'Genius' and the household mode of intellectual production: 1795-1885.

  In our age & country, every person with any mental power at all, who
  both thinks for himself & has a conscience, must feel himself, to a
  very great degree, alone.... I am in this supremely happy, that I have
  had & even now have, that communion in the fullest degree where it is
  most valuable of all, in my own home. But I have it nowhere else.
  J.S. Mill (1)

On the face of it, genius seems irreducible to sociological dissection. Yet 'genius,' as a cultural practice, is very much the product of a particular time and place. It was sometime around the period of the French Revolution that modern genius began to appear--not as an occasional gift of God, or freak of nature--but as a cohort of talented, ambitious young people, frequently from middle or lower-middle-class background, who were determined (even more profoundly than the political revolutionaries) to break the mold. (2) Regarding themselves as specially insightful and prophetic, they pioneered a new style of ultra-criticism that rejected existing society, not in the name of asceticism, but in the hopes of remaking the entire world aright.

My concern in this paper is with the second generation of modern geniuses, born after the Revolution, during the period 1795 to 1815, and reaching their prime during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Unlike the original 'romantic' geniuses of the revolutionary period, who tended to identify as artist-individualists, revolting against the corruption of the old aristocratic society and the philistinism of the new bourgeois order alike, this second generation had a somewhat more complicated challenge to surmount. (3) On one level, the Revolution had indisputably failed. And yet the conflicts and contradictions of the post 1815 Restoration era made it clear that there could be no simple return to the Ancien Regime. Romantic excess had led to the horrors of Robespierre and Napoleon, yet eighteenth-century rationalism seemed pallid and inadequate in their aftermath. Meanwhile, in Britain at least, a new urban industrial capitalist society was rapidly advancing, obliterating the traditional world of the past far more inexorably than mere political revolution had done. Creating poverty in the midst of wealth, and anarchy in the midst of order, its social and economic contradictions seemed even more perplexing and novel than those already experienced in the realms of ideas and politics. Under these circumstances, the challenge that my subjects set for themselves was that of creating a new synthesis: They would resolve the deepest, most intractable contradictions between revolution and reaction, faith and reason, romance and rationality, wealth and poverty, anarchy and order, tradition and progress--which earlier generations had accepted as inescapable discordancies.

But how was this reconciliation of antinomies to be achieved? The ante on genius had been raised for this cohort. It would require not just literary or political transformation, but a simultaneous metamorphosis of politics, society, and mentality. Yet all that a lone parvenu genius could do was to write, agitate, and try to convince the world to follow his/her lead. Even this, however, had become problematic. The old aristocratic patronage networks through which such an aspirant could enter the Republic of Letters were fast disappearing. The female-run salons in which a young upstart might make his mark were also fading away. At the same time, the institutions which have supported intellectuals in the twentieth century--universities, think-tanks, and professional associations, were only just beginning to open up. To promote one's work, for most of the nineteenth century, meant writing for the literary marketplace. That marketplace was, indeed, rapidly expanding, but the increasingly middle class and feminine audience seemed to want primarily improving manuals or escapist literature--not challenging treatises that diagnosed everything wrong with society and that offered complex analyses of how it might be repaired. (4) A few great artists, it is true,--Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Maria Edgeworth, or Walter Scott, had figured out how to produce thought-provoking and mind-expanding literature that could still exert market appeal, but most of the young geniuses scoffed at such concessions and compromises with conventionality and commerce.

As is generally the case with aspiring young geniuses, the desire to achieve a great work often succumbs before the difficulties of execution. During the 1820s and 30s, when the impulse towards synthesis was initially felt, dozens, perhaps hundreds of young men and women were drawn into a variety of intellectual movements, that claimed to have discovered the true path to the future: Young Hegelians in Germany, St. Simonians in France, the various post-utilitarians in Britain, Transcendentalists in the United States, Young Ireland and Italy (a decade later) in those countries. (5) After a few years of such transgressive cultural practice, however, the twenty-something devotees drifted off to become the bankers, businessmen, lawyers, and housewives that their parents had always insisted they be. There were, however, a few stubborn, incorrigible individuals who would not give up the aspiration to genius. They were to spend their entire lives in quest of that elusive grand synthesis whose evanescent form they had first glimpsed in the idealism of youth. These individuals are the subjects of my paper. In Fig. I, I have compiled a sample of twelve, listed in birth order, with dates of marriage and death. In Fig. II, I have also listed fifty-five others--some of them questionable cases--who might be added in future research. (6)

I

This is not a large population, even if expanded to include the candidates in Fig. II. The existing numbers are insufficient for quantitative analysis and, in any case, the questions I am asking may not entirely lend themselves to a quantitative approach. Nevertheless, I think there are good reasons to examine these people prosopographically, as a distinctive generational cohort. Nearly all of them are well known, and have been extensively studied as individuals. Yet there are many common patterns--as well as key differences--that have, to my knowledge, never been explored. It is always dangerous to shoehorn a bunch of self-proclaimed mavericks into retrospectively chosen categories, and many of my subjects would blanch at the company I am making them keep. Still, in spite of their fierce insistence on their uniqueness and individual genius, there are many common features to their stories. Some striking patterns would be missed without a comparative analysis, which suggests deeper structures and forces at work. In particular, I will suggest 1) that the ability of my subjects to pursue their quixotic synthesizing quests depended on their ability to reshape conventional nineteenth century structures of domesticity and relationships of gender, and 2) that the way in which they pursued these strategies and relationships had a significant impact on the substance of their work.

My starting point here is to build on an observation recently made by Bonnie Smith: That the household was a critical site of intellectual production, during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century. (7) Smith makes her argument with regard to historians, but it could be extended to novelists, theorists, or litterateurs. I will argue that it applies with exceptional force to the geniuses, who might try to combine two or more of these genres, and whose massive ambitions left them even more dependent on the assistance that they could only find within the household. (8)

There is a curious irony in all this. At the very moment when work was being separated from home in most bourgeois circles, and the system of separate gender spheres was becoming the norm, the exact opposite pattern was developing in most households of intellectuals, especially those that had the misfortune to harbor some aspirant to genius. (9) The novelty of this development becomes even more apparent if we contrast this domestic orientation of the nineteenth century genius with that exhibited during earlier periods. One has only to think of the great seventeenth and eighteenth century 'bachelors of science,' Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Gibbon and Smith--to name only the most famous--to see the contrast. All these men seem to have connected their intellectual identity and sense of masculinity with remaining free of domestic encumbrances. Often living their entire lives in the households of others, they sought their intellectual sustenance in the more masculine provinces of the Republic of Letters. For such men, a family was often deemed an unnecessary distraction--an encumbrance that they either did not want, or could not afford. (10)

