Poetry at the Priory: George Eliot and "Benevolent" Imperialism

Abstract

Poetry at the Priory:George Eliot and "Benevolent" Imperialism Kathleen Mccormack (bio) As George Eliot was nearing the age of fifty, she conceived a daring ambition. She wanted to become one of the superior poets of her time and place, as beloved and respected as Browning and Tennyson.1 Having finished Felix Holt in 1866, for three years she wrote line after line of lyrics, sonnets, rhymed couplets, and blank verse and did not begin seriously on Middlemarch until 1869. With The Spanish Gypsy finally in print in 1868, she continued to publish poetry during the early years of the next decade, including poetry which, like many of the long poems by her contemporaries, engages topics directly or indirectly relevant to British imperialism.2 Several circumstances and events shared by George Eliot and George Henry Lewes during the 1870s helped nourish her poetic ambitions. After buying their country home near Tennyson's Aldworth in 1876, their friendship with the laureate flourished just as he too was trying out a new genre: five-act historical dramas written for the stage. Meanwhile, the Leweses continued to host their Sunday salons, occasions that attracted sometimes overlapping groups including Lewes's fellow proto-psychologists; educators involved in women's colleges at Oxford and Cambridge; George Eliot's often younger women friends; visual artists (Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Burton, Barbara Bodichon, Helen Allingham, George du Maurier); dozens of periodical editors and contributors; people usually identified as Pre-Raphaelites; singers sometimes invited to perform—and poets of lasting or temporary fame who turned out lyrics, sonnets, and ballads, as well as dramas and narratives many thousands of lines long. While music eventually became more frequent and guests with political similarities and differences still mingled, the poets helped keep Sunday at the Priory primarily a literary salon. Finally, the Leweses were at this time sustaining their friendship with the world's most prominent human symbol of the Victorian empire, the queen's viceroy in India, Lord Robert Lytton, who also wrote long poems, notably King Poppy. After several years of epistolary discussions with Lewes about Lytton's [End Page 115] writing and strategies for publication (1865–1876), Lewes switched to delivering epistolary advice regarding two of Lytton's worst challenges as viceroy and governor general of India: famine and the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Concerning these disasters, during the last two years of his life, Lewes came close to turning eminence grise to the viceroy who was representing the newly named Empress of India. Discussions of the kind and degree of imperialist ideology lurking in the late writing of Eliot have most often concerned the ending to Daniel Deronda, in which Daniel and Mirah depart for "the East" with unspecified intentions that may or may not include colonization of a land already occupied by non-Jewish groups.3 Although Eliot leaves the future of Daniel and Mirah undescribed, she delivers the couple to the only setting where they might fulfill Mordecai's hopes for founding a Jewish homeland that will thrive under Daniel's leadership. Meanwhile, during the years she was writing Deronda, she also created Deronda-esque characters in her poetry. Additional versions of such characters and their plots recur in long poems by friends and Priory visitors, as exemplified by William Allingham's Lawrence Bloomfield, Tennyson's Harold, and Lytton's own King Poppy. Nancy Henry's definitive study of George Eliot and the British Empire not only details the Deronda debate but also cautions that Eliot's biography supplies additional connections between Eliot and Britain's colonies (p. 3). Henry specifies heavy investments in particular in railway stocks in India and argues that Lewes's sons' emigration to Africa (unhappily ending in the deaths of both Thornie and Bertie) nevertheless demonstrates a willingness to draw on the colonies as resources for placing younger sons. Only Thornie's failure at the required civil service exam redirected him from India to Natal. Eliot's poetic ambitions and her late-1870s friendships create additional biographical connections between Eliot and India, many of them fortified by interactions at her Sunday salons. Writers of long poetry who might visit at the Priory during the 1870s included Browning and Tennyson...