Marian gave her heroines such low-key endings, but that she threw the moral weight of the book behind them. She seems to approve of the littleness of Dinah’s destiny, just as she had delighted in all those
paintings of Dutch matrons, visits to homely German professors’ wives and Chrissey looking after her babies. Yet it was a life she had rejected for herself, often scathingly so. It is this tension between the sacredness of
things as they are
and her own trajectory as a self-made woman which confused Marian’s contemporaries just as it continues to unsettle us.

‘T
ALKING OF GOOD
books it is really gratifying to see our confidence in Adam Bede so confirmed,’ Lewes chirruped to Blackwood on 21 April 1859. ‘Two out of every three people I meet speak to me about it.’
¹

Only a few months earlier the mood had been very different. Although the book had been ready to go to press at the end of November 1858, Blackwood had dragged his feet. His excuse to the Leweses was that he was already committed to bringing out Bulwer-Lytton’s novel
What Will He Do With It?
in January, and did not want to run the two books against each other. The fact that Bulwer-Lytton’s dithering over the proofs had caused a backlog at the printers may have had more to do with it. But perhaps there was also a reluctance on Blackwood’s part to take the plunge with a book whose subject matter and pseudonymous authorship were almost certainly bound to cause a storm.

The wait made Marian and Lewes jumpy. A few weeks earlier Herbert Spencer had told them over dinner that the notorious blab John Chapman had guessed the real identity of George Eliot. Rumours drifting in from Warwickshire suggested that Evans
family members were also putting two and two together. If publication were delayed any longer there would be no chance of bringing out
Adam Bede
pseudonymously and, as Marian told Blackwood on 1 December 1858, ‘I wish the book to be judged quite apart from its authorship.’
²
Fidgety with frustration, she put together a ‘Remonstrance’ which, she told Blackwood in a letter of 22 December, Mr Lewes had suggested should be attached to the beginning of
Adam Bede
.
³
The essay has been lost, but presumably it took nosy critics and readers to task for trying to break the author’s incognito. Blackwood hated it and pulled Lewes up sharply for indulging Marian’s dangerous fantasies: ‘It is not like so knowing a party as you to suggest so dangerous a preface as that proposed for G.E.’
⁴

The matter was quickly dropped and the Leweses were forced to sit on their hands for another five weeks until
Adam Bede
finally appeared. Fleeting though the crisis had been, it flagged many of the problems that were to make the following year such a harrowing one. Marian’s ambivalence about being identified as the author of her work, Lewes’s tendency to fly off the handle and Blackwood’s instinctive dislike of confrontation all played a part in creating the difficulties to come.

When
Adam Bede
appeared in three volumes on 1 February 1859 it was not an instant hit. The all-important Charles Edward Mudie, who ran the biggest circulating library in the country and could make or break a new novel, agreed to take fifty copies, grudgingly increased to 500 under pressure. It was only when the notices began to appear, three weeks later, that everyone started discussing – and buying – the latest literary sensation, George Eliot’s
Adam Bede
. Mostly the reviewers picked up on the same things as Blackwood. They were charmed by the pastoral, amused by Mrs Poyser and her pithy sayings, shocked by the obstetric details – which strike the modern reader as downright coy – of Hetty giving birth in a field. The high point was E. S. Dallas’s review in
The Times
on 12 April which declared, ‘There can be no mistake about
Adam Bede
. It is a first-rate novel, and its author takes rank at once among the masters of the art.’
⁵
The effect on sales was stunning. By the middle of March the first edition was sold out. By the summer the book was on its fifth
print run. Gratifyingly, Mudie begged to be allowed to order extra. At the year’s end it was calculated that a very healthy 15,000 copies of
Adam Bede
had gone.

