My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

Author:Rebecca Mead [Mead, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-98478-4
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2014-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

CONSIDERABLE scholarly energy has been expended over the decades upon the question of whether the Rector of Lincoln and his wife inspired the characters of Edward Casaubon and Dorothea Brooke, about whom Eliot began writing a few months after this visit. Certainly the identification with the Pattisons was made almost immediately upon the novel’s publication: in 1879 the novelist Margaret Oliphant described Pattison as “a curious wizened little man” who was “supposed to be the Casaubon of ‘Middlemarch.’ ” The identification was repeated enough to become common currency. In 1895 Outlook magazine ran a brief article noting that Mrs. Pattison, who was widowed in 1884, had been remarried a year later, to Sir Charles Wentworth, Lord Dilke, a radical politician who had once been an art student. The writer observed that Mrs. Pattison had gone from Casaubon to Ladislaw, wryly noting that “as the novel was written, of course, long before the actual occurrence [of the second marriage], it has been cited as a remarkable example of George Eliot’s insight into the characters of her friends.”

Mrs. Pattison had grown up in Oxford, where her father was a banker. She showed early promise as an artist, and John Ruskin, a family acquaintance, advised her to go to London to study at the National Art Training School in South Kensington, which was eventually to become the Royal College of Art. There she was a brilliant student, impish and vivacious. She had advanced social views, but was also fanatically religious. Lord Dilke, her future second husband, was among her fellow students, and in a memoir of her that he wrote after her death he said she had presented a striking figure. “Miss Strong used to horrify her ordinary Church friends by her studies in dissection and anatomy and by her fearless advocacy of the necessity of drawing from the nude: but at the same time, still more greatly to shock them by her habit of doing penance for the smallest fault, imaginary or real, by lying for hours on the bare floor or on the stones, with her arms in the attitude of the cross,” Dilke wrote.

After marrying Pattison, Francis, as she was always known, became a pupil to her much older scholar-husband. She learned Latin, German, and French sufficient to read the important works in the literatures of those languages. (Pattison loved reading classical Latin authors, and could himself write in a beautiful fluent Latin.) “Of all the periods of her life when, to judge by results, she worked with the most Benedictine application, that of the first years of her marriage with Mark Pattison must be pronounced supreme,” Dilke wrote. She maintained her own interests—and her own income—by writing for the Saturday Review and other periodicals, and eventually she became an accomplished art historian. Dilke points out that she signed herself “E.F.S. Pattison,” “the S … being introduced by her to mark her wish for some recognition of the independent existence of women.” But, he added, “there was no personal resistance to the influence over her of her husband.

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