George Eliot

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HAPTER
1:   ‘Dear Old Griff’
Early Years 1819–28

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HAPTER
2:   ‘On Being Called a Saint’
An Evangelical Girlhood 1828–40

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HAPTER
3:   ‘The Holy War’
Coventry 1840–1

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HAPTER
4:   ‘I Fall Not In Love With Everyone’
The Rosehill Years 1841–9

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HAPTER
5:   ‘The Land of Duty and Affection’
Coventry, Geneva and London 1849–51

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HAPTER
6:   ‘The Most Important Means of Enlightenment’
Life at
The Westminster Review
1851–2

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HAPTER
7:   ‘A Man of Heart and Conscience’
Meeting Mr Lewes 1852–4

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HAPTER
8:   ‘I Don’t Think She Is Mad’
Exile 1854–6

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HAPTER
9:  ‘The Breath of Cows and the Scent of Hay’
Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede 1856–9

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HAPTER
10: ‘A Companion Picture of Provincial Life’
The Mill on the Floss 1859–60

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HAPTER
11: ‘Pure, Natural Human Relations’
Silas Marner and Romola 1860–3

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HAPTER
12: ‘The Bent of My Mind Is Conservative’
Felix Holt and The Spanish Gypsy 1864–8

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HAPTER
13: ‘Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings’
Middlemarch 1869–72

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HAPTER
14: ‘Full of the World’
Daniel Deronda 1873–6

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HAPTER
15: ‘A Deep Sense of Change Within’
Death, Love, Death 1876–80

I
N THE EARLY
hours of 22 November 1819 a baby girl was born in a small stone farmhouse, tucked away in the woodiest part of Warwickshire, about four miles from Nuneaton. It was not an important event. Mary Anne was the fifth child and third daughter of Robert Evans, and the terse note Evans made in his diary of her arrival suggests that he had other things to think about that day.
¹
As land agent to the Newdigate family of Arbury Hall, the forty-six-year-old Evans was in charge of 7000 acres of mixed arable and dairy farmland, a coal-mine, a canal and, his particular love, miles of ancient deciduous forest, the remnants of Shakespeare’s Arden. A new baby, a female too, was not something for which a man like Robert Evans had time to stop.

Six months earlier another little girl, equally obscure in her own way, had been born in a corner of Kensington Palace. Princess Alexandrina Victoria was also the child of a middle-aged man, the fifty-two-year-old Prince Edward of Kent, himself the fourth son of Mad King George III. None of George’s surviving twelve children had so far managed to produce a viable heir to succeed the Prince Regent, who was about to take over as king in his own right. It had been made brutally clear to the four elderly remaining bachelors, Edward among them, that the patriotic moment had come to give up their mistresses, acquire legal wives and produce a crop of lusty boys. But despite three sketchy, resentful mar
riages, the desired heir had yet to appear. Still, at this point it was too soon to give up hope completely. Princess Alexandrina Victoria, born on 24 May 1819, was promisingly robust and her mother, while past thirty, was young enough to try again for a son. If anyone bothered to think ahead for the little girl, the most they might imagine was that she would one day become the elder sister of a great king.

Officially the futures of these two little girls, Mary Anne and Alexandrina Victoria, were not promising. As for every other female child born that year, the worlds of commerce, industry and the professions were closed to them. As adults they would not be able to speak in the House of Commons, or vote for someone to do so on their behalf. They would not be eligible to take a degree at one of the ancient universities, become a lawyer, or manage the economic processes which were turning Britain into the most powerful nation on earth. Instead, their duties would be assumed to lie exclusively at home, whether palace or farmhouse, as companions and carers of husbands, children and ageing parents.

Yet that, as we know, is not what happened. Neither girl lived the life that the circumstances of her birth had seemed to decree. Instead, each emerged from obscurity to define the tone and temper of the age. Princess Alexandrina Victoria, pushed further up the line of succession by her father’s early death, even gave her name to it. ‘Victorian’ became the brand name for a confident, expansive hegemony which was extended absent-mindedly beyond her own lifetime. ‘Victorian’ was the sound of unassailable depth, stretch and solidity. It meant money in the bank and ships steaming the earth, factories that clattered all night and buildings that stretched for the sky. Its shape was the odd little figure of Victoria herself, sweet and girlish in the early years, fat and biddyish at the end. Wherever ‘Victorian’ energy and bustle made themselves felt, you could be sure to find that distinctive image, stamped into coins and erected in stone, woven into tablecloths and framed in cheap wood. In its ordinary femininity the figure of Victoria offered the moral counterpoise to all that striving and getting. The solid husband, puffy bosom and string of children represented the kind of good woman for whom Britain was busy getting rich.

