In the first number of A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens reflected on the ‘wonderful fact’ that:

His reflections on atomised individuals draw us into a dark vortex of nightmarish unknowability whose confirmation is the unbreakable silence of the grave. Dickens is in part setting up the conditions of suspicion and surveillance that swirl around the passengers on the Dover coach in the novel’s opening chapter, and that lie at the heart of revolutionary France with its spies and denunciations. John Rignall suggests that the urgency of that first-person voice exceeds the requirements of the novel (Rignall, p. 577), but it and the present tense of the passage astutely speak to a contemporary fascination with secrets in 1859, secrets that might be endemic to the human condition, as Dickens suggests, but that also speak especially to the condition of city-living in the mid-late 1850s. Dickens is arguing here that identity and secrecy are coterminous. The year 1859 was a fertile ground for this suggestion.

In terms of population, the 1850s was the fastest-growing decade to date in London, and in 1859 total inhabitants were likely to have topped three million for the first time.² This influx of new people meant that time-honoured guarantors of identity, such as family knowledge and shared histories, customs and reference points, could not be relied upon, and this created the possibility for ignorance and secrets to flourish. At this time, too, changes were made to company law, including the introduction in 1856 of the Joint Stock Companies Act, which was intended to open up commercial opportunities afresh following a prolonged period of concern after the infamous financial crashes associated with speculations in banks, railways, and the colonial endeavours of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This commercial move, undertaken in a period of great population growth, meant that, as Sara Malton puts it, ‘uncertainty and flux were no longer obscure threats of a burgeoning financial revolution [or a historical curiosity], but, for many, a quotidian reality in the arenas of human and economic transactions alike’.³ In terms of commerce, this ignorance meant that the possibility of fraud was very real as regulatory practices struggled to keep up with the growing business of the city, and individuals lost their bearings in new economic, financial, and social arenas.

In January, David Morier Evans published Facts, Failures, and Frauds: Revelations Financial, Mercantile, Criminal, which was a 727-page work detailing primarily the bank and railway frauds of the previous decades. Evans’s motivations were partly those of the historian, but this was also an admonitory text, warning both potential fraudsters and their victims of the prevalence of fraud in contemporary society. These crimes do not ‘represent the simple perverseness of individual natures’, he argues, ‘but are so many indices of a depreciated, and apparently bad, moral atmosphere that has of late pervaded the whole of the commercial world’. He goes on, ‘the ruling passion is the grand desire to make money expeditiously, for the purpose of gratifying luxurious propensities, or of indulging in an imposing ostentation … fraud, forgery, and misappropriation are called into existence, with all their frightful and heavy legal responsibilities’.⁴ Fraud and forgery are a central part of the texture of this burgeoning capitalist society, and forgery was, ‘part of an ongoing response to the movement from an economy based on fixed wealth, on the ownership of land, to one centered on intangible capital wealth and an expanding financial network of banking, credit, and forms of exchange that forgers could readily exploit’ (Malton, p. 4). In this space, the contours of custom, based ideally in a reciprocal relationship between labour and reward, might struggle to be seen.

Whether there were actually more cases of fraud and forgery in the 1850s than in other periods is hard to determine (Malton, p. 50), but they loom large in the literature and imaginative spaces of the period, and newspaper reports of criminal cases, which provide details about fraudsters’ and forgers’ states of mind, motivations, and circumstances, read like short stories and engage intricately with the fabric of everyday life. The cases of just one day at the Old Court of the Central Criminal Court demonstrate how varied and widespread instances of forged identities were.⁵ One William Sullivan was charged with forging a ticket showing inflated working hours, and hence claiming more money than he was owed for work on the new Adelphi Theatre, which had recently re-opened to audiences on the Strand, where it could now accommodate up to two thousand spectators. Sullivan was erroneously claiming 19 shillings – his actual wage is not given – and was sentenced to nine months’ hard labour. On the same day, James Juke is reported as having cashed in a money order for 10 shillings belonging to a fellow soldier in the Royal Artillery. Following evidence that he had previously been discharged from the regiment and had re-enlisted under a false name, he was sentenced to fifteen months’ hard labour. George Frederick Boulton Cox, a domestic servant described as ‘a well-dressed young man’, was convicted of forging his master’s name on money orders for the purpose of making ‘a show to a young lady to whom he had since been married’ and received twelve months’ hard labour. As he had been able to provide himself with a carriage on the proceeds of his crime, his theft must have been substantial. In a further case, the ‘respectably connected’ William Henry Cory, ‘who had conducted himself with considerable gallantry during the recent war in the Crimea’, and had gone on to lecture on the War, had lately forged cheques in the name of a miller near Croydon who had befriended him. Mitigation in terms of Cory’s voluntary war service at Balaclava and Inkerman was offered, but the ‘great deliberation’ of his crimes was held to outweigh his bravery and former respectability, and he was sentenced to four years imprisonment but not to hard labour. The final case of that day offered another variation on the practice, with a father and son charged with forging a cheque for just over £73. It seems, however, that the son took the whole responsibility for the act, and the case against the father was dismissed. The son was motivated by the ‘sight of the distress and misery under which he saw his father and his family labouring’ following a series of ‘unforeseen events’ which had reduced the ‘respectable and respected tradesman in the City of London’ to penury. The family’s ‘dreadful state of distress’ was agreed upon by all as the sole cause of the offence, and the judge passed a ‘lighter sentence than was ever inflicted in a case of this description’: six months’ hard labour. The resolution of this family’s situation is markedly different from that of The Porter’s Knot, which so delighted Queen Victoria (see Chapter 3).

As we have seen already, determinants of individual and collective identity may become unmoored in this period in the move to cities and the class mobility that could ensue. In this context, both customs and concepts of origin may become radically unsettled. Within this legal and commercial space, we can see how literature and science face up to the challenges, and explore the complex imaginative possibilities, of ‘profound secret[s] and myster[ies]’ and their criminal possibilities.

