My Life in Middlemarch (10 page)

In London, she became one of several lodgers at the home of John Chapman, the publisher. Chapman’s household, at 142 Strand, notoriously included not just his wife but also his mistress, who was governess to the Chapman children. Eliot and Chapman seem to have had a brief entanglement of some kind when she first moved in, though the extent of their intimacy is obscure; at any rate, their closeness was sufficient for both wife and mistress soon to demand that she move out. She did, for a while, returning to the Brays at Rosehill, but returned to Chapman’s when his editorial need for her predominated over his womenfolk’s objection.

It was in this unconventional milieu that she met Lewes and learned of his own unhappy and insoluble marital conundrum. Even so, it shocked many of their friends—if not the unshockable Chapman—when in 1854 she and Lewes set up home together. While it was generally understood that strict observance of marriage
law was not necessary, open defiance of it was something else altogether. Soon, Eliot began calling herself Marian Evans Lewes, both for the sake of appearances (landladies were apt to be suspicious) and because she felt that they were married in every respect that really mattered. She called Lewes her husband. She laid claim to a family, even if she had come by it in an unusual manner.

She spoke of her new responsibilities with defiant conventionality. “We shall both be hard workers, for we have three little boys to keep as well as ourselves,” Eliot wrote to her older, married half sister, Fanny Houghton, in 1857, when she finally told her siblings of her relationship with Lewes. Of the boys, she explained, “Two of them are in Switzerland, at a delightful school there, and the youngest is at school in England.”

No letter survives to tell us the immediate response of Fanny, who knew what it was to be an inconvenient stepchild: after her father’s remarriage she had been sent out of the family home, when she was fourteen and Mary Ann was a baby, to serve as housekeeper to her brother, Robert, the oldest Evans child, on a neighboring farm. Eliot clearly hoped for her sister’s acceptance of the situation. “I am sure you retain enough friendship and sisterly affection for me to be glad that I should have a kind husband to love me and take care of me,” she wrote. But Fanny did not prove to be tolerant of her half sister’s unconventional new household; like Eliot’s siblings Isaac and Chrissey, she cut off correspondence.

If Eliot’s relationship with Lewes was irregular, her relation to those “three little boys” of whom she spoke so intimately to Fanny was even more so. She had never laid eyes on them, and they had no idea that she existed. They had been packed off to boarding
school at an early age, at least in part to keep them in ignorance of the Leweses’ peculiar ménage with Thornton Hunt. It was nothing unusual for boys to be sent off to be educated and not to see their parents for months at a time—although the isolation of the Lewes boys from their family seems to have been extreme. Once installed at Hofwyl, a school in Bern that emphasized modern languages and outdoor activities, they did not come home to England for several years. They saw their father only once a year in the summer, and their mother never visited.

For their parents, as much as for Eliot, the Lewes boys seem to have existed largely as an abstract concern rather than a familiar presence. Lewes seems to have been, in absentia, a fond father, prone to none of the chilliness typically cultivated in the higher social classes in England. “I suppose you will be glad to hear from Papsy as he would be glad to hug you!” he once wrote to Charles and Thornie, offering them an ingenious substitute for paternal affection: “
Kiss each other
for me—the only way I know of sending a kiss so far.”

The boys wrote letters home. Charles, who was studious and sensitive, mostly addressed his to Agnes; in them he recounted news of his academic progress and of the domestic arrangements at school. (“I have just finished my third lesson in music and am already further than several boys who have had several lessons more than me,” he reported proudly, at the age of fourteen.) Thornie addressed his letters to Lewes, and if Eliot read them over his shoulder—as surely she did—she would have come to know this middle boy as an exuberant correspondent, full of passions and interests. He collected butterflies and botanical specimens, and at twelve he wrote, “I love natural History above all things,
and when I grow up, it is my desire to become a naturalist.” He was a budding philatelist, and some of his letters are half composed of what must have been wearying requests for stamps of foreign nations. There are affectionate inquiries after Lewes’s health and his travels—“I hope your head is quite well, and that you had a good passage home”—and occasional nods toward Lewes’s work, which all three boys must have taken to be the sole reason for their father’s unavailability. “I hope your book will sell well, though I don’t know which it is,” he writes in one letter. His valedictions to Lewes are florid: “I remain Dear Pater meus Filius affectionatus Thorntonius Arnottus Ludovicus Ranarum Rex.”

