My Life in Middlemarch

by Rebecca Mead

  In this exchange, Mary reminds me not so much of Juliet or Ophelia—pretty girls, both, and look where it got them—as of Rosalind, the clever, irresistible heroine of As You Like It. The play is set in the Forest of Arden, a reimagined version of the region in Warwickshire that was the birthplace of both Shakespeare and George Eliot, and Rosalind spends most of it in the guise of a boy, Ganymede. In a wonderful comic conceit, Rosalind-as-Ganymede impersonates herself as the love object of the smitten Orlando. “Love me, Rosalind,” Orlando begs. “Yes, faith, will I, Fridays and Saturdays, and all,” Rosalind replies. “And wilt thou have me?” Orlando asks. “Ay, and twenty such,” counters Rosalind. “Are you not good?” she says. “Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing?”

  Rosalind shows that it is possible for a woman to be both intelligent and passionate. She is, of course, in love with Orlando even as she tests him. “O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love!” she tells Celia, her cousin. “But it cannot be sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.” Her aching, secret, high-spirited confession conjures all the thrilling urgency of falling in love under complicated circumstances.

  Rosalind, clever Mary’s ancestor, is cherished by clever girls everywhere. Fred cherishes Mary for her cleverness—he brings her books when he visits—and this is one of his most admirable qualities. Whatever his other failings, he isn’t intimidated by a woman with a brain. (He also admires and respects Mary’s mother, Mrs. Garth, who teaches her children history in the kitchen while baking jam puffs.) But cleverness is not the only quality that Fred cherishes in Mary. Mary is what Americans call homely: unhandsome, even ugly at an unfortunate angle. But she also inspires in Fred that familiar, comforting, easy sense of rightness that is what the English mean when using the word “homely” to describe a house.

  “A homely place with an orchard in front of it, a rambling, old-fashioned, halftimbered building, which before the town had spread had been a farm-house, but was now surrounded by the private gardens of the townsmen,” is how Eliot describes the Garths’ house, where Fred goes to make his confession of fiscal irresponsibility. Mary, a girl from the borderlands of the Forest of Arden, is home to Fred. But she is much more than home, too—as is Rosalind, with her glorious admonition to Orlando on behalf of clever girls, and the women they grow up into: “Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that and ’twill out at the key-hole; stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.”

  “NO fear of my marrying,” Thornie wrote to Lewes the summer after he turned twenty, not long after his older brother Charles had announced his engagement. “I am to be the bachelor as Charlie is not, that’s clear, and I made up my mind to it a long while ago.”

  Thornie would miss his brother’s wedding, to a young woman called Gertrude Hill. In the autumn of 1863 he had set sail on the two-month voyage to Durban, South Africa, arriving there just before New Year. “Well, our poor boy Thornie parted from us today and set out on his voyage to Natal,” Eliot wrote to Sara Hennell, the sister of Cara Bray and of Charles Hennell, with whom she had been close friends since the Rosehill days. “I say ‘poor’ as one does about all beings that are gone away from us for a long while,” she added. “But he went in excellent spirits with a large packet of recommendatory letters to all sorts of people, and with what he cares much more for—a first rate rifle and revolver.”

  Thornie’s departure for Natal came after several months during which his career had been worryingly undecided. Lewes and Eliot had hoped that he would go to India to join the civil service there, but, as they belatedly discovered, he had failed to study sufficiently for the necessary examinations. Charles Lewes, meanwhile, had become a civil servant closer to home, in the Post Office, thanks to the intercession of Anthony Trollope, a family friend, who, as well as being a successful novelist, was a career postal official. Lewes and Eliot were determined to find Thornie a post abroad. “He is of an active adventurous temperament, fond of Natural History, and of roving about in search of ‘specimens,’ so that a life of London work would not suit him at all,” Eliot wrote to a friend. It would not suit her to have him there, either: in a letter written while all three boys were home, she wrote that she was “up to the ears in Boydom,” a condition in which she was unable to be productive.

