George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and the House of Blackwood 1856–60

Abstract

George Eliot’s biographers have viewed the triumvirate of George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and the publisher John Blackwood from the perspective of Eliot and Lewes, making use of their extensive letters and journals, and seeing only a successful partnership that made George Eliot’s name and generated substantial profits for William Blackwood & Sons. This article argues that rather than a triumvirate in which the two men focused on nurturing a great writer, in the early stage of their relationship Lewes and Eliot were of equal value to Blackwood as contributors to his magazine. To the publisher Lewes was a writer worth cultivating, such was his reputation and his extensive contacts in the world of letters. Simultaneously, Eliot and Blackwood forged their own relationship in which Eliot articulated the principles of her art and stood her ground against the publisher’s interventions. Material to Blackwood’s conversations with Lewes and Eliot in the 1850s were the demands of Blackwood’s Magazine, a long-established fiction-bearing monthly whose fortunes were soon to be challenged by aggressive new competitors. I argue that had John Blackwood opted to serialize Adam Bede in 1859 followed by The Mill on the Floss in 1860 the decline in the circulation and the reputation of this once pre-eminent miscellany might have been temporarily halted. Margaret Oliphant, who became a Blackwood author shortly before Lewes and Eliot and was later commissioned to write the history of the publishing house, proved a shrewd observer of the relationship of these three strong personalities.