George Eliot: The Last Victorian

CHAPTER 5

‘The Land of Duty and Affection’

Coventry, Geneva and London 1849–51

BY THE END of the 1840s, that most stormy of decades for Britain, life had been transformed for nearly everyone in Mary Ann’s circle. Unsettled by the revolutions in Europe, John Sibree had rebelled against his family culture, thrown over the ministry and opted for the precarious teaching and translating career of the self-supporting intellectual. The Brays’ silk business was under pressure from cheap foreign imports and Rosehill would never again be run with such expansive ease. Meanwhile Chrissey, the meek and mild Evans girl who had left little impression on anyone, had been quietly sinking into chronic poverty and ill-health. Unlike her canny businessmen brothers, the gentlemanly Dr Clarke was not good with money. During the middle decades of the century medicine was busy pulling away from its roots in the apothecary shop and fashioning itself into a profession. Improved training and practice was one way of doing it. Living like a gentleman was another. No longer content to be seen as a clever servant, the physician – doctor now ran an ‘establishment’, which rivalled that of his well-heeled patients. His front door was opened by a maid, his dinner served on fine china and his rounds made on a good horse. In practice, however, the cost of maintaining a conspicuously prosperous establishment often proved too much for an income that was far from secure. Just as Lydgate in Middle-march discovers that his natural inclination to live well cannot be supported from the fees he receives as a doctor newly arrived in the area, so Edward Clarke was increasingly unable to balance the books.

By 1842 the situation was so grim that Dr Clarke was forced to raise money by selling a house which had been left to his wife by her Uncle Evarard. Robert Evans, still playing his role as money lender to the feckless gentry, gave his son-in-law £250 for the Attleborough property and, a few months later, advanced him another £800 on loan to help move the whole family to Barford, near Warwick, for a new start.1 But still it was not enough. Within three years Clarke was bankrupt and the whole family decamped in panic to Bird Grove. From this low point it recovered neither its health nor prosperity. Dr Clarke died in 1852, leaving six surviving children. Chrissey was left to do her ineffectual best, scrabbling around for cheap schooling and apprenticeships, and at one point even considering moving the household out to Australia.2 In 1859, worn out by her own fertility and bad luck, Chrissey died at the age of forty-five.

Although Mary Ann continued to hunger for romantic love, her elder sister’s example offered a stern warning about its consequences. Gritty Moss, Mr Tulliver’s sister in The Mill on the Floss, is surely based on Chrissey. Described originally as ‘a patient, loosely-hung, child-producing woman’,3 Mrs Moss has the hopeless look of someone defeated by too many babies and a husband who never manages to get into profit. As a married woman Chrissey had no rights to her own property – it was Edward Clarke, after all, who sold her house back to her father. If she was unfaithful, her husband could divorce her. If he had a lover, she was obliged to stay put. Whatever the reasons for a legal separation – and there were only a handful each year, among those wealthy and smart enough not to care what other people thought – the children automatically belonged to their father. Chrissey, as far as anyone knows, had no desire to end her marriage to Edward Clarke. But she had probably never wanted to give birth to nine children, a financial and physical strain that almost certainly hastened her death: her childless sister lived to sixty-one, her brother to seventy-four. Despite being married to a doctor, Chrissey seems to have had no access to the contraceptive knowledge that, only ten years later, would allow Mary Ann and Lewes to make the decision not to bring illegitimate children into the world.

Chrissey’s marriage was one of several which Mary Ann scrutinised as she approached her late twenties, those last-chance courtship years for a woman in the mid-nineteenth century. There were the Brays, with their advanced attitudes to sexual arrangements and sufficient money to support Mrs Gray and her brood of bastards. There was married, childless Fanny, who had time and energy to read the new higher criticism, but felt obliged to keep her opinions to herself. There were Isaac and Sarah, conventionally married and busy bringing up their four children to take their place among the professional classes. None of these were agonisingly miserable matches, but they were all compromised by wavering sexual attraction, intellectual incompatibility, or force of habit. Certainly none matched Mary Ann’s ideal of a true meeting of hearts and minds.

The fault, she concluded like many before and since, lay not with individual human failing, but with the institution of marriage itself. While marriages in Britain were not arranged in the literal sense, young middle-class people were often pressured by their families into engagements with people they barely knew. ‘How terrible it must be’, Mary Sibree remembered Mary Ann saying, ‘to find one’s self tied to a being whose limitations you could see and must know were such as to prevent your ever being understood!’ Far happier, Mary Ann concluded, was the Continental arrangement of dissolving marriages once affection had died.4

These remarks, recalled in hindsight by Mary Sibree for John Cross, are suspiciously prophetic. Within fifteen years of making them, Mary Ann Evans was to become a notorious victim of Britain’s stringent divorce laws. But although Sibree probably polished up her tale for posterity, the ‘problem’ of marriage was a subject which engaged Mary Ann from the moment she first became aware of the competing pressures of family, personal and religious law. Her impulsive courtship of the picture restorer in the spring of 1845 had shown her how easy it was to rush into a marriage that would suit no one except the people who had arranged it, in this case her half-sister Fanny Houghton. During the holy war she had learned painfully that obedience and revolt in relation to an external law mattered far less than adherence to a complex inner truth.