Evenings at the Microscope

During the 1850s, the microscope, described by Isobel Armstrong as ‘the most fetishized optical instrument of the time’, was moving beyond the exclusive realm of scientists to become ‘one of the preferred optical amusements of the Victorian middle class’.⁶ As Bernard Lightman writes, it was ‘one of the most important instruments of the life sciences in the Victorian domestic parlour’.⁷ One might argue that the microscope and the novel shared similar functions as well as a domestic space: both promised to reveal secrets and to provide the means of interpreting evidence. Adam Bede opened with a drop of Egyptian sorcerer’s ink that purported ‘to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past’; Philip Gosse began his Evenings at the Microscope by similarly conjuring an oriental force: ‘Like the work of some mighty genie of Oriental fable, the brazen tube is the key which unlocks a world of wonder and beauty before invisible, which one who has once gazed upon it can never forget, and never cease to admire.’⁸ Eliot revealed the past as a key to the future, and Gosse promised to ‘open the path to the myriad wonders of creation, which, altogether unseen by the unassisted eye, are made cognizable to sight by the aid of the microscope’ (p. i) in the present.

Eliot and Lewes’s home in Wandsworth combined both activities. While Eliot wrote, Lewes performed anatomical experiments concerned with what at that time were the largely unknown workings of the nervous system. His journal details his investigations of ‘the supposed distinction between sensory and motor nerves’.⁹ Lewes’s experiments with a microscope probed the mechanics of movement and sensation in frogs, chickens, and kittens, and established that the sensory and motor nerves differed in their functions but not in their properties. His journal outlines dissections and vivisections of the spinal cords and brains of frogs and kittens, including ‘dividing the spinal chord, in dorsal region, of one of the male frogs’ when engaged in copulation (2 April).¹⁰

The microscope might once have been a marker of the serious domestic scientist, such as Lewes or Darwin, but the greater availability of microscopes in the 1850s meant that more people than ever could enjoy discovering, and revealing, the secrets of the world and people around them. Lewes reviewed Gosse’s book in April. It is a practical guide to ‘microscope manipulation’ and consists of chapters about the wonders that could be revealed by the microscope, written in a ‘colloquial and familiar style’ in the form of ‘a series of imaginary conversaziones, or microscopical soirées, in which the author is supposed to act as the provider of scientific entertainment and instruction to a circle of friends’ (p. vii). Or so he hoped. Lewes baulked at Gosse’s attempts to be funny (‘dreary’) and philosophical (‘lugubrious’), believing that the ‘dryness’ of the subject matter could only be relieved by thorough explanation and the exciting of intellectual enquiry. Nonetheless, he concedes, ‘every one who amuses himself with a microscope will derive assistance from these representations of familiar objects’.¹¹ Affordable equipment and the creation of a community of like-minded amateur scientists allowed popular science to flourish, and attested to the presence of an attentive audience for Darwin’s work later in the year.

In a series of rambling chapters, Gosse introduces the reader to molluscs, sea-anemones, barnacles, and jelly-fish, but the chapter that gained most attention in reviews was that on blood, where Gosse vividly demonstrated how a murderer was caught when the bloodstains on his knife were proved to be from a human being, and when the cotton fibres in the blood sample were found to match those of the victim’s clothing. As Lewes notes, ‘the use of the microscope in criminal jurisprudence has become universal’ (p. 570). The microscope clearly captured the imagination of people who were as intrigued as Dickens by the possibility of revealing the secrets of those with whom they lived at close quarters in the burgeoning cities of Britain, and the prospect that their near neighbours would have something to hide. William Collins uses a scientific metaphor to describe Eliot’s uncovering the secrets not just of individuals, but of humanity, in Adam Bede: ‘It is encouraging, as it is unfortunately rare, in fiction, to find ourselves watching the operations of a skillful anatomist, as he lays bare the secrets of our quivering frame, and to feel that the hand is not only sure and steady, but gentle as a woman’s’ (p. 504). The normative masculinity of the laudatory language falters as it perceives a woman’s hand, and ironically reveals a secret as yet unknown to the public.

Literature and Fraud

In the summer of 1859, literary London was enthralled by two literary intrigues: furious speculation about George Eliot’s ‘true’ identity, and the ‘horrible disclosures which are now startling the world upon the subject of Shakespearian emendations’. Punch professed itself ‘afraid to quote the divine WILLIAMS’ and called upon Lord Lyndhurst to cite the edition he was using to pay a compliment to another member in the House of Lords.¹² The magazine was referring to the forgery scandal surrounding John Payne Collier, a well-established literary figure, whose name was firmly associated with Shakespeare. He was frequently cited as an authority on verse and his editions of Shakespeare were prominently advertised; was one of a number of distinguished signatories of a letter to Sir Cresswell Cresswell requesting easier access to wills and documents held in Doctor’s Commons for writers engaged in historical research;¹³ was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and was the addressee of and inspiration behind a book-length letter, Shakespeare’s Legal Acquirements Considered, by John, Lord Campbell, which was prompted by Collier’s desire to have a professional view of the extent of Shakespeare’s legal knowledge. Payne Collier’s status was absolutely bound up with that of Shakespeare and antiquarianism, and with the cultural authority that those interests conferred.

However, a small group of scholars had become suspicious of Payne Collier’s standing and some of his publications. In 1852, he had published Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare’s Plays: from Early Manuscript Corrections in a Copy of the Folio, 1632 in the Possession of J. Payne Collier (1852), which incorporated material from the extensive emendations, annotations, and new lines that he had found in the so-called Perkins folio. The folio, so named after the signature on the inside cover, was a battered second folio which Payne Collier claimed to have bought in order to use some of its pages to make up a deficient number in another second folio that he owned, and that he had presented as a gift to his patron, the Duke of Devonshire. Payne Collier claimed that its annotations, written in what passed for Elizabethan secretary hand, were contemporaneous with the publication of the folio in 1632. However, other scholars had been dubious from the outset about these claims and had frequently demanded sight of the book. The 6th Duke had persistently refused to grant access, but following his death in 1858 the 7th Duke sent the folio to the British Museum.¹⁴

