My Life in Middlemarch (11 page)

He was bold and saw the possible advantages to be gained through triangulation. He asked her to pressure Lewes to give him a raise in his pocket money. He dared to inquire whether he and his brothers were to be included on a trip to Italy—a trip that Lewes and Eliot had planned to be very much à deux. “It is understood that we three imps should go with you, is it not?” Thornie wrote. Cost should not be an issue, he observed cheekily, “considering you are to get about 1,000,000 pounds for your next book.”

The imps did not go to Italy, though Lewes did send Thornie
some Italian stamps for his collection, a fact that makes me think irresistibly of the souvenirs sold in holiday resorts like the one I grew up in: “My Parents Went to ____ and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.” For a year, Eliot corresponded with the Lewes boys without meeting them, though she knew the day was approaching when they would materialize. “At Easter our eldest boy will come home from school,” she wrote to a friend in December 1859, using what was always her preferred formulation: “our boys” rather than “my husband’s sons” or “my stepsons.” She said that it would “make a new epoch” in their domestic life, for until then she and Lewes had lived alone.

The prospect was daunting. For all her confident references to her theoretical family, she knew she did not know what she had got herself into, and she was anxious about the transformation of the abstract into the concrete. “I hope my heart will be large enough for all the love that is required of me,” she admitted.

Eliot’s heart was evidently large enough for Charles Lewes. “It is very sweet as one gets old to have some young life about one,” she wrote to a friend, after the two elder boys arrived at the Priory for the first time, in the summer of 1860. “He is quite a passionate musician, and we play Beethoven duets with increasing appetite every evening.” But her tolerance for having young life about her does not seem to have extended so easily to the ebullient Thornie, who was swiftly dispatched to Edinburgh to complete his education. From there, he continued to write to her, affectionately if sometimes slightly challengingly. He told her, upon his arrival, that he was “celebrated through Edinburgh and Leith” for his academic potential, “but please don’t be jealous of my reputation, it doesn’t equal yours yet.”

Whatever her private worries about the effect of boisterous boys upon her working and domestic life, Eliot seems to have inspired a real fondness in Thornie. He wrote her intimate, warm letters, at once confiding and ostentatious. He told of theatrical visits, flirtations, japes. He made her a present of a preserved chaffinch, with strict instructions that it was to be kept under a glass shade, “for it is a moral and physical impossibility that a
small
bird should not spoil in 2 months, if not covered by a shade.” He sent her copies of poems he had composed: “I have no doubt of producing something superfine,” he wrote. When in 1861 she sent him
Silas Marner,
the story of a reclusive, crabbed weaver redeemed by the unexpected adoption of a child, he declared it better even than
Adam Bede,
and told her, “when I had come to the last page I almost got angry at there being no more of it.”

Thornie remained at a physical distance, even during holidays. In one letter he recounted spending a jolly Christmas and New Year in Edinburgh with family friends, kissing the girls under mistletoe that he had brought for the occasion. Blackwood, who lived in Edinburgh, occasionally served in loco parentis; in one letter Thornie gave the menu of a dinner he attended at Blackwood’s house, which sounds ideal for a hungry adolescent boy: “Soup, Fried Soles, mutton, fowls, oyster patties, pheasant, blancmange, omelette, dessert, etc. Wine in abundance i.e. 8 glasses of sherry and 1 of port, which small quantity of course had not the slightest effect upon my nervous system.” Eliot and Lewes were glad to have the publisher keeping an eye out for Thornie, of whom Lewes wrote, “The young bear wants licking into shape, but there is real power in him.”

In one letter to Lewes, the young bear enclosed a photographic
portrait, advising his father to “admire the singularly beautiful features and expression, the powerful biceps, the broad chest, the iron legs, the never failing gun of your ‘second’ son Thornton.” The photo is reproduced in
George Eliot’s Family Life and Letters,
by Arthur Paterson, a book from the 1920s whose author tends to sentimentalize Eliot in his effort to depict her as “an affectionate woman telling domestic news about herself and ‘Pater.’ ”

This, though, is not a sentimental photograph. Thornie doesn’t seem to be especially tall, though he looks well built, with a firm chin and a strong gaze; around the eyes in particular he bears a strong resemblance to George Henry Lewes as he appears in a portrait that was drawn when he was twenty-three. (Thornie reports that the photo is said to be “just like father in the good old days of yore.”) He appears to have been carefully groomed for the camera, and is wearing a formal coat and bow tie, with his hair smoothed down in a manner incompatible with roving the hillsides looking for wildlife to massacre. Held proudly in his hands is a gleaming rifle.

