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“I warn you against Ramsgate which is a strip of London come out for an airing. Broadstairs is perfect, and I have the snuggest little lodgings conceivable with a motherly good woman and a nice little damsel of 14 to wait on me.”¹

Marian Evans, later known as the novelist, George Eliot, visited Broadstairs in the summer of 1852. She had moved to London two years earlier, with the intention of becoming a writer and had gained work as assistant editor of the Westminster Review, but the work depressed her, and by July 1852 she was “sadly in want of the change.”² She wrote to her friend Sara Hennell that she felt “bothered to death with article-reading and scrap work of all sorts: it is clear my poor head will never produce anything under these circumstances, but I am patient.”³ She was also suffering from unrequited love, having recently been spurned by philosopher and biologist Herbert Spencer whom she had met through her friend, the publisher John Chapman.

According to Hughes it was unusual for a single woman to holiday alone and so the Chapmans, with whom Evans lodged in London, escorted her to the coast, thus giving an air of respectability about her stay.⁴ She found lodgings at Chandos Cottage, near the seafront with Melinda Edger (‘My nice, kind, blue-eyed landlady’) and her maid Eliza Bishop.⁵

There were two rooms in Chandos Cottage which Evans describes as “a sitting-room about eight feet by nine and a bedroom a little larger yet in that small space there is almost every comfort”.⁶ Evans wrote to her friend Cara Bray: “I pay a guinea a week for my rooms, so I shall not ruin myself by staying a month unless I commit excesses in coffee and sugar.”⁷ Coffee and sugar were not excessively expensive at this time, unlike tea which was three times the price of coffee, but reveal the additional charges that were imposed by landladies on seaside lodgings.⁸ She also mentions eating mutton chops.⁹ Evans continues “I am thinking whether it would not be wise to retire from the world and live here for the rest of my days. With some fresh paper on the walls and an easy chair I think I could resign myself.”¹⁰ Clearly, Chandos Cottage was a little shabby.

Broadstairs was at this time a fashionable sea-bathing resort “frequented by many families of distinction, particularly for those who prefer retirement to the noise and crowds of Margate and Ramsgate”¹¹. The Ramsgate steamer The Duchess of Kent had sunk on the 1st July after a collision with another boat in the Thames, so the perils of sea travel would have been much discussed among the visitors at Broadstairs and it is possible that Evans took the train to Ramsgate from London Bridge and then completed the journey to Broadstairs by road. There were baths, libraries, news rooms and assembly rooms at Broadstairs with Chandos Cottage conveniently located near the Royal Kent Library. Eliot remarked: “One sees no novels less than a year old at the seaside, so I am unacquainted with the ‘Blithedale Romance,’ except through the reviews, which have whetted my curiosity more than usual.”¹² Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book which had been published in late June and said to be available “at all Libraries in town or country” had not made it to Broadstairs.¹³

Shortly after her arrival, Evans, still in love with Herbert Spencer, invited him to visit her, writing: “No credit to me for my virtues as a refrigerant. I owe them all to a few lumps of ice which I carried away with me from that tremendous glacier of yours.”¹⁴ Spencer came down to stay at a nearby hotel, and they shared walks along the seashore, but he made it clear that he did not feel the same way. In his autobiography, he described her as “the most admirable woman, mentally, I ever met”¹⁵ but as he found her decidedly manly, there was a lack of physical attraction. In a letter to Spencer, Evans, aware of her own failure to attract him, made analogies between herself and the evolutionary biology he favoured: “I fancy I should soon be on equality, in point of sensibility, with the star-fish and sea-egg.”¹⁶ He described her as someone for whom “calmness was an habitual trait” and perhaps he failed to appreciate her disappointment.

Evans wrote to her friend Charles Bray “Do not be anxious about me – there is no cause, I am profiting, body and mind, from quiet walks and talks with nature, gathering “Lady’s Bedstraw” and “Rest-harrow” and other pretty things — picking up shells (not in the Newtonian sense, but literally)”¹⁷ Whether there was any hidden meaning in her remarks is uncertain. Our lady’s bedstraw could relate to the Virgin Mary, and to her virginal state, and restharrow to resistance or impenetrability, as the plant was known for woody roots which prevented the harrow from breaking up the soil, however as both plants can be found in chalky areas, they would have been in bloom on the cliffs around Broadstairs, at that time of year. Evans refused to talk about her emotions, writing instead about: “the world of sea and sky and rocks and flowers”¹⁸ stating that she was “imbibing its peaceful beauty and dignity and half determining never to go back to that human world with its jealousies and unrest.”¹⁹

She remained in Broadstairs for two months which she described as “this pretty, quiet place, which David Copperfield has made classic — far away from London noise and smoke”²⁰ but she was not completely isolated from friends. She received a note from Florence Nightingale and said “I was much pleased with her. There is a loftiness of mind about her which is well expressed by her form and manners”.²¹ She also kept up her work, writing to John Chapman: “I feel that I am a wretched helpmate to you, almost out of the world and incog. So far as I am in it. When you can afford to pay an Editor, if that time will ever come, you must get one.”²² In a letter to Sara Hennell she wrote: “I thought of you last night when I was in a state of mingled rapture and torture — rapture at the sight of a glorious evening sky, torture at the sight and hearing of the belabouring given to the poor donkey which was drawing me from Ramsgate home.”²³

By the middle of August, Evans was considering a return to London. She wrote: “Providence, seeing that I wanted weaning from this place, has sent a swarm of harvest-bugs and lady-birds to bite my legs. These, with the half blank, half dissipated feeling which comes on after having companions and losing them, make me think of returning to London on Saturday week with more resignation than I have felt before.”²⁴ On 30 August she wrote: “I celebrated my return to London 172 by the usual observances — that is to say, a violent headache and sickness.”²⁵

Evans spent a further six weeks in Kent on her return from a trip to Weimar and Berlin in 1855. She had been visiting Germany with George Henry Lewes, who was researching Goethe. Lewes was already married, but in an open relationship with his wife, and so the couple began to live together, however on their return to England “the practical implications of their liaison”²⁶ became apparent. Evans stayed at the Lord Warden Hotel Dover for six weeks whilst Lewes made arrangements in London. She spent the time writing Recollections of Berlin and translating Spinoza.

This article was published: 26 March 2022.

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