There’s a brand new student hall of residence at Royal Holloway, University of London. Sitting atop the hill on the A30 near Englefield Green, George Eliot Hall offers ‘single superior’ accommodation for undergraduates and postgrads and is part of the College’s huge investment in buildings to tempt young people to spend three years in Egham.
It would be a bit grudging of me, I suppose, not to celebrate the fact that my employer has chosen to name this new hall after Eliot, the subject of much of my current research. Although I’m on research leave myself this year, I love to hear students and colleagues from all departments talk of ‘lecturing in George Eliot’; ‘I was in George Eliot earlier’ and so on. The name itself is a result of a competition Royal Holloway ran last year to name our new library and resources building. Royal Holloway alumna Emily Wilding Davison topped that poll, Eliot came second and got the halls. But when asked to do a promotional spot for the competition, I spoke for the civil servant and public health advocate, Hilda Martindale, a graduate of Royal Holloway who also trained at Bedford College.
Why? Well George Eliot’s status as an alumna is shaky to say the least. Although she and her partner George Henry Lewes enjoyed blissful escapes from London to the Barley Mow Inn on Englefield Green, that’s the nearest they would have got to the site of the Halls and of Royal Holloway itself, which opened in 1886, six years after Eliot’s death. Eliot does, however, have a connection to Bedford College for Women, founded in Bloomsbury in 1849 by Elizabeth Jesser Reid and merged and incorporated with Royal Holloway in the last great era of crisis for UK universities, the mid 1980s.
What is that connection? As far as I can see – although I’ve not yet done an exhaustive search of the Bedford archives – Marian Evans (Eliot’s real name) was never registered as a student at Bedford College. What we do know of the connection comes from her letters written to her fellow radical thinkers back home in Coventry, shortly after she had moved to London to inch her way forwards into a world of literary journalism, editing, and intellectual aspiration.
Writing to Charles and Caroline Bray in January 1851, in amongst her busy account of life on the Strand working with John Chapman (see Rosemary Ashton’s excellent book 142 Strand for more on this), Evans noted:
“I am attending Professor Newman’s course of lectures on Geometry at the Ladies’ College every Monday and Thursday. You will say that I can’t afford this, which is ‘dreadful true’ — but the fact is that I happened to say I should like to do so and good-natured Mr. Chapman went straightway and bought me a ticket which he begged me to accept. I refused to accept it — and have paid for it — wherefore I must stint myself in some direction — clearly in white gloves and probably in clean collars.”
Eliot, George, 1819-1880, Letter from George Eliot to Charles Bray and Caroline Hennell Bray, January 28, 1851, in The George Eliot Letters, vol. 1: 1836-1851. Haight, Gordon S., ed.. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954, pp. 378.
The maths lecturer, Francis William Newman, was one of the founding staff members of Bedford College and brother to the most controversial religious figure of Victorian Britain: John Henry Newman. Francis Newman’s lectures on advanced mathematics were a great draw to women of all ages during the 1850s, acutely aware of the gaps in schooling offered to girls in that period. Anna Swanwick, one of the key supporters of Bedford College from its founding until her death, noted in a speech to women students that:
‘In my younger days, though I attended what was considered the best girl’s school in Liverpool, the education there given was so meagre that I felt like the Peri excluded from Paradise, and I often longed to assume the costume of a boy in order to learn Latin, Greek, and mathematics, which were them regarded as essential to a liberal education for boys, but were not thought of for girls.’
By 1851, Anna Swanwick had the official role of Lady Visitor for Newman’s lectures, ensuring that all those with tickets – and registered students – behaved in an appropriate manner.
Marian Evans must have met the required standards, despite that sacrifice in white gloves and clean collars, since Anna Swanwick paid her visits during the early 1850s and passed notes for Evans to share with her friends the Brays. On the face of it, the two women, Swanwick and Evans, had much in common: both remarkable for their intellectual ambition, both published translators of significant German texts, both passionate in their pursuit of education for women.
But there was also one very significant difference between Evans and Swanwick at this time: money. In the early 1850s Evans was barely getting by on her earnings in London and her only other resource would have been to return home, a dependent of her unyielding brother Isaac. She would, she wrote to friends in this period, rather kill herself than return to Nuneaton in those circumstances. Anna Swanwick’s work in translation, as even her closest supporters noted, was never produced under financial pressure. A woman born to independent wealth, able to travel, to educate herself, to found benevolent projects, her life was a world away from Evans in the 1850s, grubbing and scratching away in journalism, desperate to keep afloat.
So yes, let’s celebrate Marian Evans, and George Eliot as part of the history of Royal Holloway and Bedford College. Please, though, can it be remembered that her own experience of higher education was that of a part-time, mature student, figuring out how to balance paid work with her burning ambition to learn, compromising on daily expenses to pay her fees, always feeling that the system isn’t really properly set up for people in her situation. We can do better, we should do better.
Despite all this, by the mid 1860s Eliot had become one of the best-paid authors of her day.
Writing Women and Suffrage 
“I often longed to assume the costume of a boy in order to learn Latin, Greek, and mathematics…” What kinds of costumes do we assume now in order to legitimate the knowledge we desire…?
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