George Eliot in Germany, 1854–55

'Cherished Memories'

Gerlinde Roder-Bolton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351934008
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

From 1854 to 1855, George Eliot spent eight months in Germany, a period that marked the start of her life with George Lewes. Though Eliot documented this journey more extensively than any other, it has remained an under-researched part of Eliot's biography. In her meticulously documented and engaging book, Gerlinde Röder-Bolton draws on Eliot's own writings, as well as on extensive original research in German archives and libraries, to provide the most thorough account yet published of the couple's visit. Rich in historical, social, and cultural detail, George Eliot in Germany, 1854-55 not only records the couple's travels but supplies a context for their encounters with people and places. In the process, Röder-Bolton shows how the crossing of geographical boundaries may be read as symbolic of Eliot's transition from single woman to social outcast and from translator and critic to writer of fiction.

Chapter 1

First Impressions

‘I have only time to say good bye and God bless you. Poste Restante, Weimar for the next six weeks, and afterwards Berlin.’ With this short note, written in London the day before her departure, Marian Evans took leave of her two devoted friends, the sisters Cara Bray and Sara Hennell, and set off on a journey which (as she knew) would change the course of her life forever.¹ The next day, 20 July 1854, she and George Henry Lewes went on board the steamer Ravensbourne at St Katharine’s Wharf in London and crossed the Channel.² They had decided to begin their life together not in England, but in Germany. Lewes, at the time, was working on a biography of the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and needed to visit Frankfurt, Weimar and Berlin for further research. He had been to Germany and Austria before and was familiar with the language.³ Marian also knew German. During 1844–46, she had translated Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, and her translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums had just been published. From the 1820s until the middle of the nineteenth century, there was sustained interest, among educated people in Britain, in German literature and thought. Marian had read Goethe as well as works by Schiller and other German writers.⁴

Her diary of this journey is, in effect, the diary of a honeymoon, and her entries reflect the happiness and growing security in her relationship with Lewes. They are more extensive than in later years and give unusual glimpses of her feelings. But these glimpses are very subtle, for even in the privacy of her diary, which was never meant for the eyes of the public, she was guarded. We need only look at the entry for the first day. No sooner had she and Lewes eloped together than they were discovered, yet all she notes down is: ‘Mr R. Noel happened to be a fellow-passenger’ on the Ravensbourne.⁵ But this could hardly have been a welcome encounter. Robert Ralph Noel was an old acquaintance, his brother Edward a close friend of Cara Bray’s. Ten days earlier, Marian had written to Sara, forcefully rejecting Noel’s criticism of her translation of Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums and accusing him even of never having read any Feuerbach at all.⁶ He and his wife, the German Baroness Louise de Henniger, frequently travelled this route between London and their estate in Teschen, Bohemia.⁷ With his liberal continental views, he might have been surprised, but would not have been shocked, at seeing them together. Yet their secret was out much earlier than they could have wished.

Otherwise, the Channel crossing was perfect. Between two and three in the morning they were sailing up the Scheldt and into a most beautiful sunrise: a richly symbolic image to re-assure Marian of the likely success of the journey. They went on to spend a few leisurely days sightseeing in Antwerp, Brussels and Liège, inspecting the main features of the towns and visiting churches and art galleries. Marian’s understanding of painting and sculpture at the beginning of the journey was limited to a subjective response to the situations and characters depicted, but a growing knowledge and sophistication in discussing works of art becomes evident as the journey progresses.

The route they took followed the conventional tourist itinerary as dictated by the conditions of travel at the time: by boat to Antwerp, and then from Antwerp by train. Belgium was the first of the Continental countries to recognize the importance of rail travel and, from 1835 onwards, had swiftly established a centrally-planned network of railroads. But, in Germany and Austria, the development of rail travel was much slower, more haphazard, and subject to regional politics. The usual route into Germany by rail was via Liège, Vervier and Aachen to Cologne. The two travellers had no choice but to join the ‘Rhenish circuit’, caricatured by Thackeray in The Kickleburys on the Rhine. Like the Kickleburys they, too, had done ‘the Rubens’s’ at Antwerp and were now proceeding to Cologne.⁸ It was not surprising, therefore, that they would meet yet another acquaintance on this route: on the train from Liège to Cologne, Dr Brabant joined them in their carriage. Marian had first met him at the Brays in Coventry in 1842.⁹ He was a physician, but he was also interested in radical theology and was acquainted with Friedrich Strauss. His daughter Rufa had started a translation of Das Leben Jesu and, when she had to abandon the task for domestic reasons, Marian was asked to take over the translation. It had been Marian’s first opportunity to prove herself intellectually.

