by Rebecca Mead
Eliot knew all about the likes and dislikes of young boys from Isaac, her nearest sibling in age. As a child she adored Isaac, though, as is sometimes the case with little sisters, the adoration was not reciprocated. He is usually taken to be the inspiration for Tom Tulliver, Maggie’s domineering sibling in The Mill on the Floss. She began writing that novel in March 1859, by which time Thornie’s letters would have immersed her once more in the typical preoccupations of boyhood. He gave accounts of murdering insects (215 mayflies in twenty minutes on one occasion), defying schoolmasters (one “punishes me now for any little thing he can possibly find out, if for example, I smile in a lesson”), and playing at soldiers. In one letter he recounted the discovery in a school storeroom of a range of weaponry from an earlier incarnation of the institution: “a real gun but with the lock broken, a splendid standard, eight or ten swords, a cannon, cartouche boxes, drums, horns for the officers, etc. Yesterday afternoon we had a grand parade, the cannon was loaded and fired nearly twelve times, if not more even; I am the guard of the cannon.” He developed a keen interest in taxidermy, which complemented his passion for shooting. “I have got two nice lizards for you, which however cannot be forwarded by the post,” he wrote to Lewes. “One has got a bullet shot in his side through which a pistolbullet from my pistol went.”
I feel sure that Eliot felt a degree of disorientation as she absorbed this material. She was in her midthirties, and before she met Lewes she had probably expected to remain childless. She and Lewes chose not to have children together; she told one friend they practiced birth control. Possibly they felt that while they had voluntarily chosen cohabitation in spite of social censure, it would be unjust to visit the stigma of illegitimacy upon a child. Equally likely, Eliot preferred to devote her energies to her work without the distractions and dangers of childbearing and child rearing. And Lewes may have felt, with eminent justification, that caring for his boys as well as supporting the children Agnes had borne with Hunt was paternal responsibility enough.
But now there were children in her life, at least in a manner of speaking. “We are all very good puppies and wag our tails very merrily,” Thornie told Lewes. Eliot liked dogs, but had not thought to adopt three human ones. Nor had she done so quite yet. The three boys she described assertively to her sister as part of her family—and for whom she became, along with Lewes, financially responsible—existed for a long time not as flesh-and-blood children, but as conceptual ones, elements in a new way of domestic life she was just beginning to build, just as she was building her new imaginative life as a novelist.
“My life has deepened unspeakably during the last year,” she wrote at the close of 1857, the year that Scenes of Clerical Life was serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine. “I feel a greater capacity for moral and intellectual enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties, than any I remember at any former period of my life.” Amid those duties and that depth came the unknown Lewes boys. Long before she heard heavy footsteps clattering up and down her staircase, or listened patiently to indefatigable accounts of various armaments and their uses, or caught the sweet but slightly rank scent of a young head of hair that has gone too many days without washing, she had imaginary children, boys she had begun to try to love before they knew she was in the world.
I JUGGLED a paper cup of coffee and a bag full of books as I made my way through Grand Central Station, then climbed aboard the commuter train to New Haven and looked for a window seat from which I could watch the gray streets of the South Bronx melt into the wooded suburbs of Connecticut. It had been years since I’d taken this train, but in my midtwenties I spent hundreds of hours on this line, journeying back and forth to see a man I loved.
It was a situation both complicated and simple. He had a young daughter whom I had yet to meet, and for months as I fell in love with him I heard about her and took her into my imagination. I would sit on this train, staring out of the window and trying to picture an obscure future in which I would take on a domestic role unlike any I had so far played, or had imagined myself playing: one in which I would commit myself not just to one person, but to two.
No longer a fact-checker, I was now a regular contributor to the magazine where I worked, producing often-acerbic profiles of prominent cultural figures, which is one way for a young writer to get attention. I lived alone, in a tiny rental apartment in downtown Manhattan, where I had hardly any furniture beyond a futon bed that I only occasionally folded up into a couch. I didn’t even have bookshelves, and my books, hundreds of them, were stacked against a wall in precarious piles, their orange and black and gray spines abutting each other like bricks in an uneven wall that has been foolishly and irrevocably constructed without foundations. Alone in that apartment after a long day at the magazine’s offices I often dwelled on the responsibility I was close to assuming, wondering if I had come far enough from childhood to open myself to a child.
I could recall nothing in the books ranged against the wall that seemed to speak directly to my situation, and I longed for the simplicity of direct comparison. Middlemarch had a lot to say about falling in love; it even had something to say about falling in love with a learned scholar much older than oneself, not that I saw my own love affair in that unflattering light. But it had nothing, I thought, to tell me about falling in love with someone who came with such prior emotional commitments and practical obligations. I didn’t understand how to navigate this paradigm, and Middlemarch didn’t seem to give me any answers—not, at least, beyond the alternative of escaping into a different kind of love affair, one with a figure more like Ladislaw, who has his own legal complications (a codicil to Casaubon’s will means Dorothea forfeits her fortune if she marries him) but does not come trailing a custody agreement.
I often dreamed about the daughter. She became part of my life without my being any part of hers; and it was difficult to be invisible to her when she was so vivid to me. Circumstances demanded maturity of me, and I strove to be as grown-up as was required; and yet circumstances also conspired to make me feel as if I were the one who was young and powerless. Eventually, I did meet her, and when that day arrived I discovered that she was smaller than she had become in my imagination: a little human animal with soft nut-brown hair and bright eyes and an open expression. Eventually, too, I came to love her—not out of a sense of responsibility, nor out of love for her father, but for her, in herself, her sweet nature and good humor and irresistible intelligence. In all my imaginings about what it would mean to have her in my life, I had forgotten to include the prospect of joy.
I SETTLED into the peaceful, sunlit reading room at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, opened a file, and began paging through the lightweight sheets of writing paper fit for the international mail. These were letters written by Thornton Lewes, including the first he ever wrote to Eliot in August 1859. “For the first time do I seize the pen to begin a correspondence which is to be lasting,” it begins, with kinetic flourish. His father had traveled to Hofwyl that summer to tell his sons, finally, that he was separated from Agnes, and that they had a new mother: the celebrated author of Adam Bede, which had been published to great acclaim that year. “They were less distressed than I had anticipated and were delighted to hear about Marian,” Lewes wrote in his journal.
However distressed or delighted the boys really were when out of the wishful sight of their father, Thornie’s letters to Eliot brim with an affection ready to be spent on a likely object. “We received your letter at St. Moriz in the canton of the Grisons, some three hours walk from Italy,” Thornie wrote in that first letter, which was a response to an introductory one from her. “You can imagine how glad we were to get it, as being the first from you. It put a touch to our happiness on the journey.” He told her that both he and Charles liked Adam Bede very much, Lewes having brought them a copy when he visited. And he clearly had conceived of one bonus of having a famous author as a stepmother: “I
f you happen to have many letters, stamps from foreign countries, I shall be very glad if you send me them for my collection.”
As I sat in the library and looked through Thornie’s early letters, written in a surprisingly careful and elegant hand, I found myself utterly enchanted by this lively, mischievous boy. I also wondered if his letters horrified Eliot at least as much as they amused her. Eliot wrote to tell him that she and Lewes had acquired a dog, Pug; Thornie responded, “I am not afraid of him as a rival, as he is not very dangerous, but when I come home, if he still lives and is impudent, I warn you beforehand, that I shall shoot him through the head, which will make a very good end for the Biography of Pug Pugnose, Esq.”
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.
FRED 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.