Like their early modern predecessors, the nineteenth-century geniuses understood that marriage and household formation were expensive and distracting propositions. Yet, most of them married anyway, or established marriage-like household structures. Clearly, these nineteenth century geniuses felt that there was something about their households that would enable them to save money, find emotional sustenance and distraction, and facilitate their synoptic intellectual works. That something, I argue, is what I call the 'unlimited liability partnership.' The model here is heterosexual marriage, but all the individuals in my sample also tried to obtain the same intellectual sustenance from siblings, or homo-social relations with members of their own sex. Such relationships (of all three types) blurred gender boundaries, and combined elements of love and friendship, albeit at different emotional temperatures, and in differing proportional weights. Spouses and even siblings were constantly being transformed into intellectual collaborators, while intellectual collaborators were drawn into the household in surprisingly intimate ways. (11)

Obviously, the exact nature of these intertwined relationships varied considerably from case to case, depending on several factors: The structure of the household, its economic resources, its position in the career/life cycle, the psychological needs of the genius, and the nature of his/her intellectual work. At one extreme, we have the legendary picture of the Marxs, holed up in their two room Soho flat with their family retainer and four children, pawning clothes, fobbing off creditors, and trying to make ends meet, through hand-outs from Engels, and the meager pittance that Karl was able to earn from his journalistic work. Jenny Marx's main role in this demoralizing scene was simply to create the minimal space for her husband to work. She attended to the housework, and absorbed all the day-to-day worries about how to feed the family on next to nothing. She pawned off her family silver, and kept the butcher at bay. At the same time, she found time to copy her husband's manuscripts, to draft letters to political comrades, and write short articles for the Left-wing press. Engels, of course, was Marx's great intellectual collaborator, but his role in subsidizing the Great Man's projects drew him ever deeper into the Marx family circle, and made him a sharer in their tribulations and woes. (12)

At the other extreme, we might turn our sights to the picture of John Stuart Mill, retired, in 1858, with a [pounds sterling]1,500 pension, and an independently wealthy wife, pleasantly ensconced in their Blackheath villa, with frequent trips abroad. Yet in spite of this economic security, we would find the great philosopher utterly disconsolate a few months later when his beloved partner, Harriet, suddenly died. For Harriet had not only been a domestic manager and companion, she had also been the most important intellectual collaborator in his life. "In this wide sense," he avowed, "all my published writings were as much her work as mine; her share in them constantly increasing as years advanced." (13)

Most of the other individuals in my sample lay somewhere in between these two extremes. The particular balance between housekeeper and collaborator that was sought tended to vary with the life cycle, and the male geniuses, at all times tried to secure the best of both possible worlds. Thus, Michelet, in 1823, at the age of twenty-five, married Pauline Rousseau because she was "an excellent housekeeper" who was "capable of supervising and directing a considerable household," and who could, if necessary, "do everything herself." Eighteen years later, however, after Pauline died, and his career was more established, he sought to establish a more intellectually substantive relationship with Adele Dumesnil. Then again, in 1849, he embarked on a genuine (if troubled, and unequal) collaboration with Athenais Mialaret, his second wife. (14)

In the case of Carlyle, something like the opposite scenario played itself out: In the early 1820s, he wooed the brilliant and beautiful Jane Welsh, by encouraging her intellectual ambitions. They engaged in a lengthy correspondence, in which both reflected on the big questions of literature and life. After they were married, however, Carlyle became increasingly authoritarian and overbearing. Jane was demoted to a glorified maid, whose function was to keep the irascible Great Man ensconced all day in his sound-proof study, and to achieve heroic household economies so that he would not have to prostitute himself by getting a job. Later, when Carlyle was able to earn a decent income from his books, the sacrifices expected of Jane became less physical and more existential. In a sense, it was her job to eschew the great literary career that most of their friends thought she had in her, immolating herself to affirm her husband's greater genius, and to justify all the sacrifices they had made in its name. (15)

Far more attractive than the dyspeptic Carlyle was the serenely self-composed stylist Macaulay, who never let anyone completely penetrate beneath his brilliant facade. Nevertheless, one reason why Macaulay never married was that he had formed an intimate, nearly incestuous relationship with two sisters during their youths. It was through evening storytelling and breakfast badinage with these sisters that Macaulay's mature historical vision emerged. Later, when he lost both of them, the historian was inconsolable, and the vast synoptic History of England to which he devoted the last fifteen years of his life became a kind of graven monument to the memory of happier days. If Macaulay alone among these men actually produced a bestseller, it was because he had lovingly studied the female consumer market that he was trying to reach. (16)

Jacob Burckhardt also spent his life happily immersed in the households of his sisters, which milieu significantly influenced the substance of his work. Leaving Basle to study in Germany between 1839 and 1843, he was exposed to all the currents of political and philosophical radicalism that were simultaneously producing an Engels or a Marx. Disillusioned, like these men, with conventional religion and liberalism, Burckhardt eschewed the flight to communist utopia. Instead, he returned home to his ancestral city-state where a kin-support system was already in place. It was this environment--combined with his ability to reflect critically upon it--that endowed Burckhardt with the intellectual and imaginative resources to produce his pathbreaking history of the Italian Renaissance. (17)

Lacking the kin support of a Burckhardt, or a Macaulay, Auguste Comte was thrown entirely upon his own resources. After he went to Paris to learn science and soak up the 'spirit of the age,' marriage might have been his salvation had he approached it in something other than the Carlylean way. When the stress of producing his great masterpiece, the Cours de philosophie positive, drove Comte insane, all the psychiatrists (including the famed Esquirol) gave him up for lost. But his wife, Caroline Massin, heroically and painstakingly nursed him back to health. Comte, however, seems to have rebuffed her efforts to enter into a genuine intellectual dialogue over the substance of his work. Although she believed in his genius, sympathized with his circumstances of professional beleagurement, and worked hard to make ends meet, Caroline resisted his efforts to turn her into a mere domestic servant. Unable to tolerate this assault to his fragile masculine ego, Comte responded with anger and bitterness, and the couple eventually split apart. Two years later, when Comte fell in love with Clothilde de Vaux, he was content to worship her from afar as a symbol of feminine purity and love, in a manner that reaffirmed all the most conventional separate spheres ideals. (18)

Comte's psychological vulnerability, combined with his inability to engage intellectually with women, left him exceptionally dependent on intellectual partnerships with men. His failure to sustain any such relationship was the great tragedy of his working life. In youth, he quarreled with his mentor, St. Simon, and alienated virtually all of his peers with his brusque manner and insistence on groveling deference. In 1841, however, he was approached by Mill, who was greatly impressed by the Cours, and who hoped to establish a friendship and perhaps even a working partnership with his French counterpart. So long as Comte could think of Mill as his disciple, he was gratified by the relationship. Once Mill began to criticize the authoritarian strain in Comte's thinking, however, Comte became increasingly annoyed. Mill, for his part, grew alarmed as the Frenchman began to draw him into his troubled and chaotic personal life. Once Comte began to bombard the reserved Mill with the details of his failed marriage, and to indicate that he looked to England for financial support, the Englishman beat a hasty retreat. (19)

