Several Strangers

by Claire Tomalin

  One of his most interesting ventures was the setting up, in 1849, of a weekly journal, first planned as the Free Speaker, though it actually appeared as the Leader. It had a political front half, edited by Leigh Hunt’s son Thornton, and a literary back half, which makes it the model for later weeklies such as the New Age and the New Statesman. Various backers put money into it, including the remarkable George Jacob Holyoake, a self-educated working man, journalist, author, Chartist, Owenite and atheist: he boldly named one of his sons Robespierre, which must have made the boy’s life hard. He had been imprisoned for blasphemy before joining forces with Lewes and Hunt, and he formed a lifelong attachment to Lewes. Other backers were less fervent politically – one was a ‘Christian liberal’; but the magazine did get burnt at Oxford, to Lewes’s delight: ‘Our object is Truth, and quite naturally we are burnt at Oxford.’ It set out to be a platform for a wide range of opinions; in its own voice it spoke out for the abolition of hanging, for divorce, for universal suffrage, for abolishing the newspaper tax and for allowing Roman Catholics to establish their own archbishopric in England. It also reported Chartist meetings and gave its backing to international republican movements. Rather surprisingly, it failed to say much about the condition of women, and Lewes even delivered himself of some frightful nonsense when reviewing Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley: ‘The grand function of woman, it must always be recollected, is, and ever must be, Maternity… What should we do with a leader of the opposition in the seventh month of her pregnancy?… or a chief justice with twins?’

  There may have been some personal reasons for Lewes’s view of women. The Leader was not the only possession he held in common with Hunt. The other was Mrs Lewes. Like his hero Shelley, Lewes proclaimed his belief in free love and open marriage, and like Shelley found the practice less wonderful than the theory. He married young, at twenty-four, the eighteen-year-old sister of some boys to whom he acted briefly as tutor. Agnes was well educated, charming and so pretty that she was sometimes called Rose for the brightness of her complexion. Her father, Swynfen Jervis, was a country gentleman, a radical MP and scholar; both Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti knew the family, where their father had also been a tutor. Agnes was the eldest child; she lost her mother young and had two stepmothers. Rossetti, a boy of twelve when he knew her, admired her looks and her good nature; she was also musical, and knew German, and in the early days of her marriage was able to help Lewes with his journalism.

  There is a story that Lewes insisted on demonstrating his Shelleyan attitude by seducing his wife’s maidservant on the first night of their honeymoon, and later positively encouraged Thornton, who was also married, to share his wife’s sexual favours. If this is so – and we can’t be sure – it is likely to have confused and depressed Agnes, and turned her against Lewes. But initially things went well enough; he was devoted, and she bore him four children in six years, before moving on to bear Thornton another four. After a while, though, Lewes became dejected. Presently he moved out, though Thornton continued to cohabit with his wife, who on one occasion gave birth within a month of Agnes. Later Thornton challenged Lewes to a duel when he complained that he was not paying his share of the upkeep of the children. Lewes remained generous – he wrote a tribute to Thornton at his death, and continued to provide for the children – even though his original complaisance cost him the chance of ever divorcing, or marrying Marian Evans. Agnes herself was cut out of her own father’s will, and Thornton was punished by becoming a mere ‘leader-writing machine’ and, with the whirligigs of time, a most improbable editor of the Daily Telegraph.

  Rosemary Ashton has gone through the gossip, of which there is an abundance, with great care; there can be no doubt of the basic facts, though we have lost the evidence of the feelings. Her most surprising story is of how, in December 1938, a biographer of George Eliot received a letter from an old lady of eighty-five, Ethel Welsh, née Lewes, confidently asserting that she was the daughter of George Henry Lewes by his wife Agnes, and that any suggestion that her mother had behaved improperly was false: ‘My Mother was a most perfect Mother.’ Ethel had also loved her supposed father very much: ‘all children liked him,’ she wrote, and offered no explanation for his disappearance from the scene when she was four. The implication of her remarks is that George Eliot stole away Ethel’s father from his happy family, which we know to be untrue. Can Ethel really have believed what she wrote, or was she offering the version she thought proper and loyal? Nobody knows what Agnes, the perfect mother, thought about anything, though she outlived her lover and his wife, her husband, her husband’s mistress and several of her own children. The only photograph we have of her, taken in her late sixties, in a lace cap, suggests a once pretty woman, grown comfortably stout, and placid. She died in 1902, aged eighty. Perhaps she was a woman of sensations rather than thoughts.

  Lewes’s association with George Eliot is the best-known part of his story. Ashton rejects suggestions that it was ever anything but happy, and in particular the unsubstantiated rumour that she discovered evidence of his infidelity after his death. Even if no couple can be expected to be perpetually delighted, they were obviously deeply congenial both intellectually and emotionally. Those who come together later in life can expect to take an interest in each other’s indigestion and headaches, and they were enthusiastic about this as well as supportive about each other’s work. If he seems to move towards a certain pomposity, it was a small price to pay for transforming Marian Evans into George Eliot.

