George Eliot: The Last Victorian

Even if Robert Evans had not been a natural conservative, ties of deference and duty to the Newdigates meant that he was obliged to follow them in supporting the Tory party. He attended local meetings on the family’s behalf and in 1837 made sure the tenants turned up to the poll by ‘treating’ them to a hearty breakfast. At times his support for the Tories against the reforming Whigs took on the flavour of a religious battle. Describing his efforts at the 1837 election in a letter to Colonel Newdigate, he urged ‘we must not loose a Vote if we can help it’.26

We know less about Mrs Evans. Eliot mentions her only twice in her surviving letters, and Isaac and Fanny seem to have been unable to recall a single thing about her for John Cross when he interviewed them after his wife’s death. Cross’s solution was to take the generalised and evasive line, followed by many biographers since, that Mary Anne’s mother was ‘a woman with an unusual amount of natural force – a shrewd practical person, with a considerable dash of the Mrs Poyser vein in her’,27 referring to the bustling farmer’s wife in Adam Bede. But what evidence there is suggests that Christiana Evans was actually more like Mrs Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, a kind of Mrs Poyser minus the energy and wit, but with a similar stream of angry complaints issuing from her thin lips. Anecdotal sources indicate that from the time of her last two confinements Mrs Evans was in continual ill-health. She had, after all, lost twin boys eighteen months after Mary Anne’s birth. For a woman who had already produced two girls, losing two sons, especially towards the end of her fertile years, must have been a blow. Whether this was the lassitude of bereavement, depression or physical exhaustion is not clear, but the impression that emerges is of a woman straining to cope with the demands of her family.

Raising stepchildren is never easy, but Christiana seems to have found it intolerable, especially once she had three babies of her own to look after. Around the time of Mary Anne’s birth, seventeen-year-old Robert was dispatched to Derbyshire to manage the Kirk Hallam estate, with fourteen-year-old Fanny accompanying him as his housekeeper and, later, as governess to a branch of the Newdigate family. It may not have been a formal banishment, but the effect was to stretch the elder children’s relationship with their father and his second family to the point where on their occasional visits home they were greeted as stiffly as strangers.28

Chrissey, too, was rarely seen at Griff. According to John Cross, ‘shortly after her last child’s birth … [Mrs Evans] became ailing in health, and consequently her eldest girl, Christiana, was sent to school at a very early age, to Miss Lathom’s at Attleboro’.29 Even during the holidays Chrissey rarely appeared at home: her biddable personality made her a favourite with the Pearson aunts who were happy to take her off their youngest sister’s hands. Only Isaac was allowed to stay at Griff to the more reasonable age of eight or nine. Even at the end of her life, Eliot had no doubts that Isaac had been their mother’s favourite. In part this was due to temperamental similarity. The boy’s subsequent development suggests that he was a Pearson through and through – rigid, respectable, intolerant of different ways of doing things. But it may also be the case that Christiana was a woman who found it easier to love her sons – both living and dead.

Critics have long noted the lack of warm, easy mother-child relationships in Eliot’s novels. Mothers are often dead and if they survive, then, like Mrs Bede, Mrs Holt and Mrs Tulliver, they are both intrusive and rejecting, swamping and fretful. Mrs Bede and Mrs Holt both demand constant attention from their sons by complaining about them. Mrs Tulliver, likewise, cannot leave Maggie alone. She worries away at the child’s grubby pinafores, stubborn hair and ‘brown skin as makes her look like a mulatter … it seems hard as I should have but one gell, an’ her so comical’.30

