2019/01/13

Arrival at Weimar















It was between three and four o’clock on a fine morning in August, that after a ten hours’ journey from Frankfort, I awoke at the Weimar station. No tipsiness can be more dead to all appeals than that which comes from fitful draughts of sleep on a railway journey by night. To the disgust of your wakeful companions, you are totally insensible to the existence of your umbrella, and to the fact that your carpet-bag is stowed under your seat, or that you have borrowed books and tucked them behind the cushion. »What’s the odds, so long as one can sleep?« is your philosophic formula; and it is not until you have begun to shiver on the platform in the early morning air that you become alive to property and its duties, – that is, to the necessity of keeping a fast grip upon it. Such was my condition when I reached the station at Weimar.
– from: George Eliot, Three Months in Weimar



Audio comment by and with Bob Muscutt, with reading by Phil New from George Henry Lewes, The Life and works of Goethe.  Source of Goethe portraits: Goethezeitportal.




We see from the images below that a passport was issued to Miss Marian Evans on 11th July, 1854, and it has the number 13666. On the same day a passport was issued to Geo. Henry Lewes, with the consecutive number 13667. They set sail to the continent on 20th July. It is interesting that they used separate passports, although some of the passports in the lists are for two people, and with different surnames.




Reproduced by courtesy of the National Archives in accordance with Open Government Licence (OGL). Thanks to Judith Flanders for getting us on the right track, and to Joanna Blatchley for providing the images from the findmypast web site.

On 6th August, shortly after their arrival in Weimar, Marian wrote to John Chapman, who had been charged with forwarding her post: „I was delighted to see your writing on the back of the letter, which the Post Beamter (post office clerk), like a conscientious man, refused to give me because I had not my passport in my pocket, and when I at last did get it I opened it with all sorts of grateful, affectionate feelings towards you for having written to me so soon.“
Of course Chapman had written to the Poste Restante in Weimar, the forwarding address that Marian had given him before they left London. In those days the Weimar post office was housed in the hotel Russischer Hof so she had to walk about 15 minutes to her lodgings to collect the passport. After she and Lewes had settled in, both Chapman and Charles Bray sent her mail directly to the address in Kaufstraße, which Marian habitually wrote incorrectly as Kaufgasse. To keep her whereabouts as secret as possible, Bray also forwarded the mail from her beloved sister, Chrissey. Until 1857, when brother Isaac forbade the family members all contact with Marian, there was frequent correspondence between Marian and Chrissey, none of which has survived. It is almost as if they made a formal pact to destroy all the letters they exchanged. It is assumed Chrissey was kept in the dark about her sister’s other life, but we can’t be absolutely sure. It would have been difficult for Marian and Bray to evade all her inevitable questions. It is true that there is no evidence that Marian told Chrissey about her relationship with Lewes before she outed herself by letter to Isaac.  But then, there wouldn’t be, would there?
– comment by Bob Muscutt



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