George Eliot (60 page)

Naples turned out to be wet and Rome unpleasantly crowded. Normally the cheeriest of souls, Lewes seemed perpetually irritated by those things that he usually found charming: lazy trains,
tricky cabbies and other people. He could not be bothered to remember his fifty-second birthday on 18 April, and fretted constantly to be home and ‘at work again’. When he did finally get back to the Priory on 5 May, he was shocked to find a skeletal Thornie waiting for him.

Despite Lewes’s suggestion to Blackwood that he had never held out any hope of recovery for Thornie, the death hit him very hard. Usually able to work through anything, he was forced to put aside his monumental
Problems of Life and Mind
, in which he was trying to find a physiological basis for human psychology. His constant companions of headache and ringing in the ears now intensified and on one frightening evening in February 1870 he fainted in bed, waking the next morning to find his hands and feet numb and tingling. If this was a minor stroke, it remained undiagnosed and a couple of weeks later Lewes was just able to drag himself off to the Isle of Wight for a convalescent break with the hypochondriacal but supremely robust Herbert Spencer.
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The trip to Germany the following month, in March 1870, did a fair amount for Lewes’s ego, if nothing for his health. In Europe he had long been treated as a great man of both Science and Letters, rather than a versatile hack. In Berlin he talked as an equal with leading researchers in neurology and attended a University Festival in honour of the King’s birthday, where he was ‘seated apart from the public among the Princes, Professors, Ambassadors, and persons covered with stars and decorations’.
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Invited to dinner by the American ambassador, he was delighted to meet the distinguished chemist Robert Wilhelm Bunsen. Prince Frederick VIII, the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, spotted him in a bookshop and ‘begged to be introduced’.
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This was the kind of thing Lewes loved. Unlike Marian, who genuinely preferred not to be recognised by the public, Lewes had been known to drop hints about his identity to fellow hotel guests, especially if they were female, young and pretty.

With progress on
Problems
still stalled, Lewes consulted yet another doctor. Following Dr Reynolds’s advice on phosphates, cod liver oil and plenty of rest by the sea, the Leweses duly set out for a tour of east-coast health spots in June 1870, taking in Cromer and Harrogate before meeting up with Georgie Burne-Jones in Whitby. From this low point Lewes’s health gradually
improved. It may have been the happy news of Bertie’s engagement, or the peaceful death of Mrs Willim on 10 December 1870, which allowed him to release a little of the heavy responsibility he always carried for his clan. On the other hand it is possible that Marian’s descent into nausea and toothache while writing
Middlemarch
required him to vacate the role of invalid. In the ceaseless dance of sickness that the Leweses performed down the years, the jobs of nurse and patient were swapped several times. Now it was Lewes’s turn to fuss around Marian, summoning Paget from town and making sure there was a steady supply of pain-relieving quinine. Marian reported that Lewes was now ‘in an altogether flourishing condition, enjoying all things from his breakfast to the highest problems in statics and dynamics’.
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She had not seen him so well for many years.

The Leweses’ continued devotion to one another sometimes baffled onlookers. On the last day of 1870 Marian wrote in her journal: ‘In my private lot I am unspeakably happy, loving and beloved,’ while Lewes maintained to a friend that the experience of being Marian’s partner ‘is a perpetual Banquet to which that of Plato would present but a flat rival’.
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What puzzled people who met the Leweses at dinner or who came to the Priory was how this vulgar, obnoxious little man could enthral a woman as morally refined as Marian. Even the unsophisticated and prepared-to-be-impressed Mary Arnold had taken ‘a prompt and active dislike’ when she met Lewes at Lincoln College and had wondered how the great George Eliot could bear to fall silent in order to hang on every word that issued from the big, wet lips of her companion.
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Charles Norton was more specific about his dislike. Although he grudgingly conceded that Lewes’s talents ‘seem equal to anything’, he went on to point out that ‘his moral perceptions are not acute and he consequently often fails in social tact and taste’.
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Norton had a point. Over Christmas 1870 the Leweses went to stay at a High Church parsonage on the Isle of Wight with Barbara Bodichon. Lewes was highly amused to find a scourge hanging in the priest’s study and organised a little trick which, mindful of Barbara’s growing interest in Roman Catholicism, seems extremely tasteless. He arranged with the parlour maid that she would present the scourge on a covered plate during
dinner. When Barbara removed the lid the thongs of the scourge gave a little jump ‘as if a live eel or so were there’.
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Reporting the incident to Charlie and Gertrude, Lewes maintained that there was ‘Immense laughter!’ from the assembled company. Did Marian, with her great empathy for other people’s religious faith, really find this funny? If so, it means that her love and need for Lewes were powerful enough to send her carefully calibrated moral compass swinging wildly off course.