Throughout her career George Eliot repeatedly explored what it is like to be the child of such a mother, one who both pulls you towards her and pushes you away. In a late poem, ‘Self and Life’, she describes the lingering desolation of being put down too suddenly from a warm maternal lap.31 Speaking in the more accessible prose of The Mill on the Floss, she shows the way in which a child in this situation responds with an infuriating mix of attention-seeking and self-punishing behaviour. In angry reply to Aunt Pullet’s insensitive suggestion that her untidy hair should be cropped, Maggie Tulliver seizes the scissors and does the job herself.32 In another incident she retreats to the worm-eaten cobwebby rafters, surely based on the attic at Griff, where she keeps a crude wooden doll or ‘fetish’ and, concentrating this time on the image of hated Aunt Glegg, drives a nail hard into its head. When her rage is exhausted, she bursts into tears and cradles the doll in a passion of remorse and tenderness.33 Maggie’s swoops from showy self-display to brutal self-punishment were rooted in the violent swings of Mary Anne’s own childhood. An anecdote from around the age of four has her thumping the piano noisily in an attempt to impress the servant with her mastery of the instrument. Five years later she is cutting off her hair, just like Maggie. This sense that her childhood had been a time of uneasy longing remained with the adult Mary Anne. In 1844, at the age of twenty-five, she wrote to her friend Sara Hennell: ‘Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect – to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.’34

Rejection by her mother forced Mary Anne to look elsewhere for a passionate, intimate connection. At the age of three she fell violently in love with her elder brother Isaac. She trotted behind him wherever he went, following him as he climbed trees, fished or busied himself with imaginary adventures down by the quarry. The Eden that was Griff now had its own tiny Adam and Eve. Eliot’s ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets, written in 1869, open with a description of the children as romantic soulmates, twins, each other’s missing half.

I cannot choose but think upon the time

When our two lives grew like two buds that kiss

At lightest thrill from the bee’s swinging chime,

Because the one so near the other is.35

But while they may be deeply attached to one another, there is still division and difference in this Eden. The boy in the sonnets and Tom in The Mill on the Floss are older, bigger and more powerful than the little sisters who dote on them. The girl in the sonnets watches, admiring, while her brother plays marbles or spins tops; Maggie idolises Tom as the fount of all practical knowledge. And to cope with this power imbalance, Maggie likes to fantasise that the positions are reversed. In a cancelled passage from The Mill on the Floss, she imagines that,

Tom never went to school, and liked no one to play with him but Maggie; they went out together somewhere every day, and carried either hot buttered cakes with them because it was baking day, or apple puffs well sugared; Tom was never angry with her for forgetting things, and liked her to tell him tales;… Above all, Tom loved her – oh, so much, – more, even than she loved him, so that he would always want to have her with him and be afraid of vexing her; and he as well as everyone else, thought her very clever.36

The split, when it comes, is awful. Tom comes home from school to find that Maggie has forgotten to feed his rabbits. His anger is swift and terrible, but it is his gradual pulling away into the realm of boydom which hurts even more. He begins to find Maggie’s adoration tiresome, her chatter silly and her superior cleverness embarrassing. Gradually he turns into the stern, conventional patriarch who scolds, criticises and eventually ignores his wayward sister.

The separation of the boy and girl in the ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets seems, at first, to be less traumatic. ‘School parted us,’ the narrator tells us, rather than some fierce falling-out. For several years ‘the twin habit of that early time’ is enough to let the children come together easily on their subsequent meetings. But as time goes by their lives carry them in opposite directions, to the point where, although ‘still yearning in divorce’, they are unable to find their way back to that shared language which once held them together.37

The fact that the brother-sister divided was a drama that Eliot treated twice, once in prose, then in poetry, suggests that it had deep roots in her own life. Certainly Mary Anne’s early attachment to Isaac is on record as greedy and rapacious. After her death, Isaac Evans recalled for John Cross that on his return from boarding-school for the holidays he was greeted with rapture by his little sister, who demanded an account of everything he had been doing.38 The scene is a charming one, but it hints at a distress which cannot be explained simply by sibling love. Behind the little girl’s urgent questioning there lurked a deep need to possess and control Isaac for fear he might abandon her. But it was already too late. When the boy was about nine he had acquired a pony and could no longer be bothered with his little sister. Mary Anne responded by plunging into a deep, intense grief, which was to echo down the years. ‘Very jealous in her affections and easily moved to smiles or tears,’ Cross explained to his readers, ‘she was of a nature capable of the keenest enjoyment and the keenest suffering, knowing “all the wealth and all the woe” of a pre-eminently exclusive disposition. She was affectionate, proud and sensitive in the highest degree.’39

Observing his wife’s temperament in later life, John Cross believed that the pony incident provided the key to understanding George Eliot’s personality. ‘In her moral development she showed, from the earliest years, the trait that was most marked in her all through life – namely, the absolute need of some one person who should be all in all to her, and to whom she should be all in all.’40 Later biographers have been quick to point out how this passage has become the cornerstone for a character reading of Eliot as needy, dependent and leaning heavily on male lovers and women friends for approval. Yet Eliot’s later comments on her own personality, together with the pattern of her subsequent relationships, suggest that Cross was doing no more than telling it how it was. The early withdrawal of her mother’s affection had left her with a vulnerability to rejection that would last a lifetime.

