Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  And she had a genuinely good heart: seven years later she was writing comfortingly to the old man who had broken her heart and was now himself a prey to depression: ‘Dearest Old Boy…’

  New Statesman, 1975

  Maggie Tulliver’s Little Sisters

  Essay on William Hale White, or ‘Mark Rutherford’

  Just to the east of Waterloo Bridge, in the Strand, there is a row of tall houses, deep and solid to match their height. No. 142 has a restaurant in the basement today, and a wine bar at ground level; if you climb the stairs, you find offices on all the upper floors. I trespassed into them a few weeks ago, explaining that I was thinking about George Eliot, who once lived there. ‘George Eliot? Who’s he?’ asked a well-dressed young man in one of the offices.

  You expect writers who take false names to leave some eddies of confusion for posterity – even ones as well known as George Eliot. An obscurer friend of hers, who lodged at No. 142 at the same time as her, in the early 1850s, also adopted a pseudonym: he wrote under the name ‘Mark Rutherford’. She knew him as William Hale White. He is not much remembered by either name today, which is a pity, because he wrote some remarkable books. They draw directly on a private store of memories and emotions, and you sense quite strongly that he took up a mask in order to be nakedly confessional in a way he could not otherwise have managed. He concealed his authorship even from his family. If you like his books, as I do, you cannot help growing interested in his life; and the episode of his early friendship with George Eliot is a curious story in its own right.

  In 1852, when he was twenty-one, he was expelled from a theological college for questioning the divine inspiration of the Bible. He had to find a job. A friend in Hampstead put him up, and he walked down the hill, day after day, with the idea of persuading some publisher to employ him. He was a nice-looking boy, with a high forehead, curly brown hair and even features; but he was shy and agitated by his situation, and he was turned down more than once. Presently, he arrived at No. 142 the Strand, where John Chapman, the publisher of free-thinking books, conducted his business. Chapman was then thirty-one years old. He had just bought the Westminster Review, and had perpetual money troubles.

  To help with the rent for his enormous house, he made his wife, Susanna, organize it for lodgers. She was fourteen years older than him, and, to assist her with the housekeeping and the care of two children, he appointed a Miss Elizabeth Tilley, closer to him in age, who was also his mistress. A third woman living under his roof at this time was Marian Evans, not yet transformed into George Eliot: she was thirty-three. She had been in love with Chapman for a while, but her feelings had calmed after various scenes with her two rivals, and Chapman’s tactlessness in dwelling on what he termed ‘the incomprehensible mystery and witchery of beauty’ (which, in his view, she lacked). In his diary, he noted: ‘My words jarred upon her and put an end to her enjoyment. Was it from a consciousness of her own want of beauty? She wept bitterly.’

  But Marian Evans was a pragmatist, and she cooled as she wept; by 1852 the relationship was fairly strictly professional. In fact, it was she who effectively did much of the editorial work on the Westminster Review. None of this was known to Hale White when he came to the Strand seeking a job, of course. His first meeting with Chapman went like this:

  I was received, if not with cordiality, at least with an interest which surprised me. He took me into a little back shop, and after hearing patiently what I wanted, he asked me somewhat abruptly what I thought of the miracles in the Bible.

  Hale White’s cautious answer that he did not believe literally, but considered the miracles a statement of divine truth, contented Chapman.

  The result was that he asked me if I would help him in his business. In order to do this it would be more economical if I would live in his house, which was too big for him. He promised to give me £40 a year, in addition to board and lodging. I joyously assented, and the bargain was struck.

  Chapman and his new assistant were, in fact, ill assorted. But Chapman’s lodger, Miss Evans, did see something particular in the nervous young man who, like her, had come from a provincial backwater to London; like her, had undergone a crisis of religious faith; like her, felt an intense need for human affection, without knowing how to go comfortably about giving or receiving it. She was kind to him from the start.

