by Rebecca Mead
One day in late summer, I descended a stairway down to the north bank of Regent’s Canal, passed under the railway tracks that ran overhead, and emerged onto a sunny towpath. George Eliot’s garden would have been close by this path, but there was nothing to be seen of it now: just a high wall beyond which was a block of flats. Houseboats were moored all along the canal’s bank, and some of the occupants of the boats had built small gardens along the path. There were plots with runner beans climbing up bamboo canes, and tomato plants laden with ripening fruit, and stalky sunflowers turning their open faces to the sun, simple and beaming, like a child’s drawing of a flower. It was peaceful on the bank, with few people to be seen—only one or two slightly bedraggled dogs slumbering on the roofs of houseboats. A barge slid by, and I noticed its name, Mr. Pip—a passing tribute to Eliot’s literary peer, glimpsed in an environment changed beyond recognition.
I went back up to the street, where, around a corner, a short stub remained of the road Eliot and Lewes lived in. It terminated suddenly at the entrance to an electrical substation that lay behind a high brick wall that was topped with a wire fence. Yellow and black hazard signs were posted along the wall’s length. “Danger of Death,” they read, and in that melancholy moment, as I discovered Eliot’s home not only gone but her street erased, the sign took on the aspect of a grimly humorous memento mori.
But I hadn’t really expected to find any trace of George Eliot on North Bank, and perhaps this was no place to look, anyway. Eliot lived in London for most of her adult life, from her early days as a striving young editor at 142 Strand to her late years surveying the streets from a carriage as she was driven through town, wearing a fashionable hat. But she always insisted that she preferred to be in the countryside, which had the power to remind her, however obliquely, of the unexceptional terrain of her youth, with its primrose-filled hedgerows and its useful pastures and its creeping waterways. Like Wordsworth, whom she revered in adolescence and reread throughout her life, Eliot found regenerative inspiration in the remembrance of the landscape of her childhood. Her love for the deep green England of Warwickshire was the foundation of her belief that the love we have for the landscape in which we have grown up has a quality that can never be matched by our admiration of any environment discovered later, no matter how beautiful.
This love of a childhood landscape is exquisitely evoked in The Mill on the Floss. In one of that novel’s most celebrated, and most Wordsworthian, passages, the narrator describes in an authorial aside a walk she has taken “on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky.” She details the plants she sees on her walk: the starflowers and speedwell and ground ivy. “What grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene?” she asks. “These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows—such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them.”
The description is so sensually precise that the reader is tempted to believe that Eliot did actually spend that morning walking through the woodlands of her youth. But of course, she didn’t. She had been living in London for almost a decade when she wrote The Mill on the Floss, and had to settle for walks on the heaths or commons of the city to satisfy her cravings for countryside.
And crave it she did. “If I allowed myself to have any longings beyond what is given, they would be for a nook quite in the country, far away from Palaces crystal or otherwise, with an orchard behind me full of old trees and rough grass, and hedgerow paths among the endless fields where you meet nobody,” she wrote to a friend in February 1859, just as she was beginning to conceive of a new novel featuring a mill and an inundation. The landscape she would evoke so vividly in The Mill on the Floss is a lost landscape remembered, not one currently inhabited, and it seems all the more vivid and quivering because its earth and air and sky have been transmuted by imagination into inspiration. “At present my mind works with the most freedom and the keenest sense of poetry in my remotest past,” she told Barbara Bodichon that spring.
By the summer of 1859, Eliot’s projected novel about a mill was at its earliest, tender stage. “My stories grow in me like plants, and this is only in the leaf-bud,” Eliot wrote to Blackwood. “I have faith that the flower will come.” Toward the end of the summer, she decided that this plant might be nurtured by an escape from the limits of London; she and Lewes were both in ill health and sought fresher air and more open skies. First they went to Penmaenmawr, on the north coast of Wales, but they could not find lodgings, and the weather was bad, so before long they decided to repair to the south coast of England instead.
“Here we are at the other pole!” Eliot wrote to a friend from the seaside town of Weymouth on the fourth of September. They lodged at 39 East Street, with some “good Weslyans, honest and kind,” Eliot wrote in her diary. Weymouth, made popular as a resort town by George III, was not exactly what they wanted—it was still the summer season, and the town did not provide the sense of contented isolation they hankered for. Within days of arriving, however, they took a walk up the river Wey to a village named Radipole, where they made a delightful discovery. “G.E. is in high spirits, having found a Mill and Millstream to his heart’s content,” Lewes wrote to Blackwood.
Radipole Mill, the first of five mills strung along the length of the Wey, was close to a stone bridge around which clustered the rest of the village. There was a manor house, a few cottages, and a very old church, dating to the thirteenth century. In Radipole, Eliot found the possibility of inspiration—the possibility of recovering in imagination the landscape of her youth, and transforming it in literature to become the landscape of Maggie Tulliver’s childhood. “We are going to hire a laborer’s cottage for a day or two, and live a poetical primitive life, the results of which will appear in Maggie,” Lewes told Blackwood.
