George Eliot (59 page)

Middlemarch
, of course, is not concerned with the Franco-Prussian War. The novel begins in the late 1820s, and its main political focus is the agitation leading up to the 1832 Great Reform Act. This material was already familiar to Marian from her work on
Felix Holt
. But her new and wider understanding of economic and social history allowed her to deal in detail with such matters as the coming of the railway to Middlemarch, Ladislaw’s Polish heritage as well as her more expected analysis of the state of agriculture during the post-war depression.

The opening chapters of
Middlemarch
were not the first which Marian actually wrote. During that scrappy, painful year of 1869 she started work on the story of the young doctor, Lydgate, who arrives in the provincial town of Middlemarch ambitious for himself and for his profession. But only a few weeks into the New Year Marian acknowledged to Blackwood that the work was not going fast: ‘between the beginning and the middle of a book I am like the lazy Scheldt; between the middle and end I am like the arrowy Rhône’.
⁵⁰
Thornie’s illness throughout the summer was a further drag on her work, making her even more doubtful about the novel’s progress: on 11 September she wrote, ‘I do not feel very confident that I can make anything satisfactory of Middlemarch.’
⁵¹
By the end of the year she had completed fifty pages, but Thornie’s death made further progress impossible. The next we hear of the book is in March 1870 when Marian tells Blackwood despondingly, ‘My novel, I suppose, will be finished some day.’
⁵²
But by May she was feeling sufficiently positive to give him a sketch of the book, which left him feeling that ‘It promises to be something wonderful – English provincial life.’
⁵³
Then at the beginning of December she paused again and started on a different story altogether. This was called ‘Miss Brooke’ and, according to her journal, ‘is a subject which has been recorded among my possible themes ever since I began to write fiction’.
⁵⁴
Quite possibly this was the germ for ‘The Clerical Tutor’, which had once been mentioned as a possible addition to
Scenes of Clerical Life
. By the end of the month she had managed a brisk and promising one hundred pages. But it was only at the beginning of the third year, 1871, that she had the idea of joining the Lydgate and Dorothea fragments together to produce the book which we know now as
Middlemarch
.

It would be strange if from this point Marian had charged ahead. By March 1871 she was already tormented by the fact that languor and illness had produced a disappointing total of only 236 (print equivalent) pages. Typically, too, she despaired of the book’s structure, believing that she had ‘too much matter, too many “momenti”’.
⁵⁵

By May, however, she was feeling sufficiently positive to let Lewes start making provisional arrangements with Blackwood for publication. Both men had good reasons for wanting to depart from the usual way of doing things. Blackwood’s profits had long suffered from the hold which Mudie and the other circulating libraries had on the reading public: people were reluctant to buy a book which, if they waited a few weeks, they could borrow. The Leweses were shocked to note how even the wealthy Mary Cash, formerly Sibree, refused to part with her money if she thought there was a good chance of getting a book from the library. If there was a way of publishing which weakened the grip of Mudie and W. H. Smith on the market, Blackwood was keen to consider it. Lewes, for his part, had always been intrigued by the idea that bringing out Marian’s books in instalments would make her fortune. On 7 May he sketched out a plan for
Middlemarch
to Blackwood, based on the precedent of Victor Hugo’s massive
Les Misérables. Middlemarch
was already heading for four volumes instead of the more usual three, so it made sense to divide the material up in a completely new way. Lewes proposed that the book should appear in eight instalments published every two months. Each would cost five shillings and Marian was to get a royalty of two shillings on every copy sold. The high royalty reflected the fact that Marian was gambling on the success of her work, having waived her claim to the more usual lump sum.
⁵⁶

