George Eliot (43 page)
Authors: Kathryn Hughes
When the Liggins rumour – or ‘Liggers’ as his name was scrambled in some press reports – first surfaced after the publication of
Scenes
it all seemed light-hearted enough. Writing to Blackwood from Munich on 20 May 1858, where Marian was deep in
Adam Bede
, Lewes could even see it as a useful smokescreen: ‘the more confidently such reports are spread, the more difficult will be the detection of the real culprit’.
21
Nearly a year later, with the rumour now taking hold in Warwickshire, Marian was still finding it funny. On 10 April 1859 she tells Blackwood that she has heard from ‘an old friend’ – actually Sara Hennell – that Joseph Liggins was now attracting sympathy on the grounds that he had not received a penny from the Blackwoods for his work. ‘I hope you and Major Blackwood will enjoy the myth,’ she teases.
22
But within several days the mood had changed. Marian might have wanted to conceal her identity, but that was quite another matter from letting someone else ‘bear his arms on my shield’. On 15 April George Eliot wrote to
The Times
denying a statement which had appeared there a few days earlier from a busybody Nuneaton cleric that Liggins had written
Scenes of Clerical Life
and
Adam Bede
. In a robust letter Eliot, who on grounds of gender and class could hardly be considered a gentleman, waxed indignant about how ‘he’ had been deprived of the usual courtesies extended to that breed. ‘Allow me to ask whether the act of publishing a book deprives a man of all claim to the courtesies usual among gentlemen? If not, the attempt to pry into what is obviously meant to be withheld – my name – and to publish the
rumours which such prying may give rise to, seems to me quite indefensible, still more so to state these rumours as ascertained truths.’
23
The Leweses had sent the letter to
The Times
without consulting the Blackwoods first, sensing that the publishers were a long way behind them. In truth, it suited the Blackwoods to let the Liggins rumour play for as long as possible. The more muddle there was, the longer it would be before George Eliot was definitively identified as Marian Evans Lewes.
Far from fading away, the crisis grew. By the middle of April a group of Warwickshire gentlemen were organising a subscription for Liggins to compensate him for the shabby treatment he was supposed to have received at the hands of the Blackwoods. Now that outright fraud was implied, the Leweses were moving towards the position that only a definitive statement that Marian was the author of
Scenes
and
Adam Bede
would refute the claims of the Liggins camp. Blackwood, more used to the rough and tumble of publishing, remained sanguine about being branded a cheat and in a letter of 18 May 1859 begged the Leweses to ‘KEEP YOUR SECRET’ until he had had a chance to meet them face to face. Nine days later he arrived at Wandsworth and, according to Lewes’s journal, ‘urged that the secret should stedfastly be kept, at least until after the next book’.
24
In return for the Leweses’ continuing silence, Blackwood agreed to get involved in scotching the rumour. On 6 June he endorsed another letter to
The Times
from George Eliot. As far as Marian and Lewes were concerned, it was too little too late. ‘I am surprised at … the equanimity with which you have both sat down under the absurd imputation,’ Lewes wrote coldly.
25
What stung was the realisation that the Blackwoods had been motivated by different concerns all along. The publishers’ priority was less to spare Marian’s feelings than to protect book sales. But what the Leweses found most hurtful of all was the implication that there was something tainted, embarrassing, wrong with the name Marian Evans Lewes.
By May the situation was out of hand. In Warwickshire a manuscript of Eliot’s work in Liggins’s writing was doing the rounds. Marian and Lewes constructed an angry letter to
The Times
denouncing Liggins as ‘an impostor and a swindler’.
26
The editor of the newspaper, Delane, advised Blackwood to get the
letter toned down. Marian sulkily agreed, but before she had a chance to go into print with the new version, a crucial communication arrived from Barbara Leigh Smith. Married in 1857 to an eccentric French doctor called Bodichon, Barbara spent half the year in Algeria and half in Britain. She was presently in London on one of her long summer sojourns. Barbara, who by now knew the secret of Marian’s authorship, reported on the gossip she had picked up on her recent round of smart drawing-rooms: ‘They assured me all the literary men were certain it was Marian Lewes … that they did not much like saying so because it would do so much harm … From their way of talking it was evident they thought you would do the book more harm than the book do you good in public opinion.’
