George Eliot (29 page)

In 1845–6 snide comments about Lewes’s showy versatility escalated with the publication of his
Biographical History of Philosophy
. Aimed at the layman, the history consisted of four little volumes, tracing the development of Western philosophy from the Greeks to Auguste Comte. Lewes, undeniably biased, emphasised the contribution of empiricists like Aristotle, Locke and Hume over the metaphysicians Plato, Descartes and Leibniz. He saw philosophy culminating in the near-contemporary work of Auguste Comte, whom he designated ‘the Bacon of the nineteenth century’ and on whom he would write in more detail later. Academic critics sneered at the way the
Biographical History
cantered through the centuries on a sightseeing tour of esoteric thought. None the less, its brisk, clear tone made it a best-seller
among the people for whom it was intended and even those for whom it was not. In 1853 Marian reported proudly to Sara that Lewes had visited Cambridge and discovered ‘a knot of devotees there who make his history of Philosophy a private text-book’.
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As late as the 1930s the book was still popular among London University students who used it as a crib.
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During the first nine years of the marriage domestic happiness seems to have fuelled Lewes’s astonishing productivity. But by 1849 it was becoming clear that growing disillusionment lay behind his increasingly hectic and fragmented schedule. The roots of the distress went back to the free-living culture in which the marriage had been contracted. Right from the start, Lewes and Agnes had agreed that monogamy was an unnatural obligation and one which, in all conscience, they could not follow. As rational free-thinkers they gave each other permission to follow their sexual desire wherever it might lead. But what neither had ever considered was what would happen if one of them fell in love with someone else.

Thornton Hunt was Leigh Hunt’s eldest son and had known Lewes from before his marriage. The two young men had knocked around London together, edited a magazine and sent each other crude, slangy letters which were not as funny as they thought. Hunt took after his father, being careless, grasping and a free-thinker. Inspired not only by Shelley, but also by the French socialist Fourier, Hunt and his wife Kate were enthused by the idea of communal living. Together with two other couples – Hunt’s sister, who was conveniently married to Kate’s brother, and the painter Samuel Laurence who was married to Kate’s cousin – they set up home together in Bayswater. In addition they were joined by some single women, probably relatives. Officially, the inhabitants of the house in Queen’s Road were pooling material resources. In time, it became apparent that they were sharing sexual partners too.

Despite much retrospective gossip, it is fairly clear that Agnes and Lewes never lived in Queen’s Road, although they were frequent visitors during the time when the ‘phalanstery’ was at its most notorious. Sly references to the community pop up again and again in disguised – and distorted – recollections of the period, often written decades later. Eliza Lynn, speaking through
the male narrator of her autobiographical novel
Christopher Kirkland
, remembered how, arriving as a youngster in London, ‘I fell in with that notorious group of Free-lovers, whose ultimate transaction was the most notable example of matrimony void of contract of our day.’

Exactly what Lynn meant by this is not clear. Much of the gossip surrounding the community in Queen’s Road was fuelled by the fantasies of fascinated onlookers. Were the Hunts engaged in wife-swapping? And could that perhaps, by extension, include group sex? In actual fact, the Hunts’ domestic arrangements seem to have involved nothing more titillating than an agreement that they need not be faithful to one another. Although Lynn was keen to point out that Lewes was ‘the most pronounced Free-lover of the group, and openly took for himself the liberty he expressly sanctioned in his wife’, there is no suggestion that Lewes completed the symmetry by becoming sexually involved with Kate Hunt.
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Instead, he seems to have confined himself to short-term liaisons far beyond the confines of the commune.

The only firm bit of evidence we have specifically about the emerging relationship between Hunt and Agnes is a pencil sketch done by the novelist Thackeray in 1848. It shows Agnes sitting at the piano with Lewes standing by her, either singing or ready to turn the pages. A few feet behind, watching them intently, is Thornton Hunt. He is more lightly sketched than the other figures, but his presence dominates the group.
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By now it was clear that Thornton Hunt had become a ghostly third party in the Leweses’ marriage.

