George Eliot eloped to Germany with Lewes (July 20, 1854) ostensibly to accompany him while he pursued his project to write a biography of Goethe and, quite as likely, to put some distance between themselves and the social opprobrium that their union would generate. She had earlier resigned her position at the Westminster Review (around March 3, 1854, according to Letters VIII, 104). The reasons were manifold, and included tensions in the Chapman household that had previously induced her to change her residence; an editor's normal difficulties with authors, compositors, et al., which tried her fragile nerves; her expectation (fulfilled) that Chapman would come a cropper financially, ending his proprietorship; and her feeling that she hadn't succeeded in making the Westminster the ideal journal she envisaged. She was both right and wrong on the last point, for while not ideal, it had again become a force in English intellectual life. Review-articles like that by Harriet Martineau on the historian Niebuhr in the July 1852 issue, by John Oxenford on Schopenhauer's philosophy in the April 1853 issue, and by T. H. Huxley on science in the January 1854 issue were operating at the highest level in those disciplines and putting important thinkers on the English intellectual map. But leave the editorship she did, and leave England, for a bit over seven months, she did. In doing so, she took steps toward becoming a member of a social grouping that has carried many names – Bohemians, Insurgents, etc. – among which I shall choose the most neutral, “outsiders.”