The collapse of Mill's relationship with Comte coincided with the intensification of his liaison with Harriet Taylor. Their 1849 marriage, and retreat into domesticity, led him to downplay the importance of the male intellectual partnerships that he had established before then. In addition to Comte, he had befriended Carlyle, Tocqueville, and John Sterling at various points in search of a friend who possessed the qualities of intuition and imagination that he believed himself to lack. In each case, Mill was disappointed by the inability of his interlocutor to live up to his own high standard. In particular, Carlyle soon revealed an egocentrism and authoritarian streak, which exceeded that of Comte. When reports reached Mill that he was mocking Harriet Taylor with the nickname 'Platonica,' Mill knew that Carlyle had to be dropped. (20) Like Comte, this false friend had misinterpreted Mill's intellectual diffidence as a sign of 'feminine' weakness. He had failed to grasp its roots in Mill's extraordinarily well-developed critical (and self-critical) capacities, which prevented his acquiescence in any totalizing system for very long. Like his fellow male geniuses, Mill had entered the 1830s in search of grand synthesis. (21) Unlike most of them, he finished out his life in the deepening realization that no such single total synthesis was possible, and that the true test of future progress would not lie in its conformity to some prophetic doctrine, but in its capacity to promote individual difference, intellectual pluralism, and cultural diversity. (22)

II

I doubt anyone would deny my assertion that Mill's handling of the household mode of intellectual production significantly impacted on the substance of his intellectual work. But can this be said of the remaining individuals in my group? I think it can. To this end, I have divided my sample into three categories: The genre-busters, the limit-respecters, and the historians. (see Fig. III) The genre-busters were those who felt that the task of synthesis required not merely a new theory, but a whole new way of thinking and writing. Indeed, their ultimate aim was to produce, not merely literature, or theory, but to transform the entire world. Their texts were offered as conceptual levers to summon up mass movements--a goal that was spectacularly achieved by Marx and Engels, and somewhat more pathetically so in the case of Comte. Although these men were all products of bourgeois society, their vaulting ambition to re-create the world anew violated all the norms of respectable bourgeois propriety. For these transgressions they were to pay dearly with lives of poverty, insecurity and scorn from those who dismissed their quixotic aims. If Carlyle eventually succeeded in avoiding these consequences, it was only by sacrificing most of what was best in the work of his youth. (23)

To a considerable extent, the roots of these genre-busting projects can be traced back to the prospective genius's family of origin. A pattern of strong, ambitious mothers, dissatisfied with their husbands' economic inadequacy, or conventional careers, seems to have been a powerful recipe for producing 'genius' in ambitious, talented sons. Interestingly, most of those who became genre-busters (and several who did not) established complex relationships with their fathers. On the one hand, they initiated the Oedipal conflicts that a Freudian would anticipate. On the other hand, they sought paternal blessings for taking the path of originality that the more conventional father himself had eschewed. (24) Given the fact that the genre-busting geniuses all came from middle class backgrounds, while refusing to accept the humiliating constraints of a middle class career, it is difficult not to see an element of compensatory masculinity in their prodigious projects. (25) None of them had any truck with intellectual women, and they all subscribed to the most conventional notions of feminine domesticity.

I would argue that this combination of stunningly bold conceptual break-throughs on matters of history, class and progress, with uncritically trite and commonplace approaches to gender, explains a great deal about what is best and worst in their work. Carlyle's descent from the sharp social criticism of his early years into the racism and authoritarianism of his post 1845 works is inextricably connected with the curious combination of arrogance and impotence, which came to characterize his domestic life. Simultaneously frustrated, humiliated, and wracked with guilt, he took out his anger not only on Jane, but also on the racial and class Others against whom he wrote. (26) In the case of Comte, a similar pattern emerges even more clearly. His great master-work, the Cours, was produced, as Mary Pickering shows, during his years of genuine (if strained) partnership with Caroline Massin, and it was only after he dropped her that his work grew more biologistic, autocratic, and theological in tone. If Carlyle's criticism curdled into diatribes of denunciation, Comte's calcified into the dogmatism of a cult. (27)

The cases of Marx and Engels are the most interesting because their situations were more complex. Marx, of course, never became a reactionary, but his inability to theorize the household, in whose miseries he was ensnared, led to a critical blind-spot in his work. In particular, his theory of labor power and surplus value--the two concepts at the core of his critique of capitalism--were specifically designed to exclude the labor of women and household workers. As a result, these workers were allowed only a secondary relationship to Marx's proletariat, and their role in the struggle for the future was cast into doubt. (28) What was going on here? Was Marx really incapable of understanding the value of domestic labor amidst the squalor of Dean Street? Obviously not, but incorporating it into his theory would have raised too many awkward questions about the torments he had inflicted on his wife and family--and on the choices he made about how to live his life. Less domestically constrained than his comrade, Engels was slightly more open-minded on such matters of gender and domestic labor. This slight difference enabled him to incorporate a limited critique of patriarchy into the Marxist canon. (29)

III

The second category of geniuses in my scheme consists of those who began with the same outsize syncretic aspirations as those in category I, but who found the existing ground of historical writing as sufficiently capacious to accommodate what they were trying to do. This is in many ways a residual category since Michelet remained at heart a genre-buster, while Burckhardt became a limit-respecter in fact. Both men however, together with Macaulay (and perhaps others in Fig. II), exhibited similar responses to the problem of gender that may illuminate certain characteristics of the nineteenth century historian's craft. Indeed, none of these historians was as willfully gender blind as the unreconstructed genre-busters in category I. On the contrary, they each incorporated gender as an element in their thinking, and believed in what Michelet called "the two sexes of the spirit." According to this notion, every person had both masculine and feminine characteristics, and the creativity of genius consisted in the ability to play the one against the other, and to combine them in novel figurations that would transcend the inherent limitations of each.

