by David Lodge
Because the Church of England emerged, historically, out of a kind of compromise, attempts to reinvigorate it have usually taken the form of emphasising either its Catholic or its Protestant inheritance, and the Evangelical movement was emphatically Protestant in spirit. It arose in the late eighteenth century, largely in response to the development of Methodism, which itself began as a movement for renewal within the Church of England, but became a separate Church. The Evangelical movement had much in common, theologically, with Methodism and other independent or ‘dissenting’ sects whose members worshipped in chapels rather than churches. It stressed justification by faith, not works, the experience of personal ‘conversion’, the absolute authority of the Bible, and the priority of preaching over liturgy, and affirmed these principles within the Established Church with considerable success. Until the antithetical, Catholic-oriented Oxford Movement began in the 1830s, led by Keble and Newman, the Evangelical party was the most dynamic in the Church of England, and its influence persisted throughout the century. The qualities that we now think of as most characteristic, for better or worse, of Victorian culture and society were mostly Evangelical in inspiration: earnestness, idealism, and the kind of repressiveness that encourages hypocrisy. The abolition of slavery and much humane factory legislation were typical Evangelical achievements, but it was essentially conservative as a social force. It has been said that the Evangelical movement saved the Church of England from haemorrhaging its middle- and lower-class membership to Methodism, and it must be included in the historian Daniel Halévy’s plausible thesis that Methodism saved Britain from revolution in the nineteenth century.
It is not surprising that a gifted, sensitive, middle-class girl, whose plain appearance offered no great temptations to worldliness, growing up in the English midlands at this time, should have come under the influence of Evangelicalism; or that she should have followed, with a precocious child’s sharp observation and tenacious memory, the dramatic ministry of the Rev. John Edmund Jones. This clergyman’s huge success as a preacher, which caused something of a religious revival in Nuneaton, also provoked envy and hostility from the more traditionalist and materialistic sections of the community, who campaigned aggressively against him under the banner of orthodoxy until his premature death from consumption in 1831. The following year Mary Anne moved to a new school, run by the Miss Franklins in Coventry, where she boarded until 1835. The Franklins being Baptists, there was nothing in the school’s ethos to discourage the young girl’s piety, and there is evidence that in 1834, around the time of her fifteenth birthday, Marian underwent the experience of ‘conversion’ – acknowledgement of one’s sinfulness, combined with a conviction of one’s personal salvation through the imputed merits of Christ’s sacrifice – which was central to the faith of Evangelical Anglicans and Dissenters alike.
In 1836, Mary Anne’s mother died, and the following year her sister Chrissie married. Mary Anne now became her father’s housekeeper, reading voraciously and learning languages in her spare time. It was, as Kathryn Hughes says, ‘one of the greatest self-educations of the century’.5 The resident clergyman at Chilvers Coton at this period was a curate, the Rev. John Gwyther. He was also of the Evangelical persuasion, but lacked the charisma of the Rev. John Edmund Jones. Indeed he was notorious for his obstinacy and tactlessness, and caused considerable resentment among his parishioners on numerous occasions (by, for instance, substituting Methodist-style hymns for the traditional singing of psalms in church services) and gave some scandal by his association with a newcomer to the parish who styled herself as a ‘Countess’ and whose alleged father was suspected by many of being her lover. In 1841 Gwyther was rather unfairly ousted from the parish to make room for a relative of the incumbent. Many years later, as a regular subscriber to Blackwood’s, he was startled to find himself so faithfully portrayed in the story of Amos Barton that his own daughter suspected him of writing it.6
Mary Anne’s correspondence, mainly with Maria Lewis, which has survived from this period when she was at home looking after her father, is impressive testimony to her intellectual power and industry, but gives a rather forbidding impression of the Evangelical piety, at once severe and slightly unctuous, which could produce such a comment as this, on the art in which she was later to distinguish herself:
The Scriptural declaration, ‘As face answereth to face in a glass, so the heart of man to man’, will exonerate me from the charge of uncharitableness or too high an estimation of myself if I venture to believe that the same causes which exist in my own breast to render novels and romances pernicious have their counterpart in that of every fellowcreature.7
But not long after that was written, in 1839, there are hints in her correspondence that her sharp intellect was finding that some of the books she was reading, purporting to defend Christian ‘evidences’ against rationalist and scientific criticism, raised more problems than they solved. At this period, when most Christians still believed in the literal truth of the Bible, orthodox theologians were mounting a desperate defence against the findings of geological science and the systematic textual and historical study of Scripture, both of which in different ways undermined the authority of the Bible. Evangelicals, who regarded the Bible as the sole and absolute source of religious truth, were particularly vulnerable to demonstrations of its unreliability as a factual record, which perhaps explains the abruptness of Mary Anne Evans’s transition from belief to unbelief.
