George Eliot (28 page)

The next five or so years must have been bleak for the family. It is unclear how Elizabeth Lewes, as she styled herself, survived in something approaching respectability. It was probably desperation which drove her in November 1823 to marry Captain John Willim. A former captain in the East India Company, the forty-six-year-old Willim was now retired on half-pay. While this was better than nothing, it was hardly a fortune. In any case, Willim and his wife got on badly, and the boys seem to have regarded him as a tetchy nuisance. It is quite possible that for periods of the marriage the Captain actually lived apart from his ready-made and probably unwanted family. Even towards the end of his life he was causing trouble, refusing to let anyone into the London home, which he was again sharing with his wife. Lewes, by now the only surviving son, knew enough of the Captain to take his mother’s complaints seriously. ‘I told her to tell him that unless he could treat her better she should come and live with us,’ he recorded in his journal.
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When Willim died in 1864 Lewes dutifully sorted out the estate but confided to the publisher Blackwood that he was hardly sad about the removal of the man who had made his mother’s life a misery.
³³

So Lewes’s childhood was edgy and restless. The family circled southern England and northern France looking for somewhere
cheap to live. From Stroud in Gloucestershire they moved to Southampton and by 1827 they were in Plymouth, staying with Mrs Willim’s sister. The following year the Lewes-Willim household was on the move again, this time crossing the Channel for a stay in Nantes. Living economically and anonymously in France was a popular option for impoverished middle-class British families who found it impossible to keep up standards at home. It was now that George began to learn the French language and manners which were to become such a remarked-on part of his adult persona. When the American feminist Margaret Fuller met him at the Carlyles’ she reported that he was a ‘witty, French, flippant sort of man’.
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Henry James recalled another dinner party, in the last year of Lewes’s life, where the little man told a string of funny stories in colloquial French. James was unusual in approving of Lewes’s gay cosmopolitanism.
³⁵
Most commentators followed Margaret Fuller in inferring that there was a ‘sparkling shallowness’ in Lewes’s ability to straddle cultures and sensibilities. This suspicion was part of a more general xenophobia, which looked upon foreigners, Frenchmen particularly, as upstarts and bounders. It was a prejudice that was to dog Lewes all his life.

Yet Lewes’s unusual familiarity with French culture – deepened when the family moved the following year to the Channel Isles – had more important results than an ability to wave his hands around and tell
risqué
jokes. As Marian had begun to discover, beneath the jauntiness was a man of passionate intellectual engagement. He may have written for money – and who did not? – but he also had a genuine desire to introduce his English readers to the best of French thought, writing and philosophy. Without George Henry Lewes, the work of Auguste Comte and George Sand would have taken far longer to become known outside a tiny privileged circle.

What made this achievement so extraordinary was that Lewes’s formal education had been patchy and short. Returning to England from Jersey, he attended Dr Charles Parr Burney’s seminary in Greenwich, which had a fine academic reputation, but was as cold and cruel as any attended by English boys during this period before public school reform. There was no money for university and so, just like all the other men in Marian’s life, Lewes left
school before he was sixteen and set to work, reading voraciously in his spare time. Unencumbered by the traditional syllabus, the young Lewes had the freedom to roam through the ‘new’ subjects, which were currently transforming the intellectual landscape. He believed that the living languages were more important than dead ones, science more relevant than the classics, literature more revealing than history. In only a few years the curricula at the great public schools and ancient universities would be reformed in line with this kind of thinking, but in the 1830s it was young men from humble backgrounds like Lewes, Bray, Spencer and even Chapman who built and disseminated the knowledge that would transform the way people understood their world. Mostly Lewes delighted in his intellectual modernism, but occasionally the taunts of Oxford men like Froude hit home. Once Lewes was freed from the need to write for the market by Marian’s growing wealth, his lingering sense of insecurity meant that he was always in danger of weighing down his light, pliable text with too many footnotes.

After a stint in a lawyer’s office Lewes moved to a Russian merchant’s before deciding that he wanted to be a doctor. He attended lectures, probably at University College, but was turned off clinical work because he could not bear to witness the patients’ pain. This might sound like a face-saving formula for a young man who lacked the ability or sticking-power to finish a long training, but in Lewes’s case it may have been true. Certainly, he remained fascinated by physiology all his life. In the 1860s he settled down to concentrate his work on the connection between the mind and the body, puzzling away at those areas from which psychoanalysis would emerge at the end of the century. The result was his monumental book
Problems of Life and Mind
, which Marian completed from his notes after his death.