F
RED
Vincy, the eldest son of the mayor of Middlemarch, is being groomed for the clergy—an improbable social costume for the unhappy Fred, who wishes to find another career. “I don’t like divinity, and preaching, and feeling obliged to look serious,” he tells the kindly Mr. Farebrother, whose own clerical collar causes him some discomfort. “I like riding across country, and doing as other men do. I don’t mean that I want to be a bad fellow in any way; but I’ve no taste for the sort of thing people expect from a clergyman.”

Fred expects to receive an inheritance from an uncle, old Mr. Featherstone, a rich, ailing, childless misanthrope. Anticipating the receipt of a fortune without the exertion of effort beyond the expression of his familial charm, Fred is careless with his own resources and with the resources of others. At the outset of Book Three, “Waiting for Death,” he borrows money from Caleb Garth, expecting to make it and more back on a horse-trading deal, and convinced that “by dint of ‘swapping’ he should gradually metamorphose a horse worth forty pounds into a horse that would fetch a hundred at any moment.”

Unsurprisingly, his scheme fails, and he is unable to repay Caleb Garth, who can ill afford to subsidize him. Mrs. Garth must give up her hope of having her son Albert apprenticed; and Mary Garth must surrender the money she has earned by taking care of sick, grumpy Mr. Featherstone. It is upon visiting the Garths at home with the news and realizing the harm he has done to them that Fred first begins to understand the implications of his recklessness. “He had not occupied himself with the inconvenience and possible injury that his breach might occasion them, for this exercise of the imagination on other people’s needs is not common with hopeful young gentlemen,” Eliot writes. “But at this moment he suddenly saw himself as a pitiful rascal who was robbing two women of their savings.”

His shame is all the greater because Fred hopes that Mary will one day consent to marry him. Fred, for all his fondness of gambling and horses, is essentially a domestic creature who is looking forward to the comforts and pleasures of married life. Unlike his sister, Rosamond, who has cast her eye over all the young men of Middlemarch and found them lacking, Fred has fixed his sights
on Mary, the childhood playmate with whom he once enacted a pretend wedding using a ring taken from an umbrella. But he is not entirely confident of winning her. “I suppose a woman is never in love with anyone she has always known—ever since she can remember, as a man often is. It is always some new fellow who strikes a girl,” Fred grumbles to Mary, his conviction conditioned by his sister’s preferences. “Let me see,” Mary replies, archly. “I must go back on my experience. There is Juliet—she seems an example of what you say. But then Ophelia had probably known Hamlet a long while.”

Mary, who is beloved by Fred not in spite of but because of her sharp, sometimes wounding, intelligence, is a quiet heroine of
Middlemarch,
and may be particularly appealing to the kind of female reader whose own girlhood has been colored by the dawning knowledge that while her face is not as pretty as that of other girls, her mind is quicker than theirs. Mary is light and funny and serious at the same time, and while she loves Fred, she will not promise herself to him until he has determined what kind of a man he is going to be.

He insists that he needs licking into shape, and that only she can accomplish it. “I never shall be good for anything, Mary, if you will not say that you love me—if you will not promise to marry me—I mean, when I am able to marry,” he tells her. Far from being won over by his declarations, Mary is tart and riddling in response. “If I did love you, I would not marry you: I would certainly not promise ever to marry you,” she replies. Fred tells her that she is wicked to say so: if she loves him, she ought to promise to marry him. “On the contrary, I think it would be wicked in me to marry you even if I did love you,” she replies.