Middlemarch
represents George Eliot’s most comprehensive and finely rendered view of human experience. It is a vast, inclusive ‘Study of Provincial Life’, setting out her beliefs about how society works, how it supports and thwarts the individuals who compose it, and how an accommodation can be made between the two. It is, in effect, an answer to all those correspondents and callers who entreated Marian Lewes: ‘how must I live now?’

Middlemarch represents that literal and metaphoric middling part of Britain. In 1829, when the book opens, it is a thriving market town with some light industry, of which Mr Vincy’s silk factory is the prominent example, and enduring connections to the surrounding agricultural estates, owned by county families like the Brookes and the Chettams. Eliot uses the image of the web over and over to reinforce the idea that all parts of the community are intimately interwoven, and becoming more so as the time of political reform approaches. In chapter 10 the landowner Brooke invites the professional and manufacturing men of Middlemarch to dinner, already half aware that in the coming years his interests will increasingly be meshed with theirs.
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These ‘fresh threads of connection’ between the agricultural and urban communities call the hitherto unstoppable Brooke to a new kind of account.
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During his campaign to be returned as a reforming MP, the Middlemarch mob taunt him with his record as a stingy, careless landlord who allows his tenants to languish in unnecessary poverty. In embarrassment and confusion Brooke withdraws from the election.

In her handling of Brooke’s changing relationship with the men of Middlemarch, Eliot’s determination to show the ‘stealthy convergence of human lots’ is perfectly grounded in the changes in social and political power which took place in Britain from the
late twenties. Other attempts to show this shifting interconnectedness between one life and another result in some fantastic coincidences of plot, which seem to go against everything Eliot once sketched out as vital to her kind of realism. The narrative thread which reveals that Will Ladislaw, already in the neighbourhood to visit his second cousin Casaubon, is also the grandson of the banker Bulstrode’s first wife, would not be out of place in a novel by Scott or Dickens. It is in these dense, stringy corners of the plot that Henry James’s comment that
Middlemarch
‘sets a limit, we think to the development of the old-fashioned English novel’ starts to seem less of a competitive barb by the Young Pretender and more of a valid assessment of the limits to literary realism.
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In other respects, though, Eliot manages her material magnificently. When Blackwood made the remark about her being a giant he was referring not so much to her status in the literary world as to her ability to stride through her fictional landscape, eavesdropping on every kind of life. In the earliest days of ‘Amos Barton’ Blackwood had wondered at his new author’s ability to describe the conversation of a group of clerics; twenty-five years later he was marvelling at the way she managed to get the slangy talk of ‘those horsy men’ who fleece Fred Vincy exactly right.
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There seemed no end to the lives Eliot was able to inhabit. Drawing on her own priggish adolescence she could imagine the Evangelical banker Bulstrode, rigid with spiritual pride. Her schoolgirl pleasure ‘On Being Called a Saint’ was transferred to the late-middle-aged man whose overweening ambition is to be seen to be good. When revelations made by the scurrilous stranger Raffles mean that Bulstrode is about to be unmasked as a swindler, the banker’s refusal to admit the full extent of his sin to himself or to God captures exactly the agony of the narcissistic soul. It is an agony which the adolescent Mary Ann Evans, caught in her own relationship with an unforgiving Deity, knew only too well.

