My Life in Middlemarch

by Rebecca Mead

  As I read Main’s copious correspondence I found myself alternately appalled and moved by the glimpses it offered into the life of this sad, shadowy man. There was something alarming, almost stalker-like, in his attentions. Over and over again he wrote Eliot long, effusive letters, then followed up with a demand for reassurance that his effusion had not given offense, then offered apologies for his neediness. On one occasion he told her, “I should like to see you in your home, but I think I should myself choose to be unseen the while—if that could be. I could not be disappointed in you, but you might easily be disappointed in me.” I wondered how Eliot could not have recoiled from what started to feel to me like a creepy imposition.

  For all the pages that he wrote—some of the letters cover a dozen sides of writing paper—Main gave very little of himself away. He devoted pots of ink to rhapsodic pronouncements of the beneficial effects Eliot’s work had had on his life, but when Eliot asked him to tell her a little of “the general web” of that life—using a metaphor that figures prominently in Middlemarch—he darted out of sight. “I do not think that fuller knowledge would sink me in your estimation, but my life would look like a featureless one indeed were I only to show you its outward aspect, with no thorough disclosure of the inner mechanism,” he told her. He professed that he was not strong enough to offer that degree of disclosure, at least not yet. There was something he wasn’t telling her—or there was something he was pretending not to tell her, so that she would be drawn further into an engagement with him.

  Sometimes Lewes wrote to Main instead of Eliot, when she was too busy to respond, and then Main made a correspondent of Lewes, too. To him, Main confessed that he was still unmarried. “Perhaps I have hitherto idealized too much, and who, dear Sir, can find a realized ideal as you have done?” he wrote. He requested Eliot’s photograph—a request that smacks today of fandom, though it was also borne of a simple desire to know what Eliot looked like, so few images of her were there in circulation. She said she didn’t have one. When Eliot and Lewes asked him to send them his photograph so that they could picture him, he said he didn’t have one, either. He had once had his portrait taken, he acknowledged. In it he looked like a Member of Parliament, according to a gentleman he knew, while a lady of his acquaintance observed that he looked painfully sad and world-weary. “I couldn’t then, I cannot now, reconcile the two observations; but I feel at times that the lady must have caught some glimpse of the truth,” he wrote.

  In the letters he did sound world-weary for his years, prematurely despondent over the state of civilization. His book of quotations, he told Eliot, “will be one of the richest and rarest in the English language—almost too good to bestow upon a faithless and perverse generation like the present.” Having once thought of entering the ministry—he told Blackwood he spent three years at Glasgow University for that purpose—he had become dismissive of clerical teaching. Instead, he chose to worship Eliot, describing her work, to her, as “a mighty protest against all emasculated forms of the religious feeling.” He referred to his copy of a book of her poems as his “breviary.” He was rapturous at Eliot’s suggestion to him that she had been nourished by his appreciation of her. “To the benign influence which your works have shed over me for many years has now been added the closer and still more tender and potent influence of a strong personal regard,” he wrote. “Every time I think of you (and, for the last five months especially, when have I not thought of you?) I feel and am better—more like what I ought to be.”

  The letters took me two long days to read, my eyes dry and strained by evening, much too fatigued to appreciate the inspired parallelograms of Edinburgh after the library shut its doors. But as I sat at my desk and went through them, I found myself drawn into Main’s consciousness. He was in some ways repellent—fawning and pretentious and overly familiar. But he was intriguing, too, with his secret concealments and his mysterious involvements. Reading his letters was as suggestive as reading preliminary notes for a novel, in which a character and his motives are sketched out. There was a whole story submerged beneath.

  And as I read, I thought I understood better why Eliot had responded to Main as she did. Obviously, she was gratified by his appreciation for her poetry and the novel Romola—which had not sold as well as expected, although Eliot was paid an enormous advance for it from George Smith, the publisher of Cornhill Magazine, the one occasion on which she strayed from Blackwood. (She received ten thousand pounds, “the most magnificent offer ever yet made for a novel,” as Lewes trumpeted at the time.)

  But Eliot must also have been moved by Main’s frequent assurances that her work was achieving the elevated moral effect she had intended. In one of the few personal anecdotes he permitted himself, Main told her that he had been watching at the bedside of a twenty-three-year-old nephew, who had just died of an unspecified condition brought on by what Main characterized as a reckless indulgence in vice. “There I realized, as I had never done before, the need for you in a world where such things are: and I blessed you in the silence of that death chamber,” Main wrote. “It is the supreme glory of your works that they both encourage the hearts of those who are manfully struggling to rise, and tend to stagger and sober the many who are falling away.”

  This goes beyond the usual compliments that an author like Eliot would be accustomed to receiving, and it would have appealed to her core. In Main’s correspondence, Eliot received testimony that she was, as she hoped, doing something good for the world with her novels. At the same time, his praise would have answered her shy, shrinking ambition, her tremulous egoism—until, perhaps, she could not quite tell the two effects apart. And this may explain why she consented to the problematic project of the Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings. In seeking to hold on to the principles of Farebrother, Eliot was tempted into the vanities of Bulstrode. Main encouraged her to bring the gratification of her desires into alignment with the satisfaction of her beliefs.

