George Eliot (53 page)

It was this determination to live without the man-made props of faith which made Marian steer clear of Comte’s ersatz ‘Religion of Humanity’, a sort of secularised Catholicism. She had already made her feelings tactfully clear to the Congreves, but her obvious sympathy for Comte’s sociological writings meant that she would always find herself under pressure from those who wanted to recruit her to the cause. In 1866 she became friends with a young radical barrister called Frederic Harrison who had been influenced by Richard Congreve at Wadham and was an enthusiastic follower of Comtism in its cultist aspects. Initially Marian had asked Harrison to help her with the complicated legal plot which formed the background to
Felix Holt
. His enthusiasm for the task, together with his obvious moral earnestness – he was heavily involved in the trade union movement and the Working Men’s College – warmed her to him. Gradually their conversations began to roam over every aspect of human experience. Hopeful that Marian might put her talents in the service of Comte, Harrison wrote her a long letter on 19 July 1866 suggesting that her next book should show the Religion of Humanity in action. Helpfully, he even provided the sketch of a plot.
²³

Marian was gentle with Harrison, whom she had grown to like and respect. Whereas a few years earlier the young pup would have got a fierce letter from Lewes warning him not to be so impertinent, now Marian replied herself at length. She thanked Harrison for his suggestion and assured him that she was always interested to hear his ideas. She explains, though, that writing
about Utopias does not make for good novels. Although she believes that fiction can deliver ‘the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity’, it is crucial that it should never become crudely didactic. For years she has strained to ensure that her novels present philosophical ideas in a ‘thoroughly incarnate’ form ‘as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit’. If at any point the writing should lapse ‘from the picture to the diagram’ then it becomes offensively preachy. In an unconscious recognition that
Romola
’s final chapters might well have had something of the diagram about them – and a Comtist one at that – Marian emphasises to Harrison the ‘unspeakable pains’ she took in the book to reproduce the texture of a living, breathing past.
²⁴

Having spent so long detaching herself and then revaluing the teachings of the Church of England, Marian was not about to sign up for another set of doctrines. She was happy to help the Positivists with a donation which never went higher than five pounds a year, just as she did for other causes whose energy she admired but whose aims she could not whole-heartedly endorse. Her personal friendship with the Congreves drew her to the first few public lectures which Richard Congreve gave on Positivism in the late spring of 1867. All the same, she was powerless to prevent the Positivists from hijacking her work for their own ends. Her poem ‘O May I Join the Choir Invisible’, published in 1874, was a case in point. Its expressed hope that a well-spent life would endure in the hearts and minds of those left behind made it into a kind of unofficial anthem for the Religion of Humanity. Yet as Congreve himself was careful to point out to a private correspondent in 1880, Marian Lewes ‘is not nor ever has been more than by her acceptance of the general idea of Humanity a Positivist’.
²⁵

Until now Marian had very seldom mentioned politics or public events in her letters and journal. It was not that she had no interest in these matters, simply that she had always been more concerned with the social and psychological organisation of mankind. Her belief that human development was necessarily slow and organic meant that the quick cut and thrust of politics seemed not so much wrong as irrelevant. Intellectual fervour was a poor
social glue compared with the feelings, associations and memories which bound communities together. It was for this reason that on 1 August 1865 Marian refused Mrs Taylor’s request that she and Lewes contribute to the Mazzini fund, set up in support of Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian patriot. While she admired the man himself, she worried that his followers might resort ‘to acts which are more unsocial in their character than the very wrong they are directed to extinguish’.
²⁶

But from the mid-1860s Marian showed signs of a growing engagement with the political process. This was partly due to the influence of Lewes, whose work was once again taking him to the heart of public life. In October 1864 he had given up the
Cornhill
, keen to be master of his own time. But now Trollope was trying to entice him back into harness with the editorship of the
Fortnightly
, which was intended to map the new Britain as it emerged from the now inevitable Second Reform Act. According to the Prospectus, written by Lewes, the
Fortnightly
’s aim would be ‘that of aiding Progress in all directions’, including science, politics and literature.
²⁷
But there was to be nothing prescriptive about it. For the first time in publishing history contributors would sign their articles, so making it clear that the review’s liberalism consisted in its willingness to listen to a wide range of different opinions.

Lewes eventually agreed to take on the editorship for £600 a year, as long as he could have a hard-working sub-editor – the kind of person Marian had once been at the
Westminster
– to carry the burden of routine. He achieved the same deal, too, at the
Pall Mall Gazette
, another periodical run by George Smith. Quite why Lewes had decided to take on so much work, especially when he was not well, is a puzzle. It may have been money. Marian had not had a commercial hit for four years, and her new project, the dramatic poem called
The Spanish Gypsy
, was unlikely to make much. In a letter to Cara, Marian mentioned proudly how lucky she was to have a husband who did not pressure her to churn out one best-seller after another.
²⁸
Perhaps Lewes now felt morally bound to take up some of the financial strain which had rested exclusively on Marian for the past eight years. But did he also relish being seen as a powerful person in his own right? Certainly the first thing he did on getting to the
Fortnightly
was to ask Marian to contribute an article for the opening issue of May 1865. Signed ‘George Eliot’, it flagged to the world that there was only one man in London who had the influence to entice the nation’s greatest novelist back into journalism. This piece – the one sharp-eyed Fanny had spotted – was followed by two rather plodding articles for the
Pall Mall
.

Whatever the reason for his return to editing, Lewes’s new jobs drew him back to the heart of the nation’s business. He was out all the time now, meeting politicians and peers, as well as the more usual writers and artists. After the relative quiet of the early 1860s, the public mood had darkened. Economic depression meant industrial unrest, which in turn was fuelling demands for an extention of the franchise. Middle-class women, too, no longer confined themselves to campaigns for improving education and employment opportunities. Bessie, Barbara and Clementia had their eye on nothing less than the vote for women.

