George Eliot (47 page)

It is that landscape, wide and flat, which opens the book. A nameless narrator, chilly in the weak February sun, wanders on the outskirts of the red-roofed town of St Ogg’s. He – the confident tone seems to suggest the voice is male – describes the fields stretching into the distance, the hedgerows thickened with trees and the ships laden with coal, wood and seed which pass up the River Floss to unload their cargoes at the waiting wharves. Turning off to walk along the banks of the tributary Ripple, the narrator comes across Dorlcote Mill, familiar from many years before. The big wheel ceaselessly spurts out ‘diamond jets of water’, while the wagoner drives the grain-laden horses home over the bridge.
¹⁰⁰
Meanwhile a little girl – who turns out to be
Maggie Tulliver – is watching the scene intently, barely distracted by the ‘queer white cur with the brown ear’ who leaps and barks beside her.
¹⁰¹

It soon becomes apparent that the narrator’s description of the landscape goes beyond simple scene-setting. There is a Riehl-like understanding of the relationship between the natural world and the men and women who inhabit it. Maggie’s fearsome Dodson aunts are as inevitable and integral a part of St Ogg’s as the red roofs and twisty streets. The three women – inspired by Christiana Pearson’s sisters – are described as examples of how peasant life has developed in provincial urban Britain by the end of the 1820s. There is Aunt Glegg, who hoards her stock of good linen and lace until the old stuff is worn out. Her clothes are so carefully conserved that by the time she gets to wear them they are spotted with mould and comically old-fashioned. Then there is Aunt Pullet whose marriage to a wealthy farmer allows her to indulge a passion for fancy medicine. She lovingly lines up her blue bottles and shudders at her elder sister Glegg’s insistence on carrying a mutton bone in her pocket to ward off rheumatism.

As if to underline that it is Riehl and his
Natural History of German Life
which inspires this analysis, the narrator halts the story half-way through the book and takes us along the banks of the Rhône. We are shown the remains of deserted villages, long destroyed by catastrophic floods. Far from suggesting that a noble way of life has tragically disappeared, the narrator suggests that ‘these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhône, oppress me with the feeling that human life – very much of it – is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers’.
¹⁰²
The Tullivers and the Dodsons are likewise ‘emmet-like’, their respectable, ignorant lives devoid of the harsh necessity that makes the rural peasantry romantic or the intellectual capacity that nudges town dwellers to stretch beyond themselves for something ‘beautiful, great, or noble’.
¹⁰³

The narrator tells us that it is important we should feel the
‘oppressive narrowness’ of Maggie’s and Tom’s existence if we are to understand the dilemmas of their lives. Using ideas of evolution drawn from the just-published
The Origin of Species
(1859), but long familiar to Marian from her wide reading in natural science, the narrator describes how Tom and Maggie are destined to rise above ‘the mental level of the generation before them’. But their minute progress is not so much a glorious triumph as a painful struggle with the previous generation to which they are still bound with ‘the strongest fibres of their hearts’.
¹⁰⁴
Maggie’s yearning for a life which exceeds that of her mother and aunts is thwarted not simply by the limitations of the society in which she lives, but by her own residual attachment to the traditional duties of a daughter. Like Marian, she spends years caring for her infirm father, waiting and watching while Tom claims the wider world as his arena. ‘While Maggie’s life-struggles had lain almost entirely within her own soul, one shadowy army fighting another, and the slain shadows for ever rising again, Tom was engaged in a dustier, noisier warfare, grappling with more substantial obstacles, and gaining more definite conquests.’
¹⁰⁵

The frustration of Maggie’s ambitions has bothered feminist critics for years. She stands in that line of George Eliot heroines from Dinah through Romola to Dorothea who are allowed to work towards a meaningful identity and even, temporarily, to find one, before being granted a diminished scope of action at the end of the book. Maggie, who has struggled with faith, longed for culture, and searched for education, is obliged by her family’s reduced circumstances to become a schoolteacher. Her only access to polished living is as a guest in her cousin Lucy Deane’s house. When she dares to defy convention by spending the night away from home in the company of a man to whom she is not married, she ends up ostracised. In the slow evolutionary crawl there is no place in St Ogg’s for the female who refuses to be reconciled to her place in nature. Or, as her bewildered father puts it, ‘an over ’cute woman’s no better nor a long-tailed sheep’.
¹⁰⁶

