GE to Caroline [Mrs. Charles] Bray, Richmond, 26 November 1858
Title
GE to Caroline [Mrs. Charles] Bray, Richmond, 26 November 1858
Title
GE to Caroline [Mrs. Charles] Bray, Richmond, 26 November 1858
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
Caroline [Mrs. Charles] Bray
Date(s)
- 1858-11-26
Place
Richmond
Letter Content
GE to Caroline [Mrs. Charles] Bray, Richmond, 26 November 1858
MS: Yale. Extracts published: Cross, II, 72-73.
Richmond | November 26. 58.
Dear Cara
I am very grateful to you for sending me a few authentic words from your own self. They are unspekably precious to me. I mean that quite literally, for there is no putting into words any feeling that has been of long growth within us. It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibres that knit us to the old.
Mr. Bray's welcome visit 1228 was sadly too short. I have been thinking of you incessantly in the waking hours since he left, and feel a growing hunger to know more precise details about you and to talk with you about these changes in the aspect of things towards you. I am of a too sordid and anxious disposition, prone to dwell almost exclusively on fears instead of hopes, and to lay in a larger stock of resignation than of any other form of confidence. But I try to extract some comfort this morning from my consciousness of this disposition, by thinking that nothing is ever so bad as my imagination paints it. And then, I know there are incommunicable feelings within us capable of creating our best happiness at the very time others can see nothing but our troubles. And so I go on, arguing with myself, and trying to live inside you, and looking at things in all the lights I can fancy you seeing them in, for the sake of getting cheerful about you, in spite of Coventry.
I listen to the project of your spending many months abroad with some trembling, lest the pleasures should not quite counterbalance the discomforts -- especially in regions crowded with rich snobbish English visitors or residents. I should have thought beautiful scenery nearer home -- in Scotland or Wales -- would be found at less cost moral and financial. Towards the English as English, no foreigners have a kindly feeling -- only one of predatory antagonism, and the English abroad are always English who decline to know fellow-countrymen without prestige.
I cannot satisfy my love and anxiety without saying these things, which I had not opportunity to say yesterday -- and indeed the case did not present itself to me at once in all its complications. Mr. Bray's plan of living in a private lodging and providing everything himself, increases every form of difficulty. With the market-people, speaking in South Switzerland a French patois, and in N[orth] S[witzerland] a German patois, the language alone would be a serious obstacle and annoyance. In a boarding-house you would avoid that unpleasantness and twenty others that belong to the isolated plan. And in a boarding house there would be assured civility and endurable society. It is always a hateful office to urge doubts and negatives, but the distinct knowledge Mr. Lewes and I have of what foreign residence is for English people is something that we ought to use honestly for our friends, giving them the truest result we can of our experience. And after all we are only giving you a datum, which you can reject at once if you find it outweighed by others.
You are very much thought of and talked of -- you, individually, dear Cara -- in this chair where I sit, and in the Richmond walks; always with deep regard and tender affection. And so it will be through all changes, till the change that takes me out of this world. That doesn't seem so very far off to one now, the years rolling by so quickly as they do.
Ever yours
Marian.
N.B. No respectable (so-called) lodging house people would take in English lodgers who acted on Mr. Bray's plan.
MS: Yale. Extracts published: Cross, II, 72-73.
Richmond | November 26. 58.
Dear Cara
I am very grateful to you for sending me a few authentic words from your own self. They are unspekably precious to me. I mean that quite literally, for there is no putting into words any feeling that has been of long growth within us. It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibres that knit us to the old.
Mr. Bray's welcome visit 1228 was sadly too short. I have been thinking of you incessantly in the waking hours since he left, and feel a growing hunger to know more precise details about you and to talk with you about these changes in the aspect of things towards you. I am of a too sordid and anxious disposition, prone to dwell almost exclusively on fears instead of hopes, and to lay in a larger stock of resignation than of any other form of confidence. But I try to extract some comfort this morning from my consciousness of this disposition, by thinking that nothing is ever so bad as my imagination paints it. And then, I know there are incommunicable feelings within us capable of creating our best happiness at the very time others can see nothing but our troubles. And so I go on, arguing with myself, and trying to live inside you, and looking at things in all the lights I can fancy you seeing them in, for the sake of getting cheerful about you, in spite of Coventry.
I listen to the project of your spending many months abroad with some trembling, lest the pleasures should not quite counterbalance the discomforts -- especially in regions crowded with rich snobbish English visitors or residents. I should have thought beautiful scenery nearer home -- in Scotland or Wales -- would be found at less cost moral and financial. Towards the English as English, no foreigners have a kindly feeling -- only one of predatory antagonism, and the English abroad are always English who decline to know fellow-countrymen without prestige.
I cannot satisfy my love and anxiety without saying these things, which I had not opportunity to say yesterday -- and indeed the case did not present itself to me at once in all its complications. Mr. Bray's plan of living in a private lodging and providing everything himself, increases every form of difficulty. With the market-people, speaking in South Switzerland a French patois, and in N[orth] S[witzerland] a German patois, the language alone would be a serious obstacle and annoyance. In a boarding-house you would avoid that unpleasantness and twenty others that belong to the isolated plan. And in a boarding house there would be assured civility and endurable society. It is always a hateful office to urge doubts and negatives, but the distinct knowledge Mr. Lewes and I have of what foreign residence is for English people is something that we ought to use honestly for our friends, giving them the truest result we can of our experience. And after all we are only giving you a datum, which you can reject at once if you find it outweighed by others.
You are very much thought of and talked of -- you, individually, dear Cara -- in this chair where I sit, and in the Richmond walks; always with deep regard and tender affection. And so it will be through all changes, till the change that takes me out of this world. That doesn't seem so very far off to one now, the years rolling by so quickly as they do.
Ever yours
Marian.
N.B. No respectable (so-called) lodging house people would take in English lodgers who acted on Mr. Bray's plan.
Signature
Marian.
Citation
George Eliot, GE to Caroline [Mrs. Charles] Bray, Richmond, 26 November 1858, Complete George Eliot Letters(2026), George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed September 7, 2026. https://www.georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/93319