Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  When The Mill on the Floss came out in 1860, she was by then one of the most acclaimed authors of her day, and it became well known that George Eliot was a woman living with a married man. (Why she clung to her pseudonym even after her true identity was revealed is unclear.) People loved her books but judged her as immoral for her unorthodox relationship. Lewes’s wife was cast as the victim in this drama, and Marian Evans as the predator. Never mind that Agnes had given birth to not one but another four sons outside her marriage. Although Lewes had forgiven her, he had ceased to think of her as his wife. He went on with his life in a discreet and dignified manner—and did not embarrass Agnes as she had embarrassed him. He continued to support his family financially, yet his loyalty to Marian was unwavering. And she did not live with him until she knew that he would never again live under the same roof with Agnes.

  In response to the flurry of scandal, “George Eliot” took full ownership of her new self, replying to letters addressed to “Miss Evans” with a chilly correction, informing one friend, “I request that any one who has a regard for me will cease to speak of me by my maiden name.” Marian Evans represented a lonely, ugly country girl whom the author no longer knew and now deemed “extinct.” George Eliot, her “real” self, was famous and influential (however immoral). She produced Silas Marner in 1861, and Romola two years later. Set in Renaissance Florence, Romola was a poorly received departure from her earlier works. She was not dissuaded by disappointment, and kept writing: Felix Holt the Radical came out in 1866—and four years later came her masterpiece, Middlemarch. (Emily Dickinson wrote to a cousin: “What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?”)

  By 1876, when Eliot published Daniel Deronda, another breathtaking accomplishment (notable for its sympathetic portrait of Jews), she was forgiven. She was the pride of her country and was proclaimed the greatest living English novelist. Her work, finally, spoke for itself, and a judgmental public had listened and fallen silent. She was adored and admired, a literary giant—and a very wealthy woman. Whereas she and Lewes had once been exiles in London society, now they were celebrated, visited by Emerson, Turgenev, and other eminent intellectuals. A handsome American banker, John Cross, whom they affectionately called “dear nephew,” managed their business affairs. All was well.

  But on November 30, 1878, Lewes was dead by evening. Eliot had reported months earlier to a friend that Lewes was “racked with cramps from suppressed gout and feeling his inward economy all wrong.” The sixty-one-year-old had succumbed to cancer, though he had never received the diagnosis.

  They’d been together for more than two decades, and although Eliot was melancholic by nature, these had been the best years of her life. In a sense, Lewes had made everything possible. And when Eliot had received a manuscript of Adam Bede, bound in red leather, from her publisher, she had inscribed it to Lewes: “To my dear husband, George Henry Lewes, I give this M.S. of a work which would never have been written but for the happiness which his love has conferred on my life. Marian Lewes, March 23, 1859.”

  In her grief-stricken stupor, she felt unable to attend his funeral. Each new day without him represented “a new acquaintance with grief.” Her old friend Turgenev sent a letter of condolence assuring her that the whole of “learned Europe” mourned with her. When she responded to such letters, she signed herself “Your loving but half dead Marian.” She was severely depressed and weighed just over a hundred pounds. She found a sense of purpose by establishing a £5,000 grant in Lewes’s name at Cambridge University, and by devoting her waking hours to editing his final work. Eliot never wrote another novel. She would be dead within two years.

  Her fans demanded her attention more than ever; it seemed that her fame had grown after her loss, which she found deeply unsettling. Requests for photographs of the famous George Eliot were politely declined, as the author explained that she treasured her privacy and did not wish to be stared at in public. One particularly aggressive autograph hunter was finally silenced with a form letter, a reply that the author had dictated: “Mrs. Lewes (George Eliot), whom he has mistakenly addressed as Miss Marian Evans, has no photograph of herself and systematically abstains from giving her autograph.”

  One might expect that at this late stage of life—she was sixty—her knack for courting scandal would have been a distant memory. But she provoked rebuke once again, in May 1880, by marrying John Cross, who was twenty years her junior. He’d proposed to her three times before she accepted. Now she would have the legal marriage she’d always longed for; in this regard, she was rather old-fashioned, and had suffered from being unable to legitimize an otherwise blissful longtime union. At last, she could marry, if not the love of her life, a man she loved.

  For their honeymoon, John and Marian traveled to Venice, where a strange mishap occurred. One morning, suffering from a depressive episode, Cross jumped from the balcony of their suite at the Hotel Europa (where luminaries such as Proust and Verdi had stayed) and landed in the Grand Canal. He was perhaps embarrassed, but physically unharmed. Venetian newspapers reported the incident, and the local police recorded it as a suicide attempt. Eliot alerted John’s brother by telegram, and he joined them for the rest of their honeymoon. They blamed the heat for John’s bizarre leap, and the trio traveled on to Munich.

