In praise of George Eliot on her 200th birthday

This week marks the bicentenary of the birth of one of England's greatest novelists, George Eliot. She was born on 22 November 1819 in Nuneaton, not far from Coventry, the city that was to play an important part in her life and be immortalised in her novel Middlemarch.

Coventry was where I discovered George Eliot. We lived there from 1987 to 1995 when I was Precentor of Coventry Cathedral. In that time I was asked to go to Nuneaton to dedicate a memorial to its greatest daughter. By then I was reading the novels, and someone must have overheard me exclaiming how marvellous they were. And indeed, what prompts this bicentennial blog is precisely the revelation these great books proved to be when I opened them for the first time. I read through all her mature novels in the space of a year and wondered why it had taken me so long to discover them. Or, I think it's as fair to say, to be discovered by them. I'll try to explain.

In 1994 I gave a lecture at Nuneaton's George Eliot Hospital to mark the 175th anniversary of her birth. I posted it last week (on my other website where I post lectures and sermons) as I gave it at the time. The title was "Mary Ann Did Not Go". Mary Ann Evans was of course her real name. And "did not go"? It referred to a diary entry of her father's lamenting her refusal to attend church with him one Sunday morning in 1842. The church in question was St Michael's, Coventry that would later become the Cathedral and be bombed in the Luftwaffe raid of November 1940. You'll understand my keen interest in that episode. It belonged to the story of my place of work. And anyway, we clergy are as interested (or should be) in why people don't go to church as why they do.

Middlemarch was the first of her novels that I read. It was a good place to begin. It's not a perfect novel (is there such a thing?) but it's undeniably a very great one. Was it Virginia Woolf who said that it was one of the few novels written for grown-ups? In Middlemarch, many of the themes of her novels are worked out on a large canvas: human lives being lived out in small communities of dense networks and intricate relationships; the contrast between the intimate scale of ordinary human concerns and the broad sweep of a history that was, always is, changing the nation irrevocably; the place of church and religion in an industrialising and increasingly sceptical society; the portrait of a flawed clergyman surrounded by his books and driven by the need to uncover "the key to all mythologies". Was he, the unlikeable Casaubon, relentless pursuer of the inexplicable, too close for comfort? And was it significant that the book's beautifully drawn heroine Dorothea, a fictional creation Mary Ann must have been particularly fond of, had the same name as my mother?

If you are a priest, you live and work on these kinds of threshold all the time. Your task is to try to interpret how the various narratives we are part of interact and converse with one another: the larger, universal story of God as he is in the world in relation to the more intimate stories of who and what we are as men, women and children living ordinary human lives at particular times and in particular places. Of these, the church is a symbol that looks in both directions: worldwide and local, belonging to every place and to my place. "Mary Ann did not go" to her local church. But she never lost her interest in, her fascination with, religion. Church and clergy feature in most of her novels, as I point out in the lecture. Her last novel, Daniel Deronda, was as explicitly about religion as any English novelist of her century got.

In this respect, George Eliot brings an implicitly theological perspective to her characters and their settings. She knew enough about organised religion to respect it as an irreplaceable social glue and catalyst of moral good. Though she had also read the writings of honest doubters like Renan, Strauss and Feuerbach and knew not to invest religion with a metaphysical reality it can't sustain. For her, the continued potential of religion lay in the sentient dimension of imagination and feeling. Maybe she never quite grew out of a nostalgia for a secure and happy childhood in which religion played a central role. There's something rose-hued about Adam Bede and Scenes of Clerical Life as there is about the prelapsarian world of The Mill on the Floss before the flood. She was perhaps the quintessential embodiment of the Victorian crisis of faith: intellectually troubled but emotionally more attached than she might have admitted.

In all this, George Eliot is, I think, a theologian's novelist. Her range, intelligence and depth of insight are perhaps the closest an English novelist has ever got to Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Cor ad cor loquitur. A theologian recognises a kindred spirit, even when a theological heart is manifested in a different discipline. It was this, as much as anything, that first drew me to her writings. She was as important a discovery to me as John Henry Newman had been twenty years earlier, about whom I wrote a blog last month. And looking back as I do now, I see that the kind of Christianity I'm increasingly drawn to - liberal, questioning, generous, socially concerned, inclusive and above all, humane - owes more to her than I realised at the time.

