George Eliot (54 page)

Naturally, Marian drew on her own terrifying memories of the December 1832 general election. As a girl in Nuneaton she had watched from a school window while the poll descended into chaotic fighting between the Tories and Radicals. The magistrate read the Riot Act, while a detachment of Scots Greys was ordered to break up the angry mob. Many were trampled, one man died, and Robert Evans’s scare stories about the French Revolution had never seemed so real.
⁴¹
As always, Marian buttressed personal knowledge by careful reading: as she prepared for
Felix Holt
she worked her way through
The Times
and the Annual Register for 1832–3, read Macaulay and copied out long excerpts from Samuel Bamford’s
Passages in the Life of a Radical
.

Marian’s mature position on franchise reform steered a middle way between her father’s die-hard resistance and the lunge towards universal suffrage which was favoured by many of her progressive friends. In her masterly Introduction to
Felix Holt
she shows that while there was much that needed changing about the Midlands on the eve of the 1832 Reform Act, ‘there were some pleasant things too, which have also departed’.
⁴²
Pocket boroughs, an unrepresented Birmingham, the Corn Laws and widespread pauperism might all have vanished under the new regimes, but so had a way of life which was gentle, rhythmic and self-sustaining. She shows how the community of pre-industrial Britain is being threatened by the hurrying pace of modern life – of stagecoaches which can race from one end of the country to another in only a few days, bringing change and creating a bland homogeneity. Returning to her old distinction, rooted in
Riehl, between change which presses slowly from below and that which is imposed speedily from above, Eliot makes the point that progress is a mixed blessing, creating new problems even as it attempts to tackle old ones.

This conservative sensibility is shared by the novel’s hero, Felix Holt, a radical of the most unusual kind. For while he identifies himself with the working classes, Holt remains pessimistic about what would happen if they got the vote. The way in which the local miners form an encouraging mob around any candidate who ‘treats’ them with ale suggests that once enfranchised they would throw their weight unthinkingly behind any politician who played on their immediate self-interest. For Felix, as for Marian, working men needed to be taught to cherish the
status quo
before they were fit to change it.

In a series of set-piece speeches to groups of local workers Holt lays out his idiosyncratic stall. He maintains that the standard demands of the radical programme – for annual parliaments, universal male suffrage and reformed electoral districts – are nothing but ‘engines’. These engines work well or badly according to the ‘passions, feelings, desires’ which power them.
⁴³
And given the ignorant state of most working men, these passions, feelings and desires are likely to be self-serving and short-term, easily exploited by the parliamentary candidate with the biggest pocket. In a confusing jump, Felix suggests that working men will gain more power by forgetting about the vote and going soberly about their everyday business, lifting their heads only occasionally to exert moral pressure on their lords and masters.

Felix is a prig. Built on an even more massive scale than Adam Bede, he shares the carpenter’s idealisation of the ‘working-day world’ over the abstractions of religious or political ideology. Like Adam, he has a good basic education, which he prefers to put in the service of his fellows rather than use as a stepping stone into the middle class. ‘That’s how the working men are left to foolish devices and keep worsening themselves,’ he explains to Rufus Lyon, the Independent minister, ‘the best heads among them forsake their born comrades, and go in for a house with a high door-step and a brass knocker.’
⁴⁴
Instead of straining for ‘clerkly gentility’, Felix divides his time between watchmaking,
trying to stop his widowed mother selling patent medicines and playing self-appointed moral guardian to the masses.

The upright, oak-like Felix Holt is thematically pitted against the fat, pragmatic Harold Transome. Transome, heir to a dwindling fortune, has recently returned to the Midlands after fifteen years in the Near East. While he is expected to run for Parliament, his mother and clergyman uncle are mortified when he announces that far from being a Tory, he will stand as a Radical. But he is just the kind of Radical that Felix is not – unprincipled, ego-bound, loving to hurt. In the end, Transome loses the election and damages his reputation by his association with the violent, looting mob. He redeems himself only by speaking in court on behalf of Felix Holt who has been unfairly accused of leading the riot and killing a policeman.