They returned to Radipole the next day but were disappointed to discover that the laborer’s wife objected to the letting of the cottage. Efforts to find another rustic retreat failed, but in the end Weymouth itself proved tolerable, and they stayed there for two weeks. Most mornings Eliot worked on her novel while Lewes examined specimens under his microscope, and after lunch they went out and explored. They rambled on the sands and the cliffs around the wide crescent of Weymouth Bay, and took a steamer across Portland Harbor to the rocky peninsula of the Isle of Portland, which had supplied the stone for Sir Christopher Wren’s London churches. They shopped for hare and partridge in the market, listened to a band playing on the Esplanade, and went to the town’s small theater, where they saw The Hunchback, a play by James Sheridan Knowles, “performed in true provincial style,” as Lewes wrote in his diary.
I can picture them standing on the stone steps of the brick house on East Street, deciding which way to go. Turning left, they would have arrived at St. Alban Street, a narrow thoroughfare barely wide enough for the passage of a horse and cart, lined by narrow, bow-fronted shops and a stone house that had stood there since Elizabethan times. Heading toward the seafront, they would have found a grand Georgian mansion that had been built for George III’s third son, the Duke of Clarence, which overlooked the bay that curved from distant white cliffs in the east to the harbor mouth in the west. Turning right, they would quickly have come to the harbor, edged by massive brick warehouses, two-hundred-year-old inns, and the handsome fish market, newly built of Portland stone. The tang of brine would have been in the air, and so would the pungent smell of hops and yeast from the brewery on Hope Square, across a harbor crowded with fishing boats plied by tanned mariners with soft Wessex accents. If they turned from the quay onto a side street and glanced up, they might have seen a cannonball fired during the Engli
sh Civil War, embedded in the stone gable of a house that had stood there since the seventeenth century.
I can see them there, because this is my home-scene. This is the town I grew up in. As a small child I played in a brisk breeze on the beach, where a Punch and Judy show has been performed since Victorian times. At the harbor’s edge, I navigated seaweed-twined lobster pots stacked along the dock, and watched shrieking seagulls swooping to the water to snatch whatever the fishermen had discarded. When I was the age of young Maggie Tulliver I went to school in Radipole—by then no longer a village separate from the larger town, but distinct nonetheless, with its low stone cottages along the banks of a river that is brushed by trailing leaves of weeping willow. Cows grazed what we knew as the Humpty Dumpty field, so named because it was rumpled with unusual hillocks, the remains of the medieval village that had once stood there. In the graveyard of the ancient church were the remains of sailors from the wreck of the ship The Earl of Abergavenny, a vessel of the East India Company captained by John Wordsworth, the poet’s older brother, that foundered off Portland in 1805.
My own older brother and I would sometimes walk home from school along Mount Pleasant Avenue, at that time still an unpaved road edged by a field as pleasant as its name, though a new bypass has been ploughed through since then. Our route took us under chestnut trees that supplied conkers in autumn, and sycamore trees that scattered their helicopter seedpods, and shady elm trees, until the elm trees died. This is the landscape of my childhood, with its torn clouds scattered across unpredictable skies, its stony strand tossed with driftwood and bladder wrack, its backwater footpaths lined with crab apple trees and blackberry bushes.
“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it,” Eliot wrote in The Mill on the Floss. We delight in the landscape of our youth because it is imbued with the deepest of memories, she says, and those memories color our experience of every landscape we enter into thereafter: “Our delight in the sunshine on the deep bladed grass today, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years, which still live in us and transform our perception into love.”
It would be easy at first glance to mistake this for sentimentality, just as it is easy to feel sentimental about the more poetical aspects of one’s own childhood. (I am sure those backwater footpaths were often muddy under leaden skies, though that is not how I best remember them.) But while Eliot’s evocation of the landscape of childhood is alluringly beautiful—it is intensely moving—her use of it is not at all sentimental, if sentimentality is defined as the cheap reliance upon the effectiveness of an appeal to emotion, a reliance that overrules or circumvents the application of critical thought.
Eliot’s use of childhood landscape is much more complex than that. It is more rigorous, and more profound. She is not expressing a simple conservative longing for the good old days, when “the world was not so nice as it now has become,” as Alexander Main remarked. The point she is making is that our earliest experiences provide the ground upon which our characters are built, and that some part of our character grows from the brilliant, scintillating, intense capacity for emotion that a child experiences. There is nothing particularly special about the landscape of our youth, she says, except for the important fact that it is where we learned to be human. “There is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory—that it is no novelty in my life speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence that wove itself into my joys when my joys were vivid,” she writes in The Mill on the Floss. Loving something of where one comes from—and having emotional access to that love—is a moral imperative for Eliot. It is to be in touch with the kernel of one’s character, one’s most receptive self. For Eliot, being sensitive to one’s memories of childhood is a sign of moral maturity.
Being reminded of this is one of the things her books do for me, by connecting me with the child I was before I had ever heard of a writer called George Eliot. In the green fields and shady byways of my youth, Eliot glimpsed the site of her own youth, in imagination, and when I read her books I am restored anew to that place of childhood. She shows me that the remembrance of a childhood landscape is not mere nostalgia for what is lost and beyond my reach. It does not consist of longing to be back there, in the present; or of longing to be a child once more; or of wishing the world would not change. Rather it is an opportunity to be in touch again with the intensity and imagination of beginnings. It is a discovery, later in life, of what remains with me.
