ABSTRACT
On 3 August 1871, Eliot replied to a letter she had received from a thirty-year-old Scotsman, ‘a little fellow’, named Alexander Main, who had written ostensibly to ask the correct pronunciation of Romola (Romŏla).4 Over the next two months, Eliot, Lewes and Main entered into correspondence over the intricacies of Eliot’s work. So perceptive were his appraisals that, on reading his latest letter, Eliot wrote it ‘made me cry. You have thoroughly understood me – you have entered with perfect insight into the significance of the poem [Spanish Gypsy] … In the passages which you quote from the Fifth Book, you have put your finger on the true key.’5 Over the ensuing year Eliot often repeated her estimate of her young reader’s ability. So adept was Main’s key to Eliot’s mythologies that Lewes and Eliot were thrilled when he suggested, on 25 September, that he compile and publish a book of ‘Sayings’ from her works.6 Lewes forwarded the suggestion to Blackwood and, after some hesitation (including a meeting between Main and Blackwood), Blackwood wisely agreed. As The Times had remarked on the value of Middlemarch’s epigrammatic English ‘we search the pages for riches we have missed’.7
