THE DEPARTMENT OF MANUSCRIPTS'

GEORGE ELIOT HOLDINGS

DANIEL WALEY

* M R . L E W E S had set his mind on their going after our death to the British Museum',wrote George Ehot of the manuscripts of her works in a letter to William Blackwood.'In G. H. Lewes's lifetime the autograph manuscripts of her works had been inscribedand presented by her to Lewes, at least from Adam Bede, her first major novel (1859),onwards. On Lewes's death in 1878 these bound-up volumes containing the manuscriptssent to the printer came back into the possession of George Eliot, to pass after she diedin 1880 to Lewes's eldest son Charles. Only after the death of Charles Lewes in 1891 didthey reach the British Museum, no doubt on the initiative of Charles's widow Gertrude,who also presented to the Museum the autograph manuscript of Lewes's Aristotle.-^

These twenty-four volumes are incomparably the most important of the BritishLibrary's holdings of George Eliot material. It is fitting that the nation's library shouldhold the manuscripts of the works of this great novelist. The main question provokedby these volumes—how much can the student of literary composition learn from themabout how the novels were written?—is one which remains, to a surprising extent, stillto be answered, and the reply sketched out here is necessarily a brief and tentativeone. In an inscription at the front of the earliest of these manuscripts, Adam Bede^George Eliot wrote: 'A large portion of it was written twice, though often scarcely atall altered in the copying; but other parts only once . . .'•'. Certainly the Adam Bedemanuscript (Add. MSS. 34020-3) has all the appearance of a fair copy; revisions arefew, indeed often many pages on end pass with no revision at all. Such alterations asthere are tend to be economies in words or second thoughts about the spelling ofdialect. Where occasional passages are crossed out they are usually inked over in sucha fashion that the original text is illegible; the same is often true of deletions in theother volumes."^

Before reaching any conclusions about Adam Bede it is necessary to consider themanuscripts of the other novels. The Mill on the Floss, published in i860 (Add. MSS.34023-5), has some similarity to the manuscript of Adam Bede and calls for no specialcomment. Silas Marker (1861; Add. MS. 34026) has even fewer revisions than either,of these and a recent editor, Mrs. Leavis, has remarked that 'if she did not copy thismanuscript from an earlier one, it does seem as if she must have written from a fullycharged memory under something like inspiration'.^ There is rather more revision in

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the manuscript of Romola (Add. MSS. 34027-9; published in parts, 1862-3), as onemight expect in the case of that laboured production. Felix Holt (1866; Add. MSS.34030 2) is an intriguing and suggestive manuscript.^ Some pages are quite heavilyrc\iscd, whereas many others, written in a smaller and neater hand, are clearly fairL(>p\; there is as much first draft as there is fair copy. Naturally the 'fair-copy' pagescdiitain s(inK- rc\ision, but the appearance on the page of the two stages is sufficientlyLoniiMsiini: for one category to be distinguishable at a glance from the other. Occasionallyihc writing changes from the rough, flowing informality of the 'draft' hand to the neat'cnjis" h.Kui m mid-page. It is, of course, perfectly explicable that there should sometimesbe .1 change trttni neat copy to draft in mid-page, but it must be recorded that therearc sonic instances (tor example Add. MSS. 34031, fol. 89; 34032, fol. 259) ofa morepu/zling ch.muc in mid-page from draft to copy. One can only suggest that the author,cmb.irkmi: (tn .1 iliHiculi passage, broke off to continue in rough on a separate sheet ofp.iper. Such dr.il'is would then have been transferred as neat copy to the manuscript\\hich sur\i\cs. L'nfortunatcly none of the drafts later turned into fair copy havel i i cn i seK CS Mir\ i\ ct l .

