George Eliot (36 page)

When Marian went to visit Chrissey over Christmas and New Year 1855–6, it looks as if neither Isaac nor Fanny made the short journey to see her. Although Marian had not told them that she was living with Lewes, it is impossible to believe that the news had not filtered back. Isaac and Fanny might not have been part of the Rosehill circle, but they were intelligent and
sophisticated people. Marian’s changing instructions about where to send her money must have alerted him to a shift in her circumstances. And, anyway, Charles Bray was incapable of keeping a secret. Something more than indifference had surely kept Isaac and Fanny away from Attleborough that Christmas. Either way, this was the last time that Marian would set foot in the place that she was about to bring so vividly alive in her novels.

Under the influence of Herbert Spencer, whom he had met back in 1851 during that ‘dreary wasted time’ of his life, Lewes rediscovered his early interest in biological science. Working on the multi-faceted Goethe had pushed him further along this path and he had begun to read seriously in areas not tackled since he was a medical student tramping the wards. The result of this renewed interest had been an article in the October 1852 issue of the
Westminster
on ‘Goethe as a Man of Science’, as well as a chapter on the same subject in the 1855 book.

But Huxley’s 1854 sneer that Lewes was nothing but a ‘book scientist’ still stung. To remedy the situation Lewes borrowed a microscope from Arthur Helps, determined to turn himself into a practitioner. A near neighbour in Richmond was Professor Richard Owen, one of the country’s leading academic scientists, who welcomed Lewes’s friendship, as well as encouraging his interest. Instead of reading about other men’s experiments, Lewes now began to do his own, albeit in a small way. During an expedition to see Goethe’s little wooden house at Ilmenau in the summer of 1854, he had cut a caterpillar in two and watched, fascinated, while the head began to eat the tail. Marian had made a little box in order to carry the insect back to their lodgings and observe further. Believing, as always, that it was her duty to support a great man in his work, she naturally followed this new direction in Lewes’s life with enthusiasm, helping him search for polyps during their week’s holiday in Worthing in September 1855. Back home in Richmond, science now played a part equal to literature in their lives and a typical day involved ‘reading Homer and science and rearing tadpoles’,
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not to mention a stint with William Whewell’s heavy-going
History of the Inductive Sciences
.

The Leweses’ holiday at Ilfracombe in May 1856 continued
this same fine-grained blend of science and art, vacation and work. Just as Goethe had been the
raison d’être
for the trip to Germany, so the focus for this trip was a series of articles Lewes had planned called ‘Sea-Side Studies’ which were to appear in
Blackwood’s Magazine
. They were not heavy pieces – Huxley would not have approved – but they were hugely popular and reflected the new passion of Victorians for skimming rock pools, tapping away at fossils and scooping up bits of foliage. Marian and Lewes spent their first mornings in Devonshire scrambling over the rocks at low tide, looking for various kinds of anemones. It soon became clear that they were inexperienced and illequipped: the tall thin jars which they had brought all the way from London did not seem to agree with the anemones, which insisted on floating upside down. It was Marian’s job to roll up her sleeve, plunge her arm into the jar and turn the stubborn creatures the right way up.
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To get some expert advice, Lewes made a call on the local curate George Tugwell, a small young man who was an experienced naturalist. Tugwell not only lent them the right sort of jar for their specimens, but joined them on their expeditions. Dressed in old coats and big hats, the trio spent their mornings chipping away at fossils and filling their jars with rock-pool finds. In the late afternoon and evening Lewes examined the day’s takings under the microscope, before carefully classifying and recording them. Marian, who was meant to be absorbed in two big pieces for the
Westminster
, found herself becoming more and more interested and ‘every day I gleaned some little bit of naturalistic experience’.
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Once liberated from her journalism on 17 June, she gave her full attention to the range of beautiful seaweeds to be found in the local rock pools, reading up about them in the evening so that she could get ‘a little more light on their structure and history’.
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This new experience of close observation, description and categorisation had a massive impact on Marian’s writing. ‘I never before longed so much to know the names of things as during this visit to Ilfracombe,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘The desire is part of the tendency that is now constantly growing in me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct, vivid ideas.’
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On the long walks she took with Lewes in
the afternoons, Marian began to see the connections between the natural history of the landscape and that of man. ‘When one sees a house stuck on the side of a great hill, and still more a number of houses looking like a few barnacles clustered on the side of a great rock,’ she wrote, ‘we begin to think of the strong family likeness between ourselves and all other building, burrowing house-appropriating and shell-secreting animals.’
⁸⁴

These Ilfracombe observations were, in part, an attempt by Marian to see whether she could do for the British countryside what Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl had done for the German. One of the
Westminster
pieces she was currently working on concerned von Riehl’s attempts to study German peasant life as if he were a naturalist looking at an animal species.
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Drawing on her knowledge of evolutionary science – Darwin might not yet have published, but others like Herbert Spencer certainly had – Marian quotes with obvious approval von Riehl’s conclusion that social change among the peasant classes must always be snail slow.