This evolutionary plot is just one of the organising threads of
The Mill on the Floss
. Another is Greek tragedy, which is why Lewes favoured the tide ‘The House of Tulliver’, with its echoes
of ‘The House of Atreus’. The Tullivers are brought low by a mixture of human failing and uncanny coincidence. Mr Tulliver becomes bankrupt after he overreaches himself by going to law. Dorlcote Mill ends up in the hands of his sworn enemy, lawyer Wakem, who then offers Tulliver employment as its manager. Wakem’s eldest son, the hunchback Philip, happens to have been educated with Tom and so has met and fallen in love with Maggie. Thus the stage has been set for a fierce battle years later when Tom refuses to allow Maggie to continue her meetings with the son of the man he blames for his father’s ill-fortune.

Greek tragedy, too, inspires the famous ending in which Maggie and Tom are joined together in death in a way they never managed in life. A freakish flood sweeps through the valley and Maggie goes to rescue Tom from the mill in a boat. As the brother and sister row towards St Ogg’s huge fragments of industrial flotsam overwhelm them and they go down ‘in an embrace never to be parted – living through again in one supreme moment, the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together’.
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Strictly speaking, the ending breaks the rules of Greek tragedy because it has nothing to do with what has gone before. The flood is a terrible act of God, rather than the result of any action by Maggie, Tom or anyone else. The coming together of the estranged brother and sister arises not from any consequence of the plot, but from Marian’s own deep desire to experience vicariously a reconciliation with the brother who now seemed lost to her for ever. The last few turbulent pages of the book were written in an emotional frenzy. ‘Mrs Lewes is getting her eyes redder and
swollener
every morning as she lives through her tragic story,’ Lewes reported to Blackwood with grim approval during the first week of March.
¹⁰⁸
A month later, and now on holiday in Italy, Marian reported to Blackwood that Maggie and her sorrows still clung to her painfully.
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The puffy red eyes and lingering low spirits suggest that Marian was more closely attached to this material than she had been to any other.
Adam Bede
and
Scenes of Clerical Life
were based on stories and characters suggested from other people’s pasts:
The Mill on the Floss
trawled her own. Just like little Maggie, she too had run away to join the gypsies, had cried away her
unhappiness in the wormeaten attic, had felt her mother’s disappointment in her plainness. Most crucially, she had known what it was to devote herself to an older brother who did not want her, who meted out stern punishments for minor mistakes, who preferred riding his pony to playing with a little girl.

No writer has ever given a better account of the relationship between brother and sister. Tom and Maggie bicker over jam puffs, fishing rods and pocket money. Maggie’s spark and cleverness is constantly checked by Tom’s need to rule and punish. Despite the final passage of the book, which suggests that in death they finally returned to a state of merged rapture, in fact we never see Maggie and Tom achieve more than fleeting harmony.

In her depiction of the young Tom Tulliver Marian excavated the origins of the beloved boy who had grown up to be the stern, unyielding Isaac Evans. Right from the start, Tom is described as having inherited the rigid righteousness of his Dodson relatives. By only thirteen, ‘he was particularly clear and positive on one point, namely that he would punish everybody who deserved it: why, he wouldn’t have minded being punished himself if he deserved it, but then, he never
did
deserve it’.
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As he grows into a man Tom’s ‘saturnine sternness’ enables him to graft year after year until he is able to pay back his father’s debtors and reclaim the mill. But it is this very fixity that means he is unable to understand why Maggie should want to be friends with Philip Wakem, the son of their father’s enemy. Despite the fact that he knows and likes Philip personally, Tom is unable to moderate his view of the world to allow Maggie to continue to meet the man with whom she is half in love. He is, in Eliot’s famous phrase, a ‘man of maxims’ who applies clumsy moral generalisations to unique and delicate circumstances.
¹¹¹

If Tom is unable to accommodate the situation with Philip Wakem, how much less is he able to understand Maggie’s brief infatuation with Stephen Guest. In the scene when she returns from her chaste night on the boat, he greets her with spitting rage. Marian had informed Isaac of her own ‘elopement’ by letter and had never had to face his immediate reaction, only his settled contempt. In this encounter between Maggie and Tom she imaginatively worked out how that conversation might have gone between herself and Isaac. Tom, ‘trembling and white with disgust
and indignation’, shouts at her, ‘You will find no home with me … You have disgraced us all … I wash my hands of you forever. You don’t belong to me.’
¹¹²
Maggie tries to explain that her relationship with Stephen is sexually innocent – something which Marian could not claim with Lewes – but Tom is unable to hear her. Instead, he rages at her in a way which Marian remembered from those endless rows during the holy war when Isaac accused her of consulting only her own wishes. ‘You struggled with your feelings, you say. Yes!
I
have had feelings to struggle with – but I conquered them. I have had a harder life than you have had; but I have found
my
comfort in doing my duty. But
I
will sanction no such character as yours: the world shall know that
I
feel the difference between right and wrong.’
¹¹³

