My Life in Middlemarch

by Rebecca Mead

  Lydgate, Eliot suggests, recognized this moment as a hinge upon which his life might turn. And in the mind of the reviewer for the Athenaeum, a seed was sown for what might be coming in Middlemarch: the notion that Dorothea and Lydgate—who at this point in the story is still unmarried—might end up marrying each other.

  It’s easy for me to forget that there was ever a time when I did not know how the love problems presented in the novel would be resolved. But in the spring of 1872, no one at all beyond Eliot knew how the novel would conclude, and the whole reading public was on tenterhooks to discover what would happen next. “ ‘Have you read the last Book?’ is an almost inevitable question in the haunts of men,” the Daily Telegraph noted in its review of Book Four. The Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Chenevix Trench, hid his copy inside the clerical hat on his lap at the opening of the Dublin Exhibition, so that he could read it surreptitiously during the speeches—a delicious detail of a churchman’s human weakness that might have come from the pages of a novel by George Eliot.

  “We all grumble at ‘Middlemarch,’ ” a reviewer for the Spectator said. “But we all read it, and all feel that there is nothing to compare with it appearing at the present moment in the way of English literature, and not a few of us calculate whether we shall get the August number before we go for our autumn holiday, or whether we shall have to wait for it till we return.” With Book Four, we are approaching the very middle of Middlemarch—and even though I know well how the novel concludes, the riddle posed in chapter 30 always beguiles me with its suggestion of alternative fates, of different love matches, of other possible endings.

  Certain genres of fiction derive their satisfactions from the predictability of their conclusion. The reader knows where things are going to end up: in a romance the lovers are united; in a detective story the murder mystery is solved. There is a pleasure in the familiarity of the journey. But a successful realist novel necessarily takes unpredictable turns in just the way real life predictably must. The resolution of Middlemarch, even as seen in prospect halfway through the book, cannot possibly be completely tidy. (An example: Mary Garth has two possible suitors, Fred Vincy and Mr. Farebrother. Both have qualities to recommend them, but at least one is bound to be disappointed.) Middlemarch permits the reader to imagine other possible directions its characters might take, leading to entirely different futures, and as so often in life, love is the crossroads.

  “I HAD two offers last night—not of marriage, but of music—which I find it impossible to resist,” Eliot wrote spiritedly to Cara Bray, her Coventry friend, in March 1852. She was thirty-two years old, living in London, and working as a journalist—the editor in all but name of the Westminster Review, a lively monthly periodical published by John Chapman. And marriage was on her mind, as her joke to Cara let slip. Dancing around the corners of her consciousness was the possibility that she might wed Herbert Spencer, the issuer of one of the musical offers, who took her to see William Tell at the Royal Italian Opera house in Covent Garden on the first of April that year.

  Spencer was an appropriate match for Eliot in many respects. Born within a few months of her, also in the Midlands, he was her equal in intellectual power and unconventionality. Though nowadays his name is less immediately familiar than that of contemporaries like Charles Darwin or Matthew Arnold, he was to become the most significant social philosopher of the Victorian era. In the 1850s Spencer was working at the Economist, where among other duties he covered the arts. He had also just published his first book, a theory of ethics with the encompassing title Social Statics; or, the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed. Eliot had read and admired it.

  Eliot had met Spencer through Chapman, her boss and her landlord at 142 Strand. The Strand was London’s longest and most important thoroughfare, connecting the City in the east with Westminster and Parliament in the west. Rosemary Ashton, a biographer of both Eliot and George Henry Lewes, gives a sense of its character in her book 142 Strand: “Here are shoemakers, watchmakers, tailors, wax chandlers, tobacconists, umbrella makers, cutlers, linen drapers, pianoforte makers, hatmakers, wigmakers, shirtmakers, mapmakers, lozenge manufacturers, and sellers of food of all sorts, including shellfish, Italian oil, and Twining’s famous tea.” There were more than twenty newspapers and magazines along its length, as well as book publishers and printers. There were cigar clubs and supper rooms and a resort with the suggestive name of the Coal Hole, at which nude or seminude women arranged in tableaux vivants were only one of the entertainments.

