George Eliot (51 page)

Having Lewes at the head of the
Cornhill
gave Smith a persuasive ally in his campaign to get George Eliot on board. By the beginning of May she was coming round to the idea of letting him publish
Romola
in weekly sixpenny parts of twenty-four pages. However, first she insisted on reading him some of what she had already written so that he should be absolutely aware of the uncommercial nature of the novel for which he was bidding. Having heard it, Smith decided that the story would not work in such small segments, and said that he would prefer to publish it in the
Cornhill
in twelve instalments of forty to forty-five pages, starting in July. For this he would pay £7000.
⁷⁰
The Leweses accepted, but it was an odd, botched deal, which did not work properly for anyone. Smith did not get the strong successor he had wanted to Trollope’s
Framley Parsonage
, which finished its
Cornhill
run in April. And Marian was still left having to write a book against horrendous deadlines.

The next task was to tell Blackwood, who was still under the impression that he was George Eliot’s publisher. On 19 May, the day she struck a deal with Smith, Marian wrote to Edinburgh. She started by apologising that ‘this letter will seem rather abrupt to you, but the abruptness is unavoidable’, then explained that she had recently received an offer which she supposed ‘was handsomer than almost any terms ever offered to a writer of Fiction’. Then, in a barbed reference to the way in which she had always felt undervalued by John Blackwood, she continued, ‘I felt that, as I was not at liberty to mention the terms to you, and as they were hopelessly beyond your usual estimate of the value of my books to you, there would be an indelicacy in my making an appeal to you before decision.’
⁷¹

Blackwood replied the next day with superhuman restraint. He was sorry that the new novel was not to come out ‘under the old colours’, but was quite aware of the vast sums which were being offered to ‘writers of much inferior mark to you’. He concluded with a flattering reference, which may or may not have been sarcastic, to her lack of greed and high-minded loyalty. Marian certainly took him at face value, for in her journal three days later she recorded complacently that although there had been ‘regret’ in leaving Blackwood, he ‘has written me a letter in the most perfect spirit of gentlemanliness and good-feeling’.
⁷²

In fact John Blackwood was feeling anything but gentlemanly. Three days later, Langford wrote with the news that Smith and Elder had had the cheek to send an advertisement for insertion in
Maga
in which George Eliot’s new story was announced in the next number of the
Cornhill Magazine
. Langford, who had long disapproved of Marian, pointedly referred to her as ‘Miss Evans’ and branded the whole business a ‘disgusting transaction, which certainly does not surprise me on her part, but does rather on the part of Mr Smith’. Faced with Langford’s ‘attempt to sour my stomach’, Blackwood retreated to his usual defence of trying to convince himself that it was Lewes rather than Marian who was the prime mover in this bit of treachery. He blamed Lewes’s ‘voracity’ for making her act ‘against her inclination’ in ‘going over to the enemy’. He consoled himself with the thought that
Romola
was unlikely to go down well with the readers of the
Cornhill
and stuck to the moral high ground by refusing to quarrel since ‘quarrels especially literary ones are vulgar’.
⁷³

No sooner had Marian accepted Smith’s offer than she regretted it. The writing of
Romola
was not going well and the realisation that she was about to produce her first flop must have seemed like a punishment for her disloyalty and greed. On 17 June she invited Blackwood to visit Blandford Square and took advantage of a few moments alone together to tell him ‘that she could never feel to another publisher as she felt towards me – that pleasure to her was gone in the matter and she did not feel sure now whether she had acted right’. Blackwood reported with righteous satisfaction to his nephew Willie, who had taken his late father’s place in the business, that on this occasion he ‘merely looked her full in the face and shaking hands said, “I’m fully satisfied that it must have been a very sharp pang to you.”’
⁷⁴

No one could have blamed Blackwood for feeling smug. Although a critical success,
Romola
did not come near to reimbursing Smith for his tremendous outlay. It did nothing to halt the decline in the sales of the
Cornhill
and as a three-decker it was slow to sell. Painfully aware that she had not delivered her side of the bargain, Marian gave Smith ‘Brother Jacob’, for which he had been prepared to pay 250 guineas, absolutely free. It eventually appeared in the July 1864 edition of the magazine.

The obligation to write to order brought extra strain to what was already a difficult experience. Time was sometimes perilously tight: at the end of September 1862 Marian had still not finished the instalment due to be published in December.
⁷⁵
For writers like Dickens and Trollope who were used to working in this way, the pressure of serialisation was offset by certain advantages. Allowed to gauge reaction to a character or storyline as they went along, they could be sure of satisfying popular taste. Because Marian took care not to read or listen to criticism, she was unable to profit by this time lag. In any case, the organic construction of her books meant that, even if she had heard a whisper of criticism or praise, she would have been incapable of changing her work in response.

Much has been written about the damaging effects of Marian’s refusal to confront and absorb reactions to her work. Her morbid sensitivity had worsened as she grew more successful. Lewes had stretched himself into what amounted to a cordon of steel, allowing no adverse comment to reach her. In September 1862 Sara Hennell, who had still not got the point that her response to Marian’s work was not wanted, had sent a letter in which she repeated some critical remarks she had heard about
Romola
. Lewes made sure that Marian didn’t see these comments by pretending to lose the letter before she could read it for herself. The moment he was on his own, he sat down and wrote sternly to ‘My dear Miss Hennell’, explaining that after the horrors of the public gossip about
Adam Bede
, they had decided that Marian should pay no attention to anyone’s comments about her books: ‘No one speaks about her books to her, but me; she sees no criticisms.’ As for the remarks about
Romola
which Sara had repeated, Lewes explains loftily that Marian had always been aware that the book would not be popular. Then, in a swipe at the provincial company which Sara kept, he continued: ‘If you only knew the wonderful eulogies which have reached her from learned Florentines, and Englishmen of high culture (F. Maurice, Bulwer, Anthony Trollope etc.) you would be surprised that she should be made miserable by doubts as to whether the book will be a success.’ Lewes finished with an emphatic and confused warning to Sara.

