Andrew Mangham analyses the importance of narrative for the German embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer, and its influence on George Eliot’s early fiction. This chapter evidences the way in which knowledge from Europe was acquired, debated, and adopted in London soirées. Van Baer’s work was welcomed by the circle of radicals, including Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Marian Evans, who congregated around John Chapman’s Westminster Review. Newly available in a partial translation by Huxley and the botanist Arthur Henfrey, von Baer’s Uber Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere (1828) specifies a theory of growth based on early differentiation of individuals, which seemed to chime with the period’s investment in industry, but also insisted on the importance of narrative. The early work of George Eliot, specifically Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and Adam Bede (1859), bears the imprint of von Baer’s models of individuation in the secularism that we find in her work.

An iconoclast in religion and marriage in 1854–5, Marian Evans, later George Eliot, was a more conventional female traveller than her precursors in Chapters 2 and 3 due to her limited listening and speaking skills and her reliance on her partner George Henry Lewes for travel arrangements and social contacts. Her potential for cultural exchange was also limited by her desire to avoid encountering scandalous gossip that had followed her from England. Evans’s discernibly greater interest in German intellectual men than women additionally meant that she neither had nor took the opportunity to form a female friendship network in the mid-1850s. Thus, unlike Jameson or Howitt, she never met Goethe or Goethe’s friends (aside from Fanny Lewald). Eliot’s limited ethnoexocentrism also manifested itself in her public and private writing about German Jews, most notably Heinrich Heine. The chapter analyses in detail one of Evans/Eliot’s best-known essays, ‘German Wit’, in which Evans erases Heine’s Jewish identity to posit him as a German writer qualified to succeed Johann von Goethe in greatness. Though she would later have known about Heine’s Jewish origins, they remained erased when she revised her 1855 anonymous essay into George Eliot’s posthumously published essay of 1884.