  Eliot’s dark but quiet rooms were at the rear of the house. “I can see her now, with her hair over her shoulders, the easy chair half sideways to the fire, her feet over the arms, and a proof in her hands,” William Hale White, a fellow resident of the establishment, recalled after her death, providing a physical description that seems startlingly modern. This is not the upright Victorian woman of popular imagination, trussed in corsets and composed with hairpins. She could be any single, metropolitan woman of today, curled on a couch until late at night, poring over a book or typing on a laptop, completely absorbed in the concentrated pleasure of satisfying work.

  Her life was intellectually thrilling, with many leading writers and thinkers of the day contributing to the publication. There were discussions of whether Charlotte Brontë should be sought to write an article about modern novelists: “She would have to leave out Currer Bell, who is perhaps the best of them all,” Eliot observed. In the first issue that she edited Eliot also wrote an admiring review of Life of Sterling, by Thomas Carlyle, whom Chapman had unsuccessfully wooed as a contributor. (Like all her journalism, it was unsigned. The only work that was ever published under the name Marian Evans was a translation of “The Essence of Christianity,” by the philosopher Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, in 1854. She did not adopt the pseudonym George Eliot until the publication of her first work of fiction in what seems to have been a bid for it to be judged independent of the reputation of its notorious author.) In her review she described the kind of biography that was prevalent at the time—“the dreary three or five volumed compilations of letter, and diary, and detail, little to the purpose”—and outlined her conception of an alternative. She called for “a real ‘Life,’ setting forth briefly and vividly the man’s inward and outward struggles, aims, and achievements, so as to make clear the meaning which his experience has for his fellows”—a characterization fit to inspire, and perhaps also intimidate, any would-be chronicler of Eliot’s life. Eliot called for a biographer to have the imaginative talents of a novelist: what she described as “a loving and poetic nature which sees the beauty and the depth of familiar things, and the artistic power which seizes characteristic points and renders them with life-like effect.” And her own writing, too, had started to show a confidence and flair—a voice—beyond that of the dutiful translator.

  “I am training myself up to say adieu to all delights, I care for nothing but doing my work and doing it well,” she wrote to a friend, gleefully. Eliot took much better advantage of London than she had done when she visited as a pious teenager and disparaged it as the great Babel, though her proximity to its turbulent immoralities, including the domestic arrangements at her own place of residence, was now much greater. She went to see the Crystal Palace, walked in Greenwich Park, and had her first, oblique encounter with Charles Dickens, at a meeting called at Chapman’s house to discuss publishing copyright. “Dickens in the chair—a position he fills remarkably well, preserving a courteous neutrality of eyebrow, and speaking with clearness and decision,” she reported to Cara and Charles Bray, with the barely-suppressed excitement of a neophyte city dweller spotting a celebrity across a restaurant dining room.

  Her letters to the Brays, her closest friends, frequently have a quality of nervous energy about them—flashes of a bright, brittle cleverness that seems to mask anxiety. She provides vivid vignettes that indicate the novelist in the making, though she does not yet manifest the large, perceptive gene
rosity that characterizes the authorial voice of Middlemarch. She was sometimes satirical, as in her secondhand report of Dickens’s house on Tavistock Square: “Splendid library, of course, with soft carpet, couches etc. such as become a sympathizer with the suffering classes,” she wrote. “How can we sufficiently pity the needy unless we know fully the blessings of plenty?” And she was sometimes scathingly unkind. “We met that odious Mrs. Richard Greaves at Miss Swanwick’s,” she wrote. “She is fearful—her whole organization seems made for the sake of her teeth—if indeed they are not false.”

  Within a year or two, she would be writing withering analyses of revered public figures, like Dr. John Cumming. He was a well-known Evangelical preacher—a profession, she noted, which makes it possible “to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity.” With her youthful priggishness outgrown, her critical judgment could be astringent, even snarky, and she enjoyed the professional attention she got through exercising it. If one is accustomed to think of George Eliot as she ended up—the novelist famous for the generosity of her comprehension—it’s shocking, and not a little thrilling, to read these earlier essays and discover how slashing she could be. I wouldn’t exchange the large, sympathetic capacities she later uncovered for these lesser dagger blows, but there’s something very satisfying about knowing she once had it in her to land them. It’s oddly reassuring to know that before she grew good, George Eliot could be bad—to realize that she, also, had a frustrated ferocity that it gratified her to unleash, at least until she found her way to a different kind of writing, one that allowed her to lay down her arms, and to flourish without combativeness or cruelty.