In 1841 she moved with her father to Coventry, where, in November of that year, she made the acquaintance of a progressive intellectual couple, Charles and Caroline Bray, and a close friendship quickly developed. The Brays were Unitarians – just about the most theologically liberal version of Christianity available at the time – but Caroline’s brother, Charles Hennell, was the author of a book called An Inquiry into the Origins of Christianity, published in 1838, which had shaken her faith in even that diluted system of belief, and she stopped going to church. Hennell’s book, as Basil Willey lucidly demonstrated,8 was remarkable for the extent to which it anticipated or independently confirmed the essential arguments of distinguished German biblical scholars like David Strauss: that the Gospels could not be regarded as the historical depositions of eye-witnesses, but were, like the books of the Old Testament, essentially mythical writings, composed some time after the events they purported to report, containing only a small element of historical fact, but expressing authentic spiritual ideas in terms appropriate to the superstitious and relatively unrefined culture from which they originated. It is not entirely clear whether the Brays introduced Mary Anne to Hennell’s book, or whether she was already acquainted with it. Caroline Bray later denied that she and her husband were responsible for Mary Anne’s loss of faith, claiming that she was as sceptical as themselves when they met. What is certain is that discussing these matters with the Brays, and either reading or rereading Hennell’s study in that context, tipped her over the edge between private doubt and public apostasy.
Only two months after meeting the Brays she announced the change in her views by refusing to go to church on the first Sunday of 1842, and was immediately embroiled in a long and painful dispute with her father and other members of the family. Various Evangelical divines were called in to persuade her out of her infidelity, but they were invariably bested in disputation with her. A respected Baptist minister retreated saying, ‘That young lady must have the devil at her elbow to suggest her doubts, for there was not a book I recommended to her in support of Christian evidences that she had not read.’9 The stress of the situation naturally threw her more and more into the sympathetic company of the Brays and their circle of progressive – and permissive – friends. Both the Brays had discreet affairs with other partners, and it is possible that Marian’s friendship with Charles was more than platonic. It was through them that she was commissioned to translate Strauss’s Life of Jesus, and met John Chapman, who in due course published it. After her father’s death in 1849, Marian, as she now
called herself, moved to London. For a while she lodged in John Chapman’s house, where the ménage included his mistress as well as his wife, and there is evidence in Chapman’s diary that she had a sexual relationship with this incorrigible philanderer. Chapman was an intellectual lightweight who recognised Marian Evans’s ability, and when he acquired the Westminster Review in 1851 he invited her to become, in effect, his managing editor. One of its contributors, and a member of the progressive, free-thinking, somewhat bohemian circle in which Marian now moved, was George Henry Lewes, a versatile man of letters who had turned his hand to journalism, drama and fiction, and would soon make his reputation with a life of Goethe and popular books on biology. He too led a very unconventional domestic life. His wife had an ongoing relationship with another man by whom she had several children whom Lewes generously adopted. By so doing he was deemed to have condoned her adultery and thus barred himself from seeking a divorce under the laws of the time. When he and Marian Evans fell in love they decided to consider themselves married, and announced the fact by making an extended trip to Germany in the summer of 1854, leaving a buzz of scandalised comment in their wake.
Marian ceased to be editor of the Westminster Review, but Chapman continued to publish her essays and reviews in the journal. These writings, published anonymously, as was the custom, have a special interest for the glimpses they afford of George Eliot’s thinking about life and art as she prepared herself to attempt fiction. Of particular importance in this context is the concept of realism. One of the earliest recorded uses of this word in an aesthetic sense occurred in George Eliot’s review of Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Volume III, in 1856:
The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism – the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be obtained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality. The thorough acceptance of this doctrine would remould our life . . .10
It is worth noting that for George Eliot ‘realism’ involved not only a positive commitment to the observation of reality, but a negative attitude towards false romanticism, and that it had not merely an aesthetic justification, but a moral one too. She developed these ideas further, shortly afterwards, in a long review article entitled ‘The Natural History of German Life’, on the work of Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl, a pioneer in sociology. George Eliot contrasted Riehl’s exact, clear-sighted observation of the German peasantry with the false idealisation of literary pastoral: ‘We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness.’ But note that we are to be taught to feel. That is because ‘the greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies’, because ‘Art is the nearest thing to life. It is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot.’11 We come, here, upon an idea that persists through George Eliot’s letters and novels, which has been called her ‘doctrine of sympathy’.12 It was her substitute for the faith she had lost, and the moral force behind her fiction, from Scenes of Clerical Life onwards.
For George Eliot, as for most thoughtful Victorians who lost their faith, the main problem was how the ethical idealism of Christianity might be retained after its supernatural sanctions had been discredited. Liberation from the doctrine of original sin, salvation and damnation was a great relief, but could righteousness survive without a system of eternal rewards and punishments? George Eliot took her stand on the power of love – most forcefully in her essay on the eighteenth-century poet of pious reflection, Edward Young, who confidently declared:
As in the dying parent dies the child,
Virtue with Immortality expires.
