One of the Highlights on our Chelsea London walk is when we turn a corner and begin walking along Cheyne Walk. This is a street of grand houses and it can number amongst its famous former residents a glittering cast that ranges from Mick Jagger to Ian Fleming. Several blue plaques adorn the houses to testify to the tenancy in them of people such as the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
However, the first blue plaque that we encounter is on the facade of number 4 Cheyne Walk which details the fact that “George Eliot died here.”
The life of George Eliot is both fascinating and tragic in equal measure.
Her real name was Mary Anne (Mary Ann, Marian) Evans and she was born 22 November 1819 at South Farm Arbury, Warwickshire.
In 1850 she moved to London intending to become a writer and calling herself Marian Evans.
From 1851 -1856 she was the editor of John Chapman’s radical Westminster Review.
In 1851 she met the critic and philosopher George Henry Lewes.
Then in 1852 she first met Charles Dickens and found him “disappointing – no benevolence in the face and I think little in the heart.”
In 1854 She and Lewes started living together as man and wife (despite the fact that Lewes was already married). Their relationship scandalized polite society.
In 1856 Began writing The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton.
Lewes, wishing to disguise the fact that the author was a woman and also a social pariah approached the publisher John Blackwood on behalf of his ‘clerical friend’ – George Eliot.
In 1858/59 this work published as Scenes of Clerical Life.
It won critical acclaim and the guessing game concerning this new author – George Eliot’s - real identity began.
Dickens was fulsome n his praise but was not fooled by the nom de plume and quickly deduced that George Eliot was a woman: “if the Scenes had not been written by a woman then should I begin to believe that I am a woman myself” he wrote.
Dickens having learnt the truth invited her to contribute to his magazine All the year Round and was frustrated by her repeated refusals.
In a way Dickens got his revenge for, following Dickens death in 1870, it became a constant source of irritation to George Eliot that John Forster’s Life of Dickens outsold what is now her best known work Middlemarch published between 1871 and 1872.
In 1860 she published The Mill on the Floss followed Silas Mariner in 1861.
Her last book Daniel Deronda was published in 1876
In 1878 George Lewes died.
By 1880 Eliot had become involved with John Cross, twenty years her junior, and they were married in May 1880.
On their return from honeymoon in Venice (where Cross either attempted to jump off or else fell off their hotel balcony) they moved in to the house at 4 Cheyne Walk, that we include in our Chelsea London walk, on 3rd December 1880.
But she became ill and died at 10pm on 22nd December 1880 leaving Cross to write “I am left alone in this new house we meant to be so happy in.”
She was refused burial in Westminster Abbey on the grounds of her denial of Christianity and her relationship with Lewes.
She was buried instead in Highgate Cemetery next to George Henry Lewes.
In 1980, on the centenary of her death, a memorial stone was established for her in the Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey.
This is just a snippet from the life of George Eliot. Why not join us on one of our Chelsea London walks and learn more about this fascinating part of London.
Tags: Charles Dickens, Chelsea London walk, Cheyne Walk, Deronda, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes., London walks, Mary Anne Evans, Mill on the Floss, Scenes of Clerical Life, Silas Mariner