As Bonnie Smith and others have shown, Michelet's gender-bending efforts were profoundly inflected with his desire to appropriate the vantage and voice of the feminine Other, and to incorporate it into his own voracious male authorial agency. (30) In the case of Macaulay, gender-bending became a way of making his protean History hang together. On the one hand, the 'real' British-building men, who are the heroes of his story, must negotiate a centrist path between the fanatical hyper-masculinism of radicals, and the hysterical effeminacy of royalist tyranny. On the other hand, Macaulay well understood that it was his own dreamy, romantic, feminine side--originally developed in communion with his beloved sisters--that had empowered him to write a peerless book that would become a bestseller, but would also remain imprinted in the national imagination for centuries to come. (31)

For Burckhardt, the challenge was somewhat different, involving an imperative to re-masculinize the realms of culture and aesthetics that nineteenth century bourgeois philistinism was increasingly relegating to the feminine sphere. To re-present Renaissance individualism and the Renaissance state as 'works of art' was a pre-emptive move that displaced the origins of modernity from the political or economic arenas, into the realm of aesthetics. At the same time, it was designed to secure aesthetics as a manly endeavor. As Ann Douglas has perceptively noted, in the context of the United States, national history was becoming an increasingly popular enterprise, into which Victorian male intellectuals could retreat to avoid the taint of feminization that had invaded fiction, magazine writing, and other precincts of the literary marketplace. Burckhardt carefully tapped into this current without succumbing to the bombastic, xenophobic excesses that marred the work of so many German historians. (32)

And yet, these exercises in re-masculinization could never achieve the total gender-obliviousness of the genre-busters, since sexualized tropes were the historians' stock-in-trade. The problem with Michelet's, Macaulay's or Burckhardt's promiscuous playing with gender is that none of them succeeded in viewing it critically, or in problematizing it as a system of power relations. As with the genre-busters, this would simply have led to too many awkward questions about the way they had organized their own households, and related to the women in their lives. There were moments when Michelet came to the edge of such insight, but he always retreated before the abyss. (33)

IV

My final category of geniuses were those I call the 'limit-respecters.' The members of this group all began with the syncretic aspirations of the genre-busters, but eventually concluded that no single work, theory or life could achieve such a transcendent purpose. As a result, they retreated to more realistic positions, and sought to achieve intellectual synthesis in some less totalistic way. In fact, this group is by far the largest, encompassing probably the majority of 'genius-candidates' in Fig. II. For most of these individuals, the ability to respect external limits, and to temper hubristic ambitions, was more or less painfully acquired in the course of settling down to a specific profession, career, or genre of artistic expression. Like many of the historians, these individuals were disciplined by the nature of their work. The exigencies of literature, politics, the ministry, social reform, or music, all shaped the form that their mature genius took. While they never quite abandoned their youthful aspiration to originality and synthesis (which would have removed them from my sample), these impulses were channeled into more or less conventional genres, which were externally de-limited, socially constructed, and substantially defined by existing audiences or clienteles. (34)

For the remainder of this paper, however, I want to focus on a particular subsample of 'limit respecters' (identified in Fig. III) whose members acquired their respect for limits in a less disciplinary and more personal way. Like the genre-busters, these four individuals continued to insist that their genius was sui generis, and could not be limited by mere conventional or professional constraints. Respect for limits was a conclusion these individuals derived from within. Indeed, it was rooted in their experience of the household, which became an object of their genius itself.

You will notice that, with the exception of J.S. Mill, every individual in this category is a woman. For a nineteenth century woman with aspirations to genius, one formidable difficulty had to be faced: How to realize this ambition in a world which believed that the task of intellectual women was to facilitate the achievement of genius in men. Strong early affirmation from a doting and supportive father was a precondition for the nurturing of female genius. Nevertheless, as the case of Jane Carlyle demonstrates, this was never enough. (35) It was necessary for the woman herself to establish in adulthood the kind of household arrangements which would be conducive to genius and independent work.

Of course, a woman could choose to become a novelist, or an author of domestic manuals, in a manner that was, by the nineteenth century, conventionally understood. In that case, however, she would probably remain unmarried, and eschew responsibility for domestic management in a household of her own. (36) Yet, the true aspirant to genius could never be satisfied with such limitations. Determined to embrace the syncretic mission that inspired the most ambitious men of their generation, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Martineau, and George Eliot all realized that this enterprise would necessitate a new kind of household, in which they would not be reduced to the position of help-meet or co-adjutor, but which would allow them to stand as a household head on their own. To this end, they all searched for intellectual partners who would be willing to accept a woman of genius, and assist her in realizing her full potentiality.

The great tragedy of Margaret Fuller's life was her failure to find such a partner, or to establish such a household. "Will there never be a being to combine a man's mind and a woman's heart?" she lamented. In her case, unfortunately, the answer was 'no.' Her inability to find a being who would use his/her heart to sustain the full development of her mind meant that she deliberately eschewed the ambitious intellectual projects that all her male friends thought she ought to undertake. The fact that, in the final years of her life, she finally met a man (Count Ossoli) who might have provided this support, only adds an air of tragedy to her quest. (37)

For Harriet Martineau, spinsterhood was less disabling because she was able to preside over a large household of siblings after her father died. Compelled by his bankruptcy to earn her own living, Martineau brilliantly transformed this disaster into a golden opportunity by publishing her bestselling Illustrations of Political Economy, in which she glorified the very market forces that had laid her family low! (38) In contrast to the men in category I, Martineau grew more radical as she got older. In the late 1830s and 1840s, she squandered a chance to join the Whig establishment, and became an enthusiast for new causes such as mesmerism, and anti-slavery. In 1853, she published an abridgement and translation of Comte's Cours, which made it accessible to a widespread audience for the first time. (39) Martineau's inability to go beyond creatively re-packaging the grand syntheses of others might seem to indicate a second-class ambition, and a second rate mind. In fact, it merely bespeaks the realism of a woman who knew that she would have to earn her own living, and who could not afford to linger in a self-referential world of utopian dreams. At the same time, her ability to accomplish as much as she did was very much connected with her emotional satisfaction as head of a large, supportive household, surrounded by a wide circle of admirers and friends. (40)

That a woman could proceed further than Martineau on the road of syncretic genius, without falling into the solipsism of a Spencer or a Comte, is well illustrated by the case of George Eliot, which is worth examining in a bit more detail. As Marian Evans, she too had been an impecunious orphan, driven to the edges of London literary life to earn her living translating the works of great men. Throughout her youth and early adulthood, Evans had been preparing herself to accomplish some great intellectual object, the nature of which she only dimly understood. At the same time, she always found her life conditions, as an impecunious single woman editing and translating the work of great men, to be unpropitious for even defining much less accomplishing her life's work. Intuitively, she understood that without an unlimited liability partnership her genius would remain forever unexpressed. (41)

It was in this frame of mind that Evans's friendship with Herbert Spencer became the emotional turning point of her life. Spencer himself was a quintessential genre-buster, already hell-bent on his quixotic quest for the theory of everything which would occupy him totally for the remainder of his life. (42) Not yet quite attuned to Spencer's absolute self-absorption, Evans envisioned him (for the first time) as a partner who could be her intellectual equal, and this suffused her in a wave of desire. When Spencer indicated that these feelings were not reciprocated, Evans was thrown into utter despair. "If you become attached to someone else, then I must die, but until then I could gather courage to work and make life valuable, if only I had you near me." (43)

This admission, that she needed a man and a marriage to "gather courage to work and make life valuable," is usually treated by biographers as a momentary and embarrassing lapse. On the contrary, I would argue that it was a sudden and liberating clarification of the conditions of intellectual production that Evans actually did require. Within a year, she had left Spencer behind, established her union with G. H. Lewes, and was well on her way to becoming George Eliot, the famous writer. Unlike Spencer, Lewes was not her intellectual equal, but he was a man, an intellectual, and (most importantly) one who was willing to be the kind of unlimited liability partner that, she now realized, her genius required. (44)

By turning to fiction, it could be argued that Eliot was making the conventional woman's choice. Yet, her novels were unlike those of any other, male or female. By bringing the syncretic philosophical and historical concerns of Spinoza, Feuerbach, Spencer, Mill and Darwin into fiction, she transformed the very genre itself. Nevertheless, by choosing to conduct her exploration into the foundations of morality and society within a novelistic framework, Eliot signaled her belief (similar to that of Mill) that these problems had to be viewed from many different angles, and that no single theory or system was adequate to answer all the questions that they raised.

