by David Lodge
James continues for many more lines in the same vein. His rapturous and unqualified praise is, it must be admitted, something of a surprise. One would have expected that the flaws in the novel, of which Wells himself was well aware, would have been recognised by James, who set himself and others such high standards of formal elegance and consistency in the art of fiction. One almost wonders whether he actually read Kipps with close attention to the very end, since it is the third section of the novel that is weakest. But there are other explanations for the somewhat extravagant tenor of his tribute. He was writing privately to a friend and East Sussex neighbour, to a younger writer whose talent he appreciated all the more because it did not threaten his own. The social milieux and the human types they each wrote about were quite different. For James, Wells’s description of lower-middle-class life – of the social dynamics of the draper’s shop, for example – was a revelation, and what is interesting about his letter is the emphasis he gives to the book’s effect of truthfulness to life, and the contrast he draws between Wells and his Victorian precursors in this respect. I think James exaggerates this contrast – there is in fact plenty of authorial ‘interference’ in Kipps – but he does draw our attention to an important aspect of the novel: the almost documentary realism of its descriptions of architecture, decor, possessions, clothes, manners and speech. I remarked earlier on Wells’s debt to Dickens, which Wells himself more than once acknowledged; but James is right to point out that there is nothing of Dickens’s fantastic and grotesque imagination in Kipps. In Dickens the familiar world is constantly transformed by metaphor and simile: human beings behave like things, while objects are invested with an eerie and sinister life. When Dickens describes the interior of a room it is made to express its occupants through metaphorical suggestion. In a corresponding passage by Wells every detail is observed with literal exactness, and the objects function as metonyms of the taste, class, habits and prejudices of those who accumulated them. Take, for example, the description of Coote’s study, which contains not a single figurative expression to relieve the remorseless inventory of his idea of culture:
You must figure Coote’s study, a little bedroom put to studious uses, and over the mantel an array of things he had been led to believe indicative of culture and refinement – an autotype of Rossetti’s ‘Annunciation’, an autotype of Watts’ ‘Minotaur,’ a Swiss carved pipe with many joints, and a photograph of Amiens Cathedral (these two the spoils of travel), a phrenological bust, and some broken fossils from the Warren. A rotating bookshelf carried the Encyclopaedia Britannica (tenth edition) and on the top of it a large, official-looking, age-grubby envelope, bearing the mystic words, ‘On His Majesty’s Service,’ a number or so of the Bookman, and a box of cigarettes were lying. A table under the window bore a little microscope, some dust in a saucer, some grimy glass slips, and broken cover glasses, for Coote had ‘gone in for’ biology a little. The longer side of the room was given over to bookshelves, neatly edged with pinked American cloth, and with an array of books – no worse an array of books than you find in any public library; an almost haphazard accumulation of obsolete classics, contemporary successes, the Hundred Best Books (including Samuel Warren’s Ten Thousand A Year), old school-books, directories, the Times Atlas, Ruskin in bulk, Tennyson complete in one volume, Longfellow, Charles Kingsley, Smiles, a guide-book or so, several medical pamphlets, odd magazine numbers, and much indescribable rubbish – in fact, a compendium of the contemporary British mind.