27
Finally Barbara had said what the Blackwoods had been hinting at all along: people thought that Marian Evans Lewes was ashamed to come out as the author of
Adam Bede
because of her unconventional private life. If this were not enough to make Marian righteously determined to break the secret, then a vicious article in the
Athenaeum
three days later did the trick. ‘It is time to end this pother about the authorship of “Adam Bede”,’ ran a piece by William Dixon in the magazine’s gossip column. ‘The writer is in no sense a “great unknown”; the tale, if bright in parts, and such as a clever woman with an observant eye and unschooled moral nature might have written, has no great quality of any kind.’
28
Condensed into a few savage paragraphs were the two most hurtful accusations that had been made against Marian over the past few months. First, that she was a shameful woman pretending to be a respectable one. Second, that she had thought up the whole Liggins rigmarole as a gimmick to boost the sales of her books. On 2 July 1859 the Blackwood brothers attended a summit at Wandsworth, where the Leweses were now living, and it was agreed that the pseudonym would be given up. Although lunch went well, with John Blackwood struck by how happy Marian looked, by the end of the day she had crumpled under the delayed impact of the
Athenaeum
piece. A letter written to Barbara that evening breaks off abruptly with the shaky explanation: ‘I [am] very poorly and trembling, and am only fit to sit in a heap with a warm water bottle at my feet. So no more now.’
29
The whole miserable business had left Marian suspicious about John Blackwood’s loyalty. Eighteen months earlier her brother had rejected her claim to be ‘Mrs Lewes’ and now her publisher was making it clear that ‘Marian Evans Lewes’ was a name with which his family could only grudgingly be associated. Just as resentment towards Isaac had so often been played out through money, so Marian now expressed her disappointment in Blackwood by testing the limits of his financial commitment to her.
The negotiations over
The Mill
started off pleasantly enough. After a long day at Wandsworth on 25 June, John Blackwood reported to his brother, in retrospect a touch complacently, that Marian ‘honestly confesses to a most deep seated anxiety to get a large price for the new Tale and I think we will be well able to afford to give it. It should be a little fortune to her.’
30
Over the next few months there was nothing to suggest that anything was wrong. Blackwood continued to send good news about the sales of
Adam Bede
and to commiserate over the nastiness of the
Athenaeum
piece. He generously offered to bring forward one of the scheduled payments for
Adam Bede
if it would help with the Leweses’ heavy moving costs to Wandsworth. He even picked up on an earlier hint that Marian wished some noble patron would send her a pug as a thank you for
Adam Bede
. After getting a sporting cousin to scour the country for the right sort of animal, in July Blackwood via Langford presented a delighted Marian with Pug. Despite the chill which was to set into their correspondence over the next few months, no letter from Marian or Lewes was complete without a mention of the new arrival’s wagging tail and sneezing habits.
Although Blackwood liked what he had read of the manuscript of ‘Maggie’, he had dragged his feet over making a firm offer. On 13 September Marian tried to nudge him into action. Resentful that she had to expose herself like this, she compensated with a defensively bold tone. Reminding him that ‘I have now so large and eager a public’ that any new novel was bound to sell well, she expressed her concern that if the book was first serialised in the magazine, up to 40,000 readers would be lost for the subsequent book publication.
31
She wanted to know how Blackwood proposed to compensate her.
Blackwood picked up on the aggressive tone and consulted the Major before responding. But far from being a supple parry, his letter of 21 September was clumsy, oblique and, as it turned out, deeply damaging. Instead of addressing her arguments against serialisation, Blackwood plunged straight in with ‘I wish to have your new novel for the Magazine as from what I read of the story I feel confident that it will be admirably adapted for publication there. Publishing in that form we will give you at least as much as we would for it to publish in any other way.’