It soon became clear from the physical evidence of the text itself that the annotations could not have been seventeenth-century additions: the folio was rebound sometime after 1750, and none of the extensive annotations was affected by this; that is, none was cut short or otherwise impinged upon by the new binding; and, more tellingly, pencil annotations in a modern hand were seen beneath the ink annotations in secretary hand. The first public accusation was made against Payne Collier in The Times by N.E.S.A. Hamilton, a relatively junior member of the British Museum, who pointed out, in very careful terms, and without accusing Payne Collier directly of fraud, the inconsistencies of his claims. Hamilton began by acknowledging ‘the press and distraction of politics which are now agitating the great world’ in asking that space be found for his letter but justifies it on the grounds that he has an ‘account of a most extraordinary deception which has been practised in the republic of letters’.¹⁵ He outlined the significance of Payne Collier’s Notes and Emendations, on the basis of which ‘the text of Shakspeare has been extensively changed … notwithstanding the strongest remonstrance and opposition from various quarters’. Hamilton wrote of his long-frustrated desire to see the Perkins folio and of the recent loan of it to the British Museum, and gave evidence of hand-writing showing the ‘strange juxtaposition of stiff Chancery letters of the form in use two centuries ago with others of quite a modern appearance’, and most tellingly of all, of the numerous pencil notes in modern hand and using modern spellings, which were revealed underneath the inked emendations.

Payne Collier responded a week later with his own letter to The Times, in which he refuted absolutely Hamilton’s interpretation of the annotations in the Perkins folio, and also evidenced his own authenticity and authority by invoking several markers of trustworthiness: he appealed to his ‘ancient connexion with your establishment’, having written for The Times since 1819; he wrote of his connection too with the Athenaeum; invoked Lord Ellesmere’s name as a friend and as owner of a similarly bound folio; and cited the name of his Patron, the Duke of Devonshire.¹⁶ On 16 July, The Times published two more letters from the British Museum: from Hamilton backing up his case with further evidence from the text and corroboration from other experts; and from Nevil Maskelyne of the Mineral Department of the Museum, who brought science to bear on the question when he literally put the Perkins folio under the microscope. He was able to add to the ‘plentifully distributed’ pencil marks throughout the volume and also showed that the ink used by the forger was not in fact ink at all, but paint used to mimic the appearance of old ink. Being soluble, the paint was easily removed in places to prove the existence of pencil beneath the paint, rather than above it, making nonsense of Payne Collier’s explanation that he did make occasional notes in the Folio’s margins.¹⁷

The Athenaeum weighed in heavily on behalf of Payne Collier against both Hamilton, whom it describes as reckless and disrespectful, and C Mansfield Ingleby, who had long desired to inspect the folio, and who published his findings in The Shakespeare Fabrications; or. The MS Notes of the Perkins Folio Shown to Be of Recent Origin (1859). In a three-page review of his work, Ingleby was accused of immaturity, tastelessness, vindictiveness, illogicality, insulting the Athenaeum itself, and of leading the British Museum into controversy. The Athenaeum ended its partisan attack on Ingleby by invoking the aged figure of Payne Collier, ‘a veteran man of letters – a gentleman, we grieve to say, bowed by age, infirmity of health, and domestic afflictions’.¹⁸ This personal information was available because Payne Collier was well known to the paper’s editor, William Hepworth Dixon, and that connection was brought in to counter the considerable forensic evidence produced by Ingleby, and the ‘fraud and forgery’ that he avers ‘have been committed’ (p. 233). There is a clubby atmosphere at work here, of belonging, which rendered anyone outside that network suspicious.

It was soon generally agreed that Payne Collier had forged the emendations, but he never acknowledged his actions, or gave a reason why, rather than offering his annotations as textual variants based on his years of scholarship, he chose instead to forge them. But the Athenaeum’s vindictive response suggests that even more was at stake than the serious accusations levelled against Payne Collier. He was part of a well-established coterie of literary men, known to each other, and secured by formal institutional recognition that should have guarded against fraudulent behaviour. Such structures had become ever more important as traditional bases of identity became obscured by the levers of geographical and social mobility. In the spring of 1859, as we have seen, Tennyson was reading Idylls of the King to a host of well-known society figures and artists, and having his portrait painted by G. F. Watts.¹⁹ The value of this and other portraits, such as W. P. Frith’s portrait of Dickens, which was shown at the Royal Academy during the summer, is not just in the publicity accruing to the sitter, and the availability of their face to the imaginations of their viewers and readers, but the very fact of the portrait’s confident assertion of the sitter’s being embedded and acknowledged within a system of recognition based in collegiality and a set of shared experiences. This was being imperilled by Payne Collier.

The sheer quantity of leading artistic and literary figures with whom Tennyson came into contact this year is very striking: names still familiar to modern readers include Tom Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the artist Arthur Hughes, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, the poet Coventry Patmore, and the novelist and campaigner Caroline Norton. And in June, Edward Lear called on the Tennysons on the Isle of Wight and heard Tennyson read ‘“T Maid of A” [i.e. ‘Lancelot and Elaine’] with which he is delighted as he is with “Guinevere” which he reads to himself’ (Lady Tennyson’s Journal, p. 136). In Tennyson’s case, these connections went back to his college days in Cambridge. In May, Vernon Lushington, one of the earliest supporters of the Working Men’s College movement, and himself a friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, Darwin, and leading literary men, wrote to ask to buy a bust of Tennyson from Thomas Woolner: ‘Montagu Butler a friend of mine (and Fellow of Trinity) has written to me proposing that some of us Trinity men should join together, buy your Tennyson and present it to the College Library at Cambridge. What do you say to this?’²⁰ Like the Punch dinners of which Henry Silver wrote in his journal, male friendships and social interactions augmented and cemented prominence through a series of complementary cultural transactions.

