George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays 978-3-030-10626-3, 978-3-030-10625-6

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv
Introduction (Jean Arnold, Lila Marz Harper, Thomas Pinney)....Pages 1-15
Front Matter ....Pages 17-17
“A Thousand Tit-Bits”: George Eliot and the New Journalism (Alexis Easley)....Pages 19-40
George Eliot’s Literary Legacy: Poetic Perception and Self-Fashioning in the 1870s (Wendy S. Williams)....Pages 41-59
Front Matter ....Pages 61-61
George Eliot as “Worthy Scholar”: Note Taking and the Composition of Romola (Andrew Thompson)....Pages 63-95
Egyptian Mythology in Eliot’s Major Works (Molly Youngkin)....Pages 97-115
Front Matter ....Pages 117-117
Organic Realism in Middlemarch (Jean Arnold)....Pages 119-137
“These Things Are a Parable”: Natural History Metaphors and Audience in Felix Holt (1866) (Lila Marz Harper)....Pages 139-164
Handling George Eliot’s Fiction (Peter J. Capuano)....Pages 165-193
Front Matter ....Pages 195-195
“It Was All over with Wildfire”: Horse Accidents in George Eliot’s Fiction (Nancy Henry)....Pages 197-211
The Functions of Dogs in George Eliot’s Fiction (Sara Håkansson)....Pages 213-229
The Ambivalence of Water in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) (Odile Boucher-Rivalain)....Pages 231-243
Front Matter ....Pages 245-245
Hints of Same-Sex Attraction and Transgender Traits in George Eliot’s Characters (Constance M. Fulmer)....Pages 247-265
“Upright Realism”: The Influence of George Eliot on Polish Literature (Aleksandra Budrewicz)....Pages 267-297
Back Matter ....Pages 299-330

Citation preview

george eliot int er disciplinary e ssay s Edited by

jean arnold and lila marz harper

George Eliot

Jean Arnold · Lila Marz Harper Editors

George Eliot Interdisciplinary Essays

A Bicentennial Collection

Editors Jean Arnold California State University, San Bernardino San Bernardino, CA, USA

Lila Marz Harper Central Washington University Ellensburg, WA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-10625-6 ISBN 978-3-030-10626-3  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966682 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: George Eliot’s early home, Griff House ©: Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction 1 Jean Arnold, Lila Marz Harper and Thomas Pinney Part I  Periodical Studies and History of the Book 2

“A Thousand Tit-Bits”: George Eliot and the New Journalism 19 Alexis Easley

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George Eliot’s Literary Legacy: Poetic Perception and Self-Fashioning in the 1870s 41 Wendy S. Williams

Part II  Eliot’s Research Methodology 4

George Eliot as “Worthy Scholar”: Note Taking and the Composition of Romola 63 Andrew Thompson

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Contents

Egyptian Mythology in Eliot’s Major Works 97 Molly Youngkin

Part III  Eliot and Victorian Science 6

Organic Realism in Middlemarch 119 Jean Arnold

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“These Things Are a Parable”: Natural History Metaphors and Audience in Felix Holt (1866) 139 Lila Marz Harper

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Handling George Eliot’s Fiction 165 Peter J. Capuano

Part IV  Animals and Environmental Studies 9

“It Was All over with Wildfire”: Horse Accidents in George Eliot’s Fiction 197 Nancy Henry

10 The Functions of Dogs in George Eliot’s Fiction 213 Sara Håkansson 11 The Ambivalence of Water in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) 231 Odile Boucher-Rivalain Part V  Gender Studies and Feminism 12 Hints of Same-Sex Attraction and Transgender Traits in George Eliot’s Characters 247 Constance M. Fulmer

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13 “Upright Realism”: The Influence of George Eliot on Polish Literature 267 Aleksandra Budrewicz Bibliography 299 Index 321

Notes

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Contributors

Jean Arnold taught in the English Department at California State University, San Bernardino, California, and is now retired. She is co-editor of the bicentennial collection, George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and author of Victorian Jewelry, Identity, and the Novel: Prisms of Culture (Ashgate, 2011), which explores the symbolic role of jewelry in nineteenth-century cultural cohesion. Odile Boucher-Rivalain is Professor, department LLCE Anglais, University de Cergy-Pontoise, Paris, France. She has edited or co-­edited the following volumes: Le regard des Anglo-Saxons sur la France au cours du long 19esiècle (2008). Littérature et Conflit: enjeux et représentations (2006), ouvrage sélectionné sur la liste des ouvrages retenus pour le Prix de la Recherche de la SAES en 2006. Roman et Poésie en GrandeBretagne au 19esiècle: anthologie de textes critiques extraits de la presse victorienne, (1997). Roman et Poésie en Angleterre au 19e siècle: ouvrage collectif (1997). Aleksandra Budrewicz (Dr. habil., Prof. PU) works at the Institute of Modern Languages, Pedagogical University of Krakow, Poland. Her major field of interest and research includes Polish reception and translations of British writers. She has published for example Dickens in Poland (2015), and The Comedy of Madness. On a Polish Translation of “The Comedy of Errors” (“Multicultural Shakespeare” 2010, vol. 6/7).

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Peter J. Capuano  is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Program at the University of Nebraska. He is the author of Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body (2015). His current project, undertaken with a two-year grant from the National Humanities Center, is tentatively titled Dickens’s Idiomatic Imagination: The Inimitable and Victorian Body Language. Alexis Easley is Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her first book, First-Person Anonymous: Women Writers and Victorian Print Media, was published in 2004, and her second monograph, Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship, appeared in 2011. She co-edited The Routledge Handbook to NineteenthCentury British Periodicals and Newspapers (2016) and Researching the Nineteenth-Century Press: Case Studies (2017) with Andrew King and John Morton. Constance M. Fulmer is Professor of Victorian Literature at Seaver College, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California. She holds the Blanche E. Seaver Chair of English Literature. She is working on a biography of Edith J. Simcox and a study of George Eliot’s morality titled George Eliot’s Moral Aesthetic: Compelling Contradictions. In addition to editing Edith Simcox’s journal, The Autobiography of a Shirtmaker (1998) with Margaret E. Barfield, she has published an annotated bibliography of George Eliot criticism (1977). Sara Håkansson  is Senior Lecturer in English at Lund University, Sweden. She is the author of Narratorial Commentary in the Novels of George Eliot (2006), Lund Studies in English, 114. She teaches nineteenth-century literature, narratology, and Irish contemporary literature. She is also an educational developer at Lund’s educational development unit where she teaches courses on teaching and learning for senior staff members. Nancy Henry is the Nancy Goslee Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain: Cultures of Investment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), co-editor with George Levine of the new Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (2019), and author of The Life of George Eliot (2012). She is co-editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture and associate editor of George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies.

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Lila Marz Harper is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Central Washington University and Thesis Editor for the Graduate School. She is co-editor of the bicentennial collection, George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and author of Solitary Travelers: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Travel Narratives and the Scientific Vocation, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2001. She edited the Broadview edition of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (2009) and is a Distinguished Bibliographic Indexer and Section Head for the MLA International Bibliography. Thomas Pinney taught at Hamilton College, Yale, and Pomona College and is now retired. He has published scholarly work on George Eliot, Lord Macaulay, and Rudyard Kipling and on the history of wine in America. Andrew Thompson  taught English in Italy and Great Britain, where he held a faculty position in English literature at the University of Wales, Newport. He held senior administrative positions in Newport and later at The American University of Rome, where he was acting president and then executive vice president and provost. He has worked extensively in nineteenth-century studies, primarily on George Eliot, and his publications include George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento (1998) and editions of two of Eliot’s holograph notebooks, her “Romola Notebook” (2006) and the “Quarry for Romola” (2014), both published in George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies. Wendy S. Williams  is associate professor of English in the John V. Roach Honors College at Texas Christian University. Her book, George Eliot, Poetess (Ashgate, 2014), explores Eliot’s reliance on a poetess tradition that was deeply invested in religion and feminine sympathy. Molly Youngkin is Professor of English and Associate Dean at Loyola Marymount University. She has published British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910 (2016), Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle (2007), an annotated edition of Sarah Grand’s 1888 novel Ideala (2008), and numerous articles.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6

A page from Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Works of George Eliot, 2nd ed., edited by Alexander Main (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1873), 3 25 A page from the Athenaeum, 29 November 1873, 705 26 Two-page spread from The George Eliot Birthday Book, edited by Alexander Main (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1878), 146–147 29 Cover, Tit-Bits 31 (20 May 1882): 1 32 “Tit-Bits from the Works of George Eliot,” Tit-Bits 31 (27 May 1882): 92–93 33 Cover, A Thousand Tit-Bits from a Hundred Authors, edited by George Newnes (London: Tit-Bits, 1882) 35 Florentine Notes: f.1v: “Books on Florentine Subjects (+ at home)” 68 Florentine Notes f.7, extracts from Lastri’s Osservatore fiorentino 73 Romola Notebook, “Dantesque Phrases” (f.27) 75 Quarry, f.29 “Localities” (with cross-reference to page number in the notebook) 76 Florentine Notes, f.41: “Muratori Antichità”: A list of Dissertations 78 Quarry. 96l–96r, “Chronology of Savonarola’s Life, 1494–1498.” Reproduced by kind permission of Princeton University Library Rare Books and Special Collections Department 79

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List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5 Fig. 12.1

“Gorilla” and “Navvy.” Plates 1 and 3 from Richard Beamish, The Psychonomy of the Hand 167 “The Dying Message.” Frederic Leighton. The Cornhill Magazine, October 1862 174 Inset from “The Dying Message” 175 “Father, I Will Be Guided.” Frederic Leighton. The Cornhill Magazine, February 1863 177 Shabbetai Horowitz. Shefa Tal. 1612 183 Frederic Leighton, “Suppose You Let Me Look at Myself,” Woodblock Engraving, 1862, Romola 251

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Jean Arnold, Lila Marz Harper and Thomas Pinney Cover Illustration1

J. Arnold (*)  California State University, San Bernardino, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_1

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“Agriculture, after all, is … a craft like poetry” Virgil, Georgica II

In his Georgics, the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BCE) notes a similarity between different kinds of work; as he puts it, All labor is the same; the sweat pours down And runs distinctions into a salt blur.2

In the scene pictured on the cover of this collection, and with Virgil’s analogy in mind, the lone human figure could thus represent both farmer and writer. He/she appears to be working hard, judging from the rolled-up shirt sleeves despite the cool weather, as young leaves of early spring appear on the trees, and smoke ascends the chimney. Something tasty must be bubbling in the fireplace pot inside, for a meal is the reward of a farmer’s labor, just as a book signals the end of the writer’s labor: food (f)or thought, these products. If a meal offers sustenance, then so do the readings in this book, which show a labor born of deep respect for George Eliot’s works. Having spent her formative years in this pictorial setting which depicts “the farm offices” of her childhood home Griff House, George Eliot might have said to herself as Virgil said in his Georgics, yes: I hope for an easy passage in this bold venture— the scrawl of will on the blank slate of the world … for all things come from work, from work and the kindness of generous Gods.3

In response to Virgil, we can imagine the contributors to this collection planting their seeds in the form of new critical ideas they have discovered in Eliot’s works.

L. Marz Harper  Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] T. Pinney  Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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* * * As we celebrate George Eliot’s bicentennial birthday, November 22, 2019, we are led to ask how her fiction, that produced such witty and sensitive descriptions of her own era, can be read with profit and significance today: i.e., why proceed? Among numerous possible answers would be the following: we can read George Eliot’s works for her representations of cultural issues and values, for her keen discernment of interpersonal relations, and for her descriptions of private thought and motivation in lone individuals. Here, her masterful language produces rich meaning through metaphor, while her carefully wrought descriptions convey to readers previously unthought thoughts, fresh and far-reaching ideas. For example, Odile Boucher-Rivalain observes in her essay that George Eliot’s fictional and nonfictional works continually document the idea that “writing, unlike images by themselves, attunes us to the depth and height of perception in our lives. Are we silent about some things? We should think about them anyway. Then write about them. That is what George Eliot did.” If images commandeer our imaginations today with snapshots and videos that hover digitally across time and space, we are aware of the visual connections and knowledge we gain from them; however, we could also ask ourselves what we might be missing if we do not equally steep ourselves in the printed word that generates carefully considered and crafted ideas. Words on the page, such as Eliot read and wrote, enlarge a reader’s life experience and forge a depth of understanding such as no image alone can convey.

A History of Eliot’s Reader Reception Victorian readers of George Eliot (1819–1890) led the way in appreciating her capacity to reach an exceptional level of human empathy through her writing. Recognized in her own time as one of the foremost writers of the British Victorian era—if not the foremost writer—her afterlife of fame and literary reputation tells an informative story about the ongoing culture of her readers. Toward the end of the British nineteenth century, the practice of writing fiction had evolved from a focus on realistic description as a method for finding truth in the observable world into a focus on aesthetics that could lead to significant beauty in literature as experienced by an individual. Realism’s external descriptions of the

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visible had yielded to aestheticism’s self-generated interpretations, and as a result, late Victorian reading preferences bypassed Eliot’s earlier realism.4 In line with this reasoning, Aleksandra Budrewicz’s essay in this collection describes end-of-century writing as a tension between realism and aestheticism in British literature as it was exported to Poland. By 1895, fifteen years after Eliot’s passing, George Saintsbury wrote of this change: “though [Eliot] may still be read, she has more or less passed out of contemporary critical appreciation.”5 Yet Eliot’s later development of internal sense experience is described by Sally Shuttleworth who claims that, with the rise of organic science studies, the convention of realism … shifted: the task of the novelist, like that of the scientist, was no longer merely to name the visible order of the world. George Eliot’s fiction encapsulates these changes, foreshadowing subsequent developments in the Victorian novel.6

Then, in the early twentieth century, the culture became embroiled in two all-consuming world wars, leading to some critical assessments of Eliot’s writing as not actually valuable as a contemporary representation of cultural life: in literature, Henry James, for example, described Eliot’s fiction as “a moralized fable.”7 World War I, the decade of the 1920s, and World War II were reason enough for Europeans, Americans, and all readers of English to doubt that questions concerning conventional Victorian morality as represented by George Eliot, or the later study of aesthetics in literature, could be relevant to the chaos that was tearing their societies apart.

A Mid-Twentieth-Century Memoir by Thomas Pinney To gain some insight into Eliot’s reception in the postwar years of the twentieth century, we turn to Thomas Pinney, who edited and published Essays of George Eliot in 1963. Because of his combined personal and public history touching upon George Eliot’s reception in the Englishspeaking world, first as a graduate student, and then as an English professor and editor, Pinney occupies an authoritative position to offer a memoir of Eliot’s reception history in the postwar period. * * *

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“George Eliot, Then and Now”8 by Thomas Pinney

At some time in the 1940s, I, and many thousands of other middle-school students across the country, read Silas Marner. The year before we had all read Ivanhoe, and in the next year, we would all read A Tale of Two Cities.9 I don’t remember anything of my response to Silas Marner; it was simply another book that one read because it was assigned. But being made required reading can be the kiss of death, and so it was, I think, for George Eliot. We had been exposed to her work too early for most of us, and a reaction of indifference set in. That indifference was confirmed by the change in literary taste that had come about after World War I. In college, we read nothing of George Eliot’s, and I do not remember that I ever even heard her name mentioned in four years of classes. Our teachers apparently shared our indifference. Dickens, yes; Hardy, yes; Trollope, maybe; George Eliot? Who? She was not even an also-ran. That all changed when I was a graduate student, in the mid-1950s. In my first year at Yale, I signed up for Gordon Haight’s course in the English novel. Middlemarch was one of the assigned texts, and I still remember clearly my growing excitement as I made my delighted way through the book. It was a marvelous discovery and at the same time a mystery: Why, after my too-early encounter with Silas Marner, had I heard nothing further about this powerful writer? The simple answer to that question was that George Eliot was then, and had been for some years, quite out of fashion. E. M. Forster called her novels “shapeless”; Lord David Cecil found her “provincial.” Almost everyone agreed that she was ponderous, didactic, and dull. The renewal of admiring critical attention to George Eliot had already begun when I encountered Middlemarch, though I knew nothing about that. The work [of criticism] was, at first, largely English: F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948); Joan Bennett, George Eliot: Her Mind and Art, 1948; Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form, 1950. Perhaps the biggest step toward restoring George Eliot to her rightful position was taken in my first year at Yale and by the man whose course in the English novel I was then taking. That was the publication, toward the end of 1954, of the first volumes of Gordon Haight’s edition of the George Eliot letters, an edition that ultimately reached nine volumes, all published by the Yale University Press from 1954 to 1978.10

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Gordon Haight had been at work on the edition since 1933, when critical interest in George Eliot might be said not to exist. Haight, who had been introduced to her work as an undergraduate at Yale in 1920, knew for himself the excellence and interest of her work despite the prevailing dismissive attitude. When Yale acquired a large collection of George Eliot’s letters, Haight thought at first of studying them in preparation for a new biography but then changed his mind; he wrote I soon realized that to explore the vast and massive intellect of George Eliot would be more than a holiday diversion. Her letters touch every facet of Victorian life. Her insatiable curiosity embraced all literature, social and political history, science, religion, Biblical criticism, and philosophy. She had translated Strauss and Feuerbach and the whole of Spinoza’s Ethics. To edit her letters would be a formidable task, but until it was done properly the true picture of George Eliot could not be seen.11

And so began a labor, sustained over twenty years, of collecting, transcribing, and annotating the letters of a “vast and massive intellect” whose letters “touched every facet of Victorian life.” The example of scholarly commitment that Haight’s work on the letters provided must have made some contribution to the restoration of her work: Any writer who can inspire such devotion must be good. The edition was well received, as it deserved to be: The New York Times Book Review gave its first page to Lionel Trilling’s approving review—a clear sign, if only in retrospect, that the weather was changing. The effect of the Letters was soon felt; they showed that George Eliot herself was interesting—anything but dull—and led people to a new and receptive reading of her books. Once that turn had been made, there was an end to the old dismissive indifference, and a stream of books and articles began to appear that has become, in our time, a flood. Yale became a magnet for the collection of materials formerly disregarded: George Eliot’s journals and diaries, notebooks, commonplace books, the manuscript translation of Spinoza, books from her library, “and scores of letters to her and about her.”12 But what student reads an edition of letters? Especially one in seven volumes (as the edition originally was). I and the other members of Haight’s class were of course greatly impressed by his work—he had never said anything about it to us—and by the stir it made, but I doubt that any of us read the edition then. We had many other books to read and papers to write.

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At the end of my second year, it was time to choose a dissertation topic. I was leaning toward something about George Eliot, for I remembered my discovery of Middlemarch. I called on Gordon Haight to discuss the question. He came up with several suggestions, and I took one of them (never mind what) and went to work. It was then that I began to read The George Eliot Letters, a highly agreeable task, since both letter writer and editor were up to the mark; I had not known until then how interesting and informative both a good writer and a good editor could be. Luckily for me, at that time the Yale Department of English defined the dissertation as an introductory exercise, not as a finished work of mature scholarship (and how could it be anything else?). On that basis, my dissertation was accepted. It paid off for me in another way too. In working on it, I had been struck by the number and variety of the essays and reviews George Eliot wrote before her success as a novelist. I thought that they might be worth collecting, and so I set about doing that. That was in and around 1960, still a somewhat early moment in the George Eliot revival, as I found out when I submitted the manuscript of the essays to the Yale University Press. It was refused. Gordon Haight was kind enough to ask his friend the manager of the Press why? Because, he was told, the edition was an exercise in “scraping the bottom of the barrel.”13 One of the big differences, I think, between George Eliot then and George Eliot now is that if one came across some unknown essays by her today, no publisher would hesitate to publish them. Such barrel-scraping as I had done was one of the major scholarly activities at the time: now that George Eliot was worth knowing, what was there to be known? Everything that had survived of her writings, published or unpublished, was now of interest, and many people have by now contributed to what may be called the establishment of the George Eliot canon, including diaries and journals and notebooks, as well as letters. Such work has greatly assisted the editing of the Clarendon Edition of George Eliot’s novels, published between 1980 and 2001 in seven volumes under the general editorship of Gordon Haight. Biographies proliferated using the new information provided by the letters: including those by Margaret Crompton, 1960; Walter Allen, 1964; by Haight himself, 1968; R. T. Jones, 1970; and Ruby V. Redinger, 1975. There was a notable sequence in the 1990s: Rosemary Bodenheimer, Kathryn Hughes, Frederick Karl, Kerry McSweeney, and Rosemary Ashton.

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As for the novels, in the early days of the revival, they attracted much of what may be called judicial criticism: What were her best or her most characteristic writings? What were the less successful works or even, perhaps, the aberrations? It was not considered otiose then to attempt a hierarchy of her works, with Middlemarch at the top and Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss at respectable levels: Romola, Felix Holt, even or especially Daniel Deronda were hard to place and drifted up and down the lists. For the rest, the dominant form of criticism was expository: describing the form of the novels, or their major themes, or their place in the literary tradition, and so on. Returning to the scene of George Eliot studies after more than fifty years spent in other territories, I can guess how Rip Van Winkle felt when he woke from his sleep. All is changed. The judicial phase is over, and anyone surveying the scene now would be hard put to it to decide what the main pattern is. J. Hillis Miller has described George Eliot studies as a scene of “wild diversity.”14 No doubt it is, but it certainly testifies to the high critical standing to which George Eliot has been returned. I think, in fact, that she has attained to that happy condition already enjoyed by Dickens and by Jane Austen, to keep the examples in the nineteenth century, in which everything they wrote is regarded as interesting and valuable. One is not surprised by any kind of approach or method that may be applied to these writers, nor do their critics need to apologize for their choices of text and method. George Eliot has now joined that select company, to judge from the character of the work currently devoted to her. No more barrel scrapings; rather, to change the image, her work is a monument in the design of which every part has a place and may usefully be studied. The book of essays that follows in this volume will, I think, illustrate this proposition to good effect. May 7, 2017 * * *

The Late Twentieth Century Onward Continuing into a more recent history of criticism from the 1970s to 1980s, the importance of interdisciplinary readings expanded the previously established new critical aesthetic readings of literature to include a larger and more diverse reading audience in more global settings. Here, George Eliot’s works responded with resiliency to contextual and interdisciplinary criticism.

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A key concept for criticism’s focus on the contextual culture of literature came in 1973, when Richard Altick wrote in Victorian People and Ideas that an “accurate understanding of any era’s literature depends to a great or less extent on a grasp of its historical context.”15 Criticism was beginning to look deeply into the cultural dynamics of historical periods in which a work was written. At this point, criticism began discussing the broad culture itself, the culture as represented in fiction, and contemporary cultural influences on authors like George Eliot. As a materialist, Raymond Williams had viewed literature’s cultural environment as an interrelated whole; how remarkable, then, that the cultural settings in some of George Eliot’s novels had supplied a comparable organic social structure a century earlier.16 In fact, Sally Shuttleworth has noted that “organicist theories of historical development underlie the central moral and social questions George Eliot explores in her work.”17 Criticism had thus moved beyond a focus on the literary work, or biographical details of the author, to its contextual surroundings. Now, while continuing its expansion, criticism also read texts from past eras to mine past treatment of a knot of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century issues concerning gender, class, feminism, empire, economics, international trade, and scientific topics, to name a few.18 With emphasis on contextual literary analysis, critical readings had necessarily become interdisciplinary, an approach that offers clues to the strategies practiced by the essay writers in this collection that features “Interdisciplinary Essays” as an important subtitle.

The Essays in This Collection George Eliot was uniquely placed among peers as a woman and an intellectual, and equally a writer of fiction and journalistic leader. As the only female “Sage” in John Holloway’s 1965 overview, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument, she circulated within an intellectual community of writers and thinkers involved in public debate.19 She was a groundbreaker on several levels in her time, and in an essay in this volume, Constance M. Fulmer points to the relationship between Eliot’s representations of same-sex attraction and how Eliot handled the paradoxes of characters’ moral transgressions, while Aleksandra Budrewicz traces how Eliot’s novels were received within the context of nineteenth-century Polish feminism.

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How Eliot positioned herself within an “information culture”—as it existed in the British nineteenth century—becomes an important topic in this collection from several viewpoints.20 In regard to Eliot’s efforts to secure a literary status that went beyond that of a popular writer, M. A. Easley considers Eliot’s participation in the New Journalism: the journalistic practice of providing samples, or “tit-bits,” of her novels that might inspire readers to delve into her long books. This practice may have contributed to her canonization. Then, as a self-fashioned poet, Eliot had come to be known as a “female Shakespeare” in her time. Here, Wendy S. Williams focuses on Eliot’s poetry writing in the mid1870s to consider how publishing in this new genre contributed to her status as a Victorian sage. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Joseph Wiesenfarth’s work on Eliot’s notebooks brought new insight into Eliot’s use of history as she developed her novels.21 As a result, critics moved past letters and essays to consider her research material. Andrew Thompson studies Eliot’s development of her Romola material by analyzing three holograph notebooks she used containing a rich collection of material in Italian, Latin, French, Greek, and English. These he reads alongside Romola to learn Eliot’s organizational and selection process. In a different field, also a development based on Wiesenfarth’s investigations, Molly Youngkin continues the growing research into Eliot’s use of ancient mythology begun by Wiesenfarth’s investigation into Christian, Hebrew, and Greek mythology. The recurrence of Eliot’s use of Egyptian mythology in most of her works reveals her background knowledge and understanding of the connections between Western and Eastern mythologies and her use of myth in the construction of new kinds of heroes in character development. In the 1980s, two important books of criticism concerning cultural approaches to science were published: Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983) considered how Victorian fiction was shaped by developments in evolutionary science, and Sally Shuttleworth’s George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (1984) established Eliot’s familiarity with Victorian scientific debates. Shuttleworth “trace[d] the diverse and complex ways in which [Eliot’s] involvement with science influenced the development of her fiction.”22 Lila Harper’s essay, titled “George Eliot and Natural History,” features an analysis of Eliot’s interests in science and how Felix Holt engages with the nineteenth-century scientific community’s use of metaphors.

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Furthermore, two essays in this collection feature discussions of human physiology. In “Handling George Eliot’s Fiction,” Peter J. Capuano considers the significance of human hands for the Industrial Revolution, and the similarity between human hands and those of the gorillas of Africa, as noted by readers of Darwin. This emphasis made Victorians the first people to experience a radical disruption of this distinguishing mark of their humanity, arising from the unprecedented changes in industry and science in the period. Given this unique setting, Capuano examines how and why Eliot prioritized representations of hands in her fiction. Then, in “Organic Realism in Middlemarch,” Jean Arnold discusses human neurophysiological feeling in the form of both internal sensations and their outward bodily manifestations, as viewed from the standpoint of George Henry Lewes’s nineteenth-century research. Embedded in close readings of Middlemarch, the essay finds that the experience of main characters’ bodily sensations at the molecular level plays a significant role in Eliot’s narrative outcomes in Middlemarch. In the field of animal studies, Nancy Henry considers the role of horses in Eliot’s narratives. Drawing on recent work by Paul Fyfe and Ruth Livesey, Henry surveys the functions of horses in Victorian culture from transportation to economic gain. Eliot had transmuted this Victorian reality of horses into a formal convention that marked turning points in her narratives. Henry thus considers the tension between views of horses as commodities and horses as sentient creatures. Equally important in the field of animal studies is Sara Håkansson’s exploration of dogs in Eliot’s fiction; the essay investigates Eliot’s allusions to canines and how they function in the narrative. As some dog characters form part of the satiric streak in Eliot’s narratives, providing mocking commentary, Eliot’s descriptions of their behavior serve both to credit and to discredit the human characters in Eliot’s novels. River water is a feature of Odile Boucher-Rivalain’s essay that shows Eliot’s ecological awareness, as shown in The Mill on the Floss. The River Floss gives life and economic prosperity to all the inhabitants of St. Ogg’s, yet it also presents to the novel’s characters life-threatening danger from flooding and drowning. Centering on the characters’ interactions with the river, and the continuous flow of the river toward the sea, with the tide coming against it, the plot works as a metaphor for the flow of the characters’ lives with all its insecurities.

12  J. ARNOLD ET AL.

The originally composed essays in this volume commemorate the 200th birthday of George Eliot—public intellectual, letter writer, essayist, editor, translator, novelist, and poet. The essays reveal a flourishing of interdisciplinary criticism as various and diverse as Eliot’s journalistic practices, publishing strategies, her poetry, her research and compositional methods, her observations of gender practices, and her allusions to Egyptian mythology. In the general field of science, the writers present Eliot’s engagement with natural history, her era’s interpretations of hand physiology, and the significance of human neurological systems in determining life experiences. Finally, her sensitivity to animal life—horses and dogs—along with her sensitivity to rivers as a part of the English countryside landscape, all converge to present the richness of George Eliot’s writing, her breadth of knowledge, her perception of the period’s life around her, and the keen insight that today’s literary critics use to convey their special understandings of George Eliot’s writings. Today, George Eliot’s 200th birthday presents—even demands—a continued exploration of her works that probe the very basis of her culture with sensitivity, creativity, and empathy.

Notes





1. Griff House, “The Farm Offices,” in George Eliot’s Life, edited by John Walter Cross (William Blackwood and Sons, 1885). Also pictured in Nancy Henry, The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography (Chichester and West Sussex: Wiley, 2012), 27. 2. Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil, trans. David R. Slavitt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 43–45. 3. Ibid. 4. George Eliot, “John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Volume III,” in George Eliot: Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ashton (Oxford University Press, 1992), 248; Andrew Miller, “Middlemarch: January in Lowick,” in A Companion to George Eliot, edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, 153–165 (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2013), 157. Here, we would also want to note that Eliot’s works developed in the direction of an aesthetic focus over her lifetime. While in an early essay (1856), she states her allegiance to realism defined as “a humble and faithful study of nature, … [a] definite, substantial reality,” in later times, discussions of art spread throughout Middlemarch (1870–1872) and, as Andrew Miller writes, “The World is for [Will Ladislaw] primarily aesthetic.”

1 INTRODUCTION 











13

5. George Saintsbury, Corrected Impressions; Essays on Victorian Writers (London: William Heineman, 1895), 171. 6. Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 205. 7. David Carroll, George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1971), 497–498; James Eli Adams, “The Reception of George Eliot,” in A Companion to George Eliot, edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, 220–232 (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2013), 227. 8. This previously unpublished essay by Thomas Pinney was written specifically for this volume, as every other essay herein. 9. Years later, it was pointed out to me that each of these works is among the shortest that its author wrote—not a very critical principle of selection, but easy to apply. 10. Volumes 1–7, 1954–1955 (described as “in six volumes” in vol. 1 but published in 7); Volumes 8–9, 1978. 11.  The George Eliot Letters, I, edited by Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), xi. 12. Ibid. 13.  See Thomas Pinney, Essays of George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). 14. J. Hillis Miller, Reading for Our Time: “Adam Bede” and “Middlemarch” Revisited (Edinburgh, 2013), xv. 15. Richard D. Altick, Victorian People and Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 305, ix. 16. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958), The Country and the City (1973), and Marxism and Literature (1977), for example. 17. Sally Shuttleworth, 4. 18.  See Wai Chee Dimmock Editor’s Column: “Historicism, Presentism, Futurism,” PMLA 133, no. 2 (March 2018): 257–263, for an expanded discussion of the uses and differences between presentism and historicism. 19. John Holloway, The Victorian Sage (New York: Norton, 1965). 20.  James Eli Adams, The Reception of George Eliot (Malden, MA: Wiley, 2013), 230. Adams discusses the current concept “information culture” as applied to the British nineteenth century. 21. Joseph Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1977) and George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–1879, and Uncollected Writings (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and University Press of Virginia, 1981). 22. Shuttleworth, ix.

14  J. ARNOLD ET AL.

Bibliography Adams, James Eli. “The Reception of George Eliot.” In A Companion to George Eliot, edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, 219–232. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Allen, Walter Ernest. George Eliot. New York: Macmillan, 1964. Altick, Richard. Victorian People and Ideas. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Bennett, Joan. George Eliot: Her Mind and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948. Crompton, Margaret. George Eliot, the Woman. New York: T. Yoseloff, 1960. Dimock, Wai Chee. “Editor’s Column: Historicism, Presentism, Futurism.” PMLA 133, no. 2 (March 2018): 257–263. Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon Sherman Haight. 9 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954, vols. 1–3. ———. A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–1879, and Uncollected Writings. Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and University Press of Virginia, 1981. ———. “John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Volume III.” In Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ashton, 247–259. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Haight, Gordon S. George Eliot: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Hardy, Barbara. The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form. London: University of London and Athlone Press, 1959. Jones, R. T. George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Karl, Frederick. George Eliot, Voice of a Century: A Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. London: Chatto & Windus, 1948. McSweeney, Kerry. Middlemarch. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1984. Miller, Andrew. “Middlemarch: January in Lowick.” In A Companion to George Eliot, edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, 153–165. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2013. Miller, J. Hillis. Reading for Our Time: “Adam Bede” and “Middlemarch” Revisited. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Pinney, Thomas. Essays of George Eliot. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Redinger, Ruby V. George Eliot: The Emergent Self. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.

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Saintsbury, George. Corrected Impressions: Essays on Victorian Writers. London: William Heineman, 1895. Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The MakeBelieve of a Beginning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Virgil. Eclogues and Georgics of Virgil. Trans. David R. Slavitt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. George Eliot’s Mythmaking. Heidelberg: Carl Winter/ Universitätsverlag, 1977. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

PART I

Periodical Studies and History of the Book

CHAPTER 2

“A Thousand Tit-Bits”: George Eliot and the New Journalism Alexis Easley

In 1881, George Newnes founded Tit-Bits, a weekly penny newspaper which aimed to publish “all that is most interesting in the books, periodicals, and newspapers of this and other countries.”1 The reprinting of brief extracts from other papers was nothing new. In the 1820s, subeditors regularly cut and pasted news and general interest items from one newspaper to another. By the 1870s, such practices came to be associated with society journalism, and by the 1880s, the New Journalism. The republication of snippets of poetry, anecdotes, gossip, and other tit-bits soon became a staple of popular weeklies aimed at a massmarket audience. As Newnes acknowledged in his first editorial address, “There is scarcely a newspaper which does not give some extracts” (1). Newnes was nonetheless innovative in his decision to produce a weekly newspaper almost exclusively composed of extracted material. In doing so, he was responding to what he saw as the overabundance of print, the “immense variety of books and papers which have gone on accumulating,” thus overwhelming the busy reader (1). The editor is thus

A. Easley (*)  University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul, MN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_2

19

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reimagined as a bibliographer who sifts through the world of print, selecting the “best things that have ever been said or written” (1). Newnes’s brand of New Journalism would seem to have nothing to do with a writer like George Eliot, whose lengthy, ponderous novels and high status as cultural sage would seem to place her on a plane far removed from the likes of Tit-Bits. Yet snippets from George Eliot’s novels appeared in Tit-bits, and when Newnes published a book collection of extracts, A Thousand Tit-Bits from a Hundred Authors (1882), he devoted an entire section to her work. That excerpts from Eliot’s works would be appropriated by practitioners of the New Journalism is perhaps unsurprising. What is remarkable is that both Tit-Bits and A Thousand Tit-Bits were preceded by Eliot’s own publication of literary extracts, Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Works of George Eliot (1872). This collection, edited by Alexander Main, was published in eleven editions (1872–1904), a period that overlapped with the efflorescence of the New Journalism and specifically with the rise of Tit-Bits, which reprinted some of the extracts that had appeared in Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings. Later, Eliot authorized Alexander Main to publish the George Eliot Birthday Book (1878), which similarly incorporated extracts from her work, formatting them to conform to a trendy publishing format. Eliot’s forays into the market for literary extracts tell us much about her conception of authorship. While she might embrace the role of cultural sage, she also capitalized on developments in the New Journalism, which allowed her to reach the sort of mass-market readers who were unlikely to attempt a 700-page novel. Her engagement with (and perhaps anticipation of) the New Journalism also allowed her to promote the sale of her book-length works of poetry and prose. Her enthusiastic collaborator in this enterprise was George Henry Lewes, who played a leading role in planning and editing both Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings and the George Eliot Birthday Book. Her sometimes reluctant collaborator was publisher William Blackwood, who privately referred to Alexander Main as “the Gusher” and complained of the “idiotic plague” of birthday books.2 Yet even he ultimately saw the value of working at both high-brow and middle-brow ends of the publishing spectrum. In this essay, I investigate the publishing format of Alexander Main’s Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings and the George Eliot Birthday Book, demonstrating how they represent Eliot and Lewes’s engagement with the popular literary marketplace, capitalizing on new mass

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media publishing formats and audiences. These literary experiments, I argue, to some degree anticipated the excerpting practices of the New Journalism, particularly George Newnes’s Tit-Bits, which published extracts from Eliot’s work after her death, repackaging them in a form that closely resembled the format of Alexander Main’s books and making use of these volumes as source texts. Just as Eliot felt compelled to move down-market in order to reach a wide audience, Newnes felt the need to achieve greater respectability by publishing extracts from her upmarket works, even if only in excerpted form. Both embraced the tit-bit phenomenon, if for different ends. For Eliot, it was clearly a marketing strategy for directing readers to her full-length works, but for Newnes it was a means of selling papers to busy, preoccupied readers.

Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings It seems fitting to introduce a discussion of Eliot’s Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings with an extract: Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper.3

These are, of course, the opening lines of Middlemarch, a novel Eliot was writing during the same time period she was negotiating with Alexander Main and John Blackwood for the publication of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings. Just as Dorothea’s beauty is “thrown into relief by poor dress,” excerpts from sacred texts are more striking when encountered in the humble pages of a daily newspaper. Her metaphor betrays an awareness of the ubiquity of poetry in the popular press, which, as Linda Hughes has shown, marked a “shift from mundane to sacred or spiritual spaces in which contemplation [could] occur.”4 The reader of a daily or weekly newspaper did not necessarily read in a chronological, linear way, seeking a clear narrative arc. Rather, he or she might flip through the pages, skimming ephemeral, time-stamped material and meditating at greater

22  A. EASLEY

length on content that suggested transcendent values and spiritual meanings. It was the sort of material readers regularly copied into commonplace books—or cut and pasted into scrapbooks. As Ellen Gruber Garvey notes, the arrangement of scraps, whether undertaken by the editor of a newspaper or the creator of a scrapbook, was a form of “authorship”—a selection of content that allowed readers to contend with the overabundance of print.5 It is telling that Alexander Main, when first contacting Eliot by post, introduced himself as a passionate reader of her works. After receiving Main’s gushing letter on The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot writes, “You have thoroughly understood me—you have entered with perfect insight into the significance of the poem. … In the passages which you quote from the Fifth Book, you have put your finger on the true key.”6 The assurances of selective, appreciative readers like Main free her from the fear of “excessive literary production,” which she calls a “social offence” (5:185). In a print culture characterized by overabundance, the selectivity of readers and authors is crucially important. When Main proposed to edit a book of extracts from Eliot’s poems and novels, Eliot and Lewes were enthusiastic. As Lewes explained to Blackwood, “It seemed to me one likely to deepen and extend the reputation of the works by bringing distinctly before people’s minds what they only see indistinctly, the marvelous wealth of thought and feeling which the works contain.”7 Yet Lewes’s negotiations with Main and Blackwood also demonstrate his awareness of the project as a commercial proposition. He notes that the volume is likely to be a “good speculation for the publisher” and later advises Main that his book should be a “small one, both on account of price and portability.”8 After all, he notes, “reading extracts is fatiguing work,” presumably because they are not stitched together in a chronological plot.9 A book of extracts might deepen appreciation of Eliot’s “thought and feeling,” but it was not meant to be read through from beginning to end or tediously studied at length; rather, it was meant to be carried about and skimmed in an occasional way. Such a definition of popular reading—as selective and deep yet skimming and superficial—fit well within the emergent New Journalism, which likewise juxtaposed the sacred and the ephemeral, providing opportunities for readers to alternately peruse or meditate upon content in a format that was brief and portable and thus easily consumed by busy readers.

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The publication of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in 1872 occurred in the wake of the 1870 Education Act, which ensured free elementary education for all and aimed to promote literacy rates, especially among artisans and the lower-middle classes. This led to what John Goodbody has called “entrepreneurial attention on the reservoir of public literacy that was available,” including the founding of papers like Tit-Bits, which appealed to a mass audience by combining news with entertaining paragraphs, literary excerpts, prize competitions, and reader correspondence— condensed, easily consumable content that could be read on the train or at the breakfast table.10 As much as George Eliot and George Henry Lewes aimed to construct “George Eliot” as a cultural sage, they also embraced new markets in an entrepreneurial way. Indeed, in his survey of George Eliot’s negotiations with her publishers, Donald Gray notes that Lewes was “commercially aggressive” and that Eliot energetically took part in the marketing of her work.11 In 1897, Margaret Oliphant likewise commented that Eliot “was an admirable woman of business, alert and observant of every fluctuation of the book-market.”12 This market, in the 1870s, was one attuned to the interests of a broad and diversified popular readership. If, on the one hand, Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings was designed to draw greater attention to Eliot’s wit and wisdom, it was also designed to appeal to a mass readership. As Gray puts it, Eliot’s aim was to “elevate the market by energetically helping to promote her dignified presence in it.”13 The structure of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings tells us much about how Eliot, Lewes, and Main imagined the mass-market reader. The book is organized chronologically, beginning with excerpts from Scenes of Clerical Life and concluding with Eliot’s latest publication. Since the book was republished in eleven editions (1872–1904), it was continually updated to incorporate excerpts from her most recent works. Each section focused on a particular book that was subdivided by character, beginning with George Eliot herself (in propria persona, as narrator). Eliot’s narrative persona was thus defined as the voice that bound together the excerpts into an abridged oeuvre. As Fionnuala Dillane puts it, “George Eliot” was constructed as a “repository of wisdom, the Delphic oracle, the ultimate omniscience, not one of us but above us.”14 Yet the format of the book suggested that her wisdom and persona were accessible to a wide audience.

24  A. EASLEY

The extraction of character “sayings” does not assume knowledge of their original placement in a narrative sequence of events. Indeed, in his preface, Main notes that his “chief endeavour has been to make the volume such, that open it wherever he may, the reader may light upon something which is either wise, or witty, or tender, or humorous.”15 Thus, in the section on Adam Bede, the reader encounters “George Eliot’s” aphorisms (“Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult”), Dinah Morris’s pious reflections (“It makes no difference—whether we live or die, we are in the presence of God”), and Mrs. Poyser’s kitchen wisdom (“When a man’s got his limbs whole, he can bear a smart cut or two”).16 Whether or not the reader is familiar with (or remembers) these characters and their narrative contexts, the excerpts stand alone as “wise, witty, and tender sayings” that can be consumed at random as ends in themselves. One can thus claim to have read “George Eliot” without ever having cracked one of her novels. This type of reading was not only enabled by the book’s table of contents, which directed readers to particular works or characters, but also by its use of paragraph dividers, which marked off snippets into easily consumable extracts that could be read in any order (Fig. 2.1). In this regard, the structure of the book resembled the format of a periodical or newspaper, which enabled readers to consume prose selectively and non-sequentially. For example, shorter articles in literary weeklies such as the Athenaeum were set apart by horizontal lines that allowed easy navigation of the page (Fig. 2.2). Just as the reader of a weekly paper might begin with literary reviews on page six and then leaf back to the leaders on page one, the reader of Main’s book could dip in and out of the text in an act of reading that was both casual and selective. The publication of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings had another function as well—to promote the sale of George Eliot’s books, which were advertised in notices at the end of each volume. Early editions advertise William Blackwood’s uniform volumes of The Works of George Eliot (priced from 2s. 6d. per volume), which had been published just a few years earlier in 1866. The cross-marketing of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings with affordable editions of her works, along with the timing of its publication to correspond with the Christmas gift market, suggests that Eliot, Lewes, Blackwood, and Main were attempting to reach a wide range of middle- and upper-class readers who could afford the 5s. cover price.17 Later, notices in the back pages of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings advertised Blackwood’s cabinet edition of Eliot’s works (1878), the George Eliot Birthday Book (1878), and Cross’s George Eliot’s Life (1885). The excerpts in Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings thus served as

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Fig. 2.1  A page from Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Works of George Eliot, 2nd ed., edited by Alexander Main (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1873), 3

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Fig. 2.2  A page from the Athenaeum, 29 November 1873, 705

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invitations to purchase the longer texts from which they were extracted. Indeed, early on, Lewes advised Main not to include so many quotes from Adam Bede since it was already “so much more widely read and reread” than Eliot’s other novels.18 Including quotations from other titles might induce readers to broaden their exposure to Eliot’s oeuvre. Yet the publication of excerpts for marketing purposes could be taken too far. When Main expanded the third edition of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings to include extracts from Middlemarch, Eliot complained that “there are perhaps too many, and … the work is left too nearly in the condition of a gutted house.”19 Giving away too much of the novel’s wit and wisdom left its plot an empty structure, thus dampening readers’ interest in purchasing the novel. By providing a model of how to read for the quotable excerpt, Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings to some degree influenced the critical reception of Eliot’s work. A review of Daniel Deronda published in the Nottinghamshire Guardian, for example, remarks, “In respect of its writing, its wise, witty, and tender sayings, it is quite equal to anything the authoress has given us. It abounds in what may be called detachable good things—admirable sayings which can be cleared from their surroundings and presented by themselves, knocked out clean as fossils can be knocked from lime stone.”20 The Guardian’s choice of metaphor suggests that the extract is a relic of the distant past, a dead object which, through the violence of having been “knocked out,” can be understood on its own terms separate from the ancient ecological system from which it had once been created. It becomes a “thing” rather than a part of an organic living whole. The review acknowledges that Daniel Deronda includes some “detachable bad things” as well: incomprehensible sentences and examples of “pedantry.”21 Book reviews had of course long relied on the presentation of representative, admirable, or displeasing extracts, but reviewers of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings were clearly more conscious about the quotability of Eliot’s texts and how they might support or refute her status as a cultural sage. Some reviewers of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings did not view its extracts as representative, either of George Eliot’s novels or her career. The Daily News, for example, argued that “passages detached from their context furnish a very imperfect notion of any writer, and the works of George Eliot are so artistic, symmetrical, and compact that the difficulty

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is increased. Each of the selected sayings is good of its kind. The same thing may be true of every brick or stone in an imposing structure; yet to detach the bricks or stones and present them in another form than that designed by the architect is not the way in which to magnify and represent the architect’s work.”22 Here again, the extract is metaphorically compared to an inorganic object that is unintelligible without reference to the broader structure from which it was derived. Without its bricks, the building falls apart, and without a context, the brick has no purpose or design. For the Westminster Review, the book’s fault was not its premise but its choice of extracts. Alexander Main “does not know exactly what to worship, he worships anything, good, bad, or indifferent,” and as a result, he overlooks “some of the most valuable portions of her writings”—her journalism.23 She has “spoken out her real thoughts more plainly and boldly” in her “essays, papers and criticisms, which are buried in the pages of reviews and periodicals” (572). Of course, many of these essays and reviews had been published anonymously in the Westminster Review, where Eliot had worked as assistant editor from 1851 to 1854. The excavation of the periodical record, the Westminster suggests, is the only way to uncover the true gems of thought that can be rightly attributed to the author. After all, the narrator of the novels could not be said to represent the views of the writer herself. By referencing Eliot’s hidden writings and reminding readers of her important work as a journalist, the Westminster Review alters popular conception of her authorial identity, recasting her as a woman of letters, rather than just a novelist, and suggesting that her non-fiction is a better source for ascertaining her authentic thought. Ironically, the “real” George Eliot is the anonymous journalist, who reveals her true thought by excerpting and reviewing the works of others. While the Westminster defines Eliot as a journalist of the highest order, it positions Main, in contrast, as her amateur opposite. His poor selection of extracts, exacerbated “by his utter want of all order and arrangement,” makes him the worst sort of editor, who butchers the oeuvre he intends to illuminate (572). Such criticism did not deter Main from publishing subsequent editions of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, and in 1877, he proposed a followup volume, the George Eliot Birthday Book. At first, Lewes and Eliot were reluctant to publish in such a trendy format—a gift book with a yearly calendar decorated with select quotes from Eliot’s works and with spaces for recording the autographs of friends and family (Fig. 2.3).24

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Fig. 2.3  Two-page spread from The George Eliot Birthday Book, edited by Alexander Main (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1878), 146–147

As Eliot wrote to John Blackwood, “I believe that you, as much as I, hate puffing, gaudy, claptrappy forms of publication, superfluous for all good ends.”25 Yet she was willing to go along with the project if he thought it would promote the circulation of her works. Indeed, she was soon actively involved in editing the volume in collaboration with Main.26 When the volume appeared in print, Lewes could not help complaining of its cover, which was “startling and ornate,” reflecting the aesthetics of the “bookseller mind, and the mind of the idiots who buy birthday books!”27 John Blackwood explained that its design was intended to reach a “colonial class rather as likely to be its largest buyers and cater to their taste accordingly.”28 Significantly, this exchange occurred as Lewes was worrying over the lackluster sales of The Spanish Gypsy and other titles in Blackwood’s cabinet edition of Eliot’s works.29

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Reaching out to “idiots” and colonials was necessary for ensuring a healthy profit margin. Blackwood, Lewes, and Eliot were well aware that collections of excerpts could be used to reach a broader mass-market readership. Indeed, the George Eliot Birthday Book was a highly successful publishing enterprise, selling 9400 copies over the course of its run.30 As experiments in mass-market publishing, Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings and the George Eliot Birthday Book in many ways anticipated the New Journalism by suggesting how literary extracts could be used to confer consecrated status on an ephemeral publishing format, while at the same time providing cheap, easily digestible entertainment for busy readers.

Tit-Bits of Literary Wisdom After George Eliot’s death in December 1880, Alexander Main’s Wise, Witty, Tender Sayings continued to be published in new editions, 1881– 1906. The frequent reprinting of Main’s book corresponded with the proliferation of George Eliot quotations in late Victorian popular culture. As Leah Price points out, they “made their way not only into parliamentary debates, but into an anthology, onto a calendar, into four schoolbooks, onto an army officer’s examination, [and] into a sermon,” among many other expected and unexpected locales.31 They also frequently appeared in the literary and miscellaneous columns of newspapers and periodicals, appearing alongside poems, paragraphs of gossip, and other snippets cut and pasted from other sources. While the practice of scissors-and-paste journalism had a long history in British print culture, by the 1880s, it came to be associated with the New Journalism, which Matthew Arnold famously called “feather-brained.”32 Anticipating twenty-first-century anxieties about “fake news,” Arnold charged the New Journalism with “throw[ing] out assertions at a venture because it wishes them true; does not correct either them or itself, if they are false; and to get at the state of things as they truly are seems to feel no concern whatever” (638). The publication (and reprinting) of scandal, gossip, crime news, and short paragraphs on all subjects operated at the edges of professional respectability. For many commentators, Newnes’s Tit-Bits, founded in 1881, epitomized all that was trivial and reductive about the New Journalism.33 As one commentator put it, the paper was focused on “collecting tit-bits to stimulate the appetites of those who, having very little wit or knowledge themselves, like to read what was said and done by those who had more.”34

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In his introductory address to Tit-Bits, Newnes justified the publication of extracts by alluding to the problem of information overload: “It is impossible for any man in the busy times of the present to even glance at any large number of the immense variety of books and papers which have gone on accumulating, until now their number is fabulous.”35 TitBits would respond to this problem by publishing the “best things that have ever been said or written,” along with “interesting incidents, amusing anecdotes, [and] pithy paragraphs” (1). Newnes acknowledged that “opinions may differ as to whether it is fair for newspapers to use other people’s writings so extensively as has now become the practice” (1). Yet he, at least, did so “openly and avowedly, and no attempt is made to pass off extracts as original compositions” (1). Newnes did not always acknowledge the source of his extracts; nevertheless, he brought a degree of transparency to a practice that was both long-standing and ubiquitous in the weekly press. Like Alexander Main’s Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, Tit-Bits can be seen as an index of sorts that aimed to guide readers through a broader canon of available texts. It was up to the reader to infer context—or to try to access the original text from which the extract had been sourced. Beyond just condensing literary wit and wisdom into easily digested titbits or serving as an index for a “immense variety of books and papers,” the literary extract, when published in a down-market periodical, conferred a sense of legitimacy and culture (1). The reader who regularly perused Tit-Bits, Newnes claimed, would become an “entertaining companion, as he will then have at his command a stock of smart sayings and a fund of anecdote which will make his society agreeable” (1). And the journal that published high-culture extracts would be perceived as being more legitimate by association. As Richard Salmon put it in the Nineteenth Century, journals like Tit-Bits, Great Thoughts, and Rare Bits performed an educative function, even if they conveyed knowledge in a “disjointed fashion.”36 In its second year of publication, Tit-Bits published a weekly series of extracts from select British, American, and Continental writers, including Victor Hugo, Anthony Trollope, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Martineau, and George Eliot. Each installment of the series was advertised on the first page, suggesting that it was a key selling point for the paper (Fig. 2.4). The two-page spread of tit-bits from George Eliot’s works, which appeared in the May 27, 1882, issue, included eighteen excerpts from Eliot’s novels, including four extracts that exactly matched

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Fig. 2.4  Cover, Tit-Bits 31 (20 May 1882): 1

(and six that nearly matched) excerpts from Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings (Fig. 2 5). This suggests that Main’s book was a likely source for the Tit-Bits feature on Eliot. In other words, it was a series of extracts selected in part from another collection of extracts. Reprintings of this sort were of course ubiquitous in popular print culture; what made the George Eliot feature in Tit-Bits so significant was its timing—coming two years after Eliot’s death and just seven months after the publication of the 5th edition of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings. Newnes was capitalizing on what, for Blackwood and Main, had been a lucrative trade in George Eliot memorabilia. Just as importantly, Newnes was attempting to consecrate Tit-Bits as something more than just down-market entertainment. In its early days, the title of the journal had been interpreted by some readers as a form of obscene slang, and the format of the journal was seen as catering to the most superficial of readers.37 The publication of literary extracts by

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Fig. 2.5  “Tit-Bits from the Works of George Eliot,” Tit-Bits 31 (27 May 1882): 92–93

George Eliot and others thus served as a marketing strategy designed to enhance the paper’s public reputation. Newnes would later declare, Oh, you may call it cheap journalism; you may say it combined lottery with literature, but I will tell you this, that it has guided an enormous class of superficial readers, who craved for light reading, and would have read so-called sporting papers if they had not read Tit-Bits, into a wholesome vein which may have led them to higher forms of literature.38

It is perhaps unlikely that the readers of Tit-Bits, any more than the readers of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, would have read the novels from which the extracts had been derived. The consumption of transient morsels of wisdom was well suited to the modern age. Yet Newnes did count on some readers, at least, wanting to preserve literary excerpts in a more permanent form. His Thousand Tit-Bits from a Hundred Authors appeared in December 1882 just as the Tit-Bits literary series

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was coming to a close and the Christmas gift season was well underway. The title seems to have been designed to appeal to the economical consumer who desired a quantity of wisdom at a cheap price. Indeed, the handsomely bound volume was priced at only 1 shilling (Fig. 2.6). In his introduction to the volume, Newnes explained that it was created in response to consumer demand and as a solution to the problem of overabundance in the literary marketplace. “Books have now multiplied to such an extraordinary degree,” he notes, “that the task of selection becomes greater every year, and it is hoped that, to some slight extent, this book will help to alleviate the difficulty.”39 The section on George Eliot in A Thousand Tit-Bits includes many of the same excerpts that had been published in Tit-Bits and Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings. Added to this number were additional biographical anecdotes selected from articles originally published in the Century Magazine and Harper’s Monthly. Newnes may have selected one anecdote, written by Alice Maude Fenn, because it provided subtle meta-commentary on his book’s tit-bit format. In the excerpt, originally published in the Century Magazine in August 1882, Eliot is shown visiting local farms near her home at Shottermill, where she would sit on a “grassy bank” and converse with locals about the “growth of fruit or the quality of butter” (89). Eliot and Lewes had their vegetables delivered directly from the farm, selecting the choicest produce for their table. “They evidently knew what was good!” Fenn exclaims (89). The ability to select and consume high-quality tit-bits is thus shown to be a quality of genius—whether it is embodied by a great writer such as George Eliot or an enterprising editor such as Alexander Main or George Newnes.

Conclusion Within high-brow reviews, Eliot’s novels maintained a consecrated status, regardless of whether or not they had been mined for extracts to fill popular editions. In 1881, Joseph Jacobs published an obituary on George Eliot in the Athenaeum praising her for “[bringing] to the world of art a greater extent of culture than any predecessor, with the possible exception of Goethe.”40 Jacobs’s memorial appeared during the same month that the 4th edition of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings was announced in the Athenaeum, but he makes no mention of this work in his survey of Eliot’s work. He does take note of The Impressions of Theophrastus Such but casts it aside as a compilation of “disconnected examples of popular moral errors” that would “never have much more

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Fig. 2.6  Cover, A Thousand Tit-Bits from a Hundred Authors, edited by George Newnes (London: Tit-Bits, 1882)

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than a pathological interest for the student of her works” (21). Jacobs refuses to legitimize forms of publication that seem antithetical to the rest of Eliot’s oeuvre—lengthy novels with “spiritual” themes (20). Ten years later, he republished his obituary of Eliot along with some of his other memorials to dead writers which had appeared in the Athenaeum. In his introduction to the volume, he positions Eliot’s works explicitly in opposition to the New Journalism: There is a general tendency nowadays against taking intellectual nourishment in anything but small doses. The enormous growth of the magazines is at once a result and a cause of this. Tit-Bits completes what the Fortnightly Review began. It is indeed an Age of Tit-bits. The strenuous attention which the works of George Eliot demand is too much for minds accustomed to such intellectual food as the magazines now supply. The high seriousness of her art displeases the frivolous, and the tone of English Letters just now is distinctly frivolous.41

With the benefit of hindsight, Jacobs perhaps recalled that the first issue of Tit-Bits had appeared in 1881, just months after Eliot’s death. Indeed, its excerpts of her works, published in the May 1882 issue, had appeared between the fifth and sixth reprintings of Main’s Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings. He nevertheless presents Eliot’s work as an antidote to the frivolity of Tit-Bits rather than a constituent part of its successful formula of publication. Such an assessment overlooks the fact that Eliot, in collaboration with Lewes, Blackwood, and Main, had in many ways anticipated the tit-bit fad in the 1870s and had inadvertently provided source material which could be used to legitimize Tit-Bits as a form of publication that had been popularly associated with frivolity and down-market entertainment. George Eliot’s engagement with the excerpting and reprinting practices of the New Journalism is less than surprising considering how astutely she and George Henry Lewes had participated in the marketing of her work. Their engagement with popular media anticipates our own new media moment, where writers use tweets, postings, and recirculated content to establish their own celebrity identities—and where readers consume literature both as tit-bits and as full-length texts. Could the rapid-fire proliferation of snippets be used as a lure to get casual readers to buy books? George Eliot and George Henry Lewes were counting on it. But the source texts of literary tit-bits were of little importance

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to Newnes, who was happy to publish extracts of extracts. In our own time, these conflicting models of publication continue to prevail in social media contexts, where readers are simultaneously encouraged to pause or speed on, stop at the extract or seek out (and invest in) the full-length text.



Notes





1. [George Newnes],“Tit-bits,” Tit-Bits 1 (22 October 1881): 1. 2. John Blackwood to William Blackwood, 2 November 1871, in Gordon Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–1978), 5:212, 7:111n. 3. George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study in Provincial Life (New York: Penguin, 2000), 3. For an alternative reading of this passage, see Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel from Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 130. 4.  Hughes, “What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies,” Victorian Periodicals Review 40, no. 2 (2007): 103. 5. Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3–24. 6. George Eliot to Alexander Main, 11 September 1871, in Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 5:185. 7. George Henry Lewis to John Blackwood, 30 September 1871, in Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 5:195. 8. George Henry Lewes to Alexander Main, 26 September 1871, in Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 5:193; George Henry Lewes to Alexander Main, 12 October 1871, in Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 5:201. 9. George Henry Lewes to Alexander Main, 12 October 1871, in Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 5:201. 10. John Goodbody, “The Star: Its Role in the Rise of the New Journalism,” Victorian Periodicals Review 20, no. 4 (1987): 142. 11.  Donald Gray, “George Eliot and Her Publishers,” in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, edited by George Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 198. 12. Margaret Oliphant, Annals of a Publishing House: William Blackwood and His Sons (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1897), 2:446. 13. Gray, “George Eliot,” 199. 14. Fionnuala Dillane, Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 161. Rosemarie Bodenheimer also argues that Alexander Main, by publishing Wise, Witty,

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and Tender Sayings, “gave the early signal that ‘George Eliot’ would come to signify the widely ranging contemplative voice of her narrative art.” Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Anne Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 247. 15. Alexander Main, ed., Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Works of George Eliot, 10th ed. (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1896), xi. 16. Ibid., 41, 81, 71. 17. This audience is also suggested by where advertisements for the volume appeared, e.g., in the middle-class Athenaeum. 18. George Henry Lewes to Alexander Main, 21 October 1871, in Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 5:205. 19. George Eliot to Alexander Main, 14 January 1874, in Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 6:7. 20. “Daniel Deronda,” Nottinghamshire Guardian, 14 April 1876, 6. 21. Ibid. 22. “Current Literature,” Daily News, 13 August 1872, 2. Eliot herself echoed this concern after reading Main’s revision of his preface to the second edition Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings: “Unless my readers are more moved towards the ends I seek by my works as wholes than by an assemblage of extracts, my writings are a mistake.” It is important to note, though, that it was clearly the language of the preface she was objecting to, not the book itself, which was published in a second, authorized edition in 1873. George Eliot to John Blackwood, 12 November 1873, in Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 5:458–459. 23. “Belles Lettres,” Westminster Review 41 (April 1872), 571–572. 24. For background on the birthday book fad, see Maura Ives, “‘The Summit of an Author’s Fame’: Victorian Women Writers and the Birthday Book,” in Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Maura Ives and Ann R. Hawkins (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 25. George Eliot to John Blackwood, 22 November 1877, in Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 6:423. 26. See, for example, George Eliot to Alexander Main, 17 November 1877, in Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 6:433. 27. George Henry Lewes to William Blackwood, 19 July 1878, in Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 7:44. 28. William Blackwood to George Eliot, 13 August 1878, in Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 7:58. 29. George Henry Lewes to William Blackwood, 19 July 1878, in Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 7:44. 30. Haight, The George Eliot Letters, 7:111n. 31. Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, 105.