Unlike Marian, Lewes had no orthodoxy from which to rebel, no belief system against which to struggle. The mid-Victorian story of agonised doubt, Orders abandoned, and fellowships discarded had no place in his life. His rackety, atheistic upbringing had inclined him from the start to the new rational ideas which were coming off the Continent. As a nineteen-year-old it was quite natural for him to gravitate to a group of ‘students’ which met in Red Lion Square ‘whose sole object was the amiable
collision of contending views, on subjects which, at one time or another, perplex and stimulate all reflecting minds’.
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One of the members, a Jewish watchmaker named Cohn, introduced Lewes to the ideas of Spinoza, whose work was almost unknown in Britain. With characteristic enthusiasm, Lewes set about translating Spinoza’s
Ethics
from the Latin and with equally characteristic impatience he gave it up. But he never abandoned his interest in the philosopher, writing an article on him for the
Westminster
in May 1843, at around the time when Marian started translating an unspecified text of Spinoza’s in an attempt to distract herself from the stormy aftermath of the Brabant affair. This was just one of the uncanny coincidences in their early lives which, in knowing hindsight, seem to have made it inevitable that they would be drawn together in early middle age. As Marian and Lewes moved closer during 1852 and 1853 they surely talked about this outcast philosopher from two centuries before who had played such an important part in both their intellectual lives. Spinoza had called upon man to dismantle the elaborate frameworks through which he viewed the world and to accept things clear-sightedly as they are. This meant giving up the fantasy of a Divine presence and concentrating on smaller, closer truths. For instance, the philosopher suggested that man must author his own morality, using healthy self-regard as the foundation for loving others. Feuerbach had developed these ideas in
The Essence of Christianity
, where Marian, naturally, would have spotted them during her work on its translation. Lewes, in the meantime, found himself in sympathy with Spinoza’s insistence that the mind constructs its own meaning and was to develop this point over five volumes in
Problems of Life and Mind
.

Having abandoned medicine, Lewes decided with characteristic nerve to become a ‘philosopher and poet’.
³⁷
Given his unorthodox background and constitutional irreverence, it was inevitable that he would be drawn towards the raggle-taggle end of literary society. And in the context of the 1830s that meant becoming a member of the circle which surrounded the bohemian poet Leigh Hunt. Hunt, by now in his fifties, had been a member of the Byron-Shelley set, imbibing with them a kind of romantic communism, which he tried to live out even in the depths of Chelsea. He affected a saintly innocence, which concealed a cun
ning, pragmatic side. Charles Dickens quickly got the measure of the man, caricaturing him in
Bleak House
as Harold Skimpole, a guileful romantic poet who declares himself too daft to understand the workings of the world, but canny enough to accept the gift of a sovereign. Leigh Hunt’s chief attraction for Lewes was that he had been an intimate of Shelley’s. For Lewes, like every other young man of restless disposition and romantic spirit, worshipped the poet. To ‘right-minded’ people ‘Shelley’ was a word to be whispered quietly, a dark synonym for the worst kind of atheistic loose-living. But to Lewes and his like the man was a visionary who preached a life of absolute integrity. ‘If one quality might be supposed to distinguish him pre-eminently,’ he declared in an early essay in the
Westminster
in 1840, ‘it was that highest of all qualities – truthfulness, an unyielding worship of truth.’
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Ostensibly Lewes wanted to get close to Hunt because he knew the silly grand old man had contacts, memories and papers which would help in his cherished scheme of writing a biography of Shelley. But he was also shrewd enough to have spotted that Hunt had gathered around himself an interesting group of young men who might prove useful. Lewes cultivated them nakedly. He wrote to one of them, the artist William Bell Scott, describing himself as ‘a student living a quiet life, but have a great gusto for intellectual acquaintance’.
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Scott agreed to be his friend and his later recollections of Lewes are the only ones we have from this time. According to Scott, young Lewes was ‘an exuberant but not very reliable or exact talker, a promising man of parts, a mixture of the man of the world and the boy’.
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He was also, Scott hinted, sexually promiscuous. Certainly, Lewes’s letters from this time suggest a likeable, cocky, restless young man, desperate to get himself noticed by all the right people – especially female ones. From Germany, where he stayed for nine months in 1838 to learn the language, literature and philosophy, he trumpeted to Leigh Hunt, ‘I am intimate here with a great many of the first families and am considerably petted, especially by my best friends ever, the ladies.’
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Lewes was too clever not to marry well. On his return from Germany he met Agnes Jervis, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Swynfen Jervis, a Radical MP for Bridport in Dorset. Jervis was a fussy, grubby little man with a genuine love of literature and
the classics. Lewes, now armed with fluent German, may have been been employed to tutor Agnes’s brothers at Darlaston Hall, the family’s house near Stoke-on-Trent. Alternatively, he may have been working as Jervis’s secretary. Another theory has him meeting Agnes in London through the Hunt circle. In light of the way the marriage turned out, there was later gossip about Lewes eloping with the under-age Agnes, pursued by her infuriated father. But in fact Jervis was far from being a heavy-handed Victorian papa. A devotee of Godwin and Shelley, he shared with his future son-in-law the view that emotional attachments could not be trammelled by legal forms. If the young couple were in love, he was certainly not going to interfere. He gave written permission for Agnes to marry and on 18 February 1841 stood witness at her wedding to the twenty-three-year-old George Henry Lewes.

