My Life in Middlemarch (18 page)

I was studying English literature because I loved books, a common enough motivation among students of literature, but I soon discovered that love didn’t have much purchase when it came to our studies. It was the mideighties, the era of critical theory—an approach to literature that had been developed at Yale, among other distant and exotic locales. I’d never heard of critical theory before I got to Oxford, but I soon discovered that it was what the most sophisticated-seeming undergraduates were engaged by.
Scholars applied the tools of psychoanalysis or feminism to reveal the ways in which the author was blind to his or her own desire or prejudice, or they used the discipline of deconstruction to dispense with the author altogether. (Thus, J. Hillis Miller on George Eliot: “This incoherent, heterogeneous, ‘unreadable,’ or nonsynthesizable quality of the text of
Middlemarch
jeopardizes the narrator’s effort of totalization.”) Books—or texts, as they were called by those versed in theory—weren’t supposed merely to be read, but to be interrogated, as if they had committed some criminal malfeasance.

Oxford was hardly a crucible of high theory, but theory was in the air, and it was intriguing. Knowing which books to read or which lectures to attend was like knowing which clubs played the best music, and reading Michel Foucault on the history of sexuality seemed a lot more exciting than reading Alexander Pope. I once went to a seminar in the college rooms of a don who was well known in Oxford and beyond for his application of Marxist theory to literature. (“Splendid library, of course, with soft carpet, couches, etc. such as become a sympathizer with the suffering classes,” as Eliot wrote of Dickens.) I don’t recall which author was the object of that particular inquisition, but I do remember the way the room was crowded with the don’s acolytes. Monkish-looking young men with close-shaven heads wearing black turtle-necks huddled with their notebooks around the master, while others lounged on the rug at his feet. It felt very exclusive—and, with its clotted jargon, willfully difficult. Under such influences I wrote, for part of my finals, an extended feminist critique of Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene,
which, appropriately enough, clogged a friend’s printer, like a lump of undigested food.

G
EORGE
Eliot visited Oxford for the first time in May 1870. She and Lewes traveled up from London by train in the morning, then had lunch with their hosts, Mark Pattison, the Rector of Lincoln College, and his wife, Emily Francis Pattison. Afterward they took a walk through the city—which, Eliot wrote in her journal, “on this first view was rather disappointing to me.”

Eliot had a habit of being unimpressed on a first encounter with places that were generally considered worthy of admiration. Ten years earlier, she and Lewes had gone to Rome and been initially underwhelmed. “A weary length of dirty uninteresting streets had brought us within sight of the dome of St. Peter’s which was not impressive, seen in a peeping makeshift manner, just rising above the houses; and the Castle of St. Angelo seemed but a shabby likeness of the engravings,” she wrote. “We wandered farther among narrow and ugly streets and came in to our hotel again, still with some dejection at the probable relations our ‘Rome visited’ was to bear to our ‘Rome unvisited.’ ”

In the end Eliot found plenty to approve in Rome, though she found Trajan’s Forum dreary, and was persistently irritated by the exterior of St. Peter’s as well as being appalled by what she described as “the hideous red drapery” with which its interior had been decked for Easter. Eliot drew on her distaste for Rome when depicting Dorothea, on her honeymoon, chilled at St. Peter’s by the sight of “the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.”

To Dorothea, Rome seems to consist of “ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where
all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence.” The city is incomprehensible, a jumble of disconcerting impressions and experiences: “All this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion.” Eliot is necessarily elliptical about the intimacies of Dorothea’s newlywed experience, but in passages like this one the city itself becomes a metaphor for Dorothea’s disastrous induction into conjugal relations—the tremendous disparity between marriage unrealized and marriage realized.

