by Rebecca Mead
MY train rumbled into Coventry, and after I left the station I set off toward the city center. I could see from my map that there was a park, Greyfriars Green, through which I needed to pass, but to reach it I had to navigate a tangle of roads and pedestrian walkways under and alongside a busy highway that encircles the city. This ring road was built in the 1960s according to the latest urban planning principles, as was much of the contemporary city center. Coventry has a very old foundation—it is thought to have been the site of a Roman settlement, and then a Saxon nunnery, centuries before its most celebrated resident, Lady Godiva, endowed a monastery there in 1043. In the first decades of the twentieth century it became an important center of car and then airplane manufacture, which explains why, on the night of November 14, 1940, German air forces unleashed an incendiary bombardment upon it. More than five hundred people were killed and much of the city center was destroyed, including the fourteenth-century cathedral, which was reduced to a charred shell.
I’m old enough for this piece of history not to feel altogether distant. I grew up in the 1970s hearing stories of the Blitz in London. My parents, who were eight and nine when the war began, both lived in a West London suburb. My mother’s father worked as a panel-beater at a local automobile factory; as a boy he had been granted a scholarship to a grammar school, but his own father had recently died, and at fourteen he had to leave school and learn a trade. During the war, he made tail fins for Spitfire planes. They lived in a terraced house, where my grandfather installed an Anderson shelter, made from corrugated metal, in the front room, displacing the walnut-veneered cocktail cabinet that was among his most prized possessions. He built a brick wall inches from the bay window to protect the shelter against a blast, and moved the furniture out of the bedroom above. My mother was the eldest of three children, and she and her siblings used to sleep in bunk beds in the shelter, while my grandparents slept on a narrow mattress on the floor outside. It was a small house, and surrendering two rooms must have made it feel even smaller. Anti-aircraft guns were stationed in the streets at night, making a terrifying noise. During the safer daytimes my mother and the other neighborhood kids ran in the streets outside, playing a fantasy game they called “being evacuated to America.”
My father’s father, who worked as a commercial artist on Fleet Street, spent the nights of the Blitz as a fire-watcher at the Evening Standard building on Shoe Lane, and whenever I see the famous photograph of the dome of St. Paul’s rising above the smoky devastation of the City, I imagine him on a roof nearby, in heroic pose like a figure from a Stalinist propaganda poster, holding a bucket. He belonged to a different generation from my maternal grandparents. Born in 1888, at the end of the Victorian era, he was old enough to have enlisted in the infantry in the First World War in 1915, and lucky enough to have seen the war’s end, by which time he had been commissioned in the field as an officer. When I was young my father would sometimes bring out a precious relic: a yellowed map that my grandfather had carried in his pack, denoting the landscape of France cut through by the Somme. My grandfather was gregarious and charming, given to wearing a suit of green tweed, brightly colored shirts, suede shoes. He was unafraid of the grand gesture. My father contracted measles at the age of four, and because there was a new baby at home he was sent to an isolation hospital for almost three months, his parents forbidden to visit. My grandfather went to the hospital anyway, and gained access to the ward by putting on a white coat and impersonating a doctor. He died of tuberculosis when my father, brokenhearted, was seventeen. I’ve spent forty years wishing I could have met him.
I found my way through the maze of footpaths and walked across Greyfriars Green. George Eliot and her widowed father moved to Coventry in 1841, when she was twenty-one; she would live there until his death, eight years later. Her brother Isaac had recently married, and Griff House was ceded to him and the new family that he was expected soon to produce. Father and daughter moved to Bird Grove, a large semidetached house in Foleshill, then an affluent district a mile north of the city center. Coventry was chosen over the countryside because if a husband was to be found for Mary Ann that was where he might most likely be encountered. She hated being nudged out of her home, not least because of the crude dynamics of the matrimonial marketplace upon which she, a complicated commodity, was being floated. “It is like dying to one stage of existence,” she wrote to a friend.
