by Rebecca Mead
The mother tongue of my son’s imagination has a very different accent to mine, and all this will be his inheritance, if he chooses to claim it. I cannot give him my experience. But as I sit in our garden I hope that here, at least, our languages will overlap, among these old-fashioned plants that remind me of England—mature hydrangea bushes with blue flowers that darken to purple as the season progresses, glossy-leafed euonymus that clambers up the wall, and clusters of hellebores bearing subtle green flowers, like those that grow on George Eliot’s grave.
Finale
“Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.”
—MIDDLEMARCH, FINALE
The final sentence of Middlemarch is one of the most admired in literature, and with good reason—it is “quietly thrilling,” as Stanley Fish, the literary critic, has written. The book ends, as it began, with Dorothea, and it discovers what may be redeemed from disappointment. Dorothea’s fate is not to be another Saint Teresa, but to be a heroine of the ordinary—the embodiment of George Eliot’s grave, demanding, meliorist faith. It reads, “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
A vein of melancholy runs through the sentence. Dorothea’s impact upon the people around her is diffusive, like vapor vanishing into the air. Things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been—but ill they still are, to some degree, and are not likely to be otherwise. Acts are unhistoric; lives are hidden; tombs are unvisited—all is unmarked and unnoticed. With its series of long clauses and then its short final phrase, the sentence concludes with a perfect dying fall. I cannot imagine reading these words and not sighing at the end of them.
But this isn’t quite the sentence as Eliot originally wrote it. In this, the first published edition, she made several small but significant revisions from her original draft, which can be found in the manuscript in the British Library. The manuscript version reads as follows: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing life of the world is after all chiefly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is owing to many of those who sleep in unvisited tombs, having lived a hidden life nobly.”
When I first came across this passage, in the library, I felt an acute sense of disorientation. There, in violet-colored ink, was an only partly successful first stab at sublimity. It was like discovering that Leonardo had first tried painting a snub nose on the Mona Lisa, or learning that the question Hamlet originally asked was, “Not to be, or to be?” The music of the line was altered entirely, and so was its import. Instead of the “growing good of the world”—Eliot’s meliorist vision, captured in a phrase—there was the “growing life of the world,” an expression so much less specific, and so much less moving. There was the phrase “after all”—a rhetorical gesture of persuasion that undermined the solemn authority of the passage, absent in the first publication. There was “chiefly dependent” rather than “partly dependent,” and “owing” rather than “half owing”—changes which give the sentence a much more optimistic tone than characterizes the revised, published version, with its irresistible melancholic grandeur.
Still more significant are the revisions to the word order after the final comma, which, in the final published version, is far more resonant. Those tombs may be unvisited, but in reading the sentence—in arriving at them, our ultimate destination, on the page—we are able to pay homage to the hidden lives they commemorate. Those hidden lives are, in the earlier, manuscript version, lived “nobly”—which, like its close synonym “admirably,” is suggestive of moral qualities that are outwardly recognized by others. (The goodness of Miss Henrietta Noble, the Reverend Farebrother’s elderly aunt, who filches sugar lumps from the table to distribute to the poor, is revealed to all by her name.) By replacing “nobly” with “faithfully,” Eliot shifts the emphasis away from the implied judgment of an external observer—a dissonant suggestion when one is talking of “hidden lives.” Instead, she places her emphasis upon a validation that comes from inward conviction.
Faithfulness is “solely the good in us,” as Eliot characterizes Bunyan’s Faithful, the allegorical figure at the center of The Pilgrim’s Progress whom she invokes in the penultimate chapter of the novel. By substituting faith for nobility, Eliot has made those hidden lives of which she writes more humble. But she has made them richer, too, as the fertile soil from which the good might grow.
By the end of the book, Dorothea has made her own progress, even if she has not had a chance to stray far beyond the boundaries of her provincial life. Having aspired at the novel’s outset to do good for others in some grand but abstract way, she discovers that the good she is able to do is in relation to the lives that touch her own more closely, even if doing so may be inconvenient or painful for her. And there is a passage in chapter 80, only a few short pages before the end of this very long book, in which this is crystallized for Dorothea. It is here that she makes her own discovery of what Middlemarch is about.
It is early in the morning, and she is in her boudoir at Lowick Manor. By now she is a widow, Casaubon having died. Although she is convinced that she and Ladislaw must always be separated because of the codicil in Casaubon’s will, she has, until now, clung to the knowledge that he loves her, and treasured him for the brightness he brought to the gloomy days of her marriage. But her confidence in him has been shaken: the day before, in an effort to help save Lydgate’s reputation, she has visited the doctor’s house—and there stumbled across Rosamond and Ladislaw in what she has mistakenly taken for a love scene. Shocked and disillusioned, she has spent an anguished night on the hard floor of her room, regretting the loss of her cherished ideal of Ladislaw’s worthiness, and admitting to herself that she had loved him. By morning, though, she has forced herself to think beyond herself, and to consider how she still might act on behalf of Lydgate and even Rosamond, whose troubles she might yet help to remedy even though she feels her own hopes are shattered.