In Middlemarch, Eliot problematized the great masculine quest for total synthesis itself. The young, idealistic heroine, Dorothea Brooke, falls in love with the hermetic scholar Mr. Casaubon, who has devoted his life to discovering a master key to all mythologies. To her horror, Dorothea discovers, once they are married, that Casaubon is an impotent, emotionally withered pedant, whose grand project has been rendered irrelevant by the latest German research. (45) What is the moral of this story? That Casaubon is not up to the heroic quest for universal synthesis, or that the very project itself is doomed? It is entirely characteristic of George Eliot, that she leaves it to her readers to answer this question for themselves.

V

Given the small size of the population I have considered, my own conclusions are necessarily tentative. Nevertheless, they suggest a curious irony: The genre-busters of category I, who began with the boldest, most revolutionary intentions, ended up (because of their unpropitious conditions of intellectual production) producing books and theories that were most shaped by the limiting intellectual constraints of their own day. In particular, their reliance on the exploitation of household dependents (including outsiders whom they tried to enlist in quasi-domestic roles) blinded them to gender oppression in society at large. Their thrusting, outsize visions of historical progress and transcendence were silently subverted from within by unresolved dualisms from conventional separate spheres notions, which they uncritically replicated within their works.

Those, in category II, who were less domestically constrained and defensive, were also less in thrall to these conventional notions of gender difference. Yet their creative, idiosyncratic playing with gender precluded any agonized self-reflection, reinforced their distaste for systematic theorization, and kept their 'syntheses' inherently anomalous and ad hoc. Those in category III, on whom I have focused in this essay, are distinguished from the others by virtue of their acute self-consciousness about the household conditions of production within which they worked. So far from facilitating their youthful dreams of comprehensive synthesis, however, this led to a growing skepticism about the viability of such projects. In the case of a woman writer, like Eliot, this shift proved extremely fertile and creative, as it allowed her to produce works of extraordinary power and vitality by transposing her original philosophical and sociological concerns into fictional form. In the case of a male synthesizer like Mill, it proved frustrating and disabling, since it undermined his youthful syncretic ambitions, without opening up any comparable alternative intellectual project.

Extending my analysis to the broader ranks of the historians and limit-respecters identified in Fig. II would perhaps dampen the force of this contrast. Lacking the obstinate willfulness of a Marx, or the acute self-consciousness of an Eliot, these individuals allowed life and career to channel their genius into more conventional grooves. As writers, as politicians, or as social reformers, their aspirations were tempered by exigencies of the disciplines in which they worked. Yet they too were products of the household mode of intellectual production, dependent on the support of actual or virtual families, and in quest of unlimited liability partnerships. It is important to take these men and women out of the realm of pure abstraction, and return them to the contexts in which they lived and worked. The exact ways in which domesticity and gender re-shaped their genius, however, must be left for future research.

Department of History

Columbia, MO 65211

ENDNOTES

1. Letter to F.D. Maurice, quoted in A.P. Robson, and J.M. Robson eds., Sexual Equality, Writings by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Helen Taylor (Toronto, 1994), xxv. I would like to thank David Burns, Noah Heringman, and Bonnie Smith for their encouragement and comments, and Andrew Lees for suggesting that Burckhardt belongs in my pool.

2. For a survey of the concept of 'genius' in early modern European history, see Giorgio Tonelli, "Genius from the Renaissance, to 1770," Philip P. Wiener ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York, 1973), II, 293-7. Rudolf Wittkower, "Genius: Individualism in Art and Artists" Dictionary of History of Ideas, II, 297-312, makes a powerful case that, in the visual arts, the 'genius' emerged as a recognizable social type during the Renaissance. While there were always individuals recognized as geniuses in other fields of endeavor, this generalization towards a social category does not seem to have occurred until the spread of romanticism, at the end of the eighteenth century.

3. For a discussion of the first generation of modern (post-revolutionary) genius, see Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 14-36.

4. The literature on the Republic of Letters is vast. See, in particular, Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994); Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (New Haven, 1995); and Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1988), which emphasize the importance of women, the salons, correspondence, and informal networks as the glue which held the Republic together. For the rise of the literary marketplace in Britain, see Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London, 1961), 145-270; Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (Chicago, 1957); and Amy Cruse, The Victorians and their Reading (New York, n.d.).

5. Frank Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962), 103-296; John Toews, Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805-1841 (Cambridge, 1980); and Perry Miller, ed., The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1950).

6. The list in Figure II is tentative. In all likelihood, my definition of 'genius' would have to be expanded to encompass all the individuals enumerated, especially those with a question mark by their names. Correspondingly, my categories of 'genre-buster' and 'limit-respecter' might have to be modified on the basis of intensive biographical investigation into this wider pool. If enough of these cases were incorporated into some future study, it might be fruitful to attempt a quantitative analysis: Family background, gender, and youthful aspirations might be plotted against marriage patterns, household arrangements, and friendship partnerships later in life. It would be interesting to discover whether the correlation that I draw impressionistically between the degree of exploitation in a given 'genius' household, and the character of the intellectual product produced, were confirmed, or qualified, by more systematic quantitative study.

7. Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History, 70-102.

8. For a number of different approaches to the centrality of the household as a support system in nineteenth century Europe see Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women Work and Family (New York, 1987); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago, 1987); and John R. Gillis, A World of their Own Making: Myth, Ritual. And the Quest for Family Values (New York, 1996).

9. The middle class separation of work from home is treated in Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, for Britain; Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1981), for France; and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, 1981), for the United States.

10. Naomi Zack, Bachelors of Science: Seventeenth Century Identity, Then and Now (Philadelphia, 1996). According to Ian S. Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1995), "it is to be feared that the biographer can do little more with the topic of Smith's sex life than to contribute a footnote to the history of sublimation," 214.