What had happened to the novel between Dickens and Wells was the development of a new kind of realism, and its mutation into naturalism, in the work of French writers such as Flaubert, the Goncourts, Maupassant and Zola, who influenced younger British novelists like George Gissing, Arnold Bennett, George Moore – and H. G. Wells. James’s commendation of Wells for handling the vulgarity of lower-middle-class life ‘in so scientific and historic a spirit’ (my emphasis) seems to make this connection, for some of the French novelists, notably Zola, consciously emulated the empirical methods of scientific research. The example of Flaubert, however, seems more relevant to Kipps than Zola. Its subtitle The Story of a Simple Soul echoes the title of Flaubert’s tale, Un Coeur Simple, in Trois Contes (1877), which describes the life of Félicité, a housemaid in a bourgeois household. Her intelligence is so limited that she barely understands anything outside the humdrum domestic tasks which she performs so dutifully, and her frustrated capacity for love is finally displaced onto a stuffed parrot. Flaubert’s last, unfinished work, Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), is about two humble clerks who, like Wells’s hero, are released from wage-slavery by a legacy, which they apply with disastrous incompetence to ambitious schemes of self-improvement, scientific, commercial and cultural. Wells’s characters often seem to be speaking from ‘The Dictionary of Received Ideas’ which forms an appendix to Flaubert’s novel. I have found no evidence that Wells had read either of these works, but it is unlikely that he was completely unfamiliar with Flaubert, and in any case literary influence can work by contagion as well as directly. Wells, to be sure, does not imitate the unsettling authorial inscrutability of Flaubert’s narrative method – he is always ‘interfering’ to gloss his own effects (e.g. ‘in fact, a compendium of the contemporary British mind’) – but the link between the two writers can be illustrated by putting this description of Félicité’s room next to the passage just quoted from Kipps:
A big wardrobe prevented the door from opening properly. Opposite the window that overlooked the garden was a little round one looking on to the courtyard. There was a table beside the bed, with a water-jug, a couple of combs, and a block of blue soap in a chipped plate. On the walls there were rosaries, holy medals, several pictures of the Virgin, and a holy-water stoup made out of a coconut. On the chest of drawers, which was draped with a cloth just like an altar, was the shell-box Victor had given her, and also a watering-can and a ball, some copy-books, the illustrated geography book, and a pair of ankle-boots. And on the nail supporting the looking-glass, fastened by its ribbons, hung the little plush hat.16
Henry James’s treatment of the material world, especially in his later work, is in contrast impressionistic, subjective, lacking in specificity. In The Spoils of Poynton, for instance, a novel all about precious ‘things’ (i.e. antiques), hardly any of them are actually described, and then in no great detail. In James’s fiction everything is filtered through the consciousness of the characters, and it is their emotional and psychological reaction to the world and to each other, rendered in exquisitely nuanced prose, that is of central importance. James, who knew Flaubert’s work very well, and wrote a fine essay about it, revered him primarily for his complete dedication to his art, his tireless pursuit of the perfectly appropriate form for his subject, however unpromising it might be. To Wells the subject of a novel, and its relevance to contemporary life, was all-important. He was never much bothered about formal perfection, and in due course it became evident to both him and James that their respective concepts of the novel were incompatible. In 1914 James wrote critically about Wells’s recent work in a survey of contemporary fiction in the Times Literary Supplement,17 and the following year Wells retaliated with a cruel caricature of James’s late style in his satire Boon (1915). After an exchange of letters, pained on James’s part, unrepentant on Wells’s, the two men severed relations, and James died in the following year. But in 1905 the friendship was still intact, and James was able to appreciate and enjoy, along with many other readers, the originality and verve of Kipps.
Notes
1 Norman and Jean Mackenzie, The Time Traveller: The Life of H. G. Wells (1973), p. 193.
2 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: discoveries and conclusions of a very ordinary brain (since 1866), two vols (1934; reissued 1966), p. 148.
3 Ibid., p. 155.
4 Ibid., p. 387.
5 H. G. Wells, The Wealth of Mr Waddy, edited with an introduction by Harris Wilson (1969).
6 Ibid., p. xix.
8 Quoted in J. R. Hammond, An H. G. Wells Chronology (1999), p. 18.
9 Lovat Dickson, H. G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times (1969), p. 145.
10 Letter to Pinker in June 1904, quoted by Wilson, ed., The Wealth of Mr Waddy, p. xxii.
11 Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, pp. 660–1.
12 Mackenzie and Mackenzie, The Time Traveller, p. 193 and n.
13 Dickson, Wells, p. 143.
14 Ibid., pp. 146–7.
15 Philip Horne, ed., Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999), p. 424.
16 Gustave Flaubert, Three Tales, translated by Robert Baldick (1961), p. 49.
17 Henry James, ‘The Younger Generation’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 March and 2 April 1914.
* * *
THE MAKING OF
‘GEORGE ELIOT’:
Scenes of
Clerical Life
* * *
Scenes of Clerical Life is not a title likely to set the pulses of modern readers racing with anticipation, even if they misinterpret it as referring to the lives of office-workers, rather than clergymen. It is, however, well worth reading: a book of considerable intrinsic merit, and of special interest as the first work of fiction by one of England’s greatest novelists. With these three tales (or novellas, as we might call them today), ‘George Eliot’ was born.