Tennyson’s story shows how what we would call ‘networks’ proliferated and spread through the intersection of various circles and spheres of influence – cultural, literary, political, and familial. Reputation, renown, and confidence were cemented through these networks, within which works of art like Tennyson’s poems circulated as nodes of exchange that brought groups together. To some, this form of engagement came naturally: Darwin’s correspondence this year shows a regular interchange with his closest professional confidants – Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker, and Charles Lyell – as he hones On the Origin of Species for publication. Even three of Darwin’s sons, Francis, Leonard, and Horace, then aged ten, nine, and eight, wrote to the Entomologist’s Weekly Examiner in June to tell the magazine of their discovery of some rare beetles in their home in Down, Kent (Darwin Correspondence, VII, p. 310). Not everyone had this level of access to public media and potential collaborators, but such connections did seem to promise that identity could be fixed and known. Payne Collier’s deceit called that confidence into question.

We might note that the scientific world was not immune to the fraud that was such a constant threat throughout the year. On 25 August, Darwin wrote to his son William, having spent half the letter worrying about William’s weak ankles, on the subject of the fraud case that was emerging over the mismanagement of the finances of the Carron Iron Company in Scotland. Systematic under-reporting of the firm’s profits had enabled the two families who owned the firm to buy other stakeholders’ shares at a lower price than they were really worth. This practice had gone on for seventy years and had only come to light when members of the two families fell out. Darwin’s mildly gleeful interest in the case has a furtiveness about it which makes his grammar collapse: ‘Do you see Times? There has been wonderful account of gigantic fraud carried on for above 70 years by the Stainton family, & I fear the Lipidopterist must be implicated!’ (Letters, VII, p. 326). His interest in the case comes about because of the potential involvement of the eminent entomologist, Henry Stainton, a well-known and wealthy figure who had used his own resources to support the Entomological Society of London, and to found the Entomologist’s Annual in 1855 and the Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer in 1856.²¹ Despite Darwin’s suggestion, there is no evidence in the Times’ account of the law case on 23 August (p. 5) that Henry was involved in, or knew about, the source of his wealth, and as he became a member of the Linnean Society that year, it seems that the scandal did not affect his own reputation; however, it does shed light on the level of rivalry and gossip that Darwin was prone to, and which spills out in this letter to his son. It was perhaps a welcome distraction as he plugged away at the proofs of his ‘accursed’ book.

George Eliot, Fraud, and Anonymity

Once she had left the Westminster Review and embarked on her life with Lewes, George Eliot had to operate outside these circles and their gendered intimacies. Though her novel travelled far and wide in 1859, linking its readers in a network of connections as we have seen, Eliot herself was unable to do likewise. However, this did mean that she was free to write without public scrutiny. The flipside of her actions was that in this summer of literary intrigue, speculation grew about George Eliot’s ‘real’ identity. Lewes was relishing Marian’s secret success:

But Eliot and John Blackwood were both anxious about the growing inquisitiveness as to her identity, and wished to maintain her anonymity, Blackwood fearing the impact on sales if Eliot were revealed to be Marian Evans Lewes.

Rumours had been swirling around the authorship of Adam Bede since the novel first appeared. In February, Lewes had written categorically to deny Marian’s authorship to her old friend, colleague, lover, and editor of the Westminster Review, John Chapman, who had been told the secret of George Eliot’s identity by Herbert Spencer. Lewes told Chapman that, though the imputation of authorship might be meant as a compliment, it was ‘an offence against delicacy and friendship. As you seem so very slow in appreciating her feelings on this point, she authorises me to state, as distinctly as language can do so, that she is not the author of “Adam Bede”’ (Letters, 12 February; III, p. 13). It might be argued that Marian was not actually the author of Adam Bede, as that was ‘George Eliot’. Many years later, Eliot wrote to James A. H. Murray, ‘I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot’, confirming a fundamental doubleness at the heart of her life.²² Lewes’s argument, however, is grounded in an appeal to appropriate gentlemanly behaviour with which Chapman is asked to concur. On the same day, Lewes reflects in his journal that:

Anonymity is an intrinsic possibility within the literary and, Lewes implies, the masculine world too.

The matter did not end there: in April, Chapman’s laudatory review of Adam Bede hinted strongly at his knowledge of the author. He suggested that s/he was from the ‘Midlands Counties’ (p. 488), and speculated freely about the novelist’s religious beliefs, finding in the text evidence that its writer was an adherent of no one religion but believed the ‘religious spirit’ in myriad forms to be common to ‘the human race’ (p. 502), which is a reasonable summing up of Eliot’s broadly humanist approach, which she combined with a respect for the compassion of ministers like Mr Irwine. Chapman also openly speculated, as others, including Dickens, had over the gender of the writer. He found in Hetty the strongest evidence to suppose George Eliot a woman: in Hetty’s later distress, abandoned by Arthur and spurning Adam, ‘her life enters on a phase which, as it seems to us, could only be delineated as it is by an author combining the intense feelings and sympathies of a woman with the conceptive power of artistic genius’ (p. 511). In a warm tribute, Chapman writes:

Chapman concluded by suggesting that the author in fact combined the ‘best qualities of the masculine and feminine intellect’, an attribute he saw as ‘a distinguishing characteristic of the most gifted artists and poets’ (p. 512); he teases as he obfuscates.

Dickens seems to have known of Eliot’s authorship in February: his friend Edmund Yates recalled, ‘I remember at the time of the publication of Adam Bede writing to Dickens to tell me the real name of its author. His very funny reply was to the effect that “it is either Bradbury or Evans [the publishers of Household Words]; but I do not think that it is Bradbury”’.²³ However, he neither revealed Eliot’s identity more widely, nor did he contact Eliot until her identity became known in the summer, having determined, as he wrote, to ‘wait until I could write to you in person’, when he addressed Eliot as ‘My Dear Madam’, and told her how ‘Adam Bede has taken its place among the actual experiences and endurances of my life’ (10 July; Letters, p. 114). Dickens was acting generously, possibly with an eye to recruiting Eliot for All the Year Round, and in the knowledge that his own life in 1859 would not bear close scrutiny. Dickens had insisted that Bradbury and Evans publish his version of his marriage breakdown, fearing lest readers spotted dissonances between his personal life and the worship of the domestic hearth that many of his novels, including A Tale of Two Cities, proclaimed. Bradbury and Evans refused. We now know that Dickens left Catherine for the young actress, Nelly Ternan, whom he had met whilst acting in Wilkie Collins’s play The Frozen Deep in 1857. This was a closely guarded secret during Dickens’s life.

