George Eliot (48 page)
Authors: Kathryn Hughes
Although the Lewes boys had known about Marian’s place in their father’s life for the past year, the meeting at the Bernerhof Hotel in June 1860 was the first time they would meet her face to face. Deliberately casual and bright though they probably were on this occasion, they had clearly been rehearsing the thing in their minds for some time. Knowing that Marian and Lewes were due to pay a visit to the school, Thornie had written in advance asking for instructions about how to introduce their common-law stepmother to a classmate who had already met Agnes:
as he has seen Mamma, and knows her, he will of course see that Mother is not she, so that we have agreed, viz: Charles and I, that we had better tell him, enjoining at the same time secrecy, as at any rate, he would know it three or four months later, when he goes home. Mother will have therefore when we present him to say ‘How d’ye do!’ etc etc. And we only wait for your permission to tell him … You have told Mamma, that you had told us, didn’t you? In her [your] last letter there were one or two sentences from which Charles and I concluded you had.
21
This last line suggests how adept Thornie and his eldest brother had become at decoding communications from their parents. Yet it also displays the jaunty swagger and self-assertion which were unmistakably his father’s. Thornie’s descriptions of schoolboy life are full of sound and fury, as if he were the hero of his own
picaresque adventure. His natural linguistic ability, given free play at the multi-tongued Hofwyl, allowed him to hop delightedly between French, German and English in a way which recalls Lewes’s letters as a young man. He also shared his father’s interest in the natural world, collecting butterflies and small animals for enthusiastic stuffing. Touchingly, he had saved the best examples of his handiwork for his new stepmother.
Although Lewes and Agnes must have agreed that he would take responsibility for their three boys, leaving her to concentrate on her second family by Hunt, there never seems to have been any serious consideration that Thornie would come and live with his father and his new partner. This noisy lad was never going to fit easily into the Leweses’ quiet and productive London schedule. Naturally he would be provided for, the next stage of his education funded out of Marian’s growing wealth. But he would be kept as far away as possible from their London home, first in Edinburgh, then in Africa, from which he returned in 1869 only to die.
As a result of conversations with the headmaster, Dr Müller, during the June 1860 visit, Lewes decided that he would remove Thornie from Hofwyl along with Charlie. One idea was for the lad to go straight to Geneva where he would be tutored by M. D’Albert Durade, but this plan turned out to be too expensive. Next it was agreed that he would be steered towards the East India Office, in which case he would need to spend several years topping up his education at a British school. Oddly, Lewes decided that Edinburgh High School was the only place that would do, although he made a great fuss of asking Blackwood to find a kind family with whom Thornie could lodge.
22
That the boy might go to school in London and live with his father seems never to have been considered. Nor was there any chance of Thornie being allowed to disrupt the grown-ups’ plans for the summer: although he officially left Hofwyl in June, he stayed there through the summer, spending only a grudging three days in London at the end of September before being whisked away to Edinburgh for the start of term.
Thornie’s first year in Scotland went well. The Blackwood contingent, ever helpful beyond the call of duty, rallied round to keep a protective eye on the young man whom they had ominously
dubbed ‘Caliban’.
23
He was invited to stay on the Blackwoods’ country estate, Mrs Blackwood cooked him dinner, George Simpson took him on rambles and young Willie, the Major’s son, offered youthful companionship. Thornie’s natural brightness kept him near the top of his class and still left enough energy over for general wickedness. On one occasion he got home late from the theatre and climbed into his room through a window. The next day his landlord and moral caretaker, the classics master Mr Robertson, threatened to report the boy to his father, whereupon Thornie answered cheekily:
‘So you can!’
This put him in an awful rage, so, calling me an insolent dog, he made his shoeleather acquainted with my posterity. You need not ask me what I did; I did what you would have done in my place – knocked him down.