  IN her 1858 essay on Edward Young, Eliot criticized the poet’s “unintermitting habit of pedagogic moralizing.” Young, she says, views God as a didactic author, a “Divine Instructor,” whose heavens are “forever scolding as they shine.” This, she argues, is an indication of a moral deficit on the part of Young—at least when morality is defined, as Eliot defines it, as sympathetic emotion. It is also an artistic deficit. “In proportion as morality is emotional, i.e., has affinity with Art, it will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and action, and not as the recognition of a rule,” she writes. “Love does not say ‘I ought to love’—it loves. Pity does not say, ‘It is right to be pitiful’—it pities. Justice does not say, ‘I am bound to be just’—it feels justly.”

  She goes on to say that dependency upon a rule or theory only is necessary when moral emotion is weak. “We think experience, both in literature and in life, has shown that the minds which are pre-eminently didactic—which insist on a lesson and despise everything that will not convey a moral, are deficient in sympathetic emotion,” she writes. “A man who is perpetually thinking in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admonition, can have little energy left for simple emotion.”

  In her novels, Eliot sought to elicit simple emotion through complex means. She certainly wanted her readers to respond to her novels as more than compelling stories. She wanted to edify, but she wanted to do so without lecturing or hectoring. Alexander Main, her dangerous acolyte, sought to dispel the nebulous complexity of her work by deliberately reducing her to bright apothegms that eliminated her subtler shading. This was something that even he seems to have recognized, however dimly, was an act of violence. Blackwood sent him an edition of her works from which he could physically cull his quotations. “Had anybody told me a few weeks ago that I should live to cut up George Eliot’s works, and not only so, but to take pleasure in the operation, I fear I should have knocked him down,” Main wrote to Eliot. “But here I am clipping and slashing great gashes out of writings every line of which I hold sacred, and finding a deli
ght almost fiendish in the work of destruction.” I am reminded of him wielding the knife dangerously at the publisher’s dining table. This is a letter that must have made Eliot quietly glad her great admirer was several hundred miles away.

  Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings was published in January 1872, a month after the first volume of Middlemarch appeared. “Had your new and great work been to see the light just three or four weeks later than its proposed appearance—why, you and I might have made a bona fide exchange!” Main wrote to Eliot in the weeks before publication, with delusions of parity. He seems to have seen his work not only as an honoring of Eliot but also as an expression of his own creativity, claiming a kind of joint authorship with her, his idol. He pointed out to her, after receiving his copy of the first installment of Middlemarch, that his book had been advertised on its back page, and relished that their names would “go down the stream of time together, in loving fellowship, the one behind, the other before, as travelers on horseback used sometimes to journey when the world was not so nice as it now has become.”

  Over the next year, as Middlemarch was published, his letters multiplied. He cataloged his evolving responses to the work as he consumed each volume, which he seems to have read with his second edition very much in mind, always looking for passages to excise. He had firm ideas about plot and character, which he conveyed with an air of intimate confidentiality. “My dear Mrs. Lewes, you really must get that Casaubon quietly, decently, and gravely of course, out of the way,” he wrote, after receiving a presentation copy of Book One. After reading Book Two, he wondered worriedly what would become of Dorothea. “I keep asking myself what I think she will do, when her sorrows become too great for passive endurance,” Main wrote. “Will she write, I wonder?” Book Three prompted an extravagant fourteen-page letter in which Main exalted Dorothea’s sacrifice in her marriage to Casaubon. “Less trial would mean less victory; less sorrow would mean less joy; less struggle would mean a smaller nature,” he wrote. “She may indeed leave the world at least ‘foundress of nothing’—but only in one sense; in another, foundress of a great moral empire, a kingdom within her own soul.”

  Upon receiving this last letter, Eliot sent a kindly warning. “Try to keep from forecast of Dorothea’s lot, and that sort of construction beforehand which makes everything that actually happens a disappointment,” she wrote, with impressive restraint. Main didn’t take her admonition to heart. In yet another disquisition, he wrote in impassioned detail of what he saw clearly: that Dorothea and Ladislaw must be morally impelled to renounce each other, in spite of their mutual love. “She faithful and he faithful, they will keep their souls, like consecrated vessels pure and spotless, for each other’s use, somewhere or somewhere, in some other corner of this mysterious Universe, in some other section of this mysterious Time,” Main wrote, in a prediction that turned out to be as erroneous as it was overblown.

  Reading these letters about Middlemarch was a disquieting experience. Main’s assumption of intimacy with Eliot made me cringe, and yet I recognized in his enthusiasm for her works enough of my own admiration for her to feel an awkward fellowship with him. Main is the naive reader writ large—the kind of reader who approaches a book not with an academic’s theoretical apparatus or the scope of a professional critic, but who reads with commitment and intelligence, and with a conviction that there is something worth learning from a book.