The situation was not helped by the fact that Lewes had never given up his bachelor habit of spending a great deal of time on the Continent, gathering research for his articles and books. In 1842, armed with letters of introduction from J. S. Mill, he went to Paris to seek out Comte, de Tocqueville and Michelet. Three years later he was in Berlin, looking for Friedrich Schelling, August Boeckh and Ludwig Tieck. In 1846 he returned to Paris to force an introduction to George Sand, the scandalous novelist whom he admired most in the world and about whom he wrote with passionate conviction. It was, coincidentally, just at this time that Marian Evans was having to defend her admiration for George Sand to a disapproving Sara Hennell.

Even back home in Britain Lewes could not sit still. At the beginning of 1849 he lectured at the Liverpool Mechanics Institute on the history of philosophy, before moving on to Manchester where he not only reprised the lectures but also appeared at the theatre as Shylock in the
The Merchant of Venice
. He found time, too, to take the leading role in his own play,
The Noble Heart
. Lewes had greasepaint in his blood and had always toyed with the idea of a stage career. He had spent the 1840s performing in various companies, including Dickens’s celebrated amateur troupe. But the experience of playing Shylock again late in 1849, this time in Edinburgh, finally convinced him that he was never going to succeed as a professional actor. His bright sparkle and facile wit might dominate any drawing-room, but on a cavernous stage his small body and light voice were easily swamped. From now on Lewes confined himself to writing for and about the theatre. Under the name of ‘Slingsby Lawrence’ he continued to translate so-so French farces for money. More important, he became a theatre critic in the form of ‘Vivian’, the loud, louche bachelor-ish persona which he adopted for his review work at the
Leader
.

It is impossible to know whether Lewes’s continual absences were the cause or the result of the marriage breakdown. Certainly his habit of raving to Agnes about the beautiful women whom he had met on the road cannot have helped. Either way, by April 1849 sharp-eyed Jane Carlyle had noticed a definite change in Agnes towards her husband. ‘I used to think these Leweses a perfect pair of love-birds, always cuddling together on the same perch – to speak figuratively,’ she told her cousin in a letter, ‘but the female love-bird appears to have hopped off to some distance and to be now taking a somewhat critical view of her little shaggy mate!’
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We cannot know, either, why Hunt appealed to Agnes. He was not as funny or as clever as Lewes and he was almost as ugly. Perhaps it simply came down to the fact that he was there. Only three months later Agnes became pregnant by her lover. Edmund Alfred was born on 16 April 1850, just a fortnight after the first issue of the
Leader
, co-edited by Hunt and Lewes, appeared.

Although Lewes had sanctioned Agnes’s affair with Thornton on condition that no child was born from the liaison, he still took
the fateful step of registering the child as his own. As the law stood, by giving Hunt’s child his name Lewes was condoning Agnes’s adultery and relinquishing the right to sue at any point for divorce. By this one administrative act he would condemn Marian Evans to a life as a sexual and social outcast. Although it would be eighteen months before he would meet her, the puzzle remains as to why at the age of thirty-three he closed off so many options for his future life. A clue may lie in the fact that only two weeks previously his youngest son St Vincent Arthy had died of whooping cough. In the midst of despair it may have been that the joy of a new child, even another man’s, went some of the way towards filling the void. Then again, the
Leader
had just been launched after months of agonised fund-raising, and it might have seemed pointlessly destructive to create tension between the two co-editors at their moment of triumph. But perhaps, after all, the real explanation is that, despite the façade of moral flippancy which offended so many, Lewes was a man of integrity. Having agreed with Agnes on an open marriage, he was not about to renegade just because his pride had been hurt. He accepted that this situation, publicly humiliating though it might be, was the result of an agreement into which he had entered willingly.

Agnes’s feelings for Hunt turned out to be deep and lasting. Eighteen months later, on 21 October 1851, she gave birth to another of his children, this time a girl called Rose Agnes. By now Lewes ceased to think of himself as her husband and had moved out of Bedford Place. Throughout the upheaval Thornton Hunt remained his usual complacent self. Around this time he intoned sententiously in the
Leader
that ‘Human beings are born with passions; you will not discipline those passions by ignoring them’ and continued to argue for a reform of the marriage and divorce laws.
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True to his word, Hunt generously went on sleeping with his wife right through his affair with Agnes. Kate Hunt had ten children in all, two of them born within weeks of two produced by Agnes. Hunt’s liaison with Agnes produced another two babies and continued at least until 1857, when Mildred Jane Lewes was born.