Eliot and the Blackwoods’ hands would soon be forced by rumours that one Joseph Liggins was the author of Eliot’s fiction. He had lived in the Warwickshire district where Eliot grew up, and knew the same people and stories as she did. With Adam Bede’s great success, the Liggins claims, which had begun with the appearance of Scenes of Clerical Life, started up again. Sara Hennell, one of Eliot’s closest Warwickshire friends, wrote to her in early April with the news that Mr Liggins made not a penny out of Adam Bede and gave all the profits to the Blackwoods (GE to Blackwood, 10 April; III, p. 44). Initially a subject of some amusement to Eliot, the matter became more serious when the Reverend Henry Smith Anders wrote to The Times to proclaim that everyone in Nuneaton knew Liggins to be ‘George Eliot’ (The Times, 13 April; Letters, III, p. 48). This prompted Eliot, probably following Lewes’s direction and echoing the tone and terms of his earlier correspondence to Chapman, to respond with a letter denying Liggins’s authorship and asking whether:

Notwithstanding a slight critical ripple following this letter, Blackwood approved this move in the midst of the ‘perfect fever about the author’s life now’ and hoped that Eliot had ‘taken care of the hand’, that is, that she had not submitted the letter in her own hand-writing (Blackwood to GE, 16 April; Letters, III, p. 51).²⁴

Before Liggins was outed as an imposter, some commentators had suggested that the unknown Eliot was a fraud, and she was indeed careful to have her letters to correspondents, and the name ‘George Eliot’ in presentation copies, written for her by one of Blackwood’s clerks, lest her own writing be recognised. In June, in an attempt to quash a vociferous champion of Liggins, Eliot allowed a sample of her hand-writing to be sent to James R. Quirk to prove that it was not the same as Liggins’s hand (Blackwood to Quirk, 9 June; Letters, III, pp. 80–81). The act of hand-writing was freighted both with trust and the promise of a known identity: being able to trust the hand-written text was a fundamental building block of a modern society as forgery’s former status as a capital offence showed. A printed text, as Payne Collier had shown, offered no such guarantee.

Unfortunately, the matter did not rest there, as rumours soon reached Eliot that Liggins was raising money on the grounds of his having been denied his royalties by Blackwood. Eliot found herself in a situation where she was both the indirect victim and enabler of a fraud and someone who could be accused of adopting a form of forgery in order to protect her own identity and her legitimate interests. The freedoms offered by an assumed identity were now backfiring, and it became imperative to try to protect both the good name of Eliot’s publishers and the integrity of her own creativity. Lewes and Eliot concluded that the only way to do this was to reveal her identity. Read through the prism of a focus on 1859, we can see how the revelation of Eliot’s ‘real’ identity, and responses to it, may have been conditioned by the backdrop of a society concerned on a daily basis with the possibility of fraud and forgery, and latterly by the emergence of the Payne Collier scandal. There was a fine line between the self-made persona, including ‘George Eliot’, and the criminally forged identity, with both being enabled by the same mechanisms and social conditions.

Within Eliot’s group of friends, only Barbara Bodichon had guessed Eliot’s identity from the scraps of the novel that she had read in reviews. Eliot’s ‘old Coventry friends’, including Hennell, had been blinded by rumours of Liggins (5 May; Letters, III, pp. 63–64). Eliot’s delight in Bodichon’s sensitive apprehension had to be hedged with caution: ‘Keep the secret solemnly till I give you leave to tell it, and give way to no impulses of triumphant affection. You have sense enough to know how important the incognito has been, and we are anxious to keep it up for a few months longer’ (III, p. 63). The length of time given is mentioned nowhere else, and nowhere else do Eliot and Lewes yet hint at the voluntary giving up of the alias. It is interesting to note that Eliot uses the term ‘incognito’ and not pseudonym, signalling the assumption of an alternate identity rather than simply an alternative name. In his own note to Bodichon, Lewes gave her more instructions about Eliot’s name: ‘dear Barbara, you must not call her Marian Evans again: that individual is extinct, rolled up, mashed, absorbed in the Lewesian magnificence!’ (Letters, III, p. 65). The issue of naming was getting more complex, more public, and more commercially sensitive. In the same letter, a proud Lewes told Barbara that Adam Bede had now sold over 3,000 copies, and, ‘as 500 is a good success for a novel, you may estimate by that detail what my Polly has achieved’ (5 May; Letters, III, pp. 64–65).²⁵

Eliot and Lewes had already begun to let some close friends know of her authorship. That summer, in addition to their usual evening activity of reading, Eliot and Lewes ‘indulged [themselves] with tickets’ for the Handel Festival held at the nearby Crystal Palace in commemoration of the centenary of Handel’s death on 14 April 1759 (to Maria Congreve, 8 June; Letters, III, p. 79), and after the concert, they took a cab to the lodgings where the Brays and Sara Hennell were staying during their visit to the Festival. ‘Revealed the secret of Adam Bede, & had curious talk about it. Home at 11’ (GHL Journal, p. 15). ‘Curious’ is not explained, but it seems not to have been an easy meeting, in part because Eliot’s motivation for revealing her identity seems to have been prompted by necessity rather than a desire to share her joy in her success. As she wrote later to the Brays and Sara: ‘If people were to buzz round me with their remarks, or compliments, I should lose the repose of mind and truthfulness of production without which no good healthy books can be written’ (27 June; Letters, III, pp. 97, 99). There is a defensive self-isolation here, and potentially a rejection of old friends, in a month in which public assaults on her privacy became more marked as her success was more generally celebrated, and as the ‘buzz’ of speculation became so great that Eliot had to make her identity known. Unhappily, this particular revelation of her authorship immediately led to a period of estrangement from Sara because Eliot and Lewes did not pay sufficiently warm attention to a manuscript which she had shown them. This private anguish painfully compounded the more public but still deeply felt suspicion surrounding her public persona, and in the aftermath of her meeting with Sara and the Brays, Eliot echoed Dickens, in writing dispiritedly in her journal, ‘This experience has enlightened me a good deal as to the ignorance in which we all live of each other’,²⁶ a revelation which might be seen to fuel her later fiction.