  One idea was that Thornie and his younger brother Bertie might go together to Algiers to establish a farm. Thornie, however, had other intentions: he wanted to join Polish insurgents fighting the Russians. Lewes and Eliot were horrified, and feared for what they called his moral nature. “The idea of his enlisting in a guerrilla band, and in such a cause was too preposterous, and afflicted us greatly,” Lewes wrote in his diary. “But for some time we feared that he would set us at defiance and start.”

  Instead, he left for Natal with “a very sanguine expectation of shooting lions,” Eliot told a friend. Every element of the adventure seemed to delight Thornie, who managed to make even the privations of the long voyage aboard the Damietta sound entertaining—among them the fact that his trunk, which was packed at the bottom of the hold, proved impossible to retrieve. “I have given up sleeping in bed, it is too hot,” he wrote from his cabin, where it was eighty-five degrees. “Keep in my clothes on bed, get up at 6:30, strip, air my clothes, get a ducking of salt water & am prepared for a large breakfast at 8:30.” He and his shipmates had the thrill of deep-sea fishing—“we had some shark steak for breakfast, rather tough and strong but quite palatable”—and bagging albatross. He published his own shipboard newspaper, the Damietta Blunderbuss. (A sample headline: “ ‘No Monopoly’ as the Cockroach said when he drove the blowfly off the seed cake.”) He defended Darwinism among his fellow passengers. “I have consequently been set down as an atheist and a fool, but that does not matter as it furnishes subjects for chaffing me, and as I stand it of course, you know how, I am very popular,” he reported. He joined in dramatic productions, including one in which he appeared as the devil, wearing blue tights and a tail—“to the horror of the children and many of the females, and to the intense disapprobation of the parson,” he reported with glee.

  South Africa itself proved thrilling. The colony of Natal had been established twenty years earlier, on the southeastern coast of the continent, and encompassed rugged mountains and expansive grasslands, which “have very much the character of the higher moors of Devonshire,” a contemporary author noted, though unlike Devonshire, Natal was populated with hippopotamuses and hyenas and innumerable rare and beautiful butterflies. Upon arriving Thornie laid plans to join an interpreter going on the court circuit around the townships, to be followed by an excursion assisting a French trader for which he was to be paid three pounds a month. “Won’t that be glorious!” he wrote to Lewes. “I would have gone willingly for nothing at all, as the shooting and butterfly catching will be quite enough payment.”

  Thornie’s recreational expectations were not all so benignly pastoral. In the same letter he joked blithely of his intentions of shooting “Bushmen,” “who are almost the same as Chimps or gorillas … still, there is worse game no doubt, than Lions, Leopards, & Bushmen.” Eliot transcribed extended passages of Thornie’s letter to her friend Barbara Bodichon, who had written introductions for him to Durban society, but she omitted those lines. Thornie’s crude racism was embarrassing to Eliot: it suggested his moral nature was not after all as pure as she and Lewes would have liked to believe.

  But it was hardly unusual for the time and the context. In her last novel, Daniel Deronda, which was published in 1876, Eliot would allude to the ugliness and hypocrisy that characterized contemporary attitudes toward colonized populations, with her hero, Deronda, as the pointed voice of reason. In that book, at a gathering of gentlefolk, discussion turns to the West Indies. “Grandcourt held that the Jamaican negro was a beastly sort of baptist Caliban; Deronda said that he had always felt a little with Caliban, who naturally had
his own point of view and could sing a good song,” Eliot writes. “Mrs. Torrington was sure she should never sleep in her bed if she lived among blacks; her husband corrected her by saying that the blacks would be manageable enough if it were not for the half-breeds; and Deronda remarked that the whites had to thank themselves for the half-breeds.”

  The satire and contempt here are evident, but even so, looking back from today’s perspective, one can’t help wondering how Eliot managed to square her generous-minded humanism and her insistence on the need for sympathy with one’s fellow men and women with her own support of the colonial endeavor in Natal. Possibly, as she packed Thornie off to Africa, she made an intellectual case to herself for the virtues of colonialism, which was after all widely culturally sanctioned. Possibly, also, she was clueless as to what else the Lewes boys might do with themselves now that they were men. The colonial adventure presented itself as a convenient option, especially if one could edit out its more problematic aspects.

