‘[T]o correspond with you in green-covered volumes’: George Eliot, G.E. Lewes and the production of her books

In late 1877 George Eliot's publishers, William Blackwood and Sons of Edinburgh and London, succumbed to the dictates of the popular market-place when they considered publishing The George Eliot Birthday Book. The Leweses were reluctant to allow George Eliot's name to appear on a production over which they had so little control and whose frivolous purpose they found questionable. G. E. Lewes and Eliot sensed that the way her books were perceived as physical objects would have a direct impact on her readers' perception of herself and of her work. Whereas Lewes was often direct in his demands, Eliot was more diplomatic, couching her requests as observations and questions. Ironically, Barbara Bodichon assumes that the cover design and colour were imposed on Eliot by the powerful 'they', presumably the Blackwoods, but perhaps also her reading public. The green wrappings of Middlemarch evoked the comfortable rural communities of the Midlands that Eliot remembered from her childhood.