George Eliot (44 page)

Most of the overtures, however, were from altogether more orthodox quarters. None other than Lewes’s old friend Charles Dickens had recently made contact after twenty-three years. He had liked
Scenes
and loved
Adam Bede
, maintaining that ‘I cannot praise it enough.’
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Now he was after a novel to serialise in his new periodical
All the Year Round
. When he came to dinner at Holly Lodge, the Wandsworth house to which they had moved in February 1859, the evening went well. Although Dickens was always careful to emphasise that he had not actively tried to poach Eliot from Blackwoods, he was happy to exploit the Leweses’ dissatisfaction with the Edinburgh firm. He asked Lewes to write a piece for
All the Year Round
on the Newby business and the whole ethics of advertising bogus sequels. But it was Marian he was really after. The terms Dickens proposed for Eliot’s work were flatteringly generous, allowing her to keep the copyright and reprint the novel in book form with whichever publisher she chose. But time was the problem. The Leweses never seem to have considered giving Dickens
The Mill
and Marian did not see how she could meet his deadline by having her next book ready to start serialisation in summer 1860.

Dickens was especially keen that
All the Year Round
should be a success because the previous year he had disbanded his previous magazine
Household Words
, after a quarrel with the publishers
Bradbury and Evans. They, in turn, had set up
Once a Week
to rival Dickens’s new project and were equally keen to court George Eliot. The editor, Samuel Lucas, laid siege to Marian during the spring of 1859, sending letters care of Blackwood asking her to contribute a serial. Marian asked Blackwood to respond with a refusal on her behalf, hoping that he would take note of how greatly she was in demand.
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Bradbury and Evans’s next strategy was to approach Eliot through Lewes, even resorting to asking him to write a novel for them. Lewes does not seem to have been offended by so blatant a tactic and even discussed with Marian whether he should take up their offer. In the end he decided – wisely, given the awfulness of his two early tries at fiction – that ‘I should not swerve from Science.’
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Throughout these tense autumn months Marian continued to drop hints that despite having rejected Blackwood’s offer she still expected that he would be the book’s publisher. On 6 October she wrote to Langford, the London manager, and asked him to recommend a ‘hard-headed lawyer’ who could brief her on the legal background to Mr Tulliver’s court case.
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Lewes, too, was keenly aware that there was still no firm and viable agreement with any publishing house for the new book. In fact, Smith and Elder were soon to make an offer, a staggering £4500. But this reached Wandsworth on 1 December and four days earlier Marian had decided that she could not wait any longer. In desperation she had written to Blackwood:

Two days later Blackwood replied with what turned out to be the breakthrough letter. He is frank about being ‘very much annoyed or rather, I should say, hurt at the tone in which my
offer for the new novel was replied to’. He acknowledges that other publishing companies ‘may offer a sum such as I would neither think it right nor prudent to give’.
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He says that he would have quite understood if Marian had taken a higher offer ‘but I think I should have been told so frankly instead of having my offer treated as if it were not worth consideration at all’.
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But it was in his concluding paragraph that Blackwood showed himself once again to be attuned to her particular dilemma. He admits that he has always opposed the withdrawal of the incognito and recognised frankly that ‘in the eyes of many’ it will prove a disadvantage. However, ‘my opinion of your genius and confidence in the truly good, honest, religious, and moral tone of all you have written or will write is such that I think you will overcome any possible detriment from the withdrawal of the mystery which has so far taken place’.
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Marian responded with equal candour, explaining that she had been hurt by Blackwood ignoring her queries about whether he would recompense her for the loss of book sales through serial publication. She also admitted: ‘Your proposition at the same time to publish the story without the name of George Eliot seemed to me (rendered doubly sensitive by the recent withdrawal of my incognito) part of a depreciatory view that ran through your whole letter, in contrast with the usual delicacy and generosity of your tone.’
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Then she explained how annoyed she had been by his refusal to take steps to stop Newby advertising the bogus sequel to
Adam Bede
.

Blackwood’s final letter in this painful sequence was, uncannily, written from that ‘fine quaint old place’ Arbury Hall where he had gone as the guest of Charles Newdegate, Isaac Evans’s employer. He said nothing new in his letter composed carefully over 2–4 December – merely repeating that he had always wanted to bring out ‘Maggie’, that he nearly always published anonymously in the magazine, and that he and his brother knew their business well enough to know whether to tackle Newby or whether to let him expose himself as a scoundrel. He proceeded to invite himself to lunch on the following Wednesday at Wandsworth so that he could make a binding arrangement over ‘Maggie’. When Blackwood arrived on 7 December, the vexed issue of serialisation was dropped as well as Lewes’s lingering
hope of bringing the book out in monthly shilling instalments. It was agreed that Blackwood would give her £2000 for book publication. It was not a particularly generous offer, especially when compared with the magnificent sum of £4500 from Smith and Elder, which had come in a few days previously. But at least ‘we may consider the publication of Maggie settled’, Marian wrote with something approaching relief on 20 December.
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The relationship with the Blackwoods was not the only one which came near to breaking over the incognito business. Marian’s closest friendships, already changed by her intimacy with Lewes, were further strained by the decision to keep her authorship secret. The Brays, Sara Hennell and John Chapman had all provided support during the difficult Coventry and Strand years, and were bound to feel hurt when they discovered that they had been shut out from Marian’s growing happiness and success. Never keen on Lewes, they found it easy to blame the little man for pulling the girl they thought they knew into a shadowy world of fudge and equivocation.

