The moral world, in short, although surrounded by fog, is not foggy in itself. Perhaps our modern prejudice goes just the other way. We are vague about our moral judgments and decisions, certain about our business ones. Dickens would strongly disagree. I think it is worth hearing his side.
Bleak House has a complex, multilevel plot, with a cast of characters and locales that it takes two or more pages merely to list. Half a dozen are very memorable: Mr. Jarndyce and Esther Summerson. Krook and Mrs. Jellyby. Inspector Bucket and Jo, the poor little crossing-sweep. Lady Dedlock and Tom-All-Alone’s, the section of London blighted by the eternal Chancery suit, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, Chancery itself, and the Lord Chancellor. The list need not be extended; that is enough to bring to mind all the tumultuous action and passion of this great, moving book.
Having read these four works of Dickens, you are surely capable of deciding for yourself what, or whether, to read. I must add two recommendations. Do not pass over Little Dorritt because of its rather odd, antique title. I once spent an entire winter month reading that long, rich book. I will never forget the experience. Finally, there is Dickens’s last novel, Our Mutual Friend. It is not well known, at least by me; in fact I had never even heard of it when I saw in the library in Key West a set of videos of a performance by the BBC. Having nothing else to do at the time, I took them out and watched them, expecting to be bored. Just the opposite, I was entranced. Try to find this version. I’m sure you will love it. And then read the book, too. Our Mutual Friend is special not only for Dickens’s typical skills, but also because it has a real love story.
GEORGE ELIOT
1819–1880
Adam Bede
Silas Marner
Middlemarch
Mary Anne Evans was born in 1819 on an estate in Warwickshire (that is, in the Midlands of England) for which her father was the agent. She enjoyed a curious, truncated education. She went away to school, but when her mother died she was called home again to care for her father. A rigidly pious man, he nevertheless permitted her to take lessons in languages and in history and, when she told him she could no longer believe in the tenets of his church, he finally accepted her unbelief if she would agree to attend services. All the time she was watching him with the great intensity of a young woman who would someday be a novelist. But there was no sign of this scrutiny as yet.
Her father died in 1849, when she was thirty, leaving her one hundred pounds a year. Was that enough to live on? she wondered. Perhaps, if she could find a suitable place to live, probably with a family in London, and if she could obtain a small income from translations, religious articles, and essays. She moved to London in 1851 and, after producing some turmoil in several households—her intensity had grown, not decreased—she was introduced to George Henry Lewes, the famous journalist. It was he who helped to create “George Eliot.”
Lewes was the victim of a strange Victorian injustice. He and his wife Agnes had had four sons; but in 1850 a fifth son was born, admittedly the son not of Lewes but of their friend, Thornton Leigh Hunt. Lewes, a generous man, accepted the newborn as his own child. But Agnes did not give up Hunt; she continued to have children by him and Lewes found that, having once condoned the adultery, he could not sue for divorce. In fact, he supported Agnes and her children by Hunt until the end of his life. In the meantime he had fallen in love with Mary Anne Evans, and she with him.
This remarkable pair could not live apart, but they felt they could not live together in England, so in 1854 they went off to Germany, where Lewes struggled to support the family that had abandoned him by his writing. Mary Anne Evans was saddened at being isolated from her own Warwickshire family, who naturally disapproved of her decision to live with Lewes. It was nostalgia, therefore, that first brought her to write fiction. She began to compose sketches of her old home and friends, and the friends of her father. Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) was the first published result of these labors; the second, incomparably better, was Adam Bede (1859). Neither her own name nor that of Lewes was, she felt, acceptable, so she adopted a pseudonym, George Eliot.
Soon George Eliot was famous. Her books, all of which owed much to the encouragement and sympathy of the loving, helpfully critical Lewes, were successes, and the income allowed the lovers, who had lived together from the beginning exactly as man and wife, to return to London in 1863. There they established a salon and George Eliot continued to write books: The Mill on the Floss, Romola, Daniel Deronda. Silas Marner was published in 1861; Middlemarch appeared in parts from 1871 to 1872.
Adam Bede is a simply wonderful book about a wonderfully simple and loving man. Oh, there are many other persons in the book, but Adam, the village carpenter who is wiser than anyone else, is at its center. He suffers in his loves but finally is rewarded by the love of a good woman, wise and caring like himself. You will smile when you turn over the last page and thank me for suggesting the book.
Silas Marner reminds us that there is no justice like poetic justice. In this carefully crafted short novel, all the characters get their just deserts. But the punishments, and especially the rewards, are not simple. Marner, the bitter miser who loses his gold but gains a golden-haired child in its place—it is a mystery he never really understands—is rewarded not so much for things he has done as for having the capacity, not yet realized at the beginning of the book, of loving someone with all his heart. He loves the child in that way, and so his life is blessed. Godfrey Cass, the real father of the child, is condemned to childlessness by his unwillingness to accept his child while he could still do so. He gets most of what he desires in life, for he is a genial, goodhearted man; but not everything, for he is also a moral coward. In fact, the book is, more than anything else, about such carefully drawn moral distinctions.
It is not the less fascinating for that, because it is also a marvelous fairy tale. But it is a fairy tale for grown-ups, not for children; surely it has been a mistake for many years to force Silas Marner on young readers, who could hardly understand it in any but a superficial way. If the book was forced on you, and if you hated it as a result, try reading it again. The novel, which is very short, has the power deeply to affect persons who have had large experience of real life.
Of the half-dozen or ten greatest English novels, on which list Middlemarch certainly belongs, it is probably the least read. It was said by Virginia Woolf to be “one of the few English novels written for grownup people.” That may account for its relative lack of popularity.