Transome’s careless egotism, his inability to see or care for others, originates in the self-enclosed hell of Transome Court. A careful chronological reading of Marian’s notebooks suggests that she had always seen the drama of the Transome family as the main thread of the book, with the political story grafted on later. The fact that she was reading Aeschylus at the time implies that she was still interested in themes that had engaged her in
The Mill
– the fall of a once solid family. Certainly the descriptions of Mrs Transome’s bitter, withered life among the heavy sunlight and shabby drapes of a house she can barely afford to run are more vivid than anything we ever learn about the tiresomely upright Felix. The reason for Mrs Transome’s misery lies deep in the past. As a handsome young married woman she had had an affair with the sleek, self-serving family lawyer by whom she had a son, Harold. Saddled with a feeble husband, she has spent the last thirty-five years running the estate and trying to contain the greedy damage done by the lawyer Jermyn. Only the thought that the handsome Harold might one day return from Smyrna and restore Transome Court to its glory has kept a tiny light flickering inside her.

But Harold’s arrival is a disappointment. He is accompanied by a small son and no wife: the implication is that the boy’s mother was a local courtesan whose meek manner perfectly suited the despotic Harold. And although blandly attentive to Mrs Transome, Harold takes no notice of her real needs. Instead of
listening to her worries about the estate, he makes carelessly flattering remarks about her dress and figure. His will, though sheathed in silk, strikes Mrs Transome as unassailable: ‘Harold’s rapidity, decision, and indifference to any impressions in others which did not further or impede his own purposes, had made themselves felt by her as much as she would have felt the unmanageable strength of a great bird which had alighted near her, and allowed her to stroke its wing for a moment because food lay near her.’
⁴⁵

The mechanism by which Marian brings the political and the Transome strands of her story together is a tangled legal plot which makes the Newdigate – Newdegate case of her youth look simple. With the expert legal help of Frederic Harrison she wended her careful way through the impenetrable business of entail and settlement. Her ultimate aim was to have the Independent minister’s daughter Esther Lyon shown to be the rightful inheritor of Transome Court, and to do this Marian had to add swapped identities and unknown parentage to the already rich mix. Her need for absolute realism means that this part of the plot takes up far too much of the book. All that really matters is getting Esther to a point where she is obliged to make a decision between fulfilling her dearest fantasy of becoming a lady, or marrying the resolutely proletarian Felix Holt.

In the end, of course, Esther chooses Felix, drawn by what seems to be the properly moral choice. Her previous life of surface and studied refinement has been replaced by a deep attachment to his stringent, difficult way of life. It is a decision which brings her into line with the values of the man who has raised her as his own, the Independent minister Rufus Lyon, whose quaint virtue is modelled on Francis Franklin, the father of Marian’s old Baptist schoolteachers.

The fiendishly tricky legal plot made Marian’s imaginative return to the Midlands countryside less of a pleasure than it might otherwise have been. Even a month away in France during the summer of 1865 could not raise her spirits. By Christmas she was ‘sticking in the mud’ and ‘miserable’.
⁴⁶
But the next month a saviour came in the shape of Frederic Harrison, who was only too delighted to have the honour of being the first person, apart from Lewes, to read a George Eliot manuscript before it went
to the publishers. His expert help boosted her confidence and the writing speeded up until on 1 June 1866 Lewes was able to record in his journal: ‘Yesterday Polly finished
Felix Holt
. The sense of relief was very great and all day long suffused itself over our thoughts. The continual ill health of the last months, and her dreadful nervousness and depression, made the writing a serious matter. Blackwood … thinks the book superior to
Adam Bede
. I cannot share that opinion; but the book is a noble book and will I think be more popular than the
Mill
.’
⁴⁷

If conserving the best of the past was what
Felix Holt
was all about, then it fits nicely that it was the occasion on which ‘old relations’ were now restored with Blackwoods.
⁴⁸
Marian’s feelings for George Smith had never been as warm as the ones she retained for ‘the best of publishers’. At first she may have relished the fact that, unlike Blackwood, Smith never presumed to comment or interfere with his authors’ work. He had been content to pay Marian a big fee for
Romola
, send her occasional boxes of chocolates and custom-made luggage, then quietly assess in his own time whether or not he had profited by their arrangement. By contrast, Blackwood tended to fuss and flap along the way and his payments were modest, but there could be no doubting his engagement with Marian’s work.

