by Rebecca Mead
The way she ends the letter is devastating. At the bottom of the second sheet of notepaper, the words contracting to fit the page, she writes, “As a last vindication of herself from one who has no one to speak for her I may be permitted to say that if ever I loved you I do so now, if ever I sought to obey the laws of my Creator and to follow duty wherever it may lead me I have that determination now and the consciousness of this will support me though every being on earth were to frown upon me.” These impassioned, furious, heartbroken words could be those left unspoken by silent, faithful Cordelia, from whom King Lear imperiously commands a declaration of filial love, and then banishes for her failure to heave her heart into her mouth.
In 1869, the year she started writing the story that would end up being Book Two of Middlemarch, Eliot described her conflict with her father to Emily Davies, the founder of Girton College, the first women’s college at Cambridge. She said that she regretted how she had conducted herself during those months, when tensions were so great between herself and her father that instead of speaking directly to him she was reduced to writing from her study upstairs to his office downstairs. Davies recalled that Eliot “dwelt a little on how much fault there is on the side of the young in such cases, of their ignorance of life, & the narrowness of their intellectual superiority.”
Eliot’s retrospective judgment of her younger self strikes me as too severe. Fidelity toward her father’s memory comes at the expense of fidelity to her own wish to avoid hypocrisy—to avoid merely following custom when her intellectual convictions told her to do otherwise. I think she was justified in her opposition to her father, though I can also understand her mortification about how she expressed it. Being absolutely sure that one is right is part of growing up, and so is realizing, years later, that the truth might be more nuanced.
Lydgate is convinced that he has a superior knowledge in medical matters, an attitude that strikes others as arrogance. And his convictions are also justified. Lydgate has his failings: he has terribly mistaken ideas about women, and he also turns out to have devastatingly compromising expectations about what kind of domestic accoutrements are proper for a man of his birth and station, even when he can’t afford to pay for them and has to take out a loan from Bulstrode to cover his expenses. But when it comes to medicine, Lydgate actually is as superior as he thinks he is.
Eliot is more forgiving of Lydgate’s presumption in Middlemarch than she was of her own rebellion in Coventry. In the person of Lydgate, she shows how necessary youthful assertion is, and how inevitable is its expression, particularly in the case of a young person who has realized early on that books are stuff, and life is stupid. Lydgate is on the side of progress and open-mindedness; when it comes to science, at least, he stands against the creeping provincialism of the mind. Lydgate is undone not just by arrogance—he thinks he knows better than everyone else—but also by the fact that he expects everyone else to be better than they are. Being above pettiness, he expects others to be so also. And he expects to be judged fairly, by the patrons of Middlemarch’s inns as well as the members of its boardrooms. His error, as it unfolds in the book, lies in not realizing what an immense and impossible expectation that is.
THE Foleshill Road has changed a great deal since George Eliot wrote her letter to Robert Evans. There are no longer meadows between it and the three spires of Coventry—which, improbably, still stand, despite the efforts of the Luftwaffe three quarters of a century ago. Instead, there are stores offering East Asian sweets and travel agents specializing in flights to Dhaka. The neighborhood is home to a large Bangladeshi community, and Bird Grove is now the Coventry Bangladesh Centre, which provides employment advice and training to local residents.
The house is dilapidated now, its front door defaced with graffiti. There is a weed-infested car park where much of the garden used to be. When I went there in the company of John Burton, a retired teacher of English and the very dedicated chairman of the George Eliot Fellowship, a literary society devoted to the author, it wasn’t clear how far we’d get over the threshold. But Muhammed Abdul, the young man who sat behind the reception desk in what would have been the spacious front hall, was kind and welcoming. He showed us the drawing room, which came with “window curtains, Blinds, and … Carpiting,” according to Robert Evans’s diary. (Evans’s diary was a place for him to make shorthand notes about important matters; even so, the contrast between his written English and that of his erudite daughter is notable.) The room was now filled with computer terminals, incongruous beneath the high ceilings with decorative moldings picked out in brown paint. We went up a curving formal staircase that had been painted in mud-brown gloss, and I thought how big the house was for a family of two, even with a full complement of servants. How excruciating it must have been for Mary Ann to be treading her way softly around that large, redundant space, at the most painful of odds with her most beloved of relatives.