32
He offered her £3000 for serialisation and book copyright for four years, without making it clear whether this included compensation for the loss of sales from readers who had seen the story in the magazine. He also, nastily, cut her down to size by reminding her that
Scenes
had actually been a poor seller until
Adam Bede
had arrived on the market as a retrospective tonic. Then, in an uncharacteristically insensitive conclusion, he added that he did not intend to attach the name ‘George Eliot’ to the magazine instalments of the new book, ‘and it would be great fun to watch the speculation as to the author’s life’.
33
Having been briefed about her anguish over the
Athenaeum
attack, it is odd that Blackwood should think that it would be remotely ‘fun’ for Marian to undergo yet more gossip about her private life.
The very next day Marian sent her icy response.
Your letter confirms my presupposition that you would not find it worth your while to compensate me for the renunciation of the unquestionable advantages my book would derive from being presented to the public in three volumes with all its freshness upon it.
It was an oversight of mine not to inform you that I do not intend to part with the copyright, but only with an edition. As, from the nature of your offer, I infer that you think my next book will be a speculation attended with risk, I prefer incurring that risk myself.
34
This time Blackwood took three weeks to reply, having first consulted an outraged Major. In the circumstances, the letter was a model of restraint. John Blackwood sent good news of the flourishing sales of
Adam Bede
and
Scenes
, dealt tactfully with yet one more detour in the Liggins business, and said simply and
generously, ‘The Major and I are very sorry indeed that you cannot entertain our proposal for the new Tale. I hope Maggie gets on as gloriously as she promised.’
35
Marian’s response was ominous. For a start, she signed herself ‘Marian Evans Lewes’ rather than ‘George Eliot’, a switch which Major Blackwood was quick to spot – ‘I am rather sorry to see the change of signature.’ The name which bound publisher and author together, in secret and success, was being decisively withdrawn. ‘George Eliot’, Marian was reminding Blackwood, belonged to her alone. There were other signs, too, that she was angry. Avoiding any mention of current negotiations, she ticked him off about some proof-reading mistakes in a new edition of
Adam Bede
and dropped heavy hints about the book’s continuing ‘great success’.
36
Blackwood must have had to bite his tongue when he replied on 27 October. He apologises for the printing blunders, delights in the progress of ‘Maggie’ ‘in whom I shall always feel a very keen interest’ and tells her that Blackwoods are going to give her an extra-contractual £400 as an acknowledgement of the huge success of
Adam Bede.
37
Marian’s response by return contains crisp thanks, spends a whole paragraph on how enduringly wonderful
Adam Bede
is, and harries Blackwoods for not taking action over the publisher Newby, who has advertised a bogus sequel to
Adam Bede.
38
This time the saintly Blackwood had been pushed too far. Marian’s mean-mindedness threw him into a ‘fit of disgust’.
39
He was perfectly aware that she was being courted by other publishers – indeed, she had made a point of telling him – and assumed that she was now playing a waiting game to see who would offer the best price for her new novel. His hurt feelings quickly became office gossip. Simpson, the clerk in Edinburgh, wrote to Langford, the London manager, saying: ‘Mr. John and Major B are utterly disgusted and I do think would now decline the new book if it were offered them.’ Usually the Blackwood people managed to use Lewes as the scapegoat for any little bits of bad behaviour from Marian, but this time Simpson maintained that it was Eliot who was ‘inordinately greedy’ and expected some ‘wonderful price’ from a rival firm.
40
By 16 November, in a flurry of mixed pronouns, he was denouncing George Eliot on the
grounds that ‘he was an avaricious soul’ who had ‘sold herself to the highest bidder’.
41
On 18 November Lewes attempted to break the stand-off with a letter that only succeeded in making things worse. ‘What days these are for furious speculation in the periodical world!’ he crowed to Blackwood. ‘My precious time is occupied with declining offers on all sides – every one imagining that he can seduce George Eliot, simply because he (the everyone, not G.E.)
wants
that result.’
42
Obvious though the tactic was – Simpson snorted to Langford that it was the sort of crass gambit that young ladies went in for – it happened to be true. The year before, an ‘oily and fair-spoken’ American literary agent had offered Marian an extraordinary £1200 for a short story while a Derby clergyman had suggested that she might like to contribute a piece to the
Parish Magazine
urging the clergy to elevate their notions of love and courtship.