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32. Matthew Arnold, “Up to Easter,” Nineteenth Century 123 (May 1887): 638. For discussion of Arnold’s complex relationship to contemporary extracting practices, see Richard Menke, “Touchstones and Tit-Bits: Extracting Culture in the 1880s,” Victorian Periodicals Review 47, no. 4 (2014): 559–576. 33. For background on Newnes and Tit-Bits, see Kate Jackson, George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), Chapter 1; and Hulda Friederichs, The Life of George Newnes (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), Chapters 5 and 6. 34. “Table Talk,” Literary World, 25 February 1887, 188. 35. Newnes, “Tit-Bits,” 1. 36. Richard Salmon, “What the Working Classes Read,” Nineteenth Century 20 (1886): 113. 37.  For an account of these turbulent early years, see Friederichs, Life of George Newnes, Chapter 5. 38. Quoted in Friederichs, Life of George Newnes, 97. 39. George Newnes, A Thousand Tit-Bits from a Hundred Authors (London: Tit-Bits, 1882), ii. 40. [Joseph Jacobs], “George Eliot,” Athenaeum, 1 January 1881, 21. 41. Joseph Jacobs, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Browning, Newman: Essays and Reviews from the ‘Athenaeum’ (London: David Nutt, 1891), xix.

Bibliography Arnold, Matthew. “Up to Easter.” Nineteenth Century 123 (May 1887): 629–643. “Belles Lettres.” Westminster Review 41 (April 1872): 571–589. Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Real Life of Mary Anne Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. “Current Literature.” Daily News, 13 August 1872, 2. “Daniel Deronda.” Nottinghamshire Guardian, 14 April 1876, 6. Dillane, Fionnuala. Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Eliot, George. Middlemarch: A Study in Provincial Life. New York: Penguin, 2000. Friederichs, Hulda. The Life of George Newnes. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Goodbody, John. “The Star: Its Role in the Rise of the New Journalism.” Victorian Periodicals Review 20, no. 4 (1987): 141–150.

40  A. EASLEY Gray, Donald. “George Eliot and Her Publishers.” In The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, edited by George Levine, 181–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Haight, Gordon, ed. The George Eliot Letters. 9 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–1978. Hughes, Linda. “What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies.” Victorian Periodicals Review 40, no. 2 (2007): 91–125. Ives, Maura. “‘The Summit of an Author’s Fame’: Victorian Women Writers and the Birthday Book.” In Women Writers and the Artifacts of Celebrity in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Maura Ives and Ann R. Hawkins, 119– 132. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Jackson, Kate. George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880–1910. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. [Jacobs, Joseph]. “George Eliot.” Athenaeum, 1 January 1881, 20–21. ———. George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Browning, Newman: Essays and Reviews from the ‘Athenaeum’. London: David Nutt, 1891. Main, Alexander, ed. Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Works of George Eliot. 10th ed. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1896. Menke, Richard. “Touchstones and Tit-Bits: Extracting Culture in the 1880s.” Victorian Periodicals Review 47, no. 4 (2014): 559–576. [Newnes, George]. “Tit-bits.” Tit-Bits 1 (22 October 1881): 1. ———. A Thousand Tit-Bits from a Hundred Authors. London: Tit-Bits, 1882. Oliphant, Margaret. Annals of a Publishing House: William Blackwood and His Sons. 2 vols. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1897. Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel from Richardson to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Salmon, Richard. “What the Working Classes Read.” Nineteenth Century 20 (1886): 108–117. “Table Talk.” Literary World, 25 February 1887, 187–188.

CHAPTER 3

George Eliot’s Literary Legacy: Poetic Perception and Self-Fashioning in the 1870s Wendy S. Williams

On August 8, 1874, George Eliot wrote a letter to her publisher, John Blackwood, that sheds light on her artistic self-perception at the time: “As to confidence in the work to be done I am somewhat in the condition suggested to Armgart, ‘How will you bear the poise of eminence, With dread of falling?’”1 Eliot recognized her “eminence” as an artist and dreaded “falling,” or being unable to produce further great works. Eliot wrote this letter to Blackwood shortly after publishing her collection The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, which included Armgart, the poem she referenced in her letter. By this point in Eliot’s publishing career, she perceived herself as more than a novelist: She was also a poet. Though she continued to write novels, she did so with the authority of a great artist. In her letter to Blackwood, Eliot quoted Tennyson to reiterate her concern about writing well: “Tennyson said to me, ‘Everybody writes so well now,’ and … to write indifferently after having written well—that is … like an eminent clergyman’s spoiling his reputation by lapses and neutralizing all the good he did before.”2 Although Eliot did not have “plentiful faith” in her ability to continue writing influential W. S. Williams (*)  Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_3

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works, she did recognize her “exceptionalness.” She quoted her own poetry, put forward her poems, and identified with great authors— including the Poet Laureate—here and throughout her letters.3 As her career progressed, Eliot came to recognize her place alongside Tennyson and other eminent artists. By the time of her letter to Blackwood (August 1874), Eliot had published eight major works: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Middlemarch (1871–1872), and The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874). Throughout her life, she had often complained of mental and physical ill health, but in February 1874, she experienced her first kidney attack.4 Since Eliot’s father had died of kidney disease, the attack no doubt caused her to consider her own mortality.5 Nancy Henry explains that even though Eliot had just begun her new novel, Daniel Deronda, the attack prompted “a sense of urgency to bring out a volume of her collected poems.”6 Eliot’s awareness of her failing health caused her to write “with an urgent self-consciousness” and “with an eye to posterity. In fact, it is fair to say that the idea of posterity … became her greatest preoccupation. Most significantly, she approached the subject from the point of view of a writer who felt a responsibility to the past, present, and future.”7 Eliot wrote to Mrs. William Smith in July 1874: “For death seems to me now a close, real experience … and I am glad to find that advancing life brings this power of imagining the nearness of death I never had till of late years.”8 With thoughts of her own death, Eliot sought ever more assiduously to establish her artistic legacy and was increasingly turning to poetry to achieve this aim. Eliot believed in the cultural prestige of poetry and wrote that it had a “superiority over all the other arts.”9 Thus, throughout the 1870s, she progressively styled herself as a national sage by regularly publishing poetry, controlling her public image, and promoting herself as a poet.10 From 1873 to 1878, while composing Daniel Deronda and her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Eliot oversaw two editions of her collected poems in 1874 and 1878 and wrote or revised numerous poems for these collections. Throughout her career, she wrote poetic fragments and over twenty-five poems, including lyric poems (“In a London Drawingroom,” “Two Lovers,” “In the South,” “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “I grant you ample leave”), a sonnet sequence (“Brother and Sister”), elegies (“Erinna,” “Arion”), hymns and ballads (“O May I Join the Choir Invisible” and “Sweet Evenings Come and Go, Love”),

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narrative verse (“A Minor Prophet,” “Agatha,” “How Lisa Loved the King,” “The Legend of Jubal,” “Stradivarius,” and “The Death of Moses”), philosophical dialogues (“Self and Life” and “A College Breakfast Party”), and dramatic poems (Armgart and The Spanish Gypsy). Furthermore, she demonstrated her versatility as a poet by masterfully employing blank verse, free verse, heroic couplets, and irregular rhyme schemes.11 Eliot also wrote numerous poetic epigraphs to preface her novels and their chapters. She came to view herself as a celebrated artist and linked herself to a great artistic tradition in her poetry by invoking Dante, Boccaccio, Homer, Erinna, Sappho, and Shakespeare. In her novels, she reminded readers of her role as a moral authority with her poetic epigraphs, and in her letters, she aligned herself with poets such as Tennyson, Burns, and Wordsworth. In this paper, I rely on biographical evidence from 1873 to 1878 to demonstrate Eliot’s self-perception and self-fashioning as a poet. By understanding Eliot as an artist who sought literary immortality through poetry late in her career, we can gain better insight into the imagination and sensibility of one of the nineteenthcentury greatest writers. After the immense success of Middlemarch (1871–1872), George Eliot was one of the most famous public figures in Britain and was gaining attention in the USA, Australia, and Continental Europe. She had always been a private person, but as a celebrity, she redoubled her efforts to prevent the public from knowing her personal life in order to take charge of her public image. She refused to sit for photographs,12 although she enjoyed receiving photographs of others.13 Similarly, she would not allow another author to write her biography,14 though she read biographies15 and even helped complete Life and Works of Goethe, the biography Lewes was working on when he died. Eliot’s efforts to protect her private life intensified the more famous she became. In September 1876, Jewish leader Haim Guedalla wrote to thank Eliot for her favorable representation of the Jewish community in Daniel Deronda. In October, he asked if he could send a copy of her responding letter to him to the Jewish Chronicle. She promptly (the next day) refused, explaining: I have a repugnance to anything like an introduction of my own personality to the public which only an urgent sense of duty could overcome. But over and above this feeling I have a conviction founded on dispassionate judgment, that any influence I may have as an author would be injured by

44  W. S. WILLIAMS the presentation of myself in print through any other medium than that of my books. … It is my function as an artist to act (if possible) for good on the emotions and conceptions of my fellow-men. But as you are aware, when anyone who can be called a public person makes a casual speech or writes a letter that gets into print, his words are copied, served up in a work of commentary, misinterpreted, misquoted, and made matter of gossip for the emptiest minds. By giving occasion for more of this frivolous (if not vitiating) kind of comment that already exists in sickening abundance, I should be stepping out of my proper function and acting for what I think an evil result.16

Eliot took great pains to avoid having her life “served up” to gossips and commentators. She wrote to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, an American author17: “I certainly feel a strong disgust for any readiness to satisfy that idle curiosity which, caring little for the study of an author’s works, is pleased with low gossip about his private life and personal appearance. Of every writer worth reading it may be said ‘He gave the people of his best; / His worst he kept; his best he gave.’”18 In these lines, she quoted Tennyson’s poem “To—, After Reading a Life and Letters” (1849).19 In his poem, Tennyson (speaking as himself) condemns the public for mining the life of the celebrity-poet. Like Eliot, Tennyson deterred biographers.20 Tennyson prefaced his poem with Shakespeare’s epitaph, “Cursed be he that moves my bones,”21 thereby linking himself to a tradition of distinguished artists with common concerns about the public’s prying into their lives. Eliot placed herself alongside Tennyson by citing his poem and reiterating his and Shakespeare’s celebrity’s complaint.22 Eliot’s efforts to evade public scrutiny were successful. Edward Livermore Burlingame wrote to George Bancroft about his difficulty in finding biographical information about Eliot for his article for the New American Cyclopaedia: “The books are almost entirely wanting in even the most important facts regarding Mrs. Lewes; and yet we are especially anxious to devote to her an article. … Even the date of her birth it is impossible to give … and all information is wanting as to her early residence. In short we can find out accurately little besides the dates of her works.”23 The following month, Bancroft sent Burlingame’s letter to Eliot, to which she responded, “I am thoroughly opposed … to the system of contemporary biography. I think it one of the abuses of print and reading that the mass of the public will read any quantity of trivial details about a writer with whose works they are very imperfectly, if

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at all, acquainted.”24 In the letter, she decried the perversion of “this time-wasting tendency” and gave an example of a “great poet” whose “trash, written when he was a schoolboy … is brought into quite mortifying publicity at the end of half a century.”25 Was Eliot thinking of herself as a “great poet” in relating this example? She stated a wish to be known by “just my works and the order in which they have appeared,” emphatically repeating, “I decline to furnish personal information.”26 Eliot suppressed knowledge of her private life in order to fashion her own public image. She repeated her wish to be known by “just my works” many times27; however, her comment about being known by the public by “the order in which [her works] have appeared” is curious. She wrote this letter to Bancroft in July 1874, two months after the publication of The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems.28 Eliot painstakingly wrote and collected her poems and wanted the public to recognize her evolution as a writer: from an essayist and translator to a novelist to a poet. When she submitted her collection of poems to Blackwood, she emphasized how much she valued her poetry: “I send you by this post a small collection of my poems which Mr. Lewes wishes me to get published in May. Such of them as have been already printed in a fugitive form29 have been received with many signs of sympathy, and every one of those I now send you represents an idea which I care for strongly and wish to propagate as far as I can.”30 Eliot cared deeply about her poetry and hoped the public would revere her work as that of an illustrious poet such as Keats, Tennyson, or Wordsworth. To this end, she had particular ideas about the form of the volume; she desired a volume like the “delightful duodecimo edition of Keats’s poems … published during his life. It is printed on good paper and contains thirteen poems—about 200 pages of 18 lines: just the volume to slip in the pocket. Mine will be the least bit thicker.”31 She wanted her poetry collection to look like Keats’s, and she hoped the size would allow readers to “slip [it] in [their] pockets.” George Simpson, Blackwood’s printer, borrowed the Keats edition from the Advocates Library to examine the model she had in mind.32 In her letter to Simpson, Eliot described many particulars about the form and emphasized again her major concern: “What I chiefly care for is to have the volume such as may be easily carried in the pocket.”33 To make her volume accessible to the masses, she requested that Blackwood not make her “little book too costly.”34 When discussing the cost with Blackwood, she identified with another renowned poet: “Five shillings

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as the price, would have been my notion too, but I am no judge in these matters. … Browning’s Ring and the Book is even charged 7/volume.”35 The business-minded Blackwood wrote to Lewes that “appreciators of Mrs. Lewes’ Poetry do not care much whether they pay 5/or 6/-” and ultimately settled on six shillings. Eliot agreed reluctantly; she seemed to care more about wide distribution and influence than profits. She wrote to Simpson that the volume would be “hideously high-priced at 6/-,” but she left financial matters to Lewes and Blackwood.36 However, she remained keenly interested in the quality of the volume. The thin paper chosen to accommodate her wishes for a small volume displeased Eliot when she reviewed the specimen copies.37 Simpson remedied the problem by selecting thicker paper. Eliot wrote to Blackwood that she was glad for the change, and again she associated herself with Keats and Tennyson: “I was much vexed with myself for having contributed to the shabby appearance of the current edition by suggesting the thin Keats volume as a model. Since the days when Tennyson’s earlier editions made their appearance … people have become used to more luxurious editions.”38 Throughout her letters, she quoted and referred to famous poets, especially Tennyson, in this way that suggests she identified as one of them. After publishing the Jubal collection in 1874, Eliot wrote Daniel Deronda (1876) and Theophrastus Such (1879). She wrote her later works not as a popular novelist, but as a moral guide with the authority of an esteemed poet. Blackwood wrote to Lewes of Daniel Deronda: “It is a Poem, a Drama, and a Grand Novel.”39 Blackwood understood Eliot’s desire for the public to receive her as a poet and complimented her by referring to her novel as a poem. Eliot continued to write poetry throughout the mid- and late 1870s, including epigraphs (prose and poetic).40 Eliot used epigraphs, or “mottoes” as she called them, throughout her writing career. She prefaced her earlier novels with them and also used them to preface the chapters of her last three novels, Felix Holt, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. She even added an epigraph to a reprint of “The Lifted Veil” in 1878.41 David Higdon explains that “there are 225 [epigraphs] in her works—96 of them original and 129 drawn from the works of fifty-six identified and eight anonymous authors.”42 She used a variety of poetic forms and quoted poets such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and, of course, Tennyson. For example, she took the epigraph for Chapter 17 of Daniel Deronda from Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”: “This is truth the

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poet sings / That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.”43 Eike Kronshage states that “by quoting the Poet Laureate of her day (1850–1892), Eliot includes the authoritative voice of a prominent poet in her own text.”44 Kronshage further states that the effect of the epigraph “can be intensified when the motto is identified/ascribed. … The epigraph exceeds its own status as a mere sign of culture and becomes the sign of a very particular culture, often of high culture, by referencing certain ‘highbrow’ writers.”45 Gérard Genette calls this the “epigraph-effect,” a term that refers to the power of an epigraph by its very presence. The epigraph in itself, he explains, is a signal “of culture, a password of intellectuality. While the author awaits hypothetical newspaper reviews, literary prizes, and other official recognitions, the epigraph is already, a bit, his consecration. With it, he chooses his peers and thus his place in the pantheon.”46 By using epigraphs, Eliot participated in a tradition of authors who rely on poetry to provide a prophetic voice and a sense of high culture. Eliot incorporated more epigraphs in her later novels than in her early ones, and as her art matured, she increasingly used her own poetry for her epigraphs. By placing her own poetry alongside that of the great poets, she presented herself as one of the foremost authors of all time and reminded readers that she wrote fiction as a sage. While working on Daniel Deronda and Theophrastus Such, Eliot also wrote individual poems for her 1878 poetry collection, The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and New.47 Eliot worked just as scrupulously on her 1878 poetry collection as she had on her 1874 collection, adding four new poems: “Self and Life” (composed between 1874–1878), “A College Breakfast-Party” (composed in 1874), “Sweet evenings come and go, love” (likely composed in the mid-1870s), and “The Death of Moses” (composed between 1873–1876).48 In 1877, Blackwood gave Lewes an update on the sales of Eliot’s works, explaining that the sales of Deronda had slowed but that the Jubal and Spanish Gypsy sales remained steady. “This will I am sure please Mrs. Lewes,” he wrote.49 It did. The success of her poems pleased her even more than the success of her novels. Lewes replied to Blackwood: “The sales—except D.D. at 21/- are indeed very satisfactory—those of the Poems the most gratifying to G.E.”50 The poems’ steady sales confirmed to Eliot her status as a poet. While preparing the Cabinet edition of her works, the Leweses bought a complete edition of Tennyson’s works because, she explained to Blackwood, “the poet was coming to read to us, and we did not possess quite everything he had written.” But when they received the Library

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Edition of Tennyson’s works, they were “disgusted with its weight and unmanageableness.”51 Eliot bought Tennyson’s works to prepare for a reading by Tennyson they were hosting but also to consider how to present her own works. In this same letter to Blackwood, Eliot revealed her eagerness to include her poetry in the Cabinet edition: And if you think the volumes need not be all of the same price … might not the 2 volumes of poetry be issued in the series? Then there would be a handsome row. … There may be some obstacle of which I am not sufficiently aware—though, if it were desirable that the actual form of the poems should be continued, I suppose the varying editions might run on together. It would certainly be an advantage to have all the works range perfectly together.52

It is worth pointing out the fact that Eliot described purchasing a complete edition of Tennyson’s works in preparation for her own collection while also emphasizing the importance of her poetry in her Cabinet edition. Perceiving herself as among the rank of such poets as Tennyson, she made efforts to position herself accordingly. The Leweses also constructed Eliot’s image by holding Sunday salons at their home, known as “the Priory,” where they held regular gatherings and received hundreds of guests. These fashionable events brought together prominent members of society. Kathleen McCormack explains that “intellectual, artistic, scientific, political, philosophical, wealthy, sometimes titled guests contributed not only to a lively social atmosphere but also to the workings of George Eliot’s creative imagination and the marketing of her books.”53 The salons served as an arena for self-promotion where Eliot would read to her guests from her works in progress and offer a sense of anticipation for the novels and poetry that would soon be out in print. Eliot’s audience included authors, editors, publishers, reviewers, and fans—people who could write and talk about her art in magazines and in society.54 Priory guests perceived Eliot as a sage endowed with a spiritual presence; they referred to her as a “godlike” Oracle,55 a Sybil,56 and an Idol,57 to themselves as worshippers,58 and to her presence as hallowed.59 Kathryn Hughes describes the Eliot ethos in London at the height of her fame: “With Dickens and Thackeray gone and Trollope past his peak, George Eliot was now the country’s greatest living novelist. Even in their prime none of this August trio had inspired feelings as intense, personal and reverential as the ones that

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surged towards the Priory now.”60 Nancy Henry similarly explains that people responded to Eliot “personally with an intensity greater than that generated by any of her contemporary authors, including Dickens. Sundays at the Priory encouraged worshipful homage, but young men and women seemed to feel toward her a combination of moral reverence and sexual attraction.”61 Young men such as Henry Sidgwick and F. W. H. Myers confessed to her their loss of faith, and young women, including Georgiana Burne-Jones and Emilia Pattison, discussed their domestic unhappiness. Johnny Cross and Edith Simcox were both faithful worshippers and visitors to the Priory, and Elma Stuart, Maria Congreve, and Georgiana Burne-Jones were intense “daughters” to Eliot.62 Henry notes, “That she and Lewes permitted devoted admirers to get as close to her as they did shows an intermingling of the public and private personae that Eliot cultivated once she had become a celebrity.”63 At the height of her fame, friends and fans alike worshipped Eliot. In the absence of biographical information, the public mythologized the acclaimed author. Thomas Hay Sweet Escott described a time when “the lady” dropped a piece of trash on the street and a Cambridge don “snatched up the precious relic, placed it in his pocket-book, pressed it adoringly to that part of his person where his heart may have been.”64 Lewes wrote a similar account in his diary on the day he and Eliot attended Lionel Tennyson’s wedding: “I saw a lady gazing very devoutly at Polly and then quietly as if unobserved stroke the back of her cloak and person.”65 Eliot did not dissuade public or private idolatry and even encouraged it at times. She welcomed the acquaintance of one devotee Alexander Main who, like many, considered Eliot among the greatest artists, living or dead. Upon reading The Legend of Jubal, he wrote to her: “Give me Shakespeare, and George Eliot, and Robert Burns.”66 Main produced publicity works with her permission: Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse, Selected from the Works of George Eliot (1871)—a book of collected passages from her works—and The George Eliot Birthday Book (1878)—a diary for recording birthdays of friends and family decorated with quotations from Eliot’s works. Eliot often said she wanted to be known by her works and had reservations about these types of collections67 but also recognized their potential for publicity. In a letter to Blackwood in November 1877, she wrote: As to Main’s proposition, we have never seen or heard anything of the said “Birthday Books”—have you? They may be the vulgarest things in the

50  W. S. WILLIAMS book stalls for what we know. … I can give no opinion about a “George Eliot Birthday Book” unless I saw the “Tennyson do.”68 With which it is to follow suit. But in general such suits are not what—I should be fond of following or having followed on my behalf. Nor can I see that the book of ‘Sayings’ is insufficient for the purpose which Mr. Lewes mentions as the only motive for sanctioning a new issue of extracts, namely, that it is always a way of spreading acquaintance with one’s writing. … Burns and Shakespeare books are no criterion for a living writer. The Tennyson book69 would be such, and I confess I should like to see its aspect before consenting. I believe that you, as much as I, hate puffing, gaudy, claptrappy forms of publication, superfluous for all good ends. But anything graceful which you consider an advantage to the circulation of my works we are not averse to.70

Blackwood agreed that the Birthday Book would be an advantage to the circulation of Eliot’s works, though he, too, was unsure of the worth of such books. Eliot wrote to Main upon hearing of Blackwood’s decision to publish the book: “I have but just learned from Messrs. Blackwood that they have agreed with you concerning the Birthday Book. When your letter came I had already referred the decision to Mr. Blackwood, Mr. Lewes and I having no acquaintance with this new mode of serving up authors.”71 Eliot’s use of the phrase “serving up authors” recalls her letter to Haim Guedalla one year earlier in which she decried the method of taking the personal letters of public people whose words are “served up in a work of commentary, misinterpreted, misquoted, and made matter of gossip for the emptiest minds.”72 Eliot felt that Birthday Books “served up” authors for empty minds, and Lewes, too, thought “idiots” bought Birthday Books.73 However, other famous authors agreed to the medium, and so did Eliot. She refused, however, to allow her work to appear in a similar type of book, Half-Hours with Great Authors, a work she and Lewes thought “too snatchy for our tastes,”74 perhaps because the work focused on multiple authors. One might wonder if she would have accepted inclusion had the editors invited her to participate in the 1874 edition, Half-Hours with the Poets, a Collection of Choice Poems from Chaucer to Tennyson. Eliot wrote to Main of her disapproval of the Tennyson Birthday Book: “Mr. Blackwood has sent me the Tennyson specimen, and I must say that I think it exceedingly ill done. The extracts are too numerous and too short…. This is not the Poet’s fault, and I think the presentation of our beloved Tennyson in this book is cruelly inadequate.”75 Just as she had examined Tennyson’s collected works

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to discover a presentation style for her own, she reviewed his birthday book in preparation for hers. If Tennyson had a Birthday Book, after all, shouldn’t she? She wrote to Main of Mr. Lewes’s wish that “there should be a good sprinkling of the best quotations from my Poems and poetical mottoes” and requested two specific poetical epigraphs from Daniel Deronda.76 After reviewing Main’s selections, Eliot wrote to him that she did not like many of the passages he had chosen but thought “the mottoes for the months seem very felicitously chosen.”77 Even though Eliot had doubts about these works, she accepted them since she sought to establish herself as a poet. Throughout 1873–1878, Eliot put forward her poetry, publicized herself as a poet, and identified with renowned poets of her time and of ages past. Her personal association with Tennyson was therefore not surprising. In August 1878, she wrote to Alexander Macmillan: “We have seen scarcely any one except Tennyson, who has read his new drama and some other poems to us. Not a trace of age in the old poet!”78 She and Lewes received and were received by the Tennysons at Shottermill in 187179 and at Whitley in 1877,80 1878,81 1879,82 and 1880.83 Also unsurprising was a letter of remorse after having committed what she considered a serious offense against the Poet Laureate. On November 4, 1877, the Leweses held one of their many Sunday salons, and John Cross was among the visitors. Eliot participated in a discussion about Tennyson, after which she regretted what she had said. Two days after the salon, Eliot wrote to Cross: Apropos of authorship I was a little uneasy on Sunday because I had seemed in the unmanageable current of talk to echo a too slight way of speaking about a great poet. I did not mean to say Amen when “The Idyls of the King” seemed to be judged rather “de haut en bas.”84 I only meant that I should value for my own mind “In Memoriam” as the chief of the larger works, and that while I feel exquisite beauty in passages scattered through the Idyls, I must judge some smaller wholes among the lyrics as the works most decisive of Tennyson’s high place among the immortals.85

Eliot’s self-consciousness reveals her personal distaste for speaking ill of a “great poet” who held a “high place among the immortals.” Eliot was expressing the wish she held for herself: to be known as one of the immortals and to be spoken of as such. She also seemed to speak from personal experience when she wrote in the same letter:

52  W. S. WILLIAMS Not that my deliverance on this matter is of any moment, but that I cannot bear to fall in with the sickening fashion of people who talk much about writers whom they read little, and pronounce on a great man’s powers with only half his work in their mind, while if they remembered the other half they would find their judgments as to his limits flatly contradicted. Then again, I think Tennyson’s dramas such as the world should be glad of—and would be if there had been no pre-judgment that he could not write a drama.86

Some criticized Tennyson for writing a drama when they expected poetry from him. Likewise, some criticized Eliot for writing poetry when they expected novels.87 In her statement to Cross, she expressed her wish that readers would read and know the “immortals” not by half of their works and not by their lives, but by a full study of all their works. There is no doubt that Eliot wanted to be known by her works, and especially by her poetry. As she wrote in 1875: “Of every writer worth reading it may be said ‘He gave the people of his best; / His worst he kept; his best he gave.’” Eliot considered her poetry among her “best.” By understanding Eliot’s self-perception and self-fashioning as a poet, Eliot scholars gain a fuller appreciation and understanding of one of the greatest writers of all time.

Notes









1.  References to Eliot’s letters are drawn from The George Eliot Letters, edited by Gordon S. Haight, 6 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), 6:75. 2. Ibid., 6:76. 3. See also her letter to Scottish poet James Thomson, written in May 1874, in which she responds to his poem, “The City of Dreadful Night.” She wrote as one poet to another: “To accept life and write much fine poetry, is to take a very large share in the quantum of human good, and seems to draw with it necessarily some recognition, affectionate and even joyful, of the manifold willing labours which have made such a lot possible.” Letters, 6:53. 4. Ibid., 6:21. 5. Eliot ultimately died of a heart attack due to kidney failure. 6. Nancy Henry, The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 213. 7. Ibid., 236.

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8. Letters, 6:64. 9.  References to Eliot’s poetry are drawn from Complete Shorter Poetry, 2:182. 10. Despite the crucial role poetry played in the later part of Eliot’s writing career, few who read Eliot today know of her poetic work. During her lifetime, Eliot’s poetry sold well. However, after her death critics largely dismissed her poetry as inferior verse, and over time it fell out of wide circulation. Recent studies, however, reveal a renewed interest in Eliot’s poetry. Antonie Gerard van den Broek’s scholarly editions of Eliot’s poems: The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot (2005) and The Spanish Gypsy (2008), now stand as the authoritative editions of Eliot’s poetry. These invaluable works include extensive editorial notes and textual variants. Charles LaPorte’s article, “George Eliot, the Poetess as Prophet” (Victorian Literature and Culture 31, no. 1 [2003]: 159– 179), and his treatment of Eliot in Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011) focus on Eliot’s poetess persona and use of religion in her poetry. LaPorte shows how Eliot applied recycled domestic and feminine tropes, biblical themes and passages, and a higher critical understanding of prophecy to further her humanistic moral vision. Additionally, the 2011 special issue of the George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, “The Cultural Place of George Eliot’s Poetry,” represents the first collection of essays focused solely on Eliot’s poetry, further demonstrating a renewed interest in her poetry. Furthermore, Gregory Tate considers the representation of psychology in Eliot’s poetry in his book, The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). In “Poetry: The Unappreciated Eliot” (2013), Herbert F. Tucker addresses the performative nature of Eliot’s adept versification and diversification in her poetry (Williams, Poetess, 5–7). Jennifer Raterman, in “Translation and the Transfer of Impressions in George Eliot” (Nineteenth-Century Literature 68, no. 1 [2013]: 33–63) and Eike Kronshage, in “The Function of Poetic Epigraphs in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda” (Connotations 23, no. 2 [2013/2014]: 230–260) discusses the function of Eliot’s poetic epigraphs in Daniel Deronda. Ruth Abbott, in “George Eliot, Meter, and the Matter of Ideas: The Yale Poetry Notebook” (ELH 82, no. 4 [2015]: 1179–1211) examines Eliot’s Poetry Notebook to describe Eliot’s vast research on and practice of versification. Finally, my book George Eliot, Poetess (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014) offers an in-depth study of Eliot’s poetry and her role as a poetess. 11. Wendy S. Williams, “Eliot, George, Poetry,” in Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, edited by Dino Franco Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes (Chichester, UK: Blackwell, 2015), 2:520.

54  W. S. WILLIAMS 12.  Letters, 5:377, 6:385, 9:199. 13. Ibid., 6:70. Fionnuala Dillane remarks that Eliot had a role in the construction of her own public image: “public appreciation of George Eliot was … determined by a distinct lack of biographical detail and visual evidence of the writer precisely where it was most expected … in the illustrated press.” Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 145. 14. Letters, 6:68. 15. Ibid., 6:88, 6:246. 16. Ibid., 6:289. 17. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps gave lectures on George Eliot at Boston College in 1876. 18.  Letters, 6:163. 19. Lord Alfred Tennyson, The Life and Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson in Ten Volumes (London, UK: Macmillan, 1899), 449. 20.  Anne-Marie Millim, “‘Troops of Unrecording Friends’: Vicarious Celebrity in the Memoir,” in Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle, edited by Charlotte Boyce, Páraic Finnerty, and Anne-Marie Millim, 164–190 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 164. 21. Ibid., 448. 22. Eliot also refused to meet fans whom she feared might write about her personal life (Letters 7:19) and she declined to provide autographs (7:36, 9:196) acknowledging that she appeared to be “the most churlish of celebrities” (6:130). She also controlled her image by refusing to speak out on public matters. She wrote to her friend Clementia Taylor, women’s rights activist: “I thought you understood that I have grave reasons for not speaking on certain public topics…. My function is that of the aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher.” Letters, 7:44. 23.  Letters, 6:63–64. 24. Ibid., 6:67. 25. Ibid., 6:68. 26. Ibid., 6:68. Eliot wrote to Sara Hennell: “I have destroyed almost all my friends’ letters to me … because they were only intended for my eyes and could only fall into the hands of persons who knew little of the writers, if I allowed them to remain till after my death. In proportion as I love every form of piety … I hate hard curiosity.” Letters, 3:376. To Blackwood she stated: “Is it not odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk is raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for the public, is printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to re-read his books.” Letters, 6:23. See also Letters 6:113, 119, 167, and 230 to read Eliot’s requests to her friends to preserve her privacy. 27. For example, Letters, 5:437, 6:52.

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28.  George Eliot, The Journals of George Eliot, edited by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 144. The collection included: “The Legend of Jubal” (reprinted), Agatha (reprinted), Armgart (reprinted), “How Lisa Loved the King” (reprinted), “A Minor Prophet,” “Brother and Sister,” “Stradivarius,” “Two Lovers,” “Arion,” “O May I Join the Choir Invisible.” 29.  Eliot published “How Lisa Loved the King” (1869) in Blackwood’s Magazine; “The Legend of Jubal” (1870), Armgart (1871), and “A College Breakfast Party” (1878) in Macmillan’s Magazine; and “Agatha” (1869) in the Atlantic Monthly. 30.  Letters, 6:25–26. 31. Ibid., 6:25–26. 32. Ibid., 6:28. 33. Ibid., 6:30. 34. Ibid., 6:30. 35. Ibid., 6:38. 36. Ibid., 6:42. 37. Ibid., 6:42. 38. Ibid., 6:57. 39. Ibid., 6:227. 40. For Eliot’s comments on epigraphs, see her letters to John Blackwood in 1873: Letters, 5:458–459 and 1876: Letters, 6:241. 41.  Eliot wrote “The Lifted Veil” epigraph in 1873 but decided against reprinting the work at that time. She used the epigraph when the story was reprinted in the Cabinet edition: Give me no light, great heaven, but such as turns To energy of human fellowship; No powers save the growing heritage That makes completer manhood. Letters, 5:380–381. 42.  David Leon Higdon, “George Eliot and the Art of the Epigraph,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25, no. 2 (1970): 127–151, 128. 43. Lord Alfred Tennyson, The Life and Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson in Ten Volumes (London, UK: Macmillan, 1899), 353. 44. Eike Kronshage, “The Function of Poetic Epigraphs in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda,” Connotations, 23, no. 2 (2013/2014): 230–260, 232. 45. Ibid., 248. 46. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Vol. 20 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 160. See Genette, Kronshage, Higdon, J. R. Tye, Michael Ginsburg, and Jennifer Raterman for descriptions of the various functions of Eliot’s epigraphs.

56  W. S. WILLIAMS 47.  The Spanish Gypsy and Legend were volumes 18 and 19 of the Cabinet edition of her works. Letters, 7:51. 48. See Letters, 7:51, 55, 58, 69–70 for an exchange between George Eliot and John Blackwood regarding the additional poems for the 1878 Jubal volume of poetry. Also, see van den Broek’s discussion of composition dates in the poems’ introductions in Complete Shorter Poetry, 2:21–23, 55, 61, 65. 49.  Letters, 6:328. 50. Ibid., 6:331. Similarly, in January 1874, Lewes wrote to Blackwood in response to a royalty check and a summary of the sales of Eliot’s works: “The sale of the Spanish Gypsy is especially gratifying.” Letters, 6:11. 51. Ibid., 6:358. 52. Ibid., 6:359. 53. McCormack, Kathleen, George Eliot in Society: Travels Abroad and Sundays at the Priory (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 135. 54. Wendy S. Williams, George Eliot, Poetess (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), 23–24. 55.  K. K. Collins, Interviews and Recollections (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 190. 56. Ibid., 118, 124, 126, 154. 57. Ibid., 93. 58. Ibid., 69, 93, 116, 117. 59. Ibid., 145, 155. 60. Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorians (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999), 303. 61. Henry, The Life, 237. 62. Ibid., 237. 63. Ibid., 238. 64. Collins, Interviews and Recollections 124. 65.  Letters, 7:14. 66. Ibid., 6:49. 67. See Letters, 5:459. 68. The OED defines “do” as “ditto,” or, “The aforesaid, the same” Therefore, I assume that by “Tennyson do” she meant the same work produced by Tennyson that she was also considering. 69.  The Tennyson Birthday Book was published in 1877. 70.  Letters, 6:423. 71. Ibid., 6:431. 72. Ibid., 6:289. 73. Ibid., 7:44. 74. Ibid., 6:78.

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75. Ibid., 6:431. 76. Ibid., 6:431. 77. Ibid., 6:433. 78. Ibid., 7:65. 79. Ibid., 5:169, 170, 180–181; 9:26, 30, 352. The language Eliot uses for the first visits from Tennyson is worth noting. In 1871, she wrote to Blackwood from Shottermill (where they resided during Priory renovations), “Tennyson, who is one of the ‘hill-folk’ about here, has found us out, so that we have lost the utmost perfection of our solitude—the impossibility of a caller” and to Cara Bray, “Tennyson has a house on a hill about three miles from here, and he has found us out. Otherwise, we are in secure solitude and read and discuss and walk to our hearts’ content” (170, emphasis added). Eliot’s language implies that Tennyson sought out her and Lewes and that his visits were merely tolerated; however, surely Eliot received the Poet Laureate as an honored guest, for she emulated and mentioned him often throughout her career. 80. Ibid., 6:356, 360, 364, 393. 81. Ibid., 7:20, 60, 62–64, 236–237. 82. Ibid., 7:202; 9:287. 83. Ibid., 9:317. 84. “With condescension.” 85. Ibid., 6:416. 86. Ibid., 6:416. 87. After publishing The Spanish Gypsy in 1868, she wrote to her friend Cara Bray: “Don’t you imagine how the people who consider writing simply as a money-getting profession will despise me for choosing a work by which I could only get hundreds, where for a novel I could get thousands…. I expect a good deal of disgust to be felt towards me in many quarters for doing what was not looked for from me and becoming unreadable to many who have hitherto found me readable and debateable.” Letters 4:438.

Bibliography Abbott, Ruth. “George Eliot, Meter, and the Matter of Ideas: The Yale Poetry Notebook.” ELH 82, no. 4 (2015): 1179–1211. Collins, K. K., ed. George Eliot: Interviews and Reflections. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Dillane, Fionnuala. Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Edited by Gordon Sherman Haight. 9 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, vols. 1–3, 1954; 4–7, 1955; 8–9, 1978.

58  W. S. WILLIAMS ———. The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot. Edited by Antonie Gerard van den Broek, Consulting Editor, William Baker. 2 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005. ———. The Spanish Gypsy. Edited by Antoine Gerard van den Broek. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Vol. 20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Ginsburg, Michael Peled. “Pseudonym, Epigraphs, and Narrative Voice: Middlemarch and the Problem of Authorship.” ELH 47, no. 3 (1980): 542–558. Hadjiafxendi, Kyriaki, ed. “The Cultural Place of George Eliot’s Poetry.” Special Issue, George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, no. 60–61 (2011). Henry, Nancy. The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography. New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2012, 2015. Higdon, David Leon. “George Eliot and the Art of the Epigraph.” NineteenthCentury Fiction 25, no. 2 (1970): 127–151. Hughes, Kathryn. George Eliot: The Last Victorian. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999. Kronshage, Eike. “The Function of Poetic Epigraphs in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.” Connotations 23, no. 2 (2013/2014): 230–260. LaPorte, Charles. “George Eliot, the Poetess as Prophet.” Victorian Literature and Culture 31, no. 1 (2003): 159–179. ———. Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011. McCormack, Kathleen. George Eliot in Society: Travels Abroad and Sundays at the Priory. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Millim, Anne-Marie. “‘Troops of Unrecording Friends’: Vicarious Celebrity in the Memoir.” In Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle, edited by Charlotte Boyce, Páraic Finnerty, and Anne-Marie Millim, 164–190. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Owens, R. J. “George Eliot’s Epigraphs: A Note.” The George Eliot Fellowship Review 20 (1989): 57–59. Raterman, Jennifer. “Translation and the Transfer of Impressions in George Eliot.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 68, no. 1 (2013): 33–63. Tate, Gregory. The Poet’s Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830–1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Tennyson, Lord Alfred. The Life and Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson in Ten Volumes. London: Macmillan, 1899. Tucker, Herbert F. “Poetry: The Unappreciated Eliot.” In A Companion to George Eliot, edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, 178–191. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2013.

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Tye, J. R. “George Eliot’s Unascribed Mottoes.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 22, no. 3 (1967): 235–249. van den Broek, Antonie Gerard. “Epigraphs.” In Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, edited by John Rignall, 100–101. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Williams, Wendy S. George Eliot, Poetess. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014. ———. “Eliot, George, Poetry.” In Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature, edited by Dino Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes, 4 vols., 519–521. New York: Blackwell, 2015.

PART II

Eliot’s Research Methodology

CHAPTER 4

George Eliot as “Worthy Scholar”: Note Taking and the Composition of Romola Andrew Thompson

Of all her novels, Romola was the one George Eliot found most difficult to write. Her “Italian novel” caused her the most self-doubt and also proved detrimental to her health as she suffered from headaches and depression. There was a long period of extensive reading and intensive research, a distressing procrastination and inability to actually start ­writing and, once started, composition sometimes proceeded very slowly. She clearly felt under great pressure in carrying out this project in a way that had not previously been the case. By the end of July 1861, Eliot had become so despondent she was considering abandoning the work altogether, and the pressure was only temporarily relieved by Lewes taking her away for short breaks to Dorking and Englefield Green in early 1862. Two further factors intervened to complicate the history of Romola’s composition: The first was the “English novel,” which “came across [her] other plans,” and developed into Silas Marner, written and published between 1860 and the spring of 1861. Silas Marner interrupted her research for Romola in a way that did not occur for any of

A. Thompson (*)  University of Roehampton, London, UK © The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_4

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her other novels.1 The second, after six months of concentrated research and two months of rather fitful composition, resulting in just sixty manuscript pages, was “the most magnificent offer ever yet made for a novel,” put before Lewes by George Smith in January 1862.2 Smith offered £10,000 for serialization in The Cornhill Magazine in twelve parts (which later became fourteen) with illustrations by Frederic Leighton. Eliot eventually accepted a lower offer, after assuring herself that Smith wanted this novel, an historical fiction set in a remote past, and very different from anything she had written previously. Her move damaged relations with her regular publisher Blackwood, and this also weighed heavily on her. By this time, she had written only as far as Chapter 8, equivalent to only one and a half of the projected twelve parts and was now under contract to deliver. Although, as Brown speculates, “it may be that this pressing practical obligation was exactly what she needed” to break the slow pace of work, the meticulous research and attention to detail she had established appeared to be at odds with the need to work swiftly.3 On the other hand, by this time she had already completed a huge amount of research on which to draw.

Eliot and the Historical Novel An obvious reference point for the historical novel was Walter Scott, whose impact had been profound in Europe and whose work Eliot knew intimately. Scott’s treatment of history in Waverley (1814) placed historical figures in the background, while foregrounding fictional ones, to give himself the freedom of action to develop his plot. Writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he had not attempted to reproduce customs, costumes or modes of speech of past ages and had opted for modern language, choosing a middle way between accuracy and license, though in later novels, such as Old Mortality (1816), he had used different forms of language, from official English to popular Scots, and quotations from scripture to establish historical context, social class, and to create character.4 Scott, who had first encountered the problem of balancing historical reconstruction and invention in the historical novel, later warned against “dragging in historical details by head and shoulders, so that the interest of the main piece is lost in minute descriptions of events [….] [we] must not let the background eclipse the principal figures—the frame overpower the picture.”5 In Italy, and of particular relevance for her own novel, Eliot could look to Alessandro Manzoni

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whose I promessi sposi (“The Betrothed”) set in seventeenth-century Lombardy she and Lewes both knew. By contrast with Scott, Manzoni’s novel is meticulously historical in its social and political treatment, so that when fictional and historical events and characters mixed in the novel, they are both portrayed in an historical manner in an effort to the make the historical and fictional merge seamlessly. Manzoni had also struggled with issues of language: how to transpose popular speech into a literary text alongside that of social superiors and educated people at a time when no common Italian language existed. While political conditions in Italy severely restricted access to archival sources for Manzoni, in Europe as a whole historical research had developed in the first half of the nineteenth century, and by the early 1860s, History was a burgeoning discipline, a science undertaken by professionals, and novelists increasingly felt the need to bring this weight of historical scholarship to bear on novels set in a past beyond living memory.6 Eliot, then, was very much of her time in her scholarly approach, one that gravitated toward meticulous historical reconstruction. With justification, she believed that it was no longer possible to write a serious historical novel without engaging in sustained and credible research, and part of the explanation for the “distressing diffidence which paralyse[d] her” and the anxiety to get things right was her clear understanding of the many pitfalls, and that some of her readers would be very well informed indeed, with intimate local knowledge of Renaissance Florence and its customs.7 On the other hand, as Eliot’s preparations to write languished in late 1861, Lewes pleaded with John Blackwood to “discountenance the idea of a Romance being the product of an Encyclopedia” when he spoke to her.8 As she prepared to write, Eliot struggled with the accumulation of historical detail that her project appeared to require (with the attendant risks that the frame would overpower the picture) in order to achieve the vision she sought. This caused her difficulties in harmonizing the various narrative levels in the novel with her need to incorporate historical information into the text, sometimes in the form of verbatim accounts of events. Additionally, there was a complex problem with language: She was starting from fifteenth-century Tuscan, with all its range of registers, from the speech of peasants, artisans, barbers and merchants, to the refined language of Savonarola, Machiavelli and the poets and humanists of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s court and the Republic. This then had to be “translated” into a convincing idiom in English, by using various strategies, including “equivalent” words, phrases or sayings, explanations

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(for example in footnotes) or words and phrases left in Italian (with a 39-word glossary in the completed novel). As Blackwood wrote to his wife: “[her] great difficulty seems to be that she, as she describes it, hears her characters talking, and there is a weight upon her mind as if Savonarola and friends ought to be speaking Italian instead of English.”9 The risk, of which she would have become increasingly aware as work progressed, was that the demands of incorporating accurate and precise history based on credible source materials, and achieving (a translated) authenticity of language while avoiding anachronism, would stifle the fictional world of the novel to such an extent that her art would suffer.10

The Notebooks and Their Sources Romola and the notebooks need to be read, then, within this broad context of the evolution of historical studies and the historical novel, and the notebooks show her engaging fully with the wide range of historical sources available. Here I consider three holograph notebooks, two already published (the Romola Notebook held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford [2006], and her Quarry for Romola in Princeton University Library [2014] together with the Florentine Notes for Romola held in the British Library [2018]).11 These contain a wealth of material in Italian, Latin, French, Greek and English that can now be read alongside Eliot’s other notebooks, letters, journals and novels to help build a picture of the author as a “worthy scholar” engaged in reconstructing the world of Renaissance Florence.12 Eliot needed to gather, organize, and make accessible for retrieval a large amount of erudition, and the selection and recording processes at work not only reflect the way she conceptualized her task, but also shape and condition the writing process and the finished novel. Her methods of note taking may be viewed within a long tradition, and her practices both resembled and differed from those of other writers. Some had already been established in her earlier notebooks, for example in her notes for Adam Bede (1859), but the amount of reading she completed and the volume and nature of the material she was dealing with required her to refine and consolidate her scholarly practices, and many of those she adopted for Romola are then carried through into her researches for later work, including Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. At the beginning of the Florentine Notes, there is a list of “Books on Florentine Subjects (+  at home)” occupying the first two and a half

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folios before the heading “Florentine Notes” on f.3. It includes her main sources for Romola and was probably compiled before the second trip to Florence in 1861. Eliot notes the books she has at home with a “+”, and sometimes gives the locations of other volumes, for example “Poggiana (Lond. Lib).” The list, though by no means exhaustive, is representative of Eliot’s extensive reading and includes works from the fourteenth century to some of the latest historical scholarship of her own day (Fig. 4.1). Four fourteenth-century works are listed and fourteen from the fifteenth century, including Savonarola’s Poems, Sermons and the Compendium Revelationem. These were read for the contemporary detail they provided, including language and expressive idiom, as well as for insights into the character, thoughts and words of Savonarola himself. Of the fifteen sixteenth-century works consulted, five were contemporary or near-contemporary histories (or chronicles) of Florence, together with the first Life of Savonarola, and a work on the origins of the Florentine “language.” Only four seventeenth-century sources are listed, consisting of plays and poems mined for contemporary idiom and to capture the spirit of the time and place.13 The eight eighteenth-century works in the list strongly reflect the Italian Enlightenment and Romantic scholarly revival of interest in the past of Italy, and the growing national consciousness that developed into the Risorgimento. These works provide historical testimony and offer rare or unpublished sources from archives. Her most important single source for Romola was Marco Lastri’s Osservatore fiorentino (six volumes 1776–1778). In an eighteenth-century spirit of intellectual and cultural eclecticism Lastri presents his Osservatore as a guide for a “philosophical stranger to the city.” It consists of several hundred articles, each mostly comprising extracts from a wide range of earlier writers, on the history and associations of particular streets, buildings, and monuments in Florence from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century.14 Another important source was the three-volume Dissertazioni sopra le antichità italiane (1751–1755) in which Ludovico Muratori, an important figure in the early Italian Enlightenment, sought to “explain customs and rites in Italy after the decline of the Roman empire until 1500” and “deal with the various different governments of those times, with laws, judgements, contracts, the forms of warfare, the bishoprics, abbeys, pious donations, hospitals, republics, factions, coins, feuds, estates and much other similar information, which taken together would create a full picture of the Italy of that time, different in so many ways from that of today.”15 Similarly, Ildefonso di San Luigi’s Delizie degli Eruditi Toscani, a multi-volume

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Fig. 4.1  Florentine Notes: f.1v: “Books on Florentine Subjects (+ at home)”

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history of Florence, was consulted for documents and earlier fifteenthcentury sources, and Girolamo Tiraboschi’s encyclopedic Storia della letteratura italiana was another important source used frequently.16 The fifteen nineteenth-century sources in Eliot’s Florentine Notes list show her drawing heavily on European and Italian scholarship in works of Italian history, Italian literary history, local Florentine history, historiography, topography, the genealogy of celebrated families, and on three lives of Savonarola by Meier (1836), Perens (1854) and a very recently published work by Pasquale Villari (1859–1861). The most important work of history consulted was the multi-volume History of the Medieval Italian Republics (1807, 1817–1819) by the Swiss historian J-C-L Sismonde de Sismondi, whose portrayal of the medieval Italian communes as champions of liberty against popes and emperors was to exert a profound influence on Italian Romanticism and historiography. Eliot acquired her own edition and made notes from Sismondi in both the Florentine Notes and the Romola Notebook.17 She drew heavily on Villari’s Storia di Fra Girolamo Savonarola e de’ suoi tempi for details of Savonarola’s life. This work was based on exhaustive archival research, quoted extensively from contemporary manuscript sources and drew together and extended much of Eliot’s previous reading in Florentine chronicles. In the second volume, there were a large number of original documents, including depositions for Savonarola’s trial, and Eliot’s own copy is heavily marked throughout. She also consulted the Archivio Storico Italiano, founded in 1842 to pursue serious historical research and preserve unpublished or rare documents.18 Here, she consulted Jacopo Pitti’s history of Florence, Vincenzio Accaijoli’s biography of Piero Capponi and Cedrus Libani, an account of Savonarola’s life by his contemporary and fellow monk Fra Benedetto da Firenze. She read Pierre Louis Ginguéné’s Histoire Littéraire d’Italie (1811–1835) and took notes from it in the Quarry.19 Eliot does not include William Roscoe’s Lorenzo de Medici in her Florentine Notes list. She was unimpressed with the work and read it with “much disgust at his shallowness and folly,” though she quotes from Roscoe several times in the Florentine Notes (ff.20–22).20 One surprising omission from Eliot’s list is Burckhardt’s recently published Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860). There is no indication in the notebooks or journals that she read Burkhardt and she may have been unaware of the work as she was reading in preparation for Romola.21 Overall, the notebooks convey clearly that, as far as possible, Eliot was concerned to approach the world of late fifteenth-century Florence through close attention

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to contemporary or near-contemporary sources, rather than through eighteenth- or nineteenth-century works of historical interpretation. Not listed as one of the sources to consult at the beginning of Florentine Notes, but among the first she looked at in the Magliabecchian Library in Florence in 1861, was an historical novel Marietta de’ Ricci (1840) by Agostino Ademollo (1799–1841). The novel’s subtitle “or Florence at the time of the Siege” refers to the siege of 1529–1530 by the armies of the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, and the novel begins in 1527. An imitator of Manzoni, Ademollo’s historical treatment of his story attempted to “condense everything that was most interesting [about Florence] into a single work.”22 Eliot’s interest in the otherwise undistinguished novel was directed toward the extensive accompanying historical notes by Luigi Passerini, and she made notes on musical instruments, street games, the wool trade, nicknames, anonymous accusations, taxes and fairs (Florentine Notes ff.3–11). Incidentally, the novel would also have served as an illustration of Scott’s warning about how the background could obscure the foreground in historical fiction. In August of the previous year, Eliot had “begun Bulwer’s Rienzi, wishing to examine his treatment of an historical subject.”23 Rienzi, or The Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835) was one of Bulwer’s more popular works. Its substantial use of dialogue in integrating the historical and fictional would have interested Eliot. So too would his moderate use of footnotes, which were employed to acknowledge his sources, give additional historical or sociocultural information, translations from Italian or, occasionally, to comment on judgments by earlier commentators. For the most part, however, he relies heavily on the narrative and authorial voice to convey information.

Note Taking and the Organization of Information The Florentine Notes, the Quarry and the Romola Notebook offer insights into how Eliot approached the challenge of organizing and storing a huge amount of knowledge for recall using the technology available, in this case the notebook, whether defined as “commonplace” or “quarry.”24 These notes were clearly made for her own personal use, rather than to be shared with others. They were compiled in support of the relatively short-term project on which she was working between 1860 and 1863, and were intended to enable her to move to the next stage of drafting Romola. They were broadly historical and literary,

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made from her extensive reading in the sources, rather than notes made while listening, traveling, from direct experience or from her own reflections on Florence and Italian culture and history. Their general purpose was factual: They show her collecting information to enable her to establish the historical “milieu, in the broadest possible sense” for the novel she was writing, and only very rarely do we see her “intruding” into the notebook text with her own questions or reflections on what she has read.25 As Ann Blair observes, “the vast majority of notes are designed for short-term use and do not survive at all for lack of any desire to preserve them.”26 However, Eliot’s notes for Romola, and indeed for her other novels, were made in notebooks bought for the purpose and were kept and preserved well beyond the duration of the particular project itself, as having lasting value in themselves, perhaps useful in later revisions or as “quarries” for future novels, and perhaps having sentimental value, as testimonies to important parts of her life and career.27 Blair notes how “at the deepest level … note taking presents some consistent features that are identifiable across many differences of time and place,” and these three notebooks display features common to note taking both before and after Eliot was writing: strategies or maneuvers that can be discussed in terms of the broad categories of storing, sorting, summarizing and selecting information.28 At the same time, however, note taking is also very personal and, in the case of a writer like Eliot, a study of the notes opens up the possibility of a deeper understanding of some of her creative processes. Unlike Coleridge, well known as an annotator who wrote copious marginalia on the works he read, Eliot does not as a rule make notes on the books she consults, though she often indicates a passage of interest by underlining or by a line in the margin.29 She sometimes uses the endpapers of a volume in her library to write reminders to herself of where certain information may be found.30 Eliot is an extractor rather than an annotator, and within the notebooks, many of the entries conform to two methods of note taking common throughout the European tradition: organizing by epitome or abridgment, and storing under headings (often known as “commonplaces”). In the Romola notebooks, she often works by abridgment or reduction of the original, taking notes consecutively from the sources consulted and summarizing or paraphrasing a text to create adversaria, and she may do this in either English or another language, usually Italian, either translating or weaving parts together directly in Italian.31 Eliot makes notes in English from volume I of Nardi’s Istorie

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on the talk in Florence, social aspects and the personages involved in the events in 1496–1497 in Italy and Florence (Quarry ff.12–16). She reduces 30 pages of Nardi’s text to 90 lines of information, extracting what she requires and translating into English, and a good portion of the information recorded eventually found its way into the novel in some form.32 Again in the Florentine Notes (ff.7–8), Eliot mixes direct quotations from Lastri’s Osservatore fiorentino with her own paraphrases in Italian and translations into English in making notes on the religious order of the Umiliati, the woolen workers guild (L’Arte della Lana) and the wool trade (Fig. 4.2).33 The other common technique Eliot uses is to employ headings to organize notes. In the Quarry, the title “Costume” appears at the head of each page from f.22 through 31, and Eliot makes detailed notes on Florentine costumes of men and women from a variety of sources in Italian, French and English.34 In the Romola Notebook ff.48–51, under the heading “Dantesque phrases,” she lists some 27 separate quotations (or occasionally her own translations or adaptations) from Dante as she read through the Purgatorio (Fig. 4.3). The use of headings is pervasive in the two notebooks she used once the writing process was underway from January 1862. In both the Quarry and the Florentine Notes, the headings refer directly to the sources consulted or to political, social and religious aspects of Florentine life in the late fifteenth century. In the Romola Notebook, headings are used only rarely: The notes tend to be shorter, and there is much direct quotation of phrases, usually clearly separated by a mark “=” below each one. In this, the Romola Notebook conforms more closely than the Florentine Notes and the Quarry to the traditional commonplace book in which quotations from literature were extracted and copied.35 Often though, notes are taken in a less structured fashion, and Eliot prefers to extract quotations as she reads, giving the name of the author, the work and sometimes the precise reference to the volume and page, though this practice is not followed consistently. In the Romola Notebook ff.4–12, she extracts passages from Luigi Pulci’s mockepic poem Il morgante maggiore (cantos IV–XXVI) and, while she often notes the work “Morgante,” only twice does she note the precise canto from which her quotation is taken, presumably relying on her memory and surrounding material in the notebook to return to the source. In the Quarry ff.73–78, she made consecutive notes from the first 50 pages of Domenico Manni’s Life of Bartolomeo Scala (1768), mixing quotations from Manni’s Italian and his sources in Latin, and many of these entries are then woven into the first half of Chapter VII “A Learned

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Fig. 4.2  Florentine Notes f.7, extracts from Lastri’s Osservatore fiorentino

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Squabble.”36 By the time she made these entries, Eliot had begun writing and was probably looking for material to enable her to convey the hothouse humanist academic atmosphere of Florence. By now she was reading in a directed fashion in volumes that she already had a shrewd idea would provide her with the information she was seeking. Again in the Florentine Notes, there are many pages of notes taken from volumes V–IX of Lastri’s Osservatore fiorentino (ff.18–25, 38–40), sometimes with headings, such as “Osservatore Fiorentino contd.” on f.22, but often just chronologically, with the volume and page numbers given. It may be that the information they contain was located by means of the index she made at the beginning of the Quarry in early 1862 and that, having read through Lastri between July and December 1861, she already had a good memory for the information she sought. Eliot had set herself the task of giving as full a vision of the medium in which her characters moved as possible, and part of the anxiety accompanying the novel’s composition centered on the need to provide accurate detail for every aspect of Florentine society the work touched upon. The large number of notes made and the need to locate and access the information they contained as she wrote led her to use a number of devices and visual signals within the notebooks to help her orient herself and retrieve information. Unlike the Florentine Notes and the Quarry, which open like conventional books, the Romola Notebook opens at the top, with pages turned from the bottom upward. However, the notebook has been turned upside down and used from the other end for a period of time, and Eliot numbered the pages starting from what is now the back of the notebook, so that what became the title page of the Romola Notebook corresponds to Eliot’s page 51, and f.2 to 49 and so on. The page numbers are turned 90 degrees to the text and appear in the top right-hand margin if the notebook is turned on its side clockwise, and Eliot’s numbering may have contributed to later confusion about at which end the notebook started (see Fig. 4.3).37 Eliot writes on each page in the Romola Notebook, while in the Florentine Notes she usually leaves the left-hand page blank, and numbered only the right-hand pages, probably soon after she began using the notebook, as it carries numbers at the top right-hand corner throughout. The same practice, with some exceptions, is followed in the Quarry. Though she sometimes uses her page numbers to cross-reference within a notebook (see Fig. 4.4 “Localities”), she does not use them to compile indices or contents pages to these notebooks, nor to refer from one notebook to another.