George Eliot’s image, by contrast, was rarely seen by anyone. Indeed, it was whispered that she was so hideous that, Medusalike, you only had to look upon her to be turned to stone. And her name, during its early years of fame, suggested the very opposite of Victorianism. Her avowed agnosticism, sexual freedom, commercial success and childlessness were troubling reminders of everything that had been repressed from the public version of life under the great little Queen. By 1860 Victoria and Eliot had come to stand for the twin poles of female behaviour, respectability and disgrace. One gave her name to virtuous repression, a rigid channelling of desire into the safe haven of marriage and family. The other, made wickeder by male disguise, became a symbol of the ‘Fallen Woman’, banished to the edges of society or, in Eliot’s actual case, to a series of dreary suburban exiles.

That was the bluster. In real life – that messy matter which refuses to run along official lines – the Queen and Eliot shared more than distracted, greying fathers. Their emotional inheritance was uncannily similar and pressed their lives into matching moulds. Both had mothers who were intrusive yet remote, a tension which left them edgy for affection until the end of their days. Victoria slept in the Duchess of Kent’s room right up to her coronation, while Eliot spent her first thirty years looking for comfortable middle-aged women whom she could call ‘Mother’. When it came to men, both clung with the hunger of children rather than the secure attachment of grown women. Prince Albert and George Henry Lewes not only negotiated the public world for their partners, but lavished them with the intense and symbiotic affection usually associated with maternally minded wives. And when both men died before them, their widows fell into an extended stupor which recalled the despair of an abandoned baby.

What roused them in the end were intense connections with new and unsuitable men. The Queen found John Brown, then the Munshi, both servants, one black. Eliot, meanwhile, married John Cross, a banker twenty years younger and with nothing more than a gentleman’s education. Menopausal randiness was sniggeringly invoked as the reason for these ludicrous liaisons. Victoria was called ‘Mrs Brown’ behind her back. And when
John Cross had to be fished out of Venice’s Grand Canal during his honeymoon, the whisper went round the London clubs that he had preferred to drown rather than make love to the hideous old George Eliot.

Because of Eliot’s ‘scandalous’ private life, which actually the Queen did not think so very bad, there was no possibility of the two women meeting. Yet recognising their twinship, they stalked each other obliquely down the years. Eliot first mentions Victoria in 1848 when, having briefly caught the revolutionary mood, she speaks slangily in a letter of ‘our little humbug of a queen’.
²
Ironically, only eleven years later, Victoria had fallen in love with Eliot’s first full-length novel,
Adam Bede
, because of what she saw as its social conservatism, its warm endorsement of the
status quo
. The villagers of Hayslope, headed by Adam himself, reminded her of her beloved Highland servants, and in 1861 she commissioned paintings of two of the book’s central scenes by the artist Edward Henry Corbould.

George Eliot noticed how hard the Queen took the loss of Prince Albert in 1861 and, aware of the similarities in their age and temperament, wondered how she would manage the dreadful moment when it came to her. The Queen, in turn, was touched by the delicate letter of condolence that Eliot and Lewes wrote to one of her courtier’s children on his death and asked whether she might tear off their double signature as a memento.
³

The Queen’s daughters went even further. By the 1870s Eliot’s increasing celebrity and the evident stability of her relationship with Lewes meant that she was no longer a total social exile. Among the great and the good who pressed for an introduction were two of the royal princesses. Brisk and bright, Vicky and Louise lobbied behind the scenes for a meeting and then, in Louise’s case at least, dispensed with royal protocol by coming up to speak to George Eliot first.
⁴

The princesses were among the thousands of ordinary Victorians, neither especially clever nor brave, who ignored the early grim warnings of clergymen and critics about the ‘immorality’ of George Eliot’s life and work. By the 1860s working-class men and middle-class mothers, New Englanders (that most puritan of constituencies) and Jews, Italians and Australians were all reading her. Cheap editions and foreign translations carried George
Eliot into every kind of home. Even lending libraries, those most skittishly respectable of ‘family’ institutions, bowed to consumer demand and grudgingly increased their stock of
Adam Bede
and
The Mill on the Floss
.

What is more, all these Victorians read the damnable George Eliot with an intensity and engagement that was never the case with Dickens or Trollope. While readers of
Bleak House
might sniff over the death of Jo and even stir themselves to wonder whether something might not be done for crossing-sweepers in general, they did not bombard Dickens with letters asking how they should live. That intimate engagement was reserved for Eliot, who alone seemed to understand the pain and difficulty of being alive in the nineteenth century. From around the world, men and women wrote to her begging for advice about the most personal matters, from marriage through God to their own poetry. Or else, like Princess Louise, they stalked her at concert halls, hoping for a word or a glance.