Even more gratifying were the personal testimonies that found their way to Marian. ‘Praise is so much less sweet than comprehension and sympathy,’ she wrote to Charles Bray on 7 September 1859 and luckily she got plenty of both.
⁶
Jane Carlyle, still trying to decide whether George Eliot was a clergyman, gave the surest confirmation of success when she declared that the novel had put her ‘in charity with the whole human race’.
⁷
J. A. Froude, perhaps unaware he was writing to the ardent Miss Evans from whom he had fled ten years previously, framed his praise in equally specific terms, declaring that
Adam Bede
‘gave no pleasure. It gave a palpitation of the heart. That was not pleasure; but it was a passionate interest.’
⁸

In Edinburgh the reaction was equally discerning. A cabinet-making brother of the Blackwoods’ clerk George Simpson responded with delight to the accuracy of the workshop scenes.
⁹
His testimony went a long way towards cancelling the later sneer of Thomas Carlyle: ‘I found out in the first two pages that it was a woman’s writing – she supposed that in making a door, you last of all put in the
panels.’
¹⁰
It is lucky that Marian never heard this, for no one’s approval mattered more than Thomas Carlyle’s. Knowing that his youth had been spent ‘among the furrowed fields and pious peasantry’, the Sage of Chelsea had become identified in her mind with Robert Evans. If Carlyle liked the book then so, by her odd reckoning, would her father have done. In fact, Carlyle never could be persuaded to admire George Eliot, even before he knew she was that ‘strong-minded woman’ Marian Evans, and certainly not afterwards.

Even the fact that the Queen admired
Adam Bede
would not have made up for the disappointment over Carlyle. Victoria’s recommendations had sped all over Europe, from Prussia, where her daughter was Crown Princess, to Belgium, where her Uncle Leopold was King. Hayslope’s rural rhythms and old-fashioned moral values reminded her of the Scottish Highlands. Adam Bede, with his strong back and straight talking, could almost have been one of her beloved gillies. It was now that Her Majesty
commissioned two watercolours, one of Dinah preaching, the other of Hetty in the dairy.
¹¹

It felt sweet to Marian, ostracised for the past five years, to be fussed over, accepted (albeit as George Eliot) and placed at the very heart of the culture which had snubbed her. Yet as sales soared and reviewers gushed, she found herself overcome by a cold, sick dread. On 10 April she told Blackwood, ‘few authors, I suppose, who have had a real success, have known less of the flush and the sensations of triumph that are talked of as the accompaniments of success’.
¹²

What spoiled Marian’s pleasure was her deep suspicion of popularity. Writing novels was, for her, a moral activity, more akin to producing philosophy than telling stories. While discerning comments from Jane Carlyle, Charles Dickens and J. A. Froude filled her with pleasure, she was gripped by the fear that if too many people liked her writing she must be doing something wrong. She even managed to communicate this to the normally pragmatic Lewes, whose response to the praise for
Adam Bede
became uncharacteristically tetchy. The opinion of the
Statesman
’s reviewer that the book was ‘One of the best novels we have read for a long time’ only succeeded in making Lewes snap, ‘The nincompoop couldn’t see the distinction between Adam and the mass of novels he had been reading.’
¹³
Behind the graceless comment lay Marian’s contagious terror that
Adam Bede
had been mistaken by reviewers and readers alike as nothing more than an accomplished potboiler. For this reason she scrutinised Blackwood for signs that he was trying to market the book in the wrong way. On 25 February 1859 she wrote begging him not to extract from the reviews phrases like ‘best novel of the season’ or ‘best novel we have read for a long while’ in order to puff new editions of the book.
¹⁴
Yet, confusingly, only a few months earlier she had quizzed him sharply about why Mudie ‘has almost always left the C[lerical] S[cenes] out of his advertised list, although he puts in very trashy and obscure books?’
¹⁵

Luckily by now Blackwood recognised his new author’s tricky, tortured nature. He also understood what he was required to do about it. In a tactful letter of 16 March 1859 he opens with ‘I think I may now fairly congratulate you upon being a
popular
as
well as a great author’, before continuing carefully, ‘The sale is nothing to the ring of applause that I hear in all directions. The only qualm that ever came across me as to the success of the book was that really to enjoy it I required to give my mind to it and I trembled for that large section of Novel readers who have little or no mind to give, but now I think the general applause is fairly enlisting even noodles.’
¹⁶