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Fig. 4.3  Romola Notebook, “Dantesque Phrases” (f.27)

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Fig. 4.4  Quarry, f.29 “Localities” (with cross-reference to page number in the notebook)

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For certain kinds of notes in the Florentine Notes and the Quarry, the left-hand page is also used or, on occasion, the orientation of the whole notebook is changed. Eliot makes a number of lists, indices, chronologies and tables to serve as aide memoires and help her fix dates, the course of historical events or other information as she worked on her manuscript. In addition to the list of “Books on Florentine subjects (+ at home)” in the Florentine Notes (Fig. 4.1), there is a similar shorter list of books on the last folio (f.55). She also lists the titles of each of the 75 “dissertations,” effectively the contents, of Ludovico Muratori’s Antichità italiane. At this point, the notebook has been turned 180 degrees and the list occupies the left-hand pages (Florentine Notes ff.38v– 39v), and one right-hand page (f.41)38 which carries the heading “Tom I. p. 1 Muratori: Antichità” (Fig. 4.5). Each “dissertation” deals with an historical, social, economic or religious aspect of life in medieval Italian cities. That Eliot clearly considered it an important source of information for the novel she was writing is shown by the fact that she copied out the titles over four pages, even though she marks the book as one she possesses at home in the list that opens the Florentine Notes.39 The Dissertazioni list allowed her to go straight to a chapter in Muratori for specific information on the widest possible range of subjects. Thus, checking or incorporation of factual information probably occurred directly as Eliot was writing her drafts, allowing her to work more efficiently by skipping the step of transcribing notes into her notebook. A “Chronology” of Savonarola’s life from 1492 to 1497 (ff.41v–43), probably extracted from Villari’s biography, runs across two pages where dates of the year and month are given against the left-hand margin followed by the main historical events, and on the corresponding right-hand page, information on events and dates relating specifically to Savonarola’s activities is given. There is a list of names of Savonarola’s followers, the Piagnoni (f.44v), and a further Florentine “Chronology” from Savonarola’s birth in 1452 to July 1495 (f.51). A list of “Hints and Queries” (f.52v) giving brief indications of information or areas for further investigation and miscellaneous information she thought might be useful is followed by another list of “Names,” containing Italian forenames and their diminutives (f.53) and a “Chronology of Florentine History” from 1076 to 1498 (ff.53v–54v). In the Florentine Notes, two more lists, which might also be classified as tables, give information on Florentine weights and measures (f.40) and the relative value of Florentine coins (f.54v). Though not used consistently, changing the orientation of pages in the Florentine Notes does provide a clear visual signal allowing Eliot to

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Fig. 4.5  Florentine Notes, f.41: “Muratori Antichità”: A list of Dissertations

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locate material quickly in this densely written notebook. The large number of lists and chronologies present in this notebook reflects the particular stage of her research, when she was concerned to fix timelines and other details in her mind. The Quarry opens with the 138-item alphabetized subject index to the Osservatore fiorentino (1r–8r), created after reading through Lastri’s multi-volume work the previous year. Toward the end of this notebook, there is an eight-page “Chronology of Savonarola’s Life, 1494–1498” (96l–99r) with month-by-month details of events (Fig. 4.6). Here, as in the similar chronology in the Florentine Notes (ff.41v–43), information for each date carries across from the left- to the right-hand page. On only one occasion is the orientation of the Quarry changed, when

Fig. 4.6  Quarry. 96l–96r, “Chronology of Savonarola’s Life, 1494–1498.” Reproduced by kind permission of Princeton University Library Rare Books and Special Collections Department

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almost at the end (100l and 100r) it has been turned upside down for no immediately apparent reason. We find no chronologies in the Romola Notebook, though there are two lists, one giving the names of Savonarola’s party (ff.32–33) from Villari’s biography, and another short list of books, some with chapter and page references, to consult on San Giovanni in Florence (f.19). Eliot used both pencil and pen, sometimes taking notes in pencil and then overwriting them in pen. In the Romola Notebook most of the entries were made in this way. This process of overwriting undoubtedly helped her fix facts and quotations in her mind, as it involved revisiting the material she had examined earlier, though it also gave rise to the occasional error in transcription. In the Florentine Notes only occasionally does she make notes in pencil and go over them in pen, and most notes are made directly in pen. The Quarry is written in black ink throughout, with very occasional penciled additions and lines. Although there are a number of examples of Eliot copying shorter quotations into more than one notebook, there is little direct overlap in the notes taken in the Quarry, the Florentine Notes and the Romola Notebook.40

From Notebook to Manuscript When we look at how the notes were incorporated into the manuscript of Romola, we find a myriad small details from her notes used to help create the milieu. We also find more extended passages, sometimes quoted almost verbatim or rewritten through the act of translation. On occasion Eliot draws attention to her source in the text of Romola: nay, says old Villani, to the best of his knowledge, ever since the days of Constantine the Great and Pope Sylvester, when the Florentines deposed their Idol Mars, whom they were nevertheless careful not to treat with contumely; for while they consecrated their noble and beautiful temple to the honour of God and of the “Beato Messere San Giovanni,” they placed old Mars respectfully on a high tower near the River Arno, finding in certain ancient memorials that he had been elected as their tutelary deity under such astral influences that if he were broken, or otherwise treated with indignity, the city would suffer great damage and mutation. (81)

This sentence amounts to almost a direct translation of a passage from Villani’s Istorie Fiorentine (1. 60), and Eliot’s list of books to consult

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on San Giovanni (Romola Notebook f.19) provides the direct reference to the passage in question (“Villani I. i. c.60”), as well as a reference to “Gibbon for Theodolinda” queen of the Lombards, mentioned in Romola just before the passage quoted above.41 The information in Eliot’s brief note on gems and intagli (Romola Notebook f.14) is incorporated through Cennini’s comments on Tito’s ring in Romola Chapter 4 (43): “This is a curious and valuable ring, young man. This intaglio of the fish with the crested serpent above it, in the black stratum of the onyx, or rather nicolo, is well shown by the surrounding blue of the upper stratum.” Tito tells Cennini: “The ring was found in Sicily, and I have understood from those who busy themselves with gems and sigils, that both the stone and intaglio are of virtue to make the wearer fortunate, especially at sea, and also to restore to him whatever he may have lost.” The details copied into the Romola Notebook are transferred almost verbatim from King’s Antique Gems.42 Eliot’s creation of her Romola text through a freer condensation and translation of source material in her notes can be observed from two closely related notes in the Romola Notebook (f.14) and the Quarry (ff.79–80). In the Romola Notebook, she noted that “near the pass of Thermopylae rise the blind walls of the fortress or castle where once ruled the Frankish marquises of Bodenitza,” and in the Quarry part of a longer quotation from Jean Alexandre Buchon’s Recherches historiques reads: et on retrouve encore dans ces mêmes lieux les vastes ruines de ces grandes fortresses baronniales, qui couvrent en général le sommet de hautes collines. […] et ces tours dont les murailles se composent d’immenses pieces quadrilatères et sont reliées à des murailles franques pétries de ciment, se conservent aussi dans les passages les plus importants des grandes chaînes des montagnes.43

In Romola this becomes: “High over every fastness, from the plains of Lacedaemon to the straits of Thermopylae, there towers some huge Frankish fortress, once inhabited by a French or Italian marquis, now either abandoned or held by Turkish bands” (67). The additional details of location and history are also to be found in the long quotation from Buchon.44 Here, Eliot’s text is more finely rendered than merely literal translation, but can clearly be traced back to the historical entries in her two notebooks.

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Eliot wrote Romola under particular pressure—partly self-imposed, as her own cast of mind led her to approach the project as a scholar, in part a reflection of the time of writing in the early 1860s, and partly as a result of serialization of the novel—to give what she hoped would be an authentic representation. This has led to repeated criticism of the novel’s excess of erudition and over-incorporated scholarship in a laborious reconstruction of fifteenth-century Florence, and examination of the notebooks tends to reinforce this view. Yet ultimately, the notebooks can only give us partial insights into the composition of Romola. They illuminate and testify to the breadth and depth of scholarship she engaged with, but give us only part of the story of the imaginative labor involved. We do not have access to the many conversations Eliot had with Lewes before and during the process of research and writing the novel, though we know from diary entries that these occurred regularly, and that Lewes was invariably supportive.45 Nor do we know much about the work of plotting the novel, as Eliot’s notes and sketches have not come down to us. After being in “a state of so much wretchedness in attempting to concentrate my thoughts on the construction of my story, that I became desperate,” a week later she had “conceived the plot of my novel with new distinctness.”46 Between late August 1861 and the end of the year, there were a series of outlines and sketches, together with setbacks and false starts, as she constructed the plot.47 While doing the extensive reading recorded in the diary entries and Romola notebooks in these months, Eliot was also giving a great deal of thought to plotting her story knowing that, as she wrote later of the same process for Middlemarch, “construction …., once done, serves as good wheels to progress.”48 Nevertheless, the considerable imaginative labor of plotting and weaving the fictional into the historical, the nature of these struggles and the alternative versions she considered and discarded before deciding upon her plot remain almost invisible to us. Part of her “distressing diffidence” reflects anxiety about a novel focusing on the life of an ordinary person beyond the makers of history, a female protagonist written into a male-dominated Florentine society at a time when female histories were all but invisible and unwritten. Her fear of not having knowledge enough to complete the novel also relates to doubts about her ability to bring off this considerable act of imagination given the paucity of written sources on women’s everyday lives.49 Her interest in one of the few women of the period whose lives were written is apparent in a note in Florentine Notes from Roscoe’s Life of Lorenzo de Medici: “Cassandra Fidelis—one of the first scholars of

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the age—corresponded with Politian. She lived at Venice where, in 1491, Politian paid her a visit. D. in 1558 having completed a full century” (f.22). Then, in Chapter 5 of the novel, Romola says: “I will study diligently … I will become as wise as Cassandra Fedele: I will try and be as useful to you as if I had been a boy, and then perhaps some great scholar will want to marry me, and will not mind about a dowry; … and you will not be sorry that I was a daughter” (54).50 The three notebooks discussed here provide insights into George Eliot at work as she struggled hard with the challenges posed by Romola. It is surely significant that she did not complete another historical novel, if we take the term “historical” to mean one set earlier than the period dealt with in Middlemarch and Felix Holt, the Radical, both within living memory for many of Eliot’s readers. As her later notebooks testify, Eliot continued making extensive notes from her reading in preparation for writing. She continued many of the practices she had established and consolidated through her Romola research, including extracting and condensing or paraphrasing information from books to create adversaria, the use of headings, noting miscellaneous quotations often separated by a “=”, sometimes working from both ends of a notebook and going over notes made in pencil with ink, and the use of lists.51 Both MS 711 and 707 for Daniel Deronda have a brief contents list, probably made after the notebooks had been filled. However, lists and chronologies are less in evidence than in the notebooks for Romola, where Eliot worked hard to ensure she could retrieve information from a particular source when needed, to establish a reliable chronology of events and significant dates, and to remind herself of these throughout the process of composition. Interestingly, she did not eschew all further projects that were likely to involve the kind of research she had carried out for her Italian novel. The Romola Notebook includes thirteen pages of notes from her historical researches for The Spanish Gipsy, her verse drama set in fifteenth-century Spain and, following the pattern for Romola in Italy, the Leweses also went to Spain in 1866 to see for themselves. The different medium and the demands of verse in The Spanish Gipsy evidently meant that Eliot felt confident in embarking on a project requiring the incorporation of fifteenth-century Spanish history and language, and the kind of historical research, albeit on a more limited scale, she had done for Romola. Also in the Romola Notebook, there are three pages of notes under the heading “(Studies for Neapolitan Drama)” on the Carbonari and the Neapolitan resistance to government in the early nineteenth-century

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Italian Risorgimento. Finally, a short “Quarry” held at Princeton University Library in which she develops a number of narrative lines for a new novel, together with material in MS 707, indicates that, after she finished Daniel Deronda, Eliot was working toward a novel which was to have been set in the period of the Napoleonic Wars.52

Notes





1. Letters III, 371. 2. Letters IV, 17–18. 3. Andrew Brown, ed., Romola (Oxford: Oxford University Press), xxxiii. 4. Brian Hamnett, The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 36, 74 segg. 5. cit. Hamnett 174. 6. The discipline developed its own characteristic set of practices relating to the informed selection of materials, the distinction between primary and secondary sources, agreed professional standards and procedures, criteria for verification and evaluation and interpretations and methods that were open to criticism (Hamnett 39–40). 7. Letters III, 273–274. One such individual, for example, was Thomas Adolphus Trollope, a prominent member of the expatriate community in Florence who the Lewes met in 1860 and whose novel Beate Eliot later read to examine his historical treatment of the period. Trollope read proofs for the first installment and was able to correct Eliot’s use of the expression “netto di specchio” in Chapter 1, which had a specific meaning of “not being entered as a debtor in the public book” (the specchio or “Mirror”) and thus indicated an absence of disqualification. In her MS and proofs, Eliot had translated and explained the expression as “‘mirror-proof’—the phrase used to express the absence of disqualification.” In replying to Trollope’s letter, she writes: “I am very grateful to you for your notes. Concerning netto di specchio, I have found a passage in Varchi which decides the point according to your impression” (Letters III, 431; cited in Brown 599). In his What I Remember Trollope says, “as she had altogether mistaken the meaning of the phrase, I had insinuated my correction as little presumptuously as I could” (What I Remember ii, 301; cited in Brown 600). Again Trollope questions the accuracy of Eliot’s statement that the Bardi family were of lowly popolani origins, and Eliot replied with a quotation from the chronicler Villani. In What I Remember Trollope commented: “It needs some familiarity with the Florentine chroniclers to understand that the words quoted by no means indicate that the families named were not of a patrician origin. …

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But the passage is interesting as showing the great care she took to make her Italian novel historically accurate. And it is to be remembered that she came to the subject absolutely new to it. She would have known otherwise, that the Case situated in the Oltr’Arno quarter, were almost all noble. That ward of the city was the Florentine quartier St. Germain” (What I Remember, ii. 302; cited in Brown 609–19). Frederic Leighton was engaged by George Smith to do the illustrations for Romola. He had lived and worked in Florence and painted Florentine historical subjects. In addition to advice on the illustrations, he also offered comment on a Florentine interjection (“Che, che”) which Eliot subsequently removed from the first edition once she realized that it would probably have been anachronistic (“in the writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries … this exclamation … does not seem to occur.”) As Brown comments, Eliot knew she was writing in a colloquial idiom unfamiliar to her, and to Leighton she asked, “Pray let me have as many criticisms of that kind as you can” (Letters IV, 40; cited in Brown xxxiv). 8. Letters III, 273–274. 9. Ibid. 10. Such methodological difficulties have led Harold Oren and other critics to identify Romola as an example of the historical novel in crisis in the period after about 1850. See Hamnett 174 segg. 11. George Eliot, “Florentine Notes” (British Library Add. MSS. 40768), edited by Andrew Thompson. George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies 70, no. 1, 1–86. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. 12. The phrase “worthy scholar” is used of Romola’s father Bardo de’ Bardi in Chapter 7 of Romola. He is just one of many, in a city “fruitful in illustrious scholars” (29, 80). 13.  Fourteenth-century works listed include: Boccaccio’s Decameron and Franco Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle, as well as Antonio Pucci’s poem Mercato vecchio; the fifteenth-century works listed are Angelo Poliziano’s Epistolae, Poggio Bracciolini’s letters, Francesco Filelfo’s Epistolae, the poems of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Luigi Pulci’s mock epic poem Morgante maggiore, the Diario of Giovanni Cambi and the Ricordanze of Tribaldo d’Amerigo de’ Rossi (both in Stefani’s Delizie degli eruditi toscani), the Ricordi of the Rinuccini family and the Memoirs of Philippe de Comines, together with Savonarola’s works (Poems, Sermons and the Compendium Revelationem); Sixteenth-century sources included Pacifico Burlamacchi’s Vita di Savonarola, Benedetto Varchi’s Storia fiorentina, Filippo Nerli’s Storia and Jacopo Nardi’s Storia di Firenze, Ammirato’s Istorie fiorentine and Machiavelli’s Storia as well as other writings including Il principe and La mandragola. Another literary source was Bernardo Dovizi’s play La calandra. Other works listed were Varchi’s Ercolano

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(a dialogue between Varchi and Count Ercolano on the nature of vernacular Tuscan), Doni’s I Marmi (a collection of imagined conversations overheard on the marble steps of the Duomo in Florence), Giannotti’s Opere (probably the four-volume Della Repubblica Fiorentina of 1538), Borghini’s Discorsi (studies on the early history of Florence) and Agnolo Firenzuola’s Prose. Her interest in the question of language is further attested by her inclusion of Giambullari’s Origine della lingua Fiorentina; the seventeenth-century works are listed and these are all literary: two early works are the plays La tancia by Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger, and La secchia rapita by Alessandro Tassoni. Eliot also read Lorenzo Lippi’s Il Malmantile racquistato and Francesco Redi’s poem Bacco in Toscana. 14. In the Quarry she created a thematic index of the work on 9 January 1862 (Journals, 107) after reading through it. She bought a copy of the revised edition (16 vols., 1831) on her 1861 visit to Florence. 15. Muratori, Preface to Dissertazioni, trans. Thompson. 16. The list also includes Domenico Manni’s Le veglie piacevoli, ovvero notizie de’ più bizzari e giocondi uomini toscani, Francesco Saverio’s Della storia e della ragione d’ogni poesia and Giovanni Maria Mazzuchelli’s Scrittori italiani which she found in the London Library. Also listed is Christoph Meiners’ Lebens beschreiburgen berühmter Männer aus den Zeiten der Wiederherstellung der Wissenschaften. 17.  Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard Sismonde de. Historie des républiques italiennes du moyen âge. 10 vols., Paris 1840–1844. No. 2025 in Baker, 188. 18. The full title is Archivio Storico Italiano: ossia Raccolta di Opere di documenti finora inediti o divenuti rarissimi riguradanti La Storia D’Italia. Eliot notes in the Florentine Notes that volume I is to be found in the London Library, and gives references to and quotes from volumes I and IV in both the Florentine Notes and the Romola Notebook. 19. Other Italian sources listed were Giusti’s Proverbi Italiani quoted several times in the Romola Notebook, Litta’s Famiglie celebri d’Italia found in the London Library, Marchese’s Storia di San Marco, and Repetti’s Dizionario geografico fisico storico della Toscana contenente la descrizione di tutti i luoghi del granducato, ducato di Lucca, Garfagnana e Lunigiana, and Corniani’s I secoli della letteratura Italiana dopo il suo risorgimento. Eliot notes “Gervinus, on the Florentine Historians”, referring to his Historisches Schriften: Geschichte der Florentinische Historiographie. Also listed are Buhle’s Geschichte der neueren Philosophie seit der Epoche der Wiederherstellung der Wissenschaften and Anthony Panizzi’s introductory essay to an edition of Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. 20.  Journals of George Eliot 99. Roscoe’s Life (1795). In MS 708 Eliot quotes Roscoe and comments on his judgment: ‘“The wretched priest expiated

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by his death his folly & his crimes” says the wretched [illegible] Roscoe of Savonarola’ (f.12). 21. There is a copy of this work in the Eliot-Lewes library (Baker no. 339), though it is an 1869 edition, and must have been read after Eliot finished Romola. The end back papers contain Eliot’s penciled references. See also A. Fleishman, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life, 115–16. 22. Preface to Marietta de’ Ricci, trans. Thompson. 23.  Journals, 4 August 1861, 99. 24. We can make a tentative distinction between the Florentine Notes and the Quarry on the one hand and the Romola Notebook on the other. In the Romola Notebook, shorter quotations and information that might ultimately prove useful were often extracted from her reading and sometimes stored under headings and, in this, the Romola Notebook shares features of the Commonplace book, insofar as there appears to be an element of chance or serendipity in what is noted and something of the character of the “miscellany” to the Romola-related material. In much of the Florentine Notes and the Quarry on the other hand Eliot was looking for specific information when the writing of the manuscript was already underway. The Quarry and much of the Florentine Notes are “quarries,” and Eliot used the word precisely, implying a direct search for information, and that she could mine these notebooks for the valuable material she knew they would contain. It may also be that this distinction is more a product of the kinds of sources being consulted: in the Quarry and the Florentine Notes much of the information is from historical sources, broadly aimed at establishing historical facts, whereas the Romola Notebook contains more material extracted to record forms of expression, or authentic idiom, and as such it was less clear how and whether these fragments might be used, either within the body of the text or perhaps as possible epigraphs before Eliot abandoned the idea in Romola. 25. See Blair, Ann on a general typology of note taking in “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission,” Critical Inquiry (Autumn 2004): 90–91. 26. Blair, 94. 27. Twenty of Eliot’s holograph notebooks were among the “books, relics, manuscripts and portraits” in the sale that took place at Sotheby’s on 27 June 1923, and others, including the Romola Notebook, were probably sold at a later date. 28. Blair, ibid., 85, 87. 29. For example, Document L in volume II of Villari’s Savonarola (1859–1861) is heavily marked in her copy (Baker 2226), and a passage in Chapter 29 of Romola (265) incorporates a close translation of information given in the marked portion of Document L (see my edition of the Romola Notebook, in GE-GHL Studies nos. 50–51 [2006], note 2 to f.34, 78).

88  A. THOMPSON 30.  In her copy of Benedetto Varchi’s Storia fiorentina in three volumes (Baker 2206), she marked a passage on the male costumes of dignified Florentines, noting a page reference, “101 costume,” in the endpapers of volume II; in Velluti’s Cronica di Firenze (Baker 2210) the endpapers include “14 head dress” and GE’s marginal linings in the text; In Eliot’s copy of Savonarola’s Sermons (Prediche) (Baker no. 1930), there is a note in the endpapers: “22 Truth of his prophecies”; in Nardi’s Istorie the endpapers of vol. I carry the note “Beggars, concourse of, at Florence, 104” and “Horrible distress in Florence 115” (Baker 145). 31. Blair, ibid., 87. 32. See “George Eliot’s Quarry for Romola,” ed. A. Thompson, in GE-GHL Studies 66, no. 1–2 (2014), notes 8–23, 88–89. 33.  I Padre (sic.) Umiliati, / introdotta questa manifattura, la portarono ad / un segno a cui non era mai giunta; e far / non poterano (sic.) a meno. Gli Umiliati erano / un Corpo di persone ridotte insieme con questo / principal fine, oltre quello del servizio spirituale / che prestavano a’ popoli; e comechè essi Frati / eran raccolti da diversi Paesi, venivano a / riunire le notizie, ed i lumi di più nazioni, / questi si perpetuavano, anzi di più si raffi- / navano, e si moltiplicavano dal continuo / esercizio; nè era il loro lavoro inter- / rotto da latro sollecitudine + c—L’Arno [L’Arme] / degli Umiliati consisteva in una balla di / mercanzia legata con funi in forma di / croce, con quattro lettere negli angoli, / O.S.S.C. dir volevano: Omnium / Sanctorum Conventus. / Per tali mezzi fattasi grande in Firenze / l’arte di Lana … ebbe Università / Consoli, e magistratura; e la Casa appunto / che abbiamo accennata. L’Iscrizione bears / the date 1808. The Arms: sotto l’insegna della Pecora / col nimbo, e la banderuola, e spora, il rastrello / co’gigli (Dalla parte di Via Calimala) / Foreign Woollen-workers encouraged: introduction / of foreign goods forbidden. Export of fine wool, stame (yarn) / robbia (madder), guado (woad) forbidden. Si vegliava moltissimo sulla / perfezione de’panni, o rasce, perchè non vi / fosse introdotta con frode della materia / inferiore, giugnendo la pena sino all’incendio / delle pezze di simil genere (Osservatore fiorentino, vols. 5–6, 159–170) (see Fig. 4.2). 34. See notes 32–35, in “George Eliot’s Quarry for Romola,” 90–91. 35. Headings in Florentine Notes: Books of Florentine Subjects; Books cont.d; Florentine Notes; Arte di Lana; Imposte; Fairs; San Marco; Government of Florence; Notes from the Osservatore Fiorentino; Osservatore Fior. Vol. V; Florentine costume; (Miscellaneous); Compagnacci (Members); (from Venice); Muratori: Antichità; Muratori (cont.d); Chronology; Piagnoni; Notes on Savonarola’s Life; Condition of Florence 1489–1498; Hints + Queries; Names; Chronology of Florentine History; Florentine money. Headings in the Quarry: Index to the Osservatore Fiorentino (12

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ff.); Prophetic powers; Fire-ordeal; Names; Oppositon to the Pope; Talk in Florence; Social Aspects; Laws; Savonarola; Charles VII; Costume; Prices, salaries + c.; Compagnie di Firenze; Localities; Administ.n of Laws; Notes from Litta, Famiglie + Ammirato, Famiglie illustri; Filelfo’s Letters; Sumptuary laws of Florence; (from Delizie degli Eruditi Toscani, vol. VI); from Laborde; XVth Century: concerning Florence; Greek Scholars; Artists; Poets; Savonarola Mediceans; Chronology of Savonarola’s Life from 1494 to 1498. Headings in the Romola Notebook: Names of S’s party; Dantesque phrases. Eliot hardly ever uses headings in the Romola Notebook, preferring to use “=” to separate notes. The Romola notes in MS 708 also tend to follow this practice. 36.  Bartholomaei Scalae Collensis Equitis Florentini ac Romae Senatoris Vita. See “George Eliot’s Quarry for Romola,” 95–96, fn.70. In her diary for 19 February 1862 Eliot records: … we have been to the British Museum, and I have picked some details from Manni’s life of Bartolommeo Scala” (Journals 109). 37.  In addition to Eliot’s brief note “Mercato: Donatello’s Dovizia,” a Title page has been created in a different hand (Hand 1), probably that of a Bodleian librarian: “ITALIAN NOTES / GEORGE ELIOT / 1862” and additional text by another different hand (Hand 2) reads “Notes made while gathering / material for “Romola” / £21.” Down the LH margin on this page Hand 1 has added “Given by Mrs Irwin S. Strasburger / 9.xii.71.” 38. From f.38v to f.44v, and from 47v to 53 in the Florentine Notes the notebook it is turned through 180 degrees, with the exception of ff.45v, 46v and 50. 39. The work is no. 1534 in Baker (6 vols., 3rd ed., 1790) with GE’s and GHL’s pencilled references and marginal linings in vol. I. 40. In the Florentine Notes Ginevra’s trousseau, as described in the Ricordi of the Rinuccini family, is copied out in full (ff.28–29), and the same information is given in the entry on [30] of the Quarry (see n.34 in Quarry). It is not clear whether Eliot has deliberately transferred an entry from one notebook into another, or whether she reread a work at a different time and noticed the same passage again. There are several quotations from her reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy in the Romola Notebook which also appear in A Writer’s Notebook. There are many examples of Eliot making different notes from the same source in different notebooks: In the Romola Notebook f.14 Eliot makes a note from King’s Antique Gems (1860) on “Cetus, the figure of a big fish,” and in A Writer’s Notebook (79) we have notes from the same source on the “nicolo”; There are notes from Laborde’s Athènes (1854) (ff.12–15) and further notes from the same source are found in the Quarry ff.83–86; Extracts from

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the Osservatore fiorentino and from Varchi’s L’Ercolano are found in the Florentine Notes, the Quarry and the Romola Notebook, indicating that Eliot returned to the same sources at different times in search of particular details, and was probably using notebooks concurrently. 41. Both Tosello and Brown note that the text is an almost verbatim translation of the Italian original: “I Fiorentini levarono il loro idolo, il quale appelavano Iddio Marte, e posserlo in su una alta torre appresso al fiume d’Arno, e non vollono rompere nè spezzare, però che per loro antiche memorie trovavano, che il detto loro Iddio Marte era consecrato sotto ascendcente di tal pianeta, che come follse rotto e commosso in vile luogo, la città arebba gran danno, e gran mutazione …. E ciò fatto il detto loro tempio cosecrarono ed ordinarono ad onore d’iddio, e del beate messere s.Giovanni Battista, e chiamaronlo duomo di s. Giovanni.” 42. Romola Notebook f.14. Charles William King, Antique Gems, Their Origin, Uses and Value as Interpreters of Ancient History (John Murray, 1860). 43. “And we still find there the vast ruins of these great baronial fortresses, usually built on the tops of high hills [….] and these towers whose walls are made of immense quadrilateral blocks and are joined to Frankish cemented walls, are also present in the principal passes of the great mountain ranges (Trans. Thompson). 44. Quarry, edited by Andrew Thompson, 59–62, 95–96. Jean Alexandre C. Buchon, Recherches historiques sur la principauté française de Morée et ses hautes baronnies, 2 vols., Paris 1843, vol. I, Memoire xxxii–lxxi. 45. On 24 March 1861, Lewes records in his diary that they had been walking along the coast at Hastings “talking of the Italian Romance Polly is contemplating” (Haight, 342). In Eliot’s journal for August 10th we read: “we talked of my Italian novel” and on the 15th August Eliot’s diary reads: “Discussed the plot of my novel with G. and in the course of our conversation I struck out an idea with which he was thoroughly satisfied as a ‘backbone’ for the work.” 46. Diary, 20 August 1861. 47. The Diary for 30 September 1861 reads: “Took up the MSS. connected with my Italian novel, and made various arrangements towards work.” On the 2nd October she spent the morning “arranging the plot” and on the 4th, “My mind still worried about my plot—and without any confidence in my ability to do what I want.” By the end of the month she was “Still bilious with an incapable head—trying to write, trying to construct, and incapable.” On 9th November she, “Wrote sketches of scenes” and the next morning, “the Italian scenes returned upon me with fresh attraction,” so that by 12th December she had “Finished writing my plot, of which I must make several other draughts before I begin to write my book” (Journals 102–106). However by 23rd December, when she had

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still not started writing, John Blackwood wrote after a visit to the Lewes’ that Lewes “and I were reproaching her for not fairly beginning to write and she defended herself by saying, ‘Well I have made notes for a great many scenes’” (Letters III, 474). 48. Journals, “Diary,” 142. 49. In mid-December 1861, Lewes writes John Blackwood that Eliot’s “distressing diffidence paralyses her” (Letters III, 427). 50. Significantly, Eliot also lamented her difficulty in finding written accounts of contemporary female dress. In March 1861, she had written to Joseph Munt Langford: “You would oblige me very much if you would keep your eyes open for all books or fragments that will serve as memoranda of costume either mediaeval or modern. […] I would go to some expense for a good book on mediaeval costumes” (Letters III, 393–394). She copied out notes on Ginevra’s trousseau as described in the Ricordi of the Rinuccini family, in the Florentine Notes and the Quarry (see note 40 above). In her correspondence with Frederic Leighton on his illustrations in June 1862 she wrote, “We have in Varchi a sufficiently fit and clear description of the ordinary male costume of dignified Florentines in my time; but for the corresponding feminine costume the best authority I have seen is the very incomplete one of a certain Ginevra’s trousseau in the Ricordi of the Rinuccini family of rather an earlier period, but marking even there the rage for embroidery and pearls which grew instead of diminishing” (Letters IV, 43). 51. For example MS 707 in Some George Eliot Notebooks, edited by William Baker (Universität Salzburg, 1984) includes two lists of her reading (ff.83–84, 84–85). 52.  William Baker, “George Eliot’s Projected Napoleonic War Novel: An Unnoted Reading List,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29 (March 1975): 453–460.

Bibliography Baker, William. “George Eliot’s Projected Napoleonic War Novel: An Unnoted Reading List.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29 (March 1975): 453–460. ———. The George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue of Their Books at Dr. Williams’s Library, London. New York: Garland, 1977. Blair, Ann. “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission.” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 85–107. Eliot, George. Some George Eliot Notebooks: An Edition of the Carl H. Porzheimer Library’s George Eliot Holograph Notebooks, Mss 707, 708, 709, 710, 711. Edited by William Baker. Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur Universität Salzburg, 1976.

92  A. THOMPSON ———. The George Eliot Letters. Edited by Gordon Sherman Haight. 9 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, vols. 1–3, 1954; 4–7, 1955; 8–9, 1978. ———. George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook 1854–1879 and Uncollected Writings. Edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth. Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia/University Press of Virginia, 1981. ———. The Journals of George Eliot. Edited by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. “A George Eliot Holograph Notebook: An Edition (MS. Don. g.8).” Edited by Andrew Thompson. George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, nos. 50–51, 1–109. Northern Illinois University, 2006. ———. Romola. 1862–1863. Edited by Andrew Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 2009. ———. “Quarry for Romola.” An Edition of the Notebook Held in the Morris L. Parish Collection at Princeton University Library (C0171 [no. 69]), edited by Andrew Thompson. George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies 66, nos. 1–2, 5–99. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014. ———. “Florentine Notes” (British Library Add. MSS. 40768), edited by Andrew Thompson. George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies 70, no. 1, 1–86. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Fleishman, Avrom. George Eliot’s Intellectual Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Gray, Donald. “George Eliot and Her Publishers” in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, edited by George Levine, 181–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Haight, Gordon. George Eliot: A Biography. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Hamnett, Brian. The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Representations of Reality in History and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Levine, George, ed. The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Rignall, John. George Eliot, European Novelist. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Tosello, M. Le fonti italiane delle “Romola” di George Eliot. Torino: G. Giappichelli, 1956. Trollope, Thomas A. What I Remember. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1887–89.

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Works Listed by George Eliot in “Books on Florentine Subjects (+ at home)” (Florentine Notes f.3 segg) Fourteenth-Century Works Boccaccio, Giovanni. Decamerone. Pucci, Antonio. Le proprietà di mercato vecchio. Sacchetti, Franco. Trecentonovelle.

Fifteenth-Century Works Bracciolini, Poggio letters (probably Poggiana, ou la vie, le caractére, le sentences, et les bons mots de Pogge Florentin, avec son histoire de la République de Florence, J. Lenfant, ed., 1720). Cambi, Giovanni. Diario (in Stefani, M. Delizie degli eruditi toscani). Comines, Phillipe de. Memoires. Filelfo, Francesco. Epistolae. Lorenzo de’ Medici. Poems. Poliziano, Angelo. Rime and Epistolae. Pulci, Luigi. Il morgante maggiore (1483). Savonarola, Girolamo. Compendium Revelationum. ———. Sermons. ———. Poems. Tribaldo d’Amerigo de’ Rossi, Ricordanze (in Stefani, M. Delizie degli eruditi toscani).

Sixteenth-Century Works Ammirato, Scipione. Delle famiglie nobili fiorentine (1615). Borghini, Vincenzo Maria. Discorsi (1584). Burlamacchi, Pacifico. Vita con alcuni scritti di Fra Girolamo Savonarola urso in Firenze l’anno 1498 (1847). Doni, Antonio. I Marmi (1552). Dovizi, Bernardo La calandria (1513). Firenzuola, Agnolo. Novelle. Giambullari, Pier Francesco. Origine della lingua fiorentina (1549). Giannotti, Donato. Della repubblica fiorentina (1531). Macchiavelli, Niccolò. Storia, Il principe and La mandragola (Opere, 8 vols., Firenze, 1813). Nardi, Jacopo. Istorie della città di Firenze.

94  A. THOMPSON Nerli, Filippo. Commentari de’ fatti civili occorsi dentro la città di Firenze dall’anno 1215 al 1537 (1549–1553). Varchi, Benedetto. Storia fiorentina (1721) and Ercolano (1570).

Seventeenth-Century Works Buonarroti, Michelangelo il Giovane. La Tancia (1611). Lippi, Lorenzo. Il malmantile racquistato (1676). Redi, Francesco. Bacco in Toscana (1685). Tassoni, Alessandro. La secchia rapita (1622).

Eighteenth-Century Works Manni, Domenico. Le veglie piacevoli, ovvero notizie de’ più bizzari e giocondi uomini toscani (1762–1763). Mazzucchelli, Giovanni Maria. Gli scrittori d’Italia (1753–1763). Meiners, Christoph. Lebensbeschreibungen berühmter Männer aus den Zeiten der Wiederherstellung der Wissenschaften (1795–1797). Muratori, Ludovico Antonio. Dissertazioni sopra le antichità italiane (1750). Saverio, Francesco Della storia e della ragione d’ogni poesia (1739–1752). Stefani, Marchionne di Coppo, ed. Delizie degli eruditi toscani (1770–1789). Tiraboschi, Girolamo. Storia della letteratura italiana (1772–1782).

Nineteenth-Century Works Buhle, Johann Gottlieb. Geschichte der neueren Philosophie seit der Epoche der Wiederherstellung der Wissenschaft (1800–1804). Corniani, Giovanni Battista. I secoli della letteratura italiana dopo il suo risorgimento (1804–1813). Gervinus, Georg Gottfried. Historisches Schriften: Geschichte der Florentinische Historiographie (1833). Giusti, Giuseppe. Raccolta di proverbi toscani (1853). Litta, Pompeo. Famiglie celebri di Italia (1819–1833). Marchese, Vincenzo Fortunato. Storia di San Marco (1854). Meier, Frederich Karl. Girolamo Savonarola aus grossen Theils Handschriftlichen Quellen (1836). Panizzi, Sir Anthony. Introductory essay to an edition (1830) of Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. Perrens, François-Tommy. Jérome Savonarole, sa vie, ses prédications, ses écrits (1854). Repetti, Emanuele. Dizionario geografico fisico storico della Toscana (1833–1846).

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Sismondi, J. C. L. Sismonde de. Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge (1809–1818). Vieusseux, Giovan Pietro, et al. Archivio Storico Italiano: ossia Raccolta di Opere di documenti finora inediti o divenuti rarissimi riguradanti La Storia D’Italia (Vol IV: “Ricordi di Cristofano Guidini” 1843). Villari, Pasquale. Storia di Fra Girolamo Savonarola e de suoi tempi (1859–1861). Full lists of the works consulted by George Eliot whileresearchingRomolacan be found in Romola edited by Andrew Brown, Appendix B 676–79, and in my editions of the Romola Notebook 99–103, the Quarry, 80–81, and the Florentine Notes 62–64.

CHAPTER 5

Egyptian Mythology in Eliot’s Major Works Molly Youngkin

George Eliot’s use of complex mythological references in developing her realist novels has been well discussed, but her engagement of Egyptian references deserves further attention, since they provide readers with new ways of developing sympathy and understanding community. Key book-length studies about Eliot’s use of mythology include Joseph Wiesenfarth’s George Eliot’s Mythmaking, which shows how Eliot engaged Christian, Hebrew, and Greek mythologies in her novels to present a “mythology of fellow-feeling” for her nineteenth-century audience,1 and Felicia Bonaparte’s The Triptych and the Cross, which articulates how Eliot found her “poetic voice” when writing Romola (1863), a novel that reflects Eliot’s intensive reading of ancient mythologies.2 More recently, Avrom Fleishman’s George Eliot’s Intellectual Life argues that a key component in Eliot’s intellectual life was her understanding of myth, since her “strongest suit” was the ability to combine the ideal and the realistic to show “the human tendency toward myth-construction,”3 and articles and book chapters by Kirsten Hall,4 Lila Marz Harper,5 and Alessandro Grego6 draw attention to the Cupid and Psyche myth, the Medusa myth, and the Apocalypse theme, respectively. Extending the

M. Youngkin (*)  Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_5

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work of these critics, especially Wiesenfarth, I examine Eliot’s knowledge of Egyptian mythology and how she used this mythology in most of her major works. Although Eliot wrote about Egypt from an imperialist perspective, she understood well Egyptian mythology’s relation to and influence on Western mythologies.7 As early as 1852, Eliot wrote to friend Sara Hennell about the connections between Christianity, Judaism, ancient Egyptian religion, and Indian religion.8 Furthermore, Eliot’s early essays, “The Antigone and Its Moral” (1856) and “The Art of the Ancients” (1855), illustrate her understanding of the connections between Western and Eastern mythologies, since the former essay links British and Greek mythologies and the latter Greek and Egyptian mythologies.9 Finally, Eliot saw Egypt as practically useful to Westerners; after she and George Henry Lewes traveled to industrial English towns in search of treatment for Lewes’s poor health, Eliot suggested Egypt had something to offer England did not: “It is difficult to keep up one’s faith in a millennium within sight of this modern civilization which consists in ‘development of industries.’ Egypt and her big calm gods seems quite as good.”10 In researching subjects for her fictional narratives, Eliot read key books about Egypt, including Edward Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1837), which served as source material for her first novel, Adam Bede11; John Gardner Wilkinson’s Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians (1837), from which she copied information about the status of ancient Egyptian women into her Commonplace Book12; and Amelia Edwards’s A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1876), from which she copied information about Egyptian gods and goddesses into her Daniel Deronda notebooks.13 These sources promoted an imperialist perspective but also provided specific information about Egyptian culture that encouraged a more comprehensive view of mythology.14 In addition, Eliot read books linking European gypsies to Egypt, even if this connection was not accurate.15 Source material for Eliot’s long poem The Spanish Gypsy includes Henrich Grellman’s Dissertation on the Gypsies (1787), which recounts the myth that gypsies were exiled because they did not care for Mary, Joseph, and Jesus in Egypt, and George Borrow’s The Zincali; or, An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841), which discusses European languages that name gypsies according to their supposed Egyptian heritage.16 This essay traces Eliot’s use of Egyptian mythology in her major works, showing how it is used in contrast to Christian, Hebrew, and

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Greek mythologies but also how, through Eliot’s association of Egyptian imagery with the symbolic, it plays an important role in the writing of realistic fiction. Further, I argue that Eliot uses Egyptian mythology to develop new kinds of “heroes,” an element of character development important in mythological readings of her work. Examining most of Eliot’s major works—Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Romola (1863), The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Middlemarch (1871), and Daniel Deronda (1876)—I extend such readings to emphasize how references to Egyptian mythology enhance our understanding of the complex ways in which diverse mythologies structure fictional narratives.

Egyptian Sorcerer: Moses as Hero and Models for Seeing in Adam Bede Wiesenfarth, in George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, indicates Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians was Eliot’s source for the opening lines of Adam Bede: “With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.”17 In these lines, the drop of ink the sorcerer uses as a mirror “incontestably associates Eliot’s sentence with Lane, who writes: ‘I asked the magician whether objects appeared in the ink as if actually before the eyes, or as if in a glass, which makes right appear left. He answered, that they appear as in a mirror.’”18 Although the narrator’s presentation of self as “an Egyptian sorcerer” may be based on a superficial understanding of Egyptian mythology, it significantly shapes the idea that the symbolic has a place in realist storytelling and that the novel’s hero, Adam, can be associated with multiple mythologies, including the Judeo-Christian but also Egyptian Moses. Lane’s description of the modern Egyptian magician directs people to see beyond the material world and into the immaterial world, a prevalent theme in Adam Bede, and examining this theme in the context of Lane’s description enhances our understanding of Adam’s character, as well as our understanding of our role as readers. The “insight” that comes when readers see beyond the material, as Adam does, is a key element in Eliot’s belief that myth, or the symbolic, plays a role in the realist novel. The most famous section of the novel is Chapter 17, where readers are asked to recognize the material effects on the poor person’s life and sympathize with this plight. However, Eliot also asks readers, via the opening of the novel, to cultivate a form of

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sight that enables us to understand the more mysterious aspects of the world, aspects that cannot be explained by straightforward observation of the material world. Lane’s description suggests that people who are charmed by the Egyptian magician possess this insight, since the point of the magician’s experiment—asking a boy to look into the drop of ink as though it is a mirror—is “to open the boy’s eyes in a supernatural manner; to make his sight pierce into what is to us the invisible world.”19 This also is what Adam Bede does, since his mind is “humble in the region of mystery and keen in the region of knowledge.”20 Furthermore, Adam possesses the right combination of “reverence” and “hard common-sense” to reject “doctrinal religion”21 but recognize the “mystery” of love in his relationships with Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris.22 Especially in contrast to other characters, Adam’s ability to see in a way that acknowledges both the material and immaterial helps Eliot articulate what readers should do. We are more likely to sympathize with humanity, as Adam does, if we have this insight. Eliot also presents Adam as a model for readers by characterizing him in relation to diverse mythological figures. Wiesenfarth points out that Adam is compared to Judeo-Christian men (the Biblical Adam, Jacob, Job, and Jesus), as well as to ancient Greek figures (Orestes and Prometheus), and through these comparisons, Eliot “introduce[s] a mythic structure that contributes a unifying element”23 to what is overall a “realistic” novel: “myth is integrated with her theory of realism and even inseparable from it.”24 More specifically, Adam Bede “transitions from Adam (Biblical) and Prometheus to Jesus,” since he does not take revenge on Arthur Donnithorne, who seduces Hetty before Adam can declare his love for her.25 Thus, in Wiesenfarth’s reading, instead of becoming “the architect of a tragedy,” as Arthur does, Adam seeks his own “redemption” and “prevents further disaster,” contributing to an articulation of a “public ethic” even “more profound” in Eliot’s work than in the work of her reformist contemporaries.26 Despite his awareness of the importance of mythology in Adam Bede, Wiesenfarth overlooks the opening lines about the Egyptian sorcerer and does not discuss references to Adam Bede as similar to the Old Testament figures of Joseph and Moses, both of whom have ties to Egypt. Eliot likens Adam to Joseph (son of Jacob and Rachel) early in the novel, when Dinah refers to Adam as “like the patriarch Joseph, for his great skill and knowledge, and the kindness he shows to his

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brother and his parents,”27 a line that accentuates Joseph’s ability to forgive his family for consenting to his enslavement in Egypt and to win the Pharaoh’s favor.28 Dinah iterates this characterization in a letter she writes to Adam’s brother,29 but Adam identifies more fully with Moses: “I like to read about Moses best, in th’ Old Testament. He carried a hard business through, and died when other folks were going to reap the fruits: a man must have courage to … think of what will come of it after he’s dead and gone. A good solid bit o’ work lasts: if it’s only laying a floor down, somebody’s the better for it being done well, besides the man as does it.”30 Dinah accepts Adam’s characterization of himself— joking that “even the man Moses, the meekest of men, was wrathful sometimes” when she mistakenly thinks Adam is “cross” with her31—and this acceptance encourages readers to see Adam as Moses. Adam as Moses is important to understanding Eliot’s use of Egyptian mythology to infuse the realist novel with symbolic meaning regarding an individual’s responsibility to improve his or her society. Supposed to be an Egyptian prince, saved from death when the Pharaoh killed Hebrew children, Moses improved society by leading the Israelites out of Egypt after God brought ten plagues upon the Egyptians. Mrs. Poyser, Hetty’s aunt, references the plagues to show how the community of Hayslope needs its own Moses figure. When Squire Donnithorne, Arthur’s grandfather, threatens to install another farmer, Thurle, on the Poysers’ land, Mrs. Poyser says, “[S]ee if [Thurle] likes to live in a house wi’ all the plagues o’ Egypt in ‘t—wi’ the cellar full o’ water, … the floors rotten, and the rats and mice gnawing every bit o’ cheese. … See if you’ll get a stranger to lead such a life here as that: a maggot must be born i’ the rotten cheese to like it, I reckon.”32 Although Adam is not present for this conversation, there is the clear expectation Adam will be the Poysers’ Moses, especially after he proposes to Hetty.33 Adam does not marry Hetty, since she is seduced by Arthur and arrested after killing their child, but Adam’s role as the community’s Moses comes to fruition, after he agrees to manage the woods for Arthur, who himself is referred to in an Egyptian context in the novel. As Arthur looks at his “well-looking British person” in “old fashioned mirrors,” he is “stared at, from a dingy olive-green piece of tapestry, by Pharaoh’s daughter and her maidens, who ought to have been minding the infant Moses.”34 Arthur knows he cannot continue as the community’s landlord after his relationship with Hetty is revealed, and he says to Adam, when asking him to manage the woods, “You know that’s a good work to do

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for the sake of other people, besides the owner.”35 This statement anticipates the language Adam uses to describe what Moses did for his people: just as Moses did the “good solid bit o’ work” that benefits “somebody … besides the man as does it,”36 Adam will do “good work … for the sake of other people, besides the owner.”37 To read Adam as Moses does not negate Wiesenfarth’s reading that Adam is transformed from Old to New Testament figures, but it can enhance this reading, by helping readers recognize that Eliot uses multiple mythologies to articulate how readers engage communities and develop sympathies.

Virgin Queens and Gypsy Sphinxes: The Mill on the Floss and Spanish Gypsy The Mill on the Floss and Spanish Gypsy, grouped together because of their attention to women heroes in a gypsy context, build nicely from the foundation Eliot lays with Adam Bede. Wiesenfarth argues that The Mill on the Floss combines realistic characters and symbolic elements to create a different type of realism.38 The characters in the “St. Ogg legend,” one of the primary myths upon which Eliot builds The Mill on the Floss, “comes alive,”39 even though critics have found the novel flawed for its departure from the realist mode.40 Further, Wiesenfarth and others have shown that while Spanish Gypsy is viewed as Eliot’s weakest work because of its preference for myth over realism, it deserves recognition for its connection to other works, especially Daniel Deronda and The Mill on the Floss.41 Eliot wrote that it was the “symbol” of the main character Fedalma’s gypsy heritage that allowed her to highlight the sense of “duty” that is part of the “general human lot,” giving the poem “wider application.”42 Further, Eliot indicated it was Fedalma’s “renunciation of marriage,” an act also taken by Maggie in The Mill on the Floss, that makes Fedalma a “hero,” as Eliot defines this term in her short essay, “A Fine Excess. Feeling is Energy.”43 Although Maggie and Fedalma could not be more different in terms of age and ethnicity, they can be linked by examining Eliot’s use of Egyptian mythology. Through this mythology, Eliot presents both as “queens of gypsy sphinxes” and merges this characterization with others that draw on Christian mythology, especially the Virgin Mary, to create women who are heroic through their willingness to sacrifice for others. In writing The Mill on the Floss, Eliot was, in part, reacting to Charles Kingsley’s portrayal of heroes in his 1855 novel Westward Ho!, which

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Eliot reviewed. Writing about Kingsley’s “view of history,” Eliot states that it is not distinct from a child’s perspective, “when we devoutly believed that our favourite heroes, Wallace and Bruce, and all who fought on their side, were ‘good,’ while Edward and his soldiers were all ‘wicked.’”44 In The Mill on the Floss, Eliot assigns this view to Maggie’s brother Tom, who rejects the heroism of the first sultan of Egypt Saladin and prefers the heroism of the Scottish Bruce.45 Even as Tom grows up, he still has a childish mind, and his inability to mature directly affects Maggie, since his view leads her to perform the acts of renunciation central to Eliot’s definition of heroism. Maggie becomes the Virgin Mary of the St. Ogg myth, in which the Virgin accompanies the St. Christopherlike Ogg as he safely transports distressed people over bodies of water; Maggie’s death in the flood is an act of renunciation that helps Tom realize his own mistakes.46 Still, Eliot does not limit herself to Christian mythology in building Maggie’s character. Wiesenfarth and others have discussed Eliot’s use of Greek mythology by focusing on Maggie’s likeness to Antigone.47 Yet, little attention has been paid to how Maggie’s wish to become “queen of the gypsies” illustrates Eliot’s use of Egyptian mythology. Maggie’s wish typically is discussed in terms of her identification with a more broadly conceived “foreign other.”48 This interpretation has its own merit, but reading Maggie’s encounter with the gypsies in light of Eliot’s knowledge of Egyptian mythology can enhance our understanding of how Eliot constructs female heroes. Like Tom, Maggie is fascinated with heroes, and her day with the gypsies takes her into a fantastical world of heroes and villains. Twice described as “sphinxes”49—an idea Eliot may have gotten from reading Austen Henry Layard’s Nineveh and Its Remains (1849) while researching The Mill on the Floss50—the gypsies initially make Maggie “comfortable,” leading her to believe she can “instruct” them and become their “queen.”51 But, they later evoke “terror” by serving Maggie unfamiliar food and making unfamiliar noises, and she wishes for a hero, “Jack the Giantkiller, or Mr Greatheart, or St George who slew the dragon” to save her.52 Although Maggie’s view of “others” is not as rigid as Tom’s, her attitude toward the gypsies, particularly her assumption that she can be their “queen,” reflects the imperialist attitude inherent in Tom’s perspective that some heroes are better than others. Eliot does not directly reference the supposed Egyptian heritage of gypsies in The Mill on the Floss, but her characterization of them as

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sphinxes follows the nineteenth-century tendency to write about gypsies as though they were from Egypt, even after research by nineteenthcentury linguists and historians proved otherwise.53 In Spanish Gypsy, Eliot again characterizes gypsies as sphinxes, but also directly references the myth that gypsies came from Egypt.54 One character, Blasco, tells another character, Lopez, that God sent the gypsies to Spain to be used for labor, “[i]n punishment because they sheltered not/ Our Lady and Saint Joseph (and no doubt / Stole the small ass they fled with into Egypt).”55 This inaccurate and condemnatory view is countered by the more sympathetic view of Fedalma, who believes gypsies symbolize the “sadness” that “races outcast” endure.56 While Fedalma thinks their leader Zarca could be her “enemy,” she recognizes his face to be a “dark hieroglyph of coming fate / Written before her” and allies herself with Zarca by asking the Duke to release the gypsies.57 Unlike Maggie, who only wishes to become queen of the gypsies, Fedalma is actually called to become their queen, “the angel of a homeless tribe … guid[ing the gypsies] forth to their new land, / Where they shall plant and sow and reap their own.”58 Further, Fedalma is “born to reign” as “a queen in Africa,”59 and she embraces this role, leading the gypsies back to Africa, where one of them disembarks from the boat looking like the ancient Egyptian goddess, Isis: “The black-haired mother steps /Athwart the boat’s edge, and with opened arms, / A wandering Isis outcast from the gods.”60 This line references Isis wandering Egypt looking for Osiris’s body parts; once she gathers his parts, she uses her breath to create Horus.61 Fedalma is not likened to Isis, but this makes sense, given that Fedalma is not a mother but a “virgin queen” who renounces marriage in order to serve her father and their people. The “inspiration” for Fedalma was the Virgin Mary in Titian’s painting The Annunciation (1559–1564), which Eliot saw in Venice in May 1864 and described as “A young maiden, believing herself to be on the eve of … her … marriage … has suddenly announced to her that she is chosen to fulfill a great destiny.”62 Like Maggie, Fedalma is a “virgin queen,” but she is a more complete merging of Western and Eastern mythologies because of her gypsy heritage. Still, both women signify the presence of the symbolic female hero in Eliot’s realistic work, which will be further developed in Romola and Middlemarch before Eliot returns to the Moses-like male hero in Daniel Deronda.

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Living Saints and Dead Mummies: Romola and Middlemarch With Romola, Eliot “uses myth to set out opposing tendencies in human nature and human history”63 and, by focusing on Greek and Christian myths, Eliot portrays Romola as someone who rejects the role of Ariadne,64 embraces the role of Antigone,65 and becomes a Christian “saint.”66 The Ariadne and Antigone myths, along with the myth of St. Teresa of Avila, also are central in Middlemarch, where Eliot shows that although “individual heroic action” belonged to ancient cultures,67 there are nineteenth-century heroes, men, and women who perform “unheroic acts”68 with “integrity, understanding, compassion, and love.”69 I would agree that, in both novels, Eliot uses Greek and Christian myths to further develop the idea that women can be heroes because they are “living saints.” Of all of Eliot’s major works, Romola and Middlemarch make the least use of Egyptian mythology. Still, Eliot presents Romola and Dorothea in contrast to St. Catherine and St. Barbara, virgin saints who can be linked to Egypt.70 Even if Eliot did not actively read about Egyptian mythology while writing Romola, she had read about it before this time and actively read about it while writing Middlemarch. Her notes, which focus on sun-worship and the Nile as a source of knowledge, inform Middlemarch, where Dorothea’s husband Casaubon is repeatedly associated with “dead mummies,” since he is completely preoccupied with the past. Romola anticipates this emphasis, since Eliot characterizes a sick baby as a mummy several times in the novel.71 The contrast, then, between characters who are like “dead mummies” and those who are “living saints,” actively engaged with the world as Romola and Dorothea are, shows that ordinary women can be heroes in Eliot’s novels. John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt, in their introduction to George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks, detail Eliot’s reading about heroes while working on Middlemarch, indicating that she was interested in both “historical” and “legendary” heroes.72 For historical heroes, she read J. Rutherford Russell’s History and Heroes of the Art of Medicine (1861), which influenced her development of Lydgate, the male hero of the novel.73 For legendary heroes, she read Jacob Bryant’s A New System, or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology (1774–1776; 1807), J. S. Ersch and J. G. Gruber’s Allegmeine Encyklopadie der Wissenschaften und

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Kunste (1818–1889), and Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker besonders der Griechen (1836–1842), which influenced her development of Casaubon’s interest in Egypt.74 From Ersch and Gruber, Eliot writes about Vitus Scheffer’s belief that “the Sun is the sole Deity of the ancient poets,” a note that informs the narrator’s characterization of Casaubon as making “bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about solar divinities.”75 From Bryant, Eliot directly quotes his account of the earliest migratory people, the Cuthites, who “worshipped [Amon] as the sun,”76 and in the novel, Ladislaw refers to Bryant when commenting on the futility of Casaubon’s attempts to put right “the mistakes” of “men like Bryant.”77 Finally, Eliot summarizes Creuzer’s account of the various theories regarding Casaubon’s “Key to All Mythologies,” including Zoëga, who argues that the “sign of the Planet Venus [woman symbol]” is “the Key of the Nile, & as meaning in the hand of Isis the great guardian or watcher (Beschliesserin) of Nature.”78 Eliot’s summary of Creuzer is helpful in understanding Casaubon as immersed in the world of “dead mummies” and Dorothea as a “living saint,” as well as the contrast between Casaubon and Ladislaw, who marries Dorothea after Casaubon’s death. Casaubon insults Ladislaw by telling Mr. Brooke that Ladislaw’s ambitions are limited, since he has no interest in “know[ing] the sources of the Nile.”79 These comments, along with Sir James Chettam’s statement that Casaubon “is no better than a mummy!” when he hears that Dorothea will marry Casaubon,80 clearly places Casaubon in the world of “dead mummies” and in contrast to the living world of Dorothea and Ladislaw. However, Eliot’s notes about Creuzer— which indicate Eliot knew Isis was seen as a powerful figure capable of guarding the Nile, nature, and therefore creation—do not directly influence her characterization of Dorothea as a female hero. Just as Eliot does not characterize Fedalma as Isis in Spanish Gypsy, she does not characterize Dorothea as Isis or any other ancient Egyptian woman. This omission is understandable, since Dorothea does not become a mother until late in the novel and one who “will not know what to do with the baby,”81 but, like Eliot’s other heroines, Dorothea possesses some characteristics of a symbolic mother, one who looks out for and helps others. Still, Dorothea does not become a symbolic mother in the same way as Maggie, whom Wiesenfarth has described as “a Virgin with a child in her arms” when she holds Bob Jakin’s child.82 Nor does she become a mother in the same way as Romola, who reflects Christian

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models (the “Holy Mother”) and ancient Egyptian models (the cowgoddess Hathor), since Romola nurses Tessa’s children and nourishes the children of a village devastated by a plague.83 Nevertheless, the end of Middlemarch, which describes Dorothea as one whose “strength” has been “diffused” as the strength of the Gyndes river was diffused by the Persian king Cyrus, indicates Dorothea has the effect of a female hero, since “the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”84 Eliot does not reference Isis or other ancient Egyptian women, but her use of Egyptian mythology in constructing characters who live in the past as “dead mummies” illuminates Dorothea’s position as a “living saint.”

Accomplished Egyptian: Returning to Moses as Hero in Daniel Deronda Wiesenfarth recognizes that after reaching “the supreme achievement of realism” with Middlemarch, Eliot could turn to a search for “higher and wider truths” via the symbolic with her final novel, Daniel Deronda, which uses the Hebrew myth of “exile” and “the promised land” to show how “all men … yearn for spiritual as well as political freedom.”85 Building on the “quest” element in mythology developed in Middlemarch,86 while drawing on the romance and epic qualities of Spanish Gypsy,87 Daniel Deronda illustrates how the myth of exile and the promised land can be both “external” and “internal.”88 Wiesenfarth acknowledges Eliot’s use of ancient Egyptian culture by arguing that although Eliot uses the Greek Medea myth to construct Daniel’s female counterpart, Gwendolen Harleth, as Glauce, the woman for whom Jason (embodied by Gwendolen’s husband Grandcourt) abandons Medea,89 the diamonds transferred from Lydia Glasher (Grandcourt’s mistress and mother of his illegitimate children) to Gwendolen (Grancourt’s wife) reflect the customs of ancient Egyptian culture, where mistresses and illegitimate received the same privileges as legitimate wives and children.90 Wiesenfarth also acknowledges, in discussion about the connections between Daniel Deronda and Spanish Gypsy, that the Judeo-Christian but also Egyptian Moses is one of several figures representing “forces of light” that battle “forces of darkness.”91 Yet, Wiesenfarth does not develop fully the Egyptian context for understanding the characters in Daniel Deronda. I argue that Eliot returns to the narrative about heroic Moses begun in Adam Bede, since Daniel is presented as a Moses-like figure who will lead his people to a new life,

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a positive representation of the Egypt but that is placed against negative references to Egypt via the central women characters, Gwendolen and Daniel’s eventual wife Mirah, who are more like Egyptian mummies (Gwendolen) and Egyptian Cinderellas (Mirah) than the heroic women Eliot creates by merging diverse mythologies in other works. Elsewhere, I have argued that Daniel is presented as a hero via Mordecai’s characterization of him as “an accomplished Egyptian” when Mordecai takes Daniel to the Philosophers Club and introduces him to a circle of men who are invested in Judaism’s future.92 Arguing that Jews can become “heroes” by doing what the ancient Egyptians did, channeling the overflowing Nile into life-sustaining crops, Mordecai envisions a clear role for Daniel, one that critics such as Bernard Semmel and Terence Caves have paralleled to that of Moses (pp. 79–80). This interpretation of Daniel, who also has been discussed in relationship to Christian mythology by critics interested in emphasizing the parallel between Daniel and Christ (p. 81), acknowledges Eliot’s use of Egyptian mythology to supplement other mythologies. Still, Daniel’s likeness to Moses deserves further attention, since Eliot established Moses as a model for male heroes as early as Adam Bede. I also have argued that Gwendolen is characterized not just through Judeo-Christian and Greek mythologies but also Egyptian mythology. When the men who see Gwendolen at the gaming tables at Leubronn characterize her as a “serpent,” she is simultaneously the Christian Eve, Jewish Lilith, Greek Nereid, and Egyptian Hathor.93 Yet, Eliot’s nod to Hathor is implied through what we know about her reading about ancient Egyptian culture, which included the listing of equivalent Greek and Egyptian goddesses in her Daniel Deronda notebooks.94 More direct references to Egyptian mythology include Gwendolen’s frustration over the fact that, as an English woman, she cannot travel down the Nile and find its source as English men do and Vandernoodt’s description of Gwendolen as an Egyptian mummy with “a rag face and skeleton toes peeping out” that only men with an interest in history find attractive.95 Just as an interpretation of Daniel as “an accomplished Egyptian” is enhanced by recognizing that Eliot had established this model as early as Adam Bede, our understanding of Gwendolen’s character as a “dead mummy” is enhanced by recognizing that Eliot had established this view in Romola and Middlemarch. In Daniel Deronda, this characterization carries added weight because it is applied to the central female character, whom we might expect to become a hero as Maggie, Fedalma, Romola, or Dorothea do. Yet, Gwendolen cannot become a hero because of the restrictions

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placed on her as an English woman through her marriage to Grandcourt and her friendship with Daniel, who understands the power Gwendolen potentially holds but still imposes traditional gender standards.96 If we are looking for a female hero similar to those in earlier Eliot novels, we might be inclined to look to Mirah, who as Daniel’s wife accompanies Daniel on his journey East at the end of the novel. Yet Mirah, like Gwendolen, also is held to traditional standards for English women, despite her “foreign” background.97 Characterized as wearing the “dress of an English lady,” Mirah keeps her Cleopatra-like jealousy of Daniel’s friendship with Gwendolen in check,98 and at her wedding, Mirah is described as a “goodly bride” whose “marriage to Deronda crowned a romance which would always make a sweet memory” in Mrs. Meyrick’s view.99 Although Eliot draws on Egyptian mythology in creating Mirah’s romance with Daniel, using the “Egyptian Cinderella” in the Greek philosopher Strabo’s Geography as a source, she draws on a story that reinforces traditional roles for women. As Baker notes, “The story of the Egyptian girl bathing in the Nile [Rhodopis] who loses her sandal and marries the Pharaoh has its similarities with the tale of the young Jewish maiden [Mirah] … who is rescued by the handsome rich young man, Deronda.”100 This source also more fully links Daniel to Egyptian mythology, since it suggests he is not just Moses but also the Pharaoh. Still, there is no direct reference to Daniel as a Pharaoh in Eliot’s novel, and since the novel ends with Daniel leading his people East, the Moses characterization of him dominates. Ultimately, with Daniel Deronda Eliot returns to the notion of a JudeoChristian but also Egyptian Moses as hero at the end of her career, suggesting that her use of Egyptian mythology across her major works is as much cyclical as it is developmental. Rather than going from the “Egyptian sorcerer” to an “accomplished Egyptian,” Eliot’s accomplished Egyptian (Daniel Deronda) revisits the Egyptian sorcerer (Adam Bede), with the diverse mythological contexts for both male and female heroes fully fleshed out. Eliot clearly read about Egypt throughout her career and incorporated her knowledge of Egyptian mythology into most of her major works. Re-reading these works in this context enhances our understanding of the complex ways in which she engaged mythology and the ways in which diverse mythologies are used to structure fictional narratives. Although she clearly wrote from an imperialist perspective, Eliot recognized that Egyptian mythology was connected to other world mythologies and had an integral role in incorporating the symbolic into realist fiction.

