DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Wreath-laying in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey 22 June 2010

Authors

Kathryn Hughes

Date of this Version

2011

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 42 (2011)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

It seems extraordinary to think that ISO years ago Mary Ann Evans, a young woman with very few resources apart from a strong conscience and an enquiring mind, almost ruined her life by revealing to her father that she was no longer certain that the Bible was the literal word of God. Might it not instead be the work of men, she wondered, reaching out to report their sense of God at work in their own lives? Was it not, in fact, a record of human rather than divine history?

For this piece of heresy, as we know, Mary Ann endured a painful estrangement from her family which never really quite healed. Thirty years later, in the closing days of 1880, the Dean of Westminster made it discreetly but firmly clear that the Abbey could not receive her body, the resting place of so many other great literary artists including Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens.

George Eliot, as she now was, had made a career - a great one - by creating a moral universe in her novels in which goodness was not dependent on belief in God. Instead, acts of kindness towards other people and an endurance of the pain and suffering that everyday life brings were, for her, the real spiritual teachers.

In the years following Eliot's death churchmen - from non-conformist backgrounds as well as Anglican - debated keenly whether or not she was in fact a Christian manqué. Her first cousin once removed, William Mottram, a Methodist turned Congregationalist minister, wrestled with the problem in a book he wrote in 1905, clearly wishing desperately that Eliot could be counted a Christian but, being also a man of strict conscience, having to admit regretfully that she was not. Still he was able to console himself with the thought that

In her darkest hour of unbelief, I am of opinion that George Eliot was much more Christian than she knew, and that the influence of her past Christian experience was never entirely lost.