  Hale White was the son of a Bedford bookseller with a radical turn of mind. The family were Dissenters, and Hale White had agreed to prepare for the ministry at his mother’s insistence and for lack of a practicable alternative: he had dreamt of becoming an artist, or going to Oxford. In his three years at theological college, he said later, he learnt nothing and made no friends. But he began to read Wordsworth and Carlyle, and formed some fixed ideas of what he did not like – in particular, the cant of English Dissent that had lost touch with all spiritual and political enthusiasm. After his expulsion from college, there was no question of returning to Bedford to join his father’s trade – it was doing badly. He had to make his own way. At first he arranged to go to Stoke Newington as a schoolmaster, but, after one night in an attic above the empty schoolroom, he packed his bags and fled. When he arrived at the Strand, then, the little experience he had had of adult life had shaken his nerve. ‘I was a mere youth… awkward and shy,’ he wrote later, recalling the day on which he came to No. 142 and had lunch there:

  Miss Evans sat opposite me… She was then almost unknown to the world, but I had sensed enough to discern she was a remarkable creature. I was grateful to her because she replied even with eagerness to a trifling remark I happened to make, and gave it some importance… She was attractive personally. Her hair was particularly beautiful, and in her grey eyes there was a curiously shifting light, generally soft and tender, but convertible into the keenest flash…

  This quotation comes from a factual account Hale White wrote after George Eliot’s death. At this time she was on a pinnacle of fame, and her widower had published a biography presenting her as a wholly saintly figure. Hale White protested against this version of the woman he had known, and rejected Leslie Stephen’s description of her as ‘eminently respectable’. He also suggested that ‘one of the reasons why she and Chapman did not agree was that she did not like his somewhat disorderly ways’.

  I think Hale White himself must have nourished some ambivalent feelings about the disorderly ways at the Strand. He had been brought up in the most rigidly puritanical tradition where sexual matters were concerned. The Chapman ménage undoubtedly gave him a few shocks. In his fictionalized account of his youth, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, his first book, he omitted any reference to Mrs Chapman or Miss Tilley, and turned Marian Evans into Chapman’s niece.

  During the months in which Hale White and Marian Evans were both living at No. 142 – from the early summer of 1852 until October 1853, when she moved away – she was going through a period of acute crisis. In the summer of 1852 she was in love with Herbert Spencer – the violence of her feeling is quite clear from a letter lately opened at the British Museum and soon to be published – and when he, like Chapman, rejected her on the grounds of her want of beauty, it must have been hard to bear. It was something, perhaps, to be worshipped by young Hale White at that point. Whether the following scene was true or imagined – and it is not possible to tell – it is at least an indication of the way in which the real Hale White was affected by the real Marian Evans. Chapman is called ‘Wollaston’, Marian ‘Theresa’.

  After breakfast some proofs came from the printer of a pamphlet which Wollaston had in hand. Without unfastening them, he gave them to me, and said that as he had no time to read them himself, I must go upstairs to Theresa’s study and read them off with her. Accordingly I went and began to read. She took the manuscript and I took the proof. She read about a page, and then she suddenly stopped. ‘O Mr Rutherford,’ she said, ‘what have you done? I heard my uncle distinctly tell you to mark on the manuscript, when it went to the printer, that it was to be printed in
demy octavo, and you have marked it twelvemo.’ I had had little sleep that night, I was exhausted with my early walk, and suddenly the room seemed to fade from me and I fainted.

  When I came to myself, I found that Theresa had not sought for any help; she had done all that ought to be done. She had unfastened my collar and had sponged my face with cold water… With a storm of tears, I laid open all my heart. I told her how nothing I had ever attempted had succeeded; that I had never even been able to attain that degree of satisfaction with myself and my own conclusions, without which a man cannot live; and that now I found I was useless, even to the best friends I had ever known, and that the meanest clerk in the city would serve them better than I did. I was beside myself, and I threw myself on my knees, burying my face in Theresa’s lap and sobbing convulsively. She did not repel me, but she gently passed her fingers through my hair… She gently lifted me up, and as I rose I saw her eyes too were wet. ‘My poor friend,’ she said, ‘I cannot talk to you now. You are not strong enough, and for that matter, nor am I, but let me say this to you, that you are altogether mistaken about yourself. The meanest clerk in the city could not take your place here.’ There was just a slight emphasis I thought upon the word ‘here’. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘you had better go. I will see about the pamphlet.’