  Lewes was loved and respected by his peers, Trollope in particular, though he never quite escaped the patronizing tone doled out to social rebels. Being a small man made him an easy target; he was also always described as extremely ugly, except by Charlotte Brontë, who saw in him the image of her sister Emily. He doesn’t in fact look at all bad in pictures. Yet the note of condescension is persistent. He was ‘little Lewes’, vivacious and entertaining perhaps, but in the manner of ‘an old-fashioned French barber or dancing-master’ (this is Charles Eliot Norton in 1869). ‘You expect to see him take up his fiddle and begin to play.’ Henry James found him ‘personally repulsive; (as Mrs Kemble says “He looks as if he had been gnawed by the rats”…) but most clever and entertaining’.

  He was also good, generous, lacking in either intellectual or personal jealousy, courageous in facing the tragic deaths of two of his adult sons, full of wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and free of cant. Rosemary Ashton’s book makes you like the man and feel he has, at last, not only been properly placed in context but also done justice.

  London Review of Books, 1991

  Poet Underground

  The Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985 edited by Anthony Thwaite

  A card Philip Larkin sent me in June 1975 complains of suffering from public exposure: ‘a retreat into obscurity wd be a relief all round’. No such luck, of course, either then – the year after he published High Windows – or now he has been dead for seven years. His Selected Letters are an upsetting experience, to put it mildly.

  Larkin liked spring, solitude, the Queen, Mrs Thatcher, Thomas Hardy, animals, crude pornography and the idea of modest, decent, old-fashioned English middle-class life as portrayed by Barbara Pym – though when he met her, he found her ‘a kind of J. Grenfell person’. He disliked family life, his neighbours, most modern poets, students, the Labour Party, foreigners, abroad, holidays – and himself. He was a supremely dutiful son and an unhappy lover, resisting marriage or commitment because they seemed like promising to stand on one leg for the rest of one’s life’. A hypochondriac, he feared death more acutely than most. When he was only twenty-seven he wrote, ‘If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported.’ Five years later, ‘the approach and arrival of death, still seems to me the most unforgettable thing about our existence’.

  If death was a terror, life was a disappointment. At forty, ‘I feel I am still waiting for life to start.’ In his fifties, he summed up the day-to-da
y round: ‘work all day, drink at night to forget it’. And in his sixties, ‘I spend most of my time worrying about something or other, except when drunk, which is circa two-thirds of my waking hours.’

  How can this be the luminous and exact poet who wrote better than any of his contemporaries, and knew he did? Perhaps he was constructing a persona as a protection against disappointment; against bogus emotion; against the bombast and fixing of the literary life. Certainly, the refusal to falsify his responses and feelings, the – scrupulous avoidance of rhetoric, is the most striking thing about this selection.

  An early love letter makes the point: ‘These letters are a bit difficult to write, aren’t they, honey? There are so many styles to avoid.’ Women had the best of his self-revelation. To one he mocks himself for ‘the dear passionately-sentimental spinster that lurks within me’. Taking on a bit of household do-it-yourself, he writes to another, ‘It’s the sort of job you’d think needed a man: so do I.’ I wonder if the crude, scatological and sometimes plain nasty exchanges with men may represent his go at being the man needed by the job.

  The letters have been published very close to his lifetime, and there is something raw about this early exposure of intimacies. At the same time, I was totally absorbed. The self-portrait is bleak and unforgiving; there are many passages to be reread, noted, remembered. And I find my own few memories of him fit with what I read here. He always replied to no doubt tedious requests for poems and reviews courteously (when I was a literary editor); he was charming and mischievous when we met. Receiving an honour at the Royal Society of Literature, he asked me if I didn’t agree that the place was full of boring farts, his voice booming out over the assembled aristocrats and fancy-hatted ladies, about ten times louder than I thought tactful. A letter from the last year of his life expressed amusement at some attacks launched on us both: ‘We seem to have got inextricably confused in the mind of A. Waugh, which is not a meeting place I personally would have chosen. Has the Sunday Times ever thought of running a series on “Talentless Sons of Famous Fathers”?’

  My last memory is of lunching with him for a poetry-funding committee in January 1985. The ‘Poems on the Underground’ project had just come to us from Judith Chernaik. I was in favour of it; the chairman and fourth committee member were at first vehemently against it. Philip – glum, frail, hardly eating, his deafness aggravated by the noise of the Caprice – spoke up for it. He was firm, though he was not going to enthuse; he said he thought it likely to be less harmful than the other applications we were considering. Yet he also feared it might turn out to be a scheme for plastering the Underground with left-wing rubbish. So I was deputed to meet the – organizers and make sure this was not so. I carried out this quite unnecessary exercise once only. ‘Poems on the Underground’ have been a huge and deserved success; without Philip, they would not have got that bit of funding that helped to get them going. I remember that episode as vividly as I remember the day I bought High Windows, and my amazed gratitude that such miraculous poems could still be written.

  Ham and High, 1992

  Bringing out the Worst

  The Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987 by Lawrence Stone

  Eight hundred years ago, in the Christian West, divorce was virtually impossible; only the very rich and powerful might bribe or bully Rome into an annulment. Yet marriages lasted no longer than they do in today’s multitudinously divorcing society. Then, death did the work that dissatisfaction and the law do today; and then, orphans became a resented burden on the parish in much the same way the children of single-parent families are a resented burden on the state today.