Eliot knew all about the likes and dislikes of young boys from Isaac, her nearest sibling in age. As a child she adored Isaac, though, as is sometimes the case with little sisters, the adoration was not reciprocated. He is usually taken to be the inspiration for Tom Tulliver, Maggie’s domineering sibling in
The Mill on the Floss.
She began writing that novel in March 1859, by which time Thornie’s letters would have immersed her once more in the typical preoccupations of boyhood. He gave accounts of murdering insects (215 mayflies in twenty minutes on one occasion), defying schoolmasters (one “punishes me now for any little thing he can possibly find out, if for example, I smile in a lesson”), and playing at soldiers. In one letter he recounted the discovery in a school storeroom of a range of weaponry from an earlier incarnation of the institution: “a real gun but with the lock broken, a splendid standard, eight or ten swords, a cannon, cartouche boxes, drums, horns for the officers, etc. Yesterday afternoon we had a grand parade, the cannon was loaded and fired nearly twelve times, if not more even; I am the guard of the cannon.” He developed a keen
interest in taxidermy, which complemented his passion for shooting. “I have got two nice lizards for you, which however cannot be forwarded by the post,” he wrote to Lewes. “One has got a bullet shot in his side through which a
pistolbullet
from my
pistol
went.”

I feel sure that Eliot felt a degree of disorientation as she absorbed this material. She was in her midthirties, and before she met Lewes she had probably expected to remain childless. She and Lewes chose not to have children together; she told one friend they practiced birth control. Possibly they felt that while they had voluntarily chosen cohabitation in spite of social censure, it would be unjust to visit the stigma of illegitimacy upon a child. Equally likely, Eliot preferred to devote her energies to her work without the distractions and dangers of childbearing and child rearing. And Lewes may have felt, with eminent justification, that caring for his boys as well as supporting the children Agnes had borne with Hunt was paternal responsibility enough.

But now there were children in her life, at least in a manner of speaking. “We are all very good puppies and wag our tails very merrily,” Thornie told Lewes. Eliot liked dogs, but had not thought to adopt three human ones. Nor had she done so quite yet. The three boys she described assertively to her sister as part of her family—and for whom she became, along with Lewes, financially responsible—existed for a long time not as flesh-and-blood children, but as conceptual ones, elements in a new way of domestic life she was just beginning to build, just as she was building her new imaginative life as a novelist.

“My life has deepened unspeakably during the last year,” she wrote at the close of 1857, the year that
Scenes of Clerical Life
was serialized in
Blackwood’s Magazine.
“I feel a greater capacity for
moral and intellectual enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties, than any I remember at any former period of my life.” Amid those duties and that depth came the unknown Lewes boys. Long before she heard heavy footsteps clattering up and down her staircase, or listened patiently to indefatigable accounts of various armaments and their uses, or caught the sweet but slightly rank scent of a young head of hair that has gone too many days without washing, she had imaginary children, boys she had begun to try to love before they knew she was in the world.

I
JUGGLED
a paper cup of coffee and a bag full of books as I made my way through Grand Central Station, then climbed aboard the commuter train to New Haven and looked for a window seat from which I could watch the gray streets of the South Bronx melt into the wooded suburbs of Connecticut. It had been years since I’d taken this train, but in my midtwenties I spent hundreds of hours on this line, journeying back and forth to see a man I loved.

It was a situation both complicated and simple. He had a young daughter whom I had yet to meet, and for months as I fell in love with him I heard about her and took her into my imagination. I would sit on this train, staring out of the window and trying to picture an obscure future in which I would take on a domestic role unlike any I had so far played, or had imagined myself playing: one in which I would commit myself not just to one person, but to two.