We entered a small room that seems likely to have been the one she used as a study, facing south, looking toward the city. It was crammed with sewing machines and supplies: teaching materials. But the young Bangladeshi women who used them were not acquiring feminine arts as a necessary accomplishment for entry to the marriage marketplace. These women wished “to increase Employability and Competence,” as a brochure for the center put it. This was not sewing of the sort that the Miss Franklins taught. It was sewing as a skill, as a means of making a living—as a way for young women to rely upon their own energies and resources, and thereby be better equipped to bear the pressures imposed by fathers and brothers.
Mary Ann Evans was not turned out of her father’s home, as she feared she might be after declining to go to church. Within a few weeks, a compromise had been reached. She would continue to accompany him on Sundays, but would be free to have her own opinions about the services she sat through. “I generally manage to sink some little well at church, by dint of making myself deaf and looking up at the roof and arches,” she later wrote to a friend. She would be there but not there.
Near the front of Holy Trinity, in the pews reserved for more affluent residents, a carefully worded sign identifies the church as the place of worship that George Eliot attended during the years that she lived in Coventry, but it does not say that she worshipped there. As I stood in the deserted church when I visited, taking a last look around before a curate locked it up for the evening, I imagined her walking across the flagstones with her father, reconciled but still irretrievably separated, and looking up at the doom painting as she passed. There, as in the pews around her, she would have seen a varied collection of human creatures, and the images would have entered her imagination: the fraudulent alewives, those damned precursors of Mrs. Dollop of the Tankard; the figure of Jesus displaying his wounded hands and feet, risen by a miracle in which she no longer believed.
Robert Evans died in June 1849, and the day before his death she wrote to friends to say that she had stayed up until four the previous night holding his hand. “What shall I be without my Father?” she wrote, in anguish. “It will seem as if a part of my moral nature were gone. I had a horrid vision of myself last night becoming earthly sensual and devilish for want of that purifying restraining influence.” She feared she was doomed without him.
But she wasn’t, and her moral nature—an expression not much in fashion these days—wasn’t destroyed. One of the things that makes Middlemarch a book for grown-ups—a book for adults, even—is Eliot’s insistence upon taking moral questions seriously, and considering them in their complexity. The loss of faith that she underwent in Coventry was the beginning of a lifelong intellectual process of separating morality from religion—of determining how to be a good person in the absence of the Christian God. The humanistic project of working out how best to understand one’s fellow creatures, and how to behave toward them in the light of that understanding, underlay all her work. And with its wide panorama, its multiple characters, its interrelated plots, its intricate detail, Middlemarch is Eliot’s doo
m painting without God.
As a young woman, Eliot greatly admired the novelist George Sand. “I should never dream of going to her writings as a moral code or text book,” she wrote to a friend. It was, she added, sufficient for her “that I cannot read six pages of hers without feeling that it is given to her to delineate human passion and its results … so that one might live a century with nothing but one’s own dull faculties and not know so much as those six pages will suggest.”
I’ve never read the works of George Sand, but I think about this line, and what it has to say about the experience of reading Middlemarch. Eliot’s novel is intensely moral—but it is not a moral codebook, and no one would want to read it if it were. Rather, through her delineation of human passions—romantic and intellectual—Eliot reveals her morality. Middlemarch demands that we enter into the perspective of other struggling, erring humans—and recognize that we, too, will sometimes be struggling, and may sometimes be erring, even when we are at our most arrogant and confident. And this is why every time I go back to the novel I feel that—while I might live a century without knowing as much as just a handful of its pages suggest—I may hope to be enlarged by each revisiting. Only a child believes a grown-up has stopped growing.