  In his excessive, grandiose, desperately lonely letters, Main does something that most of us who love books do, to some extent or another. He talks about the characters as if they were real people—as vivid, or more so, than people in his own life. He makes demands and asks questions of an author that for most of us remain imaginary but which he transformed, by force of will and need, into an intense epistolary relationship. He turned his worship and admiration of George Eliot into a one-sided love affair of sorts, by which he seems to have felt sustained even as he felt still hungrier for engagement. He claimed Eliot as his.

  ELIOT and Main never met, though he urged her and Lewes several times to visit him, promising to show them the sights of his part of Scotland, with its peculiar enticements. “Nineteenth century refinement has had very little do with Auchmithie. It is a bit of savage-land three miles from a civilized town,” he wrote. He wanted to take her for a fish supper at an inn where Sir Walter Scott had stayed.

  At one point in 1874, when Eliot was beginning to sketch her ideas for Daniel Deronda, Main floated the idea that he might make a trip to London, and asked if he might visit her and Lewes there. Might he have “one quiet meeting with you two alone: not a party, but one delicious evening by our three selves?” he petitioned. “The sight of you, dear friends, would constitute one glorious memory in a life not like to have many such.”

  The proposed trip evaporated, and the following year, Main was still writing to Eliot in a dreamy way about the possibility of an encounter. He told her that if he did not disclose more about himself when writing it was not for lack of trust in her, nor for a deficit of devotedness, but because it seemed impossible to do so in a letter. “But perhaps I shall visit you some day, and then your sweet look of willing helpfulness will draw it all out in the most natural way imaginable,” he wrote.

  He didn’t ever experience her sweet look of willing helpfulness. Getting to London may have been beyond Main’s capacities or budget, but it also seems likely that he preferred to keep Eliot as a deferred ideal to whom he could speak at length in a letter without the emotional demands that would be placed upon him were he actually to find himself face-to-face with her. Though in the surviving recollections of those who made Eliot’s acquaintance there are few testimonials of specific pieces of advice or personal insight that she delivered, she seems to have engaged even passing strangers in conversations that showed the same degree of psychological acuity and sympathy that characterizes the depiction of the inner lives of her characters. William Hale White, her co-lodger at 142 Strand, remarked that when she was talking with any sincerely engaged person, “she strove to elicit his best, and generally disclosed to him something in himself of which he was not aware.” In a pretherapeutic age, she instinctively initiated the kind of conversation that went below the surface of things. She wanted to know how people worked—not to expose them or embarrass them, but to move them toward a greater self-understanding, and to achieve with them a greater intimacy, however fleeting. “I have never seen anybody whose search for the meaning and worth of persons and things was so unresting as hers,” White wrote. She would have made a great interviewer; and if I could spend an hour in her company, I think that, instead of hearing her answer questions about her own life, I would almost rather listen to her putting questions to a stranger about his or hers.

  And so perhaps, Main’s evasion of her questions—a characteristic that at first seemed to me so off-putting—actually helps to further illuminate Eliot’s sympathetic response to his attentions and her approval of the Sayings. There may have been something about the glimpses he offered into his circumscribed, lonely life that resonated in her novelistic imagination. Slight, opaque Mr. Main—the onetime would-be minister with the secret inner life of which he cannot bring himself to speak—is kin to that family of frail, flawed clergymen who appear throughout her fiction.

  They appear in her very first book, Scenes of Clerical Life, where stories revolve around the Reverend Amos Barton, who is defeated by the disapproval of others, and the Reverend Maynard Gilfil, whose young disappointment in love has left him inwardly maimed. “It is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk,” Eliot wrote in “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story.” “The trivial erring life which we visit with our harsh blame, may but be as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered.”

  Main has been dismissed as trivi
al and erring by Eliot’s biographers, but his letters suggest that he, too, felt his young life to be maimed—that he feared that his life-juice was being wasted. In this respect, he was Eliot’s perfect reader, in whom some of her most preoccupying novelistic themes were embodied. As I spent long hours in the library in Edinburgh with Main, reading letters Eliot would have devoted long hours to reading, I saw how little deserving he is of harsh blame. And I came to wonder if he affected Eliot not because of his glowing words about her work, after all, but because of what he quietly suggested to her—in all that he left unsaid—about mortal limitation, disappointment, and loss. Perhaps Eliot took him seriously because she recognized that even if he misread Middlemarch, Middlemarch had not misread him.

  Chapter 8

  •

  Sunset and Sunrise

  “I don’t think either of us could spare the other, or like any one else better, however much we might admire them. It would make too great a difference to us—like seeing all the old places altered, and changing the name for everything.”

  —MIDDLEMARCH, CHAPTER 86

  The Priory, with its walled garden and its books and its red-and-green study, is long gone. It was torn down at the very end of the nineteenth century to make way for the Great Central Main Line railway, which ran from Marylebone Station over Regent’s Canal and up through the Midlands to Sheffield in the north of England. At one point on its route, the railway passed within fifteen miles of Coventry. “Now, my lads, you can’t hinder the railroad: it will be made whether you like it or not,” Caleb Garth warns a group of truculent farm laborers, who seek to interrupt the work of surveyors who are measuring the land around the town. “It may do a bit of harm here and there, to this and to that; and so does the sun in heaven. But the railway’s a good thing.”