“She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates,” Eliot writes. “On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.”
There’s a biblical gravitas to the image of husband and wife as they walk through the landscape on the road to Middlemarch, representing the hidden lives of all those people Dorothea now realizes her own life is bound up with, and who must also be recognized. In looking out upon them, small figures in an enlarging vista, Dorothea comprehends the next step she must take on her own journey. We are called to express our generosity and sympathy in ways we might not have chosen for ourselves. Heeding that call, we might become better. Setting aside our own cares, we might find ourselves on the path that can lead us out of resignation.
IN the late spring of 1871, just as Middlemarch was beginning to fall into place imaginatively for Eliot, she and Lewes moved to the countryside for several months, to Shottermill, in Surrey, a village which in the nineteenth century was a center for broom making, and which was just being discovered by artists and intellectuals, including Lord Tennyson, who had built a house nearby. They rented a house, Brookbank, the home of Anne Gilchrist, whose late husband, Alexander Gilchrist, had been the biographer of William Blake. It was “a queer little cottage,” Eliot wrote to Francis Pattison before her departure, telling her Oxford friend that it “sta
nds in the midst of a lovely country, where there are hill tops from which we shall look down on a round horizon.”
They went in the first week of May, anticipating a stay of four months while renovations were under way at the Priory. (A new bath was being installed, among other improvements.) At first, Eliot was slightly dismayed at her new circumstances. A blind was not working in the bedroom; a set of keys was unforthcoming; the housekeeper was painfully slow in her work. The local tradespeople were unhelpful: the butcher did not bring the meat, nobody seemed to want to sell them fresh milk, and eggs were scarce. “An expedition we made yesterday in search of fowls showed us nothing more hopeful than some chickens six weeks old which the good woman observed were sometimes ‘eaten by the gentry with asparagus,’ ” she wrote with arch amusement to Mrs. Gilchrist.
But apart from these minor domestic frustrations there was much to be grateful for. “There is an exquisite stillness in the sunshine, and a sense of distance from London hurry, which encourages the growth of patience,” Eliot wrote. Her letters from Shottermill became increasingly contented. She wrote in the mornings and in the early evenings walked with Lewes under a broad sky across the common, and the book began to fall into place at last.
The countryside “could hardly be surpassed in its particular kind of beauty,” she wrote, remarking on the “perpetual undulation of heath and copse and clear veins of hurrying water, with here and there a grand pine wood, steep wood-clothed promontories, and gleaming pools.” Having once been a girl on a farm, she was able knowledgeably to discuss fruit growth and butter manufacture with the wife of the local farmer, surprising the latter enormously. She came to love the quaint house, with its oddly shaped rooms, its prints of Reynolds and Romney on the mantelpiece, and the effect of afternoon sunshine in the parlor, where, she wrote to Charles Lewes, “The sun is sending yellow and blue patches through our painted glass onto my paper.”
The village of Shottermill doesn’t exist anymore; in 1933 it was officially incorporated into the neighboring town of Haslemere. I went to Haslemere one day in late summer, arriving at the train station that opened in 1859. The railway hastened the gentrification of the area; after the artists and writers came wealthy Londoners, entranced by the area’s rural charms. Those charms were swiftly eroded by the construction of housing to accommodate the employees—gardeners, housekeepers—whose services the wealthy new residents required. These terraced houses look pleasant enough now, with more than a hundred years of accrued attractiveness, but they and the growth they were part of left the old village, with its mills and its taverns and its tannery on the river, utterly transformed.
Brookbank, a pretty house with a shingled facade and leaded windows, is close to the old tannery, up the hill from the river, past the railway bridge. A few years ago, a civic group put a sign up over the door. “George Eliot, Author, 1819–1880, Wrote Middlemarch while living here in 1871,” it reads, with a perhaps understandable degree of overstatement. Brookbank’s current occupants have lived there since the late nineties, and when I visited they served me tea and cream cakes in what was once Mrs. Gilchrist’s parlor. It was a delightful room, with pale yellow walls and two large bay windows overlooking the garden, where shadow was cast by a thick-trunked yew tree that was already four or five hundred years old when Eliot was there. The glass of the windows was decorated with diamond shapes painted blue and yellow, through which the sun cast patches of colored light.
Eliot and Lewes were obliged to leave Brookbank at the end of July, Mrs. Gilchrist having let it to another tenant. But because the Priory was not yet finished, and because they had been so contented in this quiet corner of the world, they rented another house, Cherrimans, which lay directly opposite, across the lane. This was a more substantial residence that belonged to a local landowner named James Simmons. There was an old half-timbered section, but much of it had been built in the eighteenth century.