No longer a fact-checker, I was now a regular contributor to the magazine where I worked, producing often-acerbic profiles of
prominent cultural figures, which is one way for a young writer to get attention. I lived alone, in a tiny rental apartment in downtown Manhattan, where I had hardly any furniture beyond a futon bed that I only occasionally folded up into a couch. I didn’t even have bookshelves, and my books, hundreds of them, were stacked against a wall in precarious piles, their orange and black and gray spines abutting each other like bricks in an uneven wall that has been foolishly and irrevocably constructed without foundations. Alone in that apartment after a long day at the magazine’s offices I often dwelled on the responsibility I was close to assuming, wondering if I had come far enough from childhood to open myself to a child.

I could recall nothing in the books ranged against the wall that seemed to speak directly to my situation, and I longed for the simplicity of direct comparison.
Middlemarch
had a lot to say about falling in love; it even had something to say about falling in love with a learned scholar much older than oneself, not that I saw my own love affair in that unflattering light. But it had nothing, I thought, to tell me about falling in love with someone who came with such prior emotional commitments and practical obligations. I didn’t understand how to navigate this paradigm, and
Middlemarch
didn’t seem to give me any answers—not, at least, beyond the alternative of escaping into a different kind of love affair, one with a figure more like Ladislaw, who has his own legal complications (a codicil to Casaubon’s will means Dorothea forfeits her fortune if she marries him) but does not come trailing a custody agreement.

I often dreamed about the daughter. She became part of my life without my being any part of hers; and it was difficult to be
invisible to her when she was so vivid to me. Circumstances demanded maturity of me, and I strove to be as grown-up as was required; and yet circumstances also conspired to make me feel as if I were the one who was young and powerless. Eventually, I did meet her, and when that day arrived I discovered that she was smaller than she had become in my imagination: a little human animal with soft nut-brown hair and bright eyes and an open expression. Eventually, too, I came to love her—not out of a sense of responsibility, nor out of love for her father, but for her, in herself, her sweet nature and good humor and irresistible intelligence. In all my imaginings about what it would mean to have her in my life, I had forgotten to include the prospect of joy.

I
SETTLED
into the peaceful, sunlit reading room at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, opened a file, and began paging through the lightweight sheets of writing paper fit for the international mail. These were letters written by Thornton Lewes, including the first he ever wrote to Eliot in August 1859. “For the first time do I seize the pen to begin a correspondence which is to be lasting,” it begins, with kinetic flourish. His father had traveled to Hofwyl that summer to tell his sons, finally, that he was separated from Agnes, and that they had a new mother: the celebrated author of
Adam Bede,
which had been published to great acclaim that year. “They were less distressed than I had anticipated and were delighted to hear about Marian,” Lewes wrote in his journal.

However distressed or delighted the boys really were when out of the wishful sight of their father, Thornie’s letters to Eliot brim with an affection ready to be spent on a likely object. “We received
your letter at St. Moriz in the canton of the Grisons, some three hours walk from Italy,” Thornie wrote in that first letter, which was a response to an introductory one from her. “You can imagine how glad we were to get it, as being the first from you. It put a touch to our happiness on the journey.” He told her that both he and Charles liked
Adam Bede
very much, Lewes having brought them a copy when he visited. And he clearly had conceived of one bonus of having a famous author as a stepmother: “If you happen to have many letters, stamps from foreign countries, I shall be very glad if you send me them for my collection.”

As I sat in the library and looked through Thornie’s early letters, written in a surprisingly careful and elegant hand, I found myself utterly enchanted by this lively, mischievous boy. I also wondered if his letters horrified Eliot at least as much as they amused her. Eliot wrote to tell him that she and Lewes had acquired a dog, Pug; Thornie responded, “I am not afraid of him as a rival, as he is not very dangerous, but when I come home, if he still lives and is impudent, I warn you beforehand, that I shall shoot him through the head, which will make a very good end for the Biography of Pug Pugnose, Esq.”