  When I went back to my work I worshipped Theresa, and was entirely overcome with unhesitating absorbing love for her. I saw nothing more of her that day nor the next day. Her uncle told me that she had gone into the country, and that probably she would not return for some time, as she had purposed paying a lengthened visit to a friend.

  We know – and Hale White must have learnt at some point -that Marian Evans moved away in order to be with George Henry Lewes, the married man who replaced Spencer in her love and reciprocated it. Hale White never advanced an opinion on this: in general he kept to a rigid view about the obligations of spouses. But later he expressed his regret at losing touch with her, and put it down to diffidence on his own part. He wrote a story called ‘Confessions of a Self-Tormentor’ in which she appears as a young widow who does her best to be kind to a gauche boy, while he gracelessly rejects her affection.

  I think that she remained in his mind as a model of the sort of woman he found desirable and a little frightening and felt – perhaps – he had denied himself. Certainly, in his own last novel, he drew a wholly admiring portrait of a young woman who deliberately transgresses against the sexual and social code, as Miss Evans did in 1854.

  Hale White too left the Strand in February 1854, in spite of an offer of a ‘partnership’ from Chapman. It is hard to see it as anything but a retreat. He went to lodge with a pious family friend whose half-sister, Harriet, he later married, and his father found him a job. It was a deadly dull clerkship at Somerset House, where he was surrounded by brutish and silly colleagues. It was torture to him.

  Harriet, sweet but intellectually null, bore some children, but was soon struck down by multiple sclerosis; it paralysed her progressively, but did not kill her until 1891. Hale White worked at his civil service job and political journalism to eke out his income and pay a housekeeper. He became hypochondriacal, insomniac and depressive.

  Marian Evans lived another thirty years in the city where he worked but they never met again. In 1876 Hale White wrote to her, asking her intercession with a publisher to find work for an old friend from the Chapman days. She was busy and low, writing Daniel Deronda, and asked Lewes to speak for the man and answer Hale White’s letter, which he did politely. Hale White then wrote again, and sent her a picture. He must have been pressing for a personal response. But Lewes was again deputed to reply, this time a shade more formally, and with the desired effect. Hale White did not try again: she would not respond; probably she wanted no reminders of the Chapman era.

  She died in 1880, on Hale White’s forty-ninth birthday, a fact that moved him greatly. It was only after this that he began to write and publish his own books, first the two autobiographical fictions, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford and Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance, then a historical novel, The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane. The next three are studies of young women, all published in the early nineties, Miriam’s Schooling, Catharine Furze and Clara Hopgood. Each takes the formative years of a girl from the English provinces and shows her struggling to find something more than the narrow birthright offered by small-town life. Maggie Tulliver’s little sisters, you could say.

  Well, it is true that Hale White read and admired George Eliot’s books, and noticeable that he sets these three of his in the 1840s, when she had been a young woman (and he a child). And there are obvious parallels in the subjects and tone: comic provincials, small-town dramas, awkward intrusions of precept and irony. The characters of the heroines would all, I think, have interested George Eliot herself: clearly they embody some of Hale White’s own frustrations and yearnings. They are also tributes to her moral vision. Miriam, most Eliotish of the heroines, is an uneducated but independent-minded beauty:

  She was a big girl… with black hair and dark eyes, limbs loosely set, with a tendency to sprawl, large feet and hands. She had a handsome, regular face, a little freckled; but the mouth, although it was beautifully curved, was a trifle too long, and except when she was in a passion, was not sufficiently under the control of her muscles, so that her words escaped her not properly formed…

  That is well observed, particularly the last phrase. And the account of Miriam’s escape from the provinces to London with her weakling brother, who takes to drink in a butcher’s shop, and her passion and torment in grimy lodgings when she falls in love with a clergyman’s son turned music-hall singer, is finely and sharply drawn. Hale White’s book is a miniature beside George Eliot’s canvas; but it is delicately put together, and its moments of intensity are as telling as any of hers.