Chapter 3
•
Waiting for Death
“A change had come over Fred’s sky, which altered his view of the distance.”
—MIDDLEMARCH, CHAPTER 23
Eliot’s progress on her incipient Novel of English Life was interrupted in the spring of 1869 by the pressing demands of life itself. Thornton Arnott Lewes, George Henry Lewes’s twenty-four-year-old son, who had spent the previous six years in the British colony of Natal, South Africa, arrived at the Priory, Eliot and Lewes’s London home, dangerously ill.
“Thornie came home. Dreadfully shocked to see him so worn,” Lewes wrote in his diary the evening that Thornton arrived. “A dreadful day—Thornie rolling on the floor in agony,” he wrote the following day. Thornton, usually a muscular young man of 180 pounds, had lost more than 50 pounds and was “piteously wasted,” as George Eliot wrote to Blackwood. Dr. James Paget, the foremost surgeon of the day who included Queen Victoria among his patients, prescribed morphine. A prone couch was set up in the drawing room near the piano, and whenever the sedatives wore off Thornton listened to Eliot playing, and was able to speak a little about his life in Natal, where he had purchased a tract of land and had built a farm. “In the evening he got excited talking about his African experiences and singing Zulu songs,” Lewes wrote in his diary on May 11. “Made anxious about him.”
Thornie, as he was always known, was Lewes’s middle child, born in 1844. An older brother, Charles, was born in 1842, and a younger brother, Herbert, called Bertie, in 1846. (Lewes’s first child, a daughter, had been born in December 1841; she survived two days. A fourth and youngest son, St. Vincent, was born in 1848; he died when he was two years old.) Lewes had been separated from their mother, Agnes, since the children were quite young, but peculiar circumstances precluded a divorce.
The Leweses’ situation was odd—even by the standards of the Victorian age, when divorce was rare and remained difficult to achieve despite the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. The couple married young: George Henry Lewes was twenty-three, and Agnes was nineteen. Within a decade, Agnes had become the lover of Thornton Leigh Hunt, a writer and editor who was Lewes’s close friend and cofounder with him of the Leader, a weekly magazine. A sketch made in 1844 by the novelist Thackeray depicts Agnes at the piano with Lewes by her side, mustachioed and singing; Hunt, a step or two away, looks on with a trace of a smile on his face, his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat. When in 1850 Agnes gave birth to another son, Edmund, the baby’s father was Hunt.
Lewes seems to have condoned the liaison in principle, at least at first: he gave Edmund his last name, thus sparing the child the stigma of illegitimacy. But after the birth of Agnes’s second child with Hunt, in 1851, there was a permanent rift between Lewes and Agnes. Lewes no longer thought of himself as her husband, although he gave his last name to all of the four children she bore Hunt. They separated, with no possibility of divorce.
Lewes first met Mary Ann Evans—or Marian, as she preferred to be known by then—in 1851, by which time she was living in London. Immediately after her father’s death, in 1849, she had made her first trip to Europe, traveling for several weeks through France, northern Italy, and Switzerland with her friends the Brays, and then spending eight months in lodgings in Geneva. Upon returning to England she soon determined to settle in the capital. Having proven herself as a translator and begun to show her capabilities as a critic, she hoped to make a living sufficient to supplement the small annuity she had been granted in her father’s will.
In London, she became one of several lodgers at the home of John Chapman, the publisher. Chapman’s household, at 142 Strand, notoriously included not just his wife but also his mistress, who was governess to the Chapman children. Eliot and Chapman seem to have had a brief entanglement of some kind when she first moved in, though the extent of their intimacy is obscure; at any rate, their closeness was sufficient for both wife and mistress soon to demand that she move out. She did, for a while, returning to the Brays at Rosehill, but returned to Chapman’s when his editorial need for her predominated over his womenfolk’s objection.