Blackwood did not jump immediately. Years before, he had rejected a similar plan for Bulwer-Lytton’s monumental
My Novel
. He knew that this kind of bold scheme would only be profitable if the book was a huge popular success. And in his usual tactless way Lewes had already made the proposal less attractive by concluding a parallel arrangement with the American publisher Osgood & Co. to bring out the book there in weekly instalments. Despite the fact that Marian hated to be read in such small parts, the price of £1200 was too good to let pass.
Blackwood was naturally worried that advance extracts might cross the Atlantic and reach London in time to spoil the full impact of
Middlemarch
. But if he was tempted to make a fuss, his first taste of the manuscript on 31 May made him determined not to scare the Leweses into the arms of another George Smith. To Marian, Blackwood wrote that Book One was ‘filled to overflowing with touches of nature and character that could not be surpassed’, while to his clerk George Simpson he confided that he ‘would willingly be content with a moderate gain to ourselves rather than let it go past us’.
⁵⁷

Both the Leweses and the Blackwoods were acutely aware of what was at stake and moved softly to avoid conflict. At the dinner celebrating Scott which Marian should have attended on 15 August, Blackwood gave a speech in which he emphasised that he had always delighted in making friends of his authors. Lewes, in turn, made a point of letting Edinburgh know how moved Marian had been when she had reached this part of the transcript, remarking that she was sure that any author who was not friends with Blackwood had only him- or herself to blame.
⁵⁸

In the end
Middlemarch
came out in eight parts, the last three appearing at monthly intervals instead of every two months. Lewes’s hunch that this method of publication would extend the swell of interest in the novel proved correct. People felt more intensely involved with
Middlemarch
than they had with any of the previous books. Marian, too, liked the idea that readers were more likely to give each instalment greater attention than if they had swallowed the book whole. The only unhappy effect of this new arrangement was the paper wrapper designed for each section. It was fussy, very green, and appalled those like Owen Jones or Barbara Bodichon who had an eye for these things.

As it turned out,
Middlemarch
marked a return to the high-water days of Marian’s relationship with Blackwood. Not since
Adam Bede
had she brought out a book with such large profits and so little fuss. This was all the luckier because her attitude to money was as confused as it had been at the beginning of her writing career. She was as haughty as ever about people who wrote ‘trash’ for money, maintaining that she felt ‘quite oppressed with the quantity of second rate art everywhere about’.
⁵⁹
To the many correspondents, from schoolgirls to published authors, who
asked for advice about their writing, she was nearly always coolly discouraging, suggesting they try something else. This went even for Anthony Trollope, about whom she commented that it was a bad idea for him to give up the Post Office because he had written quite enough novels already.
⁶⁰

Yet more than any of her books,
Middlemarch
was written for money. Marian had not had a really significant income from a new work since
Felix Holt
, five years before. Her outgoings were continuing to rise. The Priory gobbled cash and both the Leweses had been poor for long enough to believe that charity began at home. There were Mrs Willim, Agnes Lewes, Emily Clarke and Nursie to support, not to mention Bertie and Charlie, and the growing brood of grandchildren. Lewes was not bringing in much money, so the whole burden fell on Marian. It is no coincidence that it was now that she decided to return to the provincial English landscape, which had always proved most popular with her readers. And despite the extra pressure which came with serialisation – including having to rejig her narrative so that the books came out in equal parts – she was happy to fall in with an arrangement that promised to make her absolutely secure for the rest of her life.

Much of Book Two of
Middlemarch
– ‘Old and Young’ – was written down in Shottermill, a little village near Haslemere, Surrey. The Leweses moved there temporarily in May 1871 while the Priory was being refitted. They were, as always, picky about their surroundings, rejecting at least five cottages suggested by helpful friends before they found Brookbank. They stayed there from 2 May until 1 August, when they were obliged to move out for another tenant. Luckily the cottage opposite was free and they took Cherrimans for a further month before returning to London on 1 September.