What could have disappointed Eliot on that first walk in Oxford? She was staying in the very heart of the city, at Lincoln College, on Turl Street. Perhaps she was put off by the proximity to the covered market, which had been constructed a hundred years earlier and would have been busy with the trade of butchers, grocers, and fishmongers. (The stalls selling fish had been moved from one corner of the market to the other in 1850, after the owner of the Mitre Hotel complained about “the putrefaction of the entrails and scales thrown down some drain sewer or cesspool.”) But in all likelihood, Eliot and Lewes would have headed in the opposite and more inviting direction, down the High Street. “One of the finest in England; not only for its width and regular arrangement, but for the beauty and magnificence of the churches and collegiate edifices lining it on both sides,” is how
M’Culloch’s Universal Gazetteer
described it in 1855.

They would have seen St. Mary’s Church, with its ornate
fourteenth-century spire, and the Gothic grandeur of All Souls College, the church’s neighbor. They might have walked around the gorgeous neoclassical rotunda of the Radcliffe Camera, opposite All Souls, and entered the austere quadrangle of the Bodleian Library, with its high, fortress-like walls. They would have passed the Divinity School, perhaps glimpsing its Gothic vaulted ceiling through large leaded windows, and a few steps later approached the Sheldonian Theatre, designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Perhaps if one has been disappointed by St. Peter’s this would be an unimpressive circuit; otherwise, it’s hard to imagine how one could find nothing here to admire, or to feel elevated by.

In later years, Eliot would come to enjoy visiting Oxford: she became good friends with Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol College, who invited her and Lewes to the weekend parties he hosted. There she talked easily with scientists and classical scholars despite the limits of her formal education, “filling with wonder all who listened,” in the words of one young observer, William Wordsworth, the grandson and namesake of the poet. And even on this first visit to Oxford there were a number of fascinating diversions. She and Lewes saw a brain being dissected at the newly opened museum of natural history; they walked in Christ Church Meadow and watched Oxford’s rowing team race against one from Cambridge; and they mingled with undergraduates at Balliol—among whom, one student later suspected, she gathered material for the character of Fred Vincy.

But perhaps a dispiriting mood had been established at lunch on that first day. The Pattisons were relatively new friends of Eliot and Lewes; they had attended Sunday salons at the Priory, and Mrs. Pattison in particular had formed a close and confiding relationship
with Eliot. Dr. Pattison, a native of Yorkshire who was six years older than Eliot, had first gone to Oxford at eighteen, as a student, and had become a fellow at Lincoln. In 1851, at the age of thirty-eight, Pattison had expected to be made rector—or head—of the college, but was sidelined by colleagues, to his great disappointment. A decade later he finally ascended to that coveted position, and swiftly did what university rules had prevented him from doing while a fellow: he got married. His wife, Emily Francis Strong, was twenty-one at the time, twenty-seven years his junior.

It’s not recorded what the friends discussed during lunch together that first day in Oxford, but perhaps the rector asked after George Eliot’s work. If so, she might reluctantly have mentioned her new novel:
Middlemarch.
A few days before going to Oxford, she’d met with Blackwood, her publisher, and discussed her progress with him. “It promises to be something wonderful,” he reported afterward. She, though, felt her progress was sluggish. “My novel, I suppose, will be finished some day: it creeps on,” she had written to Blackwood a few weeks earlier. What Eliot discussed with Blackwood during their meeting would have been the introduction of Lydgate and the Vincy family. It was not until the end of that year that she would conceive of the story of Casaubon and Dorothea, writing the section that became the beginning of Book One and reanimated her progress on the novel.

But perhaps the conversation didn’t turn at all to her writing. Eliot did not much like to discuss her works in progress: “Talking about my books, I find, has much the same malign effect on me as talking of my feelings or my religion,” she once wrote. They could instead have discussed university politics. Eliot was once asked what the difference in her impressions was between Cambridge
and Oxford, and she replied that at Cambridge they all seemed to speak well of each other, whereas at Oxford they all criticized each other. That afternoon as she walked around the city she may have been thinking of the pettiness of the scholars cloistered within the college walls.