It was in this unconventional milieu that she met Lewes and learned of his own unhappy and insoluble marital conundrum. Even so, it shocked many of their friends—if not the unshockable Chapman—when in 1854 she and Lewes set up home together. While it was generally understood that strict observance of marriage law was not necessary, open defiance of it was something else altogether. Soon, Eliot began calling herself Marian Evans Lewes, both for the sake of appearances (landladies were apt to be suspicious) and because she felt that they were married in every respect that really mattered. She called Lewes her husband. She laid claim to a family, even if she had come by it in an unusual manner.
She spoke of her new responsibilities with defiant conventionality. “We shall both be hard workers, for we have three little boys to keep as well as ourselves,” Eliot wrote to her older, married half sister, Fanny Houghton, in 1857, when she finally told her siblings of her relationship with Lewes. Of the boys, she explained, “Two of them are in Switzerland, at a delightful school there, and the youngest is at school in England.”
No letter survives to tell us the immediate response of Fanny, who knew what it was to be an inconvenient stepchild: after her father’s remarriage she had been sent out of the family home, when she was fourteen and Mary Ann was a baby, to serve as housekeeper to her brother, Robert, the oldest Evans child, on a neighboring farm. Eliot clearly hoped for her sister’s acceptance of the situation. “I am sure you retain enough friendship and sisterly affection for me to be glad that I should have a kind husband to love me and take care of me,” she wrote. But Fanny did not prove to be tolerant of her half sister’s unconventional new household; like Eliot’s siblings Isaac and Chrissey, she cut off correspondence.
If Eliot’s relationship with Lewes was irregular, her relation to those “three little boys” of whom she spoke so intimately to Fanny was even more so. She had never laid eyes on them, and they had no idea that she existed. They had been packed off to boarding school at an early age, at least in part to keep them in ignorance of the Leweses’ peculiar ménage with Thornton Hunt. It was nothing unusual for boys to be sent off to be educated and not to see their parents for months at a time—although the isolation of the Lewes boys from their family seems to have been extreme. Once installed at Hofwyl, a school in Bern that emphasized modern languages and outdoor activities, they did not come home to England for several years. They saw their father only once a year in the summer, and their mother never visited.
For their parents, as much as for Eliot, the Lewes boys seem to have existed largely as an abstract concern rather than a familiar presence. Lewes seems to have been, in absentia, a fond f
ather, prone to none of the chilliness typically cultivated in the higher social classes in England. “I suppose you will be glad to hear from Papsy as he would be glad to hug you!” he once wrote to Charles and Thornie, offering them an ingenious substitute for paternal affection: “Kiss each other for me—the only way I know of sending a kiss so far.”
The boys wrote letters home. Charles, who was studious and sensitive, mostly addressed his to Agnes; in them he recounted news of his academic progress and of the domestic arrangements at school. (“I have just finished my third lesson in music and am already further than several boys who have had several lessons more than me,” he reported proudly, at the age of fourteen.) Thornie addressed his letters to Lewes, and if Eliot read them over his shoulder—as surely she did—she would have come to know this middle boy as an exuberant correspondent, full of passions and interests. He collected butterflies and botanical specimens, and at twelve he wrote, “I love natural History above all things, and when I grow up, it is my desire to become a naturalist.” He was a budding philatelist, and some of his letters are half composed of what must have been wearying requests for stamps of foreign nations. There are affectionate inquiries after Lewes’s health and his travels—“I hope your head is quite well, and that you had a good passage home”—and occasional nods toward Lewes’s work, which all three boys must have taken to be the sole reason for their father’s unavailability. “I hope your book will sell well, though I don’t know which it is,” he writes in one letter. His valedictions to Lewes are florid: “I remain Dear Pater meus Filius affectionatus Thorntonius Arnottus Ludovicus Ranarum Rex.”