George Henry Lewes

be a little bit reluctant about calling him one of the great psychologists.

I feel like there are much more prominent names in the 19th century, even if they've been forgotten by us, but even calling Dickens somebody interested in psychology, somebody well-versed in his contemporary psychology is assuming a bit of a controversial position because as I detail in the book, Dickens' contemporaries, at least prominent contemporaries like George Henry Lewis, objected to the idea that Dickens was a thinker at all and this this sort of stereotype of Dickens as somebody who is a great deal of fun and somebody who was a humorist but not a thinker not a reader that has just ossified in the time between Dickens and us so that I think there's lots and lots of people lots of readers lots of scholars who would object to the idea that Dickens is a psychologist at all.

So I'm fighting an uphill battle throughout the text just in saying this is somebody who knows his way around psychology and who is himself contributing to that conversation among the Victorians.

As for how I got involved in this, to be honest, this stretches all the way back to my days as an undergraduate.

He is publishing in his journals, especially Household Words and all the year-round articles on these debates, on aspects of psychology as well as many other sciences.

He also has, you know, sort of professional networks and friendships that he's tapping into.

So he is, I start the book with an anecdote of him having dinner and talking about sort of psychological curiosities with george elliott and and george henry lewis um he his physician and and good friend john elliotson was a prominent advocate for mesmerism um he's friends with a number of these people and then also just has professional connections with them and so he'll he'll you know he'll be at events with people or he'll he'll meet them in in different professional capacities so he he knows the people who are prominent voices in these debates um he is publishing work that is either responding to those debates or contributing to them um and he is is reading this stuff and then engaging using the language using the concepts in his novels and in his journalism

I think George Eliot stands out as someone I've discussed before on the channel, as someone who certainly had a lot of time for scientific metaphor, things like a study and the references to microscopes and so on, organisms and looking at society of places like Middlemarch.

She kind of hated it.

So she would always send her, um, common law husband, George Henry Lewis, in her stead.

But occasionally she actually had to go herself when she was researching Romola, um, which is set in the Italian Renaissance.

And on the, in December 1861, she wrote to a friend, "We're now, we're going now to the British Museum to read, a painful way of getting knowledge.

Italy becomes the stage on which William Dorrit's fragile respectability and reckless extravagance are exposed.

Although Middlemarch is rooted in provincial England, George Eliot's own travels to Italy, first in 1849 and later with George Henry Lewis, shape the novel's brief but pivotal Roman chapters.

Rome is the site of Dorothea Brooke's honeymoon with the much older scholar Edward Casabon.

The city's overwhelming art, architecture and intellectual life highlight the mismatch between Dorothea's idealism and Casabon's emotional and scholarly rigidity.

phaedrus ha do i perceive that have you maka dee sot of us

this is well he has made us his vlouting's dog i desire you that we may be friends and let us knock our prince together to be revenge on this same scull scurvy cogging companion the host of the garter

by gar with all my heart he promised to bring me where he's unpaid by gar he deceived me too

well i will smite his noddles pray you follow

sir? Did she change her determination?

No, Master Brooke.

But the peaking Cornetto, her husband, Master Brooke, dwelling in a continual larum of jealousy, comes me in the instant of our encounter, after we had embraced, kissed, protested, and, as it were, spoke the prologue of our comedy, and at his heels a rabble of his companions, thither provoked and instigated by his distemper, and forsooth to search his house for his wife's love.'

"'What? Why, you were there?' "'Well, I was there.' and did he search for you and could not find you

We went by train, and walked through the rooms and galleries of the palace with interest, though we constantly regretted our inability through ignorance to feel properly the charm of the place.

my knowledge of french history was limited to the very little i had learned in the schoolroom historical novels and the first volume of justin mccarthy's french revolution over thirty years before my brother had written a prize poem on marie antoinette for whom at the time i had felt much enthusiasm but the german occupation was chiefly in our minds and miss lamont and i thought and spoke of it several times we sat down and decided a glass where a very sweet air was blowing in at the open windows over the flower-beds below and finding that there was time to spare i suggested our going to the petit my sole knowledge of it was from a magazine article read as a girl from which i received a general impression that it was a farmhouse where the queen had amused herself looking in baedeker's map we saw the sort of direction and that there were two trianons and set off by not asking the way we went an unnecessarily long way round by the great flights of steps from the fountains and down the central avenue as far as the head of the long pond the weather had been very hot all the week but on this day the sky was a little overcast and the sun shaded there was a lively wind blowing the woods were looking their best and we both felt particularly vigorous it was a most enjoyable walk after reaching the beginning of the long water we struck away to the right down a woodland glade until we came obliquely to the other water close to the building which we rightly concluded to be the great we passed it on our left hand and came up a broad green drive perfectly deserted if we had followed it we should have come immediately to the petit trianon but not knowing its position we crossed the drive and went up a lane in front of us i was surprised that miss lamont did not ask the way from a woman who was shaking a white cloth out of the window of a building at the corner of the lane but followed supposing that she knew where she was going to talking about england and mutual acquaintances there we went up the lane and then made a sharp turn to the right past some buildings we looked in at an open doorway and saw the end of a carved staircase but as no one was about we did not like to go in there were three paths in front of us and as we saw two men a little ahead on the centre one we followed it and asked them the way afterwards we spoke of them as gardeners because we remembered a wheelbarrow of some kind close by and the look of a pointed spade but they were really very dignified officials dressed in long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats they directed us straight on we walked briskly forward talking as before but from the moment we left the lane an extraordinary depression had come over me which in spite of every effort to shake off steadily deepened there seemed to be absolutely no reason for it i was not at all tired and was becoming more interested in my surroundings i was anxious that my companion should not discover the sudden gloom upon my spirits which became quite overpowering on reaching the point where the path ended being crossed by another right and left in front of us was a wood within which and overshadowed by trees was a light garden kiosk circular and like a small bandstand by which a man was sitting there was no green sward but the ground was covered with rough grass and dead leaves as in a wood the place was so shut in that we could not see beyond it everything suddenly looked unnatural therefore unpleasant even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless like a wood worked in tapestry there were no effects of light and shade and no wind stirred the trees it was all intensely still the man sitting close to the kiosk who had on a cloak and a large shady hat turned his head and looked at us that was the culmination of my peculiar sensations and i felt a moment of genuine alarm the man's face was most repulsive his expression odious his complexion was very dark and rough i said to mr lamont which is our way but thought nothing will induce me to go to the left It was a great relief at that moment to hear someone running up to us in breathless haste.