Marian’s intense involvement with her material meant that she lingered over it for longer than she should. She admitted to Blackwood that she had treated Tom’s and Maggie’s childhood years with such an ‘epic breadth’ that the rest of the story had become oddly squashed. It is not until the third volume that she fully introduces Stephen Guest, the man for whom Maggie will ruin her reputation. In the rush, Guest becomes little more than a quick sketch of a wealthy, careless young man and Maggie’s ‘elopement’ with him – the relationship is not consummated – remains unlikely.

What is well handled, because once again it comes straight from Marian’s own raw experience, is the community reaction to Maggie’s ‘sin’. Drifting down river on a boat with Stephen, Maggie has reminded herself just in time that he is engaged to her cousin Lucy. Despite Stephen’s protestations of love for her, Maggie is determined to set aside her own desires in favour of duty and the couple return after a night on board ship together. St Ogg’s is scandalised. ‘The world’s wife’ would not have minded too much if they had come back married. It would even have found glamour and romance in the situation, despite the unhappiness caused to Lucy Deane and Philip Wakem, to whom Maggie was half-promised. But what the local gossips cannot forgive Maggie is her coming back a ‘fallen woman’, devoid of either virtue or husband. While in a young man of Stephen Guest’s age and class such a lapse can be forgiven, Maggie Tulliver is nothing more than ‘a designing bold girl’.
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These
chapters were written just at the time when the Liggins scandal was focusing attention on Marian’s own irregular domestic situation. In her deft, sarcastic analysis of how the world’s wife is quick to condemn behaviour that she neither knows nor understands, she was surely thinking of those women like Mrs Owen Jones who had refused Barbara Bodichon’s invitation to get to know her. And it was to avoid the kind of speculation and scrutiny that had been stirred up by the publication of
Adam Bede
that four days after
The Mill
was finished Marian and Lewes set off for Rome.

T
HE FACT THAT
The Mill on the Floss
was still untitled as it went to press suggests a lingering confusion as to what it was actually about. As late as 4 January 1860 Lewes was writing to Blackwood with a short-list of suggestions. The first, ‘Sister Maggie’, with its emphasis on the relationship between Maggie and Tom, had always been Marian’s working title. But Lewes thought it sounded like a children’s story and preferred ‘The House of Tulliver’, which dignified the book by underscoring its links with Greek tragedy. The third option, ‘Maggie Tulliver’, gave too much weight to Maggie, just as ‘The Tullivers’ or ‘The Tulliver Family’ upset the balance by stressing one group of characters over the others. Two days later John Blackwood tentatively came up with an idea of his own,
The Mill on the Floss
.
¹
Given that they had only recently patched up their quarrel, Marian was not about to fall in too easily with his suggestion. She could not resist pointing out that his version was ‘of rather laborious utterance’ and that, anyway, Dorlcote Mill was on the Ripple, not the Floss. Still, it would do.
²

Blackwood’s first complete reading of the manuscript as its official publisher brought the usual mix of fulsome compliment
and hinted criticism. In a letter of 3 February he hailed Mrs Tulliver as ‘a great creation’, her husband as ‘irresistible’, and Maggie, Tom and Bob Jakin as ‘delightful’. But despite this being the third George Eliot book he had published, Blackwood had still not got the hang of her particular brand of realism. Ever the family publisher, bits of description struck him as gratuitously coarse. He winced at ‘lymphatic’ Mrs Tulliver, and objected to Mrs Moss as ‘a patient, loosely-hung, child-producing woman’.
³
Marian bowed to pressure and changed both phrases in the final version, although the account of the unfortunate Mrs Sutton, whose swollen legs produced so much fluid ‘they say you might ha’ swum in the water as came from her’, stayed in due to an oversight.
⁴