So when Mary Anne was sent away to boarding-school at the age of five, it was inevitable that she would take it hard. Even this was not the child’s first time away from home. For the previous two years she and Isaac had spent every day at a little dame school at the bottom of the drive. In her two-up-two-down cottage, Mrs Moore looked after a handful of local children and attempted to teach them their letters in an arrangement that went little beyond cheap baby-sitting. But now Mary Anne was to join Chrissey at Miss Lathom’s school three miles away in Attleborough, while Isaac was sent to a boys’ establishment in Coventry: hence the reference to ‘school divided us’ in the ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets. Boarding-school was not unusual for farmers’ daughters, but five was an exceptionally early age to start. After only eleven years of marriage Christiana Evans had managed to clear Griff House of the five young people who were supposed to be living there.41

School did not turn out to be an emotional second start for Mary Anne. Although she sometimes came home on Saturdays, and saw her nearby Aunt Evarard more often, she felt utterly abandoned. At the end of her life she told John Cross that her chief memory of Miss Lathom’s was of trying to push her way towards the fireplace through a semicircle of bigger girls. Faced with a wall of implacable backs, she resigned herself to living in a state of permanent chill. The scene stuck in her memory because it reinforced her feelings of being excluded from the warmth of her mother’s lap. No wonder, then, that her childhood nights were filled with dreadful dreams during which, reported Cross, ‘all her soul … [became] a quivering fear’.42 It was a terror which stayed with her throughout her life, edging into consciousness during those times when she was most stressed, depressed or alone. Even in late middle age she had not forgotten that churning sickness, working it brilliantly into the pathology of Gwendolen Harleth, the neurotic heroine of her last novel, Daniel Deronda.

Children who are separated from their parents often imagine that their bad behaviour is to blame. Mary Anne was no exception. She interpreted her banishment from Griff as a sign that she had been naughty and adopted the classic strategy of becoming very good. The older girls at Miss Lathom’s nicknamed her, with unconscious irony, ‘Little Mama’ and were careful not to upset her by messing up her clothes.43 The toddler who had once loved to play mud pies with Isaac grew into a grave child who found other little girls silly. When, at the age of nine or ten, she was asked why she was sitting on the sidelines at a party, she replied stiffly, ‘I don’t like to play with children; I like to talk to grown-up people.’44

As part of her plunge into goodness, Mary Anne buried herself in books. Her half-sister Fanny, who had once worked as a governess, recalled for John Cross the surprising fact that the child had been initially slow to read, preferring to play out of doors with her brother. But once Isaac withdrew his companionship Mary Anne was left, like so many lonely children, to construct an imaginary world of her own. In 1839 she told her old schoolmistress Maria Lewis how as a little girl ‘I was constantly living in a world of my own creation, and was quite contented to have no companions that I might be left to my own musings and imagine scenes in which I was chief actress. Conceive what a character novels would give to these Utopias. I was early supplied with them by those who kindly sought to gratify my appetite for reading and of course I made use of the materials they supplied for building my castles in the air.’45 Quite who ‘supplied’ these novels is unclear. At the age of seven or so Mary Anne would have found very few books lying around Griff. The Evanses were literate but not literary and the little girl was obliged to read nursery standards like Aesop’s Fables and Pilgrim’s Progress over and over. Her father’s gift of a picture book, The Linnet’s Life, was special enough to make Mary Anne cherish it until the end of her life, handing it over to John Cross with a warm dedication.46 Joe Miller’s Jest Book was learned by heart and repeated ad nauseam to whoever would listen. In middle age Eliot recalled that an unnamed ‘old gentleman’ used to bring her reading material, but no more is known.47 For the girl who was to grow up to be the best-read woman of the century, it was an oddly unbookish start.