  Beyond the pages of the periodicals, too, she could be acid and spiky, defensive in anticipation of attack. “Treating people ill is an infallible sign of special love with me,” she wrote to a friend. New acquaintances were not sure what to make of her. “I don’t know whether you will like Miss Evans,” Bessie Rayner Parkes, who became Eliot’s good friend, wrote to Barbara Bodichon, who became an even better one. “At least I know you will like her for her large unprejudiced mind, her complete superiority to most women. But whether you or I should ever love her, as a friend, I don’t know at all. There is as yet no high moral purpose in the impression she makes, and it is that alone which commands love. I think she will alter. Large angels take a long time unfolding their wings, but when they do, soar out of sight. Miss Evans either has no wings, or, which I think is the case, they are coming, budding.”

  I WALKED along the Strand one day in early autumn. Number 142 is no longer standing: the site is now home to Strand Bridge House, an unlovely office building that houses the United Nations Refugee Agency and the Centre of Flexible Learning in Dentistry. (Eliot could have used that—she was plagued by toothache throughout her life.) Next door was a down-at-heel hotel and a pungent Indian restaurant celebrating the last days of the Raj. The establishments Eliot knew had been replaced by contemporary ones: a shoe repair store and a travel agent and a hairdresser and a Pizza Hut. A few steps away lay Somerset House, the site of a royal palace from the reign of Elizabeth I until that of George III—the last vestige of the era when the Strand was lined with riverfront mansions. The Baroque church of St. Mary-le-Strand stood islanded by traffic lanes thronging with helmeted cyclists and lurching double-decker buses.

  From the Strand it was a short walk to the National Portrait Gallery, my destination for the morning. There, I hoped to come face-to-face with George Eliot—or at least with several pictures of her. When she moved to 142 Strand there was no National Portrait Gallery, but its establishment was under discussion. Its founder, Philip Henry Stanhope, described the projected museum in the House of Lords in 1856 as one devoted to images of “those persons who are most honorably commemorated in British history as warriors or as statesmen, or in arts, in literature, or in science.” It finally opened in 1859, on Great George Street, in Westminster, which is where Eliot visited it in the 1860s.

  Now it has a permanent home on St. Martin’s Place, and I walked there along Duncannon Street, which runs through what once was the graveyard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, to the corner of Trafalgar Square. I have photographs of myself taken on the square as a three-year-old in a blue sundress, warily perched on the rim of a fountain. Fifteen years later, when I would come up to London from my hometown, I would walk this way from Waterloo Station—in those days there were homeless people living under the arches, where now there are fancy wine bars—across a footbridge over the Thames, past Charing Cross. Sometimes I’d go to the National Gallery, which flanks the northern side of the square, and in an effort at self-education I would stand before works by Titian or Caravaggio and try with only modest success to make sense of them. (Dorothea does the same thing when she and Casaubon go to Rome on their honeymoon. “I am seeing so much all at once, and not understanding half of it,” she tells Ladislaw, who happens to be in Rome at the same time. “That always makes one feel stupid. It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not to be able to feel that it is fine—something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.”)

  Sometimes I would go beyond Trafalgar Square to Soho, to a restaurant with checkered tablecloths and wine-bottle candlesticks, which struck me as inordinately sophisticated. There, a boyfriend introduced me to spaghetti vongole, well beyond the culinary range of my provincial town. That boyfriend was five or six years older than me, which seemed a lot at the time. He had a dramatic mane of hair, black with a blond streak, and wore thrift store suits over satin pajama shirts. He was part of my education, too. He introduced me to the works of Oscar Wilde and Leonard Cohen; he took me to thrift stores, which I scoured for vintage silk dresses and velvet coats, musty remnants saved for fifty years by someone lately departed. We sometimes went to the Tate, on Millbank, where we would stand before the purple and gray Rothkos or gaze at works by Turner, who painted the Battle of Trafalgar when it was still recent news.

