ABSTRACT
George Eliot and George Henry Lewes fell in love on their 1856 trip to Ilfracombe and Tenby. While the two were already deeply attached before their seaside excursion, their rambles across seashores and tide pools opened their eyes and imagination to new forms of life with which they developed numerous intimacies. In her essay “Recollections of Ilfracombe,” for example, Eliot recalls how “These tide-pools made me quite in love with sea-weeds … so I took up Landsborough’s book and tried to get a little more light on their structure and history” (267). Similarly, Lewes writes of his delight in uncovering his fi rst Anthea cereus, Clavelina, and Actinia in ways one would write of their lover, as he says, “If these fi rst thrills can never come back to us, there is ample compensation in the new vistas which open with increasing knowledge; the fi rst kiss may be peculiar in its charm, but as the years roll on, we learn to love more and more the cheek on which we fi rst found little besides that charm” (Sea-Side Studies 14). This love of seaweeds and anemones registers two competing relationships: an intimate connection that one would expect in discourses of pet keeping, and a sense of distance, one that can only be cleared by gathering new knowledge of radically different forms of life. The fact that Eliot and Lewes were writing about falling in love with small life forms far different from the Victorians’ beloved dogs, cats, and horses, suggests a new valuation of plant and animal life that is intimately connected with a desire for increasing knowledge.