  Upon their return home, the couple attended a dinner party in their honor, after which a guest wrote a petty and unkind missive to her sister: “George Eliot, old as she is, and ugly, really looked very sweet and winning in spite of both. She was dressed in a short soft satin walking dress with a lace wrap half shading the body, a costume most artistically designed to show her slenderness, yet hiding the squareness of age.” She added that there was not a single person in the room (including Eliot’s husband) “whose mother she might not have been. . . . She adores her husband, and it seemed to me it hurt her a little to have him talk so much to me. It made her, in her pain, slightly irritated and snappish. . . . He may forget the twenty years difference between them, but she never can.”

  Evans changed her name yet again, to Mary Anne Cross, but the marriage lasted less than a year. She died unexpectedly on December 22, 1880, at sixty-one—the same age at which Lewes died. Only a few days earlier, she and John had attended a concert and seen a performance of Agamemnon. In what is believed to be her final utterance, she complained of “great pain in the left side.” Then she was gone.

  Left to tend to the legacy of this towering figure, Cross had his own minor identity crisis; he was referred to as “George Eliot’s widow.” He only bolstered his image as “Mr. Eliot” when he published a biography of his late wife in 1885. It would be a stretch to assume that his marriage to Eliot had been consummated, but he is said to have truly loved and revered her. “I am left alone in this new House we meant to be so happy in,” he wrote to a friend. He never remarried.

  Even in death, Eliot paid a steep price for her unconventional life: in her will, she asked to be buried at Westminster Abbey, but the request was denied. She was dismissed as “a person whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian practice in regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to dogma.” (This was certainly true.) Further, the church noted that despite the author’s wish for a funeral in the Abbey, “[o]ne cannot eat one’s cake and have it too. Those who elect to be free in thought and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so called, which the world offers to those who put up with its fetters.”

  It was not until the centenary of her death that she would receive a memorial stone in Poet’s Corner. (She was in good company in that regard: Lord Byron, whose life was shockingly scandalous, died in 1824 and wasn’t given a stone until 1969.) The eminent scholar Gordon Haight had the honor of delivering the speech for the unveiling of her stone at Westminster Abbey on June 21, 1980, five years before his own death. “The novels of George Eliot provide the most varied and truthful picture we have of English religious life in the
nineteenth century,” he said. Whereas the novel had often previously served as a trivial pastime, he noted, Eliot elevated it into “a compelling moral force.”

  After Eliot died, Henry James paid her a glorious tribute: “What is remarkable, extraordinary—and the process remains inscrutable and mysterious—is that this quiet, anxious, sedentary, serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without adventures, without extravagance, assumption, or bravado, should have made us believe that nothing in the world was alien to her; should have produced such rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multifold life of man.”

  Today we take for granted how much Eliot sacrificed to become one of the greatest authors in the history of Western literature. She is simply George Eliot, literary master, staid historical figure, required college reading, admired by generations of authors. Her iconic Victorian visage now adorns posters, calendars, coffee mugs, stationery. But this pioneer could never forget the toll of her fame.

  Reflecting on her story, it is tempting to interpret one of the concluding passages of The Mill on the Floss as the author’s weary assessment of her own life:

  Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.

  He was obsessive-compulsive and collected books about fairies

  Chapter 4

  Lewis Carroll & CHARLES DODGSON

  A show of hands if you’ve never heard of Alice in Wonderland. That’s what I thought. You’d have to have fallen down a rabbit hole to be unfamiliar with Lewis Carroll’s 1865 masterpiece, which in the past hundred years has been adapted for television and film numerous times, including three silent films, a British musical, a pornographic movie, an animated Disney version, a Japanese anime TV series (Fushigi no Kuni no Alice), and in 2010, a 3-D blockbuster directed by Tim Burton. It has been turned into graphic novels, plays, and operas, and it was even appropriated as the title of an execrable album by Jewel (Goodbye Alice in Wonderland). It has been translated into 125 languages, including Yiddish, Swahili, and Pitjantjatjara, an Aboriginal language of Australia. It has influenced James Joyce and Jefferson Airplane. There have been Alice theme parks, mugs, teapots, soap dishes, chess sets, T-shirts, and tea towels. Aside from Shakespeare, and the Bible, it’s the most widely translated and quoted book of all time. Following the first edition illustrated by John Tenniel, subsequent versions have been accompanied by drawings from artists such as Arthur Rackham, Mervyn Peake, Ralph Steadman, and Salvador Dalí. Many woefully misguided authors have attempted sequels to Alice. Parodies have been published—some brilliant, some without merit. Vladimir Nabokov translated a Russian edition when he was just twenty-four years old. And through all its iterations, Alice has never been out of print.

  This classic story, perhaps the most-read children’s book in the world, has also been banned on at least a few occasions. In the early twentieth century, a high school in New Hampshire censored Alice in Wonderland owing to its “expletives, references to masturbation and sexual fantasies, and derogatory characterizations of teachers and of religious ceremonies.” (Fair enough.) And in 1931, China deemed it forbidden material because “animals should not use human language.”

  The author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (its original title) was Lewis Carroll, but that name was a hiding place. The eccentric Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy, eminent Oxford mathematician and lecturer, had created the nom de plume as a means of shelter from which he could let his imagination run wild. He wanted his “day job” to remain undisturbed and private. Reflecting his obsession with wordplay since childhood, the pseudonym was a clever transposition of his real name: “Lewis” was the anglicized form of Ludovicus (Latin for “Lutwidge”), and “Carroll” was an Irish surname similar to the Latin Carolus, from which the name “Charles” is derived.