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Notes











1. Joseph Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking (Heidelberg: Carl, 1977), 9. 2. Felicia Bonaparte, The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot’s Poetic Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 5. 3. Avrom Fleishman, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 111. 4. See Kirsten Hall, “‘It Is All One’: Hetty Sorrel and the Myth of Cupid and Psyche,” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 67, no. 4 (2015): 279–294. Hall argues that Hetty Sorrel’s “moral development” in Adam Bede corresponds to the Cupid and Psyche myth (279). 5.  See Lila Marz Harper “‘That Wonderous Medusa Face’: Goethe’s Italian Journey, George Eliot, and G. H. Lewes,” in Travel, Discovery, Transformation, edited by Gabriel R. Ricci, 135–154 (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2014). Harper shows how Eliot’s knowledge of “natural history” and “classical mythology” via Goethe’s Italian Journey shaped her representations of women as “evolving” Medusas whose “sacrifices” are “fruitful” (135, 145, 148). 6.  See Alessandra Grego, “George Eliot’s Use of Scriptural Typology: Incarnation of Ideas,” in Myths of Europe, edited by Richard Littlejohns and Sara Soncini (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 123–131. Grego suggests that the “spiritual development of man in history” via JudeoChristian typology appears in Daniel Deronda, “a historical re-working of the Apocalypse theme” (126–128). 7. Molly Youngkin, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 69–71. 8. George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, edited by Gordon Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1854–1878), 2:5. 9. Youngkin, British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women, 70–71. 10. Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, 4:162. Eliot and Lewes considered travelling to Egypt several times between 1864 and 1875, but were unable to go because Lewes was too ill to travel that far (see 8:366, 9:144, 6:318–319). 11.  Joseph Wiesenfarth, introduction to George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–1879, by George Eliot (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and University Press of Virginia), xxiii. 12. George Eliot, George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, 141–142. 13. George Eliot, George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” Notebook, 486–489. 14. Youngkin, British Women Writers, 65–67.

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15. Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930, 8. 16. George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy, edited by Antoine Gerard van den Broek (London: Pickering & Chatto Press, 2008), 280–288. 17. George Eliot, Adam Bede, edited by Stephen Gill (New York: Penguin, 1985), 7. 18. Joseph Wiesenfarth, Introduction, xxiii. 19. Edward Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, vol. 1. (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1837), 369. 20. Eliot, Adam Bede, 51. 21. Ibid., 51. 22. Ibid., 354, 489. 23. Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking, 77. 24. Ibid., 20. 25. Ibid., 85. 26. Ibid., 84–85. 27. Eliot, Adam Bede, 93. 28. Ibid., 554. 29. Ibid., 329. 30. Ibid., 486. 31. Ibid., 492. 32. Ibid., 347–348. 33. Ibid., 359. 34. Ibid., 123. 35. Ibid., 469. 36. Ibid., 486. 37. Ibid., 469. 38. Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Myth Making, 102. 39. Ibid., 102. 40. Ibid., 96–97. 41. See Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking, 212; Baker, Preface, in The Spanish Gypsy, edited by Antonine Gerard van den Broek (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), xxiv; van den Broek, introduction to The Spanish Gypsy, edited by Antonine Gerard van den Broek (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), xxvii, liv. 42. van den Broek, Introduction, xvii, xxxii. 43. Ibid., xxxii–xxxiii. 44. George Eliot, Essays of George Eliot, edited by Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 131. 45. Eliot, Mill, 166. 46. Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking, 119–121. 47. See Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking, 96, 108. Also, Kathryn Brigger Kruger, who argues Eliot develops a “counter-Hegelian

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reading” of Antigone in The Mill on the Floss (“‘The Antigone and Its Moral’: George Eliot’s Antigonean Considerations,” The George Eliot Review 44 [1970]: 70), and David Moldstad, who traces the “conflict between the conventions of society and individual judgment” in Sophocles and Eliot (“The Mill on the Floss and Antigone,” PMLA 85, no. 3 [1970]: 527). 48. Kevin A. Morrison, “‘The Mother Tongue of Our Imagination’: George Eliot, Landscape-Shaped Subjectivity, and the Possibility of Social Inclusion,” Victorian Review 34, no. 1 (2008): 89. 49. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 108, 110. 50. Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, 3:148–150. 51. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 108–109. 52. Ibid., 110–112. 53. Deborah Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 8. 54. Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy, line 3.54. 55. Ibid., lines 1.949–1.953. 56. Ibid., lines 1.1465–1.1468. 57. Ibid., lines 1.1480, 1.1473–1474, 1.2344. 58. Ibid., lines 1.2821, 1.2828–1.2829. 59. Ibid., lines 1.3005, 1.2997. 60. Ibid., lines 5.22–24. 61. Ibid., note 331. 62. van den Broek, Introduction, xvi–xvii. 63. Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking, 146. 64. Ibid., 161. 65. Ibid., 161. 66. Ibid., 158. 67. George Eliot, Middlemarch, 186. 68. Ibid., 202. 69. Ibid., 198. 70. Youngkin, British Women Writers, 76. 71. Eliot, Romola, 175–176, 302, 307. 72. John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt, Introduction to George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks: A Transcription, edited by Pratt and Neufeldt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), xxiv–xxv. 73. Pratt and Neufeldt, Introduction, xxiv, xliv; Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking, 186. 74. Pratt and Neufeldt, Introduction, xxv. 75. George Eliot, George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks: A Transcription, edited by John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 139.



















































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76. Ibid.,  48. 77. Eliot, Middlemarch, 254. 78. Eliot, George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks, 51. 79. Eliot, Middlemarch, 106. 80. Ibid., 81. 81. Ibid., 895. 82. Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking, 96. 83. Youngkin, British Women Writers, 76–77. 84. Eliot, Middlemarch, 896. 85. Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking, 210–211. 86. Ibid.,  211. 87. Ibid.,  214. 88. Ibid.,  210. 89. Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking, 219. 90. Eliot, George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, notes 7, 142. 91. Wiesenfarth, George Eliot’s Mythmaking, 212. 92. Youngkin, British Women Writers, 79. 93. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 83–84. 94. Eliot, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Notebooks, 71. 95. Youngkin, British Women Writers, 64, 68, 81. 96. Ibid., 87. 97. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 88–89. 98. Ibid., 88–89. 99. Ibid.,  693–694. 100. Eliot, Some George Eliot Notebooks, 68.

Bibliography Baker, William. Preface to The Spanish Gypsy, edited by Antoine Gerard van den Broek, ix–xxv. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008. Bonaparte, Felicia. The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot’s Poetic Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 1979. Caves, Terence. Introduction to Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot, ix–xxxv. New York: Penguin, 1995. Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Edited by Gordon Sherman Haight. 9 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, vols. 1–3, 1954; 4–7, 1955; 8–9, 1978. ———. Essays of George Eliot. Edited by Thomas Pinney. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963. ———. Some George Eliot Notebooks: An Edition of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library’s George Eliot Notebooks, Mss 707, 708, 709, 710, 711. Edited by

114  M. YOUNGKIN William Baker. Vol. 1, Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur Universität Salzburg, 1976. ———. George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” Notebooks: A Transcription. Edited by John Clark Pratt and Victor A. Neufeldt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. ———. George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–1879, and Uncollected Writings. Edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth. Charlotteville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and University Press of Virginia, 1981. ———. The Mill on the Floss. 1860. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. ———. Adam Bede. 1859. Edited by Stephen Gill. New York: Penguin, 1985. ———. Middlemarch: A Study in Provincial Life. 1871. Edited by W. J. Harvey. New York: Penguin, 1985, 1994, 2000. ———. George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” Notebooks. Edited by Jane Irwin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. The Spanish Gypsy. 1868. Edited by Antoine Gerard van den Broek. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008. ———. Daniel Deronda. 1876. Edited by Graham Handley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. Romola. 1862–1863. Edited by Andrew Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Fleishman, Avrom. George Eliot’s Intellectual Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Grego, Alessandra. “George Eliot’s Use of Scriptural Typology: Incarnation of Ideas.” In Myths of Europe, edited by Richard Littlejohns and Sara Soncini, 123–131. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Hall, Kirsten. “‘It Is All One’: Hetty Sorrel and the Myth of Cupid and Psyche.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 67 no. 4 (2015): 279–294. Harper, Lila Marz. “‘That Wonderous Medusa Face’: Goethe’s Italian Journey, George Eliot, and G. H. Lewes.” In Travel, Discovery, Transformation, edited by Gabriel R. Ricci, 135–154. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2014. Kruger, Kathryn Brigger. “‘The Antigone and Its Moral’: George Eliot’s Antigonean Considerations.” The George Eliot Review 44 (2012): 69–80. Lane, Edward. An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Vol. 1. London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1837. Moldstad, David. “The Mill on the Floss and Antigone.” PMLA 85, no. 3 (1970): 527–531. Morrison, Kevin A. “‘The Mother Tongue of Our Imagination’: George Eliot, Landscape-Shaped Subjectivity, and the Possibility of Social Inclusion.” Victorian Review 34, no. 1 (2008): 83–100. Nord, Deborah. Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

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Pratt, John Clark, and Victor A. Neufeldt. Introduction to George Eliot’s Middlemarch Notebooks: A Transcription, edited by Pratt and Neufeldt, xvii– lii. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Semmel, Bernard. George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. van den Broek, Antoine Gerard. “Introduction.” In The Spanish Gypsy, edited by van den Broek, xxvii–lv. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008. Wiesenfarth, Joseph. George Eliot’s Mythmaking. Heidelberg: Carl Winter/ Universitätsverlag, 1977. ———. Introduction to George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, 1854–1879, and Uncollected Writings, by Wiesenfarth, xv–xxxix. Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia and University Press of Virginia, 1981. Youngkin, Molly. British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

PART III

Eliot and Victorian Science

CHAPTER 6

Organic Realism in Middlemarch Jean Arnold

Your subject, self, or self-assertive ‘I’

Turns nought but object, melts to molecules …1

In 1876, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes purchased a country home near Alfred Lord Tennyson’s house in Surrey, and after moving there, Eliot wrote to a friend, “Tennyson, you perhaps know, is within a drive of us, and he too lives (for a few summer months) on a hill where he commands the double, contrasted beauties of this wonderful country—the wide high heath and the fertile plain.”2 After Eliot had paid a neighborly visit to Tennyson and was saying good-bye, Tennyson pressed her hand “kindly and sweetly,” and said, “I wish you well with your molecules!” Eliot then proudly replied, “I get on very well with my molecules.”3 In order to connect this curious exchange between Eliot and Tennyson to an interpretive approach to Eliot’s fiction, we could look at George Henry Lewes’s work on molecules and human physiology as a possible direct or indirect source of this repartee, for “… Eliot and Lewes were … intimately involved in each other’s work,”

J. Arnold (*)  California State University, San Bernardino, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_6

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and “enthusiastically supported each other’s intellectual pursuits.”4 As the two worked together on their research and writing, “Lewes was a constant living influence on George Eliot’s intellectual development.”5 These molecules, as understood by Eliot and Lewes, are related to Eliot’s development of an organic and internalized understanding of her main characters’ motives and behavior in Middlemarch. To correlate the close intellectual relation between Eliot and Lewes to this vignette about molecules, we might note that Lewes writes earlier in his Physiology of Common Life (1867) that “molecule by molecule … tissue is destroyed, and molecule by molecule it is repaired;” furthermore, “molecular death, or waste of substance consequent on vital activity, is incessant; but the organism lives on, surviving this death of the organs, as the nation survives though men perish daily.”6 These statements reveal Lewes’s underlying vision of the material world, invisible to the naked eye, yet always undergoing molecular action in this dynamic microbiological realm. For Eliot and Lewes, molecules had everything to do with the nervous system in which molecular motion translates into bodily sensation and, ultimately, human action. Later, Lewes also shows in his Problems of Life and Mind (1874–1879), just as Eliot writes into her fictional characterizations, that “the processes of the nervous system both affect and are affected by human thought and action.”7 In circling back to Eliot and Tennyson’s exchange of pleasantries about molecules during their friendly visit, we could deduce that Eliot was deeply involved in this perception of the molecular composition of human bodies. As Shuttleworth notes, while “Lewes only stated his assumptions, George Eliot explored fully in her novels their social and psychological implications.”8 In Middlemarch, Eliot uses the term “invisible yet active forms” to describe the processes of Dorothea’s active inward life that had dramatically changed after her journey to Rome, though “nothing had been outwardly altered there” (37.272). Dorothea’s transformed perspective seems to have come from the physiological effects of nervous sensation triggered by newfound feelings, which she began to experience in Rome as she talked to Will with “a certain liquid brightness in her eyes,” and Will had responded similarly as if it were “a law of nature” (22.166). Internal feelings were difficult to represent in ordinary realism, a type of descriptive representation that had generally focused on

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the external, visible world. In contrast, Eliot was interested in writing fiction that could depict internal sense experience, leading to an epistemology that Nancy Henry describes as “based on feeling.”9 Because of Eliot’s attempts to “depict internal sense experience,” we arrive at the term “organic realism” of this essay’s title.

Lewes Elucidates In discussing his work on the internal workings of the nervous system and the action of its molecules, Lewes had written in The Problems of Life and Mind (1874–1879): However clearly [Science] may trace … molecular movements from the excitation of a sensory nerve to its final discharge on a muscle, the transformation of a neural process into a sensation remains an impenetrable mystery…10

Here, the statement shows Lewes’s belief in a close relation between organic neural processes and human behavior, and his desire to solve this “mystery.” He explains that he can conceive of the possibility of having a sensation without thinking of it, and [he] can also conceive automatic actions to be determined by guiding sensations, although the mind may not be ‘conscious’ of them. He felt that “consciousness was not an agent but a symptom.”11

In this idea of a non-rational, physiological basis for human behavior expressed by Lewes, we may also find some surprising ways to explain the behavior of some of the main characters in Middlemarch, since Eliot and Lewes were so closely aligned in their work.

The Victorian Context of Eliot’s Organic Realism Just five years before Eliot began to publish the first pages of Middlemarch, John Tyndall published his lectures given at the Royal Institution about discoveries of the invisible world under the microscope; near the conclusion of the lecture, “On Radiation,” he ended with these words for his listening audience:

122  J. ARNOLD It is thought by some that natural science has a deadening influence on the imagination… But the experience of the last hour must, I think, have convinced you that the study of natural sciences goes hand in hand with the culture of the imagination. Throughout the greater part of this discourse we have been sustained by this faculty. We have been picturing atoms and molecules and vibrations and waves which eye has never seen nor ear heard, and which can only be discerned by the exercise of the imagination.12 (emphasis added)

New perceptions of the natural world based on microscopic research encouraged Victorians to use their imaginations to discern and pursue discoveries that might lie just beyond their naturally given senses. Molecules were thus perceived by some Victorian scientists as the very core of matter—the basis of both the inanimate and animate worlds— and Eliot and Lewes had adopted these worldviews, applying them to their work. Responding to Victorian science studies through this atomistic view of material reality, Eliot’s main characters create new self-identities, making ad hoc decisions based on their neural sensations rather than on received moral dictates of the culture. Their instinctive behaviors often collide with cultural tradition, when the characters enact their own events in response to their own desires.13 Within this line of thought, the aesthetic of organic realism Eliot developed in her writing, at this time of her career, was based on an experiential truth found in the material world at the molecular level of the human body’s nerve tissue.14 Many of the minor characters in Middlemarch are presented solely to represent traditional cultural roles while, in contrast, the main characters ultimately reject established cultural roles.15 For example, Sir James Chettam, Dorothea’s sister Celia, Mr. Brooke, The Larchers, Mrs. Cadwallader, and Mr. Standish, among others, serve as mouthpieces for traditional manners and established behavior patterns. In the end, while thus recognizing that neural responses are not the only cause of all the characters’ behavior depicted in this novel, we can look at the main characters’ behavior patterns more closely to find organic causes for their individual narrative outcomes. This essay enquires into how George Eliot perceives human physicality in Middlemarch by focusing on her characters’ life experiences and

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knowledge gained through their neurological senses. I therefore follow a path through the textual surface to explore a phenomenology of affective reactions arising from relationships between some characters; these responses—as they appear on their bodily surfaces—arise from their physiological nerve tissue and ultimately allow characters to act according to their internal feelings. The story of Dorothea, for example, then becomes her sentimental education in the dangers of following ideal standards of performance—such as civic improvement or maintaining class status—moving instead toward her knowledge of what will make her physically and emotionally well as an individual.

Character Relations In Middlemarch, we might pause over Dr. Lydgate’s key research question: “what [is] the primitive tissue?” (15.110).16 And like Lydgate, while we search out his “new connections and hitherto hidden facts of structure which must be taken into account,” we note some clear examples of how the physiological core of the material world, as perceived by Eliot, influences plot outcomes and critical reading of Middlemarch. As an illustration, Eliot presents the relation between Lydgate and Rosamund in the early stages of their courtship as “that gossamer web!”—a delicate, nearly invisible connection. The interactions of these two characters contain subtle interlacings …, momentary touches of fingertips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. (36.253)

In these interactions, Lydgate and Rosamund undergo internal bodily changes as they exchange somatically emitted sensors that become apparent on their bodily surfaces; their subtle communications envelop them in a veiled affinity, a private bond. In another scene, when the word “molecule” comes up in the narrative, Ladislaw is visiting with Uncle Brooke, feeling bored about “arranging ‘documents’ about hanging sheep-stealers.” Having his mind on pressing personal matters other than the task at hand, Will is caught off guard when Dorothea is announced and enters the room:

124  J. ARNOLD … He started up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger ends. Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch. (39.284, emphasis added)

In the instance of Will Ladislaw’s reactions to Dorothea’s presence, the narrator’s concept of active nerve fibers dissolves boundaries between internal neurological feeling and its outward, muscular display.17 Finally, in a third scene, Mr. Standish the lawyer endlessly bores his listeners while reading a lengthy preamble to Mr. Featherstone’s will. Those present are impatient because each one has an important stake in how the vast sums will be distributed. However, when Standish speaks the sentence containing the words “give and bequeath,” the extended family and friends gathered in the large room at Stone Court suddenly come to life, and “all the complexions change … subtly, as if some faint vibration were passing through them.” The men in the room let “their lower lip fall, others pursing it up, according to the habit of their muscles” (35.246, emphasis added). Here again, these delicate physical displays of muscular reaction reveal the inward attitudes of those attending the reading of the will. In the three instances—the careful building of a relationship between Dorothea and Will, the initial relationship between Rosamund and Lydgate, and the reading of Mr. Featherstone’s will—the characters’ facial expressions and bodily movements arise from a physiological response to the external happenings or events. The progression of events in the novel shows that this sensory form of epistemology reveals its “transcendent nature” over and above other forms of knowledge, as events progress in the narrative. In sum, as the characters interact with their environment through their senses, they produce their own knowledge.

Good Vibrations Throughout the narrative in Middlemarch, so powerful an impression does the “effective magic” of Dorothea’s presence make on Will that his “nerve-fibres” conduct electricity throughout his body’s nervous system.18 Will’s “primitive tissue” experiences “the bow of a violin drawn

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near him cleverly, [so that it] would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him, and [so that] his point of view shifted as easily as his mood” (39.284). Here, the narrator makes a clear statement that the source of Will’s motivation for his future actions and decisions arises from vibrations in his nerves. Along this line of reasoning, the narrator’s use of musical vibration for descriptions of the highest happiness of some of the main characters occurs throughout the novel, for in a later passage, when Will comes to Uncle Brooke’s home to collect some of his paintings, he and Dorothea find themselves alone in the same room; their ability to converse is eclipsed, as the text describes inward experience not generally subject to the external visual perception commonly expected of realistic description. Dorothea is feeling the “happy freedom” and “mutual understanding” she experiences through the developing friendship between her and Will throughout the course of the novel. In this scene, the narrator interjects: “Let the music which can take possession of our frame and fill the air with joy for us, sound once more …” (62.462), the “once more” perhaps referring to the earlier passage describing Dorothea and Will’s meeting in Rome. Rosamund and Lydgate also feel the joy of music in the first days of their courtship which takes place “in the corner of the [Vincy] drawing room” where Rosamund plays the piano, “and subtle as it was, the light made it a sort of rainbow to many observers” (36.253). In writing about the music in Eliot’s fiction, Delia Sousa Correa notes that the extraordinary extent and range of musical allusion in [Eliot’s] work is an insistent reminder of the material conditions of imaginative life. [Eliot’s] adherence to the importance of heard experience means that her allusions to music are always more than metaphorical.

In fact, they are material and internal to the body. The vibrations of musical chord changes can be experienced internally through vibrations in the nervous system, what Helmholtz had referred to as “sympathetic vibration.”19 The neural response to musical vibrations can most clearly be seen in Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, as this sample passage describes the change from a major to a minor key as it inwardly affects Maggie Tulliver:

126  J. ARNOLD she half-started from her seat with the sudden thrill of that [chord] change… [‘her whole soul was being played on in this way by the inexorable power of sound’]. You might have seen the slightest perceptive quivering through her whole frame.20 (532, emphasis added)

The “quivering” throughout her “whole frame” indicates the significant nature of the physical sensations caused by the sound vibrations of the piano music Maggie is hearing with her whole body. Correa explains that, through this sympathetic vibration, “the principles of physical acoustics also underpin George Eliot’s portrayals of emotional response,” such as when “her soul was being played on in this way by the inexorable power of sound.”21 The progression of events in the novel shows that this sensory form of epistemology reveals its “transcendent nature” over and above other forms of knowledge (39.284). The power of this affective experience is an approach to living that the main characters have in common—Dorothea, Will, Rosamund, Lydgate, Mary, and Fred. As these characters interact with their environment through their nervous reactions, they produce their own knowledge.22 As “invisible yet active forms,” the vibrating molecules conduct electricity through the neural membranes; the molecules thus play an active organic role in Middlemarch, performing as “actants” that prompt character, action, and, therefore, narrative development.23

The Moral Divide: “Molecules” vs. “Immoral Fiction” As we have seen, Eliot seeks to describe inward emotional experience of the main characters of Middlemarch by describing the external symptoms to neurological responses that occur internally. We then need to ask how this type of organic realism fits in with other literary criticisms of Eliot’s writing in this novel. Critics have often talked of Eliot’s attention to conservative cultural norms—to traditional morality—noting that one of two opposing goals for characters is to support time-honored roles and practices, with plots that lead characters such as Fred Vincy and Mary Garth into traditional social roles if they are able to contribute in some standard way to the society.24 However, in Middlemarch we can see an equally strong tendency for the author to support and present main characters’ individual desires based on neurological sensations that go against standard forms of behavior practiced in the rural town. We therefore find

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the main characters at odds with the minor characters in their surroundings; they must leave for the city or the continent to find a release from the pressures to conform imposed by the rural town.25 A close reading of scenes that show this neurological basis for main character decision making and action generates an alternative critical perspective on Middlemarch: this model of behavior is a form that takes precedence in Eliot’s narrative.26 As an abstract venue that cherishes, esteems, and works toward preserving tradition, legal and moral tenets, cultural and religious norms, the rural society of Middlemarch judges the main characters according to traditional or predetermined approaches to living; however, across the arc of the plot, the hardcore physicality of active human “molecules” of the neurological system prevail every time as part of “that involuntary, palpitating life” of the natural world (80.578). Herein lies a source of Eliot’s ambivalent stance on questions of moral behavior in Middlemarch.27 Although physiological molecules are invisible to the human eye, they act inwardly and powerfully before, during, behind, or after the novel’s scenes, influencing or managing characters’ behavior. They exist as “invisible yet active forms,” and their power is never inert (37.272). For Eliot, the biological nervous system within the human body is energetic, reactive, lively, and therefore, a determining factor in human affairs. The sensations emanating from vibrating nerve “tissues” override the characters’ own conscious narratives in Middlemarch. Dorothea, for instance, consciously anticipates a financially secure living by marrying Casaubon so that she can engage in progressive, socially beneficial projects, like building new workers’ cottages, and can have access to Casaubon’s higher learning; however, she marries Ladislaw primarily because of their attraction and sympathetic connection registered in their physical frames, without any financial security at all, and where she will “learn what everything costs” (8.83.594). Eliot thus seems to ask, “how can these characters manage their lives by preconceived and established norms of behavior or ethical considerations when underlying physical forces may at any time seize control?” The problem for Eliot in assessing morality is that “the line between the virtuous and vicious, so far from being a necessary safeguard to morality, is itself an immoral fiction.”28 Who can judge another’s moral actions given that pulsating, involuntary organic forces are at work in human lives? The tension between rational social ideals and the internal nervous responses of its characters plays out across the narrative of Middlemarch.

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For example, Eliot’s conservative, contemporary readers might have disapproved of the behavior of characters like a young Fred Vincy, Casaubon, or Bulstrode; on the other hand, these characters do experience circumstances in their lives that cannot be morally vilified at first glance. The narrator notes that young Fred had dawdled around in his early life, reasonably expecting an inheritance so “that he needed to do nothing … purely by the favor of providence” (36.250). He therefore follows his immediate desires by practicing this expected privileged mode of living as he waits for the actual living to materialize. In bargaining for an expensive racehorse that turns out to have little talent or value, he loses the money he had borrowed from Caleb Garth. Fred then must depend upon his future inheritance to come through as a source of income to repay the debt. But old Mr. Featherstone changes his will, so that Fred is no longer the primary heir, and Fred finds himself in arrears with no way to repay the borrowed money. In reaction to these altered circumstances, Fred’s father, Mayor Vincy takes the view of the larger society, complaining that Fred is just “an idle scamp of a son” (36.251). Readers who may have respected Fred’s father as mayor might also have disapproved of Fred, yet his actions were responsive to his expected financial circumstances, his fault being that he anticipated—naively and irrationally—what had appeared to him to be a sure expectation and source of wealth. Then, readers learn that Casaubon harbors an “uneasy egoism” borne of a “blight” of “jealousy,” so that his “equivalent centre of self,” upsets Dorothea’s high expectations for their marriage. Because of his advanced years, Casaubon actually becomes more important to Dorothea posthumously: first, she has to deny his request that she continue to work on his papers after he dies, and then Casaubon takes away her spousal inheritance through a codicil that takes effect if she decides to marry Will Ladislaw, the family descendent whose line originally held possession of the family fortune. Casaubon’s inheritance had previously been taken from Aunt Julia, Will’s mother, because of her “mésalliance,” so his motive in adding the codicil to his will is to fulfill his desire to preserve the current wealth of his own line within the larger family as the legitimate heir to the family fortune. The narrator asks the reader to understand the “equivalent centre of self” belonging to Casaubon, who has been caught in a situation resulting from the squabbles of his forebears (21.157). Given the pressures of Victorian class privilege, can anyone blame him?

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Finally, Bulstrode harbors “the susceptible nerve of a man whose intensest being lay in such mastery and predominance as the conditions of his life had shaped for him.” His “desires had been stronger than his theoretic [religious] beliefs,” so that when he had acquired past financial advantages against any honest standard, his decades-old indiscretions now caused him to feel “the tingling of shame [and] the pang of remorse” (61.453; 53.382, emphasis added).29 Having been driven by a desire for financial success in the material culture of Middlemarch, he now becomes subject to “tinglings” and “pangs” brought on by a physiological reaction to his “remorse,” brought on by ignoring moral standards and his own avowed religious practices. When he is discovered, he suffers, with a “low cry – [saying] who shall be my accuser?” (71.534). In all these circumstances, individuals’ perspectives change, as they form decisions and take actions, moving the plot forward. Ignoring certain unambiguous, well-established moral tenets, like honesty, truthfulness, hard work, or dutiful behavior, the characters are instead moved by intuitive, reactive, neurophysiological impulses that create irreversible chains of events.

Dorothea and Will In continuing to view the novel’s argument about the active power of the nervous system, we can compare two staged scenarios to reveal what Goethe would have called an “elective affinity” between Will and Dorothea.30 In the first scene, Will has been painting outside on the Lowick grounds, and rain drives him indoors where he is greeted by Dorothea, who is glad to see him and therefore “indebted to the rain.” Dorothea is seated by herself on a “dark ottoman with the brown books behind her,” as she and Will “speak without fear” (4.37.265–266); spatially, Casaubon’s books appear in the background, having already receded from her life, though she is still married to Casaubon. Here, as they sit facing each other with space between them, Dorothea and Will seal their friendship with a language of direct expression and sincere communication, “like two flowers which had opened then and there” (4.37.266). In the second scene, Will nervously enters the library, as Dorothea seats herself on “a long low ottoman in the middle of the room”

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(83.593–594). Because the ottoman is long, it invites both Will and Dorothea to sit there together, and because it is low it invites them to remain there. Here, while watching the rainstorm, they sit without speaking, in “awe” of nature’s power, while the rain “dash[es] against the window-panes” and a “great swoop of wind … [comes] behind.” The electrical charge from a “vivid flash of lightning [makes] them start,” shocking their nervous systems into action; Will displays a spasmodic movement as he seizes Dorothea’s hand, a show of passion that occurs in between the lightning and the “tremendous crack and roll” of thunder that inevitably follows. After this “atmoscene,” the actant status of the stormy weather subsides, having transferred its electrical power to the characters’ nervous vitality.31 When Will stands to say good-bye to Dorothea, she also stands, struggling to express her feeling (80.594). Neither of them want to say good-bye, Dorothea finally saying “Oh, I cannot bear it—my heart will break.” It is this literal as well as metaphorical statement about her organic, internal life that causes the necessary change that will bring the narrative to a close. The novel thus argues that it is more desirable for an individual to create a life in which the surrounding external action is compatible with the internal physiological nervous system, “an inward life which fill[s] the air …” (37.272). Bodily sensations must be in tune with their environment, a connection that allows individual physical well-being and an engaged existence; an organic truth of realism is best realized as a “correspondence between internal and external orders.”32 Therefore, because of their internal, mutual feelings, Will and Dorothea naturally decide to link their individual narrative endings. The forms within the rural culture of Middlemarch are two opposing worldviews at a juncture of cultural change. These formal forces inform the narrative tension of Middlemarch and create its forward motion. Instead of studying the appearances of people and plants, the nineteenth-century field of organic science studied the internal workings of living bodies, and as a new epistemological form, this science could often challenge the existing received morals that dictated traditional behavior. In like fashion, George Eliot sought to represent internal, organic truth in human life through what we could call organic realism.

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Notes

1. George Eliot, The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot, edited by Antonie Gerard van den Broek, 2 vols. (Pickering and Chatto, 2005), vol. 2, 119. Ella Mershon, “Ruskin’s Dust,” Victorian Studies 58, no. 3 (Spring 2016): 465, 476. In these poetic lines from “I Give You Ample Leave,” Eliot explores human identity in and as a material body: an effect of what Ella Mershon describes as the era’s debate about “molecular flux”: “the Victorian public followed the developments of microscopic science with mingled awe and trepidation as [natural] form became increasingly mutable and unstable.” 2. George Eliot, Letters from George Eliot to Elma Stuart, 1872–1880, edited by Roland Stuart (Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, & Co., Ltd., 1909), letter dated August 4, 1877, 89. 3. Leslie Stephen, George Eliot (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 192. Also see George Eliot: Interviews and Recollections (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 60. Although Stephen does not give a source for this anecdote, in fact, it is cited in this recent edition, published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, footnote #2, 60. This source gives some alternative versions of the exchange between Eliot and Tennyson, and while these other versions have different word usages, the meaning is essentially the same. 4. Melissa Anne Raines, Eliot’s Grammar of Being (London: Anthem Press, 2013), xiii–xiv. Moira Gatens, “Philosophy,” in George Eliot in Context, edited by Margaret Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 219. 5.  Sally Shuttleworth, “Sexuality and Knowledge in Middlemarch,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19, no. 4 (1996): 425–441, 436, fn3. 6. George Henry Lewes, Physiology of Common Life (New York: Appleton, 1867), 2:251; 2:310. 7.  Melissa Raines, xiv. Sally Shuttleworth, “Sexuality and Knowledge in Middlemarch,” endnote 5, 437. George Henry Lewes, The Problems of Life and Mind, First published 1874–1879, 5 vols. (London: Routledge, 2001), vol. II, 459. Shuttleworth quotes Lewes, who argues that “the neural process and the feeling are one and the same process viewed under different aspects. Viewed from the physical and objective side, it is a neural process; viewed from the psychological or subjective side, it is a sentient process.” 8. George Henry Lewes, Physiology, 457–458. Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 22.



132  J. ARNOLD 9. Nancy Henry, The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 93. 10. George Henry Lewes, Philosophy, 457–458. Suzy Anger, “George Eliot and Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, edited by George Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 79. Lewes continues, “motion we know and Feeling we know; but we know them as utterly different; and how the one becomes changed into the other, what causal nexus connects the two, is a question which can never be answered.” Eliot and Lewes were working within this developmental period, for, as Suzy Anger has suggested, Lewes experienced “history [as] a progressive development away from ‘Metaphysics’ and toward ‘Positive Knowledge’” or science. 11. Lewes, Physiology, vol. 2, 145. See also Graeme J. N. Gooday, “Instrumentation and Interpretation: Managing and Representing Working Environments of Victorian Experimental Science,” in Victorian Science in Context, edited by Bernard Lightman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 422. Deborah Netburn, “Biochemist Discovered What Fuels Life,” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 2018, B5. See also B. Alberts, A. Johnson, J. Lewis, et al., Chapter 14, “Energy Conversion,” Molecular Biology of the Cell, 4th ed. (New York: Garland Science, 2002). Gooday notes that in 1870 (one year before the publication of the beginning segments of Middlemarch), Thomas Henry Huxley was so sure that proof of a molecular basis of life was imminent, he argued that “physicochemical bases for life was merely a matter that awaited future technical progress.” This “future technical progress” produced a conclusion during the twentieth century. In Netburn’s article, for example, 1997 Nobel Prize winner Paul Boyer became one of three scientists who were able to reveal “mechanisms by which cells create ATP, a molecule known as the energy currency of cells … [that act through combustion and transference] of nutrients for use in building bones, contracting muscles and transmitting neurological messages” (emphasis added). 12. John Tyndale, On Radiation: The “Rede” Lecture, Delivered in the SenateHouse Before the University of Cambridge on Tuesday, May 16, 1865 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1865), 46–48. Also quoted in Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 141. 13. Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science, 204. Shuttleworth notes that “the biological premises to which George Eliot turns in her later works actually reinforces images of conflict and contradiction.” 14. Helen Thompson, Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 68; Lewes,

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Physiology, 195; Eliot, “John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Vol. III,” in Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ashton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 248; Edward Alexander, “Ruskin and Science,” Modern Language Review 64, no. 3 (July 1969): 508–521, 512. While discussing John Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding (1690), Thompson notes that “For Locke, the physicality of primary matter guarantees the truth of perceived reality.” By the nineteenth century, Eliot cites Ruskin, who affirms that “a humble and faithful study of nature” is the “ground for Truth.” Alexander notes that “Ruskin [who vastly influenced Eliot’s approach to realism,] believed that truth is made up of science and art together.” In describing the connections between molecular activity in the body and the signs of its activity on the body’s surface, Lewes (1867) writes that “Systemic sensations may be divided into two classes: Organic and Surface Sensations.” Readers, who are aware of the etymology of words and usages, would want to note the flexibility in defining “molecule,” a word whose meaning was changeable from Descartes onward. 15. Jean Arnold, “Quitting Middlemarch,” George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies 68, no. 2 (2016): 136–147, 138. 16.  Eliot explains that Lydgate, taking his inspiration from the research of Bichat, “longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of living structure, and help to define men’s thought more accurately after the true order.” Bichat (1771–1802) was an anatomist and pathologist, studied bodily tissues, and published three works: Treatise on Membranes (1799), General Anatomy Applied to Physiology and Medicine (1800), and Anatomic Description (1801–1803). 17. John W. Yolton, Perception & Reality: A History from Descartes to Kant (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 14–15. Nancy Henry, “‘George Eliot, European Novelist,’ by John Rignall, and ‘George Eliot’s Grammar of Being,’ by Melissa Raines,” Victorian Studies 55, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 546–548. Melissa Raines, George Eliot’s Grammar of Being (London: Anthem Press, 2013). Yolton’s precise phraseology delivers this meaning as he considers that we should recognize the “inescapable and fundamental [relation] played in perceptual awareness [between] physical processes in the perceiver’s environment and of neurophysiological events inside the perceiver’s body.” In her review, Nancy Henry writes of “Eliot’s reliance on the notion of a physically felt electric shock,” which Melissa Raines presents “in the context of Eliot’s knowledge of science generally and of physiology in particular.” 18. Lewes, The Problems of Life and Mind, published 1874–1879, 5 vols. (London: Routledge, 2001), vol. 2, 15. He discusses “Whether nerveforce be or not, identical with Electricity, must for the present be considered an open question”; however, the hypothesis that “Electricity is the nerve-force … [has] more evidence in its favor …”

134  J. ARNOLD 19.  Delia Sousa Correa, “Music,” in George Eliot in Context, edited by Margaret Harris (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2013, 2015), 212–213. Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (1863), 129. Correa states that Eliot harbored “a keen interest in the acoustical phenomenon of sympathetic vibration, reading Hermann von Helmholtz and later visiting him [in Germany] for a demonstration of the tuning forks by which he exemplified his theories.” 20. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, edited by Gordon Haight (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1981), 6.7.532. 21. Delia Sousa Correa, “Music,” 212. 22. Henry, Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot, 93. Henry comments that “It is the knowledge through feeling that [Dorothea’s] first marriage lacked …” 23. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Blue Ridge Summit, Collection of British Authors, Tauchnitz Edition, 519. Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz, 1860; Paris: C. Reinwald & Co., 15, Rue des Saints Peres. See Latour for a full description and discussion of “actant.” 24. For example, see Suzy Anger, “George Eliot and Philosophy,” 92–96; T. H. Irwin, “Sympathy and the Basis of Morality,” in A Companion to George Eliot, edited by Anderson and Shaw (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2016), 279–293. 25. Arnold, “Quitting Middlemarch,” 136. 26. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 23. C. Levine posits a society that contains “large numbers of colliding social forms …” with no prior “metaphysical model of causality to explain [the] world.” 27.  See, for example, George Levine, Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, edited by George Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–19, 11. Suzy Anger, “George Eliot and Philosophy,” 93. G. Levine argues that “The contest between individual desire and moral responsibility is a recurring theme of all [Eliot’s] work, and an almost inevitable corollary of the realist’s program.” In relation to his statement, I would connect this discussion of bodily “molecules” to Levine’s “individual desire” as the material, physiological source of that very desire. In discussing moral philosophy, Anger says most distinctly that “George Eliot dramatizes her view that there are no absolute moral principles that can everywhere be applied, that there are always complexities involved in moral action.”

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28.  George Eliot, “The Morality of Wilhelm Meister” (1855), in Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ashton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 132. 29. The quotation is extremely important in showing how Eliot places the primacy of desire over religion or “theoretic” beliefs. 30. Gerlinde Röder-Bolton, George Eliot and Goethe: An Elective Affinity (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 10. Röder-Bolton takes the subtitle of her book, George Eliot and Goethe: An Elective Affinity, from the title of Goethe’s novel. She writes, “Besides their affinity for moral philosophy, Goethe and George Eliot shared a scientific approach to art.” 31. See Justine Pizzo, “Atmospheric Exceptionalism in Jane Eyre: Charlotte Bronte’s Weather Wisdom,” PMLA 131, no. 1 (January 2016): 84–100, 84–85. She describes “atmospheric exceptionalism” when a character possesses a “sensual and intellectual receptivity to climate.” 32. Suzy Anger, “George Eliot,” 84.

Bibliography Alberts, B., Johnson, A., Lewis, J., et al. Molecular Biology of the Cell. 4th ed. New York: Garland Science, 2002. Chapter 14, “Energy Conversion.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK21063. Alexander, Edward. “Ruskin and Science.” Modern Language Review 64, no. 3 (July 1969): 508–521. Anger, Suzy. “George Eliot and Philosophy.” In The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, edited by George Levine, 76–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Arnold, Jean. “Quitting Middlemarch.” George Eliot/George Henry Lewes Studies 68, no. 2 (2016): 136–147. https://doi.org/10.5325/georelioghlstud.68.2.01.36. Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Correa, Delia Sousa. “Music.” In George Eliot in Context, edited by Margaret Harris, 212–213. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2013, 2015. Eliot, George. Letters from George Eliot to Elma Stuart, 1872–1880. Edited by Roland Stuart. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1909. ———. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. 1871–1872. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1956. ———. The Mill on the Floss. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, 1981, 1996.

136  J. ARNOLD ———. “The Morality of Wilhelm Meister.” 1855. In Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ashton, 129–137. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———. “John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Vol. III, 1856.” In Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ashton, 247–259. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———. The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot. Edited by Antonie Gerard van den Broek, Consulting Editor, William Baker. 2 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005. ———. George Eliot: Interviews and Recollections. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Gatens, Moira. “Philosophy.” In George Eliot in Context, edited by Margaret Harris, 214–221. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Gooday, Graeme J. N. “Instrumentation and Interpretation: Managing and Representing the Working Environments of Victorian Experimental Science.” In Victorian Science in Context, edited by Bernard Lightman, 409–437. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Helmholtz, Hermann von. On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. 1863. Edited by Alexander J. Ellis, 1885. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1895. Henry, Nancy. The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———. “‘George Eliot, European Novelist,’ by John Rignall, and ‘George Eliot’s Grammar of Being,’ by Melissa Raines.” Victorian Studies 55, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 546–548. Irwin, T. H. “Sympathy and the Basis of Morality.” In A Companion to George Eliot, edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, 279–293. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2013, 2016. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Blue Ridge Summit, Collection of British Authors, Tauchnitz Edition, 519. Leipzig: Bernard Tauchnitz, 1860; Paris: C. Reinwald & Co., 15, Rue des Saints Peres. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Levine, George. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, edited by George Levine, 1–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Lewes, George Henry. The Physiology of Common Life. New York: Appleton, 1867. ———. The Problems of Life and Mind. First published 1874–1879, 5 vols. London: Routledge, 2001, vol. 2.

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Mershon, Ella. “Ruskin’s Dust.” Victorian Studies 58, no. 3 (Spring 2016): 464– 492. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies. Netburn, Deborah. “Paul Boyer, 1918–2018: Biochemist Discovered What Fuels Life.” Los Angeles Times (June 8, 2018): B5. Pizzo, Justine. “Atmospheric Exceptionalism in Jane Eyre: Charlotte Bronte’s Weather Wisdom.” PMLA 131, no. 1 (January 2016): 84–100. Raines, Melissa Anne. George Eliot’s Grammar of Being. London: Anthem Press, 2013. Röder-Bolton, Gerlinde. George Eliot and Goethe: An Elective Affinity. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. Shuttleworth, Sally. “Sexuality and Knowledge in Middlemarch.” NineteenthCentury Contexts 19, no. 4 (1996): 425–441. ———. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning. First published, 1984. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Stephen, Leslie. George Eliot. Edited by John Morley. New York: Macmillan, 1913. Thompson, Helen. Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Tyndale, John. On Radiation: The “Rede” Lecture, Delivered in the Senate-House Before the University of Cambridge on Tuesday, May 16, 1865. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1865. Yolton, John W. Perception & Reality: A History from Descartes to Kant. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

CHAPTER 7

“These Things Are a Parable”: Natural History Metaphors and Audience in Felix Holt (1866) Lila Marz Harper

George Eliot intensely followed new developments in natural history as she joined G. H. Lewes in the popular study of tidepool life and oversaw science book reviews in The Westminster Review; her novels’ metaphors engage with and reflect mid-1800s evolutionary and taxonomic debates. Several scholars have traced the influence of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species on George Eliot’s novels.1 Among these, Sally Shuttleworth’s George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science examines the impact of Eliot’s wide-ranging readings of natural and physical sciences on social arguments.2 At the same time, others have examined Darwin’s and T. H. Huxley’s use of literary metaphors in their rhetorical arguments. Gillian Beer describes Darwin’s writing particularly as having “profoundly unsettle[d] the received relationships between fiction, metaphor, and the material world.”3 In this essay, I merge research in Victorian scientific rhetoric with Eliot studies to consider how, in Felix Holt (1866), Eliot was influenced by evolutionary scientists, particularly

L. Marz Harper (*)  Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_7

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Darwin and Huxley, in her fictional examination of how individuals struggle within a small isolated society. I differ from other studies in my emphasis: I see Eliot as being closely engaged with such major discipline-shaping questions as who is qualified to engage in scientific discussion, how scientific studies should be written, and what should be considered when framing scientific concepts for the general reading public. In examining the influences of natural history on her writing, I stress that Eliot and Lewes were part of a social circle associated with the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) and that, while Eliot and Lewes kept current with the writings of pioneering evolutionary biologists, those biologists also read her novels and Lewes’s scientific work. As Gillian Beer and Janet Browne have noted, Darwin, in particular, read Eliot’s novels as soon as they were published and his writing was powered by his “omnivorous reading.”4 Thus, I suggest, literary influence moved in both directions, and in particular, Eliot’s warning about the dangers of unexamined assumptions buried in metaphoric language responds to the metaphoric difficulties faced by Darwin and Huxley; in other words, Eliot wrote with the sense that Darwin and other naturalists were among her reading public. This discussion begins by establishing Eliot’s pre-Origin use of tidepool life in her early writings, her warnings about the use of metaphor, and the concerned reactions of Eliot and G. H. Lewes to Huxley’s efforts to eliminate those Huxley regarded as mere dilettantes in natural science research by establishing rules for professional writing in scientific research. While it is a given today that technical scientific writing must be precise and objective and steer away from any metaphoric language, such guidelines, currently learned in the science classroom, were being developed in the 1860s, partly as a response to Darwin’s difficulties in using metaphors to both establish his theory of natural of selection and communicate his ideas to a general audience. I then examine more specifically the challenges Darwin faced when constructing his metaphors, particularly the tree of life, in contrast to Huxley’s more linear and hierarchical metaphors such as the chain of being (one that later morphed into the familiar iconography of the March of Progress from ape to human criticized by Stephen Jay Gould).5 Such metaphors show how unexpectedly slippery language can be in reflecting cultural norms, even in objective writing. With this background, it is then possible to analyze the interplay between character and metaphor in Eliot’s works, particularly her longest extended natural history image: the hedgerow featured

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in her author’s introduction to Felix Holt. This hedgerow responds to and, in a sense, corrects Darwin’s parallel metaphor of the entangled bank that concludes his Origin. When examining George Eliot’s development as a fiction writer, it should be noted that she began writing fiction just prior to Charles Darwin’s publication of Origin of Species in 1859, writing during a time when there was tension between the older theology-tinged natural history and the newer professional sciences.6 Eliot’s fiction, particularly her metaphors and allusions, reflects her awareness and concern over developments in scientific rhetoric and language usage associated with the concurrent development of natural selection and the professionalization of science as such organizations as the BAAS developed power, challenging the prominence of the Royal Society.7 Eliot knew both Darwin and Huxley; her circle of friends and acquaintances included many members of the BAAS. Darwin read and enjoyed Eliot’s fiction, reading the first part of Adam Bede soon after finishing the manuscript of Origin.8 He initiated social relationships and had visited the home of Eliot and Lewes by 1868. Later, in 1873, he attended one of their Sunday gatherings of authors.9 In turn, Eliot read Origin as soon as it was published, initially commenting in her journal: “We began Darwin’s work on The Origin of Species tonight. It seems not to be well written: though full of interesting material, it is not impressive, from want of luminous and orderly presentation”; but two days later, she revised her opinion and called it “an elaborate exposition of the evidence in favour of the Development Theory, and so, makes an epoch.”10 Eliot worked in a community of readers, one that “net[ted] together Darwin and his contemporaries.”11 Eliot had begun her career in fiction writing before Darwin published Origin and her work reflected pre-Origin scientific studies. Her first short story, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” collected in Scenes of Clerical Life, was written September 23 to November 5, 1856. Adam Bede was completed in the spring and summer of 1858. During this time, she was also working with George Lewes as he wrote Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences (1853), his biography of Goethe (1855), and Sea-Side Studies (1858). She was also an editor of The Westminster Review, where T. H. Huxley reviewed scientific publications. Eliot’s pre-1859 metaphors reflect the importance of classification and marine biology in scientific studies, while her post-1859 writings question the subjectivity of metaphor in arguments, warning evolutionary

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naturalists of the unexamined assumptions often hidden in traditional metaphors. In her fiction, Eliot was particularly aware of the power of language and how metaphors might shape her characters’ perceptions. While Darwin influenced Eliot’s writing, Eliot was more than a passive recipient of evolutionary ideas; her awareness of the power of metaphors on perception is a reaction to and a corrective warning to evolutionary scientists, particularly Darwin and Huxley, as they attempted to communicate their ideas to the general population. As she wrote in Middlemarch (when sympathetically describing Casaubon’s thought process), “for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them” (Bk. I chap. 10; 63).12 Eliot’s use of the word “entangled,” echoing Darwin’s “entangled bank,” shows the difficulties in being clear when using metaphors in fiction or expressing new scientific concepts. And, indeed, rhetorical studies of Victorian science reveal how easily cultural biases can lie buried in the metaphors used in supposedly objective explanations. Eliot initially looked to natural history and new readings of mythology to develop fresher metaphors, ones not based on well-worn classical texts as studied by the masculine- and church-oriented universities of Oxford and Cambridge; she was interested in such reworkings as Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris, a retelling of Euripides’ “Iphigenia Among the Taurians”13 and less explored mythology as the Egyptian mythology Molly Youngkin discusses in this collection. In developing new metaphoric language, Eliot was engaged in finding language to explore newly developing ideas about development and human behavior. Her first short stories made metaphoric comparisons between tidepool organisms and small villages. In making these comparisons, Eliot explores how a non-moralistic understanding of the natural world can create new perspectives and allow writers to break out of clichéd descriptions and plots (such as discussed in Jean Arnold’s essay on organic realism in this collection). She contemplated the relationship between concrete description and abstraction in “The Natural History of German Life” (1856) and how “the images that are habitually associated with abstract or collective terms—what may be called the picture-writing of the mind, … carries on concurrently with the more subtle symbolism of language.”14 With this awareness, Eliot functioned as a bellwether, warning of the need to create new metaphors and carefully examine the potentially destructive power of conventional metaphors.

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Sea-Side Studies, Scenes of Clerical Life, and the Importance of Marine Invertebrates Although popular science histories often give the impression that the challenge to taxonomic classification began with Origin of Species, that is not the case. Rather, awareness that classification systems could not adequately describe the natural world was well established when Darwin wrote Origin to explain why it was impossible to really distinguish a species. Earlier, pre-1859, field research was particularly focused on marine invertebrates and the question of how to recognize juvenile forms of a species, which often look totally different than the adult form. Before publishing Origin, Darwin wrote intensively on barnacles, and Huxley established his reputation with his dissection of Portuguese Man-ofWar jellyfish while serving on the naval ship, the Rattlesnake. It is in this pre-Origin environment that Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies was written. Lewes and Eliot both attempted to take advantage of the general population’s interest in tidepool collecting while also describing current research with microscopic marine invertebrates.15 Eliot and Lewes were working as a writing team, especially in the authorship of Sea-Side Studies. Ann Dewitt has noted the similar themes that run through Eliot’s surviving journal writings and Lewes’s Sea-Side Studies. These “indicate the couple’s practice of sharing ideas,” their “joint conviction,” and how concepts are “echoed in Lewes’s description of microscopic study.”16 The two, however, shared more than conversation; Eliot and Lewes were co-authors. Although only Lewes’s name appears on the title page, Eliot’s authorship might have been initially cloaked to avoid scandal since Eliot was living with Lewes while he was still married to Agnes Jervis. Sea-Side Studies includes descriptions of their joint collecting experiences during a seven-week holiday in May and June 1856 in the resort town of Ilfracombe, located on the North Devonshire coast.17 The Sea-Side narration alternates between the first-person singular and plural, reflecting its joint authorship. Lewes announces in the beginning that the book is a group project by “a lady and two men” (17).18 (George Tugwell, the second gentleman, was a local naturalist who joined them.19) Eliot’s presence is subsumed in the plural pronoun “we,” although she physically appears in the book as an unnamed assistant in such passages as “quick female eyes have discerned, and nimble fingers have delicately secured, one of the loveliest of sea-charmers – an Eolis” (25) and “The colour has not changed on

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the cheek of the lady naturalist, who, astonished at her own fortitude (of stomach), declares dredging preferable to hunting on the rocks” (90). Mary Ellen Bellanca observes that some passages from Eliot’s short essay “Recollections of Ilfracombe,” found in her commonplace book, appear in the first two of the four parts of Lewes’s account.20 While she argues that this essay should be viewed as independent of Sea-Side Studies, my comparison of these similar passages indicates that Eliot’s involvement with Sea-Side Studies was essential to her development as a fiction writer. Indeed, it is during her visit to British coastal villages that Eliot practices her act of wearing a masculine mask, of becoming George Eliot. An examination of Eliot’s description of the seaside town of Ilfracombe in her journal and its parallel appearance in Sea-Side Studies indicates that Eliot learned to switch perspective as needed to merge her writing identity with Lewes. One passage, appearing in both her surviving journal and Sea-Side Studies, records (in the third person) her observation of Lewes smoking a cigar; this same passage is transformed into the first person of Sea-Side Studies. Eliot observes in her journal writing: “G. smoked a cigar… looked too at a caterpillar … spending its transitional life, happily knowing nothing of transitions, on the bush beside us.”21 This caterpillar passage undergoes its own transition into Lewes’s masculine authorial first person in Sea-Side Studies as “I soothed myself with a Latakia cigar, and contemplated a beautiful caterpillar spending its transitional life on a branch, happily knowing nothing of transitions” (75–76; italics added to indicate repeated language). The addition of “Latakia,” a type of cigar, adds to the masculine portrayal, as it is a particularly strong variety of tobacco. Through such journeyman work, learning to speak in Lewes’s voice, Eliot transitioned into novel writing and character creation. This fieldwork is reflected in the short stories of Scenes of Clerical Life. “Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story” and “Janet’s Repentance” were written while Eliot and Lewes were researching tidepools at the Scilly Isles and Jersey. In her “Ilfracombe Journal,” tidepool observations are projected onto the villages as buildings are compared to the shell production of marine invertebrates. Ilfracombe is described as having “an old bit of building that looks as if it were the habitation of some mollusc that had secreted its shell from the material of the rock,” and houses look “like a few barnacles clustered on the side of a great rock.”22 These analogies between people and mollusks also appear in “Janet’s Repentance”: Dissenting religious ideas come late to the village “and it was only now,

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when the tide was just on the turn, that the limpets there got a sprinkling” (211–212).23 The effect is to more closely bind the residents with their natural environment. Such references to Eliot’s studies of tidepool life continue to appear in her later novels.24 This relationship between tidepools and Scenes of Clerical Life was further strengthened for the periodical readers of Eliot’s first publications; chapters from Scenes of Clerical Life and Sea-Side Studies were featured side by side in the same issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. The first installment of “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” and the first section of Sea-Side Studies on sea anemones were both published in the January 1857 issue. Such placements, as Jennifer Gribble notes in her introduction to Scenes, allow for the interplay and association of images and ideas by the readers.25 Thus, Blackwood’s readers were encouraged to observe the seaside in new ways and connect those observations with human behavior in a non-religious, but still moral manner.

Impact of Metaphors on Darwin and Huxley’s Observations While new observations of development in the natural world provided material for new and original literary metaphors, scientific models that are too closely bound to cultural norms can restrict or distort meaning. Post-1860s science focused on the relationship of the individual to the social whole; differing theories suggested very different social models.26 These scientific models work much as metaphors work in fiction. Eliot was acutely aware of how language can shape perception and direct behavior. Her comments on the impact of metaphors on perception speak to the challenges that Darwin and Huxley faced as they attempted to communicate scientific concepts to a wider audience. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), Eliot’s narrator explores the effect of different metaphors in describing Tom Tulliver’s mental growth. Mr. Stelling decides that Tom Tulliver’s mind was “peculiarly in need of being ploughed and harrowed.” This was “his favourite metaphor” (124).27 But Eliot’s authorial comment is that such teaching methods were as effective as prescribing cheese to cure lactose intolerance: “Once call the brain an intellectual stomach, and one’s ingenuous conception of the classics and geometry as ploughs and harrows seems to settle nothing” (124). Much the same way, one could “call the camel the ship of

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the desert, but it would hardly lead one far in training that useful beast” (124). Her narrator notes that “we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else” (124). Soon after, she shows astonishing changes in perception resulting from “changing the metaphor.” Tom is described as being “in a state of as blank unimaginativeness concerning the cause and tendency of his sufferings, as if he had been an innocent shrew-mouse imprisoned in the split trunk of an ashtree in order to cure lameness in cattle” (125).28 This comparison is to a popular study of natural history, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789). Its usage in the plot of The Mill on the Floss, one evoking Ariel’s tree imprisonment from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, reveals the unexamined belief in the importance of learning Latin to be a cruel inhumane superstition that restricts and limits childhood development without any thought of the superstition’s harmful effects. Metaphoric language became a major barrier to the separation of a new moral scientific work from the older church-based, religious-focused natural theology; the formation of a secular approach was needed if the natural sciences were to develop without concerns of violating religious doctrine. While metaphors help explain scientific concepts in an easily accessible manner, they can make potentially misleading parallels; in an effort to draw out similarities, important differences can be ignored. Gillian Beer notes that although Darwin made heavy use of metaphoric language, he “seems never fully to have raised into consciousness the mythic and sociological implications of his theories.”29 Darwin struggled with the inherited “narrative patterns” and his “multiple readerships.”30 While scientific writing makes use of metaphoric language, that usage was neither acknowledged nor explored by Victorian scientists. As Robert M. Young has noted, in Origin Darwin had difficulty in describing a process in a way that was accessible to the general reader while avoiding the suggestion that natural selection implied a power or deity controlling events.31 In Origin, Darwin explains, It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. (84)32

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Darwin intended this passage to be read metaphorically, yet the language suggests a benevolent god overseeing his creation.33 Darwin was developing a new “paradigm,” using Thomas S. Kuhn’s terminology, but his metaphoric language, reflecting his nervous efforts to avoid alienating religious figures, was still embedded in the older natural theology. While Darwin was trying to describe a natural process, he spoke of nature selecting for the betterment of the species; here, he appeared to be replacing a deity with a personified nature. In other cases, biblical imagery worked well. Darwin developed an extended metaphor of a tree of life to help visualize the relationships between ancient and modern species. He wrote, “The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during each former year may represent the long succession of extinct species” (129). As he continues to develop the metaphor, Darwin points to a thin straggling branch springing from a fork low down in a tree, and which by some chance has been favoured and is still alive on its summit, so we occasionally see an animal like the Ornithorhynchus [platypus, a surviving monotreme] or Lepidosiren [South American lungfish, which is air breathing], which in some small degree connects by its affinities two large branches of life, and which has apparently been saved from fatal competition by having inhabited a protected station. (130)

Thus, surviving representatives of groups of animals that have gone extinct can still survive if they are well suited to their environments, existing, unchanged, and continuing to grow separate from the main trunk of the tree. His supporter, T. H. Huxley, rejecting the need to accommodate religious sensitivities, had an even greater difficulty controlling his metaphoric language. While Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature (1863) sidesteps the suggestion that a benevolent presence directed change, his argument reflects the Victorian cultural norm that linked science with progress; this is reflected in his choice of metaphors. Progress was a key belief in the Victorian period; it was nearly a prerequisite for scientific activities. Kuhn notes that “[f]or many men the abolition of … teleological … evolution was the most significant and least palatable of Darwin’s suggestions.”34

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Whereas Darwin’s metaphors suggested a director but no direction, Huxley’s suggested an inherent movement toward a goal. Comparing the basic evolutionary metaphors of the two writers, it is apparent that Huxley tended to think of evolutionary development using the traditional scala naturae or “chain of being,” a traditional onedimensional visualization that saw species arranged in a hierarchical linear chain, as opposed to Darwin’s biblical tree of life.35 Huxley’s chain motivated a search for “missing links.” Although the image’s limitations were quickly apparent—Darwin commented in a notebook that “it is capable of demonstration that all animals have never at any one time formed a chain”36—Huxley clung to it. Huxley’s chain implied there was continual evolutionary progress through time, with particular species (and races) more evolved than others, whereas Darwin’s tree branched out, thus acknowledging that evolutionary change would not necessarily occur if the species was well adapted to its environment; those species would simply be on a branching limb. For Darwin, evolutionary change was neither destiny nor temporally triggered, but Huxley did not entirely grasp the full argument of Darwin’s Origin. Illustrations used in his Man’s Place in Nature were similarly misleading; drawings from different species were proportionally adjusted to dramatize similar features. Skeletons of various primates (drawn by Waterhouse Hawkins) are shown as progressing from left to right from the gibbon to man, but rescaled to give the impression that the skeletons were gradually gaining an upright stature in order to better illustrate a march of progress. The same rescaling was done with skulls and the comparison of human hands and feet, enlarging or decreasing to give the impression that similar objects were being compared. Human and dog embryos (following Haeckel) were also presented as similar in size to suggest progressively more complex organisms.37 If the illustrations were given as accurate in scale, they would appear too dissimilar for comparison.