Inasmuch as any place served as an inspiration for the town of Middlemarch, Coventry was it. Like the Coventry circa 1830, Middlemarch is a prosperous provincial town with a thriving textile industry: Ned Plymdale, one of the would-be suitors of Rosamond Vincy, is the son of a textile manufacturer. Will Ladislaw attends a “meeting about the Mechanics’ Institute,” a center of learning for workingmen like the Coventry Mechanics Institution, which opened in 1828. Caleb Garth and Fred Vincy encounter surveyors measuring the land around Middlemarch for the coming railway; Coventry’s railway station, part of the London to Birmingham line, opened in 1838.
When Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch a new hospital has just been built; in Coventry, the pressing need for a new medical institution led in 1831 to the establishment of two of them. There was the Self-Supporting Dispensary, the users of which secured access to its services by means of a small weekly subscription, and the General Dispensary, which supplied medical services to the poor and relied upon charitable donations for its operating costs. The Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital, a larger institution, was founded in 1838, just before George Eliot moved to the city. It was located in “a building of considerable extent with an enclosed garden,” writes Benjamin Poole, who published a history of the city in 1847—perhaps like the “laurel-planted plots” of the New Hospital in Middlemarch.
But if Middlemarch has a canal, or a ruined monastery, or an imposing fifteenth-century guildhall, as Coventry did during the reign of George IV, we do not hear about them. George Eliot does not map Middlemarch onto the physical contours of Coventry. In fact, the novel offers little physical description of the town of Middlemarch at all. We see the balcony of an inn, the White Hart, from which Mr. Brooke launches and simultaneously aborts his career as a political candidate, “which looked out advantageously at an angle of the market-place, commanding a large area in front and two converging streets.” We know that the Vincys’ dining room looks beyond iron palisading onto “that highly respectable street called Lowick Gate.” We know something of the Green Dragon inn, with its billiard room and its archway giving on to the High Street; and we see a public house presided over by Mrs. Dollop, the Tankard in Slaughter Lane, where Lydgate’s reputation is murdered by gossip. But a reader is left with very little sense of what the streets and buildings of Middlemarch look like, or how one location lies in relation to another.
This lack of physical description doesn’t feel like a deficit, though. What Eliot most seeks to convey is Middlemarch as a state of mind—as the condition of consummate ordinariness, of absolutely middling Englishness. In her original plan for the novel, which she conceived in the first few months of 1869, it was to begin not with a woman named Dorothea Brooke, but deep within the town of Middlemarch, populated by Lydgate and the Vincys and other characters. “I am delighted to hear of a Novel of English Life having taken such warm possession of you,” Blackwood wrote to her that February. She replied, “The various elements of the story have been soliciting my mind for years—asking for a complete embodiment.” It was not until toward the end of 1870 that she began writing “Miss Brooke,” and she only thought of knitting the two stories together in the beginning of 1871.
A clue as to what she means Middlemarch to represent is indicated by her choice of name for the town. Eliot’s made-up place names—Broxton, Treby Magna, St. Ogg’s—typically adhere closely to the conventions of actual English place-names. But while there are many towns in England that begin with the word “middle”—Middleton and Middlesbrough and Middlewich and Middleham—there are no towns that end in the suffix “-march.” Ther
e is a town called March, in Cambridgeshire, which is recorded in the Doomsday Book as Merche; the name derives from the Old English word mearc, meaning boundary. And there are towns that end in “-marsh”—Michelmarsh, Saltmarsh, Widemarsh—deriving from the Old English word mersc, meaning marsh, of which there were plenty around Warwickshire when George Eliot was writing.
But the word “march” is suggestive of more than just boundaries or marshes. It implies that the book, with its subtitle, “A Study of Provincial Life,” will be concerned with that which is absolutely pedestrian and ordinary. Provincialism—geographical, emotional—will be at its heart. “You will not like us at Middlemarch, I feel sure. We are very stupid, and you have been used to something quite different,” Rosamond tells Lydgate, charmingly, on their first encounter. He replies, equally charmingly: “I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike, but I have noticed that one always believes one’s own town to be more stupid than any other.”