24
In the light of bulletins like these, it is hardly surprising that Marian did not look forward to Thornie breaking up for the first summer from Edinburgh. By now she was wrestling with the interminable
Romola
, and the clash and clatter which followed the boy wherever he went penetrated into the anguished quiet of her study. None the less, she found time to express her affection the best way she knew how, by coaching him for the first of his Civil Service exams which he passed easily before being shipped back to Hofwyl for the rest of the holiday. The interested, loving attention he continued to receive from the excellent Dr Müller and his wife, not to mention the presence of his younger brother Bertie, obscured the fact that the Lewes family used Hofwyl as a crèche for inconvenient adolescents.
At the end of his second year in Edinburgh Thornie took the examination for the Indian Service and managed to come a reasonable thirty-eighth out of 270. But things began to fall apart during his third and final year. Now that the prospect of India loomed, Thornie decided that he had never been interested anyway. Instead of cramming for his final exam, he devoted himself to his stamp collection, about which he had always been passionate. Unsurprisingly he failed, which, Marian explained in a letter to the D’Albert Durades, ‘was a great grief and disappointment to us’.
25
Thornie had displayed all the laziness and indecision of a rich man’s son who could afford to squander an opportunity in the certainty that there would be another one along shortly. For Lewes and Marian, both self-made people who continued to work like Trojans through middle age, it must have been a bitter puzzle. Thornie refused his father’s request to try the exam again and announced that he was going to Poland to fight the Russians. Before he could carry out his threat he was bundled back to Hofwyl, while his father pulled strings and consulted well-placed friends about what to do next.
Charles Lewes, a year Thornie’s senior, was a very different proposition. His eldest-child seriousness, quiet manners and sense of responsibility marked him out as someone who could be assimilated into the Leweses’ London regime without too much bother. He would make a reliable housekeeper in their absence and his excellent piano playing would be an asset in this most musical of households. Later his secretarial skills were put to good use keeping the ‘office’ running during the Leweses’ extended trips abroad. All this while he managed to earn steady promotion at the Post Office, get married and raise a family.
Of course, at seventeen Charles represented nothing but potential: in 1860 the main advantage to the plodding boy was simply that he was gentle, loving and, unlike his younger brother, did what he was told. Anthony Trollope, the Post Office’s most famously literary employee, kindly negotiated the complicated procedure which allowed Charles to take the entrance exam for the service. Coached by two of the finest brains in Britain, even the mediocre boy could hardly do anything but come an easy first. On 15 August 1860 he was appointed a supplementary clerk, second-class, at a salary of eighty pounds.
In order to ease Charlie’s journey to work, as well as give him access to concert halls and theatres, Marian and Lewes agreed that they would find a house in central London. For Lewes this was not much of a hardship: it is difficult to imagine a man less suited to suburban living. But for Marian, the countrywoman who even in greenish Wandsworth continued to long for an orchard and rough pasture, it was a huge sacrifice. She had made enough money from
The Mill
to afford a second home in the country and here she was, obliged to spend it on an ugly rented
house in Harewood Square, Marylebone. Three months of staring at its hideous yellow curtains were followed by a move to a house in nearby Blandford Square ‘which we have taken for three years’, Marian recorded in her journal: ‘hoping by the end of that time to have so far done our duty by the boys as to be free to live where we list’.
26
Although there can be no doubt that Marian genuinely suffered from being cooped up in town, she derived a compensatory psychological advantage from stressing the extent of her sacrifice: ‘I languish sadly for the fields and the broad sky; but duties must be done, and Charles’s moral education requires that he should have at once a home near to his business and the means of recreation easily within his reach’ was a refrain which she repeated over and over.
27
As a woman still widely regarded as having deprived a family of its father, here was her chance to show that she was the antithesis of a home-wrecker. She presented herself as an ‘angel in the house’, hovering over the kind of chaste domestic environment in which a young man might shelter from the corrupting pressures of the outside world. To any female correspondent involved in bringing up a child she was quick to claim the sisterhood of shared experience, stressing always her anxiety about her own ‘tall boys’.