In 1857, when they were first published, as serial stories in Blackwood’s Magazine, there would have been no uncertainty as to the meaning of ‘clerical’, and no lack of interest in the subject. The Victorians’ concern with matters of religious belief and practice can only be compared with our own era’s preoccupation with sexuality (a parallel amusingly reinforced by the fact that the word ‘pervert’ was commonly used in the nineteenth century in the religious sense of ‘convert’) and fiction reflected the earlier kind of interest as fully as it now does the later. ‘This is an age of Religious Novels’, a writer in the Dublin Review observed in 1846, calculating that at least a third of the novels published that year had been ‘either directly religious . . . or possessed more of religious character than would have been sufficient, ten years ago, to damn any novel . . .’.1 That, admittedly, was at the height of the controversy provoked by the Oxford Movement in the Church of England, but a decade later religious themes and ecclesiastical settings still figured prominently in current fiction. It was in 1857 that Trollope made a hit with Barchester Towers.
Nevertheless there is something surprising and paradoxical, on the face of it, about George Eliot’s choice of subject for her fictional debut. In September 1856, when she began writing ‘The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton’, Mary Anne Evans (or Marian Evans, as she preferred to be known) was in her thirty-seventh year, and had not been a Christian believer since she was twenty-two. In the intervening years she had translated two of the century’s most powerful intellectual assaults on Christian orthodoxy – Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1846) and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1854) – and had been both editor of and contributor to the Westminster Review, the principal organ of radical, progressive, free-thinking opinion in its day. The intellectual and bohemian social milieu in which Marian Evans moved was discreetly permissive in sexual morals, but even her liberal friends were startled and shocked when, in 1854, she began to live openly with a married man, George Henry Lewes, while ‘respectable’ society shunned her henceforth. Most members of her family, already alienated by her apostasy, reacted similarly. It is hardly surprising therefore that for some time neither her friends nor her relations guessed that she was the author of three widely admired stories about provincial clergymen published under the name of ‘George Eliot’, stories in which there was no overt questioning of Christian belief, and the longest of which (‘Janet’s Repentance’) was a wholly approving account of the redemption of a woman from drink and despair through the selfless endeavours of an Evangelical clergyman – a representative, that is, of precisely the kind of Protestant Christianity against which Marian Evans had herself rebelled fourteen years before, and of which she had written a withering critique little more than a year previously, describing it as ‘a Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as profound wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety’.2
In fact the contradiction was more apparent than real. Not very far beneath the surface Christian orthodoxy of Scenes, we find the Feuerbachian ‘religion of Humanity’ with which George Eliot sought to replace it. The same is true of her first full-length novel, Adam Bede (1859), and those that followed it: religion is allowed to serve as the vehicle for humanistic values without itself being radically called into question. George Eliot never wrote the great novel of religious Doubt for which she, above all English novelists, was best equipped, and which might have been predicted from the tenor of the essays and reviews she wrote in the 1850s. (Instead the task was left to the inferior talents of Mrs Humphry Ward, in Robert Elsmere [1888].) Marian Evans’s decision to change from writing criticism to writing fiction coincided with a significant shift in her stance towards Christianity, from scepticism to conciliation. It also coincided with a momentous change in her personal life – her union with Lewes. Virginia Woolf plausibly suggested that the achievement of this happiness, after many years of emotional suffering, frustration and rejection, released the springs of her creativity, and also, by isolating her socially, threw her back upon herself and her memories of a provincial childhood and youth.3 In so many ways the writing of Scenes of Clerical Life was the hinge on which her life turned, changing Marian Evans into George Eliot, and we can recover some sense of this transformation from the note, ‘How I Came to Write Fiction’, which she entered in her journal in December 1857.
