George Eliot (61 page)

Dorothea is so short-sighted that she falls over small dogs and bumps into furniture. Her need to see Casaubon as a great and subtle thinker requires her to ignore all the evidence that he is actually a frigid pedant, paralysed by a fear of failure and unable to start on what will certainly be a second-rate work. Lydgate is likewise flawed by his ‘spots of commonness’, which means that he is unable to perceive that the delightfully mild and pretty Rosamond Vincy will not make the docile wife of his lazy dreams. Miss Vincy, a manufacturer’s daughter, wants to marry a gentle-manly doctor, not an ardent reformer. Her ambitions are the natural ones of a girl who has been given the most pretentious of provincial educations. She thinks about houses, dresses and the fact that Lydgate’s uncle is a baronet, while Lydgate’s own mind runs on the improvements he can make to the practice of general medicine. The result is a ‘total missing of each other’s mental track, which is too evidently possible even between persons who are continually thinking of each other’.
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These two dreadful marriages – of the Casaubons and the Lydgates – are among the best of the many wonderful things Eliot ever did. Given that her own partnership with Lewes was mutually sustaining, it is a testimony to her art that she was able to portray the excruciating pain of an incompatible marriage. The confidences of Emilia Pattison and Georgie Burne-Jones about their difficult relationships may have provided the kind of intimate detail that she could not get elsewhere. In the same way, the letters she had received from two idealistic young men, Frederic Harrison and Clifford Allbutt, about the expectations of marriage they had forged during long engagements, gave her an insight into the impact which Lydgate’s alliance with a narrow-minded woman might have on his desire to dedicate himself to the service of mankind.

Eliot makes the point repeatedly that both Lydgate and Dorothea are trapped in hells of their own making. While their respective spouses fail to understand them, they too have failed to see that Rosamond and Casaubon have wishes, fears and desires which exist quite independently of them. Having asked at the beginning of chapter 29 why Dorothea’s consciousness should
dominate the account of her marriage, Eliot makes us see Casaubon in all his sad completeness. Despite his thin calves, white moles and noisy soup-eating, he is ‘spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us’, disappointed that the marriage he has entered in good faith is dissolving into the dull ache of mutual misunderstanding.
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Having picked Dorothea for her ignorance and assumed pliability, Casaubon is confronted by an intelligent woman who in a matter of months has stumbled upon the fact that his life’s work is misconceived and redundant. Dorothea’s gentle questioning chimes with the critical voices already installed in his head to produce a drowning chorus of accusation and mockery. In the circumstances Casaubon does the only thing he knows how to: withdraws to the library.

Harriet Peirce, gushy wife of a Harvard philosophy lecturer, implored Marian after
The Spanish Gypsy:
‘the poetry was so beautiful, but must noble women always fail? Is there no sumptious [sic] flower of happiness for us?’
⁸⁴
It is a question which women were to ask even more wistfully about Dorothea Brooke. From the first page of the Preface to
Middlemarch
, Eliot sets up the ardent girl to fail in her yearning to find an ‘epic life’. Unlike St Teresa of Avila who lived at a time which could use and sanction her extraordinary spirit, Dorothea is destined to flounder around in a society which allows her only the diminished scope of small, private acts. She ends the book as we have been promised that she will, not as a great social reformer or inspiring religious figure, but as the wife of a forward-looking MP. Her young adult life has been a painful education in the limits of self-determination. Claiming Casaubon as her ticket to a great destiny has resulted only in suffering. Now she must submit to the less than perfect circumstances in which she finds herself. But the very last paragraph of the book makes it clear that Dorothea’s fine spirit will never be completely buried. In the tiny ‘unhistoric acts’ of goodness which she performs within her limited circle a ripple of influence has been set in motion which may eventually lap the edge of the world.
⁸⁵

Lydgate is given an even less heroic ending. In his keenness to reform the standards of medical practice in Middlemarch he fails to understand the strength of attachment to the old ways of doing things. While some patients pronounce themselves
delighted with his work, there are others who remain suspicious of his refusal to send out medicine and his indecent desire to cut up the bodies of the dead. These are the ones who renew their loyalty to Messrs Minchin and Sprague, two old-time practitioners who display none of Lydgate’s gentlemanly indifference to profit.