  In 1851, the year in which Turner died and George Eliot arrived in London, Trafalgar Square was newly laid out, and the National Gallery building was only thirteen years old. What seemed to me as if it had always been there was modern and new to Eliot: the energy and industry of her age, rendered in marble and stone. Much of the National Portrait Gallery’s first floor is devoted to portraits of Victorian eminences and as I wandered the galleries I encountered many of Eliot’s friends and acquaintances. There was a bronze bust of Florence Nightingale, Eliot’s exact contemporary. Nightingale called on Eliot not long after she had arrived at 142 Strand; in later years, the novelist owned a ceramic bust of the nursing reformer, which is now on display at the museum in Coventry. There was a marble bust of Herbert Spencer as he was in his sixties, with a bald head and magnificent muttonchop whiskers—both of which he already had when Eliot first knew him in the 1850s, though then the head was slightly less bald and the whiskers slightly less pronounced.

  In a gallery devoted to the arts in the early Victorian era there was a portrait of a sprightly-looking Charles Dickens, painted in 1839 when he was only twenty-seven and already the creator of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. Nearby was the remarkable triple portrait of the Brontë sisters, made by their brother, Branwell, that had been thought lost until the second wife of Charlotte’s husband discovered it folded up on top of a cupboard. On the wall opposite the Brontës and Dickens was a glass case, and inside it was a small portrait in oils of George Eliot. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I might easily have missed it.

  François D’Albert Durade, an artist in whose Geneva home Eliot lodged in 1849 on the European trip she took after her father’s death, made this painting, which is the only image that gives us an idea of how she must have looked when she lived at 142 Strand. Her thick, heavy hair is light brown, almost blonde, and is fastened in a simple bun. Her pale gray-blue eyes are large and limpid; her nose is long, her chin slightly dimpled. Her cheeks
are very ruddy, and she’s smiling faintly. She wears a blouse of delicate lace under a simple black dress that laces up the front. She’s personable but not pretty, especially not in comparison with Jenny Lind, the opera singer known as the Swedish Nightingale, whose russet hair and creamy shoulders are displayed in a portrait on another wall. Nor does she have the dramatic intensity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose portrait by Michele Gordigiani hangs nearby. Eliot’s is not a great portrait by any means, and when the artist’s son first sought to sell it to the museum, in 1905, there wasn’t much urgency among the trustees to acquire it. (Alphonse D’Albert Durade first sought two hundred pounds for the work; he ended up accepting forty.) The painting looks like something one might find in a good antique shop, or hanging in a home as the only remembrance of a great-great-great-aunt. Eliot looks intelligent and modest and slightly straitlaced: the kind of woman whom you might happily hire to teach your children German and Latin, but from whom you wouldn’t necessarily expect an intimate acquaintance with, or understanding of, the most intense human passions.

  The portrait is generally held to be flattering. Eliot’s plainness has been a subject of fascination to her biographers for generations. “It must be a terrible sorrow to be young and unattractive: to look into the mirror and see a sallow unhealthy face, with a yellowish skin, straight nose and mouse-coloured hair,” wrote Anne Fremantle, an early biographer, in 1933, while Brenda Maddox, a twenty-first-century biographer, begins her own portrait of Eliot with a paradoxical reversal that takes her plainness to be the spur to her achievement: “Her face was her fortune.” For visitors who paid Eliot court at the Priory in her later years, coming up with a novel way to characterize her looks seems to have been an almost obligatory exercise. The prize has gone by popular acclaim to Henry James, who called on her in 1869. “She is magnificently ugly—deliciously hideous,” James, who at the time was twenty-six and handsome, wrote in a letter to his father. “She has a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth, full of uneven teeth and a chin and jaw-bone qui n’en finissent pas.” One wishes that Eliot had sat for a portrait as revealing as that which John Singer Sargent painted of James, in 1913, which shows the author, then seventy years old, corpulent and superior in all his penetrating, intelligent authority. (It hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, too.) She did, in 1860, sit for Samuel Lawrence, a noted portraitist of the time. For years Lawrence’s drawing hung in Blackwood’s office, but near the beginning of the last century it was moved and went astray; perhaps it will show up one day on top of a cupboard in Edinburgh. A sketch that survives in the collection of Girton College, Cambridge, is tantalizing and suggestive: in it Eliot looks dark-eyed and somber, like a mournful Madonna.