Smith claimed in his memoirs that Marian and Lewes came to him first with
Felix Holt
and that he turned them down. They wanted £5000 for the book and he wasn’t convinced that it was ‘a profitable venture’.
⁴⁹
It’s not absolutely clear whether this is retrospective embroidery on Smith’s part: it must have been hard to go down in history as the man to whom George Eliot offered her only duff novel. Whatever the case, Blackwood certainly believed that Marian had returned voluntarily to the fold. Gratifying though this might be, he was not about to override his customary caution. Lewes had asked him to make an offer for the book without seeing it, which Blackwood pleasantly but firmly refused to do. If it should turn out to be another
Romola
, he wanted time to think. Marian agreed to send the first two volumes to Edinburgh, but was so anxious about their reception, on every level, that she insisted Blackwood telegraph the moment he got them.
⁵⁰
In the event she need not have worried: three days later Blackwood was able to write to Lewes that he was ‘lost in wonder
and admiration of Mrs Lewes’ powers. It is not like a Novel and there may be a complaint of want of the ordinary Novel interest, but it is like looking on at a series of panoramas where human beings speak and act before us.’ The same day William Blackwood made an offer of £5000, and the correspondence with Marian, which in recent years had dwindled to a few notes about royalties, was now restored to its former fullness.
⁵¹
Before very long she was back leaning on John Blackwood as she had never done with Smith: asking him to track down historical references to add documentary authority to the background of the book.

Blackwood genuinely loved
Felix Holt
. After the turgid strangeness of
Romola
– which he had been lucky enough not to publish – it was wonderful to be back in a Midlands landscape teeming with vivid, particular characters. The gossip in the saddler’s, the smell of feather and leather in the golf ball maker’s shop, the chat of the town worthies all enchanted him. And, of course, the political conservatism of the piece was exactly what he liked too. ‘I had nearly forgot to say how good your politics are,’ he said in a postscript to his first full response to the book on 26 April. ‘As far as I see yet, I suspect I am a radical of the Felix Holt breed, and so was my father before me.’
⁵²

So impressed was Blackwood by
Felix Holt
that shortly after the Reform Act was passed he asked Marian to write an ‘Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt’ along the lines of the speech made by Disraeli to the working men of Edinburgh. It is hard to imagine that many of the ‘artisans, and factory hands, and miners, and labourers’ whom Holt addressed were likely readers of the January 1868 issue of
Blackwood
’s. Still, his earnest appeal that they should use their new vote carefully to preserve the ‘treasure of knowledge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, feeling, and manners’ must have played well with the predominantly Tory-voting middle-class readership of
Maga
.
⁵³
At this point it became clear that, despite the precedent of Disraeli speaking to the men in Edinburgh, Holt was not a Tory democrat. His position was more like that of Matthew Arnold, who believed that culture should be guarded by ‘the remnant’ or, looking further back, by Coleridge’s notion of ‘the clerisy’.

Certainly most of the reviewers approved of
Felix Holt
. Dallas gave his usual praise in
The Times
and John Morley, Lewes’s
successor at the
Fortnightly
, was equally enthusiastic in the crucial
Saturday Review
.
⁵⁴
A very young Henry James was more muted in the
Nation
and some of the more stuffy critics found Eliot’s return yet again to illicit sexual relationships distasteful.
⁵⁵
A few voices were raised in criticism of the wearisome legal details, but as Bulwer-Lytton put it, ‘it has the excellence of good writing’.
⁵⁶
One critic, trying to be clever, even thought he had found an error in the legal plot. Frederic Harrison rushed to reassure Marian that no such mistake had been made, and on another occasion declared that he knew ‘whole families where the three volumes [of
Felix Holt
] have been read chapter by chapter and line by line and reread and recited as are the stanzas of In Memoriam’.
⁵⁷
In truth this was unlikely, but Harrison had by now worked out that this was exactly what Marian needed to hear.