Professionalization of Science While Darwin initiated a friendship with Eliot and Lewes around 1868, Huxley clashed with the pair earlier in 1854 when anonymously reviewing Lewes’s book on Comte. In his review, Huxley used errors in Lewes’s book to establish demarcations between who was and who was not scientific. As an editor of The Westminster Review, George Eliot quickly found

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herself in the middle of these battles between Lewes and Huxley, at times playing the role of referee or diplomat. Researchers in the natural sciences debated over whether the identification and classification of organisms revealed something about a natural ordering of life or if classification was a human construct imposed upon the living world. But alongside these concerns over how to interpret the evidence were the more concrete issues of how to communicate findings to the general population and who was allowed to speak with scientific authority. Professionalization, and with it, the establishment of a shared technical language and standards, was needed and professionalization implied acts of exclusion. As James Secord has argued, when Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) was published anonymously, it triggered a response from the scientific community over the need to professionalize the scientific community, control who could speak or represent the scientific community, and establish a specialized vocabulary and way of explaining scientific processes.38 Professionalization was particularly important since scientific research was dependent on government funding, often through the military, and those without personal wealth had to make a convincing case for the application of science to military or commercial goals to justify support. To establish a professional class with authority in public affairs, Huxley publicly defined what constituted true science; he countered interdisciplinary approaches, seeing them as too close to the older theology-tinged moral use of natural history. To separate disciplined practitioners from what he saw were mere dilettantes, Huxley reviewed and assessed several publications in the January 1854 Westminster Review (including Darwin’s groundbreaking work on the formation of coral reefs), while it was under Eliot’s editorial direction. Under the heading “Scientific Method,” Huxley compared Lewes’s Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences (1853) with Harriet Martineau’s translation, praising her translation and condensation of “six wearisome volumes of indifferent French” into “two of very excellent readable English.”39 Regarding Lewes’s book, Huxley approved of his comprehension of Comte; however, he honed in on Lewes’s preface, where Lewes indicated that he would update the chemistry of physiology of 1838 to current, that is, 1854, understanding. Pouncing upon a confusion between sulfuric acid (H2SO4) with sulfurous acid (H2SO3), Huxley also chided Lewes for generalizing that crystallization was a

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characteristic of inorganic chemical processes, which indicated Lewes was not aware of an organic example (blood crystals) found in 1849, an error suggesting Lewes was unfamiliar with Continental researchers.40 Drawing from these two highlighted errors, Huxley continued: We are taking advantage of no accidental mistakes, although those already cited would suffice to show, if demonstration were needed, how impossible it is for even so acute a thinker as Mr. Lewes to succeed in scientific speculations, without the discipline and knowledge which result from being a worker also. The biological sections afford additional examples of errors proceeding from the same source.41

After establishing the superiority of field and laboratory work, Huxley continued to berate Lewes’s description of embryological organ development, finding errors that he proclaimed are “not excusable even on the plea of mere book-knowledge.”42 From here, Huxley took on development hypothesis as popularized in Vestiges of Creation and three months later, continued his attacks on Vestiges in British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review.43 Although Huxley concluded his review on a positive note, finding the Lewes’s book “exceedingly clever” with clear exposition and occasional genuine eloquence,44 the damage had been done. Huxley had not only attacked Lewes, he had essentially put science popularizers in their place, separating amateurs from those true professionals who did fieldwork. Lewes took Huxley’s criticism to heart and, beginning with Sea-Side Studies, devoted himself to laboratory and fieldwork, reaching out to Huxley for help clarifying biological concepts. Thus, Lewes became dependent on Huxley for verification of the correctness of his scientific work and Eliot, his close working companion, became well aware of Huxley’s writings and arguments. Both Lewes and Eliot continued to worry over the exclusive nature of scientific professionalization, insisting on the availability of science to those outside the newly forming professional societies. Lewes became committed to arguing for interdisciplinary studies in his biography of Goethe. Rather than the single-minded focused professional praised by Huxley, Lewes and Eliot celebrated the multi-talented individual whose observations, nurtured in the study of art and literature, challenged and contributed to an understanding of how life developed. The two promoted Goethe as their scientific hero, and Lewes positioned Goethe as an important figure in the history of science, particularly evolutionary biology.

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In Lewes’s biography of Goethe (specifically the chapter titled “The Poet as a Man of Science”), we may read between the lines a strong personal identification with his subject. Lewes saw Goethe as a creative artist who, like himself, was also motivated to contribute to scientific discussions of his time.45 Eyeing the trend toward increased specialization and professionalization of natural history in the 1860s, Lewes protested against the arrogance that accompanied it. This chapter followed and was linked with his earlier article in the Westminster Review, “Goethe as a Man of Science.”46 Lewes states that even though Goethe had no particular formalized study to support his artistic judgment, his writings received respect, but now men of science were not willing that a man of genius should speak on their topics, until he had passed College Examinations and received his diploma. To this day, the veriest blockhead who had received a diploma considers himself entitled to sneer at the “poet” who “dabbled in comparative anatomy.”47

It is not apparent whom Lewes is quoting, but the intensity of Lewes’s response suggests that this chapter is motivated by personal experience. In “The Poet as a Man of Science,” Lewes defends Goethe’s Metamorphoses of Plants, celebrating Goethe’s discovery of the intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw of humans and describing the physics underpinning Goethe’s attack on Newtonian optics. In a sense, Lewes may have felt some affinity to Goethe in terms of the German concept of Wissenschaft, a word often translated into English as “science,” but one with no English equivalent since Anglophone readers would understand the term as referring to natural science as opposed to the humanities, whereas the Germans, especially during the 1800s, would perceive natural science and the humanities as part of a common intellectual pursuit.48 Eliot and Lewes saw Goethe as coming from a shared intellectual heritage: a humanistic understanding of science that merged aesthetic concerns and engagement with the natural world.

The Hedgerow Metaphor in Felix Holt John Holloway has noted that Eliot’s metaphors “liken human life to those parts of nature that are gradual or complex or that take place unseen,” such as the “slowly growing tree” that reoccurs in The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, and Scenes of Clerical Life and rivers that work

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similarly in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss.49 These metaphors suggest that human affairs are part of a “wider pattern” found diffused through nature.50 Holloway continues to suggest that Eliot’s use of nature “as a source of scientific processes” hints at change being a “natural process, physical, mechanical or chemical” and “moral consciousness [being] a product of evolution”51; in other words, “George Eliot is concerned with nature in the scientist’s sense, rather than the conventional painter’s or poet’s.”52 Her perspective is that of a naturalist. Clear connections between natural history and human behavior are seen in Scenes of Clerical Life and The Mill on the Floss. Middlemarch’s metaphors and scientific allusions have received the greatest amount of scholarly examination, particularly their medical references.53 However, Felix Holt (1866), considered one of Eliot’s weaker novels, has generally been overlooked, except as a reflection of political upheaval, but it shows a continuing connection with the use of natural history and mythology to develop new metaphors, particularly post-Origin. In Felix Holt, Eliot explores ways to transform established or clichéd metaphors and encourages her readers to entertain new relationships between ideas. Felix Holt is the first novel where Eliot used chapter epigraphs, a technique she continued with her later novels, to help develop her metaphors. Each chapter begins with a short poetic or prose passage (or “mottoes” as Eliot called them). The epigraphs ask the reader to make connections between the text and paratextual elements, similar to the reading experience of articles in a magazine (like the Blackwell issues that contained both Eliot’s short stories and chapters from SeaSide Studies). Some are quotations; some (those uncited) are Eliot or Lewes’s own writings. Beginning with chapter 23, epigraphs become more Shakespearean, with passages from Henry IV, Midsummer’s Night Dream, Julius Caeser, Henry V, Coriolanus, and Titus Andronicus. Chapter 29 quotes Thomas Browne on the gall. Chapter 32 is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets of the Portuguese 6. Antonie Gerard van den Broek’s appendixes to his collection of Eliot’s poetry list those epigraphs he believes were written by Eliot.54 These chapter epigrams tend to link up with the metaphors used in that particular chapter. As an example, the epigraph for the Author’s Introduction (often cut from editions, such as the Dent/Everyman’s) is from Michael Drayton’s (1563–1631) lengthy topographical poem Poly-Olbion.55 This epigraph

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uses a section of the poem that describes the English Midlands and there is a play on words; where Drayton used “industrious” in “Upon the midlands now the industrious muse doth fall” to mean hardworking, Eliot expects her readers to reflect on the change in the Midlands’ economy from agriculture to manufacturing. This epigraph prepares the reader for the introduction’s discussion of how change in transportation brings shifts in perspective. In her author’s introduction to Felix Holt, Eliot takes the reader fast forward with a quick reference to experimental 1860s underground railways, picturing a possible “barren” futuristic bullet train propelled “by atmospheric pressure” that lacks “picture and narrative,” then back in time to the first Reform bill (26).56 Eliot acknowledges progress, but suggests that progress is not always an improvement. After this temporal move, she shifts the point of view, a rhetorical technique reflective of popular science essays, from the futuristic train riders to that of the riders on top of a coach looking down on a hedgerow. This hedgerow evokes Darwin’s metaphor of the entangled bank, but Eliot is less optimistic than Darwin about such ecosystems. There is beauty in the entangled bank, the hedgerow, and the village, but it is also a struggle of individuals living in close quarters, much like the small community that has shaped the psychologically realistic Mrs. Transome. Similar to tidepools, hedgerows are small, constrained ecosystems where numerous species have adapted through natural selection to live cooperatively. Darwin’s entangled bank, which ends Origin, asks us to contemplate the interconnections between species and to wonder at its beauty: clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. (489)

Apparently inspired by this language, Eliot uses a similarly entangled growth, a hedgerow, to represent pre-industrial village life as her initial metaphor in her “Author’s Introduction.” But Eliot’s entangled ecosystem is expanded through the seasons, as she develops the metaphor into a reflection on a small community’s ecology. Feminine and functioning

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outside human commercial dealings, the external appearance of these environmental niches, these wastelands, are viewed by the “passenger on the coach-box” (standing in for the reader) looking down. But everywhere the bushy hedgerows wasted the land with their straggling beauty, shrouded the grassy borders of the pastures with cat-kined hazels, and tossed their long blackberry branches on the cornfields. Perhaps they were white with May, or starred with pale pink dog roses; perhaps the urchins were already nutting amongst them, or gathering the plenteous crabs. It was worth the journey only to see those hedgerows, the liberal homes of unmarketable beauty—of the purple-blossomed ruby-berried nightshade, of the convolvulus climbing and spreading in tendrilled strength till it made a great curtain of pale-green hearts and white trumpets, of the many-tubed honeysuckle which, in its most delicate fragrance, hid a charm more subtle and penetrating than beauty. Even if it were winter the hedgerows showed their coral, the scarlet haws, the deep-crimson hips, with lingering brown leaves to make a resting-place for the jewels of the hoar-frost. (27)

Ecologically, these ancient hedgerows (today quite endangered in the face of more efficient farming methods) are long lived. Providing shelter to a range of birds, insects, small mammals and protection from farming activities, hedgerows are important small refuges. They allow animals to move across the countryside, creating a larger genetic pool for species survival. Reflecting Victorian capitalist concerns, Eliot knows they are being uprooted in favor of more efficient farming methods, but she sees their “waste” as important, although “unmarketable.” The hedgerows provide food sources, nuts, crab apples, and blackberries for urchins (hedgehogs). This is an ecosystem that ignores divisions of flora based on human use; the poisonous nightshade and morning glories are commingled with the sweet smell of the honeysuckle blossoms. These hedges of entangled plants mark the landscape of the 1830s as much as the blacksmith, the cart horse, and basket maker. This community of overlooked flora and fauna prepares the reader for the ecosystems of small villages and manufacturing towns and the apparent distance between these worlds and the history of the disputed Transome estate. The estate seems isolated and cut off from the surrounding community, but it is part of that ecosystem nonetheless, merely cloaked.

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Developing her metaphor further, Eliot considers what is not seen. She appears to consider the point Darwin makes earlier in Origin when he writes, We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey. … (62)

The introductory hedgerow, with its “thorn-bushes there, and the thickbarked stems,” hides “much pain that is quite noiseless.” Eliot’s introduction concludes: “These things are a parable” (34). “[T]he power of unuttered cries dwells in the passionless-seeming branches” opens this story of “suppressed anguish” (34) among the household members of Transome Court. The coach passengers see only the exterior of the hedgerow, not the struggle for life within, and the Transome household also hides its inhabitants’ pain. F. R. Leavis has described Felix Holt as incorporating the “sociological account of the great house and estate” from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and Disraeli’s Two Nations from Coningsby and Sybil.57 Although Felix Holt has the typical Victorian novels’ themes of legitimacy and inheritance, it is not sensationalized as it would have been in others’ hands. Plot revelations that might climax the plot in a sensational novel are quickly bypassed. Mrs. Transome’s infidelity is in the past. Harry, Harold’s son, is of mixed race and his father calmly acknowledges that his mother was a slave. Harold quickly accepts Felix Holt’s innocence. Mrs. Transome has no problem loving Esther. Esther rejects the Transome’s wealth and Harold’s hand in marriage. None of these plot elements, nor the future of the estate and its inheritors, are moralistically dwelt on. Rather, the focus is on the sympathetic consideration of the dependence of women upon their sons and their hidden pain as a natural part of the ecology of the village. The novel opens with Two Nations, but these two parallel class descriptions focus on the parallel tales of two disappointed mothers. Mrs. Transome is ignored by her second son, Harold, whom she hopes will take over and transform the estate. She has run her little world for

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many years, while Harold, the favored younger son, went his own way and married a foreigner. In turn, further down the class hierarchy, Mrs. Holt hopes her son, Felix, will manage the family’s snake oil business, but Felix learns the medications are worthless and similarly refuses to do his mother’s bidding. Both women, functioning in a male-dominated world, meekly take backseats and watch as their sons dismiss their many years of hard work performed in the belief they were saving their sons’ inheritances.

Natural History and Character Behavior Natural history metaphors describe the behaviors of members of Mrs. Transome’s household ecosystems, who live together in the same place but function like different species, coexisting, but not really engaging with one another; their behaviors are driven more by instinct than by rational thought. Mrs. Transome ignores Mr. Lyon, “not from studied haughtiness, but from sheer mental inability to consider him—as a person ignorant of natural history is unable to consider a fresh-water polype [aquatic invertebrate] otherwise than as a sort of animated weed, certainly not fit for table” (394). Mr. Lyon is simply inedible. Talk of genealogy is as essential to her conversation, as habitual and engrained “as the notes of the linnet or the blackbird” (408).58 Harold, her favored son, changes as he grows up; his adult transformation is difficult for his mother to grasp. As a child, he was like “the lizard’s egg, that white rounded passive prettiness,” still in control of his mother. In adulthood though, Harold became “a brown, darting, determined lizard” (47). This transformation, the change from egg to adult form, indicates that Harold is no longer controllable and is concerned with his own purposes. The mother is distressed, but the change is a natural process, like the often-referred-to transformation from a caterpillar to a butterfly, and one beyond her ability to control. The maid, Denner, is part of the household, but she believes she belongs to a different taxonomic order than her employer; to question her fate would be like “the wrigglings of a worm that tried to walk on its tail” (51). These allusions are all to creatures that might inhabit a hedgerow. References to mid-Victorian natural history collecting are also worked into the plot metaphorically. The greenhouse collection makes its appearance with its gathering of tropical plants that must be maintained in artificial environments. This protected conservatory experience—“where the

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fair Camelia is sighed for by the noble young Pineapple, neither of them needing to care about the frost or rain outside” since “there is a nether apparatus of hot-water pipes liable to cool down on a strike of the gardeners or a scarcity of coal” (75)—seems to suggest the cocooned world of the estate, initially seen as protected, is actually subject to labor and fuel disruption. In contrast, the members of the parish are “rooted in the common earth” (75) and, thus, have learned to cope with the frozen ground. As Lydgate’s medical research shapes Middlemarch’s metaphors, old Mr. Transome, a character on the plot’s margins, provides the metaphors for the first part of the novel. A dedicated collector, Mr. Transome guiltily seeks domestic refuge in his collections of “dried insects” and “mineralogical specimens” (38). He is so closely identified with his collection that he becomes, in Mrs. Transome’s eyes, an insect bound by circumscribed and set behaviors, another character who acts by instinct; Mrs. Transome explains that “if you alter the track he has to walk in,” it will make him “like a distracted insect” that doesn’t know where to go (44). Mr. Transome lurks tentatively around the edges of his wife and the plot, nearly invisible; when he sees his wife, he shrinks “like a timid animal looked at in a cage where flight is impossible” (38), but he endearingly appears on occasion with Harry as the only one interested in the autistic boy who is willing to play and interact with him. The child eventually gets into Mr. Transome’s insect collection; he unpins the specimen beetles to see if they would fly away, but this is seen by his adoring grandfather as cleverness (407). Dismissed as he is by his wife, he alone sees potential in the child’s imagination. And the child’s behavior signals that the members of the Transome family are themselves pinned and dead, unable to escape their roles. Although the primary focus on this novel has been in its portrayal of the political manipulations and tensions associated with the 1830 Reform Bills, Eliot’s metaphors suggest more is going on within the entangled community; they hint of silent pain and the women’s sacrifices that produce their own sacrificial victims. Reworking old metaphors in light of a moral, but not moralistic approach, allows Eliot to quietly point out the struggles within a community. Her interdisciplinary awareness and her ability to see as both novelist and naturalist allow her a non-judgmental view of human behavior and the ability to create new metaphors. In contrast, Huxley, and other pioneering scientists during the Darwinian age, failed to

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sufficiently study the underpinnings of cultural language; eventually, they would have to find ways of escaping traditional metaphoric understanding of human evolutionary development, a challenge that proved to be more difficult than initially anticipated.

Notes











1.  Book-length studies of Darwin’s influence on Victorian novels have been written by Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 2. Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 3. Gillian Beer, “Darwin’s Reading and the Fictions of Development,” in The Darwinian Heritage, edited by David Kohn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 543–588, 543. 4. See Beer, “Darwin’s Reading”; and Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (New York: Knopf, 2002), 70, 72. Darwin’s reading logs exist for the years 1838–1860. The reading logs can be found at the Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge at https:// www.darwinproject.ac.uk/. 5. See Stephen Jay Gould, “The Iconography of an Expectation,” in his Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 27–44. Gould provides a collection of such linear progression illustrations and a discussion of how they misrepresent vertebrate evolutionary history. 6. Most studies of Victorian literature and biology begin in 1860, as evidenced by Peter Morton’s The Vital Science: Biology and Literary Imagination, 1860–1900 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), a period demarcation that bypasses the impact of pre-Origin evolutionary discussion on literature. 7. The BAAS was more open to those outside aristocratic circles and was focused on the promotion of science through the development of a support infrastructure and the establishment of standards for scientific work. It became important in the history of science for hosting the debate or exchange between T. H. Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in 1860, where Huxley earned the nickname “Darwin’s Bulldog.” 8. Browne, Charles Darwin, 72.

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9. Ibid., 387. 10. George Eliot, Letters, 3:214; qtd. in Beer, “Darwin’s Reading,” 582–583. 11. Beer, “Darwin’s Reading,” 583. 12. George Eliot, Middlemarch, edited by Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Houghton, 1956). All references are to this edition. 13.  See Lila Marz Harper, “‘That Wondrous Medusa-Face’: Goethe’s Italian Journey, George Eliot, and G. H. Lewes,” in Travel, Discovery, Transformation: Culture and Civilization, edited by Gabriel R. Ricci (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2014), vol. 6, 135–154 for a discussion of Medusa and jellyfish imagery in The Mill on the Floss and Scenes of Clerical Life. 14. George Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” in Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ashton, 260–295 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 260. 15.  I discuss the debates over the classification of marine invertebrates in the mid-nineteenth century and their importance in challenging basic assumptions about reproduction, growth, and sexuality in my article “Re-examining Taxonomy and Gender: T. H. Huxley, G. H. Lewes, and George Eliot View the Medusa,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 38, no. 1 (2010): 35–58. 16. Ann Dewitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 58–59. 17. Mary Ellen Bellanca, “Recollecting Nature: George Eliot’s ‘Ilfracombe Journal’ and Victorian Women’s Natural History Writing,” Modern Language Studies 27, nos. 3–4 (1997): 19–36, 19. 18.  G. H. Lewes, Sea-Side Studies at Ilfracombe (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1858). All references are to this edition. 19.  Lewes’s review of Tugwell’s Manual of Sea Anemones, published in Blackwell’s January 1857 issue, appears to have been the basis of the first section of Sea-Side Studies. 20. Bellanca, “Recollecting Nature,” 23, note 7. 21. George Eliot, “Recollections of Ilfracombe 1856,” in The George Eliot Letters, edited by Gordon S. Haight, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 247. 22. Eliot, “Recollections,” 242. 23. Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (London: Penguin, 1998). All references are to this edition. 24. Anna Feuerstein argues in “The Realism of Animal Life: The Seashore, Adam Bede, and George Eliot’s Animal Alterity,” Victorians Institute Journal 44 (2016): 29–55, that Eliot’s observation of sea life “helped Eliot develop her theory of realism and influenced her representations of animals in Adam Bede” (30).

160  L. MARZ HARPER 25.  Jennifer Gribble, Introduction to Scenes of Clerical Life, by George Eliot (London: Penguin, 1998), ix–x. 26. Shuttleworth, George Eliot, 17. 27. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Boston: Houghton, 1961). All references to this edition. 28.  I have traced this allusion to Gilbert White and discussed it in “An Astonishing Change in Metaphor: Tom’s Education and the ShewMouse,” George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies 38–39 (2000): 76–79. 29. Beer, Darwin’s, 573. 30. Ibid., 544. 31.  Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 99. 32. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859; facsimile of first edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964). All references are to this edition. 33. In 1860, Darwin added the phrase “It may metaphorically be said” to this section. 34.  Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 160, 172. 35. Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 28–29. 36. Qtd. in Ritvo, The Platypus, 29. 37. See Nick Hopwood’s Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud (Chicago University Press, 2015) and “Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud: Ernst Haeckel’s Embryological Illustrations,” Isis 97, no. 2 (2006): 260–301, for a discussion of how these images reappeared in twentieth-century textbooks and were exploited by creationists. 38. See James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 39. [Thomas H. Huxley], “Science. Scientific Method.” Westminster Review 5 (January 1854): 134–136, 134. 40. From a modern perspective, sulfuric/sulfurous confusion is a freshman error, but crystallization is more commonly seen in inorganic chemistry. 41. [Huxley], “Science. Scientific Method,” 134. 42. Ibid., 135. 43. Secord, Victorian Sensation, 500; Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 360. However, in 1868, Huxley was embarrassingly misled by a sample of slime from the Atlantic seabed collected in 1857 to jump to a tempting theoretical conclusion.

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He was convinced this slime was a new organic substance, the marine source for all life, and evidence that live matter could develop from inorganic matter (see discussion in Laloë), a search similar to Lydgate’s quest for primitive tissue in Middlemarch (1871). Huxley named this substance Bathybius haeckelii and published an account of it in his paper, “On Some Organisms Living at Great Depths in the North Atlantic Ocean”; embarrassingly, in 1875, the chemist John Young Buchanan found that the substance was calcium sulfate, formed when the sample reacted with the ethanol alcohol it was preserved in. Huxley acknowledged his error, but the idea of a primitive source for all life was too compelling; the namesake for the now disproven substance, Ernst Haeckel, continued to believe in it until 1883. 44. [Huxley], “Science. Scientific Method,” 135. 45. In Book 5, Chapter 9, pp. 329–369. 46. G. H. Lewes, “Goethe as a Man of Science,” Westminster Review 52, no. 2 (1852): 497–506. 47.  G. H. Lewes, Life of Goethe, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1864), 229–230. 48.  W. G. Runciman’s review of Max Weber’s Collected Methodological Writings addresses the problem of how this German sociologist’s (1864– 1920) economic principles have been translated into English with particular regard to the term Wissenschaft and the difficulty of English readers to understand this integration of natural science and the humanities (Times Literary Supplement, September 28, 2012, 7–8). 49. John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (1953; repr. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 147–148. 50. Holloway, The Victorian Sage, 148. 51. Ibid., 149. 52. Ibid., 150. 53. See Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The MakeBelieve of a Beginning, for studies of Eliot’s incorporation of scientific research in her novels and short stories, most post-Origin. 54. Eike Kronshage has examined the poetic epigraphs from Daniel Deronda in her “The Function of Poetic Epigraphs in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda,” Connotations 23, no. 2 (2013/2014): 230–260. 55. In the 1866 editions, this quotation is placed on the first page of each of the three volumes, before the text of the novel. 56. George Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical. 1866. Edited by William Baker and Kenneth Womack (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2009). All references are to this edition. 57. F. R. Leavis, Introduction to Felix Holt, the Radical, by George Eliot (London: Dent, 1966), v–xii, vi. 58. Chapters 40–51 are particularly focused on bird imagery.

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Bibliography Beer, Gillian. “Darwin’s Reading and the Fictions of Development.” In The Darwinian Heritage, edited by David Kohn, 543–588. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. ———. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Bellanca, Mary Ellen. “Recollecting Nature: George Eliot’s ‘Ilfracombe Journal’ and Victorian Women’s Natural History Writing.” Modern Language Studies 27, nos. 3–4 (1997): 19–36. Browne, Janet. Charles Darwin: The Power of Place: Volume II of a Biography. New York: Knopf, 2002. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. 1859. Facsimile of the First Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964. Darwin Correspondence Project. University of Cambridge. www.darwinproject. ac.uk. Dewitt, Ann. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Eliot, George. “Recollections of Ilfracombe 1856.” In The George Eliot Letters, vol. 2, edited by Gordon S. Haight, 238–252. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954. ———. Middlemarch. 1871–1872. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. Boston: Houghton, 1956. ———. The Mill on the Floss. 1860. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. Boston: Houghton, 1961. ———. “The Natural History of German Life.” 1856. In Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ashton, 260–295. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———. Scenes of Clerical Life. 1857. Edited by Jennifer Gribble. London: Penguin, 1998. ———. Felix Holt, the Radical. 1866. Edited by William Baker and Kenneth Womack. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2009. Gribble, Jennifer. Introduction to Scenes of Clerical Life, by George Eliot, ix– xxxvi. London: Penguin, 1998. Gould, Stephen Jay. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Harper, Lila Marz. “An Astonishing Change in Metaphor: Tom’s Education and the Shrew-Mouse.” George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies 38–39 (2000): 76–79.

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———. “Re-examining Taxonomy and Gender: T. H. Huxley, G. H. Lewes, and George Eliot View the Medusa.” Nineteenth-Century Prose 38, no. 1 (2010): 35–58. ———. “‘That Wondrous Medusa-Face’: Goethe’s Italian Journey, George Eliot, and G. H. Lewes.” In Travel, Discovery, Transformation: Culture and Civilization, vol. 6, edited by Gabriel R. Ricci, 135–154. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2014. Holloway, John. The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument. New York: W. W. Norton, 1965. First published 1953. Hopwood, Nick. “Pictures of Evolution and Charges of Fraud: Ernst Haeckel’s Embryological Illustrations.” Isis 97, no. 2 (2006): 260–301. ———. Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015. [Huxley, Thomas H.]. “Science. Scientific Method.” Westminster Review 5 (January 1854): 134–136. Huxley, Thomas H. Man’s Place in Nature. 1863. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1959. Kronshage, Eike. “The Function of Poetic Epigraphs in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.” Connotations 23, no. 2 (2013/2014): 230–260. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970. Laloë, Anne-Flore. “Where Is Bathybius haeckelii? The Ship as a Scientific Instrument and a Space of Science.” In Re-inventing the Ship: Science, Technology and the Maritime World, 1800–1918, edited by Don Leggett and Richard Dunn, 113–130. Ashgate, 2012. Leavis, F. R. Introduction to Felix Holt, the Radical, by George Eliot, v–xii. London: Dent, 1966. Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Lewes, G. H. “Goethe as a Man of Science.” Westminster Review 52, no. 2 (1852): 497–506. ———. Sea-Side Studies at Ilfracombe. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1858. ———. Life of Goethe. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1864. Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Morton, Peter. The Vital Science: Biology and Literary Imagination, 1860–1900. London: Allen and Unwin, 1984. Ritvo, Harriet. The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Runciman, W. G. Review of Collected Methodological Writings, by Max Weber. Times Literary Supplement, September 28, 2012. 7–8.

164  L. MARZ HARPER Secord, James A. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation”. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The MakeBelieve of a Beginning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Van den Broek, Antonie Gerard, ed. The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot. Routledge, 2016. Young, Robert M. Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

CHAPTER 8

Handling George Eliot’s Fiction Peter J. Capuano

An argument that George Eliot was a novelist intellectually, philosophically, and aesthetically ahead of the majority of her peers thankfully needs no defense two hundred years after her birth. This lofty status, however, does not mean that Eliot was impervious to the cultural preoccupations of her time. Quite the contrary. A central contention of this essay is that Eliot, despite her imposing intellectual reputation, engaged with her culture’s popular interest in human hands in ways that profoundly affected her fiction. As I have argued elsewhere,1 the Victorians became highly cognizant of the physicality of their hands in large part because unprecedented developments in mechanized industry and new advancements in evolutionary theory made them the first culture to experience a radical disruption of this supposedly age-old, God-given, “distinguishing” mark of their humanity. Eliot did not write any “industrial” novels per se, and so it may be fair to assume that she was relatively unmoved by the human hand’s supersession by mechanized industry. And though she was not religious in any traditional sense, she definitely maintained a keen interest in the rapidly changing scientific paradigms of her day. This scientific interest, as we shall see, plays an unusually interesting—and as of yet unconsidered—role in the development of her characters’ bodies. P. J. Capuano (*)  University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_8

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In 1844, Robert Chambers anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation—one of the first English works to popularize a theory of what was known as “The Development Hypothesis.”2 Because the text was published anonymously, Vestiges had many detractors in the conservative and established scientific community. Nonetheless, criticism of the book seemed only to publicize and to increase its popularity. The more Vestiges “was dissected at public scientific meetings, [and] and condemned from pulpits and lecture platforms,” the more it was “borrowed from circulating libraries and read.”3 A passage that would have been particularly alarming to this wider audience that was already reeling from the supersession of manual labor in factories was the text’s assertion that “human hands, and other features grounded on by naturalists as characteristic…do not differ more from the simiadae than the bats do from the lemurs.”4 Chambers’ use of the double negative, here, jumbles (perhaps consciously) his more jarring point that the human hand shares its structure with primates and may not have been so exceptionally characteristic of humans after all. By 1857, when Casimir D’Arpentigny published La Science de la main (The Science of the Hand), readers on both sides of the English Channel became transfixed by the notion that “the hand had its physiognomy like the face.”5 Popular works that were filled with various disquisitions on the hand as a site of authenticity became all the more visible—and vexed—with the arrival of the first gorilla to the British Zoological Society in 1858. Amidst this atmosphere of heightened interest in the hand, the effect of the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) can not be overestimated. One of the very few passages containing explicit reference to human beings in the Origin discusses (with considerably more confidence than Chambers’ Vestiges) how much the hand resembles the extremities of “lower” animals: “the framework of bones [is] the same in the hand of man,” writes Darwin, as in the “wing of a bat, fin of the porpoise, and leg of the horse.”6 Aside from this lone sentence, Darwin famously excluded humans from his original formulation of Natural Selection, yet their conspicuous absence from the text— especially in light of discoveries concerning the “hands” of anthropoid apes—only made the subject more prominent to Victorian readers who considered the Origin to be “centrally concerned with man’s descent.”7 Propelled by Darwin’s theory of evolution, the preoccupation with a “missing link” between humans and apes had developed into a fullfledged cultural phenomenon. Virtually every British newspaper and

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magazine carried stories referencing “man’s nearest relation” by 1860. The findings of the British Zoological Society—and later the African explorer Paul du Chaillu—stressed the skeletal similarities of human and gorilla wrists and hands; both contained the exact same number of bones (twenty-seven). What Susan David Bernstein has appropriately termed the “anxiety of simianation” saturated the Victorian imagination.8 Richard Beamish’s The Psychonomy of the Hand (1843) was published in multiple editions throughout the period.9 This is an especially interesting text because it included more than thirty “life-size” plates upon which readers were encouraged to trace their own hands for comparison. Such tracings emphasized the shapes of fingers and palms in determining a whole range of character “types.” It is no coincidence that the first plate and third plates feature a gorilla hand and an English navvy hand, respectively (see Fig. 8.1). At least as far as popular science was concerned, this was the atmosphere in which George Eliot began to compose fiction. Her early work, however, especially compared to her contemporaries, seems almost

Fig. 8.1  “Gorilla” and “Navvy.” Plates 1 and 3 from Richard Beamish, The Psychonomy of the Hand

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devoid of commentary on the subject of hands in the context of newly emerging questions regarding evolutionary anxieties. Put perhaps more accurately, Eliot’s early fiction adheres to an older, more generalized and more traditional representation of hands in relation to social class as opposed to evolutionary classification. In Adam Bede (1859), for instance, the “high-bred” Arthur Donnithorne’s hands appear often throughout the novel as “well-washed” and “white-handed” in comparison to the laboring Adam, whose carpentry work gives him “hard palms and…broken fingernails” (122, 379). Similarly, in The Mill on the Floss (1860), the more refined characters, such as Stephen and Lucy have clean, “white hands” and “pink palms,” whereas working characters like Bob Akins have “hard, grimy” hands (334, 211). If anything, what we witness in Eliot’s early work is the establishment of a pattern of bemused dismissal of “missing link” anxieties that captivated the imaginations of so many readers in the second half of the century. Consider the case of Molly, a maid and servant at the Poyser household in Adam Bede. One of the more oddly memorable scenes involving Molly occurs when Eliot’s narrator describes her ability to handle multiple items while serving visitors: Mrs. Poyser’s attention was here diverted by the appearance of Molly, carrying a large jug, two small mugs, and four drinking cans, all full of ale or small beer—an interesting example of the prehensile power possessed by the human hand. (287–288)

The scene is ultimately comedic because Molly ends up dropping everything from her hands—but not because of a failure of her hands’ “prehensile power.” She catches her foot on an untied apron and therefore falls “with a crash and a splash into a pool of beer” (288). At the outset of The Mill on the Floss (1860), Eliot mentions an evolutionary scale in discussing the behavior of the young Tom and Maggie but she does not sustain it throughout the novel. Here is the narrator describing the aftermath of an early dispute between the brother and sister: We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other. We no longer approximate in our behaviour

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to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilized society. Maggie and Tom were still very much like young animals, and so she could rub her cheek against his, and kiss his ear in a very random, sobbing way… (34)

The evolutionary scale becomes compacted in this instance into the movement from youth to adulthood. The impulsiveness of youth is likened to animality, while the learned civility of adulthood is elevated to a place of “dignified alienation” from the “lower animals.” The one place in The Mill on the Floss where Eliot directly engages with contemporary anxieties regarding the human/gorilla hand involves Bob Akins, the lower-class itinerant cloth merchant. Bob has an unusual attachment to his pocket-knife, both because of the way it feels in his hand and for its utility to him in the cloth trade. He experiences “pleasure in clutching it again and again…in opening one blade after the other, and feeling their edge with his well-hardened thumb” (46). This description, along with the title of chapter thirty four—“Aunt Glegg Learns the Breadth of Bob’s Big Thumb”—might appear Lamarckian in its experiential and proportionate orientation. However, a conversation between Maggie and Bob later in the novel reveals Eliot’s rather unequivocal position on the question of human exceptionalism that was dominating discussion in popular journals and magazines. Bob explains how his dog, Mumps, knows his “secret” to cutting cloth for his customers: “I’n got no secrets but what Mumps knows ‘em. He knows about my big thumb, he does.” “Your big thumb—what’s that, Bob?” said Maggie. “That’s what it is, Miss,” said Bob, quickly, exhibiting a singularly broad specimen of that difference between the man and the monkey. “It tells i’ measuring out the flannel, you see. I carry flannel, ‘cause it’s light for my pack, an’ it’s dear stuff, you see, so a big thumb tells. I clap my thumb at the end o’ the yard and cut o’the hither side of it…” (248–249)

By bluntly mentioning “that difference between man and monkey,” Eliot is wading directly into the anxious cultural debate about the status of humans in relation to the “hands” of newly discovered anthropoid apes. In his 1859 On the Gorilla, for example, Richard Owen finds himself at pains to distinguish between human and animal hands: “Man’s perfect hand is one of his peculiar physical characteristics; that perfection is

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mainly due to the extreme differentiation of the fist from the other four digits and its concomitant power of opposing them a perfect thumb.”10 Owen’s point is that the thumbs of “the highest quadrumana” fail to measure up to the human thumb’s perfection.11 Like nearly every serious scientist and intellectual of the 1860s and 1870s, Eliot maintained a physiological understanding of the development of organic life. But unlike many of her contemporaries, she remained relatively unmoved by the anxieties about the hand that swept through the post-Darwinian world. This is because Eliot and others in her circle held a belief that would later characterize major twentiethcentury scientific and philosophical views of the human hand’s differentiation from those of the great apes.12 Her partner George Henry Lewes, for example, conceded that although “the ape has hands very much like man’s,” its “faculties are not a fiftieth part of those performed by the hand of man.”13 For Eliot, as we shall see, the most important of these faculties was the human hand’s unique ability to transfer sympathetic feeling between individual lives. Even at the height of the “gorillamania” that so often dominated popular and scientific writing in the early 1860s, Eliot’s fiction emphasizes the uniquely human attributes of the hand’s sensitivity, receptiveness, and most significantly, its connection to sympathetic feeling. Sympathy, of course, was the highest secular form of the sacred for Eliot, and so it’s no coincidence that her most outwardly “religious” novels emphasize the sensory, rather than the evolutionary, characteristics of hands.

Secular Sympathy in Romola Romola (1862–1863) has long been interpreted as an outlier in Eliot’s oeuvre. It chronicles the intricate and sometimes belabored intricacies of Roman Catholic culture in late fifteenth-century Florence. J. B. Bullen began a 1975 article by asserting that “Romola is a puzzling novel because it is unlike anything else that George Eliot wrote.”14 More recently, in an edited collection dedicated to a re-evaluation of Romola, Caroline Levine and Mark Turner contend that “it is only when set in the unitary context of George Eliot’s oeuvre that the novel disappoints, drawing criticism, most emphatically, for failing to resemble the author’s other novels.”15 I want to counter this prevailing view of the novel by making two interrelated points. First, by focusing so much

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on her characters’ hands in Romola, Eliot—despite its fifteenth-century Florentine setting—is actively engaged (albeit in a different way) with her own culture’s contemporary fascination with “manual” apprehensiveness. Second, Eliot’s treatment of the uniqueness of human hands allows her to establish a body part on which she can project her belief in the need for a secular, but crucially sacramental, model for “passionate sympathy” (Romola 401). Eliot composed Romola, as we have seen, when England was transfixed by the evolutionary tension figured in the relationship between human and animal hands. In contrast to this anxious tension, Eliot emphasizes the human hand’s unique and privileged ability to act as an extension of both sight and soul. Take, for example, her description of the blind scholar Bardo’s request to experience Tito’s disposition through manual contact early in the novel: “But before you go—” here the old man, in spite of himself, fell into a more faltering tone—“you will perhaps permit me to touch your hand? It is long since I touched the hand of a young man.” Bardo had stretched out his aged white hand and Tito immediately placed his dark but delicate and supple fingers within it. Bardo’s cramped fingers closed over them, and he held them for a few minutes in silence. (75)

Beyond the necessity created by Bardo’s blindness, the interaction Eliot creates here would have been extremely familiar to an audience that believed the hand readily offered up privileged information about human character and identity. It is significant that Bardo’s first interest is in Tito’s hands, and that he uses the sensitivity of his own hands to gather more information about the differences between Tito and his (religious) son: Bardo passed his hand again and again over the long curls and grasped them a little, as if their spiral resistance made his inward vision clearer; then he passed his hand over the brow and cheek, tracing the profile with the edge of his palm and fourth finger, and letting the breadth of his hand repose on the rich oval of the cheek. “Ah,” he said, as his hand glided from the face and rested on the young man’s shoulder. “He must be very unlike thy brother, Romola: and it is the better. You see no visions, I trust, my young friend?” (76)

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This interaction also establishes an important manual basis for two distinct forces that Eliot initially places in opposition to each other in the novel: secular humanism and Catholic religiosity. Romola has been reared in an atmosphere of scholarly humanism, and so she shares her father’s abhorrence for orthodox religion—a fact made all the more contentious because of her brother’s denunciation of their father’s lifestyle and his subsequent call to the Dominican religious order. This abhorrence only deepens when she goes to her brother’s death bed at the San Marco cathedral. As she first enters the room where her brother Dino lay dying—a room with “frescoed walls” depicting the crucifixion scene— she immediately recoils: “There was an unconquerable repulsion for her in that monkish aspect; it seemed to her the brand of the dastardly undutifulness which had left her father desolate—of the groveling superstition which could give such undutifulness the name of piety” (161). The opposition between secular, humanist sympathy and Roman Catholic religiosity collides in this scene as Romola encounters the famous Fra Girolamo Savonarola for the first time. Devastated by Dino’s abandonment of her father for the church and “taught to despise” everything connected to his religious calling, Romola steels herself not to allow religion to mar her final moments with her dying brother. The forcible presence of Savonarola changes her orientation profoundly, however, and Eliot registers this momentous change primarily through a detailed account of the famous monk’s voice and hands. The cowlshrouded Savonarola says in a tone that is not “of imperious command, but of quiet self-possession…blended with benignity”: “Kneel, my daughter, for the Angel of Death is present, and waits while the message of heaven is delivered: bend thy pride before it is bent for thee by a yoke of iron” (165). At this pivotal moment, Eliot configures Romola’s unexpected response as one that is mediated through her thoughts about Savonarola’s most remarkable feature—his hands: His face was hardly discernable under the shadow of the cowl, and her eyes fell at once on his hands, which were folded across his breast and lay in relief on the edge of his black mantle. They had a marked physiognomy which enforced the influence of the voice: they were beautiful and almost of transparent delicacy. Romola’s disposition to rebel against command, doubly active in the presence of monks, whom she had been taught to despise, would have fixed itself on any repulsive detail as a point of support. But the face was hidden, and the hands seemed to have an appeal in them against all hardness. (165, emphasis added)

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It is important that the narrator describes Savonarola’s hands, rather than his face, as having “a marked physiognomy” because his prominent facial features were so well known to the people of Florence and to Eliot herself. Baccio della Porta (later Fra Bartolommeo) had painted a famous side-profile portrait of Savonarola’s face that hung in the museum of San Marco, and Eliot had encountered it on many occasions while performing research for Romola. After the extended depiction of Savonarola’s hands, Eliot’s narrator does eventually describe the facial features that had “le[nt] themselves to popular description”: “There was the high arched nose, the prominent under lip, the coronet of thick dark hair above the brow, all seeming to tell of energy and passion” (165–166). But even this facial description is framed in terms of what we’ve already been told about Savonarola’s “beautiful” hands: “there were the bluegrey eyes, shining mildly under the auburn eyelashes, seeming, like the hands, to tell of acute sensitiveness” (166). It is precisely this acute sensitivity of Savonarola’s hands that informs what the narrator calls “the mysterious influence of a personality…given to some rare men to move their fellows” (166). Indeed, the dramatic next line of the novel reports that the religiously hostile Romola “slowly fell on her knees.” The fact that Romola is the only one of Eliot’s novels to be accompanied by illustrations in its first edition (in The Cornhill Magazine) provides additional context for her focus on Savonarola’s hands. The following full-page illustration by Frederic Leighton, entitled “The Dying Message,” appeared at the front of the October 1862 installment with the same chapter (XV) heading (see Fig. 8.2). As Eliot’s letters indicate, and as Leonee Ormond and others have noted, author and illustrator corresponded extensively and met in person to discuss the illustrations that would appear with each month’s installment.16 This does not mean that Eliot and Leighton always “saw” the same things as the novel unfolded month to month. In fact, Eliot was considerably disappointed with the novel’s first illustration, “The Blind Scholar and His Daughter.” A letter to Leighton records this disappointment: “I wished Bardo’s head to be raised with the chin thrust forward a little—the usual attitude of the blind head, I think—and a little turned towards Romola.”17 Eliot discussed the matter early on with Lewes and eventually acknowledged that the dynamic of multiple mimetic representation “must [necessarily] forbid the perfect correspondence between the text and the illustration.”18 Her conversation with Lewes on this point seemingly led her to accept the impossibility of having

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Fig. 8.2  “The Dying Message.” Frederic Leighton. The Cornhill Magazine, October 1862

artists working in two mediums achieve unerring congruity. Part of Eliot’s acceptance was likely also affected by the fact that she was asking Leighton to “see” what was in her imagination rather than in the prose he was provided from which to produce his sketches. This is an important point. Her prose, upon which the disagreement centers in the early Bardo/Romola illustration, does not indicate that Bardo’s head is raised, nor that his chin is “thrust forward a little.” What makes “The Dying Message” illustration so compelling fifteen chapters later, though, is how closely it does fit the criterion of fidelity to the accompanying prose narrative in nearly every detail. Take, for instance, Eliot’s description of Romola’s entrance into the chamber where her brother’s dramatic death scene takes place. Romola is “conscious” that “there was another monk standing by the bed, with the black cowl drawn over his head” (160). She is also “just conscious” that “in the background there was a crucified form rising high and pale on the frescoed wall” (161). This fresco appears in the upper right section of “The Dying Message,” but its appearance is truncated so that we see

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only the crossed, praying hands of the mourners Mary, Mary’s sister, and Mary Magdalene below (see Fig. 8.3). In his seminal work of criticism on Eliot’s relation to the visual arts, Hugh Witemeyer remarks with some surprise that Leighton “positively avoided the well-known [facial] features of Savonarola.”19 This is because Eliot so positively does so in her prose, and Leighton—smarting from the initial “disagreement” in the Bardo/Romola scene—would not have wanted to hazard another disappointing illustration. Savonarola’s body appears entirely shrouded in his robe and cowl in both prose and illustration, with the sole exception of “his hands, which were folded across his breast and lay in relief on the edge of his black mantle” (165). The fidelity to such an image in the illustration reinforces the “acute sensitiveness” of Savonarola’s hands, helping the reader see what Romola feels: that “they were very beautiful and almost of transparent delicacy…. hands [that] seemed to have an appeal in them against all hardness.” The central compositional placement of the mourner’s hands folded across their breasts in similar relief on the frescoed wall helps draw the reader’s attention, like Romola’s, to the exceptionality of Savonarola’s similarly folded hands. The dramatic effect of the nearly exact correlation between prose and illustration here is nothing short of arresting. “The unconquerable repulsion” to religion that Romola possesses at the beginning of the scene dissipates into an awe for the “mysterious influence” of Savonarola, causing her to clutch the crucifix and kneel by her dying brother in “renunciation of her proud erectness” (161, 166). The novelist and illustrator seem to have learned how to achieve a far more

Fig. 8.3  Inset from “The Dying Message”

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synchronized imaginative vision. Eliot’s prose and Leighton’s corresponding illustration together form an exemplary instance of what Peter Wagner calls an “iconotext”: an “artifact in which the verbal and the visual signs mingle to produce rhetoric that depends on the co-presence of words and images.”20 An uncannily similar scene occurs, in both prose and illustration, when Romola attempts to flee Florence and, along with it, her marriage to Tito. Again, despite the discovery and subsequent confrontation by Savonarola, she is “determined not to show any sign of submission” (369). “I will not return,” Romola proclaims in “stron[g] rebellion”: “I acknowledge no right of priests and monks to interfere with my actions. You have no power over me” (369). But as in the scene at her brother’s deathbed, Romola finds it extremely difficult to resist the “immense personal influence of Savonarola” (374). The narrator tells us that this influence comes from “the energy of his emotions and beliefs” and “that his words impl[y] a higher law than any [Romola] had yet obeyed” (374). Michael Schiefelbein maintains that Savonarola’s “authoritative glance is sacramental” and “a visible sign of the Divine presence.”21 But this facial marker is certainly not Eliot’s emphasis in the novel’s most dramatic and influential scenes—neither in her prose nor in Leighton’s illustrations. In fact, Romola says of Savonarola’s “calm glance” as she is stopped fleeing from Florence that “there was nothing transcendent in [his] face. It was not beautiful” (369–370). We know that Savonarola’s hands are his most exceptionally beautiful feature, and Eliot transfers what we already know about his hands’ “acute sensitiveness” and “almost transparent delicacy” to this scene where Romola’s awe is once more rendered in distinctly manual terms: “she sat shaken by awe…as if that destiny which men thought of as a sceptered deity had come to her, and grasped her with fingers of flesh” (368). The divinity residing in Savonarola’s hands at this juncture in the novel is important enough that Eliot and Leighton agreed that it should be represented in both prose and illustration at the start of the February 1863 installment (see Fig. 8.4). The narrator informs us—and the illustration shows us—that “almost unconsciously [Romola] sank on her knees. Savonarola stretched out his hands over her; but feeling would no longer pass through the channel of speech, and he was silent” (377). Here, though not shown wearing the cowl, Savonarola’s head and face are hardly visible compared to his hands, which appear in stark relief against the dark cypress trees in the background. Leighton’s

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Fig. 8.4  “Father, I Will Be Guided.” Frederic Leighton. The Cornhill Magazine, February 1863

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visual resonances again buttress the verbal ones in Eliot’s prose. With Savonarola’s hands dramatically positioned at the compositional center of the illustration, the scene takes on the feeling of divine intervention— where the divine “feeling” that “would no longer pass through the channel of speech” passes instead through the “extremities of his sensitive fingers” (541). There is perhaps no finer example of Eliot’s simultaneous engagement with the religiosity of her Florentine subject matter and her own culture’s heightened interest in new evolutionary scales than her depiction of Savonarola’s final outdoor Mass at the San Marco Piazza. As Savonarola makes his way to the altar, “the multitude” of worshipers experiences the same “electric awe” as Romola (522). The narrator likens the scene to one where “men who have been watching something in the heavens see the expected presence silently disclosing itself” (522). Savonarola emerges onto the altar “covered from head to foot in black cowl and mantle,” but once again his most distinguishable feature comes into sharpest focus: he stretched out his hands, which, in their exquisite delicacy, seemed transfigured from an animal organ for grasping into vehicles of sensibility too acute to need any gross contact: hands that came like an appealing speech from that part of his soul which was masked by his strong passionate face. (522)

Here we encounter a marked extension of what we witnessed in The Mill on the Floss. In The Mill, the narrator fleetingly uses Bob Akins’s “big thumb” as an occasion to exhibit “the difference between the man and the monkey” (248–249). The description of Savonarola’s hands, though, transcends their practical capacity as “an animal organ for grasping” as they become “a part of his soul.” The powerful sympathy residing in Savonarola’s soul, primarily visible in his outstretched hands, affects the crowd at the San Marco Piazza in the same way that Romola had felt as if “a sceptered deity had come to her, and grasped her with fingers of flesh” (368). We learn that “at the first stretching out of [Savonarola’s] hands some of the crowd in the front ranks fell on their knees” (522– 523). One may wonder why Eliot ultimately decided not to illustrate this powerful scene. We have continually read about and viewed depictions of the power of Savonarola’s hands have on Romola and others throughout the novel. As W. J. T. Mitchell has keenly observed, “the very idea

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of an ‘idea’ is bound up with the notion of imagery” once we view it.22 Perhaps having viewed Savonarola’s remarkable hands in other illustrations, we need only to read associative descriptions of them to invoke their exceptional ability to transcend all practicality and become vehicles of sensibility and sympathetic feeling.

Manual Kinship in Daniel Deronda Eliot’s final work of fiction, Daniel Deronda (1876), represents the culmination, and the most complex instance, of her sustained interest in the sympathetic and determinative power residing in human hands. While Eliot was relatively unmoved by her culture’s anxieties regarding the hand’s evolutionary proximity to “lower” animals, however, she was in lock-step agreement with the foremost scientists of her day who maintained organicist assumptions about physiological development. Like Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, and George Henry Lewes, Eliot was drawn to issues of physiological inheritance—and particularly to what Mary Jean Corbett accurately terms “the historical/ cultural/ biological production of difference” that Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man brought to the fore in 1871.23 Eliot had in fact subscribed to a version of this model of determinism from the beginning of her writing career. Her reformulation of Wilhelm Riehl’s ideas in “The History of German Life” in 1856, for example, stakes out a distinctly physiological basis for national, ethnic, and class “type”: In Germany…it is among the peasantry that we must look for the historical type of the national physique. In the towns this type has become so modified to express the individual, that even “family likeness” is often but faintly marked. But the peasants may still be distinguished into groups by their physical peculiarities. In one part of the country we find a longerlegged, in another a broader-shouldered race, which has inherited these peculiarities for centuries.24

While Eliot was reviewing Riehl, Lewes was solidifying his own “fixed type” model of historical and biological development for inclusion in Physiology of Common Life (1860).25 Both authors were simultaneously interested in pursuing questions of identifiable inheritance among historically, culturally, and biologically isolated populations. As a result, Jewish

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history became an obvious interest for both Lewes and Eliot. Lewes wrote in Physiology of Common Life: We will not say that it is mere coincidence which preserves intact the various “breeds of animals: which makes the bull-dog resemble the bull dog, and the bull-dog and terrier; which makes the Jews all over the world resemble Jews, because they keep their race free from admixture, by never marrying into other races.”26

Similarly, in “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” (1879), Eliot maintained that “every Jew” possesses common attributes passed down by “ances­ tors who have transmitted to them” a particular “physical and mental type.”27 Such formulations of course fit the more general nineteenthcentury cultural assumption that one’s classed, racial, and hereditary identity was always demarcated somewhere on the body. The era’s preoccupation with the pseudosciences of phrenology and physiognomy reflect this faith in external demarcation. As her own character, Mrs. Irwine, confidently proclaims in Adam Bede: “you’ll never persuade me that I can’t tell what men are by their outsides” (126). It is crucial to note, though, how the power and pervasiveness of this cultural assumption presented major obstacles for Eliot’s “realistic” narration of Daniel Deronda. In order to fulfill the novel’s very particular set of narrative requirements, Deronda’s future and—by the logic of Eliot’s (and her culture’s) physiological understanding of Jewish identity—his past must be detectable by some (select characters) but not by others (Deronda and readers). All the while, the legibility of such Jewishness needed also to surmount the double difficulty of either depicting Jews as invisible through assimilation or as too visible as a stigmatized type. These exigencies make for an extremely problematic set of narratological circumstances. Perhaps Gillian Beer characterizes these problems best, defining them as a matter of “how to liberate the future [of Deronda’s Jewishness] into its proper and powerful state of indeterminacy and yet make it a [realistic] part of the [present] story.”28 It is my contention that Eliot resolves these narratological problems by locating Daniel Deronda’s Jewishness in his hands. She does this for several reasons that link up with her general tendency to locate determinism and exceptionalism manually throughout her career. Beyond Savonarola, early on in Felix Holt (1866), Harold Transome fails to

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notice his biological connection to Mr. Jermyn by way of their hands’ similarities: [Jermyn’s] white, fat, but beautifully-shaped hands, which he was in the habit of rubbing gently on his entrance into a room, gave him very much the air of a lady’s physician. Harold remembered with some amusement his uncle’s dislike of [Jermyn’s] conspicuous hands; but as his own were soft and dimpled, and as he too was given to the innocent practice of rubbing those members, his suspicions were not yet deepened. (36)

So too in her long verse poem, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Eliot locates Fedalma’s realization of her (organic) Zíncala heritage in the physical likeness evident in her hands: Look at these hands! You say they were little They played about the gold on your neck. I do believe it, for their tiny pulse Made record of it in the inmost coil Of growing memory. But see them now! Oh, they have made fresh record; twined themselves With other throbbing hands whose pulse feed Not memories but a blended life…29

Nevertheless, Daniel Deronda presents a far more complicated case of hereditary (and therefore racial) determinism than Eliot had ever undertaken previously. In her final novel, Eliot paradoxically depends on the fact that her readers, as focused as they were on hands, were unlikely to have been familiar with the overwhelmingly positive biblical connections between Jews and hands. Thus, such a familiar text allows for a physiologically determinative body part to go virtually unnoticed as either a presence or an absence in the narrative. The demarcation of Jewishness in hands also fits a larger objective to replace unfortunate Jewish stereotypes with more historically informed connections between Judaism and Christianity. Eliot noted that her contemporaries “hardly k[new] that Christ was a Jew” and quipped that she could quite easily “find men educated at Rugby supposing that Christ spoke Greek.”30 Not only was Eliot well versed in the myriad positive biblical representations of Jewish hands, but she also studied the Kabbalah deeply before composing the

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novel.31 This previously unexplored dimension of what I would term “mystical physiology” depends on the fact that the hand is a crucial component in the relationship that the Kabbalah identifies between Jewish bodies and sacred Jewish texts. Such a connection was known well enough in the 1860s that an article in Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round entitled “Give Me Your Hand” quoted Adolphe Desbarrolles (the founder of nineteenth-century hand reading) as saying that “chiromancy is entirely based on the Kaballa [sic].”32 Important sections of the Zohar (the central Kabbalistic text), for instance, explicitly focus on how the “supernal mysteries” of the hand reveal an unbroken line of Jewish descendants from Biblical times onward.33 Indeed, to practitioners of the Kabbalah, Jewish hands are “fashioned as symbols of hidden, supernal realities” in such a way that is demonstrated in Shabbetai Horowitz’s iconic representation in the Shefa Tal (1612) (see Fig. 8.5). The practicing Kabbalist actually sees the fifteen words of Aaron’s sacred blessing in direct physical correlation to the fifteen parts of the hand (fourteen joint sections plus the palm). This anthropomorphic correlation is highlighted also by the inscriptions appearing on the hands and fingers, with each of the letters of the twenty-two-letter Hebrew alphabet retaining a specific numerical equivalent. The letters at the base of each hand in the Shefa Tal thus meet to spell the unutterable name of God in the Bible: YHWH. Partly because the four letters of the word (yod, he, vav, he) have the same numerical value (45) as the letters of Adam in esoteric gnosis, Kabbalists interpret hands as a crucial site of divine inscription where “the science of letter permutation” becomes decipherable. Not only did Eliot take notes on this kind of (gematriatic) symbolism while studying Christian Ginsburg’s The Kabbalah (1863), but she was also familiar with precisely this kind of Hebrew hand iconography from her visits to the Okopowa Street Jewish Cemetery in Prague during the 1860s.34 There, as is often the case in older Jewish cemeteries, a majority of the 200,000 marked graves are graced with hands in exactly the same position as those in the Shefa Tal—inscribed and facing up to heaven at the top section of the tombstones. It is the recognition of Deronda’s hands within this mystical system of physiological interpretation—rather than what critics have interpreted as wishful vision or shamanistic enthusiasm35—that accounts for the swiftness and unswerving confidence of Mordecai’s identification of Deronda as a Jew relatively early on in the novel. However, virtually any recognition of Deronda’s Jewishness is, to use Eliot’s own phrase, a flag over

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Fig. 8.5  Shabbetai Horowitz. Shefa Tal. 1612

highly contested ground. Since the novel’s publication, Eliot’s supposed withholding of Deronda’s physical attributes has been a constant source of critical frustration, and it remains one reason why the question of Deronda’s corporeal Jewishness has had so much traction (or slippage, depending on one’s theoretical allegiances) for generations of critics.36 Some of this frustration is warranted. For the first sixteen chapters of the novel, the closest the narrator comes to revealing anything specific about Deronda’s physicality occurs when we learn that he “might have served as a model for any painter who wanted to image the most memorable of boys” (141). This changes, though, in the seventeenth chapter when we encounter the novel’s single most descriptive passage of Deronda’s “terrestrial” embodiment:

184  P. J. CAPUANO Rowing in his dark-blue shirt and skull-cap, his curls closely clipped, his mouth beset with abundant soft waves of beard, he bore only disguised traces of the seraphic boy “trailing clouds of glory”…The voice, sometimes audible in subdued snatches of song, had turned out merely high baritone; indeed, only to look at his lithe powerful frame and firm gravity of his face would have been enough for an experienced guess that he had no rare and ravishing tenor such as nature reluctantly makes at some sacrifice. Look at his hands: they are not small and dimpled, with tapering fingers that seem to have only a deprecating touch: they are long, flexible, firmly grasping hands, such as Titian has painted in a picture where he wanted to show the combination of refinement with force…Not seraphic any longer: thoroughly terrestrial and manly; but still of a kind to raise belief in a human dignity which can afford to acknowledge poor relations. (157–158, emphasis added)

Not only does Eliot specifically draw our attention to Deronda’s hands as she has done in Romola, Felix Holt, and The Spanish Gypsy, but she also eventually makes good on the idea that the sympathetic exceptionalism represented in his hands “can afford to acknowledge poor relations”—in the sense of religious and hereditary kinship. Later in this same chapter, Deronda rescues the unmistakably Jewish Mirah from drowning in the Thames. Even the rescue is inflected with a kind of “manual” Jewishness, though. Mirah takes Deronda’s outstretched hand and pronounces— quizzically, but with “reverential fervour”: “The God of our fathers bless you and deliver you from all evil as you have delivered me” (170–171, emphasis added). I want to be very careful about the specifics of the larger argument I am making about Deronda’s hands. Despite the concentrated focus on Deronda’s hands at this particular juncture in the narrative, the fact that Eliot provides only hints about his (Jewish) future is pivotal for my contention about the way hands operate in the world of this novel. No amount of praise for Deronda’s hands in this early scene could guarantee his Jewishness for anyone, including perhaps most crucially, Deronda himself. Indeed, the narrator explicitly emphasizes as much. We learn that Deronda has “no thought of an adventure in which his appearance was likely to play any part” as he rows beneath the Kew bridge just minutes before encountering the drowning Mirah (158, emphasis added). My point is that, as a dedicated practitioner of the Kabbalah, Mordecai possesses the religious and mystical training to decipher Deronda’s Jewishness despite having no knowledge of his parentage, in Eliot’s text.