The central contradiction about Marian which Blackwood grasped was that despite her proclaimed indifference to what the mass of people thought about her books, she remained morbidly dependent on their good opinion. She had never wanted to be an avant-garde writer, appealing only to the knowing few. By choosing to write novels, and by setting her stories among ordinary people, she was reaching for the broadest audience. And because that audience would, if it had known the details of Marian Evans’s personal life, surely have rejected her, it became doubly important that George Eliot’s novels should be accepted unconditionally. Any dip in sales was interpreted by Marian as a judgement not just of her artistic skill but of her decision to live with Lewes out of wedlock. Deep despair combined with lofty declarations of indifference usually followed quickly. It would not be long before Lewes decided to keep the sales figures to himself and begged Blackwood to do the same.

This violent swing between the need to be loved and the desire to stand above it all, between the thirst for acclaim and the suspicion of popularity, exhausted Marian in the months following the publication of
Adam Bede
. More crucially, it led her into a bewilderingly volatile position about money, which came close to destroying her relationship with the Blackwoods before it had hardly started.

It was the need to improve their joint finances which had first led Lewes to suggest that Marian try her hand at fiction. Initially Marian was able to rationalise this motivation by the curious suggestion that there was something ‘antiseptic’ about writing for money which guarded against the production of highly coloured trash. But with the huge success of
Adam Bede
came new temptations. It would be so easy to follow the example of a popular Blackwood novelist like Margaret Oliphant who paid her sons’ Eton fees by churning out 200-odd novels which bore more than
a family resemblance. Marian had even toyed with the idea of producing a sequel to
Adam Bede
, possibly focusing on the popular Poysers.
¹⁷
But to write derivative fiction in order to make certain money ran counter to her strong need to produce work which was socially and morally useful. ‘I don’t want the world to give me anything for my books’, she declared at one point to Blackwood during the tense negotiations of 1859, ‘except money to save me from the temptation to write
only
for money.’
¹⁸

This pious wish the Blackwoods could easily have granted. The amount they had given her for
Scenes
and
Adam Bede
was fine and fair. But Marian’s wavering self-worth led her into aggressive demands over what she should be paid for her next book, at this point usually referred to simply as ‘Maggie’. Add Lewes’s love of intrigue to the mix and the stage was set for six months of embarrassment and hurt feelings.

The first Blackwood heard about Marian’s new novel was in a letter of 31 March 1859, when she mentioned that it would be ‘as long as
Adam Bede
, and a sort of companion picture of provincial life’.
¹⁹
Although this sounded promising, over the next few months several things happened to make Blackwood less sanguine. First there was the odd, gloomy short story called ‘The Lifted Veil’, which Marian had sent for interim publication in
Maga
. It is doubtful if he would have accepted it from anyone else and it must have made him reconsider whether George Eliot was going to turn out to be a one-book wonder.

Next, a series of embarrassing developments was making the Blackwoods uncomfortably aware that it would not be feasible to hide George Eliot’s identity for ever. Before long, everyone would know that the exquisitely moral
Adam Bede
had been written by the woman famous for taking someone else’s husband. Once that happened it was inevitable that sales of this and any subsequent novel would suffer. Indeed, once Mudie learned that George Eliot was Marian Evans, he threatened to boycott
The Mill on the Floss
completely. Blackwood, too, had received plenty of intelligence from his friends and from Joseph Langford, his London manager, that once the authorship was known the book was unlikely to sell well among the family audience.

The crisis which threatened to unmask Marian centred on a genteel down-and-out from Nuneaton called Joseph Liggins,
whose supporters claimed he had written
Scenes
and
Adam Bede
. Liggins, a baker’s son who had been spoiled for the world by a Cambridge education and hopes of a Church career, cut so shambling a figure that it is hard to believe he thought up the fraud himself. Indeed, he may never actually have maintained that he was Eliot, but simply allowed others to think he was. Quite why so many local gentry and clergy jumped to his cause is not clear: one theory has enemies of Lewes from
Leader
days stirring up the fuss as a kind of revenge.
²⁰
Whatever the origins of the deception, the result was to unleash a scandal that not only prematurely unmasked Marian, but raised doubts about her integrity and talent, which took years to die down.