In June 1848, during a dismal holiday with her failing father in St Leonards-on-Sea, Mary Ann clawed out a few hours to read the just-published Jane Eyre. As she sat huddled in a cold hotel, the book threw a sharp beam of light on to her own situation. Speaking of Rochester’s commitment to care for his mad wife, Mary Ann declared in a letter to Charles Bray: ‘All self-sacrifice is good – but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man’s soul and body to a putrefying carcase.’5 She was quite aware that she, too, was chained soul and body to a putrefying carcass. But the difference between her situation and Rochester’s was that her chains were made not of an abstract law but the living, loving ties of human affection.

If conventional marriage looked increasingly unappealing and unlikely, the problem still remained of how Mary Ann was to live once her father died. Isaac’s continuing grumblings about the ‘selfishness’ of her single state suggested that he was never going to want her at Griff. The Clarkes could not support themselves, let alone an extra mouth. The last time the subject had come up, during the holy war, governessing in Leamington had emerged as a grim possibility. Fortunately, since then new and more appealing options had presented themselves. In April 1845 Mary Ann met Harriet Martineau, whose sister-in-law was a cousin of Cara’s.6 Martineau belonged to a tiny band of early-Victorian women who supported themselves through high-quality journalism and authorship. Born into the thriving nexus of Norwich Unitarianism she had received a good education by the standards of the day. Too deaf to follow her sisters into governessing when the family business failed, she started in print by writing the hugely successful Tales of Political Economy, moral fables that explained the virtues of free trade in simple terms, which the uncertainly literate would understand. From there she was to expand her range to include, by the time of her death in 1876, autobiography, fiction and an embarrassingly emphatic endorsement of mesmerism (hypnosis) as a cure for all kinds of ills. Although as a jobbing journalist Martineau’s work appeared all over the place, she was most closely linked with the Westminster Review, the periodical founded by James Mill and Jeremy Bentham in 1824 to espouse the hard, happiness-driven philosophy of utilitarianism.

In some ways Martineau was not an attractive role model for Mary Ann, being plain, gauche and gossipy. Her deafness required her to carry a large ear trumpet which she used to control and inhibit others. If she grew bored with a conversation, she withdrew the trumpet and started to shout over the top of the unfortunate speaker. Hans Christian Andersen, who once met her at a garden party in London, was so exhausted by the experience that he had to go and lie down afterwards. Her old-maidish respectability ran alongside a prurient interest in other people’s doings, creating a nasty tendency to bad-mouth. Years later, at the height of the scandal over Mary Ann’s elopement with Lewes, Martineau whipped herself up into a frenzy of disapproval. She even started a strange, self-aggrandising rumour that Mary Ann had written her an insulting letter prior to leaving for the Continent.7 That Mary Ann did not expose Martineau as a meddling fantasist in 1854 and continued to express admiration and even affection for her until her death twenty years later says a great deal about the debt she believed she owed her. More than any other woman in early-Victorian Britain, Martineau’s example pointed the way out of dependent provincial spinsterhood.

It was with Martineau’s example in mind that Mary Ann started to write articles for the Coventry Herald in October 1846. Charles Bray had bought the radical paper during the previous summer as a platform in his continuing battle with the city’s ruling Tories. Mary Ann’s laboured and lame pieces did not contribute much to the struggle. The most interesting thing about the series of loose, rambling essays entitled ‘Poetry and Prose from the Notebook of An Eccentric’8 which appeared from December is her use of the form to which she was to return only at the very end of her life. Like Impressions of Theophrastus Such, published in 1879, ‘Poetry and Prose’ purports to be the jottings of a middle-aged man and, in this first attempt, comes over as implausible and dull. The reviews she wrote for the paper were much more successful, building on real interests and knowledge. The first, which appeared in October 1846, was a cogent commentary on three books by the French historians Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet.9

Mary Ann’s journalism, and the reading which informed the best of it, had to be fitted around her increasingly heavy duties as a sick-nurse. Just as her mother had used her ill-health to send Mary Ann away from the family home, her father now used his frailty to bind her to it. Evans still loathed the Brays for their hijacking of his clever, respectable little girl into unorthodoxy. Jealous and resentful of Mary Ann’s continued attachment to Rosehill, he tried everything in his power to turn her attention back towards him. The most spectacular skirmish came in October 1845, when Mary Ann was due to accompany the Brays and Sara Hennell to Scotland. This promised to be a particularly exciting trip, since the plan was to tour Scott country, exploring the landscape long branded into her imagination from repeated readings of the Waverley novels. But from the start Robert was determined that she should not go. He put forward the desperate argument that Chrissey’s and Edward’s arrival at Bird Grove, following their final bankruptcy, required her presence. In the end Charles Bray intervened, stressing how much Mary Ann needed a change of scene to lift her health and spirits.10 Reluctantly, Evans agreed, but on the evening following her departure he fell from his horse and broke a leg. Isaac dispatched a letter to Glasgow telling Mary Ann to come home immediately. Luckily it missed her and the party toured Greenock, Glasgow, Loch Lomond and Stirling, blithely unaware of the drama unfolding in Warwickshire. When the letter finally caught up with Mary Ann in Edinburgh, she wanted to set out immediately and alone. Bray talked her into staying another day and the whole party went to visit Scott’s grand castle home in Abbotsford. The next day, 28 October, they all set out for home, travelling via Birmingham.