Middli-niJiJi ( \d(.!. MSS. 34034 7; published in parts, 1871-2) is a special case,since II cnihdiiics iwii separate works, begun respectively in the summer of 1869 andl.iic m 1S70, which tlui nnt merge as one novel till the spring of 1871. The carefulprocess i)t plannini: .lnd revision has been analysed by Professor Jerome Beaty in astuds DT prelinimar) notebooks ('quarry'), the printer's manuscript, and the proofs."'Hc.iiN shows that much elaborate planning preceded the writing of the book and thati:reat chances and .uUlitmns were made during the actual writing of the chapters. 'Thecrcatesi pl.mninc stage w.is the writing itself.' He abolishes the idea of an 'inspired'\\riicr whn m.ulc no changes, showing that revision took place at each stage; 'shech.uii:ci.l .1 wiini. .1 phr.ise, .1 sentence or a passage. She added passages on the backsol" pjues She rewrote whole pages, groups of consecutive pages . . . She made changesm m.iticrs ot si\le .lnd changes in the matter itself. Moreover, the manuscript of DanielDi-rnnJj { \dd. MSS, 34039 42), the last novel (1874-6), accords with this picture,pjrticul.irK in the wj\ in which it reveals second thoughts about the order and division ofthe chapters It is .1 quite heavily revised manuscript, resembling Felix Holt in this respect.

Thus It IS clcir that the British Library's manuscripts of the novels, the printers'cop\. had norm.ill> been preceded by drafts now lost. The point needs emphasizingsince (ieorec Flint's publishers said of her text 'when she puts it upon paper it seemstn p.iss into re.ilit> not to be altered', and they described her manuscripts as 'free fromblur or erasure' ' Cross's biography also implies what Beaty calls, a little unkindly, a'Platonic tren/y\ 'She told me that, in all that she considered her best writing, therewas a "not herself which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personalitytn be niereh the instrument through which this spirit as it w ere, was acting.'^ In thededication to Lewes at the begmnmg of Adam Bede^^jihc.dy quoted above, GeorgeFHot noted among the parts of which no copying after the first draft had been necessary'the description of Dmah and a good deal of the sermon, the love-scene between her

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and Seth, "Hetty's World", most of the scene in the Two Bedchambers, the talkbetween Arthur and Adam, various parts in the second volume which I can recal [stc]less easily, and in the third, Hetty's journeys, her confession and the cottage scenes'.Yet it is strange that she should have singled out the meeting between Arthur Donnithorneand Adam Bede in the wood, a crucial episode in the novel, as one which went to theprinter in its first version, since there is clear evidence to the contrary. 'Throughoutthe book', she wrote in her journal some two weeks after it was finished, 'I have alteredlittle, and the only cases, I think, in which George suggested more than a verbalalteration, when I read the MS. aloud to him, were the first scene at the Farm andthe scene in the Wood between Arthur and Adam, both of which he recommendedme to "space out" a little, which I did.'^^ Since the autograph manuscript has norevisions compatible with spacing out this episode, one must assume that the versionof it there is indeed a fair copy and the author's memory to the contrary was at fault.Whether or not George Eliot preferred, like many writers, to believe in 'a frenzy ofinspiration' (as Beaty suggests), there can be no doubt that she tended to underemphasizethe amount of rewriting involved in the production of her novels. Certainly the autographmanuscripts of them require to be studied in conjunction with such preliminary notebooksas have survived, as well as with proofs and the final printed version. Behind themanuscripts there lay a very considerable history of planning and reconsideration andtheir textual revisions very often represent third thoughts rather than second thoughts. ^

The history of the George Eliot holdings in the Department of Manuscripts naturallyreflects the history of her reputation. In 1919 Virginia Woolf (whose father had publisheda study of George Eliot) ^ remarked that she 'became one of the butts for youth tolaugh at\ and some years later Lord David Cecil recorded that 'her reputation hassustained a more catastrophic slump than that of any of her contemporaries'.^'^ Thiswas the context of Messrs. Sotheby's sale on 27 June 1923 in which 126 lots wereoffered by order of the executors of the will of Gertrude Lewes, including (lots 573-97)'Autograph Manuscripts of "George Eliot'". Sadly, the total sum that the BritishMuseum felt able to place in bids for these lots was £55. Being outbid on lots 574('Notebook or "Quarry" for Middlemarch\ secured by Amy Lowell—poet and patronof writers—at £105) and 575 ('Notebook or "Quarry" for Romola\ bought by theOuvry family, descendants of Charles Lewes, at £52), the Museum had to remaincontent with a second, smaller Romola notebook (now Add. MS. 40768) purchased for;^i8.^^ The prices may reflect not merely the nadir of the novelist's standing (in theyear before her widower's death), but a lack of interest in literary manuscripts whichwere not finished autographs. Probably bidding would have been higher had theautograph manuscripts of the novels come into the auction room. But notebooks,journals, and sketches for unfinished novels were material too raw for the stomachs of1923, when the mass industry of literary and other learned research lay in the future.The twenty lots comprising manuscripts of George Eliot produced a total of ( 446. io.f.,Amy Lowell's purchase costing more than twice as much as any other item.

