George Eliot's English Travels: Composite Characters and Coded Communication (review)

George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) contributes to stereotypes about scholarly research as dry and isolating when Mr Casaubon buries himself in the Vatican Library on his honeymoon. Eliot buried herself in Italian libraries while researching Romola (1863), but while collecting specimens with G. H. Lewes for Sea-side Studies (1858) and scouting out locales for The Mill on the Floss (1860), she found research delightful.

In George Eliot's English Travels: Composite Characters and Coded Communications, Kathleen McCormack follows in the footsteps of Eliot and Lewes metaphorically, by undertaking enjoyable research, and literally, by visiting all of the places they visited from Whitby to the Scilly Isles, Ilfracombe to Jersey. In seeking to reconstruct the circumstances under which Eliot wrote, she emphasizes the disjunction between the composition and settings of the fiction, observing of Scenes of Clerical Life (1857–58): "While living on the margins of Britain, George Eliot planned and wrote fiction set at its very center" (62). The book calls our attention to the importance of these various landscapes and experiences to Eliot's fiction.

In part, the book describes McCormack's pilgrimages to an array of towns, villages, spas, country homes, and cities. There is at the same time a more analytical aspect to the book, which confers the status of research on what would otherwise be mere literary tourism. It is equal parts travelogue, biography, and literary criticism, and is methodologically innovative in its attempt to combine these often separate forms of investigation.

McCormack argues that many of Eliot's characters were based on people she knew, some of whom she met during her travels. This approach revives Victorian attempts to interpret Eliot's fiction through a search for "originals." Though it may seem obsolete in the light of approaches to literary studies that have evolved since local investigators circulated "keys" to the characters in Scenes of Clerical Life, McCormack's quest is given a contemporary twist through her assertion that there is no one-to-one relationship between real-life originals and fictional characters. Rather, the characters are composites of multiple originals, reflecting "a kind of literary pointillism" (3).

The second, less prominent, part of the argument is that Eliot's fiction is marked by coded communications to her brother Isaac Evans and friends such as Barbara Bodichon and Georgiana Burne-Jones. Eliot certainly encoded her fiction with personal messages, and cracking the code can unlock otherwise inexplicable jokes and allusions. McCormack highlights the difficulty of excavating the sources of such cryptic writing. This part of her argument, while interesting, is only incidentally related to the book's main theme of travel.

The cases she makes about Eliot's use of locations are more convincing than those identifying the originals of characters. She argues that the Midlands of Eliot's childhood was not the idyllic pastoral portrayed by biographers. The land was scarred by coal pits and stone quarries, and the Nuneaton of Eliot's childhood experienced poverty, unemployment, and worker unrest. The fields Mary Anne and Isaac Evans roamed could be threatening, places of "forced exile as well as pleasurable play" (23). While the damaged landscape is evident in Eliot's fiction, for example in the stone quarry into which Dunstan Cass disappears in Silas Marner (1861), McCormack convincingly connects the specter of dark and frightening fields to Hetty's lonely journey in Adam Bede (1859).

The book is rich in local detail and often persuasive in its particular readings. It seems plausible that Eliot was influenced by the landscape and the cows on Jersey, where she began to conceive of Adam Bede, a novel she described to John Blackwood as "full of the breath of cows" (The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight [Yale UP, 1954–78], II 387). Also convincing is the identification of Cadhay Manor in Devonshire, with its rows of lime trees, as a model for Lowick Manor in Middlemarch and of the Thames at...