  Thornie doesn’t seem to have given a thought to larger questions of justice: he was in his element. He visited coffee plantations and hunted leopard. He wrote to Lewes, offering to procure him a baboon. He went into Durban society, such as it was, attending the small theater and becoming a regular visitor at the home of Mr. John Sanderson, an editor and avid amateur naturalist. “His wife is a charming creature about 30, no children, and immensely fond of music,” Thornie wrote. “So you may imagine the evenings we have together, sonatas, symphonies etc, while I howl German songs.” Thornie seemed to have found his course in life. “The wild, free and easy, independent life suits me wonderfully,” he wrote. “If you could only see me you would say it agreed with me.”

  THE congenial young man who charms the wife of his friend with song and sophisticated attention figures in Middlemarch, too. “Mr. Orlando Ladislaw is making a sad dark-blue scandal by warbling continually with your Mr. Lydgate’s wife, who they tell me is as pretty as pretty can be,” Mrs. Cadwallader, the parson’s wife, tells Dorothea. “It seems nobody ever goes into the house without finding this young gentleman lying on the rug or warbling at the piano.”

  Like Fred Vincy, Will Ladislaw is another iteration upon a theme: that of the young man seeking to determine his course in life. While Fred seems endowed with Thornie’s outdoorsy tastes and with his amiable good nature, Ladislaw shares Thornie’s restlessness and his quest for adventure. At the outset of the novel, Will Ladislaw is introduced as a young man without any fixed career, but with a desire for travel and discovery. The reader learns that he elected not to go to an English university, but studied instead in Heidelberg; when we first meet him, he is leaving for Rome for the vague purpose of exposing himself to culture. His cousin, Mr. Casaubon, has supplied him with funds for a year of exploration, although Casaubon considers Ladislaw self-indulgent and lacking in application. “I shall let him be tried by the test of freedom,” Casaubon loftily tells Dorothea and Mr. Brooke. Dorothea has a more compassionate perspective upon the frailties of a young person who has not yet determined what to make of him- or herself. “People may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not?” she asks. “They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.”

  In Rome Ladislaw studies painting, though he quickly recognizes the limitations of his talents for that art, or for poetry, Thornie’s amateur pursuit. “To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge,” Ladislaw tells Dorothea, with self-important authority. “But you leave out the poems. I think they are wanted to complete the poet,” she points out in earnest reply.

  Back in England, Ladislaw makes rushed assaults on more prosaic careers. For a while, he becomes the editor of a local newspaper, the Pioneer, and he contemplates entering politics, now that the Reform Bill is about to open the field: “He could go away easily, and begin a career which at five-and-twenty seemed probable enough in the inward order of things, where talent brings fame, and fame everything else which is delightful.” Like Thornie, Will imagines the world bending to his irrepressible will.

  As Middlemarch progresses the reader sees Ladislaw repeatedly declaring that he is about to leave town to seek his fate, although he finds it hard to get moving. Thornie, on the other hand, was in a new field of experience altogether, and his adventures grew more lurid as time passed. He volunteered for battle against the Basotho resisting colonial rule whose land lay on the eastern edge of Natal, and set off with an Enfield rifle and a saber. “By tomorrow we hope to have 2,000 men here to start for Basuto land, to wreak vengeance on their heads,” he wrote home. “Of course I volunteer, and hope to have the pleasure of potting a few Basutos before I have done with them. Who would have thought, that by my coming out here, instead of going to Poland, I should have fallen from the frying pan into the fire, and instead of fighting an enemy I hate, I should have to fight one I despise.”

  He sent missives home with some details of his experiences, which must have shocked Lewes and Eliot. The horrors could no longer easily be edited out. “We soon arrived at the scene of the murder of the Boers,” he wrote in one. The dead men “had been buried by a party from Harrismith, or rather had had some branches and earth strewn over them, and their legs were sticking through.” But Thornie maintained his usual jaunty tone, describing the weevil-infested biscuits that were among their supplies at camp, and the stewing in butter of a whole sheep. “I composed a Frontier Guard Song for the occasion, which though very mediocre, was welcomed with great applause,” he wrote.