Sucked into debt by Rosamond’s refusal to honour his principled ambition, Lydgate ends up by becoming what he always most despised, a society doctor supported by a pack of rich patients. Instead of the paper he had longed to write on the structures of the origins of tissue, he produces only a treatise on gout. He dies early, a broken man, regarding himself as a failure because ‘he had not done what he once meant to do’.
⁸⁶
Starting out with the fire and spirit of Dorothea, he ends with the choked despair of Casaubon.

Critical reaction to
Middlemarch
came in several waves and different registers, from Henry James’s concern about where it stood in the development of the English novel, to Oscar Browning’s unlikely boast that he was the model for Lydgate. The leading papers and periodicals loved it, with the
Telegraph
declaring that it was ‘almost profane to speak of ordinary novels in the same breath with George Eliot’s’.
⁸⁷
Edith Simcox, who was to become the last and most intense of George Eliot’s women fans, pointed out in her review in the
Academy
that what made
Middle-march
so different was the way it drew its drama from the inner psychological life of its characters.
⁸⁸

Marian and Lewes, as usual, played that odd game in which he filtered through to her a few of the best reviews, while she pretended not to be bothered about them at all. She was disappointed with the little she read, believing that no critic had offered her ‘the word which is the refle[ction] of one’s own aim and delight in writing’.
⁸⁹
Private readers, however, fell over themselves to supply this lack. Even Harriet Martineau, who always did her best to think of something nasty to say about the Leweses, had to admit that ‘The Casaubons set me dreaming all night’, although she added pointedly to her correspondent, ‘Do you ever hear
anything
of Lewes and Miss Evans?’ Emily Dickinson, part of that New England circle which had claimed Eliot as spiritually one of its own, said, ‘What do I think of
Middlemarch?
What do
I think of glory?’ while Barbara Bodichon thought it ‘a beautiful book’, though unbearably sad.
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There were, as usual, the oddly determined people who loved to point out little mistakes. The good thing about serialisation was that, if the complaint arrived in time, Marian could try to accommodate it in the next instalment. This happened over an inevitable querying of the legal procedure by which Featherstone tries to revive his first will by destroying the second. Other mistakes had to wait until the revised one-volume edition which came out in 1874. These included the exact appearance of Lydgate’s eyes during his brief experience with opium and the Finale’s assertion that society had smiled on Dorothea’s engagement to Casaubon, when in fact it had done no such thing.

It was this 1874 edition which made Marian her fortune. Sales of each of the eight instalments had been a little disappointing, around 5000 copies instead of the 8000 Lewes had hoped for. The lending libraries of Mudie and W. H. Smith were obliged to take between 1000 and 1500 copies of each part. The four-volume edition of 1873 accounted for another 3000 copies, but it was the one-volume edition which followed in 1874 which really took off. By 1879 nearly 30,000 copies of the book had been sold world-wide, bringing Marian a profit of about £9000.
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Some of the most intense excitement generated by
Middle-march
concerned that intriguing issue of real-life models. People queued up either to claim that they were the original Lydgate, or to point to someone who they felt sure was the model for Casaubon (no one, unsurprisingly, nominated himself for this honour). Robert Chambers, a fussy bachelor from the
Westminster Review
days who had made the mistake of marrying at the age of forty-eight, was one candidate for the ageing scholar. The futile, flapping Dr Brabant, whose much-vaunted preliminary work on the Strauss translation turned out to be nothing more than a few notes, was the theory put forward by Eliza Lynn. This would certainly tie in with the young Mary Ann’s desire to dedicate herself to helping him in his work. But the most talked-about option was Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, who had married the much younger Emilia Strong when he was middle-aged. The fact that in the early 1870s Pattison was working on a
Life of Isaac Casaubon
, the French scholar,
seemed to fit, as did the fact that the marriage was obviously ill-fated. However, both the Pattisons continued to be cheerful friends of Eliot, talking unselfconsciously about the Rector’s book on Casaubon, which suggests that they, at least, could not see the similarities.

