Rosemary Ashton

Coleridge has always been our representative Romantic literary critic, and Matthew Arnold has long been thought of as the type of the Victorian critic. There is, perhaps, no need to topple Arnold from his eminence, but it is high time that a close competitor was brought out from the shadows where he now lurks, uncollected and unread. For Richard Holt Hutton was a prodigious and impressive critic. And unlike Arnold he made literary (and theological) criticism his profession. Hutton was the author of about seven thousand reviews and essays. He edited the Spectator from 1861 until his death in 1897. Like Jeffrey, first editor of the great Edinburgh Review in the early part of the century, he read for the Bar, but unlike Jeffrey he never practised law, choosing to devote all his time and attention to literary journalism. In more ways than this, too, he was typical of the progressive movement, during the 19th century, away from the uniformity of Oxford or Cambridge-educated professional men who undertook reviewing as a gentlemanly pastime. As a Unitarian in his youth, he was debarred from taking a degree at either of the universities, and became one of the first distinguished generation of Victorian intellectuals to be educated at University College London, which was founded on the German system guaranteeing freedom of opportunity and learning to dissenters from the established Church. He even spent some time studying at the University of Bonn, one of the institutions which served as a model for University College.

Was it sisterly or unsisterly of George Eliot to celebrate in Middlemarch Dorothea’s contribution to human progress by means of ‘unhistoric acts’ carried out under limiting social conditions which ensured that, unlike St Theresa, she remained ‘foundress of nothing’? Certainly, Dorothea’s sphere of action is represented as being – true to life for her class and time – confined to the domestic. She passes from eligible spinster to helpmeet, wife and mother, and on the whole George Eliot describes that passage as one to fulfilment. Contemporary women readers, lacking the vote and still, despite decades of agitation by reformers, without rights over their own property – the Married Women’s Property Act was not passed until 1883 – were perhaps expected to take comfort, even pride, in the conclusion that ‘the effect of [Dorothea’s] being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’’

It was fortunate for George Eliot, or Marian Evans as she was in 1852, that the philosopher Herbert Spencer rejected her brave and desperate pleas for him to marry her. If he had accepted, she might well have found herself in something akin to Sarah Austin’s position as emotional and financial prop to a miserable, selfish hypochondriac. As it was, her relationship with the very different G.H. Lewes, fostered by Spencer himself in his eagerness to retreat, blossomed within the year, and by 1854 Marian was ‘Mrs Lewes’ (and soon to be ‘George Eliot’, too). Being Mrs Austin meant for Sarah Taylor a life of toil and sacrifice, though it is probable that she was at least less unhappy than her tortured husband. The story of their marriage is ghastly, comic, and dismaying. It has the interest not only of the particular case but also of the illustrative type: the Austin marriage was a classic mismatch which, appropriately enough, reminds us of fictional pairings, especially that of Dorothea and Casaubon in Middlemarch. Moreover, in its elements of husbandly pride and disappointment constantly self-excused and of wifely activity, compensating yet self-effacing, it was one of many Victorian marriages (one thinks of the Carlyles) which showed the strains of the age, with its changing expectations of and for women in questions of education, employment and opinion.

Was George Eliot reticent about sex? During the period in which her reputation was at its lowest, between 1890 and 1940, one element in the general argument that her novels were philosophical treatises rather than art was her supposed coyness in sexual matters. ‘Pallas with prejudices and a corset,’ cried W.E. Henley in 1890, ‘George Sand plus Science and minus Sex.’ Since Leavis rehabilitated her in The Great Tradition in 1948, critics have laboured to answer the criticism. Strangely, though, the subject has brought mainly defences of her reticence, such as Barbara Hardy’s eloquent discussion of the ‘hints and implications’ of George Eliot’s handling of sexual relationships in The Appropriate Form (1964), the appropriate chapter of which is now reprinted in Particularities, or, in the George Eliot Centenary Tribute, Juliet McMaster’s vigorous attempt ‘to bring back the voluptuous George Eliot’ by arguing that ‘the physical and sexual lives of her characters are very fully expressed, albeit often by indirection.’ Leavis himself came much nearer to claiming for George Eliot a daring lack of reticence. Of Felix Holt he wrote: ‘It is remarkable – and it is characteristic of George Eliot’s mature art – that the treatment of Mrs Transome’s early lapse should have in it nothing of the Victorian moralist. In the world of this art the atmosphere of the taboo is unknown; there is none of the excited hush, the skirting round, the thrill of shocked reprobation, or any of the forms of sentimentality typical of Victorian fiction when such themes are handled.’ We may find Leavis’s circumlocution itself rather coy (‘Mrs Transome’s early lapse’), but I think it surprising that critics have not generally taken his lead and tackled the question of sexuality in the novels head-on.

In 1827, Thomas Carlyle, already the translator of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, was invited by Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, to ‘Germanise the public’. Jeffrey issued the invitation cautiously, even negatively, asking Carlyle to temper his enthusiasm for ‘your German divinities’ – an enthusiasm he could scarcely understand, let alone share. Indeed, two years earlier Jeffrey had reviewed Carlyle’s Meister translation, censoring the work as ‘eminently absurd, puerile, incongruous, vulgar and affected’. Carlyle fulfilled the task set him by his amused, semi-reluctant editor with the influential essay ‘The State of German Literature’. As a result of this and other articles on German literature, Carlyle became the most celebrated Germanist of his age. It was Carlyle, as G.H. Lewes acknowledged in his Life of Goethe (1855), ‘who first taught England to appreciate Goethe’.