Blackwood’s childlike insistence on reading fiction as if it described real life and his commercially canny preference for happy endings meant that he was never going to admire
The Mill
as much as
Adam Bede
. In his opinion neither Stephen nor Philip was good enough for Maggie and, given the shame over her ‘elopement’ with Stephen, it was probably better that she should die: ‘She could not have been happy here.’ None the less he recognised the skill it had taken to draw him into such an intense identification. He revealed flatteringly to Marian that reading the last tragic chapters had made him ‘start from my seat and walk to the Major’s adjoining room exclaiming, “By God she is a
wonderful
woman”’.
⁵

To other correspondents Blackwood was more muted about
The Mill
’s merits and chances. On 24 April 1860 he wrote to Lewes in Rome with the good news that Mudie had given up his threat to boycott the book on the grounds of its infamous authorship and was ‘nibbling at a third thousand’.
⁶
However, the word from the Garrick, where Langford had been taking the temperature, was ‘not so universally favourable’.
⁷
The gentlemen of clubland who had wept over
Scenes
and warmed to
Adam Bede
were less taken with
The Mill
. Blackwood put this down to the fact that there was no longer any secret about Marian’s authorship. Lewes thought so too, but also confided to his journal that
The Mill
was not ‘so intrinsically interesting as “Adam”. Neither the story nor the characters take so profound a hold of the sympathies. Mais nous verrons. It is early days yet.’
⁸

The critics, as it turned out, did find
The Mill
interesting, even if they didn’t entirely understand it. Dallas, who had always been such a champion of Marian’s work in
The Times
, once again opened his review with a thundering ‘“George Eliot” is as great as ever.’ He delighted in the detailed depiction of Tom’s and Maggie’s childhood, and thought the Dodson aunts well done. But much to Marian’s frustration he also damned the redoubtable Mrs Glegg, Pullet and Deane as narrow, ignorant and coarse. On 27 May 1860 Marian wrote to William Blackwood from Florence in genuine bewilderment, ‘I have certainly fulfilled my intention very badly if I have made the Dodson honesty appear “mean and uninteresting”, or made the payment of one’s debts appear a contemptible virtue in comparison with any sort of “Bohemian” qualities.’
⁹

A year later she got the same obtuse response from
Macmillan
’s. The reviewer there took Eliot to task for lauding Maggie over Tom and gave the boy what amounted to a character reference, insisting: ‘He alone has the self-denial to do what he does not like, for the sake of doing right.’ Again, Marian was frustrated by this misunderstanding of the creative process: ‘as if it were not
my
respect for Tom which infused itself into my reader – as if he would have respected Tom, if I had not painted him with respect’.
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But if the reviews were sometimes off the mark, at least they were free of the nosy spite which had made the publication of
Adam Bede
such an ordeal. By now ‘George Eliot’ was accepted by all but the most prissy readers as a phenomenon quite detached from the unfortunate circumstances of Marian Evans Lewes’s life. And although
The Mill
might not have been as popular as
Adam Bede
, it made twice the profit. Soon after the Leweses arrived in Rome Blackwood wrote to say that the book had sold a gratifying 4600 copies during the first four days of publication. Three weeks later the figure had risen to 6000, with 500 more being printed.
¹¹
Blackwood was genuinely delighted that Marian was assured of at least £3250, but couldn’t resist pointing out that she had probably made as much by their hard-won arrangement as she would have with any of the publishers who had been tempting her with fantastic sums during 1859.
¹²

The good news allowed the Leweses to relax their hold on the
purse strings. After years of travelling on a budget, it was heady not to have to count the cost of anything. In Rome they splashed out on some expensive prints and in Venice they engaged a natty courier who showed them round the sights and shops, and serenaded them with love-songs. The decision to come away had been a good one. As each sybaritic week succeeded another, Marian’s anxious enquiries to Blackwood about the financial and critical fate of
The Mill
began to tail off. Even her dank pessimism could not withstand the sunny pleasures of an Italian spring.

Following a few days in Paris, the Leweses had timed their arrival in Rome for Easter week. But they had not bargained for the crowds of pilgrims and tourists who poured into the Holy City, cramming every corner and filling all available beds. After one night in a pricey, sky-high hotel room, they found reasonable lodgings with a Frenchman and his local wife, on whom Marian could practise her rusty Italian. But still it was impossible to relax. The pushing crowds and pious mumbling pressed down heavily. Lewes found the whole phenomenon of popular Catholicism ‘very odious; built on shams’ and felt particularly queasy when a young priest who had arrived to bless their lodgings simply ‘gabbled out some phrases with indifference and haste’.
¹³
Marian, too, found the ceremonies ‘a melancholy, hollow business’, despite having felt moved to kneel in St Peter’s when the Pope passed by.
¹⁴