Where once upon a time the sport of matching real people to characters in her books appalled Marian, these days she was able to take it lightly. This was partly the freedom of a clear conscience since, unlike with
Adam Bede
and
Scenes
, she had no buried half-awareness of her guilt as a plagiarist. What she had said in those early days was now actually true – her characters were creations of her own imagining. So when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote and asked her if Dorothea’s marriage was based on her relationship with Lewes, Marian replied, ‘Impossible to conceive of any creature less like Mr Casaubon than my warm, enthusiastic husband,’ before admitting that ‘I fear that the Casaubon-tints are not quite foreign to my own mental complexion.’
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In truth, she knew all about the clamourings of what she had earlier described to Maria Congreve as ‘a fastidious yet hungry ambition’, which had condemned her until the age of nearly forty to an endless loop of journalism, translation and editing.
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No surprise that when on another occasion someone asked her from what source she had drawn Casaubon, she pointed silently to her own heart.
⁹⁴

But Lewes would have none of it. He told Blackwood that if Marian was like anyone, it was Dorothea. By this he presumably meant that she too had learned to bring her ardent nature in line with petty circumstance, to concentrate on the small good instead of the great deed. But perhaps what he also half recognised is that there is a kind of ambitious fantasy here too. Dorothea Brooke was the strikingly beautiful daughter of a gentleman, in possession of an independent fortune of £700 a year and the inheritor of a country estate. Marian Evans Lewes was the notoriously plain daughter of a land agent, who had ninety pounds a year and no other assets. While it is often remarked that George Eliot would not allow Dorothea the social freedoms she claimed for herself, it is less frequently noticed that by identifying with Dorothea she created just that fantasy of social advancement which she had always been so quick to condemn in others.

W
ITH
D
ICKENS AND
Thackeray gone and Trollope past his peak, George Eliot was now the country’s greatest living novelist. Even in their prime none of this august trio had inspired feelings as intense, personal and reverential as the ones that surged towards the Priory now. Flowers were left anonymously at the door. Adoring fan mail arrived daily. When Marian ventured out strangers pressed forward, wanting to pat, touch and kiss their idol’s hand. On one occasion, at the theatre, a young woman helped Marian on with her cloak before embracing her. When Marian enquired politely, ‘Forgive me, but I do not recollect you,’ the girl replied, ‘Oh! it is good of you to let me. If you speak to me I shall cry.’
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It was because George Eliot wrote with such intensity about interior life that people felt they knew her or, more accurately, that she knew them. One of the compliments most commonly paid to her was that the reader felt as if she must have had access to his or her innermost emotions. Her characters grappled with the problems that beset thoughtful Victorians, especially how to balance the rights of the individual with the needs of others, and her wise narrative voice seemed to offer at least partial answers. From all over the world came letters bearing testimony to the way in which she had helped people lead moral lives. Feckless young men swore they had given up their foolish ways and wives said they had tried to love their husbands better. Although pub
licly Marian stressed that she was no teacher, religious or otherwise, she did little to stop others seeing her that way. For thousands of readers her words had become knitted into the fabric of their daily lives. One man was so panicked when he dreamed that George Eliot was seriously ill that he wrote to Lewes begging him to return the pre-addressed card on which was written ‘DREAM WRONG’.
²

Lewes lapped it up. He was calling Polly ‘Madonna’ all the time now and asking the Crosses to accept ‘fervent blessings’ from ‘this Religious House’ in a way which she would surely have found offensive had she known.
³
He loved the fact that members of Europe’s numerous royal clans were pressing for introductions, although he was always careful to pretend not to care. In July 1875 Lady Airlie, one of the Stanley sisters, invited Marian and Lewes to a garden party. Lewes went alone and found himself whisked away to meet the Queen of Holland. In a letter to Mary Cross, Lewes gives a mocking account of what happened next, describing how the plain old lady barked
non sequiturs
while he tried to make his escape.
⁴
A year later, in May 1876, the indefatigable people-collector, Lord Houghton, invited Marian and Lewes to meet the rapturous King of the Belgians. When Marian refused to go because she needed all her strength to tackle the last few pages of
Daniel Deronda
, Houghton sulked, while King Leopold made the best of it by asking to meet Lewes. Lewes later reported grandly to William Blackwood that he had found the young king ‘amiable and uninteresting’ and ‘was glad enough to be released and give place to others who were so eager to bask in the royal smile’.
⁵

The British royal family were equally intrigued by George Eliot. Queen Victoria had made a point of letting her know, via her Clerk to the Privy Council Arthur Helps, how much she enjoyed her books. When Helps’s daughter Alice showed the Queen the condolence letter she had received from the Leweses on the death of her father, the Queen asked if she might tear off the double autograph to keep.
⁶
One of the royal daughters, Princess Louise, was so intrigued by the sight of Marian among the audience at a concert in March 1877, that she drew a profile of her massive head on the back of the programme.
⁷
A few months later the Princess asked the banker and Liberal politician Goschen
to make sure the Leweses were invited to a dinner she was scheduled to attend. The moment the Princess arrived she broke with protocol by asking to be introduced to Marian, whom she proceeded to engage in long and earnest talk.
⁸

