Letter from E. B. Lytton to John Blackwood.
"Malvern, April 24, 1859.
"My dear Sir,—I ought long since to have thanked you for 'Adam Bede.' But I never had a moment to look at it till arriving here, and ordered by the doctors to abstain from all 'work.'
"I owe the author much gratitude for some very pleasing hours. The book indeed is worthy of great admiration. There are touches of beauty in the conception of human character that are exquisite, and much wit and much poetry embedded in the 'dialect,' which nevertheless the author over-uses.
"The style is remarkably good whenever it is English and not provincial—racy, original, and nervous.
"I congratulate you on having found an author of such promise, and published one of the very ablest works of fiction I have read for years.—
Yours truly,
E. B. L.
"I am better than I was, but thoroughly done up."
Journal, 1859.
April 29.—Finished a story—"The Lifted Veil"—which I began one morning at Richmond as a resource when my head was too stupid for more important work.
Resumed my new novel, of which I am going to rewrite the two first chapters. I shall call it provisionally "The Tullivers," for the sake of a title quelconque, or perhaps "St. Ogg's on the Floss."
Letter to John Blackwood, 29th April, 1859.
Thank you for sending me Sir Edward Lytton's letter, which has given me real pleasure. The praise is doubly valuable to me for the sake of the generous feeling that prompted it. I think you judged rightly about writing to the Times. I would abstain from the remotest appearance of a "dodge." I am anxious to know of any positive rumors that may get abroad; for while I would willingly, if it were possible—which it clearly is not—retain my incognito as long as I live, I can suffer no one to bear my arms on his shield.
There is one alteration, or rather an addition—merely of a sentence—that I wish to make in the 12s. edition of "Adam Bede." It is a sentence in the chapter where Adam is making the coffin at night, and hears the willow wand. Some readers seem not to have understood what I meant—namely, that it was in Adam's peasant blood and nurture to believe in this, and that he narrated it with awed belief to his dying day. That is not a fancy of my own brain, but a matter of observation, and is, in my mind, an important feature in Adam's character. There is nothing else I wish to touch. I will send you the sentence some day soon, with the page where it is to be inserted.
Journal, 1859.
May 3.—I had a letter from Mrs. Richard Congreve, telling me of her safe arrival, with her husband and sister,[7] at Dieppe. This new friend, whom I have gained by coming to Wandsworth, is the chief charm of the place to me. Her friendship has the same date as the success of "Adam Bede"—two good things in my lot that ought to have made me less sad than I have been in this house.