In the immediate aftermath of her decision to go public, Lewes and Eliot left for Switzerland: in part because Lewes wanted to see his three sons, who were at school in Hofwyl; to visit Lucerne to catch up with their Wandsworth friends, Richard and Maria Congreve; and to go to Holland; but also to try to avoid commentary on Eliot’s situation. Eliot did not meet her step-sons on this visit to Europe, and it was only now that Lewes revealed his relationship with Marian to his boys, a revelation heightened by the success of Adam Bede, news of which had reached their school. On his return, Lewes writes to tell Blackwood that ‘Paris is in a fever about Adam Bede. Even at Hofwyl – five miles from Berne – with only half a dozen English boys – I heard of it; for on telling my second son I had brought him a novel all three shouted “Is it Adam Bede?”’ (22 July; Letters, III, p. 117).

Contrary to John Blackwood’s fears, when news of Eliot’s identity emerged, sales of Adam Bede rocketed. Lewes noted in his Journal for 9 July: ‘I learned from Langford the amazing news that the 4th edition of “Adam Bede” was already out of print – 5,000 copies in a fortnight – & the fever still at its height.’ Lewes, delighted as ever with his partner’s success, interpreted this as confirmation that enthusiasm for the novel was going from strength to strength, but in truth the boost in sales might have come about because of the public’s increased, and probably prurient, interest in its newly revealed author. The Athenaeum, however, maintained an open hostility to Eliot. Over three weeks in June and July, its ‘Weekly Gossip’ column kept ‘the shadowy George Eliot’ and the Liggins question in full view.²⁷ On 2 July, the paper decried the length of time that the controversy about Adam Bede’s authorship had been going on, and suggested that the whole Liggins question ‘was a mystification, got up by George Eliot’ and that ‘no woman of genius ever condescended to such a ruse’, in which assertion they were of course right.²⁸ The paragraph was a misogynistic and gratuitous insult, describing Adam Bede’s author as ‘a clever woman with an observant eye and unschooled moral nature’, ‘a rather strong-minded lady, blessed with abundance of showy sentiment and profusion of pious words, but kept for sale rather than use’. The novel itself was dismissed as ‘bright in parts’ but with ‘no great quality of any kind’. The vicious column troubled Eliot for weeks, but its virulence might all too readily be seen as a tactic designed to distract attention from Payne Collier’s extraordinary literary fraud that was becoming known at that time, and as a warning not to trespass on masculine literary grounds.

The revelation of Eliot’s identity was coldly received by others, too, and especially contemporary women writers amongst whom no formal network based on college or school affiliations yet existed. But many of them were well-connected. Harriet Martineau wrote to her cousin and editor of the Edinburgh Review, Henry Reeve, ‘I suppose you & others feel much in the same way about “Adam Bede’, (wh. I have not seen).’ She went on, rather startlingly: ‘I am sorry Miss Evans wrote it, & shd be glad to die a year or two, or many, sooner, – if that cd make it any one else’s’. She goes on:

This seems to be experienced more intimately and far more virulently than a purely public scandal might be and is an interesting contrast to Martineau’s response to the revelation of Charlotte Brontë’s pseudonym. In her Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell recalls that one of the results of Charlotte’s dropping her pseudonym was that she could become acquainted with Harriet Martineau. Arranging to visit the older writer, with her alias still intact, Brontë ‘came [into the room], – hesitated one moment at finding four or five people assembled, – then went straight to Miss Martineau with intuitive recognition, and, with the freemasonry of good feeling and gentle breeding, she soon became as one of the family seated round the tea-table’ (Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, p. 313). Freemasonry is an interesting collective term, suggesting a rite of belonging that can be accorded to one recognised as being ‘one of us’ but not to someone whose background and actions clearly set her beyond the reach of Martineau and Gaskell’s expectations of ‘good feeling and gentle breeding’. Recognised social signifiers are lacking in Eliot, originally perhaps because of her class background, and now because of her relationship with Lewes.

Martineau is interesting in that she has not read Adam Bede and is therefore, unlike other contemporaries, not responding as someone who is affronted by such a moving and morally rigorous novel coming from the pen of someone living with a married man. In early June, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote to Eliot saying that the greatest compliment she’d been paid in her life was to be supposed the author of Adam Bede (3 June; Letters, III, p. 74). Eliot reacted awkwardly to the letter in her response to John Blackwood, picking up on Gaskell’s signing herself Gilbert Elliott, which may have been a joke, but which Eliot took as a careless mistake. Two months later, however, Gaskell despite, or perhaps because of, her admiration of Adam Bede, wrote to her publisher, who like Henry Reeve was at the heart of the publishing world, that she was firmly, sadly resisting the news that ‘Miss Evans’ wrote the novel: ‘I am very sorry if it is true … It is a noble book, whoever wrote it, – but Miss Evans’ life taken at the best construction, does so jar against the beautiful book that one cannot help hoping against hope’. She raises the issue three times during her letter, and at the end bursts out: ‘Oh do say Miss Evans did not write it’ (to George Smith, 4 August; Gaskell Letters, pp. 566–67).

