Victorian Sexual Politics and the Unsettling Case of George Eliot's Response to Walt Whitman

Abstract

George Eliot and Walt Whitman, two of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century, are rarely discussed in relation to one another. They did not correspond, nor did either writer ever cross the Atlantic. There may have been several degrees of separation between Eliot and Whitman personally, but even from a distance, the two writers influ- enced each other's careers. There has been some misconception that Eliot disdained and discounted Whitman. This essay seeks to refute that assumption by examining the context in which Eliot appeared to reject him. Perhaps more significantly, this essay breaks new critical ground by attributing a second review of Whitman's 1855 Leaves of Grass to George Eliot.This study examines statements Eliot and Whitman made about one another, and considers the interrelationships of the people they knew in order to demonstrate that Eliot and her domestic partner George Henry Lewes played significant roles in Whitman's British reception. This new information about their mutual friendships and avenues of promotion supplements several foundational studies of Whitman's British or European reception undertaken by Clara Barrus, Harold Blodgett, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, M. Wynn Thomas, Joann P. Krieg, Betsy Erkkila, and Michael Robertson.1 These scholars have traced Whitman's network of supporters across the Atlantic without noticing that Eliot and Lewes were members of the relatively small circle of in- fluential British intellectuals that embraced and promoted Whitman in Britain early in his career. Finally, this essay posits several reasons why, after initially endorsing Whitman in 1856, Eliot appeared to withdraw her support in 1876. We see in her changing response to Whitman an example of how Eliot responded to the pressures of nineteenth-century sexual politics and her own celebrity status by self-censoring and cod- ing sexuality, particularly same-sex desire, in her fiction, which extends scholarship by Nancy Henry, Kathleen McCormack, Laura Callanan, and Dennis S. Gouws, among others.2The Victorian writer who called herself George Eliot and her part- ner George Henry Lewes occupied positions of prominence in Britain's literary world at the time Whitman was publishing his various editions of Leaves of Grass in the United States. Eliot and Lewes interacted regu- larly with many of the Victorian era's best-known authors, critics, and publishers.3 Before she became a famous novelist with the pen name George Eliot-the name on her tombstone, on all her biographies, and by which she still is known-she was Marian Evans, the enterprising journalist. By 1851, she was living independently in London, writing articles and reviews for several periodicals and serving as the managing editor of one of Britain's leading journals, the Westminster Review.4 Her work brought her into contact with prominent intellectuals including George Henry Lewes, a frequent contributor to the Review. Lewes was well established in literary London as one of the most versatile of writers and editors. He wrote novels, biographies, philosophy, theater and book reviews, scientific articles, and he abridged plays. In 1850, Lewes co-founded with Thornton Hunt the Leader weekly newspaper; in 1860, Lewes became consulting editor of the Cornhill, while Hunt assumed leadership of the Spectator. By 1865, Lewes had become the inaugural editor of the Fortnightly Review. He also acted as adviser for George Smith's Pall Mall Gazette from 1865-68 while he was editing the Fortnightly Review (Baker and Ross 421). These literary associations demonstrate that Lewes and Eliot, who were a couple by 1852 and living together by 1854, were closely connected with the writers and editors of the Victorian British periodicals that favorably reviewed Walt Whit- man's poetry for more than twenty years, specifically the Westminster Review, the Spectator, the Cornhill, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Leader, and the Fortnightly Review.The copies of Whitman's original Leaves of Grass that were cir- culated in London in the early spring of 1856-remaindered copies of the original 1855 edition-had pasted into them several American notices of the book. …