She begins by recalling that ‘it had always been a vague dream of mine that some time or other I might write a novel’ but that she never got further than writing ‘an introductory chapter describing a Staffordshire village and the life of the neighbouring farm houses’, until she started to live with George Lewes, who encouraged her to make another attempt. When they went to Tenby in South Wales for an extended holiday in 1856 he urged her to begin.
One morning as I was lying in bed, thinking what should be the subject of my first story, my thoughts merged themselves into a dreamy doze, and I imagined myself writing a story of which the title was – ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’. I was soon wide awake again, and told G. He said, ‘O what a capital title!’ and from that time I had settled in my mind that this should be my first story.4
Lewes warned her not to expect immediate success. He told her, ‘You have wit, description and philosophy’, but questioned whether she possessed the power of ‘dramatic presentation’. She soon settled his doubts. The first chapter of her story, in which Amos Barton is introduced to the reader through the gossipy chit-chat of a provincial tea-party, demonstrated that she had a wonderful ear for ordinary speech and a talent for satirical characterisation; and when, later, she read him the scene of Milly Barton’s death, ‘We both cried over it, and then he came up to me and kissed me, saying, “I think your pathos is better than your fun.”’ Lewes sent the story to John Blackwood, Scottish publisher and editor of the famous magazine, as the work of a male friend who wished to conceal his identity under a nom de plume. Blackwood responded favourably, but asked to see more of the proposed series of ‘Scenes’ before committing himself. When Lewes replied that his ‘friend’ had been somewhat discouraged by this caution, Blackwood quickly offered to publish the story at once, and paid fifty guineas for it, with a proposal for eventual book publication of the series. The career of George Eliot had begun.
The ‘Note’ describes how she began writing fiction, but it does not explain why the Rev. Amos Barton, the most unpromising of fictional heroes, was the first fictional character to be summoned up by her imagination. To answer that qu
estion, and others raised by the subject matter of Scenes of Clerical Life – to unravel its intimate but complex connections with her own experience – it is necessary to put the tales in their historical and biographical context.
Mary Anne Evans was born on 2 November 1819, at South Farm on the estate of Arbury Hall, in the parish of Chilvers Coton, a village near Coventry and Nuneaton in Warwickshire, in the heart of England. Her father Robert Evans was agent to the owner of Arbury Hall, Francis Paget Newdigate, who had inherited it from Sir Roger Newdigate, founder of the celebrated poetry prize at Oxford University. From 1750 till shortly before his death in 1806, Sir Roger devoted most of his time, energy and income to remodelling his house in the Gothic style, then coming into vogue. Arbury Hall, described with meticulous – perhaps too meticulous – accuracy, is the ‘Cheverel Manor’ of ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’, the second tale in Scenes of Clerical Life. Sir Christopher Cheverel and his wife are closely modelled upon Sir Roger and Lady Newdigate, and Mr Gilfil is thought to be a portrait of the Vicar of Chilvers Coton, the Rev. Bernard Gilpin Ebdell, who baptised Mary Anne Evans, though the character of Caterina, the Italian girl adopted by the Newdigates, with whom Gilfil falls in love, was George Eliot’s invention.
The next significant date in Mary Anne’s life was 1828, when she went as a boarder to Miss Wallington’s school in Nuneaton. One of the teachers there, Maria Lewis, was to be Mary Anne’s closest and most influential friend for the next twelve years. Miss Lewis was an earnest young woman who became one of many disciples of a young Evangelical clergyman called John Edmund Jones, who was appointed in that same year Perpetual Curate of the chapel-of-ease at Stockingford, on the outskirts of Nuneaton, and licensed to give a series of Sunday evening lectures at Nuneaton parish church. This innovation gave offence to the more conservative Anglicans in the town, leading to demonstrations and disturbances which provide the background to the third story in Scenes of Clerical Life, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, where Jones is represented in the character of Mr Tryan. Although the Church of England is still riven with disagreements between the High (or Anglo-Catholic), Low (or Evangelical) and Broad (or liberal) parties in its communion, the issues that divide them most sharply today are sexual ethics and women priests, rather than the matters of doctrine and devotional practice to which the Victorians attached such great importance. To fully appreciate Scenes of Clerical Life it is necessary to have some idea of what Evangelicalism meant in those days.