CHAPTER 2

‘On Being Called a Saint’

An Evangelical Girlhood 1828–40

AT THE AGE of eight Mary Anne took a step towards a new world, urban and refined. In 1828 she followed Chrissey to school in Nuneaton. Miss Lathom’s had been only three miles from Griff and was attended by farmers’ daughters with thick Warwickshire tongues, broad butter-making hands and little hope of going much beyond the three Rs. The Elms, run by Mrs Wallington, was a different proposition altogether. The lady herself was a genteel, hard-up widow from Cork. She had followed one of the few options available to her by opening a school and advertising for boarders whom she taught alongside her own daughters. There were hundreds of these ‘ladies’ seminaries’ struggling to survive in the first half of the nineteenth century and most of them were dreadful. What marked out The Elms was its excellent teaching: by the time Mary Anne arrived, the school was reckoned to be one of the best in Nuneaton. Responsibility for the thirty pupils was shared between Mrs Wallington, her daughter Nancy, now twenty-five, and another Irishwoman, Maria Lewis, who was about twenty-eight.

The change of environment did nothing to help Mary Anne shed her shyness. Adults and children still steered clear, assuming they had nothing to offer the little girl whom they privately described as ‘uncanny’.1 Only the assistant governess Miss Lewis, with her ugly squint and her Irishness, recognised in Mary Anne something of her own isolation. Looking beyond the smooth, hard shell of perfection, she saw a deeply unhappy child ‘given to great bursts of weeping’. Within months of her arrival at Nuneaton Mary Anne had formed an attachment to Miss Lewis, which was to be the pivot of both women’s lives for the next ten years. Miss Lewis became ‘like an elder sister’ to the Evans girls, often staying at Griff during the holidays.2

Mr and Mrs Evans were delighted with Mrs Wallington’s in general and Maria Lewis in particular. In their different ways they both set great store by their youngest girl getting an education. Shrewdly practical, Robert Evans had already schooled his eldest daughter, Fanny, to a standard that had enabled her to work as a governess to the Newdigates before her marriage to a prosperous farmer, Henry Houghton. Anticipating that the quiet, odd-looking Mary Anne might remain a spinster all her life, Evans was determined that she would not be reduced to relying on her brothers for support. A life as a governess was not, as Miss Lewis’s example was increasingly to show, either secure or cheerful. Still, it was the one bit of independence open to middle-class women and Robert Evans was determined that it should be Mary Anne’s if she needed it.

Christiana’s hopes for her daughter were altogether fancier.3 Like many a prosperous farmer’s wife, she expected a stint at boarding-school to soften her child’s rough corners and round out her flat vowels. A smattering of indifferent French and basic piano were the icing on the cake of an education designed to prepare the girl for marriage to a prosperous farmer or local professional man. In the case of young Chrissey the investment was soon to pay off handsomely. A few years after leaving Mrs Wallington’s she married a local doctor, the gentlemanly Edward Clarke. Still, husbands were a long way off for little Mary Anne. All Mrs Evans hoped for at this stage was that her odd little girl would become near enough a lady. Maria Lewis may not have been pretty, but her careful manners and measured diction were held up to Mary Anne – who still looked and sounded like a farm girl – as the model to which she should aspire.

It did no harm, either, that Miss Lewis was ‘serious’ in her religion, belonging to the Evangelical wing of the Church of England. From the end of the previous century the Evangelicals had worked to revitalise an Established Church that had become lethargic and indifferent to the needs of a changing social landscape. A population which was increasingly urban and mobile found nothing of relevance in the tepid rituals of weekly parish worship. During the 1760s and 1770s, the charismatic clergyman John Wesley had taken the Gospel out to the people, preaching with passion about a Saviour who might be personally and intimately known. For Wesley ritual, liturgy and the sacrament were less important than a first-hand knowledge of God’s word as revealed through the Bible and private prayer. When it came to deciding questions of right and wrong, the authority of the priest ceded to individual conscience. This made Methodism, as Wesley’s brand of Anglicanism became known, a particularly democratic faith. Mill workers, apothecaries and, until 1803, women, were all encouraged to preach the word of the Lord as and when the spirit moved them.