I guess I recognised in George Eliot a novelist with a sense of place. I came to think of her as a geographer of the human spirit, at home in the landscape of the mind and a reliable guide to reading its map so as to chart our paths across it. But I also warmed to her physical sense of place. I'd moved to the Midlands from North East England and had felt the loss of its regional distinctiveness, its strong, definable character, the accents of both people and place. I think I was looking for a native voice who could help me find my home in "Loamshire", as Mary Ann called it. I came across these words in Daniel Deronda, new to me then though, I discovered, much quoted long before it became fashionable for some of us to describe ourselves proudly as "citizens of the world".

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.

Has the elusive idea of "sense of place", of the importance of being nourished by attachment and belonging, ever better been put into words? Every great novelist has this sense of place, whether it's Dickens' London, Hardy's Wessex or the Bronte's West Riding. But I hadn't realised how literature can help bond you to the particular geography you call your own until I needed it to do that for me. And although I now live a long way from Goerge Eliot's Midlands, I can't revisit them in my mind without construing the shapes and patterns of the human textures she laid over them in her writings. Only the greatest of writers achieves this to the point of depositing ideas and images in the mind that you know you'll never forget.

To mark the anniversary of her birth this week, Kathryn Hughes has been presenting A Life in Five Characters on BBC Radio 4. George Eliot never wrote an autobiography (if only she had! - wouldn't it have been one of the most luminous and intelligent of all nineteenth century lives?). Instead she wrote her life into her leading characters: Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, Janet Dempster in Janet's Repentance - a novella which was a new one for me, Silas Marner in the novel that bears his name, and finally, on her day itself, Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda.

Kathryn Hughes has also written an engaging piece in The Guardian in honour of the bicentenary, "What George Eliot's 'provincial' novels can teach today's divided Britain". She writes with the Brexit referendum in mind, and the current election campaign. "This recent habit of reducing people to types would have appalled Eliot. Her chief message is that we must learn to identify and honour the particular differences between us while acknowledging our shared humanity. Art is the nearest thing to life, she wrote in an essay in 1856. It is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.... Until we have understood what life is like for the Tullivers and the Dodsons, we are in no position to judge them for holding preferences and opinions that are so different from our own."

Verb sap. The great writer still speaks. Two hundred years on, we need to listen carefully.

Well done Coventry!

30 years ago this year, Coventry won the FA Cup Final. The city went wild with delight. It was said that a quarter of a million people were out on the streets to welcome their team home. Coventry was awash with sky-blue. The newly-hung cathedral bells, not yet formally dedicated, rang out for the first time to celebrate. No-one who was there will ever forget that weekend.

It's also 30 years since our family moved to Coventry. I went there to take up a post as residentiary canon at the Cathedral. I was installed on 10 May, the Sunday before the Big Match. In my sermon I wished the Sky Blues well at Wembley. There was hollow laughter, I recall. Who'd have thought that I of all people would be aware of an upcoming football event? And who'd have thought that Coventry had any chance of defeating Spurs who had won the trophy twice in the previous seven seasons?

And now, exactly three decades later, Coventry is once again walking tall. The city has been named UK Capital of Culture 2021. It deserves the honour. I can say that as someone who has known it well. We spent eight happy years there. It's where our children mostly grew up, so we have always thought fondly of the city as, in a sense, still "ours". (That's also true, by the way, of another of the 2021 candidate cities, Sunderland, where we have lots of family connections. They too put up a first-rate bid and it's a pity that when it comes to the Capital of Culture, it can't be a case of Alice's oft-quoted words "all have won, so all must have prizes".)

A few years ago I blogged about going back to Coventry. That occasion was the golden jubilee of the consecration of the "new" Coventry Cathedral in 1962. As I wrote then, I'd been one of the millions who'd visited the Cathedral that year. I was twelve when my parents took me. I can vividly recall my impressions on that late spring day, most of all of Graham Sutherland's huge tapestry of Christ in Glory, John Piper's marvellous coloured glass in the baptistery, and not least, looking down at my own reflection in the black mirror-like surface of the nave floor. I was not a religious boy in those days, but I was both stirred and moved by that great building. It seemed to speak beyond itself to something bigger and more expansive than I think I'd ever known. Looking back, I guess it was one of my early spiritual experiences, an intimation of resurrection. Twenty-five years later, one of my first jobs at the Cathedral was to organise the silver jubilee celebrations.