‘The fact is,’ George Eliot retorts, turning upon a poet she had revered in early youth, ‘I do not love myself alone, whatever logical necessity there may be for that in your mind.’ She loves her family and friends and ‘through that love I sympathise with like affections in other men’.13
The essay on Young, begun in 1856 before the composition of ‘Amos Barton’, and completed after it, was George Eliot’s last fling as an explicit critic of Christian orthodoxy. Its confidently secular scorn finds no echo in Scenes, or in the novels that followed, for reasons that George Eliot tried to explain to a Swiss friend who, having just read Adam Bede, published in 1859, whose heroine is a Methodist preacher, could hardly recognise in its authorial voice the bold freethinker he had met ten years previously in Geneva:
When I was in Geneva, I had not yet lost the attitude of antagonism which belongs to the renunciation of any belief – also, I was unhappy, and in a state of discord and rebellion towards my own lot. Ten years of experience have wrought great changes in that inward self: I have no longer any antagonism towards any faith in which human sorrow and human longing for purity have expressed themselves . . . I have not returned to dogmatic Christianity . . . but I see in it the highest expression of the religious sentiment that has yet found its place in the history of mankind . . . on many points, where I used to delight in expressing intellectual difference, I now delight in feeling an emotional agreement.14
In her developing philosophy of life, Christianity was something to be, not rejected, but assimilated into a nobler and more comprehensive humanist faith – a project in which she was encouraged by passages like this in Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, which she first read in 1851, and translated in 1854:
. . . out of the heart, out of the inward impulse to do good, to live and die for man, out of the divine instinct for benevolence which desires to make all happy, and exclude none, not even the most abandoned and abject, out of the moral duty of benevolence, in the highest sense . . . out of the human nature, therefore, as it reveals itself through the heart, has sprung what is best, what is true in Christianity.15
What George Eliot did in her fiction – and this is where her commitment to literary realism came in – was to test Feuerbach’s rather vague and abstract assertion against the hard facts of experience, showing how love and sympathy might be cultivated in the most unpromising circumstances and in the teeth of the bitterest discouragement. She chose, for her first attempt, to take as her human material the lives of clergymen, thus making the old faith witness, despite itself, to the validity of the new; or, as Lewes more reassuringly put it when he wrote, under George Eliot’s direction, to Blackwood, proposing Scenes of Clerical Life:
It will consist of tales and sketches illustrative of the actual life of our country clergy about a quarter of a century ago; but solely in its human and not at all in its theological aspect . . . representing the clergy like any other class with the humours, sorrows and troubles of other men.16
The clearest indication in George Eliot’s journalism at this time of what she was aiming to do, and to avoid, in her fiction, came in a long and witty review article in the Westminster Review entitled ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’. Most of the novels she was reviewing were religious in theme, and she found that:
As a general rule, the ability of a lady novelist to describe actual life and her fellowmen, is in inverse proportion to her confident eloquence about God and the other world, and the means by which she actually chooses to conduct you to true ideas of the invisible is a totally false picture of the visible.17
She noted a contradiction between the spiritual pretensions of the lady novelists and their fascination with the glamour and wealth of the aristocracy – a feature that was particularly incongruous in novels written from an Evangelical point of view. ‘The real drama of Evangelicalism – and it has abundance of fine drama for anyone who has genius enough to discern and reproduce it – lies among the middle and lower classes’, she declared, blowing a trumpet, under cover of journalistic anonymity, to herald her own fictional endeavours.18 George Eliot finished writing ‘Silly Novels�
�� on 12 September 1856. Eleven days later she began writing ‘The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton’.
In many respects ‘Amos Barton’ was the most original (though not of course the greatest) work of fiction George Eliot ever wrote. In no other novel or story did she carry out so uncompromisingly her own programme of making the commonplace and unglamorous figure the centre of attention, or allow her narrative such freedom to follow its own inner logic, assuming a shape that seems given by experience rather than dictated by art or moral purpose. In ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, and still more obviously in the novels that followed, George Eliot grew in eloquence, wisdom, social vision and psychological penetration, but at the same time she tended, in the interest of thematic explicitness, to idealise her heroes and heroines, and to moralise her narratives into patterns of reward and retribution through the construction of a complex and sometimes contrived ‘plot’. Her namesake, T. S. Eliot, overstated the matter when he wrote to a friend in 1918, ‘George Eliot had a great talent, and wrote one great story, Amos Barton, and went steadily down hill afterwards.’19 But paradoxically the longer she went on writing, the more ‘Victorian’ a novelist George Eliot seemed to become; while her first story has about it a naturalness, a clean economy of line, a confidence in the significance of the quotidian, which anticipate the early modern masters of the short story, like Maupassant, Chekhov, or the Joyce of Dubliners, and it was these qualities to which T. S. Eliot responded. It was probably because she was conscious of not producing what was generally expected of a ‘story’ in her day, that she called her earliest attempts in fiction at first ‘Sketches’, and then ‘Scenes’, and insisted on ‘Amos Barton’ appearing in Blackwood’s under the general title of Scenes of Clerical Life even though the future of the series was at that point uncertain.20