The news took a little longer to reach Barrett Browning in Siena, where she was recuperating from the exhaustion wrought by the political situation in Italy and the heat of Florence, but her response was similar to Gaskell’s: ‘Is it really true that “Adam Bede” is the work of Miss Evans? The woman (as I have heard of her) and the author (as I read her) do not hold together’ (to H. F. Chorley; September–October; p. 338). Both Gaskell and Barrett Browning are responding primarily to what they perceive as the incongruity between the person who could write such a wise, kind, demanding, and fundamentally moral novel and the woman who lived a life so far beyond conventional assumptions of the time. They perceive Eliot’s situation almost in terms of a fraud case as they struggle to make sense of the two conflicting identities of the novelist and the woman. There is an assumption that the woman has to be legible through the words of the author, and in this case, Gaskell and Barrett Browning cannot accept that to be the case. Both had recently written of redeemable fallen women in Ruth (1853) and Aurora Leigh (1856) but struggle with Eliot’s both actively choosing to live with a married man and writing a novel that they so much admired. It seems that they would almost rather that a fraud had taken place, than that their assumptions, and perhaps their own identities as professional women writers, should be so challenged.

‘The Lifted Veil’

The authorship controversy coincides, as Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Adam Abraham, and Sean O’Toole have also noted, with Eliot’s writing ‘The Lifted Veil’, a long short story which appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in July, and which was her only first-person fiction. The story’s publication history is highly pertinent: despite being aware that the Liggins question was getting more serious and that the supposed author was set to gain financially from his claiming authorship, John Blackwood was still urging Eliot to ‘KEEP YOUR SECRET’ on 18 May (III, p. 68). He had just read Eliot’s short story, ‘The Lifted Veil’, a curious successor to Adam Bede, and this might have coloured his stance. Eliot had already rather anxiously warned her publisher about what to expect in her new work:

The story would in fact take a few weeks rather than a few days to send, and she finished it, as O’Toole observes, on 26 April, the day on which Barbara Bodichon had written to let Eliot know that she had identified her authorship.²⁹ ‘The Lifted Veil’ is embedded in the thick of the Eliot authorship controversy.

She writes of having begun the story ‘as a resource when my head was too stupid for more important work’ (Letters, III, p. 60, n. 1), and it is perhaps born out of her isolation, anxiety about Liggins, about her sister Chrissey, who was dying, and possibly her intrigued horror at Lewes’s domestic experiments. Lewes wrote to Blackwood:

The story was sent on 29 April.

Blackwood’s advice to ‘KEEP YOUR SECRET’ comes at the end of the letter containing the proofs of, and his long-awaited response to, ‘The Lifted Veil’. He appears to have been concerned for his sensitive author, her reputation, and probably for his Magazine; as ‘The Lifted Veil’ did not accord with his – and her readers’ – expectations of George Eliot, her continued anonymity would be helpful in protecting Adam Bede’s sales. Blackwood wrote:

Blackwood was right about Lewes’s influence, but wrong in thinking that he might persuade Eliot to change her ending.

A concern with performed identities, secrets, and self-knowledge can be seen in ‘The Lifted Veil’. It is the story of Latimer, a sensitive, socially isolated man who had the ability, or so he believed, to read the minds of those around him, and the clairvoyant skills to predict events. In some ways, it is a story that experiments with the opposite of the situation outlined by Dickens, with what happens when there are no secrets, when the mysteries of others’ minds are known to us absolutely, and when the onset of death proves to reveal rather than to close down knowledge. Eliot considers whether we need secrets to impel narrative, and indeed whether we can be fully human without them. The story strikingly begins with Latimer’s foretelling the date of his own death and ends with the onset of the angina that will kill him. His was a lonely life: his mother died when he was young, and his father chose for him an education designed to compensate for deficiencies in his aptitude rather than to fulfil his talents. Latimer’s primary dilemma was that he believed that he knew too much, that he could read the disdainful thoughts about him in the minds of his family and friends. Whether this was the case, or whether Latimer’s insecurities led him to project his own self-loathing onto the minds of others is a moot point, but the primary effect of his belief was that he lived with his knowledge as a fearful burden, what he terms ‘the curse of insight – of my double consciousness’.³⁰

This state of mind is employed in a variety of ways throughout the story. Initially, it signifies Latimer’s insight being at war with his passion, specifically when it comes to his feelings for Bertha Grant, the orphan niece of a family friend who initially became Latimer’s brother’s fiancée, and then, after his brother’s death, Latimer’s wife. But the phrase also signals a ‘superadded consciousness’ that is aware of ‘the vagrant, frivolous ideas and emotions’ flitting through the mind ‘of some uninteresting acquaintance’ (p. 30), and acting as a jarring backdrop to their social intercourse. Latimer is unable to block out this awareness of the double aspect of his companions, which:

This ‘microscopic vision’ is of course precisely the complex insight which fuels Eliot’s fiction but which prompts from her a humane generosity that sees such ‘failings’ and disappointments as part of the human condition which demands compassion and mutual tolerance.

Yizhi Xiao writes that the ‘microscope’s prosthetic enhancement of vision affords entertainment [to the mid-Victorians], but it also challenges the very practices of observation’.³¹ Eliot’s work as a writer is, as Xiao puts it, ‘directed both outward, toward the tiny forms of life under the object glass, and inward, magnifying the inherent imperfection of observation’ (p. 76). Latimer too assumes the microscope’s metaphorical power, but in his case it reveals only the unmediated chaos of his perceptions. The chaos of doubleness envelops and stuns Latimer, as he lacks either the scientific insight or novelistic capacity to interpret, and thus partially to contain, it. Secrets are revealed to him, but he can do nothing with them, lacking the ability to stand aside from his own personal response, to analyse, or to sympathise.

‘The Lifted Veil’ has often been read recently through the prism of contemporary science and psychology,³² but if we situate it also within the social, financial, criminal, and economic contexts of 1859, we might argue that Latimer’s double consciousness, his painful awareness of the double aspect of those around him, their inward and outward characters, in fact speaks to the ubiquity at this time of fears about counterfeiting, fraud, and forgery. As Rebecca Stern argues, ‘the social aspects of a potentially abstract economic system [of financial fraud] permeated the plots and thematic concerns of a wide array of nineteenth-century British print culture’,³³ and indeed it comes to seem as though fraud, and its facilitating activities, such as forgery, are the criminal manifestations of what science and fiction were declaring: that identities were multiple, and indeed that to be identified as multiple was necessary in order to be fully human. Latimer’s story denies this insight in a fantasy of control, in his desire that identities should be singular and remain intact in the face of social interactions, that there should effectively be no secrets. This desire for control becomes itself a form of self-violation that stunts any possibility of social development, and Latimer is propelled into a peripatetic life of exile. He can neither forge nor recreate himself in any other persona; he can’t recognise the necessity of variable forms of socially sensitive behaviour, and fears losing himself under the scrutiny of others.

