GHL to Alexander Main, London, 21 February 1872
Title
GHL to Alexander Main, London, 21 February 1872
Title
GHL to Alexander Main, London, 21 February 1872
Sender
George Henry Lewes
Recipient
Alexander Main
Date(s)
- 1872-02-21
Place
London
Letter Content
GHL to Alexander Main, London, 21 February 1872
Text: Main's copy owned by Mr. John R. Sprunt. Hitherto unpublished.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
February 72.
My dear Main
Mrs. Lewes interrupted me in my reading of your last to exclaim "Really this is a case to apply the conventional phrase and say if I can only find one reader who understands me I shall be content" -- so that the works may be said to have been written for you! But when I came to that passage in which you refer to what I said in the paper on Dickens respecting preliminary praise being done away with subsequent blundering, we both protested that such an allusion never could apply to you -- for one of the great pleasures of your letters has been precisely this absence of the too common tendency to scratch one when one doesn't itch!
It is pleasant to hear that the "Sayings" are already beginning to sell. I feel confident they will ultimately reach a very large sale. Already some friends of ours have got at the trick of making a present of it to proper readers, and this will spread.
I will ask my son for a photograph of himself and send it you but of her alas! there is nothing and will be nothing. Some day you will come to London and see her in the flesh, I hope.
I wish some of your hopefulness and Blackwood's could be communicated to her respecting the parts that are still to be written and those that are ready to appear: but she is incorrigibly sceptical, diffident -- or rather confident on the negative side -- feeling profoundly convinced that nothing will be worth printing. The more emphatic the testimonies to the parts that have already appeared the greater seems to her the ground for despair over the unborn!
Ever truly yours
G. H. Lewes.
Text: Main's copy owned by Mr. John R. Sprunt. Hitherto unpublished.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
February 72.
My dear Main
Mrs. Lewes interrupted me in my reading of your last to exclaim "Really this is a case to apply the conventional phrase and say if I can only find one reader who understands me I shall be content" -- so that the works may be said to have been written for you! But when I came to that passage in which you refer to what I said in the paper on Dickens respecting preliminary praise being done away with subsequent blundering, we both protested that such an allusion never could apply to you -- for one of the great pleasures of your letters has been precisely this absence of the too common tendency to scratch one when one doesn't itch!
It is pleasant to hear that the "Sayings" are already beginning to sell. I feel confident they will ultimately reach a very large sale. Already some friends of ours have got at the trick of making a present of it to proper readers, and this will spread.
I will ask my son for a photograph of himself and send it you but of her alas! there is nothing and will be nothing. Some day you will come to London and see her in the flesh, I hope.
I wish some of your hopefulness and Blackwood's could be communicated to her respecting the parts that are still to be written and those that are ready to appear: but she is incorrigibly sceptical, diffident -- or rather confident on the negative side -- feeling profoundly convinced that nothing will be worth printing. The more emphatic the testimonies to the parts that have already appeared the greater seems to her the ground for despair over the unborn!
Ever truly yours
G. H. Lewes.
Signature
G. H. Lewes.
Citation
George Henry Lewes, GHL to Alexander Main, London, 21 February 1872, 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/94415