‘She never forgets anything which comes within the curl of her eyelash,’ Lewes had said to Mary Cash, formerly Sibree, in answer to her reverential query in 1873 about the source of George Eliot’s power.
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The political infighting on Middle-march’s Board of Health over the new fever hospital was probably
suggested by some story Robert Evans carried home from one of the committees that increasingly occupied him during the last decade at Griff. Fred Vincy’s listless assumption that he will go into the Church is possibly based on what Marian had picked up about her nephew, Fred Evans. Just like Mr Vincy, Isaac Evans had educated his children with an eye to social advancement. His son Fred had been sent to Exeter College, Oxford, where he managed a lacklustre third before becoming ordained and taking up a post in the parish of Bedworth, the little industrial village where Mary Ann had once busied herself providing second-hand clothing for the coal-miners. Here is a fine example of what Marian hated most: young men and women aiming for ‘the highest work’ without any regard to talent or calling. Luckily Fred Vincy is redeemed by his childhood sweetheart, Mary Garth, who refuses to marry him unless he finds a career for which he is more honestly suited.

There are more marvels in
Middlemarch
. Although she had not been born into the gentry, young Mary Anne’s ladylike ways had elevated her from agent’s daughter to the favourite of Mrs Maria Newdegate, mistress of Arbury Hall. And Robert Evans’s increasing reputation as a clever land agent not only now provided the model for Caleb Garth, but had given the adolescent Mary Ann some access to the local county families. Whatever her exact sources, Eliot was able to write about the gentry as if she knew them intimately. There is Sir James Chettam, a well-meaning, slightly stupid baronet who wants to marry Dorothea Brooke, but ends up as her protective brother-in-law. Unlike his blustery neighbour Brooke, Chettam treats his tenants well, engaging Caleb Garth to make sure the land is farmed along the most modern and effective lines. There is Mrs Cadwallader, an impoverished gentlewoman and rector’s wife, whose snobbish adherence to the old country ways is saved by a sharp wit and her loathing of the dusty Casaubon. And finally there is Mr Brooke, a pompous, windy old fool who likes the idea of being at the cutting edge of art, music and politics, but lives in horror of ‘going too far’ in anything. His promiscuous activities, which include becoming proprietor of the local newspaper in order to influence local politics, recall Charles Bray’s ubiquitous presence in the public life of Coventry.

While the town and county families in
Middlemarch
muddle through, being ordinarily kind and cutting to one another, there are two young people, one from each side, who are resolved to do better. Mr Brooke’s nineteen-year-old niece Dorothea is impatient with the privileges of her position, and spends her time designing cottages for the poor and praying enthusiastically for them when they fall ill. Noble-hearted and ‘ardent’, she longs for a great cause to shape her life. Unimpressed by Sir James Chettam’s courtship, which promises to turn her into nothing more special than a liberal baronet’s wife, she insists upon marrying the middle-aged scholar and cleric Edward Casaubon. By becoming her husband’s amanuensis and helpmate on his monumental life-work, the ‘Key to All Mythologies’, Dorothea hopes to find the key which will unlock the meaning of her own life.

The twenty-seven-year-old Tertius Lydgate shares Dorothea’s hunger to improve the lot of the people around him. Unlike her, he has a clear arena in which to realise his ambitions. Although a gentleman by birth, he has qualified in medicine from the prestigious universities of Edinburgh and Paris. Armed with the new tools of stethoscope and microscope, he plans to combine an effective modern practice with a continued interest in pure scientific research, ‘to do good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world’.
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Lydgate’s first step is to practise a general medicine which is rigorous and effective. This means refusing to follow what family doctors have been doing for centuries – making money by sending out drugs which would be better obtained from the apothecary or the dispensary. Although willing to attend anyone who asks to see him, Lydgate has a horror of appearing to court favour and wears his independence with more than a hint of pride. He believes his energies will be best used introducing up-to-date procedures at the fever hospital or persuading bereaved relatives to allow him to carry out the novel procedure of an autopsy.

Eliot uses one of her stunning scientific metaphors to explain the disabling egotism of her major characters. She imagines a lighted candle held against a piece of polished steel and points out that the random scratches on the surface will appear to fall ‘in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun’. These things, she tells us, are a parable. The scratches are events and
the candle is the powerfully distorting centre of an individual consciousness.
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