VENICE — Tourists crammed into the motorboats taking them along Venice’s Grand Canal from St. Mark’s Square toward the domed Salute basilica should pause and turn their heads to the right. The ornate bronze stucco of Ca’ Giustinian marks the scene of the suicide attempt in June 1880 of the new young husband of the British novelist George Eliot.
Eliot (Marian Evans), author of “Middlemarch” and “Adam Bede,” among other classics, was then 60. She had never been married before she walked down the aisle of St. George’s Church in London on May 6, 1880, and emerged as Mrs. John Cross.
Cross, then 40, had served Eliot and her long-term partner, George Henry Lewes, as a lawyer and accountant for many years. He understood that the couple had never been able to marry because Lewes could not get a divorce from his legal wife.
But when Lewes died after a long illness in November 1878, Cross and the novelist began translating Dante together and fell in love.
Cross, long a bachelor, seemed happy to be married. From Verona, he informed his sister Mary that he was looking forward to their 10 days in Venice: “I don’t know what people generally complain so much of in their wedding journeys — ours has certainly been very full of delight and it goes on increasing.”Continue reading the main story
On June 4, 1880, the Gazzetta di Venezia, which carried news of visitors to Venice, listed a couple named Cross among seven English families who had checked into the Grande Albergo l’Europa that day. (The Albergo Europa is now the Ca’ Giustinian, headquarters of the Venice Biennale). The hotel attracted many famous guests, including Giuseppe Verdi and Marcel Proust.
The Crosses hired their own gondola and gondolier and for 12 days looked at pictures and churches, and cruised about the waterways. But their cheerful letters home did not tell the whole story. Marian, who also went by Mary Ann, could see that her husband had lost much weight and that he was alternately agitated and deeply depressed. On the morning of June 16 she summoned a doctor and recited Cross’s symptoms.
While she and the doctor (named Ricchetti) were talking in an interior room, Cross went out onto the balcony, clambered up on the railing and hurled himself into the Grand Canal.
He leaped with such force that he sailed over the three or four gondolas stationed outside and landed in the middle of the canal.
Corradini, their gondolier, immediately threw himself into the water, as did one of the Europa hotel staff members. Together they rescued Cross and carried him back to his rooms.
The incident made at least two Venetian newspapers. Il Tempo reported that “an Englishman of about 40 years of age” (un inglese dell’eta d’anni 40 circa), suffering from a permanent melancholy had at half past 11 in the morning thrown himself from the first floor of the Hotel Europe (se gettato dal primo piano dell’hotel Europe) and was saved by a gondolier named Corradini.
“Imagine for yourself the desolation of the poor wife!” exclaimed paper, with no hint that the “poor wife” was the most famous English woman novelist of the day.
Next day, another paper, L’Adriatico, described the incident and attributed “una mania maliconica” for prompting the suicide attempt. “One could say that he had a lucky escape!”
The inspector for the San Marco police station was struck by the age difference between husband and wife. It described J.W. Cross as an Englishman of 40 years and his wife, a woman over 60. For some days, the report said, he had been looking sad and melancholy.
The “inglese” was found to be lavishly supplied with money, as well as with cards giving him unlimited credit at major banks. It appeared that three years previously he had suffered a similar attack — una peripezia or sudden change in personality. “L’Ispettore B” concluded his report that the aforementioned individual had regained his normal health.
Marian summoned her brother-in-law, who arrived and the honeymoon continued, the three of them together. No suggestion of suicide appeared in any of Marian’s letters to her friends. Cross’s later biography of his wife, Volume III, published in 1885, deals with the episode:
“We thought too little of the heat, and rather laughed at English people’s dread of the sun. It is one thing to enjoy heat when leading an active life ... another to spend all one’s days in a gondola ... and with bedroom-windows always open on the great drain of the Grand Canal.”
Any whiff of attempted suicide would inevitably have cast aspersions on Marian’s vanity in imagining that she could be a satisfying wife for a much younger man.
The incident did not reach the English papers, but gossip did. As recounted in the memoirs of Walter Sichel, the political biographer and barrister, “after a prolonged course of Dante at Venice” Cross “had cast himself into the Grand Canal and begged the gondoliers not to rescue him.”
A trustworthy note on the incident survives in the papers of Lord Acton. A historian and writer, Acton knew the Cross family through the Alfred Tennysons, and became a personal friend of John Cross. In undated notes left at the University Library at Cambridge, where he later became Regius Professor of Modern History, Acton wrote, “At Venice she thought him mad, and she never recovered from the dreadful depression that followed. Sent for Ricchetti, told him that Cross had a mad brother. Told her fears. Just then, heard that he had jumped into the Canal.”
All told, it seems unlikely that the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. John Cross was ever consummated. Of Cross’s admiration, even adoration, of the great writer he had married, there is no doubt. Yet it seems to have been love without desire.
Tourists today can judge for themselves. While there are undoubtedly more gondolas and walkways in front of the building than there were in 1880, Cross clearly made a prodigious leap.Continue reading the main story