  The English have tended to associate divorce with dangerous social experiment, feminism and revolution, particularly since the French legalized it for a short, heady period in 1792; it did not pass unremarked that three quarters of the petitions were instituted by wives. One of the subtexts of Lawrence Stone’s engrossing historical survey is that marital misbehaviour has always been all right for men, and especially rich men. The history of divorce is largely the history of the double standard; when, in the 1850s, there was talk of making adultery into a criminal misdemeanour, and Gladstone insisted that it should apply to husbands as well as to wives, the proposal was dropped like a scalding poker. It’s when women refuse to be patient Griseldas, and when the poor look for redress for domestic wretchedness, that moralists begin to preach and warn.

  The moral question is closely allied to economic ones. In 1912 the Archbishop of York pointed out that ‘the permanence of the nuptial tie is … of advantage to the state’; and so it will remain, until and unless the state takes a wholly different stance, and decides it is worth ensuring basic income, first-class education and decent housing for all its children – the dream of the welfare state.

  Lawrence Stone points out that the study of divorce offers ‘an almost unique insight into the interaction of the public spheres of morality, religion and the law’. Of these, religion, in the shape of the pronouncements of bishops, puritan zealots and pious law lords, appears as mostly unappealing and sometimes absurd. Morality’s changing fashions are mapped out with fine attention to detail and the grasp of wide patterns of behaviour to be expected from this author. Here is an example: towards the end of the eighteenth century, according to his statistics, adultery became both more widespread and more interesting to the reading public – amusing rather than shameful, he writes. At this point improved techniques of stenography meant that court cases could be reported in detail, and advances in newspaper technology meant the reports could be widely sold: thus the press was set on its long, prosperous preoccupation with divorce. ‘You may look upon the British public as constantly occupied in reading trials for adultery,’ observed Leigh Hunt in 1820; the point was still being taken by Nigel Dempster and his friends a hundred and fifty years later.

  In considering the legal aspect of divorce Stone is at his most biting, particularly in the long chapter in which he discusses ‘criminal conversation’ – or crim. con., as it was generally known, the abbreviation suggesting at once its status as a familiar, grubby provider of popular entertainment. In seventy brilliantly narrated pages, we are offered an elegant and devastating indictment of a legal device organized to suit the needs of the ‘elite males’ (the phrase is Stone’s) who profited from it. They were the barristers who made their reputations through it, the judges who presided over the courts and the well-to-do plaintiffs who used and abused it.

  Crim. con. began in the late seventeenth century as an extension of the law of trespass, and got into its real swing about 1730. The action was taken by an injured husband against the alleged seducer of his wife. A single act of adultery would do. The case was tried before a jury with no testimony from husband, wife or lover, but only witnesses called by the men. The expense of gathering – and bribing – witnesses could be high, but judgments were speedy and financial awards to the injured husband, and against the lover, could be still higher. Collusion between all parties was frequent, as judges knew well. Yet when Lord Kenyon became lord chief justice in 1788 he instituted a reign of terror against adulterers, insisting that crim. con. judges and juries must set an example to a nation threatened with moral turpitude by inflicting ever greater punishments. ‘If he cannot pay with his purse, he must pay with his person,’ he said, meaning that the defendant who couldn’t pay should go to gaol until he could; later he expressed a wish that adultery should be made a capital crime.

  Far from stemming the tide of sexual irregularity, Kenyon’s regime led to an ever increasing number of cases; and crim. con. was the making of some notable lawyers, among them Lord Mansfield and Lord Erskine, who did a double act with Kenyon. Erskine performed successfully for thirty years in these highly publicized court dramas. A fellow law lord wrote that his speeches ‘upon seduction… are of exquisite beauty’; sometimes he broke down in tears as he read a letter by a guilty wife, or called for an adjournment on the grounds that emotion had made him feel faint. Not so faint, p
resumably, as the defendant.

  Crim. con. was on the way out by 1830. Collusion had become too blatant to be borne. The reporting of the cases, from which ‘the foulest of French novelists might have learned something’, became distasteful to the domestic Victorians. The contempt of foreign lawyers, who marvelled at a nation of shopkeepers awarding money damages for the lost honour of a wife, was felt; and the pleas of women such as Caroline Norton, that they might be allowed to speak for themselves, began to be considered. The way was paved for the 1857 divorce act; as we all know, divorce has been an ever widening stream ever since.

  Thackeray, who was locked into marriage to a mad wife, wisely asked, ‘Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?’ His question is one that appeals to those who have doubts about divorce. Stone invokes another question, that of Lord Hailsham, who asked in 1969 whether easier divorce increases the sum of human happiness; and Stone concludes with the remark that the hopes of divorce reformers have not measured up to their expectations. But although divorce may not be a passport to happiness, it can be an exit from unhappiness, or at least a regularization of something that has already occurred; and perhaps that is as much as the law can occupy itself with.