In all likelihood Eliot and Lewes would have described their recent visit to Berlin, a city in which Pattison had spent some time after his first disappointing effort to become rector. The garrulous Lewes might have bragged about the eminences among whom they had hobnobbed, including Frederick VIII, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein. (“Altogether his Highness was as agreeable an acquaintance as if he had been Mr. Smith with a first rate education,” Lewes had written afterward in a letter.) Lewes would surely have described how at a grand party Eliot had been feted as a celebrity, surrounded by crowds of adoring women whose attentions she privately likened to being pecked at by flocks of birds. Eliot herself would likely have explained that her response to her fans had been colored by the sore throat and headaches from which she had been suffering. “I felt my heart go out to some good women who seemed really to have an affectionate feeling towards me for the sake of my books,” she had written to a friend. “But the sick animal longs for quiet and darkness.”

Mrs. Pattison had been ill recently, too, and not long before the visit to Oxford Eliot had expressed her concern in a letter. “It saddens me to think of the trouble and the bodily suffering that you have undergone. Can severe troubles ever be said to have quite passed away?” Eliot had written. “I think it alters all one’s tissues, enlarging life perhaps by bringing new susceptibilities, but often dulling even the wish for personal pleasure.” Perhaps there was
still a cloud of suffering hanging over the lunch table, a sense of troubles that were not of the transient kind.

C
ONSIDERABLE
scholarly energy has been expended over the decades upon the question of whether the Rector of Lincoln and his wife inspired the characters of Edward Casaubon and Dorothea Brooke, about whom Eliot began writing a few months after this visit. Certainly the identification with the Pattisons was made almost immediately upon the novel’s publication: in 1879 the novelist Margaret Oliphant described Pattison as “a curious wizened little man” who was “supposed to be the Casaubon of ‘Middlemarch.’ ” The identification was repeated enough to become common currency. In 1895
Outlook
magazine ran a brief article noting that Mrs. Pattison, who was widowed in 1884, had been remarried a year later, to Sir Charles Wentworth, Lord Dilke, a radical politician who had once been an art student. The writer observed that Mrs. Pattison had gone from Casaubon to Ladislaw, wryly noting that “as the novel was written, of course, long before the actual occurrence [of the second marriage], it has been cited as a remarkable example of George Eliot’s insight into the characters of her friends.”

Mrs. Pattison had grown up in Oxford, where her father was a banker. She showed early promise as an artist, and John Ruskin, a family acquaintance, advised her to go to London to study at the National Art Training School in South Kensington, which was eventually to become the Royal College of Art. There she was a brilliant student, impish and vivacious. She had advanced social views, but was also fanatically religious. Lord Dilke, her future
second husband, was among her fellow students, and in a memoir of her that he wrote after her death he said she had presented a striking figure. “Miss Strong used to horrify her ordinary Church friends by her studies in dissection and anatomy and by her fearless advocacy of the necessity of drawing from the nude: but at the same time, still more greatly to shock them by her habit of doing penance for the smallest fault, imaginary or real, by lying for hours on the bare floor or on the stones, with her arms in the attitude of the cross,” Dilke wrote.

After marrying Pattison, Francis, as she was always known, became a pupil to her much older scholar-husband. She learned Latin, German, and French sufficient to read the important works in the literatures of those languages. (Pattison loved reading classical Latin authors, and could himself write in a beautiful fluent Latin.) “Of all the periods of her life when, to judge by results, she worked with the most Benedictine application, that of the first years of her marriage with Mark Pattison must be pronounced supreme,” Dilke wrote. She maintained her own interests—and her own income—by writing for the
Saturday Review
and other periodicals, and eventually she became an accomplished art historian. Dilke points out that she signed herself “E.F.S. Pattison,” “the S … being introduced by her to mark her wish for some recognition of the independent existence of women.” But, he added, “there was no personal resistance to the influence over her of her husband. His mind and learning deserved the surrender of the educational direction of a young girl, however gifted, to his mental and philosophical control; and he obtained it.”