Robert Evans lived on for another grim three and a half years. At times, Mary Ann feared she was going mad with the strain of looking after him. He was not a man who said thank you, believing that his youngest daughter’s care and attention was his natural due. He was often grumpy and always demanding, wanting her to read or play the piano or just talk. During the ghastly visit to St Leonards-on-Sea in May – June 1848, Mary Ann reported to the Brays that her father made ‘not the slightest attempt to amuse himself, so that I scarcely feel easy in following my own bent even for an hour’.11 Trapped on the out-of-season south coast, she tried to stretch out the days with ‘very trivial doings … spread over a large space’, to the point where one featureless day merged drearily into the next.12

The result was the kind of depression she had not experienced since the years of intense isolation at Griff. Spoofing Scott, she wrote to Charles Bray from the dismal guest-house that ‘my present address is Grief Castle, on the river of Gloom, in the valley of Dolour’.13 Without other people to reflect her back to herself – Robert Evans’s hungry demands only made her feel invisible – she felt herself on the brink of a terrifying disintegration. In a desperate letter to Sara, she cried out, ‘I feel a sort of madness growing upon me.’14

But throughout this slow pounding of her spirits Mary Ann’s devotion to her father never wavered. Mr Bury, the surgeon who attended Evans during these last years, declared that ‘he never saw a patient more admirably and thoroughly cared for’.15 Still deeply regretful of the pain she had caused him during the holy war, Mary Ann took her father’s nursing upon her as an absolute charge. And while the limits that her sick-room duties imposed upon her time and freedom often irked, they also satisfied her need for a vocation. Just as giving up two years of her life to the tortuous Strauss had calmed her fears that she was achieving nothing in her life, so the burden of caring for her father left neither time nor energy to agonise over her ultimate lack of direction. While others, especially Cara, marvelled at her sacrifice and patience, Mary Ann understood that it was her devotion to her father which made life possible. Without this ‘poetry of duty’ she feared herself ‘nothing more than miserable agglomerations of atoms’.16 Frightened about relaxing for a second, she had even begun translating Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in her spare time: ‘she says it is such a rest to her mind,’ reported Cara Bray wonderingly.17

This makes sense of the puzzle that it was in the final few months of Robert Evans’s life that Mary Ann found her greatest ease. She was with him all the time now, worrying about the effect of the cold on his health, tying a mustard bag between his shoulders to get him to sleep, sending written bulletins to Fanny and Robert about his worsening condition. There are no surviving letters to Isaac and Chrissey, and no evidence that they shared the load with her. It was Mary Ann’s half-brother Robert who spent the last night of their father’s life with her, a fact she remembered with gratitude all her life. Yet although she declared that her life during these months was ‘a perpetual nightmare – always haunted by something to be done which I have never the time or rather the energy to do’,18 she accepted that she would have it no other way. To Charles Bray she reported that ‘strange to say I feel that these will ever be the happiest days of life to me. The one deep strong love I have ever known has now its highest exercise and fullest reward.’19 To some extent this was because Evans was finally able to unbend a little and say ‘kind things’ to Mary Ann. ‘It shows how rare they are’, said Cara tartly, ‘by the gratitude with which she repeats the commonest expressions of kindness.’20 But it was not just that. As the abyss of life without home, family or purpose loomed, Mary Ann clung to her exhausting duties as a way of keeping terror at bay.

It could not be held off for ever. When the final hours came, on the night of 30–31 May, disintegration threatened once again. In panic, Mary Ann sat down and scribbled an anguished note to Cara and Charles: ‘What shall I be without my Father? It will seem as if a part of my moral nature were gone. I had a horrid vision of myself last night becoming earthly sensual and devilish for want of that purifying restraining influence.’21

But, of course, it had never been her father who had protected Mary Ann from herself. It was her attachment to him, her elevation of his care into an absolute duty, which had disciplined the warring parts of herself into working together. For this reason Evans’s deliberate snubbing of her in his will may not have hurt her as much as it has outraged her biographers. There was nothing odd about his leaving the valuable Derbyshire and Warwickshire properties to Robert and Isaac respectively, while his three daughters received relatively small amounts of cash. Fanny and Chrissey had both been given a thousand pounds on their marriage and now got another thousand. Mary Ann received two thousand pounds in trust, the income to be administered by her brother, half-brother and the family solicitor. But it was in the tiny details that Evans’s will stung. The novels of Walter Scott, from which Mary Ann had read so tirelessly during the last few years of his life, were given to Fanny who, as far as we know, had no particular attachment to them. It was a small, cutting gesture, the only way Robert Evans knew to show Mary Ann that he had still not forgiven her for the holy war.