11. As the details of this paper will indicate, most of this experimentation with unconventional emotional and intellectual (if not sexual) partnerships occurred between the 1820s and the 1840s, when the material and psychological needs of my subjects were at their peak. During the high Victorian period, 1850-1880, most (though not all) settled down into more conventional unions. In this case, the obvious explanation is generational: Young people are more open to experimentation than the middle aged, who (usually) settle down. Nevertheless, it would also be interesting to contextualize these trends in relation to John Gillis's more global argument, which identifies the first half of the nineteenth century as a period of sexual and conjugal experimentation, followed by a 'retreat' into (mostly invented) traditions of conventional marriage, after 1850. For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (Oxford, 1985), 190-259.

12. Jerrold Seigel, Marx's Fate: The Shape of a Life (Princeton, 1975), offers a powerful and penetrating study of the relationship between Marx's household conditions of intellectual production, and the substance of his theoretical work. There is, however, room for further investigation that would build on Seigel's insights, refracting them more systematically through the conceptual lens of gender. In particular, I know of no adequate analysis of the role of Jenny Marx. She is usually portrayed as the long-suffering victim of her husband's political commitments and impecunious lifestyle. That she was a comrade in the propagation of Marxism (if not its creation), however, is hinted at in H.F. Peters, Red Jenny: A Life with Karl Marx (New York, 1986).

13. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, (London [1973], 1989), 184; Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (London, 1954), 345, 372-3, 390. This economic security, however, did not predate 1858, since Mill refused to take any benefit from his wife's inheritance, and the value of his pension was unclear.

14. Gabriel Monod, La Vie et la pensee de Jules Michelet, 1798 a 1852, 2 volumes (Paris, 1953); Arthur Mitzman, Michelet: Historian: Rebirth and Romanticism in Nineteenth Century France (New Haven, 1990), quote on pg. 19-20.

15. J.A. Froude, The Life of Thomas Carlyle, in two volumes (New York, 1882, 1892); Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (Ithaca, 1983). The Carlyle marriage is insightfully examined in Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (New York, 1984), 21-44, 239-59; and Norma Clarke, Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love, the Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans and Jane Carlyle (London, 1990). Carlyle was also constantly trying to enlist younger male disciples who would be gradually inducted into the details of his private life. At various points, John Sterling, J.S. Mill, John Ruskin, and J.A. Froude were ensnared in the Carlyle net. In addition, he became somewhat scandalously close to Harriet Baring (Lady Ashburton), a salonniere, whom Carlyle tried to transform into a personal intimate, much to the secret fury of his wife.

16. G. Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, two volumes (New York, 1876); John Clive, Macaulay, The Shaping of the Historian (New York, 1973); and Theodore Koditschek, "Towards a Greater Britain," in Terry Brotherstone, Anna Clark, and Kevin Whelan eds., These Fissured Isles, 1798 and After (forthcoming, 2005).

17. Werner Kaegi, Jacob Burckhardt: Eine Biographie, in seven volumes (Basel, 1947-1982), especially I, 293-304; Felix Gilbert, "Jacob Burckhardt's Student Years: The Road to Cultural History," Journal of the History of Ideas, 47/2 (1986), 249-74; Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L. Wette, Jacob Burckhardt and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge, 2000).

18. Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte, An Intellectual Biography, vol. I (Cambridge, 1993); 318-27, 382-98, 473-5, 489-94; Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, translated by R.J. Holingdale (Cambridge, 1988), 19-46.

19. The Correspondence of John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, translated and edited by Oscar A. Haac, with an introduction by Angele Kremer-Marietti (New Brunswick, 1995).

20. For a sensitive, if sometimes overly psychoanalytic approach to Mill's friendships and marriage, see Bruce Mazlish, James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1975), especially 112-327.

21. For Mill's particular framing of this problem of synthesis, see his youthful essays, "The Spirit of the Age" (1831) in Alan Ryan ed., Mill (New York, 1997), 3-40; and "Bentham" (1838), and "Coleridge" (1840) in Alan Ryan ed., Utilitarianism and other Essays (London, 1987), 132-226. These essays are all the direct products of his famous identity crises of 1826 (age 20), when he lost his faith in the hyper-rationalist utilitarianism of his father and Bentham. Regarding himself as emotionally stunted by his early education, Mill longed for union with some Other who would complete him, by proffering the qualities of imagination and creativity that he lacked. In his Autobiography, Mill emphasized that he had found this Other in Harriet. Before the mid 1840s, however, while he was writing the abovementioned essays, and his active search for synthesis was most intense, a good case can be made that he was more deeply engaged, on an intellectual level, with his prospective male partners (Carlyle, Comte, and Tocqueville). For Harriet was not deeply interested in questions of theory, about which Mill was then writing, and was, in any case, still married to someone else. Mill's pre 1848 writings were all demonstrably influenced by his dialogues with male interlocutors. By contrast, it is only in his post 1848 writings that the direct influence of Harriet can be documented. The reasons for the collapse of Mill's homo-social partnerships are complex. In the cases of Carlyle and Comte, Mill was repelled by their turn to reaction, and by their intolerable demands for submission. In the case of Tocqueville (to whom Mill was intellectually and temperamentally well suited) there was never any close emotional bond. My point here is that the deepening of Mill's domestic partnership with Harriet corresponded with the depletion of his youthful hopes for synthesis. He continued to pay lip-service to the prospect of a new science of 'ethology,' to serve as a bridge between the universal principles of human psychology, and the particulars of political, economic and cultural behavior, in a given time and place, The fact that he never offered any contribution to this proposed new science, suggests that he no longer harbored high hopes for the intellectual fruits that it might yield.

22. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Arlington Heights, IL, [1859], 1947).

23. Bernard Yack, The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophical Sources of Social Discontent, From Rousseau to Marx (Princeton, 1986); Carlyle could enjoy the adventure of genre-busting, without incurring its economic costs, by tailoring his synoptic projects to fit the role of Victorian man of letters, which the still unprofessionalized literary marketplace allowed. John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800 (Chicago, 1991). But, where most men of letters got quickly drawn up in the minutiae of reviewing, writing, and editing for periodicals, Carlyle was able to retain his independence (and syncretic pretensions), by playing the part of The Sage of Chelsea--a personage of volcanic depths, who periodically erupted with enigmatic prophetic rumblings, whose exact meaning were understood by no one, least of all, himself.

24. Seigel, Marx's Fate, 13-64; Pickering, Auguste Comte, 1, 8-15, 181-2, 259, 335, 393-5, 414, 480, 597; Mazlish, James and John Stuart Mill, 3-280; Kaplan, Carlyle, 20-7, 50-1; Clive, Macaulay, 3-60; Steven Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (New York, 1974), 67-130; Kaegi, Jacob Burckhardt, I, 111-94, 219, 252-4, 338, 400.