So it was lucky that Charles was sufficiently biddable to slot into the part reserved for him in this highly staged reconstitution of Lewes’s family life. Instructed by his father in July 1859 to write to ‘Miss Evans’ from Hofwyl as if she were his mother, he obligingly complied. His first letter sensibly concentrated on their shared love of music and finished: ‘Give three kisses to Father, one for each of us, and tell him to give you the same for us. I remain, dear Mother, Yours affectionately, Charles Lewes.’
28
Marian, who had been referring to Lewes’s sons as ‘our boys’ for over a year now, could not match Charles’s fluent intimacy and her reply came back awkwardly signed ‘your loving Mother, Marian Lewes’. It was not until her third letter in this sequence, written in November, that she found a voice which adequately represented her odd position as a common-law stepmother. This time she signed herself ‘Your loving
Mutter
’ – using the German in which all the boys had been educated to suggest her distance from conventional motherhood.
29
Marian’s anxiety to present herself as a proper mother led to some dull, preachy letters. Making Charlie a present of a watch, she is careful to remind him that it is a reward for the good use he has made of his time at Hofwyl. When he complains that he has lost an archery competition because of a duff bow, she is quick to tell him that a bad workman always blames his tools. Moral homilies and exhortations to do better are regularly interspersed with excruciating references to the physical signs of puberty. One wonders how many unfunny jokes about his slow-growing whiskers the lad was forced to endure.
Rehearsing their new family roles in letters was one thing, playing them for real was another. Acutely aware that they could not afford to flounder, Marian and Lewes plunged wholesale into family life – any family’s life. Their first move after Hofwyl was to take Charles to Geneva where Marian saw her old ‘family’, M. D’Albert Durade and ‘Maman’, for the first time in twenty years. She had already renewed her ties with them by appointing M. D’Albert as the French translator of
Adam Bede
and now she authorised him to do
The Mill
as well. Lewes for his part was delighted to see how truly the D’Alberts ‘loved and prized Polly’ and, to strengthen the family connection, asked them to take Thornie into their household.
30
From Venice Marian had written ahead to Nursie, currently house-sitting at Holly Lodge, asking her to make Charlie’s bedroom as welcome as possible. Charles repaid this fussing admirably, spending his first few weeks in London cramming for his Post Office exam and immersing himself in an instantly intimate relationship with his ‘
Mutter’
. By May 1861 Lewes could report exultantly to Blackwood that ‘it would interest you to see her with the eldest, who
worships
her, and thinks no treat equal to having her all to himself for an evening to make, and be made much of. Among the many blessings that have come to me late in life this of seeing the perfect love between her and the children is one of the greatest; perhaps because it was one of the rocks ahead.’
31
Marian, too, was keen to stress how well this little family was doing under her moral guidance. Within two weeks of Charlie’s arrival, she was writing to Charles Bray to tell him: ‘I think we are quite peculiarly blest in the fact that this eldest lad seems the
most entirely lovable human animal of seventeen and a half, that I ever met with or heard of: he has a sweetness of disposition which is saved from weakness by a remarkable sense of duty.’
32
Meditations on Charles’s specialness were woven into her letters to both friends and acquaintances. Yet despite her insistence to M. D’Albert in August 1860 that Charles was ‘improving constantly and applying himself with admirable resolution and good sense to the everyday work of life’, the inconvenient truth was that the boy was not doing very well at all.
33
In May 1862 Anthony Trollope confided to Lewes that Charles’s superiors at the Post Office had reported that he ‘was careless, slow, and inefficient’.
34
The problem, Trollope generously suggested, might be that Charles wasn’t very quick in English, having been educated mainly in German. Certainly his letters from Hofwyl are spotted with clumsy constructions. Whatever the root of the problem, Charles was doggedly persistent in putting it right. Within a year he was back on course, getting promoted steadily and eventually rising to the creditable post of Principal Clerk by 1880, the year of his
Mutter
’s death.