Perhaps it would have been better if Marian had read the offending paragraph in Sara’s letter. By closing her ears to popular opinion she lost touch during these middle years of her career with the springs of her own talent. Instead of the creamy dairy and the pithy sayings, the green fields and the Christmas dance of an England only just disappeared, there was the history-lesson tedium of a culture far removed from anyone’s experience. Anthony Trollope had tactfully warned her after the first instalment of
Romola
not to ‘fire too much over the heads of your readers’, but she had stubbornly insisted that if her readers were not able to follow her into new territory, then it was no concern of hers.
⁷⁷
Her next endeavour, the prose poem
The Spanish Gypsy
, was likewise to baffle and bore all but her most devoted fans. Other critics pointed to the complicated scientific metaphors in
Middlemarch
, which they assumed must have been the result of Lewes’s overbearing influence.

Posterity blamed Lewes for keeping Marian in a ‘mental greenhouse’, but those who knew her personally were adamant that if it had not been for this constant protection, self-doubt would have stopped her from writing.
⁷⁸
What is sometimes missed is that while Marian invited Lewes’s total protection, Lewes had a corresponding need to control Marian. As a couple they were by now in a situation unique in mid-Victorian England. Marian’s huge earnings not only supported Lewes in his unprofitable scientific work, but paid for his mother, his children, his wife, her children, as well as his widowed sister-in-law and her child. In the unlikely event that Marian were to leave him or to die, Lewes would have found himself in severe financial difficulties. His income for 1862 was £639 14s, handsome enough for a self-employed
writer, but hardly sufficient to keep all those impecunious Leweses out of the workhouse. No wonder that his anxiety about Marian’s career tipped over into an exaggerated fussiness. No surprise, either, that he felt the need to maintain his influence over her by making sure that no one else had access.

It is a shame that Marian was kept away from helpful criticism, because on the rare occasions she heard it she was able to respond creatively. When Richard Hutton, the
Spectator
critic, wrote thoughtfully to her about
Romola
, she neither crumbled nor resorted to lofty dismissals of his fitness to comment. Instead, she wrote back agreeing with and even amplifying some of his points. She reassured him that there was nothing in his
Spectator
review which struck her as wrong and was delighted that he had grasped the way in which she had tried to show the impact of Florentine political life on the development of Tito’s nature. She went on to stress what critics (both then and now) have failed to grasp, that while the subject matter of
Romola
represented a new departure, the treatment remained the same.

Marian probably found it easier to admit that there were important things wrong with
Romola
precisely because it was proving to be such a big critical hit. Lewes had not been exaggerating when he boasted to Sara Hennell that men of the calibre of F. D. Maurice and Anthony Trollope revered the book. Italy was in the process of fighting its way to freedom and unity, and Marian’s careful consideration of its history and culture provided a useful background to the current debate among the British intellectual
establishment as to the legitimacy of the revolutionary cause. So there was something entirely fitting about the fact that when on 18 April 1864 the Leweses went to see Garibaldi fêted at the Crystal Palace, none other than F. D. Maurice stepped forward in person to be introduced to the author of
Romola
.
⁸⁰

During the years 1859 to 1862 the Leweses were nearly always ill. Marian’s letters and journal entries are full of headaches, some of them lasting days. In part this was a response to the difficulties with
Romola
, but it was also the result of feeling choked and trapped in the city. As Marian told Barbara Bodichon, ‘The wide sky, the
not
-London, makes a new creature of me in half an hour.’
⁸¹
Whenever possible Lewes would take Marian for a break down to Surrey or Sussex. While it is hard today to imagine Dorking or Littlehampton representing some kind of rural idyll, in the 1860s they were sufficiently quiet to give Marian the glimpse of the country she needed, complete with foxhounds and stag meets. They were near enough to London, too, to allow Lewes to travel up to town to take care of business whenever necessary. Taking her Florentines with her, Marian managed to get through a significant amount of work in anonymous hotel rooms, a skill which she had enjoyed ever since her earliest days with Lewes.

The Lewes boys – their noise and chaos and failure to excel – hardly helped her spirits. Although Thornie was safely away in Edinburgh, there were still the occasional and disruptive weeks when he had to be in Blandford Square, usually
en route
for a summer break in Hofwyl. Although Marian tried manfully not to mind, she could not help her true feelings leaking out in letters. To Willie Blackwood, who had befriended Thornie in Edinburgh, she wrote that she hoped the boy was not being a nuisance: ‘Young gentlemen of seventeen have often immense resources for boring their elders.’
⁸²
Once Thornie had failed his exams and refused to re-sit them, there was the worry of designing a new future for him. At one time the worry became too much for Marian and she departed for a fortnight to Wandsworth, leaving Lewes and Thornie to thrash it out between them. This time, with the advice and practical help of Barbara Bodichon, it was decided that he should try Africa. In October 1863 Thornton
Lewes set off with a rifle, a revolver, a bit of Dutch and Zulu, and his usual high spirits.