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Mordecai’s Kabbalistic orientation gives a certain credence to what are, up to this point in the narrative, only inchoate ideas of Jewishness— such as Mirah’s fleeting, but arresting, presumption that the God of her fathers is the God of Deronda’s fathers. This helps explain why Eliot was drawn to the convergence of determinism and prophecy in the Kabbalah; it offers her a realistic mode of prediction that is to a large degree hidden. Thus, all of the novel’s other exigencies can follow: Deronda may be Jewish without him, other characters, or the reader knowing it too soon. Analyzing the Kabbalah’s relationship to prophecy is also an intervention on behalf of the novel’s realism. An understanding of Eliot’s knowledge of the Kabbalah eliminates what so many critics see as detrimental to the text’s realism; namely, its supposed reliance on the (unrealistic) trope of metalepsis (the transference of effects into causes). The predictive element of Deronda’s status as a Jew at last becomes outwardly determinative when he meets his mother in Genoa. The longawaited reunion of Deronda with his mother is also the most poignant example of Eliot’s tendency to locate Jewishness in his hands. Upon meeting her son for the first time since his infancy, the Alcharisi is preeminently drawn to what we already know is Deronda’s most extraordinary physical attribute: “Let me look at your hand again: the hand with the ring on. It was your father’s ring.” [Deronda] drew his chair nearer to her and gave her his hand. We know what type of hand it was: her own very much smaller was of the same type. (543, emphasis added)

The physiological “type” of hand shared by mother and son adheres to Eliot’s and Lewes’s sense of the fixed organic model—especially in relation to Jewish endogamy and its laws of matrilineal descent. Moreover, the Alcharisi’s biblical (oddly Jacobesque) request to inspect her son’s hands links up with Eliot’s larger aim to reacquaint her audience with the positive connections between Judaism and Christianity. Just as many Anglican Britons, much to Eliot’s dismay, hardly recognized that Christ was a Jew, many who perpetuated negative stereotypes of Jewish hands as “bony, yellow, [and] crablike” were wholly ignorant of the sacred status of Jewish hands in the Bible—let alone the Kabbalah (Deronda 4). For Jews, the “hand of God” was not merely a scriptural allusion to divine power in the Hebrew Bible; it was the sacred body part through which

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God worked most directly: Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt by stretching his hands over the Red Sea (Exod. 14:21) and later helps Joshua’s army to victory by raising and lowering his hands from afar in the battle against Amalek (Exod. 17:10–13). We may witness this centrality of embodied handedness to Judaic culture more recently in work by Sigmund Freud, whose famous essay, “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914), focuses not on theoretical developments arising from psychoanalysis, but instead on the positionality and strength of Moses’s sculpted hands.37 Similarly, the cover image of Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body (2009), features only two strong and statuesque fists.38 Therefore, in the pivotal moment of mother-son reunion in Genoa, Eliot’s (positively) racialized view of heredity, her commitment to disabuse Britain of negative Jewish stereotypes, and her successful negotiation of problematic narrative requirements all converge on the figure of Deronda’s hand in a singular moment of haptic (manual) visuality—what William Cohen, in another context, calls “seeing on the model of touch.”39 Deronda’s hands mark him as a Jew in the world of Eliot’s final novel but, crucially his hands do not perform only this function. The “consecrating power” of Deronda’s sympathy for others—Jew and non-Jew alike—manifests itself throughout the narrative in scenes that make a spectacle of the firm but gentle touch embodied in the Titian example (141). Nowhere is the “flexible sympathy” of Deronda’s touch more apparent than in his reaction to Gwendolen’s suffering (307). We witness such physiologized sympathy in the narrator’s description of Gwendolen’s account of the harrowing story of Grandcourt’s death: Her quivering lips remained parted as she ceased speaking. Deronda could not answer; he was obliged to look away. He took one of her hands, and clasped it as if they were going to walk together as two children: [the hand clasp] was the only way he could answer, “I will not forsake you”… That grasp was an entirely new experience to Gwendolen: she had never before had from any man a sign of tenderness which her own being had needed, and she interpreted its powerful effect on her into a promise of inexhaustible patience and constancy. The stream of renewed strength made it possible for her to go on… (592)

The divinely restorative impact of Deronda’s hands so transcends the Jewish realm that the narrator ultimately renders even Daniel’s dialogue with Gwendolen in the rhetoric of manual intervention: “[His] words were like the touch of a miraculous hand to Gwendolen” (659).

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This universalized but divine mode of transcendence is fitting, however, since the narrative does not lead to a discovery that Deronda is no longer English; it instead shows that he is also a Jew. The expanded scope of Deronda’s relationships with groups ranging from the poor Jewish Cohens to the aristocratic Christian Mallingers allows Eliot to transform the possibility of multiple class and religious allegiances into multiple racial, ethnic, and national possibilities. The novel literally enacts this multiplicity on the level of plot where Deronda’s hands connect what skeptics have long referred to as the English and the Jewish “halves” of the text: he becomes a sacred priest to the Christian Gwendolen even as he and Mirah prepare to build a Jewish homeland in the East. Ultimately, Eliot sacramentalizes Deronda’s hands not only because they are Jewish, but because of her longstanding belief that they are the appendages through which human sympathy flows most directly—as we saw in Romola. Writing at a time when her culture was anxiously preoccupied by the possibilities of animality and “devolution” in ape-like hands, Eliot saw human hands as instruments of elevated and divine feeling. Most importantly, recognizing how Eliot treats hands in her fiction adds a decidedly embodied dimension to her most sacred concern for human sympathy in her work.

Notes





1.  See Peter J. Capuano, “Introduction: The Half-Lives of Hands,” in Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 1–16. 2. Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, edited by James A. Secord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 3.  James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 37. Charles Dickens, for instance, in his contributions to All the Year Round and in the structural thematics of Great Expectations (1860–1861), is quite profoundly interested in new Darwinian evolutionary paradigms. See Capuano, Changing Hands, Chapter 5: “The Evolutionary Moment in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations,” 127–151. 4. Chambers, Vestiges, 266. 5. Casimir D’Arpentigny, The Science of the Hand (1857), translated and edited by Edward Heron-Allen (London: Ward and Lock, 1886), 184.

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6. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), edited by Gillian Beer (London: Oxford University Press, 1996), 387. 7. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 59–60. 8. Susan David Bernstein, “Ape Anxiety: Sensation Fiction, Evolution, and the Genre Question,” Journal of Victorian Culture 6, no. 2 (Autumn 2001): 250–71, 255 (italics in the original). 9. Richard Beamish, Psychonomy of the Hand; or, the Hand an Index of Mental Development, According to MM. D’Arpentigny and Desbarrolles (London: Pitman, 1865). 10. Richard Owen, On the Gorilla (London: Taylor and Francis, 1865), 78. 11. For a discussion of the embodied hand in terms of religious thought in the nineteenth century, see Capuano, Changing Hands, Chapter 2: “The Anatomy of Anglican Industry,” 42–65. See also, Aviva Briefel’s Introduction to The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), especially pages 2–3. 12. I am thinking here of the way the hand is treated in the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others. 13.  George Henry Lewes, Problems: A Cultural Study of Life and Mind (Boston: Houghton, 1879), I:28. 14. J. B. Bullen, “George Eliot’s Romola as a Positivist Allegory,” The Review of English Studies 26, no. 4 (November 1975): 425–445, 425. 15. Caroline Levine and Mark Turner, eds., From Author to Text: Re-reading George Eliot’s “Romola” (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 2. 16.  See Leonee Ormond, “Frederic Leighton and the Illustrations for Romola,” George Eliot Review 45, no. 1 (2014): 50–55, 52. (emphasis original). 17. George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, edited by Gordon Sherman Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1955), 4:40. 18. Ibid., 4:41. 19. Hugh Witemeyer, George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 159. 20. Peter Wagner, Icons, Texts, Iconotext (New York: de Gruyter, 1996), 16. 21.  Michael Schiefelbein, “Crucifixes and Madonnas: George Eliot’s Fascination with Catholicism in Romola,” Victorian Newsletter 88, no. 1 (1995): 31–34, 32. 22. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 5. 23. Mary Jean Corbett, Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 116. 24. George Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” in Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ashton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 260–295, 267 (emphasis in the original).

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25.  George Henry Lewes, The Physiology of Common Life (New York: Appleton, 1860). 26. Ibid., 315. 27.  George Eliot, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” in Impressions of Theophrastus Such, edited by Nancy Henry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994), 164. 28. Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 185. Critics of virtually every stripe have responded to the “crisis” of Deronda’s supposed physical abstraction with a myriad of disparate interpretations. Henry James was among the first to voice a critical frustration with Eliot’s lack of physiological description. In James’s estimation, Eliot’s deliberate ambiguity on the topic of Deronda’s appearance made him “a person outside of Judaism—aesthetically” (687). Perhaps the most notable and enduring interpretation has been Cynthia Chase’s influential—and what some consider “virtuoso”—contention that the realism of the plot “goes aground” on the issue of Deronda’s circumcision (see discussion in Ian Duncan, “George Eliot’s Science Fiction,” Representations 125, no. 1 [Winter 2014]: 15–39, 31). Chase’s argument works brilliantly because of its premise that Deronda’s Jewish illegibility could appear everywhere but on his circumcised penis—an obviously “unseeable” place in the novel (222). My argument is that criticism of this important subject has focused for far too long on body parts that have preoccupied contemporary critics, as opposed to those that were most visible and important to Victorians. 29. George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy, edited by Antoine Gerard van den Broek (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), lines 2963–2971. 30. F. M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 72. 31.  See William Baker, George Eliot and Judaism (Salzburg: University of Salzburg Press, 1975); and Jane Irwin, George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” Notebooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 32.  “Give Me Your Hand,” All the Year Round 10 (1863): 345–349 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1864), 346. 33. Daniel Matt, ed. and trans., The Zohar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 411. 34. Irwin, Notebooks, 456. 35. Critics most often interpret Mordecai’s seemingly unfounded and early insistence on Deronda’s Jewishness as an odd, “wish-fulfillment aspect” of the plot (Jonathan Loesberg, “Aesthetics, Ethics, and Unreadable Acts in George Eliot,” in Knowing the Past, edited by Suzy Anger [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006], 121–147, 139). Audrey Jaffe captures the spirit of a line of critical interpretation running fairly straight between U. C. Knoepflmacher and Deborah Epstein Nord when she claims that “before Mordecai’s ‘wishful vision,’ Deronda is the Jew even the most discerning of observers can’t discern” (Scenes of Sympathy: Identity

190  P. J. CAPUANO and Representation in Victorian Fiction [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000], 125). Nord contends that Mordecai “decides” to regard Deronda as a Jew “for his own quixotic reasons” (Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930 [New York: Columbia University Press, 2006], 116). According to Michael Ragussis, Mordecai “unaccountably” asks Deronda to accept a Jewish heritage (Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995], 273). 36. U. C. Knoepflmacher sees Deronda as “fleshless and ethereal” (Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965], 147). George Levine asserts that Deronda “is almost literally abstracted from the contingencies of the sensible world” (Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 43) and Irene Tucker maintains that Jewishness in the novel is a “condition of spectrality” (A Probable State: The Novel, the Contract, and the Jews [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 96). Bryan Cheyette interprets Deronda’s “featureless” body as a necessary precondition for Eliot’s displacement of nationalist ideals on her eponymous hero (Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 45). Daniel A. Novak argues that Deronda’s “corporeal evacuation and abstraction” is the product of a literal reproduction of Francis Galton’s “composite photography” of Jewish faces (“A Model Jew: ‘Literary Photographs’ and the Jewish Body in Daniel Deronda,” Representations 85, no. 1 [Winter 2004]: 58–97, 60). These typological composites—where anything and nothing are possible—make Deronda a “model Jew” (45, original italics). 37. Sigmund Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” in The Sigmund Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 522–539. 38. Melvin Konner, The Jewish Body (New York: Schocken Books, 2009). 39. William Cohen, Sex Scandal (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 17.

Bibliography Baker, William. George Eliot and Judaism. Salzburg: University of Salzburg Press, 1975. Beamish, Richard. Psychonomy of the Hand; or, the Hand an Index of Mental Development, According to MM. D’Arpentigny and Desbarrolles. London: Pitman, 1865. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

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Bernstein, Susan David. “Ape Anxiety: Sensation Fiction, Evolution, and the Genre Question.” Journal of Victorian Culture 6, no. 2 (Autumn 2001): 250–271. Briefel, Aviva. The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Bullen, J. B. “George Eliot’s Romola as a Positivist Allegory.” The Review of English Studies 26, no. 4 (November 1975): 425–435. Capuano, Peter J. Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. Chambers, Robert. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Edited by James A. Secord. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Chase, Cynthia. “The Decomposition of Elephants: Double Reading in Daniel Deronda.” PMLA 93, no. 2 (1978): 217–227. Cheyette, Bryan. Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Cohen, William. Sex Scandal. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Corbett, Mary Jean. Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. D’Arpentigny, Casimir. The Science of the Hand. 1857. Translated and edited by Edward Heron-Allen. London: Ward and Lock, 1886. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. 1859. Edited by Gillian Beer. London: Oxford University Press, 1996. Du Chaillu, Paul. Explorations & Adventures in Equatorial Africa. London: John Murray, 1861. Duncan, Ian. “George Eliot’s Science Fiction.” Representations 125, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 15–39. Eliot, George. Romola. 1862–1863. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913. ———. The George Eliot Letters. Edited by Gordon Sherman Haight, vol. 4. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1955. ———. The Mill on the Floss. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. ———. Daniel Deronda. 1876. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. ———. “The Natural History of German Life.” 1856. In Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ashton, 260–295. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———. “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” In Impressions of Theophrastus Such, edited by Nancy Henry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. ———. Felix Holt: The Radical. 1886. New York: Penguin Classics, 1995. ———. Adam Bede. 1859. Edited by Mary Waldron. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005. ———. The Spanish Gypsy. Edited by Antoine Gerard van den Broek. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008.

192  P. J. CAPUANO Freud, Sigmund. “The Moses of Michelangelo.” In The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay, 522–539. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Ginsburg, Christian. The Kabbalah: Its Doctrines, Development, and Literature. London: Longman, 1863. “Give Me Your Hand.” All the Year Round 10 (1863): 345–349. London: Chapman and Hall, 1864. Irwin, Jane. George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” Notebooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Jaffe, Audrey. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. James, Henry. “Daniel Deronda: A Conversation.” The Atlantic Monthly 38 (December 1876): 684–694. Konner, Melvin. The Jewish Body. New York: Schocken, 2009. Knoepflmacher, U. C. Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. Levine, Caroline, and Mark Turner, eds. From Author to Text: Re-reading George Eliot’s “Romola.” Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. Levine, George. Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Lewes, George Henry. The Physiology of Common Life. New York: Appleton, 1860. ———. Problems: A Cultural Study of Life and Mind. Boston: Houghton, 1879. Loesberg, Jonathan. “Aesthetics, Ethics, and Unreadable Acts in George Eliot.” In Knowing the Past, edited by Suzy Anger, 121–147. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Matt, Daniel, ed. and trans. The Zohar. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Nord, Deborah Epstein. Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Novak, Daniel A. “A Model Jew: ‘Literary Photographs’ and the Jewish Body in Daniel Deronda.” Representations 85, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 58–97. Ormond, Leonee. “Frederic Leighton and the Illustrations for Romola.” George Eliot Review 45, no. 1 (2014): 50–55. Owen, Richard. On the Gorilla. London: Taylor and Francis, 1865. Ragussis, Michael. Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Schiefelbein, Michael. “Crucifixes and Madonnas: George Eliot’s Fascination with Catholicism in Romola.” Victorian Newsletter 88, no. 1 (1995): 31–34. Secord, James A. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation”. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

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Tucker, Irene. A Probable State: The Novel, the Contract, and the Jews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Turner, F. M. The Greek Heritage in Victorian England, 72. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Wagner, Peter. Icons, Texts, Iconotext. New York: de Gruyter, 1996. Witemeyer, Hugh. George Eliot and the Visual Arts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

PART IV

Animals and Environmental Studies

CHAPTER 9

“It Was All over with Wildfire”: Horse Accidents in George Eliot’s Fiction Nancy Henry

In a dark moment on Christmas day 1879, George Eliot wrote to her future husband John Walter Cross: “The fog is dense and one thinks of cab accidents.”1 Thinking of cab accidents on what she could not know would be her last Christmas was an indulgence of the depression Eliot experienced throughout her life, especially following the death of her long-time domestic partner George Henry Lewes in 1878. Yet even when not depressed, Eliot frequently thought of horse-related accidents, which transform the lives of human and equine characters throughout her fiction. By focusing on the role of such accidents in her work, I consider how she transmuted a dangerous aspect of everyday life into a dramatic narrative device, raising central questions about the importance of the accidental and the unexpected in life and fiction. In the Victorian period, accidents involving horses were the equivalent of car accidents today. To the hazards of bad weather, poor roads, faulty equipment and heavy traffic, as well as drunk, aggressive or drowsy drivers, was added to the tendency of horses to bolt when frightened. Yet, because horses, unlike cars, are sentient beings with names, histories and N. Henry (*)  University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_9

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personalities, their deaths and injuries require both authors and readers to confront their interwoven economic and affective place in Victorian culture. Horse accidents are ubiquitous in Victorian fiction. Riding and coach accidents appear throughout Charles Dickens’ work. Anthony Trollope’s fox hunting scenes inevitably include falls and injuries to horses and riders. George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) sets the plot in motion with Mr. Madden’s fatal crash (and includes two more horse accidents). Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1892) also begins with an ominous accident in which the horse Prince is staked by the shaft of an oncoming mail cart, pathetically bleeding to death and causing serious economic loss to Tess and her family.2 Eliot’s fiction epitomizes the convention employed by so many of her contemporaries. Horse accidents appear throughout her work as crucial points of plot development. In “Janet’s Repentance” (1858), the lawyer Dempster is fatally injured while drunkenly driving his gig. In “The Lifted Veil” (1859), Latimer covets his brother Alfred’s fiancée and is able to marry her after Alfred is “pitched from his horse, and killed on the spot by a concussion to the brain.”3 In The Mill on the Floss (1860), Mr. Tulliver falls from his horse and later causes Mr. Wakem to fall from his. In Silas Marner (1861), Dunstan Cass stakes his brother Godfrey’s valuable horse Wildfire on his way to sell it, prompting the narrator to remark, “it was all over with Wildfire.”4 In Middlemarch (1871–1872), Fred Vincy breaks the knees of his hunter. Trying to recover from this economic loss, he purchases Diamond, who “without the slightest warning exhibited in the stable a most vicious energy in kicking, had just missed killing the groom, and had ended in laming himself severely by catching his leg in a rope that overhung the stable-board.”5 Diamond thus loses his monetary value and casts Fred further into debt. Fred’s sister Rosamond suffers a miscarriage after her horse spooks at the sound of a falling tree. In Daniel Deronda (1876), Gwendolen rides gleefully in a foxhunt on an expensive horse in which her uncle had invested to show off his niece and increase her marriage prospects. Trying to keep up with the chase, her cousin Rex falls while taking a jump, breaking the knees of his father’s horse Primrose, dislocating his own shoulder and hastening the end of his hopeless passion for Gwendolen.6 Throughout her work, Eliot highlights the economic loss involved in horse accidents with subtle yet trenchant critiques of treating animals as commodities. When Dunstan Cass’s reckless riding kills Wildfire, the narrator’s observations are particularly caustic: “His own ill-favoured person, which was quite unmarketable, escaped without injury; but poor Wildfire,

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unconscious of his price, turned on his flank and painfully panted his last” (Silas Marner, 31). In an instant, the prospects of both man and horse are forever changed as the literally and figuratively worthless young man walks away from the once-marketable animal now dying in pain. Eliot managed to hold in tension her recognition of horses as commodities and her sympathy with horses as sensitive creatures in a co-dependent relationship with humans. Her repeated use of horse accidents functions as a critique of human insensitivity to animals, as well as a reminder of the role that the accidental and the unexpected plays in human lives. Explorations of the philosophical, theological and aesthetic significance of accidents date back to Aristotle. Contemporary literary critics draw on this tradition to consider accidents in historical contexts. Michael Witmore argues that in the early modern period, accidents existed “halfway between the realms of fact and fiction.”7 Accidents result when “certain narrative conventions (what we usually describe as plot) come into contact with communal beliefs about what is likely, valuable or purposive.”8 Writing about the Victorian period, Paul Fyfe argues that accidents (including horse-driven cab accidents) “cross a variety of cultural domains”; through the metropolitan accident, Victorians “reimagined the formative possibilities of chance.”9 As these critics note, authors representing accidents draw both on the reality of lived experience and on long-standing traditions of turning chance events into symbolic aspects of plot and character development. Two aspects of this critical discussion are relevant to my argument about accidents in Eliot’s work: agency and interpretation. Who if anyone is responsible for accidents? In the early modern period, theologians debated whether accidents were part of God’s plan. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the legal and economic category of liability emerged, giving rise to institutions, such as insurance companies, whose business it was to interpret accidents and assign responsibility. Fyfe writes that in the nineteenth century, the authority to interpret accidents rested with “varied cultural and professional domains.”10 I will return to this point about professional authority to argue that Rosamond’s riding accident in Middlemarch poses an interpretive problem that undermines Lydgate’s medical authority. Accidents in Eliot’s fiction conform to a pattern: they are generally either predictable or actually predicted because of human actions. The drowning of Thias Bede in Adam Bede and Dunstan Cass in Silas Marner are the result of drunkenness.11 Horse accidents result from reckless behavior; they are rarely unforeseen or without an identifiable cause.

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Even when they are predictable, however, they are no less accidental, and in this respect, horse accidents do important work in exploring questions central to Eliot’s fiction, such as the interplay between human agency and chance, as well as the way horses are the victims of human disregard for their wellbeing. Although Eliot disliked unnecessary risk-taking, particularly gambling and speculation, she also believed that the impossibility of knowing or predicting the future was an essential aspect of the human condition. In “The Lifted Veil,” her narrator Latimer observes: So absolute is our soul’s need of something hidden and uncertain for the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond today, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that lie between … we should rush fiercely to the Exchange for our last possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment. (Lifted Veil, 29)

In short, we need the unknown, unexpected and accidental to provide a combination of doubt and hope that gives meaning to life. What makes horses so thrilling and compelling for both riders and novelists is the challenge of mastering unpredictable animals. Eliot’s fiction explores the idea that death may come at any time, as it does for Alfred in “The Lifted Veil.” The unpredictability of even the best-trained horses when they are forced into unnatural circumstances thus becomes a primary way for her to examine a condition inherent to the human/equine bond, which was essential to all aspects of Victorian economic and cultural life. Horses in Victorian Britain reflected class stratification generally. Rural society depended on massively built workhorses. Stagecoach horses, urban cab horses and dock horses drove the Victorian economy. Cavalry horses went to war, and many died in battle, like the men who rode them. Then, there were the aristocratic horses. Eastern “blood horses” were imported into England from what is now Turkey and Syria in the eighteenth century and were bred with English horses to produce what we know today as Thoroughbreds. These elite horses were used for pleasure riding, fox hunting and racing. Everything about horses in the nineteenth century has broader material and ideological implications: how they were bred, trained, ridden, cared for and imaginatively represented in art and in literature.12 In Middlemarch, Sir James Chettam urges riding as a means of exercise for Dorothea Brooke, just as riding was recommended for Queen

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Victoria after the death of Prince Albert in 1861. In objecting to Sir James’s entreaty for her to become a perfect horsewoman, Dorothea says: “Excuse me, I have had little practice, and I should be easily thrown” (Middlemarch, 20). While Dorothea is not thrown from a horse, her petulant prediction reflects the very real dangers of riding, especially for women. There are not many horsewomen in Eliot’s fiction, and they are clustered in her later novels: Mrs. Transome surveys her property on horseback in Felix Holt; Dorothea and Rosamond ride for pleasure in Middlemarch; and in Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen rides to the hounds along with several other foxhunting women.13 Dickens imagined the perspective of horses, selectively turning them into characters that objected to their enslaved state. In Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–1844), the horses drawing the hearse in Anthony Chuzzlewit’s funeral rejoice: “‘They break us, drive us, ride us; ill treat, abuse, and maim us for their pleasure — But they die; Hurrah, they die!’”14 He also used horse accidents for dramatic affect. Following a gory coach crash in Martin Chuzzlewit, Jonas Chuzzlewit tries to make the terrified horses trample his rival Montague Tigg. During Esther’s breathless coach ride during a snowstorm in Bleak House (1852–1853), the horses, “sometimes slipped and floundered for a mile together … One horse fell three times in this first stage, and trembled so, and was so shaken, that the driver had to dismount from his saddle and lead him at last.”15 Lest we think such incidents were confined to melodramatic scenes in fiction, Lewes noted in his journal for 1874 that on a drive to Highgate, the horse pulling his carriage fell and broke its knees, forcing him to walk home.16 What did George Eliot know about horses? She was raised in the rural Midlands, and, while not a rider in her adult life, she understood the value of horses to farmers, young men in need of cash, as well as clergymen, doctors and estate agents like her father making their rounds. She was aware of horses as part of both the rural and the urban economy. Like most Victorians, she had experience of horse accidents. On a trip to Italy in 1861, she and Lewes met Thomas Trollope (Anthony’s brother) at his villa in Florence. With him, they set off to visit the monasteries at Camaldoli and La Verna in the Tuscan Apennines. En route in Trollope’s carriage, one of the horses fell and cut his head. Lewes recorded: “At first we thought him dead: it was with some difficulty he was got up again.”17 The next day, on a ride to Bibbiena, Eliot’s horse fell on the edge of a precipice. She was unfazed, but Lewes wrote: “I who saw her fall felt very sick and faint from the shock.”18

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Lewes was not a horseman, but in October of 1864, he tried riding lessons for his health. He was forced to quit them, however, because: “The exercise seemed to stir up my liver into unpleasant activity.”19 His sensitivity to the physical demands of riding may have contributed to Eliot’s negative perspective on men who need to master horses. Shortly before she almost fell off the Italian mountain precipice, she had written in The Mill on the Floss of Tom Tulliver’s “desire for mastery over the inferior animals” and his disdain for his Uncle Pullet, who “never rode anything taller than a low pony” (99). In Felix Holt, the embittered Mrs. Transome remarks of high spirited women: “Men like such captives, as they like horses that champ the bit and paw the ground: they feel more triumph in their mastery” (313).20 In November of 1873, spending some of the profits from Middlemarch, the Leweses went shopping for a carriage of their own, a significant marker of status. At first they arranged for a “man, horse, harness and standing room for 140£ a year” (GEL, 5:469). They soon found that they had been cheated because the carriage was unsuitable for one horse. Lewes then went to “Morgan the Coachbuilder and ordered a new Landau to be finished for us, price 150£” (GEL, 5:469). By 9 December, he was able to write proudly: “We had our own Carriage at last, and with it open drove around Cricklewood and Hampstead Heath, walking occasionally” (GEL, 5:469). Despite her dislike of gambling, Eliot attended horse races. In July of 1857, she and Lewes spent two days at the races on Gorey Commons on the Isle of Jersey (GEL, 2:369). In 1858, while Eliot was writing Adam Bede, Lewes employed an equine metaphor when corresponding with the publisher and racing enthusiast John Blackwood about her progress: “Bedesman is in training, and will make a splendid run if he does not win the Derby. I have faith in that horse and will back him to any reasonable amount” (GEL, 2:474). The two men extended this metaphor in their letters to each other over the next several months. This punning banter referred to an actual horse called Beadsman, who won the Epsom Derby in 1858 with Blackwood in attendance.21 In October of 1878, Eliot and Lewes attended the races at Newmarket, sitting next to the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev.22 Two years earlier, they had visited the stables at Newmarket and met Kisber, the Hungarian-bred horse who won both the Epsom Derby and the Grand Pris de Paris in 1876 (GEL, 6:292; Haight, George Eliot, 498). Lewes compared Kisber’s trainer, Joseph Hayhoe, to the horse dealer in Middlemarch, calling him “a sort

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of refined Bambridge.” Hayhoe was actually a successful trainer who worked for the Rothschild family. Eliot astonished Hayhoe by pointing out a flaw in Kisber’s conformation (GEL, 6:292; Haight, George Eliot, 498). It is a fitting symmetry that in 1876, Kisber had beaten Coeruleus, the son of the Derby winner Beadsman, who lent his name (as we have seen) to Adam Bede in the Lewes-Blackwood correspondence.23 Horse races and horse fairs were associated with alcohol, gambling and sex. Rebecca Cassidy writes of early nineteenth-century local horse meets: “A carnival atmosphere prevailed, and behavior that would have been unacceptable outside such events was tolerated, if reluctantly.”24 Eliot captures this environment in Middlemarch when Fred Vincy attends the Houndsley Horse Fair. He takes his last £80 and his unnamed broken-winded horse to the fair in the company of some shady characters: Mr. Horrock the vet and Bambridge, a horse dealer given to “swearing, drinking, and beating his wife” (223). Bambridge and Horrock unite to swindle Fred out of his horse and his money to sell him Diamond, the horse who kicks out in the stall, thus losing his value. We are not offered Diamond’s opinion, but the narrator makes an analogy that resonates with the marriage plots in the novel, saying of Diamond’s behavior: “There was no more redress for this than for the discovery of bad temper after marriage — which of course old companions were aware of before the ceremony” (226). Eliot affirms her opinion of racing meets when Caleb Garth describe Raffles as, “like one of those men one sees about after the races” (490), a comment that emphasizes Raffles’ unsavory, dishonest, not to mention besotted, appearance. Eliot has few unredeemed villains in her fiction, but among them are Dempster, Dunstan Cass and Raffles (all alcoholics). Dempster’s abuse of his wife Janet and his horse are linked. Mr. Landor describes Dempster’s fate: “It seems he was more drunk than usual, and they say he came along the Bridge Way flogging his horse like a madman, till at last it gave a sudden wheel, and he was pitched out.”25 In his alcoholic delirium, Dempster relives the moment of his accident, “flogging the bedclothes furiously with his right hand” and exclaiming: “Get along, you lame brute! … get along you damned limping beast … I’ll lay your back open …” (278). Previously, Dempster had beaten Janet in a drunken rage and locked her outside in a snowstorm. Eliot’s violent language is literal and specific, even if reimagined rather than directly represented. While the unnamed horse is given no agency other than making “a sudden wheel” to protect itself, Dempster’s intention to harm and brutalize a lame

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creature is clear. It is ironic that Dempster, rather than his horse, ends up with a broken leg and dies as a result of the accident. As I have argued, horse accidents in Eliot’s fiction conform to a pattern. They are generally predictable: if you drive while intoxicated and flog your horse like a madman, you will probably crash. Or, they are actually predicted, as in the case of Rosamond’s accident in Middlemarch. Eliot’s non-chronological treatment of this latter offstage event is notably complicated with respect to cause and effect, suggesting that even when an accident is likely, its consequences are not so easily foreseen. Rosamond’s mother first alludes to her daughter’s loss in Chapter 56: “I am sure I felt for her being disappointed of her baby; but she got over it nicely” (535). Later in Chapter 58, the narrator explains the public consensus: “This misfortune was attributed entirely to her having persisted in going out on horseback one day when her husband had desired her not do so” (545, my emphasis). Later still, we have a flashback to the circumstances. Lydgate warns his wife not to ride while pregnant because, even with “the quietest, most familiar horse in the world, there would always be the chance of accident” (548). She defies him as part of her flirtation with his aristocratic cousin Captain Lydgate who had brought her a grey horse that “he warranted to be gentle and trained to carry a lady” (548). Finally, the narrator recounts the incident cryptically: “But the gentle gray, unprepared for the crash of a tree that was being felled on the edge of Halsell wood, took fright, and caused a worse fright to Rosamond, leading finally to the loss of her baby” (549). But is the narrator relating a fact or reiterating the interpretation of Lydgate and the Middlemarch gossips? Rosamond maintains that the accident had no effect on the pregnancy, which would have terminated in the same way had she not gone riding (549). Doreen Thierauf argues that Rosamond intentionally “procures her own miscarriage by deciding to go horseback riding with Lydgate’s cousin.”26 She refers to Rosamond’s self-induced miscarriage as Eliot’s “veiled representation of an abortion to warn her audience that middleclass women’s morally empty education quite literally threatened to end the rule of the father.”27 What is lost in this reading is the ambiguity of the relationship between the riding accident and the premature birth of the baby (referred to neither as a miscarriage nor an abortion). Internal evidence suggests that Rosamond’s riding scare is a critique of Lydgate’s assumption that having a fright brings on a miscarriage. A few chapters before the account of Rosamond’s premature baby are related,

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Mrs. Waule is apprehensive about the coming of the railway. She worries that, with trains running through the fields, “the cows will all cast their calves”; she adds: “I shouldn’t wonder at the mare too, if she was in foal” (Middlemarch, 520). These comments about cows and mares casting their offspring due to fear are examples of ignorant superstition. They also foreshadow Rosamond’s loss of her baby. Lydgate predicts that Rosamond will have an accident, by which he seems to mean a fall. When instead her horse spooks and Rosamond does lose her baby, he and the community assume that his prediction has come true. As Theirauf notes, medical experts warned against riding and other physical activity for pregnant women. Yet, as Eliot must have known, being frightened does not lead necessarily to miscarriage, and she provides no information about what Rosamond experienced when her horse spooked. The narrator never pronounces that it was the riding that brought on the premature birth, only that it was believed to be so, and no definitive cause and effect is established.28 This intentional ambiguity raises questions about agency, authority and the interpretation of accidents. Elaborating on the narrator’s remark that Lydgate was on the wrong track with respect to the “original tissue,” Mark Wormald argues that Lydgate was misguided in his pursuits of scientific knowledge. He “clings to fortuitously acquired assumptions” and displays “inflexibility” in his assumptions about both science and women.29 Lydgate’s belief that his prediction about Rosamond’s riding led to the premature birth of her baby represents the imposition of masculine authority onto an incident whose outcome could not be known with certainty. It is as dubious as Mrs. Waule’s belief that the railroad would lead to cows and mares aborting their calves and foals. Yet Lydgate’s perspective becomes established fact, like so much misinformation in Middlemarch, and thus may be read as a reflection of how predictions are self-fulfilling, as well as a critique of what Paul Fyfe identifies as the emergence of professional authority in interpreting accidents. Lydgate predicts and then interprets the accident, and everyone but Rosamond, who is in tune to the changes in her own body, accepts that interpretation. While I disagree that Rosamond went riding in order to abort her baby, a possible later literary allusion to her horse ride suggests that the idea of an intentional miscarriage is at least present. Gissing’s The Whirlpool, a novel about financial speculation and other reckless behavior, features a cab and steeplechase accident, along with financial crashes, in the first four chapters. Later, the rebellious New Woman Alma Rolfe

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insists on driving her own “dog cart” and allows the horse to run away with her, leaving her wild-eyed and the horse trembling. Alma faints, becomes hysterical, is confined to bed, and suffers a miscarriage. Her husband Harvey refrains from criticizing her but sees that the “illness seemed a blessing; its result, which some women would have wept over, brought joy into her eyes.”30 As in Rosamond’s case, the runaway horse scene takes place offstage, and Gissing may be updating Eliot’s scenario through Alma’s professional aspirations and Harvey’s inability to regret that their baby is lost. Both Rosamond and Alma’s experiences suggest the inherent dangers of horse travel; a horse’s behavior was neither predictable nor easily controlled, even by those wishing for a lethal outcome. Neither Rosamond nor Alma could know with certainty that a runaway horse would lead to the loss of the child she was carrying at the time. Such unpredictability is at the heart of Margaret Oliphant’s story “Mr. Sandford” (1888). The title character is a painter whose historical style has gone out of fashion. Foreseeing debt and financial disaster for his family, the artist considers suicide until he realizes that such an act would vitiate any life insurance claims. The narrator remarks: “A man cannot die when he wishes it, though there should be every argument in favor of such an event, and its advantages most palpable … We live when we should do much better to die, and we die sometimes when every circumstance calls upon us to live.”31 In an ironic ending, after attending a horse racing meet, Mr. Sandford and his friends are driven home by a drunken coach driver who loses control of the horses. The result is a devastating crash after which Mr. Sandford dies of his injuries. Not only can his family now claim his life insurance, but his paintings also regain their value. Oliphant’s observation that a man “cannot die when he wishes it,” is of course true; yet the plotting of “Mr. Sandford” offers a morbid wish fulfillment in which the man who wants to die does so due to the unpredictability of horse travel. Eliot had a perspective on providential death that was notably different from that of Oliphant. Sophia Kovalevskaia recalled a conversation in which Eliot spoke about the logic of death, saying: “When in life the situation becomes strained beyond measure, when there is no exit anywhere, when the most sacred obligations contradict one another, then death appears; and, suddenly it opens new paths which no one had any thought of before; it reconciles what had seemed irreconcilable.”32 In Eliot’s fiction, characters often die as a result of accidents that seem to solve the problem of their existence. Dempster’s death releases his wife

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Janet from his alcoholic tyranny. Thias Bede’s drowning spares his family the further misery of his alcoholism. Dunstan Cass’s death frees his brother Godfrey from blackmail. Latimer can only marry Bertha because of his brother’s death. Tito’s death liberates Romola. The death of Mrs. Transome’s eldest son allows her favorite son Harold to become her heir. Death frees both Dorothea and Gwendolen from unhappy marriages. The timeliness of such accidental deaths forms a pattern that might seem contrived until we realize that Eliot viewed death by whatever means as providential in life as well as fiction. The subset of horse accidents in Eliot’s fiction involves collateral damage including the death of Wildfire and the laming of Diamond and Primrose, all of which have economic consequences for their owners and elicit at least some sympathy for the horses. Although most accidents in Eliot’s fiction are predictable, their consequences cannot be seen in advance. Rosamond could not know that her horse would spook, and Lydgate’s prediction that she would lose her baby because of her riding becomes an occasion for ambiguity, as well as a critique of superstition even in men of science. In Farewell to the Horse (2017), Ulrich Raulff writes that the great novels of the nineteenth century “have horses in their very fabric, equine motifs running through them like tendons and veins.”33 He argues that horses are the “ghosts of modernity, and the more they forfeit their worldly presence, the more they haunt the minds of a humanity that has turned away from them.”34 Eliot and her contemporaries lived in a world where death by horse accident was a reality, though a thoroughly unpredictable one. The possibility of accidents bringing either wanted or unwanted outcomes is a prime example of how she transmuted a familiar aspect of everyday life into a narrative convention with profound implications, illuminating her views about the role of the accidental and the unexpected in human and animal life.

Notes

1. The George Eliot Letters, edited by Gordon Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–1978), 7:235. Hereafter cited as GEL. 2. Other examples among many include Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Margaret Oliphant’s In Trust (1881), Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896). In novels that involve horse racing, such as Ouida’s Under Two Flags (1867) and George Moore’s Esther Waters (1894), accidents are to be expected.



208  N. HENRY 3. George Eliot, The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob, edited by Helen Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 27. 4. George Eliot, Silas Marner, edited by Juliet Atkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 31. 5. George Eliot, Middlemarch, edited by David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 226. 6. On horses in George Eliot’s fiction, see Sarah Wintle, “George Eliot’s Peculiar Passion,” Essays in Criticism 50 (January 2000): 23–43; and Beryl Gray, “Riding Horses in Middlemarch,” George Eliot Review 46 (2016): 8–17. Focusing on Middlemarch, Gray identifies a seeming lack of sympathy for horses, which are “sentient commodities unremarkably distributed among the greater part of the novel’s population” (11). Margaret Linley, “The Living Transport Machine: George Eliot’s Middlemarch,” in Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840–1940, edited by Adrienne E. Gavin and Andrew F. Humphries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 84–100. 7. Michael Whitmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 6. 8. Whitmore, Culture of Accidents, 11. 9. Paul Fyfe, By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 24, 27. 10. Fyfe, By Accident or Design, 24. 11. Ominously, Thias does his drinking at a pub called “The Waggon Overthrown” (Adam Bede, 50). 12. See Donna Landry, Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 13. Victorian women rode sidesaddle until the early decades of the twentieth century when the freedom to sit astride the horse became part of broader movements for women’s liberation. 14. Charles Dickens, Marti Chuzzlewit, edited by Margaret Cardwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 278. This language in the English plot resonates with the slavery invoked in the American plot. 15. Charles Dickens, Bleak House, edited by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 880. 16. GHL Journal, 26 November 1874. Manuscript. Beinecke Library. Yale University. 17. GHL Journal, 3–6 June 1861, quoted in Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 346. 18. GHL Journal, 3 June 1861, quoted in Haight, George Eliot, 347. 19. GHL Journal, 2 October 1864. Manuscript. Beinecke Library, Yale University. 20. On the relationship between women, horses and the male desire for mastery, see Gina M. Dorré, Victorian Literature and the Cult of the Horse

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(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006); and Elsie B. Michie, “Horses and Sexual/Social Dominance,” in Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin Danahay (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). 21. See Rosemary Ashton, “On Bats and Bedes,” TLS (14 June 2017). 22. Haight, George Eliot, 513. 23. Thoroughbred Heritage Portraits, http://www.tbheritage.com/Portraits/ Kisber.html. 24. Rebecca Cassidy, Horse People: Thoroughbred Culture in Lexington and Newmarket (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 6. 25. George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, edited by Thomas A. Noble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 271. 26.  Doreen Thierauf, “The Hidden Abortion Plot in George Eliot’s Middlemarch,” Victorian Studies 56, no. 3 (Spring 2014), 482. 27. Thierauf, “Hidden Abortion Plot,” 483. 28. Some critics recall this as a clear-cut example of cause and effect. Wintle writes that Rosamond “miscarries in an accident” (28). Dorré writes that she “insists on riding while pregnant, which leads to an accident that causes her to miscarry her baby” (78). 29. Mark Wormald, “Microscopy and Semiotic in Middlemarch,” NineteenthCentury Literature 50, no. 4 (March 1996), 510. 30. George Gissing, The Whirlpool, edited by Gillian Tindall (London: Hogarth, 1984), 162. 31. Margaret Oliphant, “Mr. Sandford,” in The Ways of Life: Two Stories (New York: G. P. Putnam’s and Sons, 1897). Reprints from the Collection of the University of Michigan (n.d.), 112. 32. K. K. Collins, ed., George Eliot: Interviews and Reflections (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 224. 33. Ulrich Raulff, Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship (AllenLane, 2017), 10. 34. Raulff, Farewell to the Horse, 11.

Bibliography Ashton, Rosemary. “On Bats and Bedes.” TLS, 14 June 2017. Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. 1853. Edited by Margaret Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Cassidy, Rebecca. Horse People: Thoroughbred Culture in Lexington and Newmarket. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Collins, K. K., ed. George Eliot: Interviews and Reflections. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

210  N. HENRY Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1852–1853. Edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. ———. Martin Chuzzlewit. 1843–1844. Edited by Margaret Cardwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Dorré, Gina M. Victorian Literature and the Cult of the Horse. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Edited by Gordon Sherman Haight. 9 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, vols. 1–3, 1954; 4–7, 1955; 8–9, 1978. ———. Adam Bede. 1859. Edited by Valentine Cunningham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———. The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob. Edited by Helen Small. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. Scenes of Clerical Life. Edited by Thomas A. Noble. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, 2000. ——— The Mill on the Floss. 1860. Edited by Nancy Henry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. ———. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. Edited by David Carroll. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 2008. ———. Silas Marner. Edited by Juliet Atkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Fyfe, Paul. By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Gissing, George. The Whirlpool. Edited by Gillian Tindall. London: Hogarth, 1984. Gray, Beryl. “Riding Horses in Middlemarch.” The George Eliot Review 46 (2016): 8–17. Haight, Gordon. George Eliot. A Biography. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Hardy, Thomas. The Woodlanders. 1887. Edited by Patricia Ingham. London: Penguin, 1998. James, Henry. “The Figure in the Carpet.” 1896. In The Complete Tales of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964. Landry, Donna. Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Lewes, George Henry. Journals. Manuscript. Beinecke Library, Yale University. Linley, Margaret. “The Living Transport Machine: George Eliot’s Middlemarch.” In Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840–1940, edited by Adrienne E. Gavin and Andrew F. Humphries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015: 84–100. Michie, Elsie B. “Horses and Sexual/Social Dominance.” In Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture,

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edited by Deborah Denenhoz Morse and Martin Danahay. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Moore, George. Esther Waters. 1894. Edited by Stephen Regan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Oliphant, Margaret. In Trust: A Story of a Lady and Her Lover. 1881. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1882. ———. “Mr. Sandford.” In The Ways of Life: Two Stories. New York: G. P. Putnam’s and Sons, 1897. Reprinted from the collection of the University of Michigan, n.d. Ouida. Under Two Flags. 1867. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1898. Raulff, Ulrich. Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship. Translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp. London: Penguin, 2017. Thierauf, Doreen. “The Hidden Abortion Plot in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.” Victorian Studies 56, no. 3 (Spring 2014): 479–489. Whitmore, Michael. Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Wintle, Sarah. “George Eliot’s Peculiar Passion.” Essays in Criticism 50 (January 2000): 23–43. Wormald, Mark. “Microscopy and Semiotic in Middlemarch.” NineteenthCentury Literature 50, no. 4 (March 1996): 501–524.

CHAPTER 10

The Functions of Dogs in George Eliot’s Fiction Sara Håkansson

“Hev a dog, Miss!–they’re better friends nor any Christian”1

In an attempt to console Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Bob Jakin offers sound advice. Later in the novel, he proposes a further canine remedy by offering his loyal companion Mumps as temporary company to a distraught Maggie: “Lors, it’s a fine thing to hev a dumb brute fond on you; it’ll stick to you, an’ make no jaw” (489). Bob’s opinion seems to coincide with that of George Eliot herself who, in 1859, received her first pet, the fittingly named Pug, as a present from her publisher John Blackwood, celebrating the success of Adam Bede. In response to Blackwood she writes: Pug is come! — come to fill up the void left by false and narrow-hearted friends. I see already that he is without envy, hatred, or malice — that he will betray no secrets, and feel neither pain at my success nor pleasure in my chagrin. […] He is snoring by my side at this moment, with a serene

S. Håkansson (*)  Lund University, Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_10

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214  S. HÅKANSSON promise of remaining quiet for any length of time: he couldn’t behave better if he had been expressly educated for me.2

Given Eliot’s affection for dogs, it is no surprise that they should feature so extensively in her novels. For example, the word “dog” is mentioned 44 times in The Mill on the Floss and 34 times in Adam Bede and even more with conjugations and synonyms included. As a writer, though, Eliot was a story builder first and a dog lover second. The prevalence of dogs in her work may be viewed as an expression of the author’s personal predilection, but their functions in the narratological setup go beyond a mere fancy for a species. Eliot’s animals often aid the reader’s understanding of characters and their relationships with society.3 This essay argues that Eliot’s dogs serve as instruments to actively direct the reader’s responses to the diegetic world by offering alternative perspectives on characters and events. The Victorian era saw a great increase of interest in the welfare of animals and in the keeping of pets.4 Naturally, this translated into literature and, according to Ivan Kreilkamp, England became “preeminently associated with long novels and beloved pet animals”. Kreilkamp argues that the “history of English domestic fiction is deeply bound up with that of the domestic animal”.5 Kreilkamp and George Levine point to connections between animals and sympathy in nineteenth-century literature and Keridiana W. Chez discusses dogs as emotional prostheses for humans. Monica Flegel states that narratives constructed around animals “provide the means of policing social norms”6; and Anna Feuerstein and Georges Letissier discuss dogs in terms of alterity, moving away from what could be considered a stereotype of the dog as a reflection of his or her owner. Although the present article acknowledges that there is some value attached to that very stereotype, it is concerned with narrative perspective. Starting out from Eliot’s defective-mirror analogy in Adam Bede, I hold that canine perspectives are part of Eliot’s concern with perception and interpretation and serve to refine interpretations which, without alternative perspectives, may “turn out to be rather coarse”.7 Eliot’s artistic concern is to evoke sympathy, to affect the emotional and intellectual attitudes of her readers so that they are “better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures”.8 For this purpose, she employs a range of rhetorical techniques such as free indirect discourse, narratorial commentary and varied

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focalisations. As will be argued below, dogs serve as the narrator’s device to nuance the presentation of particular characters. According to Brenda Ayres-Ricker, the “true nature” of Eliot’s characters is revealed once they have been compared with a dog.9 Indeed, the primary purpose of dogs in Eliot’s fiction is to explore human perspectives and motivation. In this sense, the narrator’s use of dogs operates to influence reader response. The canine perspective stimulates the reader’s sense of recognition, bringing the reader into an experience that entails a deeper comprehension of the people and situations in the narrative. This recognition does not necessarily involve first-hand experience of dogs, or the ability to see the world through the eyes of a dog. As a phenomenon, recognition may be said to have two dimensions: an experientially orientated dimension based on actual experiences, and an imaginatively orientated dimension based on a consciousness which is able to inhabit states of mind, feelings and beliefs. Both experiences are part of the reader’s sphere of experience; and even if they cannot be kept separate in the reader’s mind, they are nonetheless possible to distinguish as strands making up a whole. With regard to Eliot’s dogs, the appeal is usually to the reader’s imaginatively orientated experience.10 Dogs are the only animal species given human traits, thoughts and emotions in Eliot’s oeuvre.11 In the first collection, Scenes of Clerical Life, the cosseted spaniel Jet has his own opinion of his and his owner’s departure from the Barton vicarage: “Jet’s little black phiz was also seen, and doubtless he had his thoughts and feelings on the occasion, but he kept them strictly within his own bosom” (55). And in Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, the narrator interprets Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt’s water-spaniel Fetch as expressing feelings of jealousy and neglect: “I fear that Fetch was jealous, and wounded that her master gave her no word or look; at last it seemed she could bear this neglect no longer, and she gently put her large silky paw on her master’s leg” (104). Despite the latter example, dogs are more frequently used as lenses through which to view human characters in Eliot’s early fiction.

Scenes of Clerical Life When Jet, the spaniel, figures as a character in his own right, it is primarily as a silent commentator on his mistress, the Countess Czerlaski’s statements.12 His first known response to her appears as she tells Amos Barton about her influence with Lord Blarney, giving Amos the false

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impression that Blarney somehow could be persuaded to help Amos in his plight. The narrator reports: Whether Jet the spaniel, being a much more knowing dog than was suspected, wished to express his disapproval of the Countess’s last speech, as not accordant with his ideas of wisdom and veracity, I cannot say; but at this moment he jumped off her lap, and, turning his back upon her, placed one paw on the fender, and held the other up to warm, as if affecting to abstract himself from the current of conversation.13

Jet is given the “voice” of reason in this scene, indicating that the Countess Czerlaski is overstating her influence. If the reader has suspected that little will come of the Countess’s assertions, Jet’s reaction hammers the message home. Jet, then, reveals the “true” nature of the Countess: not only does she lie to Amos, her own dog literally turns his back on her. Despite this moment of silent truth-telling, Jet is his mistress’s dog first and foremost. He serves as an accessory (in both senses of the word), for whom she requires extravagances in a home where there is scarcely enough to feed the children. But even as an accessory and prop, Jet adds to the understanding of the Countess’s character and demonstrates how out of place she is in the Barton home. Jet is also the trigger that moves the action forward as the infuriated Nanny, who cannot stomach the Countess, finally explodes over “the nasty little blackamoor” (54) “whom she couldn’t a-bear to see made a fuss wi’ like a Christian” (53). This finally impels the Countess to move out of the Barton household.14 In The Mill on The Floss, Lucy Deane’s King Charles spaniel Minny fulfils similar functions. He appears primarily in Book Sixth, “The Great Temptation”, as a chaperone and distraction over which the young couples Lucy and Stephen and, later, Maggie and Stephen carry on flirtations. Like Jet, Minny is a lapdog whom the narrator uses to encourage certain views on the characters around him. In a climactic scene between Maggie and Stephen Guest, Minny is used to channel the passion that the young couple cannot express or act upon. There is obvious sexual tension between Maggie and Stephen, but being restricted by social conduct rules, they hardly dare look at each other, let alone speak. Instead, Maggie strokes Minny incessantly and keeps her eyes focused on the dog’s shiny coat. It is telling, however, that Minny, the coddled lapdog,

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rebuffs the caresses: “A pause: during which Minny is stroked again, but has sufficient insight not to be grateful for it – to growl rather” (406). Minny’s unhappiness with the situation is one of the warnings to the reader that all is not as it should be in this scene.15 Both Minny and Jet are pampered pets who convey information about the social standing of their mistresses. Their part in the narrative could have ended there. But Eliot has endowed these pet dogs with character; their non-worded commentary invites the reader to nuance his or her interpretations of characters and situations. Their mute responses mediated by the narrator, Minny and Jet act as means through which the narrator attempts to influence the reader’s understanding of the text. However, most dogs in Eliot’s novels are not cosseted spaniels with mistresses, but trusty companions with masters. In “Mr Gilfil’s Love Story”, Sir Christopher’s bloodhound Rupert takes a principal role in some critical scenes. Like Jet and Minny, Rupert serves to shed light on the characters around him. Unlike the two spaniels, however, Rupert’s role is that of eliciting sympathy. He does not growl or discreetly walk away from his master’s moral improprieties but instead showers Sir Christopher with affection. Rupert is the original likable dog, the inference being that anyone who is loved by such an uncorrupted companion must be good. Rupert is the first in a string of dogs in Eliot’s novels to be closely connected with his master and through whose eyes the reader is invited to view the characters associated with the canine focaliser and to sympathise with them on that basis. The most evident of these alliances is the one between Gyp, the shepherd-dog, and Adam Bede.

Adam Bede Of all canine characters in Eliot’s oeuvre, Gyp in Adam Bede has the most prominent role. His name is mentioned 43 times in the novel and he is introduced as early as the second paragraph. In fact, it is through Gyp that Adam is first “seen”. Unlike the silky-coated Minny and Jet, the cosseted spaniel, Gyp’s coat is rough and grey, and he is without a tail. Accordingly, Gyp lacks the primary physical instrument with which to show emotion; his connection to Adam’s difficulty in sharing his feelings is evident.16 Although there is a resemblance on the emotional plane, Gyp is Adam’s physical antithesis. With his six-foot frame, broad chest and muscular physique, Adam is described as a soldier, with arms “likely to win the prize for feats of strength” (6). In contrast, the rough-coated,

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tailless dog forms a pathetic image. His vulnerability, in the mere fact of being the subordinate creature and a stunted one at that, complements Adam’s strength. Even so, they are connected through mutual loyalty. The humans around Adam are not so lucky. Their weaknesses are reasons for Adam’s reproaches. Attempting to shield themselves from his criticism, both Lisbeth and Seth draw parallels between Gyp and his master. Trying to explain his brother’s behaviour, Seth says: “Nay, nay, Addy, thee mean’st me no unkindness, […] I know thee well enough. Thee’t like thy dog Gyp – thee bark’st at me sometimes, but thee allays lick’st my hand after” (10). And after Adam refuses to eat the supper she has prepared for him, his mother, Lisbeth, consoles herself by feeding his dog: “Lisbeth dared say no more; but she got up and called Gyp, thinking to console herself somewhat […] by feeding Adam’s dog with extra liberality” (42). On Adam’s different treatment of human and non-human family members, the narrator comments: “We are apt to be kinder to the brutes that love us than to the women that love us. Is it because the brutes are dumb?” (42). This comment hints at a gendered tension which is resumed in Chapter 17, “In Which the Story Pauses a Little” where the narrator identifies himself as an experienced man of the world. It could be argued that the comment serves as an instance where the male narrator and reader are bonded; women are regarded as “the other”, on the same level as “brutes”, and the recognition of their alleged tendency to be garrulous serves as a humorous element for those initiated in the joke.17 But it is also possible to read the comment as a general reflection on humanity. Seen in relation to Adam, it may be regarded as criticism of a character who lacks patience with his fellow human beings, considers himself superior and, not least, treats his dog more kindly than he does his mother. But what is additionally significant about this comment is that there is another dimension, a mutual recognition between narrator and reader: Gyp’s allegiance to his master, manifested in his “mental conflict” (42) which immediately softens Adam, offers an alternate perspective on Adam’s character and thereby adds to the complexity of his makeup. Accordingly, and in line with Eliot’s narratorial commentary, the comment may prompt a complex set of interpretations which serve to shift and shape the reader’s relation to the narrator as well as the reader’s understanding of Adam Bede’s character. Two important events in the novel are anticipated by Gyp: first he howls at an ill-omened rap on the door, and second, he barks at Arthur

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and Hetty when he finds them together. With regard to the rap on the door, Adam’s superstition conjures up images of a willow wand striking the door as a foreboding of imminent death. Indeed, in the same moment Gyp howls, Adam’s father Thias Bede lies dead in a ditch although Adam does not yet know it. In relation to the second event, Gyp’s revelation of Arthur and Hetty kissing in the woods marks the start of the public exposure of Hetty’s downfall which eventually ends in infanticide and transportation. Gyp’s howl and bark, hence, function as foreshadowings of these ensuing tragedies. Gyp’s reactions may be details in themselves, but, nonetheless, they encourage the reader’s alertness to the unfolding of events. The observant reader will notice that Gyp never accompanies Adam to Hall Farm to see Hetty, a further detail that marks the dog’s “sixth sense” and ability to distinguish “good” from “bad”.18 Additionally, Gyp significantly picks up on his master’s feelings towards Dinah; but he is not, at any point in the novel, seen together with Hetty apart from the scene mentioned above. Conversely, Gyp’s estimation of Dinah is unambiguous: The kind smile with which Adam uttered the last words was apparently decisive with Gyp of the light in which the stranger was to be regarded, and as she turned round after putting aside her sweeping-brush, he trotted towards her and put up his muzzle against her hand in a friendly way. “You see Gyp bids you welcome,” said Adam, “and he’s very slow to welcome strangers.”19

Similarly to Lucy Deane’s Minny, Gyp discreetly divulges non-worded opinions of characters and thereby affects reader response. Three bachelors in Adam Bede keep named dogs as close companions.20 Of these, it is the schoolmaster Bartle Massey who has the most complex relationship with his dog, the bitch Vixen. Massey, an ageing misogynist, claims that all women are good for is bearing children, and even that “they do in a poor make-shift way” (240). In an ironic twist of fate, Massey saves a dog from drowning, and only after the rescue does he realise that she is a bitch expecting pups. Though incessantly showering her with derogatory appellations on account of her sex, Massey clearly loves the dog.21 His constant references to her as a “woman” suggest that she fulfils a longing for companionship, and the narrator comments: “He always called Vixen a woman, and seemed to have lost all consciousness that he was using a figure of speech” (238). In reference

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to Massey’s housekeeping, the narrator remarks: “The table was as clean as if Vixen had been an excellent housewife in a checkered apron” (239). On discovering that Massey has been absent from church because of the pups, Adam exclaims: “Why, you’ve got a family, I see, Mr Massey?” (238). Massey’s communication with and about Vixen reveals qualities which help the reader perceive the complexity of his character. His references to the dog as a wench, sly hussy and “good-for nothing-woman” who “like the rest o’ the women— [is] always putting in your word before you know why” (241), troubling as they may be, are part of his humour. He maintains a comical contradictoriness, expressing criticisms against the female sex that are so unreasonable that they become comical and even more so when addressed to an innocent dog. Simultaneously, Massey’s care for Vixen, making certain she receives an abundant supper so she can feed the “babbies” and declaring, when she motions for him to come inside, “I must go in, must I? Ay, ay, I’m never to have a will o’ my own any more” (246), reveals a softer side of his character. In his communication with Vixen, the outwardly cantankerous man thus shows humane qualities. Brenda Ayres-Ricker notes another function of Vixen, one which refers not to Bartle Massey, but to Hetty Sorrel. Like Vixen, Hetty becomes pregnant and again, like Vixen who is almost drowned, Hetty near escapes death by water. Ayres-Ricker argues that Vixen serves to facilitate the reader’s understanding of what has gone on between Hetty and Arthur without any need to aggravate Victorian sensibilities.22 While I suspect that a Victorian readership would have been well able to imagine the nature of Hetty’s and Arthur’s encounters as well as Hetty’s plight even without parallels drawn to Vixen, there are obvious connections between Hetty and Vixen in terms of both character and fate. Additionally, and as Ayres-Ricker observes, the rhetoric Bartle Massey uses in relation to Vixen would be the type of language the Hayslope community would use in relation to Hetty, but about which Eliot cannot be explicit. However, the narrator’s (rather than Massey’s) characterization of Vixen is instructive: Vixen comes “creeping along the floor, wagging her tail, and hesitating at every other step” (237): she looks at Massey with a “keen sense of opprobrium” (238); she returns to her hamper “in humiliation” (241) and tucks “her tail between her legs” (246). Confronted by these expressions of shame and subjection

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projected onto a dog one cannot but feel sympathy—surely a deliberate strategy. By extension, I would suggest that sympathy is also elicited for Hetty in her similar shame and humiliation. The pregnant, almost drowned dog is Hetty’s canine counterpart and the narrator’s language of suppression and subjection has as much reference to Hetty as it has to Vixen. As with Lisbeth Bede who is relegated to the level of a dog in her domestic sphere, Hetty occupies the same outcast space as Vixen in the social hierarchy of Hayslope. Vixen is not the only dog with which Hetty is connected. In “The Journey of Hope” Hetty sets out, on foot, to find Arthur Donnithorne at Windsor. Having walked for days, she is overtaken by a wagon, but hesitates about hitching a ride. As the wagon draws close she sees, sitting on the front ledge, a small, shivering spaniel, and immediately feels less intimidated by the driver: “Hetty cared little for animals, as you know, but at this moment she felt as if the helpless timid creature had some fellowship with her, and without being quite aware as of the reason, she was less doubtful about speaking to the driver” (373). The kinship between Hetty and the little dog is plain. Beryl Gray notes that the suggested assumption of the driver’s harmlessness on the basis of the dog “underscore[s] [Hetty’s] own helplessness and vulnerability”.23 In this example, the function of the dog is to dispense sympathy in every direction. The driver is presumed to be sympathetic because of the dog; Hetty’s reflection on the lost dog serves to elicit the reader’s sympathy for her ordeal and the description of the spaniel’s “large timid eyes” and “trembling body” (373) serves to draw sympathy for the dog himself as well as to reduce the element of risk in the situation. Accordingly, the dog serves as an instrument on two narrative levels: reducing the element of risk within the diegetic world, and affecting response in the relation between text and reader. At one point, the lost, trembling spaniel on the wagon is foreshadowed when Arthur likens Hetty to a “bright-eyed spaniel with a thorn in her foot” (137). His only option is to soothe her suffering. In contrast, the Reverend Irwine compares Hetty to another type of canine, and warning Arthur not to associate too closely with her, he comments: “When I’ve made up my mind that I can’t afford to buy a tempting dog, I take no notice of him” (102). Thus, with regard to her association with dogs, depictions of Hetty move from and between the teasing bitch and the helpless puppy. All canine versions have the effect of nuancing

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the reader’s perception of her character through a sense of recognition, both in respect to the metaphorical dogs and in relation to “real”, albeit diegetic, ones.