Nor was Agnes the unwitting victim of two men’s libidinous conniving. Well educated and clever, she was clear-eyed about her own future. All the evidence suggests that, young as she was, Agnes understood and approved of what she was going into. Throughout her long life – she died in 1902 – she never once complained about Lewes or begrudged his relationship with Marian. True, she was careless and demanding about money, expecting her husband to support her tribe of children by another man, but she never gave the slightest suggestion that she considered herself the victim of the piece.

But in 1841 these marital post-mortems were a long way off. Agnes was a strikingly pretty girl and Lewes, everyone agreed, was a lucky man. W. B. Scott described Agnes as ‘one of the loveliest creatures in the world’, while Jane Carlyle, who along with her husband took a strangely proprietorial interest in the Leweses’ marriage, called her a ‘charming little wife’.
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Agnes was clever, too, a good enough linguist to take on some translating work to boost their meagre funds. Despite being the great-niece of an earl, Agnes does not seem to have brought much of a dowry with her and the young couple were obliged to live in a series of rooms in Kensington, more often than not with his mother. Still, they were happy. Thomas Carlyle remembered how ‘They used to come down of an evening to us [in Chelsea] through the lanes from Kensington, and were as merry as two birds.’
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There may
have been some casual infidelity on Lewes’s part, but nothing serious. In time, four baby boys appeared: Charles Lee (1842), Thornton Arnott (1844) (named after Hunt), Herbert Arthur (1846) and St Vincent Arthy (1848).

Domestic happiness did not so much mellow Lewes as make him more determined to succeed. While his pushiness annoyed some, others were charmed in spite of themselves. Macvey Napier, editor of the stuffily prestigious
Edinburgh Review
, dismissed him as a ‘coxcomb’ although the chilly John Stuart Mill, still influential at the
Westminster
, put up a defence for the young man on the grounds that ‘he is confident but not at all conceited, for he will bear to be told anything however unflattering about what he writes’.
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Napier, however, took a lot of convincing and it was not until October 1843 that he accepted one of the articles with which Lewes had been pestering him for the last three years. Mill, however, made sure that his protégé’s pieces appeared regularly in the
Westminster
, including the article on Shelley, all that remained of the original project of publishing a biography of the great man. He also gave Lewes detailed notes on articles that were intended for publication elsewhere. Whenever he wrote about his favourite subject of German philosophy Lewes had a habit of trying to out-Carlyle Carlyle, slipping into the ranting, rhetorical style that had burst into print in
Sartor Resartus
. Mill sensibly and gently steered Lewes towards a more authentic voice for the pieces he was now contributing regularly to the
British and Foreign Review
, the
Foreign Quarterly Review
and the
Monthly Magazine
.