In this exchange, Mary reminds me not so much of Juliet or Ophelia—pretty girls, both, and look where it got
them
—as of Rosalind, the clever, irresistible heroine of
As You Like It.
The play is set in the Forest of Arden, a reimagined version of the region in Warwickshire that was the birthplace of both Shakespeare and George Eliot, and Rosalind spends most of it in the guise of a boy, Ganymede. In a wonderful comic conceit, Rosalind-as-Ganymede impersonates
herself
as the love object of the smitten Orlando. “Love me, Rosalind,” Orlando begs. “Yes, faith, will I, Fridays and Saturdays, and all,” Rosalind replies. “And wilt thou have me?” Orlando asks. “Ay, and twenty such,” counters Rosalind. “Are you not good?” she says. “Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing?”

Rosalind shows that it is possible for a woman to be both intelligent and passionate. She is, of course, in love with Orlando even as she tests him. “O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love!” she tells Celia, her cousin. “But it cannot be sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.” Her aching, secret, high-spirited confession conjures all the thrilling urgency of falling in love under complicated circumstances.

Rosalind, clever Mary’s ancestor, is cherished by clever girls everywhere. Fred cherishes Mary for her cleverness—he brings her books when he visits—and this is one of his most admirable qualities. Whatever his other failings, he isn’t intimidated by a woman with a brain. (He also admires and respects Mary’s mother, Mrs. Garth, who teaches her children history in the kitchen while baking jam puffs.) But cleverness is not the only quality that Fred cherishes in Mary. Mary is what Americans call homely: unhandsome,
even ugly at an unfortunate angle. But she also inspires in Fred that familiar, comforting, easy sense of rightness that is what the English mean when using the word “homely” to describe a house.

“A homely place with an orchard in front of it, a rambling, old-fashioned, halftimbered building, which before the town had spread had been a farm-house, but was now surrounded by the private gardens of the townsmen,” is how Eliot describes the Garths’ house, where Fred goes to make his confession of fiscal irresponsibility. Mary, a girl from the borderlands of the Forest of Arden, is home to Fred. But she is much more than home, too—as is Rosalind, with her glorious admonition to Orlando on behalf of clever girls, and the women they grow up into: “Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that and ’twill out at the key-hole; stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.”

“N
O
fear of
my
marrying,” Thornie wrote to Lewes the summer after he turned twenty, not long after his older brother Charles had announced his engagement. “I am to be the bachelor as Charlie is not, that’s clear, and I made up my mind to it a long while ago.”

Thornie would miss his brother’s wedding, to a young woman called Gertrude Hill. In the autumn of 1863 he had set sail on the two-month voyage to Durban, South Africa, arriving there just before New Year. “Well, our poor boy Thornie parted from us today and set out on his voyage to Natal,” Eliot wrote to Sara Hennell, the sister of Cara Bray and of Charles Hennell, with whom she had been close friends since the Rosehill days. “I say
‘poor’ as one does about all beings that are gone away from us for a long while,” she added. “But he went in excellent spirits with a large packet of recommendatory letters to all sorts of people, and with what he cares much more for—a first rate rifle and revolver.”

Thornie’s departure for Natal came after several months during which his career had been worryingly undecided. Lewes and Eliot had hoped that he would go to India to join the civil service there, but, as they belatedly discovered, he had failed to study sufficiently for the necessary examinations. Charles Lewes, meanwhile, had become a civil servant closer to home, in the Post Office, thanks to the intercession of Anthony Trollope, a family friend, who, as well as being a successful novelist, was a career postal official. Lewes and Eliot were determined to find Thornie a post abroad. “He is of an active adventurous temperament, fond of Natural History, and of roving about in search of ‘specimens,’ so that a life of London work would not suit him at all,” Eliot wrote to a friend. It would not suit her to have him there, either: in a letter written while all three boys were home, she wrote that she was “up to the ears in Boydom,” a condition in which she was unable to be productive.

One idea was that Thornie and his younger brother Bertie might go together to Algiers to establish a farm. Thornie, however, had other intentions: he wanted to join Polish insurgents fighting the Russians. Lewes and Eliot were horrified, and feared for what they called his moral nature. “The idea of his enlisting in a guerrilla band, and in such a cause was too preposterous, and afflicted us greatly,” Lewes wrote in his diary. “But for some time we feared that he would set us at defiance and start.”