The Library's notebook for Romola is of considerable interest, and to study it is to feel

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the more melancholy at the absence of the other volumes from the nation's collections.The main contents are notes on reading, particularly on the Osservatore Fiorentino.

There are also lists of political affiliations (Tiagnoni' and 'Bigi') and of personal names.Fhc reading lists are of daunting length and it is irnpressivc that the Lewes-George

l'-liot hinisehold owned a high proportion of the volumes mentioned. One list (fols.0 2M c(Mitains forty titles marked 'at home', five which were borrowed from theLondon Library, two read at the British Museum, one (Rinuccini's Ricordi) read ati'lorence, and one (I'lavio Biondo's Italia Illustrata) 'not found'.

Some items in the t923 sale, as has been seen, returned to Lewes's descendants,trom whom a considerable collection of papers passed to Yale in 1941,^^ but someGeorge Eliot material remained with both the Evans and the Lewes families. Aninteresting purchase by the Library, made in 1977, was that ofa folding writing-caseor 'blotter' of George Eliot. The blotter, which can be dated to 1868^'' by a list writtenon It ot projected themes for poems, has a sort of anthology in the novelist's hand.George Eliot enjoyed noting passages which had pleased her and she often used theseas 'niottos' to set at the head of chapters. The blotter-anthology contains Greek, Latin,Italian, I'rench, German, as well as English. Though it bears testimony to the widthof George ?",liot's reading, it reveals her in a strongly seventeenth-century mood. Baconand Cieorge Herbert being the authors most frequently quoted.

Meanwhile in 1975 a small but significant acquisition of correspondence had beenmade from descendants of the writer's own family.'^ This includes letters from Mary\nn to her brother Isaac Evans and to his wife and daughter. The correspondencew ith Isaac above all the gap in it from 1856 to 1880 - poignantly illustrates the tragedyin the nii\elist's life. Sternly disapproving, in the Victorian tradition, the brother whom\\.\y\ \nn h.ui adored as a small child refused to communicate with her when hele.iniet! ih.it she was living with Lewes, to whom she was not married. The part of//;( Will nu the I-loss concerned with Maggie and Tom's childhood, which came todominate ihc ilcv clopnient (tf the stor\, is strongly autobiographical. Tom had moreih.in ihe usual share ot 'the justice that desires to hurt culprits as much as they deserveto he hurt' and would 'sanction no such character as yours: the world shall know that1 teel the difference between right and wrong'. In this respect at least his characterwas Isaac's.'" ()nl\ after her marriage to Cross was Mary Ann able to write to Isaacthat 'our long silence has never broken the affection for you which began when wewere little ones'. Seven months later Cross himself wrote to give the news of her death.

A \er\ considerable holding of George Eliot correspondence is the volume of herletters (1S72-S0) to Mrs. Elma Stuart, the lady whose tombstone in Highgate cemeterybears a strange description of her as one 'whom for 8j blessed years George Eliot calledh\ the sweet name of "Daughter"'. These affectionate letters were presented by Mrs.Stuart's son in 1910.-'^ A volume in the Dilke Papers-' contains thirty-five letters(iS6(, 79) to .Mrs. Mark Pattison, later Lady Dilke; they too bear witness to asenii-maternal relationship, George Eliot sometimes writing to Mrs. Pattison as her'Fighuolina'. A smaller collection of George Eliot correspondence, comprising five