Living there, I became fascinated by this city of paradoxes. There was something homely and familiar about its medieval streets, so Warwickshire, so quintessentially England. Yet the pre-war planners (quoting Tennyson's "the old order changeth, giving place to new") had already laid waste to Butchers' Row, what we would now regard as a priceless piece of heritage townscape comparable to the Shambles in York). And what they didn't destroy, the Luftwaffe made swift work of on that terrible night of bombing on 14 November 1940, codenamed "Operation Moonlight Sonata". What does it do to a city to have been reduced to ashes, to be the only one in Britain whose cathedral was destroyed by enemy action?

After the war, a brave new city arose like a phoenix. Ancient and modern stood inextricably bound together in both the way the city was re-engineered, and in the experience of its citizens. So much was symbolised by the old and new cathedrals standing side by side, or rather, in these two physical expressions of one single Cathedral. With the exception of the Cathedral, the architecture of the 1950s and 60s has not fared as well as what survives of the middle ages. Perhaps Coventry was rebuilt in too much of a hurry. These days the city is not the gleaming emblem of modernity it once was. Its industries experienced a steep decline from the late 1970s so that by the time I was living there, unemployment was high and the future of its manufacturing industries looked bleak.

Yet somehow, the spirit of Coventrians was not broken by this turnabout in its fortunes. Yes, they could be good at looking west to Birmingham and envying the seemingly unstoppable success of their near neighbour. (Coventry is to Birmingham as Sunderland is to Newcastle and Bradford is to Leeds - these pairings of cities with very different characteristics are an intriguing aspect of modern Britain.) But look at what the new Commonwealth immigrants who came to work in Coventry after the war brought to the city. I found I was living in one of the most vibrant, multicultural places I'd ever known. My suburban assumptions about what it meant to be British were challenged like never before or since. We loved visiting the places of worship of other faith communities and getting to know our warm-hearted, hospitable hosts. I think that it was there that I consciously began trying to think of myself, in a famous if much maligned phrase, as a "citizen of the world".

It's important that "City of Culture" is interpreted in the widest possible way. Hull has demonstrated this most successfully in 2017 and we salute that city. Culture is a slippery word that can quickly take on a whiff of elitism if we aren't careful. The point about culture is that it is essentially demotic in character. This is because it is about what has formed and made us to be the people, the societies, the communities we are, how we have been grown. That's much more than simply a matter of museums and libraries, literature and poetry, art and architecture. Somehow, I have a hunch that the people of Coventry will be very good at sharing who and what they are, and how they have travelled together as a city across the centuries and through the recent past into the present.

As for what we call culture in the more traditional sense, there is more than enough to make the trip to Coventry worth while. Many have pointed out that Hull and Coventry (together with my own village of Haydon Bridge) have in common the poet Philip Larkin. One of the best twentieth century English poets, while he lived and worked in Hull, it was in Coventry that he was born. I have to say that in my time, Coventry had not done nearly as much as Hull to honour him, so I hope 2021 will put that right. Similarly, though less noticed, the Nuneaton-born Victorian novelist George Eliot, as great in her century as Larkin was in his, also lived in Coventry. Her greatest novel Middlemarch ("the magnificent book that...is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" said Virginia Woolf) is very probably based on Coventry.

I could go on to write about the legendary Leofric and Godiva, Coventry's history as one of England's great medieval cities, its industrial heritage, its Herbert Art Gallery and Motor Museum, to say nothing of the Cathedral itself which constitutes one of the best expressions of mid-twentieth century artistry and craftsmanship in England. I could mention the rich diversity of performing arts in the city in both dedicated venues and in the streets and squares. I could write about the two universities that contribute so much to Coventry's intellectual and cultural landscape. And I could write about how Coventry has become a symbol of international reconciliation and peace-making that has evoked the admiration of people across the world.

But most of all, it's the people who make the place. When it was announced that Coventry had won their bid to be City of Culture, I was touched to hear ordinary Coventry people speak about their city and why they loved it. I'm sure the citizens of all five shortlisted cities would have said the same of theirs. Perhaps Coventry, with its cosmopolitan and internationalist outlook, can represent the best of what they would have contributed to this celebration of all that we cherish and are proud of in the culture of these islands.

A final thought. Why can't we have a UK City of Culture every year? The quality of this year's bids shows how much potential there is across the nation to promote art, heritage, tourism and regeneration. We need more local celebrations like this to shine a light on the cultural riches of the UK's towns and cities outside London - not just on places but on their communities. It would be a modest enough claim on central funds. Thanks to the enterprise of their citizens, Hull and Coventry show how a little can go a very long way. Let's go for it, and let Sunderland have the next turn in 2022.