If one is from a provincial town, it’s easy to assume that in the great elsewhere people are enjoying far more sophisticated and complex lives. I assumed it when I looked out from the town in which I was raised toward the tantalizing city of London, from which my parents had moved when I was three. (I was, I insisted, a city person forcibly removed to the provinces, even if I had only the sketchiest memories of London life, mostly involving playgrounds.) And there’s some truth to the assumption, if by sophistication and complexity one means access to museums and arts and neighbors unlike oneself. But Middlemarch is not just concerned with the social consequences of geographical provincialism. It is also concerned with the emotional repercussions of a kind of immature provincialism of the soul—a small-minded, self-centered perspective that resists the implications of a larger view.
Eliot didn’t think Coventry was stupid, not entirely, though she missed the “free range for walking” which she had enjoyed at Griff, she wrote to a friend. Rather than tramping widely through fields, she was now required to step daintily through drawing rooms, perhaps wearing the fancy pair of kid ankle boots decorated with ribbons that is in the Nuneaton museum’s collection. (The boots are extremely narrow, with soles that are barely worn, as if they have only ever trodden on carpets.) Often, she chose to stay home with her books rather than to socialize. A couple of months after her move, she reported to Maria Lewis that she had failed to call on some acquaintances, “young ladies being the animals that would possess the minimum of attraction for me in a menagerie of the varieties of the human race.”
She had a study upstairs at Bird Grove where she could escape the menagerie and the requirement to be a presentable specimen within it, and could devote herself to her books instead. “I have been rather humbled in thinking that if I were thrown on an uncivilised island and had to form a literature for its inhabitants from my own mental stock how very fragmentary would be the information with which I could furnish them,” she wrote to Lewis. “It would be a good mode of testing one’s knowledge, to set one’s self the task of writing sketches of all subjects that have entered into one’s studies, entirely from the chronicles of memory.”
As I walked through Coventry, I thought about this serious-minded young woman stocking the chronicles of her memory for future use. Now a real estate agent’s office, 29 Warwick Row once housed the Miss Franklins’ school, which George Eliot had attended in the first half of her teens and where she helped sew the baby’s cloak that belongs to the Herbert museum. (“Her sewing is exquisite; it is the nicest thing I know about Mary,” Rosamond says airily when she engages serious, plain, intelligent Mary Garth to sew items for her trousseau.) I wandered through the pedestrian shopping center that was constructed after the Coventry Blitz obliterated most of George Eliot’s Coventry, and progressed to Holy Trinity Church. Here, Robert Evans held the office of sidesman, passing along the aisles at the end of the service bearing a basket for contributions.
Holy Trinity survived the war mostly unscathed. It’s a big church, largely built in the medieval era, and its most remarkable feature is a fifteenth-century doom painting high on a wall over the nave, depicting the Last Judgment. The painting, which was restored and unveiled in 2004, is aged and yellowed, and the lighting is kept deliberately dim. When I visited I had to crane my neck to look at it, and resort to souvenir postcards to see the details.
Even so, it was not hard to understand how it would have terrified churchgoers for generations. The painting shows Christ enthroned, surrounded by dozens of other figures. Some of them are saints ascending to heaven, including John the Baptist in a camel-skin robe, and a tonsured Saint Peter, the first pope. But many of them are ordinary-looking people, stripped naked and, in some cases, carrying the tools of their trade. Three alewives are chained together, bearing tankards with which they have tried to defraud customers. Some of these anonymous figures are going heavenward, but others are being borne toward the mouth of hell, represented by a gaping mouth of a fanged beast with bloodshot eye.
There used to be paintings like this in churches all over England, but during the Reformation they were condemned as misbegotten church-establishment propaganda and painted over with whitewash, and many of them were lost. Coventry’s is considered one of the finest surviving examples, though it, too, was covered up, until a piece of it was exposed in 1831 during repair work to the church, and a local artist was engaged to uncover it completely. When George Eliot lived in Coventry in the 1840s the restoration was quite new, though by the early twentieth century a coat of varnish the restorer applied had blackened and obscured it again.