  He was so mortified by publicity that he refused to acknowledge his alter ego. Whenever he was a guest in someone’s home, if the name “Lewis Carroll” arose in conversation, he would leave. Autograph hunters were turned away without exception.

  Her Majesty Queen Victoria loved Alice and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, so much that she wrote a letter to Lewis Carroll, asking if he would send her the rest of his books. Unable to decline a request from the Queen, the humble author obliged as best he could, sending her numerous volumes—all by Charles Dodgson, and all mathematical texts, including the popular beach read Condensation of Determinants, Being a New and Brief Method for Computing Their Arithmetical Values.

  Until the end of his life, this reticent polymath maintained a strict divide between himself and the fanciful Lewis Carroll. “For 30 years I have managed to keep the 2 personalities distinct,” he boasted in a letter written three years before his death, “and to avoid all communication, in propria persona, with the outer world, about my books.”

  Fastidious in everything he did—today, we might apply the clinical term “obsessive-compulsive,” a mental disorder—Dodgson went so far as to conceal his own handwriting. When he had to handle official correspondence for Lewis Carroll, he’d ask someone to copy out his response so that no one would have a sample of his writing. In 1883, he wrote to the divinity school at Oxford, begging the staff never to release anything he had handwritten. “It is a thing I often have to do—people seeming to assume that everybody likes notoriety,” he explained, “and scarcely believing me when I say I dislike it particularly. My constant aim is to remain, personally, unknown to the world.”

  More than a hundred years after his death, it is still hard to believe that the same man who wrote whimsical, exuberant classics of Victorian literature also produced arcane texts such as Notes on the First Two Books of Euclid, Designed for Candidates for Responsions; and An Elementary Treatise on Determinants with Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraical Geometry. No wonder he needed a pen name.

  To recount, even broadly, the achievements of Dodgson’s life is the equivalent of tracing the lives of ten extraordinary men. The sheer vastness and absurd variety of his accomplishments, beyond his literary success, is exhausting to contemplate. He defies comprehension; only speculation is possible.

  His beginnings were unremarkable. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born in Daresbury, Cheshire, on January 27, 1832, the third child (and first son) of eleven children—there would be five more sisters and three brothers. His father, Charles Dodgson, and mother, Frances Jean Lutwidge, were first cousins. This genetic intermix might be to blame for the severe stammer that afflicted their son throughout his life, as well as most of his siblings. In childhood, he suffered a high fever making him permanently deaf in his right ear.

  The young Dodgson had a fantastic imagination. He devised elaborate games with lists of rules, performed magic tricks to entertain his family, and created a puppet theater, writing plays and handling the troupe of marionettes himself. He wrote stories and poems (including acrostics), drew sketches, and wrote, edited, and illustrated magazines for his family. This was a common activity for many Victorians; what was unusual was for a young boy to lead the creative efforts and make all the booklets almost entirely alone. He was educated at home in his early years and proved a precocious reader, supposedly tackling The Pilgrim’s Progress at age seven. Frances, who doted on her son, kept a record of his endeavors—“Religious Reading: Private,” “Religious Reading with Mama,” and “Daily Reading: Useful—Private.” In an 1898 biography of Dodgson, his nephew Stuart Dodgson Collingwood wrote that “the boy invented the strangest diversions for himself . . . [and] numbered certain snails and toads among his intimate friends. . . . [He] lived in that charming ‘Wonderland’ which he afterwards described so vividly; but for all that he was a thorough boy, and loved to climb the trees and to scramb
le about in the marl-pits.” It was an idyllic childhood.

  He may have been a “thorough boy,” but he was wary of other boys. “I am fond of children (except boys),” he famously wrote, and admitted once that “little girls I can now and then get along with . . . but with little boys I’m out of my element altogether.” His negative sentiment might be traced to his time at Richmond Grammar School, where he was sent at the age of twelve. In a letter home, he recounted his unhappy initiation: “The boys have played two tricks upon me which were these—they first proposed to play at ‘King of the cobblers’ and asked me if I would be king, to which I agreed, then they made me sit down . . . and immediately began kicking me and knocking on all sides.” He was bitten by another student, too. Although this was a rude awakening from his early years at the parsonage at Daresbury, where his father was a vicar (eventually rising to archdeacon), the boy quickly adapted to his new life. The headmaster sent an enthusiastic report to Dodgson’s father, saying that “he possesses, along with other and excellent natural endowments, a very uncommon share of genius.”

  He switched schools after a year and a half, but left feeling confident, intellectually superior to his peers, and, toughened by experience, unafraid to challenge would-be bullies. For the next four years he attended the public school Rugby; founded in 1567, it was one of Britain’s most prestigious boarding schools (and the source of the sport). At the time Dodgson enrolled, Rugby was considered the best public school in England. Here, however, the hazing and cruelty proved far more brutal than had been the case at Richmond.