25. John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, 1999). Among the men in category I, only Marx and Carlyle completely eschewed middle class careers. The others (as well as the men in categories II and III) accepted this concession as a regrettable necessity, but tried to avoid its most humiliating constraints. Comte and Michelet took advantage of the opportunities offered by the expansion of higher education in post-revolutionary France. These posts however, offered little security, and the assertion of independence (personal, in the case of Comte, political, in the case of Michelet) cost both men their jobs. Burckhardt became a professor at the University of Basle, although this post was in many ways a civic extension of his already extended family. In England, Engels was a businessman, Macaulay a politician, Mill, a colonial bureaucrat, and Spencer, an engineer (later an editor). In each case, these men tried to find employment that was consistent with their true callings, and (excepting Burckhardt) saved up enough money to retire as quickly as possible. The three women were the only individuals (excepting Carlyle) completely dependent on the literary marketplace for their sustenance.

26. Rose, Parallel Lives, 21-44, 243-70; Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (London, 1992); Eugene R. August ed., Carlyle, The Nigger Question and Mill, The Negro Question (New York, 1971); Thomas Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets (London, 1850).

27. Pickering, Auguste Comte, 362-504.

28. Karl Marx, Capital, volume I (Moscow, [1867], 1954). See also the so-called 'house-work debate' which engaged Marxist-feminists, during the 1970s. Margaret Benston, 'The Political Economy of Women's Liberation," Monthly Review, 21 (1969), 12-27; Selma James and Mariarosa dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (London, 1972); Wally Seccombe, "The Housewife and her Labour under Capitalism," New Left Review, 83 (1973), 3-25; Jean Gardiner, "Women's Domestic Labour", New Left Review, 93 (1975), 47-57; Margaret Coulson, Branka Magas, and Hilary Wainwright, "The Housewife and her Labour under Capitalism," New Left Review, 93 (1975, 59-71; and Wally Seccombe, "Reply to Critics," New Left Review, 94 (1975), 85-96.

29. Frederick Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York, [1884], 1942). Engels notes, in his preface, that Marx had originally intended to write on this subject, but is difficult to imagine that he would have treated it in the same way. I would argue that Engels's ability to posit a gendered basis for the original class struggle, reflects a limited ability to register the operation of patriarchy in history. His assumption that patriarchy will no longer be a problem under socialism, however, indicates the limits to his ability to confront its significance in the modern age.

30. Jules Michelet, The People, translated by John McKay (Urbana, [1846] 1973), 143; Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History, 86-90.

31. Macaulay's sense of bereavement and humiliation at the loss of his sisters (one to death, the other to marriage) left him feeling "altogether unmanned". This humiliation was redeemed, however, by his transformation of the History, which he had created in their company, into the towering published masterpiece that, he believed, would preserve his name forever. See TB Macaulay to Thomas Flower Ellis, 2/3/1835, 12/30, 1835, and to William Empson, 6/19, 1837, Thomas Pinney ed., The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, vol III (Cambridge, 1976), 129-32, 57-60, 217-21.

32. Douglas, Feminization of American Culture; John R. Hinde, Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity (Montreal, 2000).

33. In The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, two volumes (New York, 1929), Burckhardt has trouble integrating women into his picture. On the one hand, he insists that "women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men" (II, 389), and that "the educated woman, no less than the man, strove naturally after a characteristic and complete development." At the same time, he acknowledges, a few sentences later, that they "had no thought of the public; their function was to influence distinguished men and to moderate male impulse and caprice." (II, 391).

34. As per note 25, the difference between the genre-busters and the limit-respecters is not that the former were exempted from careers, but that they did not allow these careers to reshape their life-long syncretic projects. The reason why I have assigned the historians to a separate category is 1) because nineteenth century historical studies could accommodate a wide range of approaches, from genre-busting (Michelet) to limit-respecting (Burckhardt), and 2) because it was especially conducive to creative (if not always critical) playing with gender tropes. Finally, 3) it is worth noting that history seems to have drawn from a slightly higher social class. Many of the most likely candidates in this category had to be excluded because they were the beneficiaries of inherited wealth. See Fig. II's 'obvious outliers'.

35. J.A. Froude ed., Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle (New York, 1883); R.K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (New York, 1960), 1-91; Frederick R. Karl, George Eliot: Voice of a Century (New York, 1995), 3-87.

36. Ann Douglas criticizes the sentimentalism of most women writers during this period in Feminization of American Culture. Norma Clarke offers a more nuanced reading, which claims that successful female Victorian writers were usually unmarried, and that this confined them to a sentimentalized approach to domestic themes. She contrasts Geraldine Jewsbury, the independent, published writer of light romances, with Jane Carlyle, the married but embittered critic of patriarchy whose private writings were too subversive to see the light of day. Ambitious Heights, 1-43, 100-154. Of course, this argument ignores the great female Victorian writers who were married, (e.g. Elizabeth Gaskell, or Harriet Beecher Stowe) who did publish (limited, somewhat sentimentalized) critiques of patriarchy, and who received sufficient support from their husbands to accomplish their work. Although both Stowe (1811-96) and Gaskell (1810-65) fall within the dates of my sample, I have not included them, because they do not strike me as having been animated by the lifelong drive to achieve a unique work of synthetic genius, which impelled those whom I have included in the group. I could, however, be persuaded otherwise. See also Dierdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barret Browning, George Eliot (Ithaca, 1987).

37. Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 259-288; W.H. Channing, J.F. Clarke, and R.W. Emerson, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, in two volumes (Boston, 1852), quote on I-248-9; Margaret Fuller (Ossoli), Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition, and Duties of Woman (New York, 1968).

38. I include Harriet Martineau not only because of her adult accomplishments but, also, because of her voracious love of study and learning in her teens. In part, perhaps, because her deafness made social intercourse difficult, she plunged into a reading program of philosophical study, wrestling with the question of free will vs. necessity, and longing to find "a clear distinction between the knowable and the unknowable--of some available indication of an indisputable point of view, whence one's contemplation of human nature, as of everything else in the universe, should make its range." Autobiography, in two volumes, (London, [1877] 1983), quote on I, 106-7. See, also, Webb, Harriet Martineau, 134. It was Martineau's capacity for combining systemic thinking with attractive presentation, which made her Illustrations of Political Economy, in nine volumes, (London, 1834) such a hit.

39. Webb, Harriet Martineau, 135-367; The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, abridged and translated by Harriet Martineau (New York, [1853] 1893?). For an interesting attempt to induct Harriet Martineu into the canon as a founding-mother of modern sociology, see Michael R. Hill and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale, Harriet Martineau: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives (New York, 2001).

40. Not least among Martineau's triumphs was her ability to combine intellectual and domestic work in a healthy, balanced way. Throughout her life, she always alternated writing with sewing, and considered both equally valuable. As with Macaulay, her failure to marry was compensated by continued intimacy with her siblings, among whom she continued to live (and to partly support economically) In later life, she moved from London to Lake Windermere, where she held court with friends and family, gardening, cooking, cleaning, mending clothes, and engaging in a whirl of charitable activities. Webb, Harriet Martineau, 254-70.