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letters to Mrs. Richard Strachey (1876-80) was purchased in 1968.^^ One of these isa letter of congratulation on the birth of an infant who was to become the author ofEminent Victorians^ while another is the last letter that George Eliot wrote, foundunfinished by Cross in her writing portfolio. It referred to the death of Sir JamesColvile, Lady Strachey's brother-in-law, and said of the widow, with characteristicsympathy: 'One great comfort I believe she has—that of a sister's affection.'^^ Themost recent acquisition of correspondence (Add. MS. 60391DD) is that of five lettersfrom George Eliot to her Jewish protegee and friend, Phoebe Sarah Marks, sometimessaid to be the original of Mirah in Daniel Deronda. Two of these interesting letters(written in 1875-9) are totally, and two partially, unpublished.^'^

The most important of the Library's holdings of George Eliot correspondence,however, are certainly the Herbert Spencer-George Eliot letters. Spencer met GeorgeEliot in 1851 and was a friend for the remaining thirty years of her life. The trusteesof Herbert Spencer presented to the British Museum five letters to him from GeorgeEliot, four of which date from 1852, the fifth from 1859. The letters were depositedin 1935 on condition that for fifty years there was to be no access to them except withthe authorization of the Trustees of the British Museum. The terms now seem excessivelycautious (Spencer died in 1903, leaving no close relatives), but his trustees knew howsensitive the sociologist had been on the subject of his relationship with the novelist.The truth was that, contrary to the belief of many, it was he who had rejected herand not she him—and he felt it ungentlemanly to reveal this. In 1973 the envelope ofreserved George Eliot-Spencer letters (Reserved MS. 49) passed, with the rest of theBritish Museum's manuscript and book collections, to the newly formed British Library.In due course applications to see the letters were received from Professor RichardSchoenwald (who was working on a biography of Spencer) and Professor GordonHaight. In each of these cases permission was given. The letters were first publishedby Professor Schoenwald in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library (Spring 1976)then, with a much more accurate text, by Haight in volume viii (1978) of The GeorgeEliot Letters.^^ Since passages from them have been included in Margaret Wolfit'srecitations, they may be considered to have passed into the public domain.

The four letters of 1852 show George Eliot in the miserable depths of unrequitedlove. She begged for assurance that 'you will not forsake me'. Life under any otherconditions 'I find it impossible to contemplate' and 'if you become attached to someone else, then I must die'. The fifth letter (2 October 1859) is a much happier one, inwhich the novelist thanks Spencer for his letter praising the recently published AdamBede. Spencer's letter to which this was a reply was long believed to be lost. By goodfortune the British Library was able to secure it at a provincial book auction in 1976and it has thus joined the other side of the correspondence.^^ It is an admiring letterand one of great interest. Spencer says of Adam Bede that 'it comes up to my ideal ofa work of art' and he praises its 'moral effect'; he 'can scarcely imagine any one readingit without having their sympathies widened and their better resolves strengthened'.These generous and perceptive phrases should be remembered to the credit of the

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sociologist, whose spinsterish personality has been treated harshly by admirers of Georgel'.liot and by others. After all, the misunderstandings of 1852 and the misery of thesusceptible Miss Fvans were not his fault.

One should conclude with a word about the principal George Eliot manuscript itemselsewhere. Many are in the United States. The manuscript of Scenes of Clerical Life,which was retained by John Blackwood, is now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New\ork. The volume of '(Quarry' for Middlemarch bought by Amy Lowell in 1923 is at1 larsard. The proof-sheets of the novels —for the most part not very heavily corrected—were also sold b\ Hlackwood's and are now, far separated alas from the manuscripts,at the University of Texas. The Folger Library at Washington has an important notebook,but considerably the richest American collection of George Eliot material, comprisingimportant acquisitions made from members of both I>ewes's and Cross's family, is at Yale.

1 G. S. 1 laipht. The George F./ini Lcttcn. (hereafterLetters) (New I!a\cn and London. 1954 7H},\iil \ii , p 245 (Iciter ot II Jan. iSSo). ThetKc.i\inn u.is llljckwoml sending back the title-paiic ot } heophfiistus Siuh.