OF the triad of young couples in Middlemarch, two move away from the town at the novel’s end. Dorothea and Ladislaw, who marry in spite of the codicil to Casaubon’s will, go to London, where Ladislaw enters Parliament. Lydgate and Rosamond move there, too, so that Lydgate can pursue a more lucrative, less idealistic medical practice. Only Fred Vincy and Mary Garth remain in Middlemarch, rooted there, as their parents were before them. Through Dorothea and Ladislaw, Lydgate and Rosamond, Eliot gives different perspectives on the experience of yearning, and ambition, and aspiration for an unknown beyond. In them, the reader learns of hopefulness, and of falling short. But in Fred and Mary, who have loved each other for as long as they can remember, Eliot shows the virtues of rootedness, the value of the home-scene.
Mary is the wisest character in Middlemarch. She surpasses even her admirable father, Caleb Garth, who occasionally indulges in the foolishness of thinking well of those who don’t deserve it. She also surpasses her mother, Susan Garth, a sharp, intelligent, competent woman who makes the mistake of underestimating her girl children in favor of her sons. Mary’s wisdom lies in having an almost preternatural knowledge of what course in life will be good for her, wanting to follow that course, and having no doubts about its rectitude. She has none of the inclination toward self-sabotage that bedevils Dorothea or Lydgate. She is utterly ethical, just, and good-natured; but since she is also quick-tongued and sardonic, the mature reader at least is not tempted to dismiss her as too good by half. Mary is the character who grows the least during the course of Middlemarch, because she is already full grown. She already has the wisdom that it takes most of us at least until middle age to begin to acquire.
One of the things that Mary knows is that she does not want to leave home—home for her being Middlemarch, proximity to her family, and the countryside she loves. At one point in the novel, Mary is on the verge of going away to become a governess in another region. A change in her father’s fortunes means she does not have to go, and in her customary ironical manner, she expresses her happiness in terms of a loss—the loss of anticipated nostalgia. “I thought it would always be part of my life to long for home, and losing that grievance makes me feel rather empty,” she says. “I suppose it served instead of sense to fill up my mind.”
In the final chapter of Book Eight of Middlemarch, “Sunset and Sunrise,” Mary is seen again in her childhood home, glimpsed in a grassy corner of the garden. She is pushing Letty, her little sister, on a swing hung between two pear trees, “a pink kerchief tied over her head, making a little poke to shade her eyes from the level sunbeams.” Her father comes to walk with her among the nut trees, to talk about the prospect of her marrying Fred at last. “I don’t love him because he is a fine match,” Mary tells Caleb, with a skeptical laugh. Her sober father asks her why then she is marrying him. “Oh, dear, because I have always loved him,” Mary replies. “I should never like scolding anyone else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.” Fred is not a romantic figure—an Orlando—to Mary. He is already an intimate. He is already family—which is what, in a marriage that works, all spouses end up becoming, even those spouses who started out as idealized objects of infatuation or desire.
Some readers have found Mary Garth to be the true heroine of Middlemarch, including Gordon Haight, who once argued her case in an essay with that title. And in fact an
attempt was once made to cast Mary Garth as the heroine of her own book. In 1853 Oxford University Press published a curious volume called Mary Garth: A Romance from “Middlemarch,” in which an editor, Frederick Page, detached the love story of Fred and Mary from the web of the novel proper. The result was a slim, 170-page volume, built from George Eliot’s own sentences—but largely stripped of her authorial asides—that charts the progress of the pair from being the best of childhood companions to being nearly-weds.
Mary Garth is a very peculiar piece of work, bearing the same relation to Middlemarch as does a melody played on a mouth organ to a symphony performed by an orchestra. Dorothea and Casaubon are eliminated: he’s dead, and she is mentioned only once in passing. Lydgate is relevant only insofar as he is Fred’s brother-in-law, and Rosamond matters only as a fleeting foil to Mary. Bulstrode’s entanglement with Raffles is alluded to but quickly brushed aside as “part of another story.” Ladislaw isn’t even mentioned.
In The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis notoriously suggested that Eliot’s last great work, Daniel Deronda, would be much improved if half of it were discarded. (He wanted to keep the glittering, high-society half that pertained to Gwendolen Harleth, the novel’s troubled heroine, and to discard the half that was concerned with Jewish life and history, which he saw as flawed and uninteresting.) Unlike Leavis’s provocative proposal, the mutilation of Middlemarch that produced Mary Garth grew from a pedagogical impulse rather than from a judgment of literary worth. As the book’s adapter explained in a preface, the intended purpose of Mary Garth was to introduce young readers to George Eliot. After Mary Garth, Page recommended, readers could go on to Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Scenes of Clerical Life, before approaching the monumental Middlemarch itself. “They will thus be growing up with George Eliot, their minds enlarging as hers enlarged,” he wrote.