The Mill on the Floss In The Mill on the Floss, the relationship between Tom Tulliver and his terrier Yap is much like the one between Adam and Gyp. Yap’s devotion to his master serves to nuance Tom’s less than cordial character. The power relations between the two are unbalanced and Yap, although not tailless, like Gyp, strikes a pathetic picture which is intensified when it is revealed that he has a lump in his throat. Naturally, the fact that this pitiable creature adores Tom affects the reader’s understanding of his character. Most significantly, however, Yap’s adoration for Tom reflects Maggie’s feelings towards her brother. The narrator comments: Her brother was the human being of whom she had been most afraid, from her childhood upwards: afraid with that fear which springs in us when we love one who is inexorable, unbending, unmodifiable – with a mind that we can never mould ourselves upon, and yet that we cannot endure to alienate from us.24

Inevitably, Maggie’s passionate nature will vex the “inexorable, unbending” Tom, as will the less than courageous Yap when he shirks from chasing rats: “‘Ugh! you coward!’ said Tom, and kicked him over, feeling humiliated as a sportsman to possess so poor-spirited an animal” (49). Neither Yap nor Maggie lives up to Tom’s standards, and as a result, he turns his back on them both. The emphasis Tom places on values such as duty and bravery in combination with the importance to him of pride and honour leaves him inescapably open to feelings of indignation. Duty and honour are as difficult for Maggie to abide by as they are for the fun-loving Yap, who lives by his instincts. In this sense, as well as in the constant pursuit of Tom’s approval, Yap is Maggie’s canine counterpart. The Mill on the Floss is intensely concerned with patriarchal conventions and the restrictions they place on women’s personal development. It constitutes a critique of women’s situation in the nineteenth century, and Maggie’s conflict between interior desire and exterior conventions certainly forms part of that criticism. Maggie is passionate and intelligent, but she has learned to suppress those qualities in a society that

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cannot accept unconventional brilliance in a woman. Hence, it is no coincidence that Yap and Maggie should be each other’s counterparts in relation to Tom, whose dedication to rigour and convention is relentless. “Maggie always writhed under this judgement of Tom’s: she rebelled and was humiliated in the same moment: it seemed as if he held a glass before her to show her her own folly and weakness […] and yet, all the while, she judged him in return” (393). The dog and the girl/woman are situated on the same level of subjection and can only appeal to Tom’s forgiveness for their failure to meet his expectations. Like Tom, Bob Jakin is followed everywhere by his canine companion. Unlike Yap, however, Mumps features in his master’s plans for the future and therefore plays a more important role in the understanding of Bob’s character than Yap does for Tom’s. Additionally, Mumps’ companionship is so vital to Bob that it is he, rather than the narrator, who forms a mouthpiece for the dog: He knows his company, Mumps does […] Lors, I talk to him by th’ hour together, when I’m walking i’ lone places, and if I’n done a bit o’ mischief, I allays tell him. I’n got no secrets but what Mumps knows ‘em.25

Hitherto in Eliot’s novels, all anthropomorphic interpretations have been suggested by the narrator. With regard to Mumps, however, there is a discursive shift, as the presentation of Mumps is channelled through Bob. Bob’s own words underscore the dog’s loyalty and friendship as well as Bob’s domestic situation. Although, Bob lives with his mother (and later forms a family of his own), his discourse in relation to the dog, continuously talking and discussing with his canine friend, highlights the sense of Bob and Mumps as a unit: Mumps fills a void in Bob’s life. Besides, Bob’s discourse in relation to the dog, the way in which he acts as a conduit for the dog’s preferences and feelings, strikes a humorous note which serves to elicit sympathy for a marginalised character who operates on the outskirts of society.26 Mrs. Glegg, who is herself likened to a mad dog at one point in the novel (125), also reluctantly falls for the charms of Mumps as channelled through Bob who, on their first encounter, comments: “It is wonderful how he [Mumps] knows which is the good-looking ladies – and’s partic’lar fond of ‘em when they’ve good shapes” (316). Bob gets away with this impudence precisely because it is channelled through the dog and thereby defused of its original impropriety.

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Middlemarch Despite the presence of a fair number of dogs in Middlemarch—Monk, Fly, Fag, Brownie, Blucher and Celia’s unnamed Maltese puppy—their roles in the narrative have less impact on characters and are less informative than in the earlier books in terms of the understanding of characters. Of the dogs mentioned above, it is the Maltese puppy which has come under most scrutiny in previous scholarship. It was first offered to Dorothea by the courting Sir James, but is rejected, and the reader learns that Dorothea does not agree with the breeding of “parasitic” pets (28), much preferring the companionship of animals such as Monk, Mr. Brooke’s Great St. Bernard, who has a “soul something like our own” (28). Nina Auerbach goes so far as to call Dorothea “dog-hating”.27 She claims that the narrator’s insistence that “[Dorothea] was always attentive to the feelings of dogs, and very polite if she had to decline their advances” (Middlemarch 366), despite having an aversion to pets, signifies little. Instead, it reveals a grandiose attitude on the part of Dorothea and comes across as “distant noblesse oblige”, especially compared to Mary Garth’s easy discourse with the little terrier Fly.28 Auerbach argues that Dorothea’s and Mary’s differing interchanges with animals, and in this case dogs, highlight the capacity for fellowship which Mary possesses and which Dorothea can only long for.29 The scene between Mary and Fly to which Auerbach refers is, in fact, the only passage in Middlemarch in which a character addresses a dog directly. Mary scolds the little terrier for intruding on her gardening: “Fly, Fly, I am ashamed of you […] This is not becoming in a sensible dog; anybody would think you were a silly young gentleman” (483). Her playful admonishing is overheard by the Reverend Farebrother, who has come to discuss Fred Vincy—if not a silly young gentleman then, at least, in Farebrother’s words, a man for whom “wisdom is not his strong point” (483). The easy interchange between Mary and Fly reveals more than Mary’s sensitive nature. Her rhetoric in relation to Fly mirrors her discourse with Fred Vincy, her childhood playmate turned suitor. When Fly is regarded as a stand-in for Fred, the scene becomes a love-triangle, with the secret admirer looking on as the object of his affections flirts with another. The function of Fly is twofold in that he brings out a lighthearted side to Mary’s character and restrains the potential intensity of the scene by acting as a substitute for Fred. In Middlemarch, Eliot perfects her skills in subtlety, and this scene forms an example of her deft touch.

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Chapter 39 is the only chapter in Middlemarch which features dogs as characters who respond to their surrounding situations. Mr. Brooke has taken himself to Mr. Dagley’s cottage to tell him of young Jacob’s poaching, but finds Mr. Dagley inebriated and in a cantankerous frame of mind. The two men fall into a confrontation, and their respective roles are reflected in their dogs. Mr. Dagley’s Fag pricks his ears, slouches and growls while Monk’s advances are “charitable” (371) and “dignified” (372). Only when Mr. Dagley strikes his fork into the ground does Monk bark, providing Mr. Brooke with an opportunity to quit the scene. Hence, the representation of the dogs reflects the attitude of their owners and accordingly serves to affect the reader’s understanding of Brooke and Dagley respectively. Additionally, Monk puts an end to the scene, thereby saving Mr. Brooke from further humiliation. As with Gyp, whose bark puts an end to Hetty’s and Arthur’s lovemaking, Monk’s bark defuses an intense situation which might have ended badly. In the last of Eliot’s novels, Daniel Deronda, named dogs appear less frequently, and only as characters in Chapter 12 mentioned above.30 Their function in this chapter is to underscore and foreshadow the degree of sadism that Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt is capable of. The chapter shows how Grandcourt seems to enjoy manipulating his dogs in a calculated fashion and how he has them kicked out when they react to his mind games. In a connected scene in the same, very short, chapter, Grandcourt announces that he will marry Gwendolen Harleth, rendering the foreshadowing elements of the preceding dog scene all the more pertinent. In Middlemarch, the narrator comments: “Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable” (23). The comment is a direct reference to Dorothea Brooke’s misinterpretation of Edward Casaubon’s spiritual greatness, but can be understood as representing a thematic dimension in all of Eliot’s fiction. In the context of Eliot’s dogs, the canine perspectives remind the reader of the possibility of alternate outlooks and interpretations. Much like Eliot’s scientific imagery which often serves to highlight the fickle nature of interpretation, the function of dogs in Eliot’s fiction serves to nuance and monitor the reader’s understanding of characters and events. Eliot’s dogs then, who “ask no questions [and] pass no criticisms”31 nonetheless, offer alternate perspectives prompting readers to continuously make new interpretations and to challenge fixed notions of what constitutes the “true” nature of characters, relations and events.

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Notes









1. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 283. 2. George Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, edited by Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–1978), III, 124–125. 3. The functions of dogs in Eliot’s fiction have been studied by several critics in the past, notably Beryl Gray, Linda K. Robertson, Brenda AyresRicker, and Keridiana W. Chez. However, most critics have focused on dogs in one or two novels rather than looking at a more extensive body of Eliot’s fiction. 4. See Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (London: Penguin, 1987). 5. Ivan Kreilkamp, “Petted Things: Wuthering Heights and the Animal,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no.1 (2005): 87. 6. Monica Flegel, Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture: Animality, Queer Relations and the Victorian Family (New York: Routledge, 2015), 14. 7. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 55. 8. Eliot, The George Eliot Letters, III, 111 (original emphases). 9. Brenda Ayres-Ricker, “Dogs in George Eliot’s Adam Bede,” The George Eliot, George Henry Lewes Newsletter, nos. 18/19 (1991): 29. 10. Barbara Hardy Beierl notes a similar phenomenon in “The Sympathetic Imagination and the Human—Animal Bond: Fostering Empathy Through Reading Imaginative Literature.” Anthrozoös 21, no. 3 (2008): 216. 11. Several scholars discuss the presence of pets and anthropomorphism in Victorian literature. See especially Monica Flegel, Ivan Kreilkamp and Kathleen Kete. 12. Commenting on Jet’s function in the narrative, Beryl Gray states that he is “invested with more character than the Countess’s brother, Mr Bridmain” in “Idlers and Collaborators,” special issue of The George Eliot Review (2009): 33. 13. George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, edited by Thomas A. Noble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 31. 14. Beryl Gray argues that the reader is invited not to blame Jet for the situation, but rather to regard him as an “opportunistic individual of some charm” (33). However, the reader is also invited to see the sense in Nanny’s arguments. In fact, Nanny speaks what many readers will have thought for many pages leading up to the climactic scene. As with every spoilt child, the adult knows that it is not the child’s fault that he or she is spoilt, but such knowledge does not make it easier to like them. 15.  For a discussion of Minny’s role in “courtship rituals,” see Georges Letissier, “From Dog Alterity to Canine Sublime: A Cross-Century

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Reading of Victorian Fiction,” Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens, no. 85 (2017): 5. 16. See James Eli Adams, “Gyp’s Tale: On Sympathy, Silence and Realism in Adam Bede,” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 20 (1991): 227–242. 17. The specification of the narrator’s identity and gender as masculine was abandoned with the later novels, once Eliot’s cover had been revealed. 18.  Brenda Ayres-Ricker argues that Gyp represents the good people of Hayslope (25). Although she does not go so far as to claim that Gyp serves as an emblem for the moral consensus of the good people of Hayslope, I think that this could very well be argued in relation to Adam’s interest in Hetty. 19. George Eliot, Adam Bede, 118. 20. Apart from Adam and Gyp and Bartle Massey and Vixen, there is the Reverend Irwine who keeps a pug and a brown setter (Juno) who has pups. 21.  See Monica Flegel and Keridiana W. Chez for extensive readings of Massey and Vixen. 22. Brenda Ayres-Ricker, “Dogs in George Eliot’s Adam Bede,” 23. 23. Beryl Gray, “George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and Dogs,” The George Eliot Review, no. 33 (2002): 55. 24. Eliot, The Mill, 483. 25. Eliot, The Mill, 284. 26. For more on Bob’s marginalisation, see Georges Letissier. 27. Nina Auerbach, “Dorothea’s Lost Dog,” Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century (2006): 89. 28. Auerbach, “Dorothea’s Lost Dog,” 89. 29. Auerbach, “Dorothea’s Lost Dog,” 90. 30. Barbara Hardy spots the extensive occurrence of animal imagery in Daniel Deronda and points especially to a “silent struggle in imagery” between Grandcourt and Gwendolen relating to horses (“Imagery in GE’s Novels,” 13). 31. Eliot, Scenes, 116.

Bibliography Adams, James Eli. “Gyp’s Tale: On Sympathy, Silence and Realism in Adam Bede.” Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 20 (1991): 227–242. Auerbach, Nina. “Dorothea’s Lost Dog.” In Middlemarch in the 21st Century, edited by Karen Chase. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Ayres-Ricker, Brenda. “Dogs in George Eliot’s Adam Bede.” The George Eliot, George Henry Lewes Newsletter, nos. 18/19 (1991): 22–30.

228  S. HÅKANSSON Beierl, Barbara Hardy. “The Sympathetic Imagination and the Human-Animal Bond: Fostering Empathy Through Reading Imaginative Literature.” Anthrozoös 21, no. 3 (2008): 213–220. Chez, Keridiana W. Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017. Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Edited by Gordon Sherman Haight. 9 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, vols. 1–3, 1954; 4–7, 1955; 8–9, 1978. ———. Daniel Deronda. Edited by Graham Handley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988a. ———. Scenes of Clerical Life. Edited by Thomas A. Noble. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988b. ———. Adam Bede. Edited by Valentine Cunningham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996a. ———. The Mill on the Floss. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996b. ———. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. Edited by David Carroll. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Feuerstein, Anna. “The Realism of Animal Life: The Seashore, Adam Bede, and George Eliot’s Animal Alterity.” Victorians Institute Journal, no. 44 (2016): 29–55. Flegel, Monica. Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture: Animality, Queer Relations and the Victorian Family. New York: Routledge, 2015. Gray, Beryl. “George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and Dogs.” The George Eliot Review, no. 33 (2002): 51–63. ———. “Idlers and Collaborators: Enter the Dog.” The George Eliot Review, special issue (2009): 25–35. Hardy, Barbara. “Imagery in George Eliot’s Last Novels.” The Modern Language Review 50, no. 1 (1955): 6–14. Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Pet-keeping in Nineteenth Century Paris. Berkley: University of California Press, 1994. Kreilkamp, Ivan. “Petted Things: Wuthering Heights and the Animal.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18, no. 1 (2005): 87–110. Letissier, Georges. “From Dog Alterity to Canine Sublime: A Cross-Century Reading of Victorian Fiction.” Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens, no. 85 (2017): 1–12. Levine, George. “The Heartbeat of the Squirrel.” In Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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Richardson, Angelique. “George Eliot, G.H. Lewes, and Darwin: Animals, Emotions and Morals.” In After Darwin: Animals, Emotions and the Mind. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2013. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. London: Penguin, 1987. Robertson, Linda K. “Horses and Hounds: The Importance of Animals in The Mill on the Floss.” The George Eliot Review, no. 26 (1995): 61–63.

CHAPTER 11

The Ambivalence of Water in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) Odile Boucher-Rivalain

No Victorian work of fiction bears a clearer testimony in its title to the function of water in its narrative than George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss in which the river achieves the status of an emblematic character. The story takes place in the transition period between the age with a dominant rural activity and the new industrial age with its expanding urban landscape of the 1820s. Since George Eliot had conceived her story around the central presence of the River Floss, she meant to feed it on her sense of observation, so central in her theory of the art of fiction, as well as the on importance of feelings to enlarge the readers’ moral sense which she had made the overall principle of her fiction, acknowledging in one of her early reviews in 1856: “The fundamental principles of all just thought and beautiful action or creation are the same […] widening our sympathy and deepening the basis of our tolerance and charity.”1 Beyond the many descriptive details of the river contributing both to the atmosphere of some of the scenes and to its economic function, Eliot makes it a metaphor for the flow of life, smooth and gentle at

O. Boucher-Rivalain (*)  University de Cergy-Pontoise, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_11

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times, violent and destructive at other times: the threat of the river flooding which will prove to be a reality at the end is used as a metaphor for moral danger which affects the heroine’s life. The tragic death of Maggie Tulliver and her brother’s death can, however, be argued to be a representation of moral redemption for both characters beyond their physical destruction.

The Ambiguity of the River Floss In accordance with the emblematic status of the river, Chapter 1 opens on the narrator’s evocation of the landscape “Outside Dorlcote Mill”: “A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace” (I, ch.1, 7).2 The opening sentence contains no fewer than three references to water with the river Floss, the tide and the sea, climaxing with the personification of the Floss itself with the use of “embrace” applied to water, being thus endowed with human feelings. The river is thus personified and given the role of a companion to the narrator which can be seen as a proleptic image of Maggie Tulliver’s fascination for the river: “How lovely the little river is, with its dark, changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank and listen to its low placid voice, as to the voice of one who is deaf and loving” (Book I, ch.1, 7). Thus, the role given to the river as the narrator’s companion foreshadows the continuous presence of the Floss in the scenic backdrop from the opening of the novel to its final tragic episode. This initial description of the scenery will be echoed halfway through the novel when the reader is reminded of the key function of the river as a vital element located on a: “…rich plain where the great river flows for ever onward, and links the small pulse of the old English town with the beatings of the world’s mighty heart” (Book IV, ch.1, 272). The reader is immediately given the key to the ambiguous role to be played by water in the narrative, both benevolent (“loving tide,” “embrace”) and dangerous (“checks its passage”) and later on compared to “a hungry monster.” The narrator’s specific description of the wide plain with the small town of St. Ogg’s lying on the banks of the river is to be the one of an acute observer, standing on a bridge, looking at the surrounding landscape, combined with a strong emotional

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response made visible in the personification device with the narrator in love with the river itself: “I am in love with moistness and envy the white ducks that are dipping their heads far into the water among the withes […]” (8). This is also combined with the vision of a dream-like nature due not only to the peaceful atmosphere of the scene but also to the noise made by the repetitive movement of the wheel of the mill as if it were a lullaby soothing her and sending her to a dream-like state: “The rush of the water, and the booming of the mill bring a dreamy deafness, which seems to heighten the peacefulness of the scene” (8). The question can reasonably be asked: is the description that the reader has been given of the river and its environment the reflection of the reality or the result of the narrator’s daydream? This scene and other scenes to come can be seen as a justification of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s theory analysed in L’eau et les rêves (1942) in which he declared: “Imagination usually works in the direction of joy, of shapes and colours, of varieties and metamorphoses, of the transformation of the surface.”3 Isn’t the narrator in this scene fascinated by the river which led her to dream and create the story which will be revealed to the reader in the following chapters? Bachelard states further that nature and dream are tightly dependent upon each other: “Before being a conscious manifestation any landscape is a dream-like experience. One looks with a genuine aesthetic passion only those landscapes first seen in dreams.”4 George Eliot’s depiction of Maggie’s fascination for the river matches Bachelard’s remark that “water is more feminine and uniform than fire.”5 The duality dream vs. reality, past vs. present, conscious vs. unconscious, will indeed be omnipresent in the novel focusing on Maggie’s conflicts between her desires and the reality of human existence. The end of the chapter reveals that the narrator has been half asleep in an armchair transported back into the past: “… the bridge in front of Dorlcote Mill as it looked one February afternoon many years ago” (I, ch.1, 9). The flow of water can be seen not only as inducing a dream-like state but also as a poetical image of the flow of life from the present to an unknown future which is in itself an image of the unknown self that is to be unveiled and revealed, according to Bachelard: “Water flowing, taking life further along.”6 The novel will relate Maggie’s life in childhood and youth as a series of conflicts in which the River Floss will play a major role. The notion of danger associated with water is also presented explicitly in the opening chapter in a number of childhood episodes. Maggie’s

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magnet-like attraction to water takes her out wandering along the river banks, unconscious of time passing, causing her mother to worry about her wild-tempered daughter: “I don’t know where she is now, an’ it’s pretty nigh tea-time. Ah, I thought so—wanderin’ up an’ down by the water, like a wild thing: she’ll tumble in some day” (I, ch.2, 12). or later on the mother lamenting to herself, “They’re such children for the water, mine are,” she said aloud, without reflecting that there was no one to hear her; “they’ll be brought in dead and drowned some day. I wish that river was far enough” (I, ch.10, 103). Mrs. Tulliver’s prophecy is interestingly based on the combination of the danger represented by the proximity of the river with Maggie’s constant daydreaming and imaginative nature disconnecting her from the reality: “[… ] I’m sure the child’s half an idiot i’ some things; for if I send her upstairs to fetch anything, she forgets what she’s gone for, [ …]” (I, ch.2, 13). This obsessive fear rings out to the reader’s ear as a proleptic warning. Brother and sister’s occupations in childhood have much to do with water, presented not so much as a source of risks but of conflicts. An example of this occurs when both children had agreed to go fishing but this pleasurable activity is cancelled at the last minute due to Tom’s irritation at his sister having failed to feed the rabbits during his absence from home, thus causing their death, which appears as another prolepsis to their much more serious conflicts in adulthood causing their estrangement. These childhood scenes anticipating the danger of water, in both a realistic and a symbolical sense, announce the role that water is due to play in the family conflicts.

The River as a Metaphor for Human Life Maggie’s attraction to water associated with her imaginative nature does not only manifest itself in her wandering along the river or sitting by the pool, but also in her reading stories in which water is present as a natural element. Her active imagination takes delight in fantastic stories such as Defoe’s History of the Devil which her father gave her ignorant of its inadequate content for a little girl: “It’s a dreadful picture, isn’t it? But I can’t help looking at it. That old woman’s in the water’s a witch—they’ve put her in to find out whether she’s a witch or no, and if she swims she’s a witch, and if she’s drowned—and killed, you know—she’s innocent, and not a witch, but only a poor silly woman” (Book I, ch.3, 18). The

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reader is invited to bear this childish pronouncement in mind until the final chapter when Maggie is drowned in the flood, proleptically declared to be free from evil intentions or deeds, “not a witch” (18). Here again, the narrator works as a guide to the reader along the meandering flow of the river that the narrative itself represents. Maggie herself had certainly been as fascinated as the reader on hearing the local legend of St. Ogg (Book I, ch.12), the boatman who in remote times ferried a poor woman and her child across the river in a storm: on stepping ashore, the woman was transfigured into a sanctified being: “[…] her rags were turned into robes of flying white, and her face became bright with exceeding beauty, and there was a glory around it, so that she shed a light on the water like the moon in its brightness” (116). The woman ferried across the river by Ogg is first described as “a foolish woman” for taking such risks: Ogg overlooks the woman’s foolishness by generously responding to her desire: “I will ferry thee across: it is enough that thy heart needs it” (116). Nature is seen here in its violent and destructive force, and yet man can overcome its danger by adopting essential human values: sympathy and solidarity. By referring quite early on in the novel to the importance of generosity, compassion and help George Eliot foreshadows the final episode. I, therefore, propose to read the legend of St. Ogg as a proleptic vision of Maggie’s final purification and Tom’s reconciliation with his sister through death in the river Floss as a counterpoint to Maggie’s human frailty, as George Eliot no doubt meant it to be. The very legend of St. Ogg haunts Maggie in her dream as she lets Stephen Guest steer the boat down the river, and in her dream she sees her cousin Lucy as the Virgin Mary and herself as the sinner (Book VI, ch.14, 470).7 I would argue further that Ogg, the boatman, could also represent Tom Tulliver who sees himself as another Noah who saved God’s creatures from the flood when he declares to his friend Bob Jakin in one of his many proud childish confidences: “When I am a man, I shall make a boat with a wooden house on top of it, like Noah’s ark, and keep plenty of things in it—rabbits and things, all ready. And if the flood came, you know, Bob, I shouldn’t mind . … And I’d take you in, if I saw you swimming” (Book I, ch.6, 50). In fact, this proleptic vision will turn out to be reversed as Maggie will be the boatman coming to her brother’s rescue: gender roles will be reversed signifying Maggie’s transformation from her role as the sinful victim condemned by her own brother into a redeemed figure attempting to rescue her censor.

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Maggie’s Symbolical Drift into Temptation Given the disastrous situation of financial ruin affecting her family, Maggie sought comfort in nourishing her inner life through the reading of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, the medieval monk advocating self-renunciation as the surest way to both human happiness and salvation. Bringing her emotional life into conformity with this philosophy of self-denial, she endangers her own inner life. Her determination to effect this self-denial in a radical way made her give up the only source of friendship left in the person of Philip Wakem, the son of Lawyer Wakem, Mr. Tulliver’s landlord and personal enemy. Their secret meetings in the Red Deeps, a name emblematic of the depth of both characters’ mutual feelings, come to an end as the climax of Maggie’s misleading conviction that happiness is to be found in self-denial: “She had a moment of real happiness then—a moment of belief that, if there were sacrifices in this love, it was all the richer and more satisfying” (Book V, ch.4, 337). Meanwhile, as the river was flowing along its natural course towards the sea, Maggie went on living an unnatural life obeying principles which were contrary to her own nature. The natural flow of the river is thus opposed to Maggie’s stagnation from which she will be released by her cousin Lucy’s invitation to break away from too long a period of isolation and self-denial. Visiting the Deane family in their middle-class home, Maggie is transported into a radically different mode of living, the narrator skillfully letting the reader share Maggie’s subtle pleasure: “The well-furnished drawing-room, with the open grand piano and the pleasant outlook down a sloping garden to a boat house by the side of the Floss is Mr Dean’s” (Book VI, ch.1, 341). Lucy Deane and her rich, handsome suitor, Stephen Guest, are at that moment going through a very enviable, happy period of courtship, which created an atmosphere liable to let Maggie be tempted away from her long period of selfimposed renunciation. The proximity of the river signals this temptation at the opening of Book VI entitled “The Great Temptation.” The danger awaiting Maggie, as the result of her unnatural drift to self-denial, is clearly stated by the narrator: “Her future was likely to be worse than her past, after two years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing” (Book VI, ch.2, 374). Stephen’s invitation to

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a boat ride follows a musical interlude during which Stephen Guest was struck by Maggie’s enticing beauty: “For one instant Stephen could not conceal his astonishment at the sight of this tall, dark-eyed nymph with her jet-black coronet of hair; the next, Maggie felt herself, for the first time in her life, receiving the tribute of a very deep blush and a very deep bow from a person towards whom she herself was conscious of timidity. This new experience was very agreeable to her—so agreeable, that it almost effaced her previous emotion about Philip” (Book VI, ch.2, 376). Following this immediate surge of reciprocal attraction, Stephen’s invitation to a boat-ride is not as innocent as it may sound given that the seducing effect of the nymph has been immediate. Concerning Maggie’s reaction, the reader is left with two possible interpretations: either Maggie’s willpower has been exhausted by the long period of self-denial and can no longer be active when the temptation comes upon her, or she lets herself be convinced by what could appear as an innocent moment of leisure. Whatever the reader’s interpretation may be, Maggie appears as a victim, either of the self-denial she had embraced consciously and naïvely, or victim of her blindness to the reality of Stephen Guest’s intention. When Stephen oversteps the limits of the expedition as originally planned, the current having carried them along, this turns Maggie into a totally passive being as if the current had drowned her moral conscience. It is too late, the deed is done, and when her conscience is restored to her, she realizes the sinful position she is in: Stephen ought not to have left Lucy behind to enjoy Maggie’s company, Maggie herself ought not to have deserted Philip Wakem. Stephen’s moral conscience never returns since he does his utmost to convince her that it is impossible to return to St. Ogg’s without being married to her: social conventions banish moral science and his stratagem has taken him to his desirable objective, renouncing Lucy to satisfy his love at first sight compulsive desire. The river has by then lost its nurturing capacity to become the liquid poison that has annihilated Maggie’s moral conscience for some time. Maggie’s sudden awareness of having drifted into sin gives way to her decision to return to her own identity, self-sacrificing Maggie Tulliver for the sake of her attachment to her family. The apple as the symbol of temptation leading to evil in the Garden of Eden has here been replaced by the current of the river, emphasizing the duality of water, which, like any other natural element, can be used for good or for evil.

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The River Passes Its Judgment The ambivalent vision of the river is in keeping with the atmosphere of self-doubt, instability and failure in the novel. Like nature’s destructive power, as shown in the final episode with the Floss inundating the land and creating havoc, many experiences in the characters’ lives are shown to be destructive of their original hopes. Even if disappointment, disillusion and renunciation are the ultimate feelings of all the characters in the novel, let us consider the final episode of the flood as the inevitable outcome of Maggie’s tumultuous life. The narrator had clearly pointed out to the reader that, observing Maggie, “one had a sense of oppressing elements, of which a fierce collision is imminent” (299). Her secret meetings with Philip Wakem, prohibited by Tom who intends to rule over his sister’s life, are ominous of a dramatic sequence. The very name of their meeting-place, the Red Deeps, together with the overpowering presence of the “group of Scotch firs” (Book V, ch.1, 299; Book V, ch.4, 332) suggests the loss of a harmonious and protective natural environment. The benevolent nature of the childhood episodes has been replaced by an overpowering element hostile to man since the supposedly secret meetings will eventually have to be revealed to Tom. Just like the many collisions between individuals and families produce confrontations through diverging interests, nature will turn out to release its destructive force. The sudden violence of Nature shown in the flood is thus emblematic of human conflicts entailing separations, often long-lasting break-ups. The characters’ inability to conduct harmonious social relationships, to live in peace with themselves and their community, is symbolized in the destructive episode of the flood. Maggie is featured as a soul adrift. As Jenny Uglow sees it: “In many ways the new generation has been set adrift: Stephen is out of place on the wharf, Philip uncomfortable in the lawyer’s office—what will their future be?”8 The flood occurs while Maggie lives in exile away from the mill and her mother and brother, after being banned from her family and her social community, her own choices being at odds with the conventional expectations of Victorian society for women. The banished female figure is a recurrent image of the fallen woman in Victorian novels symbolically associated with water; such is the fate of Martha Endell in Dickens’s novel David Copperfield (1850), who expresses her feelings of inferiority and shame, not through words, but through tears; her watery eyes being expressive of her feelings due to her

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incapacity to express herself. In Chapter 47, she is described as having found refuge in a poor district in East London and ready to commit suicide by drowning herself in the River Thames. Water is represented in this scene as a source of liberation from a life which has nothing positive to offer and not as a nourishing source of vitality. Wilkie Collins’ novel The Moonstone (1868) depicts the character of Limping Lucy, a fisherman’s daughter, an outcast not due to any moral sin but to her physical handicap making her an undesirable and unmarriageable poor woman. She is seen walking on the seashore in search of some clue to the enigma of the secret hidden in the Shivering Sands which keep the secret of Rosanna Spearman‘s death linked to the mystery of the Moonstone. The tide can either retain a secret forever or deliver it. The duality present in the power of water is thereby pinpointed. The flood episode in Book VII entitled “The Final Rescue” takes Maggie’s evolution in life to a tragic end. As Allan Bellringer has rightly said, “… her destructive tendency to renunciation and her emotional impulses make her vulnerable to misfortune, liable to misfortune but not predestined.”9 The flood occurs at the time of Maggie’s banishment and exile after her refusal of Stephen Guest’s marriage proposal to redeem the fault of their elopement. She takes full responsibility of her lapse in a proleptic admission to Philip Wakem: “I do always think too much of my own feelings, and not enough of others’, and not enough of yours” (Book VI, ch.7, 413). The flood has been unpredictable and takes the inhabitants of St. Ogg’s by surprise in spite of the warnings they had heard from their elders. Thus, the dangerous flood symbolizes the unexpected risks taken or encountered in any human life of life. It takes Maggie by surprise at a time of inner restlessness and the absence of any positive vision. The final episode of the flood in the novel serves to confirm the prediction that the river Floss is liable to dangerous flood episodes and to give an instance of human power to find solutions to adversity. After Tom has paid back the family’s debts and has become the rightful owner of the mill which had been in the hands of the Tulliver family for five generations, order seems to be restored. Yet, nature will make itself heard and the flood is associated with the notion of revenge and anger: Tom is an angry master just as his father had been before him, having made his son swear on the Bible that he would get the mill back from his enemy, Lawyer Wakem. Tom’s anger is now inflicted upon his sister for the dishonour she has brought upon the family. His treatment is unlike

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the generosity that his father who, “with the good fibre he had in him” (I, ch.8, 77) had lavished upon his sister in times of need. Tom’s inflexibility, the inadequacy of his superior and unforgiving attitude to his sister all along, his narrow-mindedness, are the objects of Maggie’s final reproach to him: “You have no pity: you have no sense of your own imperfection and your own sins. It is a sin to be hard; it is not fitting for a mortal—for a Christian. […] You have not a vision of feelings by the side of which your shining virtues are mere darkness” (Book V, ch.5, 347). With the imminent danger caused by the overflowing river, a sudden reversal is caused, exemplified by Maggie’s immediate decision to row down the river to the mill to rescue her mother and Tom where they are trapped. The immediacy of the decision contrasts with the slow rhythm of Books IV and V, set in the context of her self-renunciation and isolation. The flood with its sudden destructive force has, as its first effect, to bring Maggie back to life as she obeys the interior compulsion of risking her own life to save her brother from drowning. The fast rhythm in the rapid succession of events, embarking on a fragile boat and rowing frantically to the mill, the Tullivers’ focal point of old, emphasizes the tragic tone of the scene: “The whole thing had been so rapid—so dreamlike—that the threads of ordinary association were broken” (Book VII, ch.5, 517). “In the first moments Maggie felt nothing, thought of nothing, but that she had suddenly passed away from that life which she had been dreading: it was the transition of death, without its agony—and she was alone in the darkness with God” (ibid.). Maggie’s decision is thus prompted by her natural affections and attachment to her family, regardless of their past respective behaviour. Her risky undertaking has fatal consequences. Death is the price to be paid, confirming the repeated references to death by drowning in dangerous waters: the characters cannot control an environment which they cannot understand in “this puzzling world” (Book I, ch.13, 129). A sense of uncertainty and insecurity has prevailed all along the novel, and the course of human life is seen by George Eliot as comparable to “an unmapped river: we only know that the river is full and rapid, and that for all rivers there is the same final home” (Book VI, ch.6, 402). Death will not engulf Maggie before she has experienced reconciliation with her brother: it is paradoxically the destructive force of the river which permits this epiphany: Maggie risks her life for her brother in a Christ-like sacrifice and for Tom who,

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unexpectedly after years of domination and months of condemnation of his sister, is moved to the quick by Maggie’s generosity. From the tragedy clearly announced through the force of the water destroying trees, bridges, houses on its way, the revelation of Tom’s capacity to eventually understand his sister transforms the tragedy into a moment of bliss: his intelligence which had, all his life long, been non-receptive to any understanding beside his own limited vision opens now to the awareness of Maggie’s true nature: “It came with so overpowering a force- it was such a new revelation to his spirit, of the depths in life that had lain beyond his vision, which he had fancied so keen and clear—that he was unable to ask a question” (Book VII, ch. 5, 520). The close embrace of brother and sister united in death, ending a life made of tumultuous conflicts, is set within the context of destructive natural forces to focus on the brother–sister relationship encapsulating the very essence of human emotions. This ending is thus the final manifestation of the inadequacy of the human environment of St. Ogg’s given the heroine’s superior aspirations: the family unit represents the germ of social reconciliation which George Eliot emphasizes in the final lines with a hindsight to the five years that have elapsed since the flood: “Nature repairs her ravages—repairs them with her sunshine, and with human labour. The desolation wrought by that flood, had left little visible trace on the face of the earth, five years after” (Conclusion, 521). Bachelard saw water as an image of purity and redemption in the Biblical tradition: “Water presents itself as a natural symbol for purity.”10 Maggie achieves through her self-sacrifice the highest possible manifestation of human perfection and dies in this state of accomplishment. Far from what contemporary critics had considered as an artificial outcome, arguing that George Eliot had come to a deadlock in her narrative, one can read in Maggie’s heroic death the self-fulfilment she had missed by making the error of following Thomas à Kempis’s lesson of self-denial. Had her life continued, it would have been doomed in a society where egotism, competition, conflicts and rivalries prevailed and in which Maggie’s intelligence and generosity could find no fertile ground to develop and thrive. The novelist had assured that the aim of the novel was “to show the conflict which is going on everywhere when the younger generation with its higher culture comes into collision with the older, and in which … so many young hearts shipwreck far worse than Maggie.”11

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Conclusion The water motif in the novel goes through an inversion of its meaning in the novel. From the gentle and dream-conducive element in the opening chapter and playground of the Tulliver children, it turns into a furious flood causing death and destruction in the final episode, but death accompanied by redemption and rebirth as the destruction of all natural elements and man-made items is shown to have given way to a cyclical process, that is, the renewal of nature and the recreation of human works. The biblical image of the ark saving Noah and his family from the flood and symbolizing God’s loving protection of his creatures makes the flood drowning the two young heroic characters braving the force of nature the instrument of their redemption in death. Death is thus to be understood, beyond the tragic event of two young lives being cut short, as redemption from the conflictual human relations which are overcome bringing back the brotherly and sisterly affection of old as George Eliot’s plan to extend our sympathies to all characters: So far as my own feeling and intention is concerned, no one class of persons or form of character is held up to reprobation or to exclusive admiration. Tom is painted with as much love and pity as Maggie, … .”12

Notes





1. George Eliot, “Ruskin’s Modern Painters III,” Westminster Review 65, (April 1856), 626. 2. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, edited by Gordon S. Haight (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1996). All quotations are taken from this edition. 3. « L’imagination travaille plus généralement où va la joie, dans le sens des formes et des couleurs, dans le sens des variétés et des métamorphoses, dans un sens d’avenir de la surface. » Gaston Bachelard, L’eau et les rêves (Paris: José Corti, 1942), 2–3. 4. Ibid., 6 « Avant d’être un spectacle conscient tout paysage est une expérience onirique. On ne regarde avec une passion esthétique que les paysages qu’on a d’abord vus en rêve. » 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 7 « … l’eau s’offre comme un élément plus féminin et uniforme que le feu. »

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7. See in Alain Jumeau, The Mill on the Floss (Paris: Armand Colin, 2002), 95. 8. Jenny Uglow, George Eliot (London: Virago Press, 1987), ch. 8. “The Mill on the Floss: The Search for a Key,” 139. 9. Allan Bellringer, George Eliot (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1993), 54. 10. Gaston Bachelard, “L’eau s’offre comme le symbole naturel de la pureté.” Ibid., 20. 11. Gordon Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1954–1978), vol. 8, 465. 12.  Ibid., vol. 3, 229. Quoted by G. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 328.

Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. L’eau et les rêves. Paris: Joseph Corti, 1942. Bellringer, Allan. George Eliot. Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1993. Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1996. All quotations are taken from this edition. Haight, Gordon, ed. George Eliot: A Biography. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1968. ———. The George Eliot Letters. 9 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1954–1978. Uglow, Jenny. George Eliot. London: Virago Press, 1987.

PART V

Gender Studies and Feminism

CHAPTER 12

Hints of Same-Sex Attraction and Transgender Traits in George Eliot’s Characters Constance M. Fulmer

A surprising number of critics have suggested that some of George Eliot’s characters—both men and women—are sexually attracted to individuals of the same sex. And a number of her characters have been identified as having transgender traits. One of the most intriguing things about this is that the characters cited tend to be the characters who are either her very best or very worst in the degree to which they exemplify the principles which define her moral philosophy. For e­xample, the relationship between Daniel Deronda and Mordecai is the one most frequently mentioned as having homosexual overtones; however, they are definitely morally “good”—and clearly receive George Eliot’s stamp of moral approval. On the other hand, Tito Melema in Romola and Henleigh Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda also portray homosexual tendencies, but, without a doubt, George Eliot considers both of them to be morally “bad.”

C. M. Fulmer (*)  Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_12

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What do I mean by morally “good” and morally “bad”? As I understand George Eliot’s moral philosophy, there are two basic principles which she called Solidarity or sympathetic understanding and Continuity which involves both an appreciation of the past and a commitment to leaving a lasting legacy for posterity.1 In their relationship, Daniel Deronda and Mordecai reach out to one another in ways that suggest intimacy and physical contact as well as the emotional closeness which defines sympathetic understanding. By way of contrast, George Eliot’s characters who demonstrate a lack of a sense of Solidarity are characterized by egotism, self-centeredness, and selfishness as are Tito Melema in Romola and Henleigh Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda. These same relationships also epitomize either a strong commitment or a complete lack of commitment both to generations past and generations to come; for example, Tito betrays his father and Romola’s father and has neither respect for the past or a sense of responsibility to his children or his legacy. On the other end of the moral spectrum, Daniel Deronda gladly and enthusiastically assumes his Jewish heritage and devotes his life to carrying out Mordecai’s mission. The moral maturity of all of her characters may be measured by where they are on this spectrum of “goodness” and “badness” by the degree to which they manifest Solidarity and Continuity. Ironically, not only Deronda and Mordecai, Tito, and Grandcourt but also the other examples of same-sex couples which I will discuss are at the opposite extremes of George Eliot’s moral spectrum. It is interesting to speculate whether this is a characteristic of George Eliot’s moral philosophy or an indication of an inherent conflict in her personal view of same-sex relationships and transgender traits. In 1881, soon after George Eliot died, Edith Simcox characterized George Eliot as taking the position that no one moral principle applies in every case and that each situation has a “right” of its own as well as a “wrong” of its own.2 This principle would also apply to George Eliot’s depiction of relationships and gender roles. It is interesting to consider the possible moral implications for a woman who is an expert at handling paradoxes of all kinds—particularly moral paradoxes. For example, there is the paradox of George Eliot’s being an avowed atheist who fervently preaches morality in everything she writes and whose characters are all experiencing moral growth or decline. Also, while she is herself living in an adulterous relationship, George Eliot requires the vast majority of her heroines to marry. And in the context of these paradoxes, it is appropriate to think of Dorothea and what a disappointment she and all

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of George Eliot’s women characters have been to feminists.3 And it is compelling to ponder the question of why George Eliot so adamantly condemned the idea of same-sex attraction as recorded in Edith Simcox’s personal journal and yet provides hints of approving of it in her most morally mature characters.4 It is also interesting to note the fact that George Eliot was so well-informed about homosexuality and androgyny. Nancy Henry’s exhaustive study validates Eliot’s familiarity with the homosexual culture in Renaissance Florence, which was “characterized by the idea of love between males and the practice of sex between males.”5 She makes it clear that, while George Eliot does not use words such as pederasty and sodomy or even the word homosexuality, “sex between males is everywhere in Romola.”6 Henry establishes the fact that the hints of homosexuality in George Eliot’s depiction of Tito are deliberate. George Eliot uses this aspect of the historical circumstances to emphasize Tito’s Narcissism, selfishness, and egotism. He obviously uses homosexuality to advance himself and is the most obviously morally transgressive of George Eliot’s characters. He has no conscience and blatantly uses his good looks and sexual charm to win personal and political favor for himself. Henry suggests that George Eliot did not necessarily want readers to think of Tito as sexually involved with Nello, Pucci, Spini, or any other specific character.7 But her point is that Eliot was deliberately placing Tito in an environment that accurately depicts both the prevalence of sodomy and the Christian backlash against it. Tito’s flirtatious and insinuating relations with these men are played out in a climate of homoeroticism, homosexuality, and sodomy, which contributes to Eliot’s portrayal of Tito as the epitome of what George Eliot considered to be morally depraved. Even if George Eliot did not want to portray Tito as being sexually involved with Nello, Pucci, or Spini, she creates an air of suspicion about them that implies same-sex attraction by taking advantage of this prevailing climate which Nancy Henry describes. Nello is the barber who introduces Tito to Florence, and his shop provides a convenient meeting and gathering place for all of the people in Tito’s world. Nello plays with Tito’s curls (130) and obviously adores him; in one of the scenes in the barber shop which involves flirtation and political intrigue, Nello refers to Tito as “the handsomest scholar in the world” as he “looks at himself tragically in the hand-mirror” (97). In many ways, including their ability to manipulate others, Nello and Tito are mirror images of one another. In his illustration for this scene Frederic Leighton captures Tito’s

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effeminacy and egotism and Nello’s voyeuristic fascination with Tito’s person (Fig. 12.1).8 Giannozzo Pucci is a member of the Medicean party who woos Tito at dinner by “laying his hand on Tito’s shoulder” and flattering him (346), and Tito is playing the lute for Pucci in a suggestive manner when Baldassarre, Tito’s father—whom Tito fails to claim— makes an unexpected appearance (348). Dolfo Spini is the leader of the opposition against Savonarola who enlists Tito’s aid; his attention to Tito such as his “affectionate pat on Tito’s shoulder” (518) certainly suggests more than if it were the gesture of a comrade. In her portrayal of Tito and his moral depravity, George Eliot seems to be consciously using these suggestions of his homosexuality. On the other hand, Daniel Deronda is the epitome of what George Eliot considered to be morally mature, and ironically there are far more articles which discuss his same-sex relationship with Mordecai than there are even hinting at such with any of George Eliot’s other characters—including Tito. Daniel is self-effacing and insecure about his own identity. He reaches out unselfishly with a sincere desire to help the two males who appear to be of sexual interest to him—Hans Myrick and Mordecai—in the same generous way he reaches out to Mirah Lapidoth, who becomes his wife, to Gwendolyn, and to everyone whose life touches his. George Eliot says that between Deronda and Mordecai there was “so intense a consciousness as if they had been declared lovers” (485). Several critics discuss this close relationship between Daniel Deronda and Mordecai as part of their spiritual and moral growth. One of the most bizarre, but fascinating, is Roger Mahawatte. In George Eliot and the Gothic Novel, Mahawatte sees Daniel Deronda as being a novel about identity formation and Deronda as making the journey to self-awareness and Jewishness.9 He describes Deronda’s Jewishness to be “a spectral experience” and says that he “is more feminine than most critics would like.”10 Mahawatte sees Mordecai’s intense emotional behavior as being “metaphorically vampiric and predatory” since his grasp, clutch, and touch have erotic overtones.11 Mahawatte says, “Ambiguously as it may be conveyed, the subject of desire is something Eliot wanted the reader to consider,”12 and he concludes that, in spite of all of the erotic suggestiveness and moral ambiguity, the suspense and lack of closure in their sexual relationship are an indication of spiritual growth and reformed sensibility.13 Several other critics also focus on the homoerotic aspects of the relationship between Daniel and Mordecai as intensifying Daniel’s commitment to Mordecai’s mission. Jacob Press says that for Deronda Jewish

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Fig. 12.1  Frederic Leighton, “Suppose You Let Me Look at Myself,” Woodblock Engraving, 1862, Romola

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nationalism becomes a way of reframing his ideology of self; he empowers himself by subordinating himself to the interests of the brotherhood and that Deronda’s relationship to Mordecai—which is dramatized, staged repeatedly, and centrally framed as a marriage—is the novel’s definitive act of closure. He says that Mordecai’s political enthusiasm is virtually orgasmic since he has been looking for an aesthetically appropriate receptacle into which to release himself and that, since Deronda longs to be dominated, his love affair with Mordecai is exactly what he needs.14 In her article “The Seduction of Daniel Deronda,” Laura Callanan also suggests that the real center of the novel is the bonding that takes place between Daniel and Mordecai as Daniel moves toward his destiny as Mordecai’s spiritual heir. She says that Eliot embeds erotic language within the “rhetoric of spirituality and filial affection” and finds “evidence of slippage between spiritual and erotic language.”15 Of Mordecai she says, “Rather than sexually join with a woman to pass on his line to a new generation” … his “sense of immortality will be achieved by means of his wisdom, rather than his semen.”16 He “is clearly fixated” on Daniel and sees him as his spiritual heir, and Eliot’s narrator “directs the reader to view Mordecai’s strong feelings from within a paradigm of sexual desire.”17 To support this claim, Callanan quotes a sentence in which Eliot’s narrator speaks of Mordecai’s vision for the future as a “mature spiritual need” which is “akin to the boy’s and girl’s picturing of the future beloved,” and adds “the stirrings of such young desire are feeble compared with the passionate current of an ideal life straining to embody itself, made intense by resistance to imminent dissolution.” Callanan concludes that “Eliot makes Mordecai’s spiritual dedication more passionate, more erotic than any eroticism that Deronda feels for either of the female characters” and that “this intensity illustrates that true passion can be expressed in spiritual devotion and dedication to the betterment of one’s own people.”18 Joanne Long Demaria is another critic who supports the idea that Daniel Deronda is morally mature in his understanding of George Eliot’s sense of Continuity. In “The Wondrous Marriages of Daniel Deronda: Gender, Work, and Love,” Demaria says that Mordecai finds the love that transcends self in his “marriage” with Deronda and in a relationship which is defined by metaphors of parents, generations, and spouses.19 In this way Deronda demonstrates a commitment to the past as well as the desire to leave a legacy to benefit posterity.

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In thinking about George Eliot’s same-sex relationships, I have been struck by the similarities between Tito and Deronda as well as the differences. In spite of the fact that the two characters are at the opposite ends of George Eliot’s spectrum of good and bad, they are alike in at least three ways. First, their family backgrounds are amazingly similar; yet their adult responses to their upbringing are very different. Both Tito and Deronda have been adopted by men who are financially and socially secure, are very well-educated, and have loved their sons and given them every possible opportunity. Tito cruelly betrays his father Baldassare: he deserts him to die in a shipwreck, steals his ancient jewels, and then proceeds to establish a new life for himself in Florence. When his father surprises Tito by coming to Florence—a broken man—Tito ignores him and refuses to acknowledge or help him. Ironically, when Tito dies, he is being pursued by a mob as a criminal and still has no loyalty to his own family heritage, even though he dies looking into his adoptive father’s eyes and clasping his father’s cloak (548). Deronda thinks he is the illegitimate son of his adoptive father, Sir Hugo Mallinger, who has loved him and given him the best English education possible at Eton and then at Cambridge. As an adult, Deronda meets his mother and discovers his Jewish identity, and it is through his relationship with the dying Jewish scholar, Mordecai, that Deronda comes to understand Judaism, accept his true identity, and fulfill Mordecai’s mission to support the Jewish nation. However, even though Deronda sails away to the Holy Land, he still acknowledges with gratitude all that his adoptive father has done for him. Second, Tito’s and Deronda’s perspectives of self and others are diametrically opposed. Tito is totally self-centered and thinks only of what will advance his standing. He uses others solely for his own benefit; he is heartless, deceptive, and has no conscience. He marries Romola purely for selfish reasons and unmercifully exploits his mistress Tessa and their children without compassion or guilt. He uses his sex appeal and attraction to men in the same way—to advance himself and his selfish ambition. By way of contrast, Deronda truly loves Mordecai. Deronda is totally self-effacing and thinks only of others’ needs. His sexually suspicious closeness to Mordecai grows out of unselfish love and the desire to help Mordecai, who identifies with the Jewish heritage which has been passed down from generation to generation and epitomizes George Eliot’s concept of Continuity.

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Third, both Tito and Deronda are totally committed to the political involvement that dominates their lives. Tito is intricately involved in the political affairs of Florence and becomes so embroiled that he is actually serving as a triple agent at the time of his death. He has worked so hard to advance his own selfish interests that he is tracked down and dies like an animal on the shore of the Arno River in his effort to escape from a political uprising. His sexual compromises and blatant use of his sexual appeal in his attempts to charm others have availed nothing. By way of contrast, Daniel Deronda gives up everything he has ever known to further Mordicai’s mission. His extremely close relationship with Mordecai not only is mutually beneficial and a blessing to both of them but will prove a blessing to the Jewish nation. Both Deronda and Mordecai have purely unselfish motives and see themselves as having only a small and humble role in the restoration of the Jewish nation and as helping to advance the Jewish heritage. So in having both her best character and her worst character exemplify tendencies that are stereotypically associated with homosexuality, George Eliot is not advocating same-sex relationships. She is illustrating the extremes of attitude and behavior that define her moral message. She can most effectively show the difference between extreme selfishness and utter unselfishness with human behaviors that are generally associated with sexual attraction. Throughout George Eliot’s writings, there are also other pairs of characters whose relationships are colored and enhanced by the aura of same-sex attraction. Bartle Massey mentors Adam Bede in ways similar to, but much less extreme than, the way Mordecai serves as Deronda’s teacher and spiritual guide. Bartle Massey conducts a night school for Adam Bede, the carpenter, and other working men. He is dismissive of women and the need for them and says that he will never be fool enough to let any woman into his home except his dog Vixen (238). And in a scene which has biblical allusions, Massey lovingly watches with Adam during Hetty’s trial in “an upper room” (422), and expresses his concern and desire to commune with Adam in every phase of his suffering by offering him a bit of a loaf and a drop of wine in Eucharistic sharing (428). Also in Adam Bede, the Rector Adolphous Irwine never marries and is characterized by his loving concern for his godson Arthur Donnithorne. In Daniel Deronda, Daniel is very devoted to his dear friend Hans Myrick and is anxious to help Hans pass his examinations at Cambridge;

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however, in doing so, Daniel fails his own (462–463). Hans confides in Daniel his own fascination with and attraction to Mirah Lappidoth, and it is only after Deronda realizes that Hans is interested in her that he admits the depth and extent of his own interest in Mirah and begins his successful attempt to win Mirah for himself (462–463). However, circumstances do not work out so well for Silas Marner in a same-sex relationship which he has in Lantern Yard before he comes to Raveloe. Silas has a very close friend, who ruined his reputation and took the young woman to whom Silas was betrothed to be his own wife. The narrator observes that “among the members of his church there was one young man, a little older than himself, with whom he had long lived in such close friendship that it was the custom of their Lantern Yard brethren to call them David and Jonathan” (10). This dear friend stole the church money and set up the circumstances so that Silas Marner was charged with the crime. His friend’s betrayal causes Silas to leave the church, move to far away Raveloe, and cut himself off from society. However, this change in his circumstances leads to his moral growth and ultimate happiness. In George Eliot’s short story “The Lifted Veil,” two intriguing samesex relationships contribute to the sinister atmosphere and strange circumstances. The main character, Latimer, is an odd and extremely sensitive child (5), who in his youth had one intimate friendship with a young man named Charles Meunier (8). When Latimer learns that Meunier is coming for a visit, he feels that “his presence would be to me like a transient resurrection into a happier pre-existence” (37). This friend appears in time to bring about the “scientific” experiment in which he reanimates the corpse of Mrs. Archer, whose relationship with Latimer’s wife Bertha has sexual overtones. Meunier’s reviving Mrs. Archer after she had died allows her to share the secret that Latimer’s wife Bertha plans to kill him (42). After Mrs. Archer was hired as a maid to Bertha, she “rapidly became a favorite with her mistress” (35), and the two had shared many confidences including Bertha’s intentions. Also on this morally depraved end of the spectrum of unwholesome same-sex relationships, there is Grandcourt’s questionable and suspicious loyalty to Lush, his right-hand man, in Daniel Deronda. When Grandcourt marries Gwendolen, he promises her that he will let Lush go if his presence is not pleasing to her (182); however, a telling part of the crushing dominance that Grandcourt has over his wife is the reappearance and reinstatement of this man upon whom Grandcourt is so

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dependent (305). Lush says of Grandcourt, “I’m attached to him, of course. I’ve given up everything else for the sake of keeping by him, and it has lasted a good fifteen years now” (280). In discussing Grandcourt, Royce Mahawatte speculates that Gwendolen’s marriage to Grandcourt was never consummated and that her marriage is “blighted” by his “sadistic sexuality.”20 The relationship between Grandcourt and Lush is reminiscent of the one between Harold Transome and his man Dominic in Felix Holt. Harold brings Dominic with him when he returns to Transome Court and explains his presence by saying that Dominic is “cook, valet, major domo, and secretary all in one, and what’s more he’s an affectionate fellow—I can trust to his attachment” (37). The negative aura of shared secrets and a questionable past characterizes both of these relationships. On the other end of the moral spectrum, the sexually charged scene between Rosamond and Dorothea in the chapter in Middlemarch in which Dorothea explains to Rosamond how Lydgate has been wronged is full of significant looks, hand pressing, and physical proximity. But as a number of critics have pointed out, even though this scene is important to the moral growth of both Rosamond and Dorothea, it is primarily a transitional scene which allows Dorothea to become more aware of her love for and commitment to Will Ladislaw, whom she marries. While Rosamond remains one of George Eliot’s most self-centered characters, Dorothea denies self and makes choices that benefit others by leaving a legacy for generations to come. There are a number of critics who discuss the idea that for George Eliot same-sex relationships and homoeroticism are not incompatible with marriage between a man and a woman. Kathryn Stockton proposes that female friendship functions as the catalyst of the marriage plot; she suggests that in Middlemarch George Eliot codes sympathy as desire21 and redomesticates Rosamond and Dorothea so that the passionate scene between them is a prelude to Dorothea’s marriage to Will Ladislaw.22 And Sharon Marcus discusses homoeroticism in the context of moral growth. For example, she says that the passionate moment in Middlemarch between Rosamond and Dorothea demonstrates Dorothea’s ability to reach outside herself. In this “vivid sympathetic experience,” there is definitely a palpable connection between the women involving physical proximity and sensual gestures that are erotic in their power to disrupt each woman’s personal uncertainties.23 Marcus also refers to the kisses in “Janet’s Repentance” in Scenes of Clerical

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Life between Janet and Mrs. Pettifer as “such kisses as seal a new and closer bond between the helper and the helped.”24 In all of these scenes George Eliot creates women whose reaching out to other women— whether for selfish or unselfish reasons—involved gestures and sharing which had sexual overtones. The degree to which George Eliot understood every aspect of human nature—including same-sex relationships— is truly amazing. Even in her poems, which have been ignored largely because of their moralizing themes, two women are often involved in intimate relationships. In his Introductory Notes to “Erinna,” Antonie Gerard van den Brock explains the history of the poem which was not published during George Eliot’s lifetime. Eliot found Erinna’s verse fragments in a book on Greek history in the pages dealing with Sappho’s history.25 The poem was written between February 1873 and February 1876,26 and van den Brock speculates that it may relate to an early poem by Erinna that refers to homoerotic associations between two adolescent girls.27 He finds that Erinna herself in Eliot’s poem transcends her “personal lot by turning from absorption with self to imaginative identification with the larger life outside the self.”28 Even though Eliot’s Erinna had been chained by her mother to the spinning-wheel, her Erinna grows in sympathetic understanding. In “Armgart,” written August 1870, the title character has given up the possibility of marriage and motherhood to pursue a career as a singer. Even when she has lost her voice, Armgart chooses not to marry but to move with her companion Walpurga to a small town where Walpurga was born and which she had left to be with Armgart.29 In doing so, Armgart shows that she understands and accepts her responsibility to others and her desire to leave to coming generations the legacy that Leo, her mentor and teacher, has given to her. She says to Leo that she can pass his “gift to others who can use it for delight.”30 And another way to think of George Eliot’s approach to sexuality is in terms of gender stereotypes as they suggest transgender. In 1986, Bonnie Zimmerman suggested that in creating Deronda Eliot deliberately “attempts to unite the male and female spheres through a male political leader endowed with those characteristics and duties ordinarily reserved for heroines.”31 Zimmerman characterizes Deronda as “an androgyne who integrates stereotypically feminine traits such as beauty, passion, ardency, feeling, and especially sympathy with his masculine destiny.”32 And Demaria explores “the concentration of masculine and feminine traits in Deronda” in discussing Eliot’s “overall use of marital and

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generational metaphors in the novel.”33 Mahawatte says that “Daniel is more feminine than most critics would like.”34 We cannot deny that George Eliot is aware of gender roles as significant dimensions of personality and self-definition when we look at some of the comments she makes about her characters and that they make about themselves. George Eliot herself says that Deronda was “moved by an affectionateness such as we are apt to call feminine, disposing him to yield in ordinary details, while he had a certain inflexibility of judgment, and independence of opinion, held to be rightfully masculine” (322). And Deronda’s mother, the Alcharisi, says, “It was my nature to resist, and says, ‘I have a right to resist’” (636), and “I have never felt exactly what other women feel” (628). She also says to Deronda, “you can never imagine what it is like to have a man’s force of genius in you and to suffer the slavery of being a girl” (631). In Middlemarch, Will Ladislaw is described as a slim young fellow with a girl’s complexion (610); and when Bulstrode’s secrets are found out, he “wept like a woman” (624). There are numerous other examples such as these of Eliot’s use of transgender traits rather than gender stereotypes in describing her characters. In 1971 Sandra Bem (1944–2014) developed the Bem Sex Role Inventory to facilitate her empirical research on psychological androgyny, which is a balance of masculine and feminine traits. Bem considered androgyny to be healthy and desirable, and I think George Eliot would agree with her. Bem makes it clear that the labels masculine and feminine are defined in terms of what society sees as culturally desirable for males and females. Bem also cautions that imposing gender stereotypes and viewing them as expectations of what ideally constitutes masculinity and femininity creates severe limitations for both men and women. Attempting to categorize characters from George Eliot’s novels as masculine, feminine, or androgynous provides a way of considering that for George Eliot these stereotypical gender roles are more indicative of moral maturity than of sexuality. Bem’s inventory defines feminine gender stereotypes in terms that are very similar to those George Eliot uses in depicting the ways Silas Marner develops traditionally feminine characteristics as he mothers Eppie. And George Eliot uses terms which Bem sees as masculine stereotypes to suggest ways Romola becomes a better husband to Tessa than Tito ever was to Romola or to Tessa. In depicting these characters who exemplify gender roles that are culturally considered to be opposite to their physical sex, George Eliot is simultaneously demonstrating

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that Silas Marner and Romola are growing morally. They are becoming more responsive to the needs of others. Using Bem’s definitions, or any approach to measuring femininity and masculinity, George Eliot’s morally good men tend to have an abundance of feminine traits, and her morally good women tend to be stereotypically masculine. Seth Bede and Romola’s brother Dino di’ Barti, like Silas Marner, are gentle, sympathetic, sensitive to others’ needs, tender, loyal, and understanding— all feminine characteristics according to Bem. While, on the other hand, Dinah Morris, Priscilla Lameter in Silas Marner, Arabella Transome in Felix Holt, Mary Garth and Dorothea in Middlemarch—like Romola and George Eliot herself—have all of these feminine traits, but they are also self-reliant, able to defend their beliefs, independent, willing to take risks, willing to take a stand, and ambitious—all masculine traits according to Bem. No doubt George Eliot took pleasure in creating “masculine” women such as Priscilla Lameter, in Silas Marner, who never marries but manages her father’s farm (182), and Arabella Transome, in Felix Holt, who is married to a weak and ineffectual man of limited mental capacity. Of Mrs. Transome, Eliot says that she loved rule (116) and “liked every little sign of power her lot had left her” (30). Recent studies of George Eliot’s heroines are increasingly interested in her handling of gender and raise more questions about the way she depicts femininity than the way she depicts masculinity. For example, Deborah Epstein Nord comments regarding Fedalma, in The Spanish Gypsy, “the racialized and unsexed woman ceases to be a woman at all, whereas the man whose masculinity is diminished … is still a man.”35 This may be a bit extreme, but Fedalma definitely makes decisions that are opposite those which Eliot’s heroines typically make. She gives up her plans to marry Don Silva, who is the heir to the Spanish throne, in order to take on her father’s mission to lead her people to establish a home in northern Africa. Armgart, a talented and successful singer loses her voice, and rather than marry, she goes with her female companion Walpurga to the country to teach music in order to pursue a life of service which a man might pursue. Demaria suggests that Eliot uses “a language of gender differentiation as it was commonly used in her time, even by feminist reformers.” However, she suggests that in Daniel Deronda, Eliot “elevates the ‘masculine’ search for vocation by conflating it with a ‘feminine’ instinct for love through the ‘marriage’ of two male characters.”36 Demaria also comments that “It is one of the peculiarities of Daniel Deronda that the chief searchers after the feminine

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Divine are male.”37 And she hopes that “The elevation of marriage into the type of spiritual and social commitment, coupled as it is with an exaltation of the feminine, might seem to move in the direction of increased respect for women.”38 Armgart and Fedalma both make this “masculine” search for vocation, and Armgart makes it with another female character. Perhaps, in this way, George Eliot’s portrayal of these two women also represents a step toward increased respect for women. Tracey Rosenberg makes the point that the anger which feminists express against George Eliot arises from her failure to allow her heroines the freedom which she allowed herself; however, she says that we must be wary of constructing an identity which is restricted to the dominant ideologies of our own historical moments. And she reminds us that George Eliot herself offered a corrective. In a letter which she wrote to Charles Bray in 1859, George Eliot said: “the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures” (Letters, 3:111). The hints of same-sex attraction between her characters most frequently indicate this genuine unselfish responsiveness to the needs of others. Of course, we have no way of knowing how George Eliot felt about same-sex relationships and transgendered individuals. We do know that she knew these affinities and combinations of gender roles existed and that they existed among her acquaintances and even among her friends. Kathleen McCormack, in her recent study George Eliot in Society, emphasizes the fact that George Eliot and George Henry Lewes invited those who differed from themselves to the Sunday gatherings at the Priory. She says that they “welcomed guests whose biographers’ declarations, sustained relationships with same-sex partners, long avoidance of marriage, and/or comments of contemporaries concerning effeminacy in men or mannishness in women suggest manifestations of same-sex desire”39 (92). And Beverley Park Rilett suggests in her article about George Eliot’s response to Walt Whitman that she and George Henry Lewes had friends who were part of a subculture in which the sharing of Leaves of Grass and photos of Whitman functioned as an implicit means of communication between individuals who expressed same-sex desire. In her chapter in the collection George Eliot and Europe, Nancy Henry discusses George Eliot’s last book Impressions of Theophrastus Such

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(1879) as “a dialogue with Lewes, which, reflecting both of their careers, consistently yokes art and science.”40 And she suggests that Eliot and Lewes used scientific inquiry as their “personal means of coded signaling” and that “In the pages of Impressions, the Eliot-Lewes relationship is simultaneously exposed and protected because their private communication is public but invisible.”41 Henry gives an example of this private signaling by discussing a new species which, in his Sea-Side Studies (1857), Lewes claims to have discovered and to have christened Sagitta Marina. He describes his species as hermaphroditic, both male and female.42 Henry suggests that this was an example of this personal signaling between Lewes and Eliot and that, even in his calling his species “Mariana,” he is naming it for her. George Eliot seems to have enjoyed playing with the idea of transgender with Lewes. No doubt she also enjoyed playing with the idea with her readers. However, it is always dangerous to attempt to discover what other people—including writers—think about any subject, but especially about sex. It is also difficult to know the extent to which authors personally endorse the opinions expressed by their characters. However, the speculations about George Eliot’s attitudes toward her own role and gender identity and the roles and gender identities which she gives her characters—especially her women characters—goes on and will continue. For instance, in 2015 June Skye Szirotny published a very interesting and thorough discussion of George Eliot’s Feminism. She concludes that Eliot’s “interest in exposing the evil of the patriarchal world led her to agitate for most contemporary causes.” For her, as for the reformer Felix Holt, “the spirit of innovation” was “a part of religion.”43 This is one of the many ways that George Eliot’s depictions of same-sex relationships and transgendered characteristics are integral aspects of her feminism as well as her moral message.