2 The manuscripts are not mentioned in GeorgeKliot's will, and the Catalogue nf Additions to theMjntdSiTspts in the British Muscttm iSSS /iVgj(London, iSg4), p. 164, is slightly misleading indcscrihinp them as 'Hequcathed h\ the author'.PresumabK a wish had heen expressed 10 (CharlesLewes, the residuar\ legatee. I must thank myeollc^igue .\!rs. ,Sall\ Brown for looking into the(ernis nt the \\ ill

1 \dd MS 34020. fol. 14 The same ink is used Inr the tTossing out as lor

the passages crossed mil, hence il is difficult torccM\cr the te\t e\en with the use ot intra-red orultravHilet light- lUii recentl) use of a videi>-spectral comparator has made it pr)ssible torecover some deleted passages.

^ Penguin Lnglish Librar> edition (1(^67}, p. 45.Ntrs. I,ca\is prints some of the more signiticanttextual changes in notes on pp. 249-53 ot thisedition.

h Some ot the revisions are published in the Pen-guin F.nglish Library edition (ed. P. Coveney,'972). pp '>. Q 77 (f^r tlic text see alsoPP ^ 70)

7 J, Beat), ' Widdlemarch' jriim Sotehook to Novel(Ittinois Studies in f.iinguage und Ltterature^\ol 47 L rbana. 1960) This work, suh-titled 'AStud) ot George Kliot's CTeative Method', shows

very clearly the inadequacy of the autographmanuscripts on their own as a basis for the studyof George Eliot's composition.

S William Blackwood, quoted in J. Beaty, op. cit.,pp. 106 7.

9 J. VV. Cross, George Eliot's Life (Edinburgh andLondon, 1885), vol. iii, pp. 424-5.

10 Add. MS. 34020, fol. t, partly printed in Cata-logue of .idditions . . . i88S-gj, pp. 164-5.

11 Letters., vol. ii, p. 504.12 In (iordon Haight's opinion 'what Beaty says

ahout Middlemarch is generally true of the othernovels. The Milt . . . is certainly a mixture oftirst dratt and rewriting' (letter from ProfessorI laight. quoted with his permission). See TheMill nn Ihe Floss, ed. G. S. Haight (Oxford,19S0), Introduction, particularly pp. xvi-xix andvx\ xxxi.

13 L. Stephen, George Eltot, J. Morley (edJ,English Men of Letters (London, 1902).

14 (Quoted from The Times Literary Supplement(20 Nov. 1919) and Early Victorian Novelists(1935) in G. S. Haight (ed.), A Century of GeorgeEliot Criticism (Boston, 1965), pp. 183, 205.

15 I am most grateful to Mr. N. Poole-Wilson ofMessrs. Quaritch for information concerningbids at the t923 sale.

t6 G. S. Haight, George Eliot (Oxford, 1968), p. vii.17 Add. MS. 59866. I hope to publish the text of the

blotter-anthology in a British Library booklet inthe present year (1980).

iS Add. MS. 58436. The hitherto unpublishedmaterial was published by T. A. J. Burnett in

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'Brother and Sister: New George Eliot Letters',British Library Journal, iii, i (1977), pp- 24-8 andthen in Letters, vols. viii and ix.

19 Book I, chapter 6; Book VII, chapter i.20 Add. MS. 37952 (containing also a lock of George

Eliot's hair sent to Mrs. Stuart in 1873). Tbereare omissions in the edition of Roland Stuart,Letters from George Eliot to Elma Stuart(London, 1909). The full text is publisbed inLetters.

21 Add. MS. 43907, fols. 26-80.22 Add. MS. 54338. Published by Joan Bennett in

The Times Literary Supplement (16 May 1968)and subsequently in Letters, vol. ix.

23 Two letters from George Eliot to Lady Colviie

of 22 and 23 Jan. 1877 are among the materialpurchased by the British Library from theStrachey Trust in 1978 (now Add. MS. 60633).

24 The text, when known, bad been preserved inEvelyn Sharp, Hertha Ayrton (London, 1926)and then republished by Haigbt in the Letters.

25 See Letters, vol. viii, pp. vii-viii and vol. ix,p. 330 (where compression has led to theomission of the conditions governing the'reservation' of the letters till 1985; the accountgiven in vol. viii, pp. vii-viii, is to be preferred).Professor Haight's strictures concerning some ofthe misreadings in the text of the Bulletin of theNew York Public Library version are justified.

26 Add. MS. 59789.

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