Cologne looked very dismal to her as they drove in the horse-drawn omnibus to the Hotel de Hollande. There is a significant change in tone in the diary from the exuberance of the previous entries. The happy spell was broken. The meeting with Brabant, now in his seventies, seems to have placed an obligation on the younger couple, and his almost continuous company and incessant talk during their brief stay in Cologne could not have been easy. It was also a forceful reminder to Marian that the social difficulties, caused by the path she had chosen, were only just beginning. There were also more immediate problems. She had had an image of Germany in her mind since she had started to learn the language at the age of twenty. As was customary then, she had acquired German by reading the best of recent literature, to which she later added German philosophy, the New Criticism and science. Yet these studies did little to prepare her for the reality of life in that country. Her preconceptions were immediately challenged by this dreary-looking foreign place. She expected to find comfort and the stimulation of art and culture, but Cologne had little to offer the casual traveller passing through. Many of these travellers came from England on their way to the Rhine, to the many spas or to the casinos at Bad Homburg and Baden-Baden. If Thackeray’s Kickleburys are anything to go by, then the route was to most of them ‘as familiar … as Greenwich’. They hardly noticed their surroundings and were more interested in the ‘Strangers Book’ at their hotel to see who else was staying there. As one of the characters in The Kickleburys on the Rhine says: ‘We carry our nation everywhere with us; and are in our island, wherever we go’.¹⁰ Marian was far more open to what was for her a new country. Yet her reactions on this first journey through Germany frequently show that she, too, shared these travellers’ conviction of having ventured out from the centre of the civilized world to its periphery: to the strange, if not primitive European East.

1. George Henry Lewes, photogravure by Elliott & Fry, National Portrait Gallery

Brabant took the couple later that day to see Cologne’s cathedral. Like many other tourists, Marian responds without awareness of the historical context:

We went with Dr. B. to see the Cathedral. When I entered it the sight of the ugly wall which shuts out the choir — the proper vista of the nave, shocked me as one would be shocked by an ugly wooden arm attached to an exquisite marble torso. In the evening we had a ramble through the town, which looked more endurable by the soft evening light but its grand characteristics are the multitude of churches and the multitude of smells.¹¹

Germany, the cradle of Protestantism, was far from homogeneously Protestant, and a vibrant Catholic life was very evident in Cologne. To Marian, who had defined herself as someone who had rejected Protestant dogma, the city’s strongly religious atmosphere must have been repellent. Although in recent years the city’s streets had been widened and paved, while new houses had been built and old ones repaired, Cologne had not yet lost that dirty and gloomy appearance for which it was notorious. What the uninformed tourist’s eye did not recover was the history and significance of the city and its cathedral. Murray’s Handbook for Belgium and the Rhine, for instance, prepares the traveller by giving a concise description of Cologne’s importance as the Roman capital of Germania Inferior, before tracing the city’s turbulent history up to the present day.¹² Travelling without such a guidebook invariably led Marian to misunderstandings and misinterpretations.

The Romans occupied the left bank of the Rhine for about 500 years from around 58BC onwards. With the Romans came Christianity to Cologne and, by the twelfth century, some two hundred sacred buildings were in existence. The city had become a place of pilgrimage. In 1164, the relics of the Three Magi were brought from Milan to Cologne, and a great sepulchral cathedral was to be built to house them. Building started in 1248, and the cathedral was intended to match the great gothic cathedrals of France. But soon political conflict interfered with this huge enterprise and slowed down building work. In 1322 the wall, mentioned by Marian, was erected as a temporary measure to prevent a possible collapse of the structure. Building continued slowly until 1560 and then ceased completely.¹³ From then onwards, the uncompleted structure, with its building crane still in place, pointing a useless arm towards the sky, became the city’s identifying image. But while the cathedral remained unfinished, Cologne itself prospered in commerce and trade ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• 1 First Impressions
• 2 Frankfurt am Main — Goethe’s Birthplace
• 3 Weimar
• 4 Franz Liszt and his Circle
• 5 Goethe’s Weimar
• 6 Marian’s Weimar
• 7 Berlin
• 8 The Last Literary Salon
• 9 A Circle of Friends
• 10 The Art and Artists of Berlin
• Select Bibliography
• Index