Connecting the sound with the gardeners, I turned and ascertained that there was no one on the paths, either to the side or behind, but at almost the same moment I suddenly perceived another man quite close to us, behind and rather to the left hand, who had apparently just come either over or through the rock, or whatever it was, that shut out the view at the junction of the paths.

The suddenness of his appearance was something of a shock.

His purpose was to learn about the wild animals rather than to kill them.

But the naturalist is close kin to the sportsman, and the gun was his constant companion.

In the clearing, the only animal of any size was a fat woodchuck.

It had a hole under a stump some hundred yards from the shanty.

Chapter 4 The Terror of the Woods Six weeks had passed in daily routine when one day the young giant seemed unusually quiet as he went about.

His handsome face was very sober and he sang not at all that morning.

He and Thor slept on a hay bunk in one corner of the main room, and that night the boy awakened more than once to hear his companion groaning and tossing in his sleep.

Corny arose as usual in the morning and fed the horses, but lay down again while the sisters got breakfast.

There lies before me as I write the massive volume of The Self-Interpreting Bible with explanatory contents, parallel scriptures, large notes, and practical observations by John Brown, Minister of the Gospel at Haddington, printed in 1778 and bought by C. Simeon, King's College, Cambridge, March 24, 1785.

This Bible was his lifelong companion and is inscribed with many notes from his pen.

One of these is appended to Deuteronomy 16.3, that thou mayest remember the day when thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt all the days of thy life.

In the margin, on the hand of his old age, he has written thus, underlining every word, So must I, and God helping me, so will I, the Easter week and especially the Easter Sunday, when my deliverance was complete, in 1779.

The vast congregation departed in a mood very different from that in which it had assembled, and it was evident from the remarks which were overheard at going out and the subdued tone in which they were made that many were seriously affected as well as surprised at what they had heard.

Of two young men who had come among the scoffers, one was heard to say to the other, Well, Simeon is no fool, however.

Fool, replied his companion, did you ever hear such a sermon before? Simeon had been preparing in many ways for this occasion.

Before honour is humility, and he had been, in John Thornton's words, growing downwards year by year under the stern discipline of difficulty met in the right way, the way of close and adoring communion with God.

It's pretty maddening to think that an important secret may lie here on this slip of paper and that it is beyond human power to penetrate it.

Sherlock Holmes had pushed away his untasted breakfast and lit the unsavory pipe, which was the companion of his deepest meditations.

I wonder,

said he, leaning back and staring at the ceiling.

In the dining-room she had been demure and discreet.

Now, all pretense of grief had passed away from her.

Her eyes shone with the joy of living, and her face still quivered with amusement at some remark of her companion.

He sat forward, his hands clasped and his forearms on his knees, with an answering smile upon his bold, handsome face.

In the alum works we made accurate inquiries after the production and purifying of this so necessary material and when we saw great heaps of a white greasy loose earthy matter and asked the use of it the laborers answered smiling that it was the scum thrown up in boiling the alum and that Herr Stauff had it collected as he hoped perchance to turn it to some profit.

"Is Herr Stauff alive yet?" exclaimed my companion in surprise.

They answered in the affirmative and assured us that according to the plan of our journey we should not pass far from his lonely dwelling.

A road now led up along the channels by which the alum water is conducted down and the principal horizontal works Stollen which they call the Landgrube and from which the famous Duttweiler coals are procured.

The thick forests on both the heights remain unused by the hand of man.

Here trunks of trees lie rotting on each other by thousands and young scions sprout up without number from their half-moulded progenitors.

Here in conversation with some companions on foot the name von Dieterich again struck our ears which we had often heard honourably mentioned already in these woody regions.

The activity and cleverness of this man his wealth and the use and applications of it all seemed in proportion.