'The Most Splendid City in Germany?' George Eliot and Prague

Beginning of article

IT was in July 1858, a decade after 'the year of revolutions', that the novelist George Eliot (Marian Evans) and her partner George Henry Lewes undertook a journey that led from London to Dresden by way of Munich. Preoccupied with German culture, Eliot was eager to explore the delights of the Saxon capital, and wrote rapturously in her letters and diaries of the art treasures that she saw there. On the way, however, they travelled through Vienna, and spent a day and a night in Prague, their first visit to the city. Immediately after breakfast, as Eliot explains in her journal, they went out to see as much of 'the grand old city' as possible in one day.

'The most interesting things we saw were the Jewish burial-ground (the alter Friedhof) and the old Synagogue. The Friedhof is unique--with a wild growth of grass and shrubs and trees and a multitude of quaint tombs in all sorts of positions looking like the fragments of a great building, or as if they had been shaken by an earthquake. We saw a lovely dark eyed Jewish child here, which we were glad to kiss in all its dirt. Then came the sombre old synagogue with its smoked groins, and lamp for ever burning. An intelligent Jew was our cicerone and read us some Hebrew out of the precious old book of the Law. After dinner we took a carriage and went across the wonderful bridge of St. Jean Nepomuck with its avenue of statues, towards the Radschin--an ugly straight-lined building but grand in effect from its magnificent site, on the summit of an eminence crowded with old massive buildings. The view from this eminence is one of the most impressive in the world--perhaps as much from one's associations with Prague as from its visible grandeur and antiquity. The Cathedral close to the Radschin is a melancholy object on the outside--left with unfinished sides like scars. The interior is rich, but sadly confused in its ornamentation, like so many of the …