It wasn’t much to Victorian taste. “As a relic, it is interesting from its antiquity; but is otherwise less attractive,” Benjamin Poole observed in his history of the city, noting the depiction of “unhappy spirits condemned to exclusion from the abodes of bliss … who, in the most unaccountable attitudes, are being removed by devils into the place of torment.” The image of the ultimate judgment being delivered upon those ordinary, anonymous people would have confronted Eliot every Sunday, when she entered the church on her father’s arm.
UNTIL that Sunday when she didn’t. On the second day of January in 1842, not even a year after moving to Coventry, Mary Ann Evans declined to accompany her father to church. Two weeks later she again did not attend the service. “Went to church in the forenoon Mary Ann did not go to church,” Robert Evans wrote in his diary.
She did not merely grow out of her religiosity, as one might grow out of some dwindling youthful enthusiasms. She thought her way out of it through study and inquiry—through industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires. In Coventry, she had become acquainted with a group of young intellectuals who gathered at the home of Charles Bray, a ribbon manufacturer, and his wife, Cara; these friends would remain important to her for the rest of her life. The Brays lived at a house called Rosehill, not far from Bird Grove, which became a second home to Mary Ann. The Brays were freethinking and inquiring people, and introduced her to novel ideas, including phrenology, the study of personality as revealed through the shape of one’s skull. (Mary Ann had her head examined by George Combe, a prominent advocate of the pseudoscience, who was amazed at the size of her brain.) It was through the Brays that she later met Emerson, with whom she discussed Rousseau. Emerson said she had a “calm, serious soul”; she called him “the first man I have ever seen.”
The Brays and their circle also introduced her to the latest ideas in liberal theology. Cara Bray’s brother, Charles Hennell, was the author of a book, An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity, which argued that an account of the life of Jesus could and should be given without resort to supernatural or miraculous occurrences. Mary Ann read it, intending to formulate an argument against it; instead she was converted to Hennell’s disbelief.
She became more or less agnostic—a term that was not coined until 1869 by her friend Thomas Henry Huxley, but which seems most accurately to apply to her rejection of the supernatural element of religion. Today atheists hav
e claimed her as one of their own, with good reason, although she might have resisted a partisan alignment. But her relinquishing of religion was executed with a distinctly religious flavor. “I wish to be among the ranks of that glorious crusade that is seeking to set Truth’s Holy Sepulchre free from a usurped domination,” she wrote to a neighbor. But her loss of faith in the church was complete.
Her father was furious, and Mary Ann did what a writer does: she took up her pen to defend herself. One Monday morning she sat down in her study at Bird Grove, a south-facing room overlooking meadows and gardens toward the spires of Coventry, and wrote a long letter to her father, extending over two sheets of paper, with words filling the page to its margins. The letter—the only one she wrote to her father that survives—looks as if it were written swiftly, with thoughts put down as quickly as they came to mind; the words are elongated, as if her hand were rushing across the page in a force of passion. But she maintains clarity and legibility. Her mind is clear, as is her urgent wish to be understood.
First, she lays out her new beliefs. “I regard [the Bible] as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life and drawn as to its materials from Jewish notions to be most dishonorable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness,” she writes. She cannot join in with worship of which she disapproves—at least not without “vile hypocrisy and a miserable truckling to the smile of the world for the sake of my supposed interests.”
Those supposed interests are her marital prospects. She goes on to say that she realizes her behavior has, in the eyes of her father at least, rendered her unmarriageable. She also recognizes that her family at large—and her brother Isaac in particular—believe that the expense to which Robert Evans is being put to maintain a home in Coventry for the specific purpose of finding her a husband is now going to waste, and the money should rightfully be redistributed among her other siblings. “I could not be happy to remain as an incubus or an unjust absorber of your hardly earned gains,” she writes, and the reader can feel the anger simmering. The true injustice, she clearly feels, is being done to her. She goes on to say that she would be just as happy to live in the country with her father, or anywhere else with him. “I fear nothing but voluntarily leaving you,” she writes—unless he does not want her. In which case, she writes, “I must prefer to rely on my own energies and resources, feeble as they are.”