No matter how amicable their feelings for one another and how rational their personal choices, it was inevitable that the
Lewes – Hunt friendship would eventually buckle under the strain. For a time the excitement of producing a new and highly regarded weekly magazine carried them through their differences. Their responsibilities, in any case, were distinct: Hunt was in charge of the political coverage, Lewes the arts and cultural side. But over the following months odd hints and nudges in the magazine suggest that Lewes was finding it increasingly hard to work alongside the man who was publicly cuckolding him. Shortly after the birth of Agnes’s daughter Ethel Isabel in October 1853 Lewes used his Vivian persona to reveal his unhappy situation. Reviewing a farce called
How to Make Home Happy
, he heavy-handedly informed his readers, ‘As I have
no
home, and that home is not happy, I really stand in need of [the author’s] secret.’
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But on this occasion the normally nimble Vivian was lagging behind events. By the time he made the remark his alter ego Lewes had already moved out of the family home and was well into his relationship with Marian Evans, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. At first glance it might not seem clear why this affair should last any longer than the countless others Lewes had already enjoyed: this, indeed, was the substance of the Brays’ objections to him as a partner for Marian. But at thirty-five, homeless and alone, Lewes had had enough of the free love that had brought him to what he later called this ‘dreary, wasted period of my life’.
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Despair had burned away his ideological certainties and prepared him to try something, anything, to bring stability into his life.

Whether he was always faithful to Marian is not clear. Their odd situation meant that throughout most of their life together he continued to receive invitations, while she did not. In effect, this left him free to play the merry bachelor, sauntering around clubland, turning up at the theatre, attending dinner parties. But by then his careful pose as a ladies’ man was just that, a bit of play-acting. He might flirt and tell
risqué
stories in French, but mostly he came home to her as soon as he could. There is a story that after Lewes’s death Marian discovered from reading his papers that he had been unfaithful to her. According to this account her hurt and anger turned to loathing, and shortly afterwards she accepted John Cross’s unlikely proposal.
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Sober
minded biographers have been quick to point out that the evidence is malign and slight. Yet, it is hard to believe that a man who from his earliest adult years had been a parallel lover should, merely by an effort of will, change himself into an uncompromising monogamist.

But the possibility of Lewes’s occasional infidelity should not be taken as a comment on the quality of his love for Marian. In a brief journal entry of January 1859 he recalled with great tenderness the moment when they were first introduced: ‘to know her was to love her, and since then my life has been a new birth’.
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Although he had always been sexually involved with women, Lewes’s interest in them extended far beyond their bodies. He liked clever women. Indeed, he had married one. His articles on female novelists are, save for a few stray conventionalities, full of admiration for their particular skills and sensibilities. At a time when many thought Charlotte Brontë’s work scandalous, he wrote publicly and privately of his admiration for her. Back in the late 1840s he had published two bad novels and was quick to spot when others, whatever their sex, could do things which he could not. It was he, not Spencer, who first suggested that Marian should write fiction and he was characteristically generous when she succeeded. He recognised that she was cleverer and more talented than he, and never felt the need to punish her for it. As for the fact that Marian was plain – well, he had already married a pretty girl and it had not brought him happiness.

Marian, for her part, responded to Lewes’s breadth of intellect. Initially she had assumed that his versatility was a cynical ploy to exploit the periodical market, but gradually she came to realise that his interest in these subjects – and in the many more that would follow – was genuine and, when given an opportunity, deep. As for his womanising, she had several times been drawn to men who were polygamists. One explanation might be that she felt that she did not deserve a man of her own and so continually found herself forced to share. But another possibility was that these men – Bray, Chapman, even Brabant and now Lewes – were unusual in being able to relate to women in an easy, intimate way. As gender codes formalised during the first decades of Victoria’s reign, men and women found themselves leading increasingly segregated lives. Marian Evans, unusual in spending
her working life among men, was drawn to partners who could match her ability to transcend limited ideas about what it meant to be a man or a woman.