GE to Alexander Main, London, 14 January 1874
Title
GE to Alexander Main, London, 14 January 1874
Title
GE to Alexander Main, London, 14 January 1874
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
Alexander Main
Date(s)
- 1874-01-14
Place
London
Letter Content
GE to Alexander Main, London, 14 January 1874
MS: The late Mr. Arthur Pforzheimer. Hitherto unpublished.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
January 14. 74.
My dear Mr. Main
On looking at the date of your kind inscription in the new edition of the "Sayings," I see December 30th 12 -- fully a fortnight ago. But I feel sure that you will revoke any conclusion taxing me with indifference to your sympathetic work when I tell you that I have been more than usually a victim to incapacitating headache and other miserable sensations for the last six weeks, and that my days have glided by leaving me little more than a registry of loss.
I have just been looking through the extracts from Middlemarch which make the [differentia] of the new edition, and I find your choice marked as usual by a keen sensibility and penetration. The only objection I see possible to urge is, that there are perhaps too many, and that the work is left too nearly in the condition of the gutted house.
The book has now so goodly an embonpoint, that it gives at least this amount of cheerfulness to the probability that I shall never write another book worth extracting from, namely, that the "Sayings" will not bear any addition.
If I had not already allowed so much time to pass before thanking you for what you have done in painstaking judgment applied to Middlemarch, I should have waited to write until I could tell you my impression from your work on Johnson. But I cannot bear to delay my little sign of grateful remembrance longer, especially as I fear that you may have felt a wound from the wantonly expressed animus of the notice which the Athenaeum hurled at you. 13 Yet, you would see that there was no pretence of a judgment determined by examination of your work, and the notice may have been prompted solely by some backstairs influence of a publisher. Happily, Mr. F. Chapman, when Mr. Lewes saw him the other day, laughed at the notice and showed that his publishing withers were unwrung.
I am delighted to tell you that my husband's health is much improved under the guidance of a friendly physician, and he works with much enjoyment. But there is rather an excess of occupation just now, owing to the pleasant fact that his volume already published is going out of print, and he has to revise it for going to press again. 14
In reading this scanty letter you must allow for the fact that I am writing in the first hour of freedom from a trying attack of dyspepsia, and am very much below par. Still, I make myself happier by writing, instead of bearing you on my mind with a sense that I have omitted the discharge of a debt.
Always yours most faithfully
M. E. Lewes.
MS: The late Mr. Arthur Pforzheimer. Hitherto unpublished.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
January 14. 74.
My dear Mr. Main
On looking at the date of your kind inscription in the new edition of the "Sayings," I see December 30th 12 -- fully a fortnight ago. But I feel sure that you will revoke any conclusion taxing me with indifference to your sympathetic work when I tell you that I have been more than usually a victim to incapacitating headache and other miserable sensations for the last six weeks, and that my days have glided by leaving me little more than a registry of loss.
I have just been looking through the extracts from Middlemarch which make the [differentia] of the new edition, and I find your choice marked as usual by a keen sensibility and penetration. The only objection I see possible to urge is, that there are perhaps too many, and that the work is left too nearly in the condition of the gutted house.
The book has now so goodly an embonpoint, that it gives at least this amount of cheerfulness to the probability that I shall never write another book worth extracting from, namely, that the "Sayings" will not bear any addition.
If I had not already allowed so much time to pass before thanking you for what you have done in painstaking judgment applied to Middlemarch, I should have waited to write until I could tell you my impression from your work on Johnson. But I cannot bear to delay my little sign of grateful remembrance longer, especially as I fear that you may have felt a wound from the wantonly expressed animus of the notice which the Athenaeum hurled at you. 13 Yet, you would see that there was no pretence of a judgment determined by examination of your work, and the notice may have been prompted solely by some backstairs influence of a publisher. Happily, Mr. F. Chapman, when Mr. Lewes saw him the other day, laughed at the notice and showed that his publishing withers were unwrung.
I am delighted to tell you that my husband's health is much improved under the guidance of a friendly physician, and he works with much enjoyment. But there is rather an excess of occupation just now, owing to the pleasant fact that his volume already published is going out of print, and he has to revise it for going to press again. 14
In reading this scanty letter you must allow for the fact that I am writing in the first hour of freedom from a trying attack of dyspepsia, and am very much below par. Still, I make myself happier by writing, instead of bearing you on my mind with a sense that I have omitted the discharge of a debt.
Always yours most faithfully
M. E. Lewes.
Signature
M. E. Lewes.
Citation
George Eliot, GE to Alexander Main, London, 14 January 1874, Complete George Eliot Letters(2026), George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed September 7, 2026. https://georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/91987