In the quiet of the country Marian wrote fluently and well. Disturbed only by an occasional visit from Barbara Bodichon, the Calls and the Tennysons, she spent her mornings working and her afternoons walking with Lewes. Blackwood was increasingly enthusiastic about the instalments which were arriving in Edinburgh, remarking after reading Book Two, ‘You are like a great giant walking about among us.’
⁶¹

Once Book One of
Middlemarch
appeared in print in
December, new voices were raised in admiration. James Paget refused to believe that Mrs Lewes had never known a doctor intimately, since her portrayal of Lydgate was so exact. Lawyers expressed surprise that a layperson could get the details about Featherstone’s will so right. ‘And all of us’, concluded a triumphant Lewes writing to Main, ‘wonder at the insight into Soul!’
⁶²

By this time Marian needed to hear every little bit of praise which Lewes could soak up. A week after her return to the Priory on 1 September she had suddenly become ‘depressed in spirits and in liver’. Lewes had no doubt that this was linked to the creative process, writing hopefully to Blackwood that ‘perhaps gestation is more favourable when so much emotion accompanies it’.
⁶³
But a week later Marian took a turn for the worse, falling seriously ill for five days with gastric fever which left her, she told Sara, ‘as thin as a mediaeval Christ’.
⁶⁴
Sensing that he had a full-scale crisis on his hands, Lewes now urged Blackwood to sanction Alexander Main’s tribute of a commonplace-style selection from Eliot’s published work in the hope that good Christmas sales and some nice reviews would boost Marian’s tottering confidence.

Over 1872, which saw the publication of the remaining seven parts of
Middlemarch
, Marian’s spirits rose and fell almost daily. She held a small party at the Priory on 30 November 1871 to celebrate the publication of Book One and enjoyed the fun of sending out presentation copies to very close friends, among whom she now counted ‘the Gusher’. Two months later, on 27 January, the Leweses held a large dinner party and musical evening at the Priory, the biggest of its kind since the death of Thornie. But even in the midst of this returning buoyancy Marian could not help focusing on the dark side, writing gloomily to Blackwood, ‘I am thoroughly comforted as to the half of the work which is already written – but there remains the terror about the unwritten.’
⁶⁵
Only a few weeks later she was back in deep despair. Rereading her previous book,
Felix Holt
, she declared to Lewes that she ‘could never write like that again and that what is now in hand is rinsings of the cask!’
⁶⁶

From this low point Marian’s health and spirits gradually began to rise. In order to give her a chance to work concentratedly on Book Six of
Middlemarch
, in May 1872 the Leweses tried the
trick of moving once again to the country, this time choosing Redhill. They kept their address secret even from close friends and were rewarded with nothing more disruptive than the occasional noisy hen or dog. The magic did not work straight away, for Marian found herself in severe agony from aching teeth and sore gums – a trouble spot with her which would get worse over the years. But the combination of attention from the dentist and visits from James Paget – who presumably was given the address – gradually eased the problem and Book Six was finished in a record five weeks. Encouraged by Marian’s characteristic late burst of speed, Lewes now suggested to Blackwood that he bring out Books Seven and Eight at monthly intervals. By 17 September 1872 Marian had finished correcting the proofs of Book Eight, and the very next day she and Lewes set out for Germany.

‘Why always Dorothea?’ asks Eliot famously at the beginning of chapter 29 of
Middlemarch
, making the point that while her heroine might be one of the principal centres of consciousness in the novel, her elderly, unappealing husband Casaubon also has an internal life, as vivid to him as Dorothea’s is to her. One could say the same of Marian and Lewes. For all the time that Marian was battling with fading inspiration, depressed liver and grief over Thornie, Lewes was tackling parallel pressures in his own life.

The letter from Thornie in October 1868 telling of his terrible health had rattled Lewes dreadfully. Although there was nothing which could be done immediately, aside from sending off the money the boy had asked for, he felt restless with responsibility. He was committed to spending the spring in Italy with Marian, but appeared distracted and tetchy throughout the holiday. This time it was sciatica which made things difficult, although never enough to stop him visiting the people he wanted to see. In Florence, staying once again at the Villino Trollope, Lewes made an excursion to Professor Schiff’s laboratory to see a machine which, it was claimed, could measure the speed of thought.