Eliot provided a useful key to ‘The Lifted Veil’ with a motto that she wrote for it in the 1870s, and which first appeared in the Cabinet Edition of 1878:

The motto counters what for O’Toole is the key to the story, Prague’s living on ‘in the rigidity of habit’ (p. 28) and ‘the stale repetition of memories’ (p. 27), which prefigure Latimer’s ‘integral, changeless self’ (O’Toole, p. 72). This description of Prague as it appears to Latimer’s distressed mind is not unlike J. S. Mill’s take on custom, a deadening repetition of past practice, leading nowhere and stultifying the possibility of a lived future. In response, Eliot’s motto offers a heritage that grows, that provides for healthy identities, and the possibility of fellowship; that is, she envisages history as custom, as based in community, and congruent with a fellowship that is distinct from the social identity of a ‘band of brothers’ as it is a principle and not just a social practice. Custom rescues the past from ‘stale repetition’; it is a form of living history, inhabited heritage, and fellowship, and as such absolutely counters Latimer’s singular life, and death.³⁵

Marian Evans Lewes understood the perils of public scrutiny and chose an alternative identity for her working self: becoming George Eliot was an act necessary to her creativity. The Liggins affair was a form of violation, an intrusion upon the mind and its creativity, and precipitated the revelation of her social as opposed to professional identity; in both the act of writing ‘The Lifted Veil’, and in Latimer’s story, Eliot demonstrates the legitimacy of the need for a pseudonym to identify another self. The story acknowledges the persecution of gossip and speculation, but it also recognises that retreat into the singular self is a literally self-defeating act. It is a bleak though insightful counter-narrative to Adam Bede’s quietly progressive restoration of community despite and because of the weaknesses and failings of those within it.

Under the protection of her assumed name, her resolutely unlifted veil, Eliot was able to pursue her form of writing, and her identity as a pseudonymous novelist. At home or with friends, the author of Adam Bede Eliot was Marian Evans Lewes or Polly, but professionally that person ceased to exist and took on instead the alternative identity of George Eliot, an assumed name designed initially to disguise the truth and to outwit hostile critics. Rather than being keen to protect her ‘real’ identity as Marian Evans Lewes, it begins to look as though Eliot wanted to maintain her identity as most accurately plural and that it was that plurality that her pseudonym protected, rather than a simple, singular form of identity. It is this reality – the sheer complexity of identity, and the validity of the ‘secret’ as well as the socially legible self – that her story lifts the veil on. It is possible to read the story as a qualified caution to Lewes to beware of what he and his microscope are seeking to find, or perhaps rather of the integrity and sufficiency of what he might discover: that scientific revelation is not the whole truth. The stories we tell and maintain, the frauds, are also a form of truth.

Her pseudonym is in Eliot’s case not an attempt deliberately to mislead or misdirect. It is the only way in which she might obtain a fair hearing for her work, and it too becomes a claim for the multiplicity of personality, the complication of identity. New modes of political, social, and cultural identity were evolving, and they were not uncomplicated, as we have seen in politicians’ efforts to manage markers of identity. ‘The Lifted Veil’ is about identity, but it is distinct from the legal and political entities with which politicians and police were concerned. Eliot is concerned with what it takes to live a fully human, creative identity, which ultimately has nothing to do with the public markers transgressed by acts of fraud and forgery. Her response to the possibility of multiplicity recognises its richness and its potential for connectivity, rather than the awful, inexorable inscrutability which Dickens finds in ‘every human creature’.

Cases of fraud, forgery, and the assumption of the names, habits, or the hand-writing of others all represent a form of lived fiction. As such, they produce secrets and possibilities that novelists grasp with relish. It seems only fitting that the climax of the most infamous Victorian novel of secrets, Mary Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), was set in 1859. In the final chapter of the novel, Braddon writes that ‘two years have passed since the May twilight in which Robert [Audley]found his old friend’ and then identifies the current moment as ‘this bright summer of 1861’.³⁶ Contemporary conditions opened up a fertile field for fraudsters and forgers, but they also provided material substance and a compelling context for novelists, and a chance to explore identity beyond the strictures of politics and the criminal courts.

We might think of Sir Percival Glyde in Collins’s A Woman in White, which began in All the Year Round in November, in which Glyde commits fraud by inserting a false record of his parents’ marriage into a parish register, thereby making himself legitimate and able to inherit his title, and his house, Blackwater Park. Walter Hartright’s breathless account of his discovery of Glyde’s crime makes all too clear what is at stake:

The subject of fraud exercised a fascination for Collins throughout his sensation-writing career and is manifest again this year in his short story collection The Queen of Hearts, where he revisits the true story of Henry Fauntleroy, a banker who was convicted of fraud and executed in 1824. Collins adds an additional complication to the story in telling a tale of a great kindness shown by Fauntleroy to a young investor, which saved the young man’s money from being lost just before the bank for whom Fauntleroy worked stopped payments. Like Eliot, Collins is allowing for the possibility of multiplicity. Like the scientists whose interest was in penetrating the secrets that lay beyond the scope of the human eye, novelists’ acts of looking carefully might uncover not just secret worlds lying unperceived in a surface perception but new understandings of identity and function.

In On the Origin of Species, Darwin writes: ‘No one ought to feel surprise at much remaining as yet unexplained in regard to the origin of species and varieties, if he makes due allowance for our profound ignorance in regard to the mutual relations of all the beings which live around us’.³⁸ Fraud and forgery expose and are enabled by ignorance, and they create vulnerability. In a period proud of its accomplishments and power, it is perhaps this ignorance and vulnerability as much as its genuine excitement and inherent controversy that ensured an eager audience for Darwin’s new book.