Lewes was not Marian’s only source of information. In February 1862 she had received a circular from James Quirk, a kindhearted curate at Attleborough who had made a nuisance of himself during the Liggins business. In it he explained how local ribbon weavers were suffering from the effects of a strike among the Coventry workers.
²⁹
At the end of the year Marian sent a pound to the Coventry men via Charles Bray, keenly aware that the parallel plight of the Lancashire cotton factories was diverting attention away from the Midlands.
³⁰

Friends were in trouble too. Since 1860 when a trade treaty had been signed with France, the Coventry silk industry had been in decline. The Brays and Hennells, whose fortunes depended on it, had been obliged to move away from Rosehill altogether and settle at Barr’s Hill Terrace on the outskirts of Coventry. They struggled constantly to find tenants for their house at Sydenham, too. ‘Dear Sara,’ wrote Marian to Cara Bray on 16 July 1867, ‘I think a great deal, though she may not, of her income being reduced.’ She may implicitly have meant the Brays too, for she goes on to beg Cara to let her know if she can give them any financial help.
³¹
But the unhappiness did not stop there. Arthur Helps, Lewes’s old friend and the bearer of several kind messages from the Queen to Marian, had recently lost everything when he tried to produce a profit from the clay deposits at Vernon Hill.
³²

It was against this backdrop of distress that demands to extend the franchise had been growing. The Great Reform Bill of 1832 might have seemed like a huge symbolic victory for progress, but it had done little to change the balance of power in Britain. Well-to-do middle-class men could now vote, Birmingham had been given an MP and the most blatant examples of corruption had been tackled. But that still left the vast majority of men and all women unrepresented. Thirty years on it became clear that a second instalment of electoral reform was inevitable. Although the first attempt foundered on 12 April 1866, a bill enfranchising skilled working-class urban men was passed the following year.

Marian, as always, took a cautious view of political change. The heady days when she had sung out to John Sibree about the European revolutions of 1848 were long gone. These days, the bent of her mind was, she explained to Clifford Allbutt, ‘conservative rather than destructive’, and she remained convinced that political change which ran ahead of social and psychological development was at best useless and at worst dangerous.
³³
The hopes riding on the secret ballot – for so long a key demand of radical campaigners – struck her as absurd.
³⁴
Likewise, she thought the giving of the vote to urban working-class men a mixed blessing. Without the moral and social education that would make them cherish the best of the
status quo
, there was a danger that they would cut loose from their roots and degenerate into a selfish mob.

The same thing went for the vexed issue of what had become known as ‘The Woman Question’. Ever since Marian had gone to live with Lewes, her feminist friends had been trying to harness the prestige of her name to their various causes. Clementia Taylor, Bessie Parkes (now Belloc) and Barbara Bodichon had all at one time insisted on calling her ‘Miss Evans’, under the assumption that her living arrangement represented a refusal of the married state. And even now that they had finally got the point that Marian would have preferred to be legally married, they still assumed that she must be a natural supporter of votes for women. In fact, Marian felt about the question exactly as she did about working-class men: until women were properly educated, female suffrage would remain ‘an extremely doubtful
good’.
³⁵
For this reason she was deliberately vague when Clementia Taylor tried to get her to back John Stuart Mill’s amendment to the Reform Bill, which proposed enfranchising women on the same terms as men. To Sara Hennell she was more candid: ‘I love and honour my friend Mrs Taylor, but it is impossible that she can judge beforehand of the proportionate toil and interruption such labours cause to women whose habits and duties differ so much from her own.’
³⁶

Those habits and duties which Marian was thinking of included child-rearing, housekeeping, looking after the elderly – all chores that women without Mrs Taylor’s large income were obliged to carry out themselves. Although Marian had no desire to keep middle-class women confined to simpering, ignorant ‘angels in the house’, she worried that too much education would lead them to turn their backs on ‘the great amount of social unproductive labour’ which they currently undertook.
³⁷
While she agreed that women needed equal access to education if they were to have ‘the possibilities of free development’, she wanted that development to keep women securely attached to the family and the home rather than in paid employment.
³⁸
Instead of a new generation of mediocre women novelists, painters and doctors, she wanted intelligent wives and thoughtful mothers. ‘The highest work’ – the creative work which she did – must always be reserved for the special few.

It was what she saw as her unique position – both domestic and professional – which made Marian reluctant to be quoted on anything to do with women. Behind the scenes, though, she was ready to listen and learn. In November 1867 she asked Barbara Bodichon’s friend Emily Davies to tea in order to hear her plans for a women’s college attached to Cambridge University.
³⁹
As cautious towards Girton as she was towards the Positivists, Marian donated a modest fifty pounds in March 1868 and asked it to be tagged ‘From the author of
Romola
’. If any of the girls entering the college in 1869 got round to reading their benefactor’s book, they may have wondered at the fate of her stupendously learned heroine and by extension their own. Romola ends up not as a scholar, doctor or teacher, but as a nurse-cummother-cum-saint.

On 29 March 1865,
The Spanish Gypsy
having ground to a halt, Marian began a new novel. In
Felix Holt, The Radical
, she returned once again to ‘that central plain, watered at one extremity by the Avon, at the other by the Trent’.
⁴⁰
The year is 1831, just before the passing of the Great Reform Act which its advocates believed would bring the electoral system into line with modern conditions once and for all. With the benefit of hindsight, Marian was able to show that 1832 was actually the thin edge of the wedge, the first step in a process that was moving into its second phase even as she wrote. By concentrating on the role of the unenfranchised urban mob in the 1832 election she was implicitly asking whether these men were ready for the vote in 1867.