INTRODUCTION

On Monday 3 May 1852 Dickens sent a brief note to the radical London publisher John Chapman about a meeting scheduled for the next day at Chapman's bookselling business and family home, 142 Strand. 'I have a previous appointment', he wrote, 'but will be with you as early as I can, and before the general hour.'1 The meeting in question had been called by Chapman, owner and nominal editor of the Westminster Review, the quarterly periodical set up in 1824 by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill to support political reform, and publisher of books of a radical tendency in politics, philosophy, and religion. The object of the meeting, which Dickens was to chair, was to protest against the practice of fixing book prices. More specifically, the protesters were targeting the Booksellers' Association, a grouping of large booksellers which had set prices, prohibiting smaller businesses like that of Chapman from offering discounts over 10 per cent. Dickens's publishers Bradbury and Evans had protested against the Association, and Dickens was only one of a number of leading writers to support Chapman in his bid for free trade in books.

The April number of the Westminster Review had carried an article by Chapman, 'The Commerce of Literature'. In it he accused the Association of adding to the 'taxes on knowledge' represented by duty on paper and the Stamp Tax on newspapers - which was not abolished until 1855 - by its price fixing. A wider debate was sparked off, with the letters page of The Times printing arguments for and against loosening the regulations governing the sale of books.

The meeting on 4 May attracted support for the cause from a large number of luminaries. Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and the Anti-Corn Law agitator Richard Cobden sent letters which Dickens read out. Those present at 142 Strand included Wilkie Collins, the social philosopher Herbert Spencer, and the medical lecturer and practitioner Edwin Lankester. Among the speakers were Richard Owen, naturalist, designer of dinosaur models for Crystal Palace, and prime mover in the establishment of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington; Francis Newman, brother of John Henry Newman and professor of Latin at University College London; and Charles Babbage the inventor. The meeting endorsed several resolutions to be sent to Lord Campbell, the Lord Chief Justice, who was chairing a committee set up to arbitrate between the free traders and the protectionists. Also there was George Henry Lewes. He was co-founder and editor of the Leader, a radical weekly newspaper, and a frequenter of Chapman's regular soirées for authors.

Another man of note was Henry Crabb Robinson, ageing literary man, erstwhile friend of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb, and indefatigable diarist from 1811 until his death in 1867. Crabb Robinson not only attended the meeting, but noted the occasion in his diary. According to him, the best speakers were the playwright Tom Taylor and Professor Owen, who 'spoke feelingly'. Some booksellers 'on the other side' also spoke, but 'were not listened to'.2

Not everyone spoke. Lewes did not, nor did Herbert Spencer, though he did a lot of backroom work, helping Chapman draft parts of his address.3 Neither did the person who has left the most detailed account of the proceedings. This was not Dickens or Crabb Robinson or Spencer, but Marian Evans, Chapman's editorial assistant on the Westminster Review, who lodged in one of the upper rooms at 142 Strand which Chapman let to his assistants, and to visiting authors and business acquaintances. She had moved into Chapman's house in January 1851, having left Warwickshire at the age of thirty-one to make an independent living as a journalist in London. Marian Evans was in fact much more than Chapman's assistant. She was the actual editor of the Westminster, though unofficially so.

The account she sent on 5 May to her Coventry friends Charles and Cara Bray conveys her excitement at being involved in a cause embraced by so many of the leading writers and thinkers of the day:

Dearest Friends

The meeting last night went off triumphantly, and I saluted Mr. Chapman with 'See the Conquering Hero Comes' on the piano at 12 o'clock, for not until then was the last magnate except Herbert Spencer out of the house. I sat at the door for a short time, but soon got a chair within it and heard and saw everything.

Dickens in the chair - a position he fills remarkably well, preserving a courteous neutrality of eyebrow, and speaking with clearness and decision. His appearance is certainly disappointing - no benevolence in the face and I think little in the head - the anterior lobe not by any means remarkable. In fact he is not distinguished looking in any way - neither handsome nor ugly, neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor short.

The reference to benevolence and anterior lobes was directed at Charles Bray's interest in phrenology, the 'science' of reading character by means of observing the contours of the head in the belief that certain faculties resided in different parts of the cranium and could be assessed in terms of the relative size and shape of those parts. Like Crabb Robinson, Marian thought that Professor Owen's speech was 'remarkably good', adding for Bray's benefit, 'Owen has a tremendous head and looked, as he was, the greatest celebrity of the meeting.'4

As it happens, Marian Evans's own head had also more than once been pronounced tremendous. She had accompanied Bray to London in 1844, when she had a cast made of her head by James Deville of the Strand. The cast was taken by the country's leading phrenologist, George Combe of Edinburgh, for a man's.5 When Combe subsequently met Marian at Rosehill, Bray's hospitable house in Coventry, in August 1851, he studied her head in the flesh, noting its unusual size and drawing on his conversation with her as well as his experience of feeling her head to report that she was 'the most extraordinary person of the party' gathered at Rosehill. 'She has a very large brain, the anterior lobe is remarkable for length, breadth, and height, the coronal region is large, the front rather predominating', Combe wrote admiringly in his journal.6

The phrenologists were not alone in their astonishment at the size of Marian Evans's brain. Herbert Spencer, her closest companion in 1852, wrote in April that year that she was 'the most admirable woman, mentally, I ever met'. He was working with her in preparation for the 4 May meeting, making multiple copies of the resolutions to be put by Chapman, and later recalled the speed with which she wrote in her large, free handwriting.7 She had not yet written a line of fiction; no one knew her outside the small but important circle of progressive men of letters clustered around Chapman. But she was known to them - to Chapman, for whose charms she had fallen in 1850; to Spencer, with whom she was in love in 1852; to Lewes, with whom she was to live happily for twenty-five years; to Dickens, whose pre-eminence among novelists she was to challenge in 1859 with the publication of Adam Bede - as a most remarkable woman.

Her presence at the meeting on 4 May, attended by all these men, each of whom played such an important part in her life then and later, was itself remarkable. For Marian Evans was the only woman there. The unusualness of her position as a young woman pursuing an independent career in the radical free-thinking man's world of London in 1852 can hardly be overestimated.

Two contemporaries who knew her well in these years before she achieved fame recalled her early days in London in striking terms. Bessie Rayner Parkes (later Madame Belloc, mother of Hilaire) frequently saw Marian Evans, nearly ten years her senior, at dinner parties given at the London house of her father, Joseph Parkes, a radical lawyer from Birmingham:

On these occasions, from 1851 to 1855, she used to wear black velvet, then seldom adopted by unmarried ladies. I can see her descending the great staircase of our house in Savile Row (afterwards the Stafford Club), on my father's arm, the only lady, except my mother, among the group of remarkable men, politicians, and authors of the first literary rank. She would talk and laugh softly, and look up into my father's face respectfully, while the light of the bright hall-lamp shone on the waving masses of her hair, and the black velvet fell in folds about her feet.8

And William Hale White, known as 'Mark Rutherford' from the two pseudonymous volumes of semi-fictional 'autobiography' he published in the 1880s, described her in even more arresting detail. He lodged in the same house, 142 Strand, for two years from 1852. like her, he was employed as an assistant by Chapman. In 1885 Hale White remembered Marian Evans, with whom he had been half in love but too diffident to express his feelings at the time, in the following words:

She was really one of the most sceptical, unusual creatures I ever knew, and it was this side of her character which to me was the most attractive. She told me that it was worth while to undertake all the labour of learning French if it resulted in nothing more than reading one book - Rousseau's 'Confessions'. That saying was perfectly symbolical of her,...