41. Like Fuller, the teen-aged Marian Evans faced the formidable challenge of finding a heterosexual partner, under circumstances where she was clearly more intelligent and erudite than any man she knew. Jenny Uglow, George Eliot (London, 1987), 1-81; Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: a Life (London, 1997), 1-163; Frederick R. Karl, George Eliot: Voice of a Century (New York, 1995), 1-170.

42. Spencer never did find his unlimited liability partner, and he became solipsistically married to his system, itself. In that sense, he is unique within my group, as a kind of throwback to the eighteenth century bachelor-intellectual. Yet, even Spencer was not entirely immune to the lure of the household world. His attraction to children, his later-life absorption in the Potter family, and his fumbling attempts to adopt the young Beatrice Potter as his intellectual heir, all bespeak the existence of sublimated domestic desires. In old age, when Spencer half-realized that his grand synthesis of universal evolution had collapsed, he bitterly lamented that he had sacrificed his life to this awesome endeavor, rather than seeking the normal human pleasures of family life. J.D.Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer, The Evolution of a Sociologist (New York, 1971), especially 1-32; Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (Cambridge, [1926] 1979), 21-39, 190-193.

43. Quoted in Karl, George Eliot, 146.

44. Karl, George Eliot, 142-68; Evans, George Eliot, 94-107.

45. George Eliot, Middlemarch (London, [1871-2] 1965).

By Theodore Koditschek

University of Missouri-Columbia

Figure I Provisional 'Genius' Cohort (listed by order of birth, with
spouse)

Criteria for inclusion:
  1) Born between 1795 and 1820
  2) Not independently wealthy
  3) Life project based on youthful vision of post-revolutionary
  transformation: Seeing nineteenth century as a coming era of
  synthesis, to resolve contradictions between:
    a) revolution vs. reaction
    b) reason vs. faith
    c) rationalism vs. romanticism
    d) wealth vs. poverty
    e) anarchy vs. order
    f) tradition vs. progress
Thomas Carlyle, (1795-1881) -- met Jane 1821, married 1826
Auguste Comte, (1798-1857) married Caroline Massin, 1823, separated,
  1842; liaison with Clothilde de Vaux, 1844.
Jules Michelet, (1798-1874) married Pauline 1823; liaison with Adele
  Dusmenil, 1840-2, married Athenais 1849.
T. B. Macaulay, (1800-1857) -- never married.
Harriet Martineau, (1802-1876) -- never married.
J.S. Mill, (1806-1873) -- met Harriet 1830, married 1851; household with
  Helen Taylor from 1858.
Margaret Fuller, (1810-1850) -- married Angelo Ossoli, 1848.
Karl Marx, (1818-1883) -- engaged to Jenny, 1836, married, 1843.
Jacob Burckhardt, (1818-1897) -- never married.
George Eliot, (1819-1880) -- 'married' G.H. Lewes 1854, married J.W.
  Cross, 1880.
Friedrich Engels, (1820-95) -- liaison with Mary Burns 1843; household
  with Lizzie Burns from, 1863.
Herbert Spencer, (1820-1903) -- never married.

Figure II Other Possible Candidates (with Tentative Category
Assignments)

Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804-72 (I)
Moses Hess, 1812-75 (I)
Max Stirner, 1806-56 (I)
Richard Wagner, 1815-83 (I)
Hector Berlioz, 1803-69 (I)
Mikhail Bakunin, 1814-76 (I)
H. D. Thoreau, 1817-62 (I)
Bruno Bauer, 1809-82 (I)
J.A. Froude, 1818-94 (II)
Leopold Ranke, 1795-1886 (II)
Augustin Thierry, 1795-1856 (II)
Edgar Quinet, 1803-75 (II)
George Bancroft, 1800-1891 (II)
Ralph W. Emerson, 1803-82 (III/letters)
Orestes Brownson, 1803-76 (III/ministry)
P. J. Prudhon, 1809-65 (III/social reformer)
Edward Bulwer Lytton, 1803-73 (III/letters)
Thornton Leigh Hunt, 1810-73 (III/letters)
Fanny Wright, 1795-1852 (III/social reformer)
Emma Martin, 1812-51 (III/social reformer)
Flora Tristan, 1803-44 (III/social reformer)
B.P. Enfantin, 1796-1864 (III/social reformer)
Gustav d'Eichtal, 1804-86 (III/letters)
James Martineau, 1805-1900 (III/ministry)
Heinrich Heine, 1797-1856 (III/poetry)
Henry W. Beecher, 1813-87 (III/ministry)
John Henry Newman, 1801-90 (III/ministry)
F.D. Maurice, 1805-72 (III/ministry)
August Cieszkowski, 1812-94 (III/social reformer)
Alexandr Herzen, 1812-70 (III/social reformer)
Giuseppe Mazzini, 1805-72 (III/politician)
Louis Kossuth, 1802-94 (III/politician)
Louis Blanc, 1811-82 (III/social reformer)
Henry Derozio, 1809-1831 (I)
Bronson Alcott, 1799-1888 (III/teacher)
Bronterre O'Brien, 1808-64 (III/social reformer)
David Friedrich Strauss, 1808-74 (III/theologian)
Alexander Pushkin, 1799-1837 (III/poet)
Victor Considerant, 1808-93 (I)
Auguste Blanqui, 1805-81 (I)
Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-81 (III/politician)
W. E. Gladstone, 1809-98 (III/politician)
William Smith O'Brien, 1803-64 (III/politician)
Mary Shelley, 1797-1851 (III/novelist)
Branwell Bronte, 1817-48 (III/artist)
Charlotte Bronte, 1816-55 (III/novelist)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811-96 (III/novelist)
George Sand, 1804-76 (III/novelist)
Honore de Balzac, 1799-1850 (III/novelist)
Victor Hugo, 1802-85 (III/letters)
Ivan Turgenev, 1818-83 (III/novelist)
Georg Herwegh, 1817-75 (III/poet)
Frederick Chopin, 1810-49 (III/musician)
Franz Liszt, 1811-86 (III/musician)
Robert Schumann, 1810-56 (III/musician)

Obvious Outliers
Charles Darwin, 1809-82 (I) -- independently wealthy
Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860 (I) -- too old
Victor Cousin, 1792-1867 (II) -- too old
Francois Guizot, 1787-1874 (II) -- too old
Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-59 (II) -- independently wealthy
J.R. Motley, 1814-77 -- (II) independently wealthy
John Ruskin, 1819-1900 -- independently wealthy

Figure III Three Approaches To Problem of Synthesis

Category I: Genre Busters:

  Karl Marx
  Friedrich Engels
  Auguste Comte
  Thomas Carlyle
  Herbert Spencer

Category II: Historians

  T.B. Macaulay
  Jules Michelet
  Jacob Burckhardt

Category III: Limit Respecters

  J.S. Mill
  Harriet Martineau
  Margaret Fuller
  George Eliot