"Where Do You Come From?" Thoughts on belonging and identity

"A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood."

George Eliot in Daniel Deronda is talking about childhood, how our earliest "sense of place" helps form our instinct that we belong to the soil we live on, and that we should love it and let it teach us about the great world into which we have been born as its citizens. 

I was brought up in suburban north London. I may have caught the occasional glimpse of Eliot's world when riding my bicycle in Highgate Woods or roaming Hampstead Heath on my way back from school. But it was hard to love the net curtains, manicured privet hedges and creosoted fences of suburbia. To me they all came to symbolise the addiction to privacy that's a peculiarly English trait. We knew few of our neighbours by name and socialised with fewer still though they were kind, decent people. We all kept ourselves to ourselves. We liked it that way. I had a good upbringing there. But it didn't help me to understand the idea of community.

So where do I say I'm "from"? This question has exercised me for some time. My usual answer is "North East England". I've lived here for longer than anywhere else in my life. I've come to love the strong sense of identity here in this region, and the wonderful people we have lived amongst, both in County Durham and Northumberland. I feel I belong here in a way that's more true than any of the many places we've been glad to call "home" up and down the country. When we first came to work in Northumberland in the 1980s, I found a lived understanding of "community" that was new to me. The Cheviot farmers talk about sheep being "hefted" on to their hill, bound to it as their own place. That's how I've come to feel about the North East. I've "gone native" as they say.

But that's only a part of my answer. In the expanding concentric circles of my belonging, my being European has always been important too. I've blogged about this before, how my mother's family were German-Jewish war refugees whom this country took in before it was too late. In my childhood we found ourselves on the periphery of a community of German emigrés in north London, all of them a lot better off than we were. Perhaps the fact that my mother had married "out" (i.e. an Englishman) meant that we weren't altogether kosher. But at social gatherings, we all flipped easily from English to German and back again. Families compared notes about their German homelands: Bavaria, Swabia and my mother's native Westphalia. As children we went to Germany a number of times to sort out my mother's family affairs. I felt at home there, and still do. And that goes for all the other countries in our continent that I've visited, from Ireland via Spain, France and Austria to the Czech Rebgpublic, Slovakia and Hungary.

On my Twitter profile, it says that I am "a European at home in North East England". I thought carefully about how to phrase that. "North East" says that locality is important, George Eliot's sense of a native soil in a particular place. "European" says that our larger networks and associations are important too, our ability to think beyond national boundaries (and not to stop until we think of ourselves as "citizens of the world" which is what George Eliot goes on to speak about). What about "England"? 

I admit that I don't often speak about being "English" (except in France where "je suis Anglais" is the usual answer to "where are you from?"). I'm a British national as it says on my passport. And my sense of nationhood is profoundly important. I don't give it absolute value ("my country right or wrong") and I always want to nuance it by saying that both my smaller and my larger circles of belonging matter just as much. However, I guess that if you are at all moved by Rupert Brooke's poem "The Soldier" and can read it, not as Great War jingoism nor as cloying nostalgic sentimentalism but for what it is, a simple, affecting love poem to his country, you're a patriot at heart. "A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, / Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam" is precisely what George Eliot is talking about. For Brooke, it had become "a sweet habit of the blood" to think and - just as important - to feel like this. I think I'm beginning to grasp this as I inhabit the later decades of my life when asking who I have been is vital to understanding who I am now. 

The EU referendum is making us think about these questions, where and how and why we belong. Some people seem to think that the EU is all about creating a superstate that will do away with local, regional and national identities and the human dimensions we associate with homeland and home. But the exact opposite is the case. The European Union has been a staunch defender of regionalism and localism and funds have followed that conviction. We've seen how in our own islands, membership of the United Kingdom has promoted a growth in Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish identities, and the same is true across continental Europe. These are welcome developments. They express the important idea of "subsidiarity" whereby things are not undertaken centrally that are better done nationally or locally. That's usually associated with decision-making. But implicit in it is the more basic concept of belonging. That's why it's to the good when we associate to all the communities we live in - small, large and intermediate. They help us learn that ultimately, our family is nothing less than the whole human race. 

This isn't quite making a "patriotic case" for remaining in the EU. But I hope that at the very least, it begins to show how a patriotic love of our country and a grateful attachment to our locality are not only compatible with our membership of the EU but positively encouraged by it.