My Life in Middlemarch (14 page)

Upstairs, David led me to a bookcase, and I stooped down to look at the volumes ranged upon it: first editions of all of George Eliot’s novels, inscribed by the author to Charles Lewes and Gertrude. David pulled out
Middlemarch.
He’d reread the novel recently, he said, and then astonished me by saying that rather than using a battered paperback he’d read Charles and Gertrude’s copy. “It was very nice to do that,” he said, with a quiet note of satisfaction. Thornie had written that
“good
novels bear re-reading.” The book that Eliot had given Charles hadn’t become a relic after all: it was a useful thing, still being used.

David handed
Middlemarch
to me, and I opened to the inscription. “To Charles & Gertrude Lewes,” it read. “Their loving Mutter gives this book of hers, which was coming into the world and growing along with their little daughter Blanche.” The inscription to Charles and Gertrude was deeply touching, tying the cherished birth of the girl in the portrait downstairs at David’s house with the labor Eliot had spent on her own literary offspring.

But
Middlemarch
also grew as Thornie was dying, and now when I read about Fred Vincy and his unformed hopefulness and Will Ladislaw and his chafing restlessness—and when I am up to my ears in boydom, as three big and one small clatter on the stairs of my house, or spiritedly recount their adventures over the dinner table—I see Thornie Lewes inscribed within its pages, too. I was wrong in my twenties, when I thought that
Middlemarch
had nothing to tell me about being a stepparent—and not just because I was being too literal-minded about what was represented in the book and what wasn’t, and failed to see how Eliot’s intelligence might illuminate situations she had not explicitly described.

A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book. Now when I read the novel in the light of Eliot’s life, and in the light of my own, I see her experience of unexpected family woven deep into the fabric of the novel—not as part of the book’s obvious pattern, but as part of its tensile strength.
Middlemarch
seems charged with the question of being a stepmother: of how one might do well by one’s stepchildren, or unwittingly fail them, and of all that might be gained from opening one’s heart wider.

I
n a review that appeared in the
Athenaeum
on March 30, 1872, in advance of the publication of “Three Love Problems,” the fourth book of
Middlemarch,
the writer suggested that toward the end of the third book “a riddle is put” which “ought to be the hinge of the tale.”

The reviewer does not elaborate, nor return to the idea in later reviews. (
Middlemarch,
being published serially in eight five-shilling parts, was also reviewed serially in some periodicals.) But the reference must have been to a charged exchange that takes place between Dorothea—now Mrs. Casaubon—and Lydgate. The doctor has been called to Lowick Manor, the Casaubon residence, because Mr. Casaubon has suffered what appears to be a heart attack.

Lydgate and Dorothea withdraw to the library. The shutters
are closed, and as they sit in the gloom Lydgate suggests to Dorothea that, although her husband seems to be recovering, ongoing vigilance against overexertion is required. He must not work as hard as he has done, nor may he restrict his occupations so exclusively. Perhaps, Lydgate suggests, they might go abroad. “Oh, that would not do—that would be worse than anything,” Dorothea responds. As tears roll down her cheeks she tells Lydgate that nothing will be of any use to Casaubon that he does not enjoy. Lydgate is deeply touched, yet wonders what her marriage must be like: “Women just like Dorothea had not entered into his traditions.”

Then Dorothea begs Lydgate to advise her. “You know all about life and death,” she tells him. “He has been labouring all his life and looking forward. He minds about nothing else. And I mind about nothing else.” Eliot underlines the importance of this exchange not by showing the reader how Lydgate responds in the moment, but by telling how he sees it later, in retrospect. “For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal—this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life,” she writes.

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 generosity 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.