The first pressure on the incognito had come from Warwickshire. In her chatty letter acknowledging Marian’s ‘marriage’ in late May 1857 Fanny Houghton had mentioned that Joseph Liggins, a man remembered vaguely from the half-sisters’ overlapping youth, was said to be the author of the new series in
Blackwood’s Magazine
. If Fanny was angling for a confession, she was disappointed. Marian wrote back with a mixture of contrived vagueness – mis-calling the stories ‘Clerical Sketches’ – and inexplicable certainty, telling Fanny that no less an authority than Mr Blackwood had told Mr Lewes that the stories were by ‘Mr. Eliot, a clergyman, I presume’.
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Fanny was not the only member of the Evans family to have suspicions. Isaac had also been reading
Blackwood’s Magazine
and found his thoughts jumping to his sister. Later, when
Adam Bede
came out, he had been heard to mutter that ‘No one but his Sister could write the book’ and that ‘there are things in it about his Father that she must have written’.
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Although Isaac had resolved never to speak to Marian, he was proud enough to grumble about her.

Frustratingly, we do not know what Isaac thought about
Marian’s next book,
The Mill on the Floss
, which so obviously draws on their shared childhood. The next we hear of the Evanses is not until 1866 when Fanny wrote to Isaac about the up-coming
Felix Holt
– perhaps also with a hint of exasperated pride? – ‘I am on the tip-toe of expectation to see the forthcoming novel by Mary Ann. It is too much to hope that no member of her own family will figure in it.’
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The Evanses were not the only Midlands people to have been reading George Eliot’s work with interest. In May 1858 John Blackwood was watching the Derby at Epsom when he was hailed by Charles Newdegate with, ‘Do you know that you have been publishing a capital series of stories in the Mag., the Clerical Scenes, all about my place and County?’ Newdegate was certain the author was Liggins, but was so delighted with the tales’ ‘delicacy, good taste, and good feeling’ that he appeared not to be in the least offended. Indeed, he seemed to relish the whole business enormously, boasting that he was sure he could provide a ‘key’ to the characters and their real-life counterparts.
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If Blackwood was unsettled by the revelation that his new author’s refreshingly ‘realistic’ fiction might be nothing more than crude documentary, he disguised it in a lightly worded request to Marian that she should ‘write me a line with a message’ to Newdegate.
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Marian was quick to sense the seriousness of the implications and her answer went far beyond ‘a line’. As always when under pressure, she retreated to an Olympian position, declaring that ‘it is invariably the case that when people discover certain points of coincidence in a fiction with facts that happen to have come to their knowledge, they believe themselves able to furnish a key to the whole’. She admits that ‘certain vague traditions’ about Sir Roger Newdigate were woven into the story of Sir Christopher Cheverel, but ‘the rest of “Mr Gilfil’s Love Story” is spun out of the subtlest web of minute observation and inward experience, from my first childish recollections up to recent years’.
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This was not the first time Blackwood had found himself accosted by people who claimed to have relatives who had stepped out of a George Eliot story. The previous August he had received a letter from the Revd W. P. Jones of Preston asking if he was planning any more ‘Clerical Scenes’. According to Mr Jones,
‘Janet’s Repentance’ was based on an episode in the life of his dead brother and he was ‘utterly at a loss to conceive who could have written the statements or revived what should have been buried in oblivion’.
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When gently pressed by Blackwood, Marian had, as always, taken refuge in a defensively superior attitude to the way in which ordinary mortals insist on misunderstanding the creative process. ‘I suppose there is no perfect safeguard against erroneous impressions or a mistaken susceptibility.’
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But the third time it happened, Blackwood was getting worried. In June 1859 he received a badly constructed, uncertainly grammaticised letter from the Revd John Gwyther, the curate at Chilvers Coton whose unlikely crush on a mysterious Countess had provided the raw material for ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’. In laborious detail Gwyther explains how his ‘Eldest Daughter’ had been reading the ‘Clerical Scenes’ when she spotted the borrowing. With unexpected insight Gwyther says that he doesn’t believe that Joseph Liggins had it in him to produce the ‘Clerical Scenes’. He believes the author must be a Mr King, who was curate at Nuneaton during those crucial years.
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Perhaps because he was shocked by how Gwyther’s meandering and ungrammatical communication was exactly the kind that Barton would have written, Blackwood thought it deserved a detailed response. Marian composed a letter in which she came the closest she would ever get to an admission – and perhaps a recognition? – that she had gone too far in using the details of other people’s lives.

The worrying suggestion that Marian was some kind of plagiarist would not go away. The reluctant admission by the Liggins camp in November 1859 that their man had, after all, not written
Scenes
and
Adam
only succeeded in clearing the ground for new and embarrassing rumours. The chief source of these was Charles Holte Bracebridge, a huffy-puffy magistrate with a genius for getting things wrong. Just like Mr Brooke of
Middlemarch
, Brace-bridge had ‘gone into everything’, but with no obvious benefit to himself or anyone else. Genuinely moved by Liggins’s broken-down home and outstanding grocery bills, the well-meaning meddler had been at the forefront of the campaign to raise funds for the literary genius so shamefully treated by Blackwoods.
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