New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg may have forked out a whopping £16m for the Chelsea mansion where Eliot once lived, but it’s her family farmhouse – now bordering a Beefeater Grill car park – that most deserves the funds
News comes that Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York, has paid around £16m for 4 Cheyne Walk, the riverside Chelsea mansion where George Eliot once lived. It sounds pricey, but for that you get seven bedrooms, a baroque ceiling – painted by Sir James Thornhill, who also did the inside of St Paul’s dome – a swirly central staircase, some nifty pillars (Eliot would have known if they are Doric or Ionic) and a huge garden.
What Bloomberg hasn’t got for his money, though, is a building that has much to do with Eliot. For what nearly all the breathless accounts of the financial maestro’s literary coup leave out is the fact that the author of Adam Bede and Middlemarch lived at 4 Cheyne Walk for only the last few weeks of her life. It was in early December 1880, having just turned 61, that Eliot moved into it with her new and much younger husband, John Cross. Just three weeks later she caught a chill and died, leaving Cross to mourn, “I am left alone in this new House we meant to be so happy in”.
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