recounted the discovery in a school storeroom of a range of weaponry from an earlier incarnation of the institution: “a real gun but with the lock broken, a splendid standard, eight or ten swords, a cannon, cartouche boxes, drums, horns for the officers, etc. Yesterday afternoon we had a grand parade, the cannon was loaded and fired nearly twelve times, if not more even; I am the guard of the cannon.” He developed a keeninterest in taxidermy, which complemented his passion for shooting. “I have got two nice lizards for you, which however cannot be forwarded by the post,” he wrote to Lewes. “One has got a bullet shot in his side through which a
pistolbullet
from my
pistol
went.”
I feel sure that Eliot felt a degree of disorientation as she absorbed this material. She was in her midthirties, and before she met Lewes she had probably expected to remain childless. She and Lewes chose not to have children together; she told one friend they practiced birth control. Possibly they felt that while they had voluntarily chosen cohabitation in spite of social censure, it would be unjust to visit the stigma of illegitimacy upon a child. Equally likely, Eliot preferred to devote her energies to her work without the distractions and dangers of childbearing and child rearing. And Lewes may have felt, with eminent justification, that caring for his boys as well as supporting the children Agnes had borne with Hunt was paternal responsibility enough.
But now there were children in her life, at least in a manner of speaking. “We are all very good puppies and wag our tails very merrily,” Thornie told Lewes. Eliot liked dogs, but had not thought to adopt three human ones. Nor had she done so quite yet. The three boys she described assertively to her sister as part of her family—and for whom she became, along with Lewes, financially responsible—existed for a long time not as flesh-and-blood children, but as conceptual ones, elements in a new way of domestic life she was just beginning to build, just as she was building her new imaginative life as a novelist.
“My life has deepened unspeakably during the last year,” she wrote at the close of 1857, the year that
Scenes of Clerical Life
was serialized in
Blackwood’s Magazine.
“I feel a greater capacity formoral and intellectual enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties, than any I remember at any former period of my life.” Amid those duties and that depth came the unknown Lewes boys. Long before she heard heavy footsteps clattering up and down her staircase, or listened patiently to indefatigable accounts of various armaments and their uses, or caught the sweet but slightly rank scent of a young head of hair that has gone too many days without washing, she had imaginary children, boys she had begun to try to love before they knew she was in the world.
I JUGGLED a paper cup of coffee and a bag full of books as I made my way through Grand Central Station, then climbed aboard the commuter train to New Haven and looked for a window seat from which I could watch the gray streets of the South Bronx melt into the wooded suburbs of Connecticut. It had been years since I’d taken this train, but in my midtwenties I spent hundreds of hours on this line, journeying back and forth to see a man I loved.
It was a situation both complicated and simple. He had a young daughter whom I had yet to meet, and for months as I fell in love with him I heard about her and took her into my imagination. I would sit on this train, staring out of the window and trying to picture an obscure future in which I would take on a domestic role unlike any I had so far played, or had imagined myself playing: one in which I would commit myself not just to one person, but to two.
No longer a fact-checker, I was now a regular contributor to the magazine where I worked, producing often-acerbic profiles ofprominent cultural figures,
pistolbullet
from my
pistol
went.”
I feel sure that Eliot felt a degree of disorientation as she absorbed this material. She was in her midthirties, and before she met Lewes she had probably expected to remain childless. She and Lewes chose not to have children together; she told one friend they practiced birth control. Possibly they felt that while they had voluntarily chosen cohabitation in spite of social censure, it would be unjust to visit the stigma of illegitimacy upon a child. Equally likely, Eliot preferred to devote her energies to her work without the distractions and dangers of childbearing and child rearing. And Lewes may have felt, with eminent justification, that caring for his boys as well as supporting the children Agnes had borne with Hunt was paternal responsibility enough.
But now there were children in her life, at least in a manner of speaking. “We are all very good puppies and wag our tails very merrily,” Thornie told Lewes. Eliot liked dogs, but had not thought to adopt three human ones. Nor had she done so quite yet. The three boys she described assertively to her sister as part of her family—and for whom she became, along with Lewes, financially responsible—existed for a long time not as flesh-and-blood children, but as conceptual ones, elements in a new way of domestic life she was just beginning to build, just as she was building her new imaginative life as a novelist.
“My life has deepened unspeakably during the last year,” she wrote at the close of 1857, the year that
Scenes of Clerical Life
was serialized in
Blackwood’s Magazine.
“I feel a greater capacity formoral and intellectual enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties, than any I remember at any former period of my life.” Amid those duties and that depth came the unknown Lewes boys. Long before she heard heavy footsteps clattering up and down her staircase, or listened patiently to indefatigable accounts of various armaments and their uses, or caught the sweet but slightly rank scent of a young head of hair that has gone too many days without washing, she had imaginary children, boys she had begun to try to love before they knew she was in the world.
I JUGGLED a paper cup of coffee and a bag full of books as I made my way through Grand Central Station, then climbed aboard the commuter train to New Haven and looked for a window seat from which I could watch the gray streets of the South Bronx melt into the wooded suburbs of Connecticut. It had been years since I’d taken this train, but in my midtwenties I spent hundreds of hours on this line, journeying back and forth to see a man I loved.
It was a situation both complicated and simple. He had a young daughter whom I had yet to meet, and for months as I fell in love with him I heard about her and took her into my imagination. I would sit on this train, staring out of the window and trying to picture an obscure future in which I would take on a domestic role unlike any I had so far played, or had imagined myself playing: one in which I would commit myself not just to one person, but to two.
No longer a fact-checker, I was now a regular contributor to the magazine where I worked, producing often-acerbic profiles ofprominent cultural figures,
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