Von Riehl’s conclusions exactly suited Marian’s conservative temperament. Apart from her brief flirtation with radicalism in 1848, she had always discounted political solutions imposed from above in favour of slow, gradual change pushing up from below. Primed by her father’s stories of the French Revolution and nourished by her own observations of the slow-changing Warwickshire countryside, she believed that ‘a wise social policy must be based not simply on abstract social science, but on the Natural History of social bodies’.
⁸⁷

This plea for an acceptance of
things as they are
leads Marian into making a case for a new kind of realism in art. In the article, which appears in the July 1856 issue of the
Westminster
, Marian
turns aside temporarily from von Riehl as she endorses Ruskin’s complaint that all too often peasants are portrayed as straight out of a picture postcard or an opera chorus – all rosy-cheeked honesty. Instead, she asks for a new accuracy in painting, drama and literature that would show peasants as they are, neither touched up nor toned down. This request comes not from a pedantic desire for detail, but from a powerful belief that it is art’s duty to make us aware of realities which are not our own: ‘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.’
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Eager to practise what she preached, Marian now tried her hand at a couple of bits of description of local life in her journal. The first was a report of the celebrations which Ilfracombe put on to mark the end of the Crimean War. With minute attention to detail she described the yards of bunting, an unconvincing reconstruction of the allied armies, a half-hearted race for village boys and, after dark, a row of fires along the tors. The second piece of writing was a description of two local ‘cockle women’ whom she saw at Swansea, their next destination.

From Swansea the Leweses moved to Tenby, a place to stir up memories for Marian. Sara Hennell was unpleasantly quick to remind her by letter of their visit there thirteen years ago. Unpleasant because it was then that Rufa Brabant had announced her engagement to Charles Hennell and, by way of painful compensation, had taken Marian to a dance at the assembly rooms to try and find her a man. It was strange for Marian to contrast
that uncertain time with the security of the present. Now she had a partner she loved and a new best woman friend to take the place of envious Sara. On 12 July Barbara Leigh Smith joined the Leweses at Tenby. She was looking and feeling exhausted by the traumas of the previous year. John Chapman had been urging her to become his mistress and have his baby on the strange grounds that it would sort out her irregular periods. He even pointed to Marian and Lewes as a happy example of how well these things could work out.
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Barbara’s father, although he had not been married to her mother, was outraged by the proposition and had thundered that his elder daughter had better go to America if she wanted to go in for that sort of thing. In the end, Barbara had decided against setting up a liaison with Chapman and had come to Tenby to recover from the relationship. She arrived ready to pitch in and immediately set about using her skills as an artist to record various specimens for Lewes. Predisposed to dislike the little man, she left Tenby a few days later believing that he was a good, dear creature who made Marian happy. Fresh from her relationship with Chapman, Barbara was in the mood to discuss sex. During the long sandy days at Tenby she drew from Marian the confidence that Lewes was a considerate lover and that they practised birth control, having made the decision not to have children. If Marian went into details about her preferred method of contraception, Barbara did not pass them on to Bessie, who in turn reported the conversation to her daughter. Condoms, of a reusable variety, were available by now and the rhythm method was also practised in an
ad hoc
way by those who understood it. Lewes, as a one-time medical student and physiologist, may be assumed to have been one of the initiated few who had grasped the fact that pregnancy was most likely to happen in the middle of a woman’s cycle.

On the surface, Marian was less productive in Tenby than she had been in Ilfracombe. Since finishing the piece on von Riehl she recorded that she had ‘done no
visible
work’ but added, ‘I have absorbed many ideas and much bodily strength; indeed, I do not remember ever feeling so strong in mind and body as I feel at this moment.’ Then she admitted to herself what had been brewing for ten years: ‘I am anxious to begin my fiction writing.’
⁹¹

It was a momentous psychological breakthrough. Until now
Marian had approached the realisation that she wanted to be a novelist crab-like, from the side. There must have been a bit of talk about her ambitions back in Coventry because in 1846 Sara had spotted that, newly released from the dreary Strauss, Mary Ann was looking ‘very brilliant just now – we fancy she must be writing her novel’.
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This was perhaps the point at which Marian wrote the description of the Staffordshire farmhouse and its neighbours which, according to her journal entry of 6 December 1857, ‘How I Came to Write Fiction’, had come to nothing and, ‘I lost any hope that I should ever be able to write a novel, just as I desponded about everything else in my future life.’
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But one night during their stay in Berlin she had plucked up courage to show these yellowing pages to Lewes who, although liking them, confirmed her fears that ‘he disbelieved in my possession of any dramatic power’.
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The words cut deep, seeming to confirm Marian’s own low opinion of what she might achieve as a fiction writer. Even when Lewes managed to sell her journal recollections of Weimar in the form of two essays for
Fraser
’s in the June and July 1855 issues, she was defensively aware that they too were almost wholly descriptive. Retreating to the high ground, she told Bray not to mention her name in connection with the essays ‘for to people who do not enjoy description of scenery it will seem very tame and stupid, and I really think a taste for descriptive writing is the rarest of all tastes among ordinary people’.
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It was a shame. Lewes had not meant the comment nastily. He truly admired her descriptive writing, and scholars have been quick to spot the passages from her unpublished journals which he lifted – with her permission – and put straight into his own work. He was keen for her to write fiction, not least because it paid better than essay writing and they were, as always, looking for ‘the main chance’. He had been genuinely impressed by the Cumming essay and kept up a gentle pressure that she should try to write fiction. Now, in Tenby, he suggested it again. ‘You have wit, description and philosophy – those go a good way towards the production of a novel. It is worth while for you to try the experiment.’
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