There were less exalted people who were also thinking about Marian. In April 1874 the Priory had received a visit from Isaac Evans’s eldest daughter. Now married – to a Birmingham clergyman – Edith Griffiths presumably felt sufficiently sure of herself to defy her father’s ban on communication with her wayward aunt, just as her cousin Emily Clarke had always done. A couple of weeks after the meeting Edith thoughtfully sent her Aunt Pollie some photographs of Griff House, where her father still lived.
⁹

Mary Cash, née Sibree, had also re-established contact and now kept Marian informed of Coventry news by letter. As Marian became increasingly aware of her own frailty, and that of her Warwickshire contemporaries, she began to think kindly about the people towards whom she had nourished grudges down the years. When John Sibree senior died, Marian wrote to Mary saying kind things about a man to whom she had been exceedingly catty when she had last seen him in Geneva in 1849. Through Cara Bray she sent her love to Mrs Pears, the neighbour who had done so much to help her during the difficult holy war and towards whom she had afterwards become cool.
¹⁰
In June 1873 the news about the long senility and death of Rebecca Franklin, the Coventry schoolmistress whose learning and refinement had once seemed like a benchmark of civilisation, made Marian mindful of long-standing obligations.
¹¹
The following summer she sent Cara to track down Maria Lewis, her old teacher and correspondent, to whom she sent the first of several much-needed gifts of ten pounds.
¹²

But not all contacts with the past were so eagerly sought or met. In September 1874 Marian received a letter from Robert Evans junior suggesting that the elderly Fanny Houghton might now be prepared for a meeting with her half-sister. Marian wrote back saying that it was ‘too late’ for a rapprochement since ‘some (perhaps eight or ten) years ago, she spoke of me with dislike and unkindness’.
¹³
How much Fanny knew about her nephew’s overtures and Marian’s rejection of them is not entirely clear, but she certainly stayed bitter to the end. When Marian died in 1880
Fanny wrote Isaac an angry letter, returning yet again to the scandal which their sister’s domestic arrangements had brought the family. There was no shred of doubt in Fanny’s mind that George Henry Lewes had ‘spoiled’ Marian’s life.
¹⁴

Perhaps Marian was still waiting for that letter which never came, the one from Isaac asking for forgiveness, a meeting, anything. Relations between brothers and sisters, always a precious subject, now flooded her thoughts. In the summer of 1874 she rushed to comfort her on-off American correspondent, Harriet Beecher Stowe, when the latter’s clergyman brother was publicly accused of adultery. Mrs Stowe was already strongly associated in Marian’s mind with the tangled business of erotic relations between siblings, since in 1869 she had published a notorious essay in the
Atlantic
, in which she dragged up the old allegation of Lord Byron’s incest with his half-sister. Marian maintained that she cared little about the rights and wrongs of the case, but deeply disliked the fact that such an unpleasant subject should have been given another public airing. One critic has suggested that this is why Marian did not publish her ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets immediately they were written in 1869: she was aware of their ambiguity in the light of the reheated Byron scandal. Whether or not this is exactly true, Marian had clearly made the connection, because in the 1873 letter in which she told Blackwood about the existence of the sonnets, she immediately weighed in with ‘And I was proportionately enraged about that execrable discussion raised in relation to Byron’, setting out instead her own vision of the brother-sister bond: ‘life might be so enriched if that relation were made the most of, as one of the highest forms of friendship’.
¹⁵

This was not the only brother-and-sister drama engaging her now. Harriet Martineau’s autobiography, written in the early 1860s, was finally published in the year following her death in 1876. Marian was appalled by the way in which Harriet had taken this chance to settle scores with her brother James who, she maintained, had always been eaten by envy of her success. It is true that James Martineau’s public humiliation of his sister in 1851 via a cutting book review had been spiteful. But Marian was repelled by Harriet Martineau’s ‘ignoble desire to perpetuate personal animosities’, by laying them out in print. In a confused
and emotional letter written on 15 May 1877 in which Marian moves from Harriet Martineau to Harriet Beecher Stowe and back again, she maintains, ‘To write a cruel letter in a rage is very pardonable … But I have no pity to spare for the rancour that corrects its proofs and revises and lays it by, chuckling with the sense of its future publicity.’
¹⁶
No matter how hurt she was by her own brother’s cruel behaviour, ‘the root of piety’ demanded that Marian Lewes would never speak publicly about Isaac Evans.
¹⁷

