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The Complicity of Friends
How George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and John Hughlings-Jackson Encoded Herbert Spencer’s Secret
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2012
Summary
One of Victorian England’s most famous philosophers harbored a secret: Herbert Spencer suffered from an illness so laden with stigma that he feared its revelation would ruin him. He therefore went to extraordinary lengths to hide his malady from the public. Exceptionally, he drew two of his closest friends—the novelist George Eliot and her partner, G. H. Lewes—into his secret. Years later, he also shared it with a remarkable neurologist, John Hughlings-Jackson, better placed than anyone else in England to understand his illness. Spencer insisted that all three support him without betraying his condition to others—and two of them did so. But George Eliot, still smarting from Spencer’s rejection, years earlier, of her offer of love, did not. Ingeniously, she devised a means both of nominally respecting (for their contemporaries) and of violating (for our benefit) Spencer’s injunction. What she hid from her peers she reveals to us in an act of deferred, but audacious literary revenge. It’s here decoded for the first time. Indeed The Complicity of Friends comprises the first disclosure of Spencer’s hidden frailty but also, more importantly, of the responses it generated in the lives and works of his three notable friends.
This book provides a complete rethinking of its principal figures. The novelist who emerges in these pages is a more sinuous and passionate George Eliot than the oracular Victorian we are used to hearing about. The significance of the friendship between Lewes, her irrepressible partner, and the inventive Hughlings-Jackson is outlined for the first time. And in an ironic twist, even his three farsighted confidants could not anticipate that, late in the twentieth century, certain of Spencer’s own intuitions about the nature and provenance of his illness would be vindicated. Those with any interest in George Eliot, Lewes, Hughlings-Jackson, or Spencer will be compelled to re-envision their personalities after reading The Complicity of Friends.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright year
2012
ISBN-Print
978-1-61148-418-2
ISBN-Online
978-1-61148-419-9
Publisher
Lexington, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
385
Product type
Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Abbreviations No access
Preface No access
Chapter One: Introduction: Two Secrets—or One? No access Pages 1 - 20
Chapter Two: “The Lifted Veil,” A: George Eliot Stolen! No access
Chapter Three: “The Lifted Veil,” B: Revenge by Diagnosis No access
Chapter Four: A Fitful Reader No access
Chapter Five: The Dagger Sheathed, Partly No access
Chapter Six: Electricity and the Man No access
Chapter Seven: The Mystery of the Two Rooms No access
Chapter Eight: Enter Hughlings-Jackson No access
Chapter Nine: A Good Strong Terrible Vision No access
Chapter Ten: Lewes the Fixer No access
Chapter Eleven: Who Was Hughlings-Jackson’s “Educated Patient”? No access
Chapter Twelve: Ghost Stories No access
Chapter Thirteen: The Man between the Fits No access
Chapter Fourteen: Eliot Does Mischief (Again) No access
Chapter Fifteen: Life After the Georges No access
Chapter Sixteen: Conclusion: The Brain Is Not the Mind No access
Appendix 1: Many Snapshots, One Secretive Patient No access Pages 331 - 344
Appendix 2: Did Spencer Have Autosomal Dominant Partial Epilepsy with Auditory Features? No access Pages 345 - 354