The house had a large garden in which Eliot liked to sit and write when the weather permitted, her head shaded by a large deodara tree. One day Mr. Simmons found her there and reproached her for the exposure to the sun. “Oh, I like it!” she said. “Today is the first time I have felt warm this summer.” Most of the time she sat and worked in the parlor, the deep country silence broken only by the rush of an occasional train. “Imagine me seated near a window, opening under a verandah, with flower-beds and lawn and pretty hills in sight, my feet on a warm water-bottle, and my writing on my knees. In that attitude my mornings are passed,” she wrote in a letter. This must be the most vivid picture Eliot ever gave of herself in the act of creativity, and the least anguished. She sounds contented, comfortable, and self-aware. One evening she read aloud to Lewes the pages she had been working on—Book Three of Middlemarch—and he declared it splendid.
The house’s current residents had recently restored the verandah according to its appearance in a photograph from the Victorian era, as they showed me when I visited, pointing out the grapevine that had begun to wreath its way around the wooden supports. The verandah borders an elegant living room, from which three French windows face the garden. Two of the windows look over the garden toward the lane, while one faces a lawn, with countryside beyond.
The house’s owners left me alone in the living room, from which I could hear the banging of further renovations under way in the kitchen, where windows installed in the 1950s were being replaced by new ones with decorative cast-iron frames, painstakingly reproduced from a Victorian original. I looked around at the living room windows, under the verandah. The third one, facing away from the lane, must have been the one before which Eliot sat as she wrote the letter. There was an armchair by the window, and I perched on it and looked out over the view Eliot had described as she sat warming her feet.
There was still a stretch of grass and pretty flower beds before me. But I could not see any hills beyond—only a dense growth of trees, like that which could be seen all around the neighborhood. Then I remembered something I had learned from a local historian: that in the nineteenth century, there had been far fewer trees in Shottermill. In those days, the hills had been sparsely covered with grasses and heather. The trees had come later, and were due to changes in the local economy. Partly, their growth was tied to the decline of the broom industry, which had depended upon cutting down birch trees. But a more important change, the historian told me, had been the Education Act of 1880.
The Education Act, which ushered in mandatory elementary school education for all children, was an inevitable consequence of the changes to the political landscape that had begun with the Reform Act of 1832—the transformative event that reverberates through Middlemarch. The Reform Act of 1832 led ultimately to the Reform Act of 1867, in which working-class men were given the vote for the first time. These new voters needed an education; as one disdainful parliamentary opponent of Reform put it to his colleagues, “I believe it will be absolutely necessary that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their letters.”
But when Eliot saw Shottermill, the Education Act was still a decade in the future. When she knew the village many of its young boys were not in school, but were instead tending to the flocks of sheep that grazed its hills—sheep that trampled upon and ate up seedlings before they had a chance to turn into trees. Within not too many years, though, the village children were in school, required to learn writing and arithmetic instead of animal husbandry. Then the sheep left the hills, and the trees were free to grow unchecked.
As I looked out from the window toward the obscured hills, I felt a quiet thrill of excitement at the idea that the landscape itself had been transformed by the reading of books. The trees were there because ordinary children not much older than my late-Victorian grandfather—children close to the age of George Eliot’s baby granddaughter, Blanche—had learned their letters. Some of them would have learned not just to read books but also to love them. Some of those children would have become writers themselves, and so would some among their descendants.
“Imagine me seated near a window, opening under a verandah,” George Eliot had written. And I could imagine her there: I could conjure her more vividly than anywhere else I had pictured her in my travels. But through that window was a larger vista: a landscape changed by books, reshaped by reading, transfigured by the slow green growth.
Bibliographical Notes and
Acknowledgments
Many books been written about George Eliot, and I am indebted to the work of many biographers whose scholarship has revealed the contours of her life, the processes of her work, and the development of her thought. I first read Gordon S. Haight’s George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 1968) as a teenager; it remains indispensable. For readers wishing to learn about George Eliot’s life in greater detail, I recommend Rosemary Ashton’s excellent George Eliot: A Life (Penguin Press, 1996) and Kathryn Hughes’s very readable George Eliot: The Last Victorian (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998). Among critical biographies I particularly admire Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Cornell, 1994), and Barbara Hardy’s George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography (Continuum, 2006). As I was finishing this book, Nancy Henry’s The Life of George Eliot (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) was published, offering a fascinating critical reading of earlier biographies.
Before I began writing this book—but after I had published an essay in the New Yorker about my love of George Eliot—I received out of the blue from K. K. Collins a kind note and a copy of his volume, George Eliot: Interviews and Recollections (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). This fascinating collection of firsthand accounts of meeting George Eliot has been extremely useful, while its author, Ken Collins, has patiently answered many questions and pointed me to other sources. A number of scholars have graciously responded to my queries both for the New Yorker article and for this book, while others have been kind enough to engage in longer conversations with me. I am grateful to Rosemary Ashton, William Baker, Harold Bloom, Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Kathleen McCormack, Edward Mendelson, Jeff Nunokawa, Leah Price, and Ilya Wachs. I accosted James Arnett on the subway one day because I saw him reading Haight’s biography; he subsequently invited me to sit in on the classes on Middlemarch he was teaching at Hunter College, and I am grateful for the insights of both James and his students. I am in perpetual debt to Roy Park and Helen Cooper, my own former tutors at University College, Oxford.