The flatness of Marian’s response to the surrounding spectacle worried her sufficiently to make a note of it in her journal ‘Recollections of Italy 1860’. She despaired that when she stood in front of a work of art or religious icon ‘I am not enjoying the actual vision enough’. This not only affected her pleasure in the moment but meant that when she tried to recall the image later it constantly eluded her. This terror of losing peak moments comes through in her account of the interior of St Peter’s. Her first impression was of its magnificence, but on later visits the image was spoiled by the ugly red drapes which had been hung to obscure the beautiful marble.
¹⁵
It was this combination of ennui and disappointment, not to mention red curtains, which Marian gave to Dorothea Brooke during her disappointing honeymoon in Rome: ‘in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St Peter’s, the huge bronze
canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina’.
¹⁶

While Lewes’s stomach lurched at the sight of thousands of genuflecting tourists, Marian was able to imagine, envy even, the comfort to be derived from regular religious practice. The news in March that her young niece Katy Clarke had died had pressed painfully upon her continuing agnosticism and refusal to take easy comfort in the idea of an afterlife. Any remaining traces of her youthful hostility towards organised religion had long dissolved, as she had explained in a letter to M. D’Albert Durade the previous December. Now back in touch after a silence of many years, M. D’Albert had expressed surprise that his freethinking ‘Minie’ could have written the passages of orthodox Christianity which he had found in
Adam Bede
. Marian explained that

This tolerance shone through in Marian’s discussions with Barbara Bodichon about the increasing leanings of her circle towards Catholicism. In December 1860 Barbara wrote explaining how her sister Nanny, coping with the recent death of her father and the illness of another sister, yearned for ‘a religion with forms and ceremonies, something present, something of routine, and how many do want it!… Now don’t think I am going over with Bessie [Rayner Parkes, who eventually converted in 1864] to the C.C. but I do see that the “golden rule” and the matins and
vespers she attends do her daily good, make her more cheerful and bright.’
¹⁸

Here was exactly what Marian – through Feuerbach – had been saying for years. In her next novel,
Silas Mamer
, she was to explore the power of even the most enervated Anglicanism to provide a form and focus for human longing. In the book, good-natured blacksmith’s wife Dolly Winthrop has been pricking the letters IHS on her cakes ever since she can remember, under the vague impression that ‘they’re good letters, else they wouldn’t be in the church’. It is her belief in these ‘good letters’ which impels her to offer the cakes to Silas in a gesture of fellow feeling which she can ill afford.
¹⁹
Likewise, she chivvies the isolated weaver into going to church in the belief that he will gain a powerful sense of being linked to the wider community, both human and divine.

To Barbara’s letter of December 1860 Marian replied sympathetically, admitting that she too found comfort in the rituals of liturgy. She had seen nothing wrong in kneeling for a blessing from the Pope and once she moved to central London in late 1860, she sometimes attended services at the Unitarian chapel in Little Portland Street, taking pot luck with the preachers. All the same, she told Barbara, ‘I have faith in the working-out of higher possibilities than the Catholic or any other church has presented.’
²⁰
For her the best and most difficult option was still to live one’s life without what she called in an uncanny and unintentional echo of Marx’s famous phrase the ‘opium’ of religion.

Going to Italy was not just about hiding from hostile reviews or distracting Marian from the tragic fate of ‘poor Maggie’. The next three months were to be the last that the Leweses could count on being alone together for a long time. They were due to finish their holiday in Berne, from where they would take Lewes’s eldest son back home to live with them in London. The ‘dual solitude’ of the past six years was about to be interrupted by a seventeen-year-old boy.

When Lewes had broken the news to his sons the previous summer about their parents’ odd living arrangements they had seemed to take it well. The dislocations of the past ten years had
taught them to be resilient, flexible and discreet. Apart from the occasional wistful comment, they accepted without fuss that they never came home for the holidays. Presumably Lewes worried that having them in London each summer would entail a premature explanation of his separation from Agnes. But he was also keen to protect Marian and her work from the impact of three puppyish young men. Despite being a loving and involved father, Lewes always put his relationship with Marian first. And if the boys felt angry about their abandonment they were sufficiently attuned to their parents’ culture of silence not to say so. Instead, they filled their letters ‘home’ to Agnes’s Kensington address with cheerful accounts of piano lessons and butterfly catching and messages of love to ‘the babies’ – the four children by Hunt whom they still thought of as their full siblings.