Mr. Chapman's Ladies

GEORGE ELIOT & JOHN CHAPMAN: WITH CHAPMAN'S DIARIES--Gordon S. Haiqht --Yale ($2.75).

Mary Ann (later Marian) Evans (later George Eliot) was one of the homeliest women who ever wrote a first-rate English novel. She was also one of the most affectionate. For many years she looked for a man who would prefer character to beauty and in Publisher John Chapman she thought she had found him. This episode, overlooked by John W. Cross in his official Life of George Eliot, was resuscitated last fortnight to the delight of literary gossips when Chapman's diaries were published with a lively, 119-page introduction by Gordon S. Haight.

In 1843, age 22, John Chapman bought a publishing house, and later bought the great, liberal Westminster Review. Chapman, says Author Haight, was vain, humble, shrewd, generous, a quack and a reformer. "Though he refused to publish a novel containing an objectionable love scene, he maintained in the heart of mid-Victorian London a household no novelist would then have dared to describe."

Throughout a long life of deliberate sensuality, his diaries reveal a continual preoccupation with moral uplift. Constantly obtaining money on dubious pretenses, he published important books that nobody else would touch, did much to quicken British philosophic thought.

To assist him in editing the Review, Chapman shrewdly imported Marian Evans from the country, installed her in his home as a boarder. She was not the first. Marian soon discovered that Chapman made a practice of renting room's to women who could distract him mentally while their board contributed to the upkeep of his publishing business. Marian had been preceded by the authoress of a learned novel on ancient Egypt who was known to her enemies as Miss Sennacherib. Co-boarding with Miss Sennacherib was Miss Tilley, who acted as the mistress of Chapman and the governess of his children. There was also Mrs. Chapman.

Whether or not Marian was a platonic boarder, Author Haight does not say. In any case, she remained for two years of weekly soirees, got to know nearly everybody worth knowing among Victorian advanced thinkers. Among them were Herbert Spencer, Carlyle, Harriet Martineau, Francis Newman.

In this worldly environment, young Marian Evans had long feared that she might become "earthly, sensual and devilish." She wrote little but translations, but even these were a moral hazard: she had lost her faith while translating Strauss's Life of Jesus. She was about to lose something else. Says Author Haight: "The sensual side seems to have developed to a marked degree while she was translating The Essence of Christianity." From this work Marian learned Philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach's notions about free love. She had met "the ugliest man in London," George Lewes, the biographer of Goethe, who at first sight impressed her as a "miniature Mirabeau." With inflexible tranquillity Marian Evans decided to become Mrs. George Lewes (as she afterwards called herself), despite the fact that Mr. Lewes already had a wife and children. For some 24 years the homely woman lived with the ugly man in an exalted state of semi-ostracism, though literary friends continued to call.

John Chapman was one of them. He adapted himself to the change with the philosophic abandon of a publisher who sees himself on the verge of losing a valuable author. Besides, Chapman had another "boarder." This time it was Florence Nightingale's cousin, Barbara Leigh Smith --one of the "tabooed" Smiths, so called because the parents, being progressive thinkers, were in the habit of having children out of wedlock.

Soon George Eliot began to publish her novels serially--not in the Westminster Review. Spurred on by enlightened self-interest, Chapman soon snooped so successfully that he discovered who George Eliot was. Wrote Lewes to Chapman: ". . . [Mrs. Lewes] authorizes me to state, as distinctly as language can do so, that she is not the author of Adam Bede." Chapman's only reply seems to have been to ask if he might republish some of George Eliot's old articles in the Westminster Review. Lewes said No, wrote in his diary: "Squashed that idea."

Meanwhile, Chapman had decided to become a doctor. In London he treated diabetes, paralysis, epilepsy, cholera with hot & cold water bags. Later he moved to Paris, continued to edit the Westminster Review. In 1894 he died, is buried near George Eliot. He had been molding advanced British opinion for 43 years.

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