  In spite of this violent turn, Lewes and Eliot were evidently not ready to retreat from the colonial opportunity. When the fighting died down, Bertie Lewes, Thornie’s younger brother, joined him in Natal. (Bertie’s own letters to Lewes, which are also collected at the Beinecke, are few and seem laboriously written.) Thornie was glad to have Bertie there, but their adventures continued to be perilous. The brothers established a farm; it burned down, igniting their gunpowder and causing twenty pounds’ worth of damage. They resorted to living in a hut constructed by their African employees, “something like a large beehive, in which we are very comfortable,” Thornie wrote. The loss of books, at least, was compensated for by new ones sent from home. “We should be miserable without books, and our old lot has been read and reread times out of number,” Thornie wrote to Lewes, in thanks for a shipment. “I can tell you that good novels bear rereading.”

  On a tip, the brothers undertook a trading adventure. They purchased blankets which—like Fred Vincy and his horses—they aimed to transform by dint of swapping into a valuable quantity of ivory. Thornie hoped to use the proceeds to fund a trip home, but they were no more successful in this than Fred and his horse-trading. “We are on our last legs,” Thornie wrote to Lewes.

  Worse, Thornie was suffering from what he thought were kidney stones, which were causing him paroxysms of pain. “I can hardly stoop to touch the ground, I can’t sit up for half an hour, all I can do is lie down, then get up and walk about for half an hour, then lie down again,” he wrote in October 1868. “In fact if I were 50 instead of 24, I should have quietly walked some fine day over our waterfall; but while there is youth there is hope.” Within seven months, he was in agonies on the couch at the Priory.

  WHEN Thornie arrived at home, leaving Bertie behind in Africa, George Eliot’s slow progress on Middlemarch temporarily halted. She and Lewes were absorbed in looking after him. By June tuberculosis of the spine had been diagnosed, and the only prescription was rest, cod-liver oil, and morphine, which induced Thornie, who was subsisting on a diet of mainly fruit and milk, to long periods of sleep.

  He was sweeter than ever, Eliot wrote to a friend. His moral nature was uncorrupted even by experience o
f warfare, she insisted. “There is nothing that we discern in his character or habits to cause us grief,” she said. Perhaps Eliot was attempting to reassure herself that she had not failed Thornie by sending him overseas. And perhaps, too, the sweetness that had always been there was more poignant to her now, with the rambunctiousness wasted away.

  That month, Eliot began writing an introduction to Middlemarch, and “meditated characters” for the novel, as she noted in her diary. Otherwise, she sat by Thornie with her books, absenting herself quietly on the few occasions that Agnes Lewes came to visit. On August 1 as she sat by his bedside she read through all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, making notes on them in the small leather-bound notebook that is now in the New York Public Library. She marked down individual lines she admired: “Looking on darkness which the blind do see”; “My grief lies onward & my joy behind.” And she remarked upon the “wearisome series about leaving posterity”—the sequence of sonnets in which the poet urges another man to father a child, so his beauty might live on in his son.

  Thornie died at six thirty in the evening of October 19, 1869, in Eliot’s arms. “Nurse and I raised him and his last breathings were quite peaceful,” she wrote to Cara Bray in Coventry. To Barbara Bodichon Eliot wrote, “It has cut deeper than I expected—that he is gone and I can never make him feel my love any more. Just now all else seems trivial compared with the powers of delighting and soothing a heart that is in need.” In her diary, she wrote, “This death seems to me the beginning of our own.”

  “She had lavished almost a mother’s love on my dear boy, and felt almost a mother’s grief,” Lewes wrote to Blackwood a few weeks later. He revised the formulation slightly for a letter to Thomas Trollope, the brother of the novelist, omitting the second modification of Eliot’s maternal sensibility: “She had lavished almost a mother’s love on the dear boy, and suffered a mother’s grief in the bereavement.”