If real blood relatives continued to disappoint, make-believe ones were behaving better than ever. The Leweses continued to grow close to the Cross family, often spending Christmases at their Weybridge home. Johnny Cross was a particular favourite and by now they were both calling the tall, bearded young man ‘nephew’. After a successful stint working as a banker in New York, Cross was doing equally well in London and had taken over the management of the Leweses’ business affairs. Marian’s feelings for Johnny were fed, in a way which Lewes’s probably were not, by her continued idealisation of friendships between older and younger people. She also grasped the erotic current which might be at play when the situation involved a man and a woman. On hearing that Thackeray’s daughter Anne was to be married to a man seventeen years younger than herself, Marian wrote to Barbara Bodichon with an odd precognisance, ‘This is one of several instances that I have known of lately, showing that young men with even brilliant advantages will often choose as their life’s companion a woman whose attractions are wholly of the spiritual order.’
¹⁸
All the same, she could not help sometimes being shocked by Cross’s puppyish ignorance. Despite having received a gentleman’s education at Rugby, he seemed to be labouring under the impression that Jesus Christ spoke Greek.

Luckily lapses like these did not affect Cross’s ability to make money for the Leweses. He invested their capital wisely and well, concentrating on the emerging American markets, which he knew at first hand. It was thanks to him that over half of Marian’s 1873 income – £5000 in all – was made up of interest payments. The Leweses were now financially secure for the rest of their lives and they celebrated with another surge of spending. Marian started investing in expensive clothes, depending on her team of
‘spiritual daughters’ for advice about the latest fashions. Where once upon a time she had worn whatever came to hand, now she started to worry about what kind of dress would be suitable for a morning visit at Oxford or Cambridge. Emilia Pattison and Jane Senior took her round the shops and guided her towards the best fabric and design, while Lady Castletown and Alice Helps helped her choose furs – a subject with which both the Leweses were obsessed, perhaps because they felt the cold. It was now that Marian adopted a lace mantilla as her signature indoor wear.
¹⁹
Yet there remained something incongruous about her excursions into high fashion, as the writer Edmund Gosse noticed on the several occasions he passed her in the street around 1876. He was struck by the contrast between her ‘massive features, somewhat grim’ and the flouncy hat ‘always in the height of the Paris fashion’, which framed them. ‘The contrast between the solemnity of the face and the frivolity of the headgear’, said Gosse, ‘had something pathetic and provincial about it.’
²⁰

More magnificent than any fancy headgear was the splendid carriage in which Gosse often glimpsed Marian and Lewes as they trotted slowly homewards to north-west London. After consulting with Johnny Cross, they had finally invested in a custom-made landau by Morgan, the equivalent of buying their first Rolls-Royce.
²¹

Despite the earnestness with which she pursued high style, Marian knew she did not look right. To the many correspondents, famous or otherwise, who sent their photographs to the Priory and demanded one in return, she always said that she had never had her picture taken. In 1859 she made the Brays promise to remove her portrait from their dining-room, well away from prying eyes.
²²
Unlike every other famous or half-famous writer, she did not allow photographs of herself to slip into circulation, which explains why Fanny Houghton was unable to find one when she went looking in the Leamington bookshop in 1866. In fact, there had been a photograph taken in 1858, but Marian did not like it, with good reason: the conventionally coy pose made her features look even heavier than usual.
²³
That it was self-consciousness about her looks which stopped her submitting to the camera is suggested by her warning to Elma Stuart just before they met face to face in September 1873 that she looked nothing
like the Burton portrait of 1865. Instead, Elma should prepare herself for ‘a first cousin of the old Dante’s – rather smoke-dried – a face with lines in it that seem a map of sorrows’.
²⁴

Sadly, not all the money that Johnny Cross made for Marian was available for new hats and fancy carriages. At the end of July the news came from Natal that Bertie had followed his brother Thornie into tubercular decline and an early grave. He died on 29 June, aged twenty-nine, leaving behind two children, a little Marian and one-month-old George, as well as their mother Eliza. Big Marian would now be responsible for their support, as well as the continuing burden of the rest of the Lewes clan. Even though Thornton Hunt’s death in 1873 had left Agnes Lewes slightly more secure, she still received a regular income from the Priory. In addition there were occasional money gifts for her children by Hunt, including £101 3s in 1875 for Edmund, which may have gone towards setting him up as a dentist.
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