This challenge of Methodism, together with the continuing vitality of other dissenting sects such as the Baptists and the Independents, had forced the Established Church to put its house in order. The result was Evangelicalism – a brand of Anglicanism which held out the possibility of knowing Christ as a personal redeemer. In order to attain this state of grace an individual was to prepare her soul by renouncing all manner of leisure and pleasure. A constant diet of prayer, Bible study and self-scrutiny was required to stamp out temptation. Yet at the same time as renouncing the world, the Evangelical Anglican was to be busily present within it. Visiting the poor, leading prayer meetings and worrying about the state of other people’s souls were part of the programme by which the ‘serious’ Christian would reach heaven. Uninviting though this dour programme might seem, Evangelicalism swept right through the middle classes and even lapped the gentry during the first decades of the century. Its combination of self-consciousness, sentimentality and pious bustle went a long way to defining the temper of domestic and public life in early nineteenth-century England. In ‘Janet’s Repentance’, one of her first pieces of fiction, George Eliot showed how Evangelical Anglicanism had worked a little revolution in the petty hearts and minds of female Milby, a barely disguised Nuneaton: ‘Whatever might be the weaknesses of the ladies who pruned the luxuriance of their lace and ribbons, cut out garments for the poor, distributed tracts, quoted Scripture, and defined the true Gospel, they had learned this – that there was a divine work to be done in life, a rule of goodness higher than the opinion of their neighbours.’4

Even Robert Evans, not known for his susceptibility to passing trends, was affected by Evangelical fervour. During the late 1820s he went to hear the Revd John Jones give a series of passionate evening sermons in Nuneaton. Jones’s fundamentalist style was credited with inspiring a religious revival in Nuneaton and with provoking a reaction from more orthodox church members – events which Eliot portrayed in ‘Janet’s Repentance’. But Evans was too much of a conservative to do more than dip into this new moral and political force. As the Newdigates’ representative, he was expected to uphold the tradition of Broad Church Anglicanism. The parish church of Chilvers Coton stood at the heart of village life and it was here the Evanses came to be christened – as Mary Anne was a week after her birth – married and buried. Labourers, farmers and neighbouring artisans gathered every Sunday to affirm not so much that Christ was Risen but that the community endured.

At a time when many country people still could not read, it was the familiar cadences of the Prayer Book rather than the precise doctrine it conveyed which brought comfort, a point Eliot was to put into the mouth of the illiterate Dolly Winthrop as she urged the isolated weaver Silas Marner to attend Raveloe’s Christmas service: ‘If you was to … go to church, and see the holly and the yew, and hear the anthim, and then take the sacramen’, you’d be a deal the better, and you’d know which end you stood on, and you could put your trust i’ Them as knows better nor we do, seein’ you’d ha’ done what it lies on us all to do.’5

While this was exactly the kind of hazy, casual observance which the Evangelical teenage Mary Anne abhorred, as a mature woman she came to value the way it strengthened social relations. Mr Ebdell, who had christened her, turns up in fiction as Mr Gilfil of ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’. Schooled in his own suffering, Gilfil is a much-loved figure in the community, with an instinctive understanding of his parishioners’ needs. He pulls sugar plums out of his pockets for the village children and sends an old lady a flitch of bacon so that she will not have to kill her beloved pet pig. Yet when it comes to preaching, that key activity for a new generation of zealous church-goers, Mr Gilfil is sadly lacking: ‘He had a large heap of short sermons, rather yellow and worn at the edges, from which he took two every Sunday, securing perfect impartiality in the selection by taking them as they came, without reference to topics.’6

Gilfil begins a long line of theologically lax, but emotionally generous, Anglican clergy in Eliot’s fiction which includes Mr Irwine of Adam Bede and Mr Farebrother in Middlemarch. Irwine may hunt and Farebrother play cards, much to the horror of their dissenting and Evangelical neighbours, but both extend a charity and understanding to their fellow men which was to become the corner-stone of Eliot’s adult moral philosophy.