The worries which Eliot’s troubled readers laid before her concerned the dislocations of a social and moral world that was changing at the speed of light. Here were the doubts and disorientations that had been displaced from that triumphant version of Victorianism. An exploding urban population, for instance, might well suggest bustling productivity, but it could also mean a growing sense of social anomie. Rural communities were indeed invigorated by their new proximity to big towns, but they were also losing their fittest sons and daughters to factories and, later, to offices and shops. Meanwhile the suburbs, conceived as a
rus in urbe
, pleased no one, least of all George Eliot, who spent five years hating Richmond and Wandsworth for their odd mix of nosy neighbours and lack of real green.

For if in one way Victorians felt more separate from each other, in others they were being offered opportunities to come together as never before. It was not just the railway that was changing the psycho-geography of the country, bringing friends, enemies and business partners into constant contact. The postal service, democratised in 1840 by the introduction of the Penny Post, allowed letters to fly from one end of the country to the other at a pace that makes our own mail service look like a slowcoach. Then there was the telephone which, at the end of her life, George
Eliot was invited to try. As a result of these changes Victorians found themselves pulled in two directions. Scattering from their original communities, they spent the rest of their lives trying to reconstitute these earlier networks in imaginary forms.

Science, too, was taking away the old certainties and replacing them with new and sometimes painful ones. It would not be until 1859 that Darwin would publish
Origin of Species
, but plenty of other geologists and biologists were already embracing the possibility that the world was older than Genesis suggested, in which case the Bible was perhaps not the last word on God’s word. Perhaps, indeed, it was not God’s word at all, but rather the product of man’s need to believe in something other than himself. This certainly was the double conclusion that Eliot came to during the early anonymous years of her career when she translated those seminal German texts, Strauss’s
The Life of Jesus
(1835–6) and Feuerbach’s
The Essence of Christianity
(1841). Her readers likewise wrestled with the awful possibility that there was no moral authority except the one which was to be found by digging deep within themselves. Not only did a godless universe lay terrifying burdens of responsibility upon the individual, but it unsettled the idea of an afterlife. To a culture which had always believed that, no matter how dismal earthly life might be, there was a reward waiting in heaven, this was a horrifying blow beside which the possibility that one was an ape paled into insignificance.

That much-vaunted prosperity turned out to be a tricky business too. For every Victorian who felt rich, there were two who felt very poor indeed, especially during the volatile 1840s and again in the late 1860s. During Eliot’s early years in the Midlands she saw the effect of trade slumps on the lives of working families. As a schoolgirl in Nuneaton she had watched while idle weavers queued for free soup; at home, during the holidays, she sorted out second-hand clothing for unemployed miners’ families. Even her own sister, married promisingly to a gentlemanly doctor, found herself as a widow fighting to stay out of the workhouse.

To middle-class Victorians these sights and stories added to a growing sense that they were not, after all, in control of the economic and social revolution being carried out in their name. Getting the vote in 1832 had initially seemed to give them the
power to reshape the world in their own image: the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 had represented a real triumph of urban needs over the agricultural interest. But it soon became clear that early fears that 1832 would be the first step towards a raggle-taggle democracy were justified. On three occasions during the ‘hungry forties’ working-class men and women rallied themselves around the Charter, a frightening document demanding universal suffrage and annual parliaments. By the mid-186os, with the economy newly unsettled, urban working men were once again agitating violently for the vote.

These were worrying times. The fat little figure of the Queen was not enough to soothe Victorians’ fears that the blustery world in which they lived might not one day blow apart completely. In fear and hope they turned to the woman whose name they were initially only supposed to whisper and whose image they were seldom allowed to see. George Eliot’s novels offered Victorians the chance to understand their edginess in its wider intellectual setting and to rehearse responses by identifying with characters who looked and sounded like themselves. Thanks to her immense erudition in everything from theology to biology, anthropology to psychology, Eliot was able to give current doubts their proper historic context. Dorothea’s ardent desire to do great deeds, for instance, is set alongside St Teresa’s matching passion in the sixteenth century and their contrasting destinies explained. In the same way Tom Tulliver’s battles with his sister Maggie are understood not just in terms of their individual personalities, but as the meeting point of several arcs of genetic, cultural, and family conditioning at a particular moment in human history.