  Catharine Furze is a study of another spirited country-town girl. She takes on her mother’s prejudices successfully, but is destroyed by falling in love with a married clergyman. The book suffers from a determination to make a tale of spiritual victory out of a story that really spells out loss, waste and defeat – not because Catharine needed adultery in itself, but because there was nothing else for her to turn to:

  The pattern of her existence was henceforth settled, and she was to live not only without that which is sweetest for woman, but with no definite object before her. The force in woman is so great that something with which it can grapple, on which it can expend itself, is a necessity, and Catharine felt that her strength would have to occupy itself in twisting straws. It is really this which is the root of many a poor girl’s suffering.

  The final novel is the most surprising, containing in one of its two heroines, Madge Hopgood, a creature as bold as Marian Evans in real life, and bolder than any she drew. Madge first seduces her fiancé and then rejects him because she realizes her feeling for him is only physical, and goes on to bear his child as an unmarried woman. The portrait of Madge herself; the account of the effect of her behaviour on her mother and sister; the picture of the way in which the girls shift into a new class of penniless London intellectuals with links amongst foreigners and the working class – this is subtly, neatly and memorably done.

  Hale White wrote no more novels after this one, which was roughly handled by critics for its immoral theme. He did go on, however, to produce a handful of excellent and unusual short stories which touch on some bitter truths about Victorian life. He never strove for the grand manner. His writing, unlike George Eliot’s, is constrained. But then his subject too was constraint, the sense of constraint that dominated the lives of most of his contemporaries. I think he got it down pretty accurately, because he himself had felt it so close to the nerve and unrelieved. He had never been able to leap sideways as Marian Evans did; he hadn’t the power. But he did manage to write small, vigorous masterpieces of the puritan conscience trying to beat out a narrow path for itself. He deserves to be more widely read today. It is sad that Marian Evans never knew what her
young man achieved. She would surely have approved.

  Radio 3 review, printed in the Listener, 1975

  Oink

  Ottoline: The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell by Sandra Jobson Darroch

  The story of Circe is a warning to all hostesses. The more invitations are looked for and parties flocked to, the more swine are likely to be grunting and rooting about in the mud later. John, Lamb, Huxley, Lawrence, Russell, Murry, Strachey, Woolf: Lady Ottoline captured them (and many more) one after another, first in her grey and yellow Bedford Square salon with the silk cushions, and later at Garsington, where décor and generosity were both memorable. Most rendered thanks with grunts, if not snorts. In the Bedford Square days Henry James advised her: ‘Look at them, dear lady, over the banisters. But don’t go down amongst them.’ But to go down amongst them was exactly what she wanted to do.

  Born in 1873, she had that sense of exclusion from intellectual and artistic life that went with an English aristocratic background and upbringing. She had lost her father early, her pious and conventional mother became an invalid and died when Ottoline was only twenty, her brothers were embarrassed by her: so tall, so intense, such a nose – would she enter a convent? So, to a very considerable extent, Ottoline made herself in her own image. There was her extravagant style in dress (although her insouciance about doing up a dropped suspender in full view of anyone was no doubt the superbness of her class). Her marriage to Philip Morrell was a step down socially: she sent for him and gave him permission to propose; thereafter she supported him loyally in his brave but unfortunate career as a Liberal politician. Motherhood did not come easily to her; after the birth of twins, of whom the boy died, she had no more children; instead, she pursued a course of unusual sexual freedom and useful patronage of the arts.