Notes

1. Eliot’s definition of her basic moral principles, Continuity and Solidarity, is from a note entitled “Historic Guidance” which is published in an article by Thomas Pinney, “More Leaves from George Eliot’s Notebook,” Huntington Library Quarterly 29, no. 4 (August 1966): 353–376. Pinney says there is no way to know when the note was composed, but he suggests that it was somewhere between 1874 and 1879. Even though

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Pinney does not recognize these principles as the basis of George Eliot’s moral philosophy, he does say that the notes “exhibit the vices of her moralizing mode” (356). 2. Edith Simcox, “George Eliot,” The Nineteenth Century 9 (May 1881): 792. 3. In introducing her study, George Eliot’s Feminism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), June Skye Szirotny discusses the fact that by the 1970s second-wave feminists were “angry and disillusioned” at not finding in George Eliot “a fellow revolutionary in a woman who wrested success from a conservative, sexist establishment” and felt that Eliot had betrayed them (31). In her 1976 essay, “Why Feminist Critics Are Angry with George Eliot,” College English 37 (February 1976): 549–561, Zelda Austen attempts “to resurrect her as a feminist.” However, Szirotny concludes, in spite of Austen’s efforts, most writers continued to see George Eliot as “ambivalent about the Woman Question” (31). 4.  Simcox makes it clear in her personal journal, which she entitled Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, that George Eliot consistently rejected her expressions of love, frequently urged Simcox to marry, and, as noted in the entry of March 9, 1880, said that “she had never cared very much for women” and that “the friendship and intimacy of men was more to her” (117). However, it is interesting to note that in the same journal entry Simcox records that George Eliot kissed her on the lips (118). 5. Nancy Henry, “The Romola Code ‘Men of Appetites’ in George Eliot’s Historical Novel,” Victorian Literature and Culture 39 (2011): 327. 6. Henry, 327. 7. Henry, 344. 8. George Eliot allowed George Smith, the editor of The Cornhill Magazine, to publish Romola rather than Blackwoods, her usual publisher. Smith arranged for Frederic Leighton to illustrate the volume. This was appropriate since Leighton had studied in Florence, and his illustration of Tito and Nello captures Tito’s fascination with himself, his egotism, and the sexually charged atmosphere (see Fig. 12.1). 9. Roger Mahawatte, George Eliot and the Gothic Novel (Cardiff: University of Wales, 2013), 182. 10. Mahawatte, 183. 11. Mahawatte, 187. 12. Mahawatte, 191. 13. Mahawatte, 194–195. 14.  Jacob Press, “Same-Sex Unions in Modern Europe: Daniel Deronda, Altneuland, and the Homerotics of Jewish Nationalism,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosdofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 310–311.

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263

15. Laura Callanan, “The Seduction of Daniel Deronda,” Women’s Writing 3, no. 2 (1996): 177. 16. Callanan, 178. 17. Callanan, 179. 18. Callanan, 178, 186. 19. Joanne Long Demaria, “The Wondrous Marriages of Daniel Deronda,” Studies in the Novel 22, no. 4 (1990): 403. 20. Mahawatte, 192. 21. Kathryn Bond Stockton, God Between Their Lips in Inigray, Brontë, and Eliot (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 214. 22. Stockton, 238. 23. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 76. 24. Marcus, 78. 25. Antonie Gerard van den Brock, The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot, 2 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2005), 2, 109. 26. van den Brock, 2, 110. 27. van den Brock, 2, 111. 28. van den Brock, 2, 112. 29. van den Brock, 1, 903–905. 30. van den Brock, 1, 892–893. 31. Bonnie Zimmerman, “George Eliot and Feminism: The Case of Daniel Deronda,” in Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, edited by Rhoda B. Nathan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 231. 32. Zimmerman, 232–233. 33. Demaria, 404. 34. Mahawatte, 183. 35. Deborah Epstein Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1950 (Columbia University Press, 2006), 119. 36. Demaria, 403. 37. Demaria, 410. 38. Demaria, 414. 39. Kathleen McCormack, George Eliot in Society (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 92. 40. Nancy Henry, “George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and Comparative Anatomy,” in George Eliot and Europe, edited by John Rignall (Scolar Press, 1997), 45. 41. Henry, 46. 42. Henry, 61, 43.  June Skye Szirotny, George Eliot’s Feminism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 202.

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Bibliography Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. “The Measurement of Psychological Androgyny.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 42 (1974): 155–162. Callanan, Laura. “The Seduction of Daniel Deronda.” Women’s Writing 3, no. 2 (1996): 177–188. Demaria, Joanne Long. “The Wondrous Marriages of Daniel Deronda: Gender, Work, and Love.” Studies in the Novel 22, no. 4 (1990): 403–417. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. New York: Penguin Classics, 1958. ———. Middlemarch. New York: Penguin Classics, 1994. ———. “Janet’s Repentance.” Scenes of Clerical Life. London: Everyman, 1994. ———. Daniel Deronda. New York: Penguin Classics, 1995. ———. Felix Holt: The Radical. New York: Penguin Classics, 1995. ———. Romola. New York: Penguin Classics, 1996. ———. Silas Marner. New York: Penguin Classics, 1996. ———. The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1999. Haight, Gordon S. The George Eliot Letters. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, vols. 1–3, 1954; 4–7, 1955; 8–9, 1978. Henry, Nancy. “George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and Comparative Anatomy.” In George Eliot and Europe, edited by John Rignall. Scolar Press, 1997. ———. “The Romola Code: ‘Men of Appetites’ in George Eliot’s Historical Novel.” Victorian Literature and Culture 39 (2011): 327–348. Mahawatte, Royce. George Eliot and the Gothic Novel: Genres, Gender, Feeling. Cardiff: University of Wales, 2013. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. McCormack, Kathleen. George Eliot in Society: Travels Abroad and Sundays at the Priory. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Nord, Deborah Epstein. Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Pinney, Thomas. “More Leaves from George Eliot’s Notebook.” Huntington Library Quarterly 29 (1966): 353–376. Press, Jacob. “Same-Sex Unions in Modern Europe: Daniel Deronda, Altneuland, and the Homoerotics of Jewish Nationalism.” In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosdofsky Sedgwick, 299–329. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Rilett, Beverley Park. “Victorian Sexual Politics and the Unsettling Case of George Eliot’s Response to Walt Whitman.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 31 (2014): 69–97.

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Rosenberg, Tracey S. “The Awkward Blot: George Eliot and the Ideal Woman Writer.” Nineteenth Century Gender Studies 3, no. 1 (2007). http://ncgsjournal.com/issue31/rosenberg.htm. Simcox, Edith. “George Eliot.” The Nineteenth Century 9 (May 1881): 778–801; reprinted Littell’s Living Age 149 (1881): 791–805. ———. A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith J. Simcox’s Autobiography of a Shirtmaker. Edited by Constance M. Fulmer and Margaret E. Barfield. New York: Garland, 1998. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. God Between Their Lips in Inigray, Brontë, and Eliot. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Szirotny, June Skye. George Eliot’s Feminism: “The Right to Rebellion”. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. van den Brock, Antonie Gerard. The Complete Shorter Poetry of George Eliot. 2 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005. Witemeyer, Hugh. “Frederic Leighton’s Illustrations of Romola.” Victorian Web Book: George Eliot and the Visual Arts from George Eliot and the Visual Arts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. http://www.victorianweb.org/ authors/eliot/hw/9.html. Zimmerman, Bonnie. “George Eliot and Feminism: The Case of Daniel Deronda.” In Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the English-Speaking World, edited by Rhoda B. Nathan. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.

CHAPTER 13

“Upright Realism”: The Influence of George Eliot on Polish Literature Aleksandra Budrewicz

The late introduction of George Eliot to the Polish reading public was an important factor in her Polish reception. In the nineteenth century, Poland did not formally exist because it was partitioned between Russia, Austria and Prussia. This fact resulted in, among other things, severe repression, strict censorship and delays in translations. Yet some information related to her life and work was available, thanks to Polish correspondents in London, for example. The first Polish notes on George Eliot presented her as an intellectual writer who advocated emancipation of women. These articles frequently mention her within the context of Victorian literature and compare her to some Polish novelists of this time. Some critics (like Władysław Jabłonowski in 1897) placed Eliot among the most distinguished European writers; others focused on her personal life: Marrené-Morzkowska in the preface to her translation of Adam Bede (1891), for example. Several reviewers (Karol Waliszewski, among others) commented on the philosophical and religious aspects of her novels; the term “upright realism” [realizm rzetelny] was employed by Waliszewski to describe the style of her novels1; the critic A. Budrewicz (*)  Institute of Modern Languages, Pedagogical University of Kraków, Kraków, Poland © The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3_13

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meant that Eliot’s method was detailed and exhaustive. The first translations of Eliot’s works (in the late nineteenth century) were positively reviewed, but then the Polish reading public had to wait for many years for the next translations. The twentieth-century translations of Romola, Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss contributed to increased awareness of Eliot’s work. Polish literary scholars (Roman Dyboski, Irena Dobrzycka, and most recently Ilona Dobosiewicz) started to explore George Eliot’s fiction more extensively. Some of her works were compared to the nineteenth-century Polish novels by these previously mentioned critics. So far, the Polish reception of George Eliot has not been investigated thoroughly in Poland. The research carried out by Wanda Krajewska (1972), Alina Szala, (1991) and Ilona Dobosiewicz (2016) shows Eliot’s reception in a diachronic way.2 It also proves that Polish reception of Eliot’s work began at the end of the nineteenth century, and was limited to a few novels (Adam Bede—Polish translation 1891, 1930; Sceny z życia duchownych—1891; Romola—1922, 1927; Młyn nad Flossą—1960, 1991; Miasteczko Middlemarch—2004, 2005). The result of this research is clear: the reception of Eliot’s work was cursory and short-lived. Dobosiewicz discusses the language of the Polish translations published in the second half of the twentieth century.3 However, the information on the Polish reception of Eliot in the nineteenth century should be corrected and completed. There is a widespread belief in the Polish history of literature that the beginning of Polish reception of Eliot was the time when the aesthetics of modernism was in fashion. Such a view may arouse some doubts: modernism preferred non-realistic poetics, whereas Eliot’s work represented a more realistic type of writing. As James Russell Perkin states, Eliot’s work “raises a problem of particular interest for reception history.”4 The research on the reception of Eliot accepted the view that reception starts when translations appear and that the traces of reception should be found in professional literary periodicals and journals. This method is sufficient when publishing and reading markets are concerned. It does, however, narrow down the process of reception to an elite and small circle of literary critics. Investigation of bibliographical records and reviews in professional periodicals should only be a prelude to a more comprehensive analysis of the problem of reception, which incorporates the process of reception of a given author into the cultural and social continuum. Reception, which is

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based on literary criticism, the daily press and a variety of social life documents, may give a new perspective on the picture of Eliot’s presence in Polish culture in the nineteenth century. Among Victorian writers Eliot was never as popular as Charles Dickens,5 but she had a stronger presence than is suggested by the research. From the very beginning the information on the reception of Eliot in Poland was incorrect. The only extensive obituary (1881) says: “Many of her novels were translated into Polish. People read them with a great interest.”6 The statement concerning the large number of Polish translations, however, is not true. There was only one translation, that of Middlemarch, which was published in 1874 in a weekly for women called Bluszcz. The incorrect information was published in Kłosy, a serious and widely respected weekly. Since the author of the obituary made a mistake and the editors failed to notice it, we may speculate that many people believed that Eliot was widely translated into Polish. Eliot was so well known in Poland that people could not imagine that there were no Polish translations of her novels. The library catalogues show that Eliot’s work in the original English, as well as French and German translations, were available in libraries.7 Many educated Poles knew them in the original—as shown in the correspondence of the writer Narcyza Żmichowska.8 Later novelists read Eliot’s novels either in the original, or in non-Polish translations.9 Incorrect information on Eliot’s translations into Polish lasted for a long time. Zbigniew Grabowski, a specialist in British literature (he published a monograph of Walter Pater), stated in 1927 that there was no Polish translation of any novel by Eliot, although there had already been four by this time.10 At the same time, the correct information on Eliot was incomplete and vague.11 The style of the above-mentioned examples suggests that the information presented in them may have been written from memory, which indicates that many people may have heard about Eliot, but only a few had read her works. There was almost no transmission of opinion on Eliot’s novels, so subsequent generations of readers began reading Eliot with no knowledge of previous readers’ views. In the 1870s and 1880s, Eliot’s novels were seen as a model of realism and courageous depictions of contemporary social problems. After WWI she was seen as too intellectual, abstract and scientific. At the time, the world was going through “an era of crisis of past scientific dogmatism, an era of disappointment in social charity of science and education (…),” in which the figure of

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George Eliot, who was “a friend of Herbert Spencer’s and the partner of the positivist philosopher George Henry Lewes,”12 was symbolic of a time which was to bring progress, but instead led to the slaughter of the trenches.

An Outline of Reception The name “George Eliot” first appeared in Polish dailies and weeklies in the 1860s. Notes about Eliot concerned the author’s large earnings as a writer. Nineteenth-century Polish culture was strongly influenced by landowning mentality; therefore, speaking publicly about money was taboo. Debts and loans were often mentioned in public discourse, but no word was said about jobs and salaries. A note related to the amount of money someone earned for their work meant that Polish press represented the bourgeois ideals and disapproved of nobility traditions. Before Polish readers learnt about Eliot the writer, they had already been told about the fees she received as a writer. Polish journals and magazines informed their readers that Eliot “sold Adam Bede for 2000 pounds, Silas Marner for 2500, The Mill on the Floss for 4000, whereas Romola earned her 7000 pounds.”13 Later on they spoke about Eliot’s large earnings for Daniel Deronda (1 million pounds, “40000 copies were printed in 8 parts for 5 shillings”14; and that thanks to Romola, she made a profit of 10,000 pounds.15 There was also news about many copies of Eliot’s novels which were available in Polish libraries and about her high position in rankings of the most popular writers.16 Despite that, Eliot’s biography was at best only vaguely familiar. Although it was commonly known that the male nickname concealed a female author, her pseudonym was often inflected like a male name. Some notes focused on the fact that she was a clergyman’s daughter, even though her father was an estate manager.17 In Catholic Poland, where priests lived in celibacy, such news functioned as social titbits. Her relationship with George Henry Lewes was also known to the Polish public18; Lewes himself was regarded as a respectable author and his work was translated into Polish. This was a similar situation to that of the Polish novelist Eliza Orzeszkowa, who lived in cohabitation with Stanisław Nahorski after she divorced her husband,19 a practice which was widely condemned in the conservative Poland of the nineteenth century.

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Some critics wrote that although Eliot was not an attractive woman, several men loved her.20 The personal values, despite physical deficiencies,21 were raised by Polish feminists for whom these aspects of Eliot’s biography were arguments against the concept of woman as an eternal child and a beautiful doll. After Eliot’s death, the Polish literary press did not publish occasional articles which would sum up her oeuvre. Dailies reprinted obituaries from foreign press: the date was often wrong,22 but at least the name was correct.23 The few bibliographical notes which were published during Eliot’s life expressed admiration for her relationship with Lewes as a union of love, thought and work (“together with her husband, they are possibly the most excellent married couple.”24) This type of information influenced the feminist movement in Poland. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Polish feminism focused on the possible changes to marriage law and created projects of partnership of women and men in terms of household duties and activities. The most outstanding Polish novelists of the time, Maria Konopnicka and Eliza Orzeszkowa, argued that women should be partners, rather than slaves, for men. The Polish press highlighted elements of Eliot’s biography which enhanced her feminist views; her biography also prepared the ground for the problem of “free love,” which feminists discussed at the end of the century. Eliot’s intellectual biography was also important. Positivism, Utilitarianism and Darwinism were the dominant philosophies in Poland in the second half of the nineteenth century. There was a common belief that, thanks to science and knowledge, civilisation would bring progress and happiness. In the1870s, the press and literature were the tools of science. Eliot was thought to be an educated woman and a partner for the most outstanding people of the era. In some cases, her name was listed together with August Comte and Charles Darwin,25 the greatest thinkers of the Victorian times. She was believed to be a writer who popularised scientific theories in her novels: “she popularises the theories of August Comte and Darwin, and her novels surely contributed to the broadening of these theories more than any serious scientific work would.”26 The attitude to Darwin and positivism divided Polish society and press into two groups: conservatives rejected the new trends in philosophy, whereas democratic liberals supported them. This is why Eliot was mentioned only in democratic press. Eliot’s popularity in Poland in the nineteenth century lasted for 30 years. The publications which discussed her writing focused on three dates: the mid-1870s, mid-1880s, and the beginning of the 1890s.

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Such chronology is in accordance with the changes in Polish prose. The 1870s were dominated by the so-called didactic novel. It corresponded to positivists’ and democrats’ programs, and propagated the application of science in social and economic life. Eliot’s intellectualism and scientism strengthened the position of tendentious novels. The mid-1880s saw a turn to realism in Polish literature. British realism competed with French naturalism. Eliot and Thomas Hardy, who depicted country life, people’s attitudes, customs of small villages and who avoided biologism and extreme ugliness of the world,27 appealed to Polish readers more than the naturalistic visions of urban centres as described by Emile Zola.28 The popularity of British realist novels in Poland was growing, and it effectively competed with the naturalist model of French novel which had been dominant earlier. The articles about the aesthetics of Eliot’s novels functioned as arguments for a realistic model of the novel instead of a naturalistic one. The second wave of Eliot’s popularity in Poland coincided with the creation of the best Polish realistic novels: The Doll [Lalka] by Bolesław Prus, On the Bank of the Niemen River [Nad Niemnem] by Eliza Orzeszkowa and The Połaniecki Family [Rodzina Połanieckich] by Henryk Sienkiewicz. The third stage overlaps during a time of disputes over the aesthetics of realism and modernism. The translations of Eliot’s novels, as well as literary critiques, argued that realism was not over yet, and that it was still attractive as a method of writing. During that time, Eliot’s work was seen as a tool to defend the aesthetics of realism against the new aesthetics of modernism. In all these three stages Eliot was infrequently mentioned in the Polish press. She was not an inspirer, but her work was often used to support additional arguments. She was often invoked in debates against Modernism. The average Polish reader was more familiar with her work from reviews and summaries, while only a handful would have read the novels themselves. Eliot’s work rendered into Polish had, at best, a shadowy existence, but she was a major presence as a subject of philosophical and aesthetic discourse. The knowledge of the author’s life came first, whereas her existence in the book market was second. The articles published in the 1870s were general outlines or syntheses of contemporary British literature. Eliot was presented as the most outstanding novelist after Dickens and as a representative of realism in literature.29 Her work was analysed together with Hyppolite Taine’s theories on the significance of race and environment. Feliks Jezierski called

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Eliot the most prolific British writer together with Ouida (nee Maria Louisa Ramée). He published a separate study on Eliot but wrote only about Ouida. Both writers, he states, helped change the book market by eliminating historical novel. Their novels are like mirrors which depict real lives.30 Other studies on Eliot highlighted her mastery of psychological and “physiological” analysis of the characters; it was explained—in accordance with Taine’s concepts—by referring to her perfect knowledge of English provincial life in which she grew up.31 Her intellectual values were also discussed, and she was presented as a single British talent unequalled by any other English writer. The second group of publications from the 1870s concerned Middlemarch. The novel was published between in Britain, 1871–1872. In 1873, the editors of the weekly Bluszcz announced the publication of a Polish translation in single additional issues of Bluszcz.32 This date of publication may imply that the Polish translation was prepared quickly. (The editors did not want to take any risk and decided to print the works which had already been discussed in press.) The translation of Middlemarch was printed in Warszawa, which was then ruled by Russia, but the text was also advertised in other parts of Poland (Prussian and Russian).33 Bluszcz was a prestigious periodical, and the most outstanding Polish poets of the time (such as Adam Asnyk, Maria Konopnicka) contributed to it. In terms of ideology, it represented moderate feminism, which was far from radical ideas. Despite that, the translation of Middlemarch was advertised even in liberal press, which frequently criticised Bluszcz.34 Middlemarch could possibly reunite the old enemies, i.e. conservatives and liberals. It was not, however, published as a single book. (Only selected translations were published in press and as books at the same time.) This may be the reason why this translation was forgotten for a long time, and even now Internet browsers maintain that the first Polish translation of Middlemarch was published as late as 2002.35 The truth is that Polish readers were able to read it in 1874. Bluszcz had many subscribers, so it may be assumed that the cream of the Polish intelligentsia read Middlemarch that very year. Literary critics invoked the novel to support ideological arguments related to emancipation; the novel also proved that women do not differ from men in terms of literary talent, careful examination of life and explaining the world through categories of science.36 The longest and most interesting article about Middlemarch was published in a weekly Wędrowiec. An anonymous author based his/her views on Taine’s method. He/she claimed

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that Eliot represented the British race, which was to be seen in a reflection of “religious spirit, house and family hearth.”37 The belief was that in France novels depict human emotions, whereas in England they concern a quiet family life based on religion; according to the essayist, the cult of family and rustic themes is typical of the British race. The author compares the significance of Eliot to that of Walter Scott. Her greatest value is the depiction of British provincial landscapes, which are presented realistically, carefully and precisely. It may be stated that the Polish reader could easily identify with such pictures as they were close to his own experience: The readers link George Eliot’s descriptions of life and country customs with their memories of these tiny towns which, despite fierce trends of national life, which keep great cities alive, are but a background on which there are: thought, love, and the imagination of nations. Each of us remembers the picture of this piece of the land where they were born, and this small corner, thank God, was shadowed by several green branches so that it serves more people.38

The author claims that Darwin’s ideas about heredity are confirmed in several presentations of families. The sweet and mystical Maggie represents Norman and Danish races; Dorothea is a British type and she has “the blood of country bourgeoisie,” which contributed to the political and commercial greatness of the country.39 The figure of the doctor (Tertius Lydgate) is particularly interesting for the critic—in the contemporary Polish novel the character of doctor was common; he/she symbolised a new type of hero who owed his social position solely to his work and science instead of hereditary features, and regarded his research as a vocation higher than professional duties. The interpretation of Middlemarch as a hymn of praise of British provincial life harmonises with the anonymous study (probably a translation from Revue des deux Mondes), which thoroughly discussed Eliot’s work and summarised Daniel Deronda in great detail. The writer calls Eliot a master of psychological portrayals. The following idea was seen as particularly valuable: a person needs to establish roots in a small spot of one’s mother country, to grow used to her scenery, with the smallest sound his ear can hear, and this attachment to the centre of his childhood, to neighbours, to household members, even to the animals which are also a part [of this vision], will

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remain with him forever as a sweet and salutary habit rather than a sentimental memento.40

In the 1880s in Poland, Eliot was mentioned more and more often in debates on feminism and the right of women to work and be present in the public sphere. Britain was seen as a country in which many women occupied themselves with professional writing. Eliot was praised for her masterly level of professionalism and set as a model to follow.41 An article entitled “Kobiety na Zachodzie” was reprinted; it claimed that Maria Edgeworth and George Eliot wrote novels because they wanted to say important truths and they were outstanding, original minds. Eliot’s biography was seen as so unusual and instructive that it should be published as a separate work or a novel.42 Eliot became an icon of a social movement which fought against the belief that women could be treated and perceived as little more than house servants. During this time Eliot was generally seen as an example of realistic writing. Indeed, the critics admitted that British prose was going through a serious crisis and Eliot’s novels were less popular,43 but at the same time, people still referred to her novels while discussing realism in contemporary Polish and Russian novels. The works of Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy were seen as closest to Eliot’s type of writing, while Zola’s style was regarded as radically different. Eliot’s realism was understood as a universal and classic type of mimetic literature that was in accordance with Aristotle’s poetics: in the significance and fidelity of the descriptions, in the depth of describing the characters together with an accurate preservation of the main argument and a constant subordination of single parts to the body, and the details to the whole.44

On the other hand, Eliot’s realism was criticised for its “cognitive minimalism.” Seweryna Duchińska accused Eliot of limiting herself only to “copying reality.” She called Eliot’s method “cold realism” limited to exact depictions of people. As a result, Eliot’s characters arouse neither compassion nor hatred in readers; according to Duchińska, Eliot is not as good as Scott (who created “bold knights”) or Dickens (and his immortal humoristic types).45 The most important articles of that time were written by Nekanda Trepka and Karol Waliszewski. Both discussed Eliot’s oeuvre against the

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background of Victorian novel. Trepka called her a great talent, superior to other writers in terms of “the power of imagination and freshness of inspiration,” “depth of moral doctrine,” “a power of science” and “artistry of form.”46 He calls Adam Bede Eliot’s greatest achievement, while Middlemarch repeated her previous ideas; Romola was too intellectual for a novel, and Daniel Deronda’s eponymous character lacks logic in his motivation. Eliot’s entire oeuvre is called an outstanding example of realism. At the same time, this kind of realism was different from that of other novelists because it was not limited to the method of description, but was in fact “a moral attitude.” Trepka stated that “simple, humble and moderate life, with sublime thought and a great spiritual ideal—— this is the moral axis around which George Eliot’s ethics revolves.”47 Eliot’s novels were valued more highly than those of George Sand. Waliszewski called Adam Bede a British equivalent of Adam Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (which is generally believed to be the greatest achievement in Polish poetry; it was translated into English by Maud Biggs in 1885).48 He claimed that Eliot created a new literary genre— “philosophical novel,” which combined didacticism and morality. Her realism was explained in three stages: First of all, the writer should notice and differentiate between social and psychological features of characters, the next step involves highlighting the strongest positive features, which finally leads to the creation of probable (fictional but realistic) types. Among all the Polish critics Waliszewski was the one who claimed that Eliot was a master of psychological analysis of characters. It was the same time when the greatest Polish realistic novels were published: Prus’s Lalka and Orzeszkowa’s Nad Niemnem. Waliszewski’s arguments were in keeping with the new aesthetics of Polish novel. The third stage of Eliot’s reception in nineteenth century Poland took place when realism was being slowly replaced by modernism, and the cult of the bourgeoisie turned into a sharp attack on bourgeois morality. Its patron was Friedrich Nietzsche. Between 1891 and 1892, Eliot’s Selected Novels were published, with an introduction by Waleria Marrené-Morzkowska. It contained only two novels: Adam Bede (translated by Morzkowska), and Scenes from Clerical Life (translated by Maria Obrębska). This edition (by Samuel Lewenthal) was hardly successful as for many years to come it was still advertised in daily press proving that it had not sold out. Eliot was certainly known and read by female critics and writers: some referred to her views in their articles,49 while others incorporated excerpts from her novels into their own works.50

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Eliot’s Selected Novels failed to arouse much interest. Only a few short notes were published, which were in fact bibliographical surveys with no interpretation.51 Marrené-Morzkowska was criticised for her introduction in which she discussed Eliot’s biography in terms of feminism and emphasised the novelist’s personal courage. The significance of Eliot in the history of literature was called into question; her novels were dismissed as “delirious ravings of a diseased mind,” while Adam Bede was simply called “boring.”52 The conservative-minded readers who criticised the introduction were, in fact, afraid that the patriarchal model of the family might be jeopardised by the views which gave women the right to decide about their own bodies. Marrené-Morzkowska reconstructed Eliot’s life with a clear intent to twist this biography to fit her so-called ≪progressive≫ purposes and to absolve the writer for her all sins. We find there a defence of Mary Evans who, having “lost her faith,” did not want to go to church and continued to blame her parents for criticising her decisions. Then the author carries on about the thirty-year long concubinage with a popular critic Lewes. Waleria Mareené is not bothered by these issues and she is even surprised that this scandalous relationship was seen as a source of depravity in England and that it forced this loving but elderly couple to live in isolation. Each healthy society hates injuries and dirty dealings and forgives them the less readily, the higher the status of those who are to be forgiven.53

The antifeminist discourse ignored Eliot’s artistry through exaggerated exposition of her “feminine” chattiness which was contrasted with the “male” art of narration by Zola and Guy de Maupassant. It was not due to Eliot’s artistic obsolescence as much as her aesthetics of realism and the cult of detailed descriptions which modernism found unnecessary and the past realists agreed with them.54 The second theme of public discussion in which Eliot’s name appeared was invoked concerned Zionism and anti-Semitism. Critics referred to Daniel Deronda to support the argument of the power of Jewish culture and its popularity in Western Europe.55 In the Polish discourse on the Jewish question, Eliot’s views were mentioned only infrequently. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Eliot was treated as a classic novelist56; many people heard about her novels, but few took the trouble of reading them.57 Eliot’s views were referred to during debates on the new ethical movement (universal ethics with no religious sanctions) of Walter Lorenzo Sheldon, who quoted Eliot.58

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George Eliot Versus Polish Novelists of the Nineteenth Century: Parallels Monica Gardner claimed that “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” and Middlemarch present negative depictions of Poles.59 Unlike the Romantic poets with their revolutionary ideas, the conservativeminded Victorians gave little thought to the tragic predicament of Polish people in the nineteenth century. Interestingly, numerous similarities between the plots of Jermoła (1855) by the Polish novelist Józef Ignacy Kraszewski and George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) were noticed by Leslie Stephen, Mathilde Blind, Julian Krzyżanowski and Victor Buyniak. The interpretation of Silas Marner, however, needs to be complemented with more historical context. In 1883, the Polish press reprinted information from British newspapers that the British critic Mathilde Blind claimed that Eliot “often took her ideas from Polish literature,” and Silas Marner “paraphrases” Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s Jermoła.60 Blind discussed the similarities between the two novels; she emphasised the fact that Jermoła (1857) had been published before Silas Marner (1861) and that it was available in French and German translations.61 Robert Lytton in his drama Orval, or the Fool of Time (1868) directly translated the French rendition of Zygmunt Krasiński’s play Nie-Boska komedia,62 but in the case of Kraszewski and Eliot, there was no imitation. The parallel between Jermoła and Silas Marner was analysed in detail by Julian Krzyżanowski,63 who claimed that both novels might have had one source: an eighteenth-century French morality tale written when the themes of foundlings who were happy in nature but unhappy in palaces were very popular. Tadeusz Sinko, a great Polish scholar, stated that it was necessary to find the “source” text.64 Jermoła tells the story of a boy who is found by an old man. The man, Jermoła, becomes an adoptive father to Radionek and teaches him how to be a workman. The boy’s biological parents come to claim their son (after their tyrant father has died), but Radionek is unhappy in their luxurious household. He misses his simple life close to nature. The boy runs away to Jermoła and the two hide in the forest. Due to numerous difficulties Radionek dies, and Jermoła becomes a beggar. In his work, Kraszewski often used the theme of tragedies which strike simple country folk. Similarities between the two novels may have resulted from the writers’ similar attitudes and opinions, so comparative analysis between the texts is justified.65

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This inspiring and interesting parallel between Eliot and Kraszewski was found by accident; a more serious affinity, however, is that between Eliot and Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841–1910), a prolific Polish female novelist. It is Orzeszkowa whom I believe to be the closest to George Eliot in terms of the novelists’ biographies, religious experience, opinions on women’s question, the themes for their writing, which they both found in the contemporary world and in history. What brings them together more than anything else is their detailed descriptions of everydayness and psychology of people in the provinces, which is the space that links nature and civilisation. There has been no comparative study on that issue so far but in all probability, one will be written before long since many Polish literature specialists believe that: Orzeszkowa would be seen as the most realistic writer among all realistic writers (just like Eliot), […] She was, like no other novelist, predisposed to write about compromise (a painful one, often understood as a resignation from one’s own self), ethical values, a harmonious and quiet life in small country societies far away from city.66

Orzeszkowa mentioned Eliot several times in her work. The Polish novelist considered herself a self-taught woman and she juxtaposed her loneliness with George Eliot’s, claiming that “her master, friend and confidant was Herbert Spencer.”67 In a letter to Tadeusz Grabowski (dated 8 January 1901), she stated that Eliot and Louise-Victorine Ackermann were the last great talents of European literature.68 Undoubtedly, she knew the most important Polish notes on Eliot printed in Świt and Tygodnik Ilustrowany as she published some of her own works in these weeklies. Orzeszkowa was a good friend of Wilhelmina ZyndramKościółkowska, who translated Dickens into Polish and informed Polish readers about British and American literature. The names of Orzeszkowa and Eliot were mentioned together as examples of unbiased attitude to the Jewish question69; this might have been the first time when the possible parallel between these writers was pointed out. In his study on Orzeszkowa’s work Tadeusz Grabowski referred to Eliot: The artist needs to be a citizen, she often repeated to herself, just like Tolstoy and Eliot say, an artist needs to be himself, he needs to protest against whatever he finds bad and reprehensible.70

280  A. BUDREWICZ If comparisons could teach us something, we could juxtapose her with Dickens, whom she adored, and with George Eliot, who died prematurely. Just like them, [Orzeszkowa] is an out-and-out moralist, a moralist from the bottom of her heart and not from speculations, who draws her reformative enthusiasm from Christianity, from humanitarian aspirations of Romanticism. […] The social man feels a sense of duty, divine and human law guides him, and both laws are closely linked with each other.71

Despite such obvious parallels as intellectual biographies of both writers, the twists and turns of their love life, similarities in literary creations of women, the motives of simultaneous biographies of sister and brother, the theme of natural and social determinism, despite the characteristic model of the narrator who addresses the reader directly, the ethics of duty and Grabowski’s statements, the parallel between Eliot and Orzeszkowa was discussed too late and too superficially. Maria Żmigrodzka signalled the problem rather than solved it when she wrote: There are, however, obvious similarities which – for all the numerous but accidental coincidences of the writers’ lives – linked together the social role of the recluse of Grodno and the Sibyl of Victorian England, whom the luminaries of British positivism visited at home. These similarities are expressed in the unity of the model of a woman writer – a freethinker intellectual, researcher and interpreter of the changes in contemporary societies, who discusses the burning “problems” of the era, a moralist who forms the notion of social duty of the 19th century citizen.72

David J. Welsh discussed similarities between Eliot’s and Orzeszkowa’s writing techniques.73 These include verbosity and lack of intellectual discipline of discourse, which he observed were, in fact, features of the whole era. Even the most eminent Victorian novelists, such as Charles Dickens, could be charged with the vice of loquacity. Orzeszkowa’s technique evolved into what Grażyna Borkowska described as “reserved silence”74; in the sphere of the novels’ language, the relation between the narrator and the reader may be interpreted as a convention of realism.75 New areas where further parallels may be drawn were pointed out by Tomasz Sobieraj.76 The works of Eliot and Orzeszkowa can be called pastoral novels.77 Nad Niemnem shows—just like Adam Bede—“a relation between work and rustic face-time continuum”; positive characters are the people of hard labour, whereas the negative ones evade their duties. Work becomes “a realistic supplement of the world view and

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axiology of the nineteenth century pastoral novel.”78 Ewa Paczoska discussed analogies between Orzeszkowa’s early work and Eliot’s selected characters who are forced to adapt to “new life conditions.”79 Recently, Polish literature scholars have explored the parallel between George Eliot and Bolesław Prus. Prus’s relations with British literature have been discussed many times and Dickens’s influence on his work was particularly well investigated. Prus’s parallels with Eliot were signalled by Wacław Borowy.80 Sobieraj notices the similarities between Maggie Tulliver (The Mill on the Floss) and Madzia Brzeska from Prus’s Emancypantki; the scholar treated them as a common model for Bildungsroman.81 These characters were also compared by Małgorzata Grzegorzewska, who claimed that Prus had read Eliot’s novel in the original.82 Prus, however, could not speak English but he might have read The Mill on the Floss in translation or summary. Grzegorzewska analysed the issue of mimesis in both novels and she pointed to an important motif of reading Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ by both characters. Maggie “imitates” someone who earlier owned a copy of this work; Madzia reads á Kempis at the end of the novel. In terms of composition, this motif is used differently by both writers, but it provides the key to a new interpretation of the characters’ spiritual progress. A comparison of psychological portraits of both characters leads to the conclusion that thanks to Maggie’s features, we are able to notice Madzia’ faults. Madzia used to be interpreted as an angelic type of a young woman. Thanks to Grzegorzewska’s comparative interpretation, Maggie and Madzia allow us to observe metaphysical problems unclear. (It “enables us to understand the essence of metaphysical desire and notice its destructive metamorphoses.”)83 Aneta Mazur has exhaustively discussed the problem of correspondences between Maggie and Madzia. She has supplemented the discussion by drawing attention to some common motives: both characters are victims of public opinion (gossip) and the tyranny of their parents. Their love lives are similar, and they both perform ancillary functions towards their brothers. They represent a type of an angelic woman and a fallen. Mazur states that Both Eliot’s and Prus’s plot realizes the scheme of initiation and, partially, a family novel. They concern the maturation of girls whose sensitivity is jeopardized in the face of changes of various ethical codes functioning in public sphere. […] Simultaneously, both stories transcend their historic

282  A. BUDREWICZ determinants, turning into a parable of unique individuals, destroyed by the world’s indifference and hypocrisy.84

The last parallel between Eliot and Polish novelists was noticed quite late, and it concerned a writer who was chronologically closest to Eliot— Narcyza Żmichowska. In some of her articles85 and in a large study translated into Polish,86 Ursula Philips compared the intellectual biographies of both writers and pointed to numerous coincidences. Eliot (1819–1880) and Żmichowska (1819–1876) were of the same age. Both were educated much better than other women, which they owed solely to themselves. Both experienced spiritual conflicts related to religion, and both protested against conventional forms of faith and worship. They were determined by their rural education and they came into contact with the lower class of society. In their novels, they discussed similar themes (women’s physical appearance and the power which this appearance gives them over men; relationship between brothers and sisters). Żmichowska read Eliot in the original and in French translations; she valued her novels and encouraged her friends to read them. Philips proved that both writers wrote mainly about women’s issues, which were widespread across national boundaries and more important than the question of national identity. When we interpret Żmichowska through the context of Eliot’s work, we may observe a problem which has not been discussed so far—the author’s dilemma over religion. It allows scholars to depart from previous analyses in which they tried to find a justification for Żmichowska’s pedagogical views. The parallel Eliot—Żmichowska also exposes the Polish writer’s discussion on love and sexuality (“reintegration of the material self of a woman, her body, and the recognition of her physical body as an integral and essential part of her identity”87). Both authors created portraits of women whose intellectual aspirations were crushed by the patriarchal model of contemporary culture; both treated radical feminism with reserve. Eliot and Żmichowska talked about the concept of androgyny” who is beyond any gender, thus providing a common ground for woman and man. George Eliot was never very popular in Poland. Polish reception of the Victorian novel was dominated by Charles Dickens. The 1960 celebrations of the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Mill on the Floss was ignored by Polish critics. Recently, however, Polish studies of Eliot’s novels and the Victorian period have gained new momentum. The articles and studies by Ilona Dobosiewicz deserve to be

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mentioned as particularly exhaustive and important.88 Maybe in 2019, when the literary world celebrates Eliot’s bicentenary, there will appear a large study of her influence on Polish culture?

Notes







1.  Karol Waliszewski, “Powieść współczesna w Anglii,” Ateneum R. 12, t. 1(1887): 304. 2. Wanda Krajewska, Recepcja literatury angielskiej w Polsce w okresie modernizmu (1887–1918) (Wrocław–Warszawa–Kraków–Gdańsk: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1972); Alina Szala, “Wstęp,” in Młyn nad Flossą, by George Eliot. Translated by A. Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska, prepared by Alina Szala. (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1991), 99–102 and Ilona Dobosiewicz, “The Polish Reception of George Eliot,” in The Reception of George Eliot in Europe, edited by Elinor Shaffer and Catherine Brown (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 318–335. 3. Dobosiewicz, “The Polish Reception of George Eliot.” 4.  James Russell Perkin, A Reception-History of George Eliot’s Fiction. (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1990), 17; cf. James Eli Adams, “The Reception of George Eliot,” in A Companion to George Eliot, edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 219–232. 5. Aleksandra Budrewicz, Dickens w Polsce: Pierwsze stulecie (Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego: Kraków, 2015). 6. “George Eliot.” Kłosy 32, no. 812 (1881): 48. “Wiele jej powieści przełożonych jest na język polski. Czytano je z wielkim zajęciem.” 7. Jagiellonian Library in Kraków preserves some manuscripts of G. Eliot’s letters: http://jbc.bj.uj.edu.pl/dlibra/docmetadata?id=225968&from= &dirids=1&ver_id=&lp=2&QI=. 8. Ursula Phillips, Narcyza Żmichowska: feminizm i religia, trans. K. Bojarska (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL, 2008), 29. 9.  W. Szukiewicz, “Anglik o Anglii.” Gazeta Lwowska R. 89, no. 152 (1899): 4. A very popular Polish novelist, Stefan Żeromski, read Daniel Deronda in 1879, but so far this novel has not been translated into Polish. Cf. Stefan Żeromski: Kalendarz życia i twórczości, edited by S. Eile and S. Kasztelowicz (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1976), 74. 10. Zbigniew Grabowski, “Frank Swinnerton,” Tygodnik Ilustrowany 3520, no. 28 (1927): 560; “Z literatury angielskiej,” Tygodnik Ilustrowany 3515, no. 14 (1927): 277. 11. Waleria Marrené-Morzkowska, “Wstęp.” [Preface.] In George Eliot, Adam Bede, vol. 1, 5–15 (Warszawa: S. Lewental, 1891), 15; Antoni Lange,

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“Evans, Maria Anna,” Wielka encyklopedia powszechna ilustrowana, vol. 19 (Warszawa, 1897), 872–887, 873. 12.  Roman Dyboski “Wielcy powieściopisarze angielscy XIX wieku z perspektywy dzisiejszej.” Pamiętnik Literacki 1935, Yearbook 32, no. 1–4, pp. 84–109, 108. Dyboski criticized Eliot for an excessive intellectualism of her prose. Also see Dyboski O Anglii i Anglikach (Warszawa 1929), 64. 13. “Wiadomości literackie,” Wędrowiec 14, no. 348 (1869): 158; “Wędrowiec podaje,” Kurier Warszawski 195 (1869): 2; and “Honoraria autorskie.” Gazeta Warszawska no. 194 (1869): 2. 14. “Kronika zagraniczna,” Kurier Warszawski R. 56, no. 140 (1876): 5. 15.  “Honoraria autorów angielskich.” Gazeta Warszawska Yearbook 111 no. 207 (1884): 3. 16. “Czytelnictwo młodzieży. Ze sportu. Japonomania.” Gazeta Handlowa 1895, no. 84, p. 2; S. M. [author unknown]. “Kronika oświaty.” Ogniwo R. 1, no. 44 (1903): 1040. 17. Rignall, John. “Evans Robert,” in Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot, edited by John Rignall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 107–109, 107. 18. G. [author unknown]. “Jerzy Henryk Lewes.” Kłosy 28, no. 716: (1879), 183. The intellectual relation of Eliot and Lewes was discussed by Marcin Jauksz, “George Eliot, George Henry Lewes i mechanizmy literackiego oddziaływania.” Forum Poetyki (2017). http://fp.amu.edu.pl/georgeeliot-george-henry-lewes-i-mechanizmy-literackiego-oddzialywania/. 19.  Edward Jankowski, “Komentarze,” in E. Orzeszkowa, Listy zebrane, edited by E. Jankowski, vol. 3. (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1956), 502. 20.  J. S. [author unknown]. “Bezsilne.” [Powerless] Świt [Dawn] 2, no. 9 (1885): 71; Trepka “Z obcych piśmiennictw.” [From Foreign Sources] Tygodnik Ilustrowany [Weekly Illustrated] 1324, no. 112 (1885): 123–124. 21. Eliot herself was interested in inner and outer beauty, and in Spencer’s theories related to the correlation between physical and mental beauty (Nancy Henry, The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography [New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2015], 70). 22.  “[S]he died in London at night, on 24th of December” (“umarła w Londynie w nocy na 24 b.m.”) in “Kronika,” Gazeta Lwowska R. 70, no. 297 (1880): 4 and in “Nekrologia” (Wędrowiec no. 211 [1881]: 31), it was stated she died “the day of 26th of December.” 23.  “Miss Maria Anna Cross, the name of Lewes after her first husband, known under the pseudonym of George Eliot” (“miss Maria Anna Cross, 1-go ślubu Lewes, miss Ewans, znana pod pseudonimem George Eliot”) (“Nekrologia” Wędrowiec no. 211 [1881]: 31). 24. Świętochowski, Aleksander. “Humorystyczna proza XIX wieku.” Przegląd Tygodniowy Yearbook 10, no. 34 (1875): 408.

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25. “George Eliot” (Wędrowiec 9, no. 209 [1874a]: 1–2), 2; Stanisław Niew­ iadomski, “Literatura angielska. Okres od 1860–1874. Powieściopisarze.” (Przegląd Tygodniowy Yearbook 10, no. 2 [1875]: 16). Stefan Pawlicki, a philosopher (ethicit, neothomist) talked about Eliot in his public lectures in Kraków in 1884, and he compared her to J. Tyndall (“Wiadomości artystyczne, literackie i naukowe,” Czas no. 71 [1884]: 3). Pawlicki discussed Eliot’s opinions on ethics during his lectures at Jagiellonian University in Kraków; he criticised her ideas of life’s purpose, that is the happiness of future generations. He stated that Eliot’s theorises have no philosophical ground (“nie ma żadnej filozoficznej podstawy”) and that the future generations’ happiness needs to involve the belief in an afterlife. Cf. Stefan Pawlicki, Etyka przyrodzona [Kraków, 1891–1892], 83–84. 26. K. “Szczęśliwy śmiertelnik,” Gazeta Toruńska no. 19 (1876): 3. “[P]opularyzuje teorie Augusta Comte’a i Darwina, a jej powieści zapewne daleko więcej przyczyniły się do rozszerzenia tych filozoficznych teorii, aniżeli poważne naukowe działa.” 27.  Pinion, F. B. “George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.” In A George Eliot Companion: Literary Achievement and Modern Significance, (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1981) 244–252. 28. For a long time, Polish scholars Eliot was considered to be a precursor of regional literature. Compare Władysław Tarnawski, “Sheila Kaye-Smith. Z cyklu: pisarze katoliccy Anglii współczesnej” (Tęcza Yearbook 10, no. 10 [1936]: 40). 29.  Feliks Jezierski’s “Obrazy ze współczesnej literatury angielskiej” (Biblioteka Warszawska 139 [1875]: 32) is one of several fragments in Polish literary criticism which positively talked about Eliot’s poetry. Rare notes on her poems only mention that they were not as good as her novels. The only case in which the author in fact read some of her poems and quoted them was Roman Dyboski in his study “Siedem lat w Rosji i na Syberii (1915–1921)” in Przygody i wrażenia (Warszawa: Gebethner i Wolff, 1922), 37. 30.  Jezierski, “Listy o współczesnej literaturze angielskiej” (Wiek no. 130 [1876a]: 2) and “Listy o współczesnej literaturze angielskiej” (Wiek no. 168 [1876b]: 3). 31. Aleksander Świętochowski, “Humorystyczna proza XIX wieku” (Przegląd Tygodniowy Yearbook 10, no. 34 [1875]: 408); “Literatura powieściowa angielska w roku 1874” (Przegląd Tygodniowy Yearbook 10, no. 11 [1875]: 89–90), 89. 32. “Od wydawcy,” Bluszcz R. 8, no. 53 (1873): 424. The novel was printed with a subtitle: Scenes from provincial life in England, so it was slightly changed in relation to the original subtitle (A Study of Provincial Life).

286  A. BUDREWICZ It was translated by Bolesław Majkowski, and the introduction, which emphasized that the novel was about an extraordinary woman who was a victim of the imperfect social system, was by Maria Ilnicka, the main editor of Bluszcz. 33. “Literatura polska” (Gazeta Narodowa R. 13, no. 94 [1874]: 1). 34. “Literatura powieściowa angielska w roku 1874.” Przegląd Tygodniowy Yearbook 10, no. 11 (1875): 89–90, 90. 35. See “Middlemarch” Wikipedia at https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasteczko_ Middlemarch. Accessed on 7 August 2017. 36. Daniel Zgliński. “Z bliska i z daleka.” Przegląd Tygodniowy R. 8, no. 49 (1873): 390. 37. “George Eliot,” Wędrowiec 9, no. 209 (1874a): 1–2, 1. “ducha religijnego, rodzinnego i domowego ogniska.” 38. Ibid. “Obrazowanie życia i obyczajów wiejskich przez George Eliot łączy się w pamięci czytelników ze wspomnieniem tych drobnych miast, które mimo gwałtownych prądów życia narodowego, unoszącego wielkie miasta, są jeszcze tłem, na którym wspierają się: myśl, miłość i wyobraźnia narodów. Każdy z nas ma w pamięci obrazek tego kawałka ziemi, na której się urodził, a kącik ten dzięki Bogu dla większej liczby był jeszcze ocieniony kilku gałązkami zieleni.” 39. “George Eliot.” Wędrowiec 9, no. 210 (1874b): 21. 40. “Romans obyczajowy w Anglii.” Gazeta Handlowa Yearbook 14, no. 35 (1877): 2. “powinno zapuścić korzenie w kąciku rodzinnej ziemi, oswoić się z jej widokami, z najmniejszym dźwiękiem uderzającym jego ucho, to przywiązanie do ogniska lat dziecinnych, do sąsiadów, do domowników, do zwierząt nawet, które część jego składają, zostanie przy nim na zawsze i to nie pod postacią sentymentalnej pamiątki, ale jako słodkie i zbawienne przyzwyczajenie, które w krew przechodzi.” The entire article was printed in numbers, 34–37, 40–41. 41. “W Anglii. Notatki i wrażenia.” Biesiada Literacka 18, no. 37 (1884): 167. 42. A. N., “Kobiety na Zachodz” (Prawda R. 8, no. 40 [1888]: 473). 43. J. H. Siemieniecki, “Z obcego świata” (Głos R. 4, no. 39 [1889]: 495); W. Janicki, “Z beletrystyki angielskiej” (Echo Muzyczne, Teatralne i Artystyczne R. 4, no. 207 [1887]: 440). 44. T. Wroński, “Z obcego świata. XVI. L`invasion des Moscovites” (Głos R. 2, no. 48 [1887]: 725). “w znaczeniu dokładności i wierności opisów, głębokości w kreśleniu charakterów obok ścisłego zachowywania myśli przewodniej i stałego podporządkowywania pojedynczych części – całości, szczegółów – ogółowi.” Z. Pietkiewicz expressed a very similar opinion in “Literatura rosyjska” (Prawda R. 7, no. 32 [1887]: 380). 45. Seweryna Duchińska, “Korespondencja z Paryża” (Tygodnik Powszechny no. 44 [1882]: 699).

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46.  Nekanda Trepka, “Powieść w Anglii. Studium literackie. VI. George Eliot” (Kłosy 35, no. 904 [1882]: 271). 47. Ibid. “życie proste, skromne, umiarkowane, przy myśli podniosłej, przy wielkim duchowym ideale – oto oś moralna, około której obraca się etyka George’a Eliota.” 48. Karol Waliszewski, “Powieść współczesna w Anglii” (Ateneum R. 12, t. 1 [1887]: 292). 49. Julia D. [author unknown], “Kilka słów o nowelach Marii Rodziewiczówny” (Dom Polski 3, no. 21 [1890]: 167). 50. Esteja [J. Kisielnicka]. Mgławica. Powieść, vol. 22, (Nakład S. Lewentala: Warszawa, 1894), 1187–1188. 51. “Jerzy Eliot. Wybór powieści” Biblioteka Warszawska R. 51, t. 4 (1891a): 446–447; “Jerzy Eliot. Wybór powieści” Tygodnik Romansów i Powieści 46, no. 1194 (1891b): 544; and “Jerzy Eliot. Wybór powieści” Echo Muzyczne, Teatralne i Artystyczne R. 9, no. 434 (1891c): 45. 52. “Jerzy Eliot. Wybór powieści” Słowo R. 10, no. 236 (1891d): 2. “ sennym majaczeniem jakiegoś chorego i zwyrodniałego mózgu” 53.  Waleria Marrené-Morzkowska, „z widocznym staraniem nagięcia tego życiorysu do swoich rzekomo celów – i rozgrzeszenia ze wszystkich win bezecnego żywota angielskiej pisarki. Znajdujemy tu więc naprzód obronę Marii Ewans, gdy nie chciała uczęszczać do kościoła i wieczny żal zachowała do rodziców, iż nie pochwalali takiego postepowania, następnie zaś zarys 30 lat trwającego konkubinatu jej z głośnym krytykiem Lewesem. Pani Walerii Mareené wydaje się to zgoła naturalnym i zdaje się nawet ją dziwić, iż skandaliczny ten stosunek wywołał w Anglii zgorszenie i pociągnął za sobą zupełne odosobnienie czułej a pary (…) Każde zdrowe społeczeństwo nie cierpi ran i brudów, a wybacza je tym mniej, im dotknięte nimi jednostki wyżej w hierarchii społecznej są postawione.” At the end of the article, the author calls Eliot inconsistent due to the fact that after Lewes’s death she planned to spend the rest of her life in mourning, but soon fell in love again. 54.  Waleria Marrené-Morzkowska, “Treść i forma w powieści.” Tygodnik Ilustrowany no. 90 (1891): 179. The critic admitted that Eliot’s novels are lengthy because they faithfully “reconstruct people and their surroundings” (“odtwarzają ludzi i otaczające ich warunki”). 55.  Is. [author unknown], “Poroniona monarchia.” Przegląd Tygodniowy R. 23, no. 6: (1887): 82; J. J. F. [author unknown], “Klerykalizm i Żydzi.” Przegląd Tygodniowy R. 14, no. 5 (1879): 53; and F. Drumont, “Francja zżydziała.” Głos Narodu R. 2, no. 85: (1894): 3; and “Ruch syjonistyczny.” Przegląd Tygodniowy R. 30, no. 30 (1895): 349. 56.  Trepka, Nekanda. “Powieść w Anglii i powieściopisarze angielscy dni naszych.” Życie R. 1, no. 35 (1887): 554. She was called “the greatest

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British and European writer” („najznakomitszy pisarz nie tylko angielski, ale i europejski”). 57. W. M. Kozłowski, Jak czytać utwory piękna: Literatura piękna jako źródło wykształcenia (Warszawa, 1909), 12. 58. W. L. Sheldon, An Ethical Movement: A Volume of Lectures (New York, 1896). 59. Gardner, Monica. “Polacy w powieści angielskiej.” Przegląd Współczesny Yearbook 12, no. 137 (1933): 300–301. 60. “Eliot i Kraszewski.” Dziennik Polski R. 16, no. 105 (1883): 2; “Ze świata.” Kurier Warszawski R. 63, no. 106 (1883): 4. 61. Blind, George Eliot, 139–143. 62.  Budrewicz, “Przekład, parafraza czy plagiat? ‘Nie-Boska komedia.’” 23–43. 63. Julian Krzyżanowski, “Zagadka Jermoły. Kraszewski i George Eliot,” in Księga ku czci Józefa Ignacego Kraszewskiego (Łuck: Wolynskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciot Nauk, 1939). After many years Krzyżanowski stated that this problem needs to be analysed further because Kraszewski did not know Eliot’s work, Eliot did not know Kraszewski’s, but the similarities between the novels cannot be seen as accidental. Cf. Julian Krzyżanowski, “Romantyzm polski,” Pamiętnik Literacki Yearbook 53, no. 3 (1962): 178. 64. Tadeusz Sinko, “Angielski sobowtór Jermoły Kraszewskiego.” Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny R. 30, no. 154 (1939): 8. 65.  The comparative studies concerned the plot and the relation man– nature. Cf. Victor Buyniak, “Kraszewski`s ‘Jermoła’ and George Eliot`s ‘Silas Marner.’” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 17, no. 1–2 (1990): 57–67; “In Commemoration of Kraszewski’s Antennial: His Jermoła and George Eliot’s Silas Marner.” In Essays for Yvonne Grabowski, edited by John McErlean (Toronto: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in Canada, 1993), 3–14; and Ilona Dobosiewicz, “The Polish Reception of George Eliot.” In The Reception of George Eliot in Europe, edited by Elinor Shaffer and Catherine Brown (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 318–335. 66. Grażyna Borkowska, “Wokół (kilku) nowszych koncepcji realizmu powieściowego. Komentarze i uwagi,” in Realiści, realizm, realność. W stulecie śmierci Bolesława Prusa, edited by E. Paczoska, B. Szleszyński, and D. M. Osiński (Warszawa: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2013), 222. “Orzeszkowa pozostałaby najbardziej realistyczną z realistycznych (tak jak Eliot), […] Jest bowiem, jak nikt inny, nastawiona na kompromis (bolesny, rozumiany często jako rezygnacja z własnego »ja«), wartości etyczne, zgodne, ciche bytowanie w małych wiejskich społecznościach oddalonych od miasta.”



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67. Leonee Orzeszkowa, Autobiografia w listach. (Warszawa, 1910), 25. Text was written in 1896. 68. Eliza Orzeszkowa, Listy zebrane, edited by E. Jankowski, vol. 3 (Wrocław: zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1956), 247. 69.  Cezary Jellenta, [Napoleon Hirszband] “Literatura polska.” Prawda R. 7, no. 31(1887): 366. Jellenta mentioned Orzeszkowa’s Meir Ezofowicz and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. As a writer and journalist, Orzeszkowa often wrote about the Jews and she advocated their interests in Polish press. Cf. I. Butkiewiczówna, Powieści i nowele żydowskie Elizy Orzeszkowej (Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1937). 70. Tadeusz Grabowski, Eliza Orzeszkowa: Szkic jubileuszowy. (Kraków: Gebethner i Wolff, 1907), 29. “Artysta musi być obywatelem, mówiła sobie zawsze, jak teraz mówili Tołstoj i Eliot, artysta musi być sobą, musi protestować przeciw temu, co uważa za złe i naganne”. 71. Grabowski, Eliza Orzeszkowa, 38–39. “Gdyby porównania mogły czegoś nauczyć, można by ją zestawić z Dickensem, którego uwielbia, również z zmarłą przedwcześnie George Eliot. Jak tamci jest moralistką do dna, moralistką z serca a nie z spekulacji, czerpiącą swój zapał reformatorski z chrześcijaństwa, z humanitarnych dążeń romantyzmu. […] Człowiek społeczny uczuwa potrzebę obowiązku, nad własnym ja panuje prawo boskie i ludzkie, a drugie pozostaje w ścisłej łączności z pierwszym.” On page 41 Grabowski claimed that Eliot is “less realistic and homogeneous” than Orzeszkowa [“mniej realistyczną i jednolitą”]. 72. Maria Żmigrodzka, Orzeszkowa: Młodość pozytywizmu (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1965), 87. “A jednak niewątpliwe są podobieństwa, które – niezależnie od licznych a przypadkowych zbieżności losów osobistych obu autorek – wiązały rolę społeczną grodzieńskiej samotnicy i Sybilli wiktoriańskiej Anglii, skupiającej w swym salonie luminarzy wyspiarskiego pozytywizmu. Wyrażają się one we wspólnocie modelu pisarki – wolnomyślnej intelektualistki, badaczki i interpretatorki przemian współczesnego społeczeństwa, podejmującej najdonioślejsze »kwestie« epoki, moralistki, formułującej pojęcie społecznego obowiązku obywatela wieku XIX”. Żmigrodzka 1965: 87. 73. D. J. Welsh, “Two talkative authors: Orzeszkowa and George Eliot,” The Polish Review 10, no. 1 (1965): 53–60. 74. Grażyna Borkowska, Dialog powieściowy i jego kontekst (Na podstawie twórczości Elizy Orzeszkowej) (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1988), 151–156. 75. Agata Buda, Powieść wiktoriańska i jej dwudziestowieczne życie (Radom: Uniwersytet Technologiczno-Humanistyczny, 2014), 84. 76. Tomasz Sobieraj, Fabuły i “światopogląd”: Studia z historii polskiej powieści XIX-wiecznej (Poznań: Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza, 2004).

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77. Michael Squires, The Pastoral Novel: Studies on George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974). 78. Sobieraj, Fabuły i “światopogląd,” 276. 79. Ewa Paczoska, “Wiktorianizm i rytmy rozwojowe powieści polskiej drugiej połowy XIX wieku. Rekonesans,” in Wiktorianie nad Tamizą i nad Wisłą, edited by E. Paczoska and A. Budrewicz (Warszawa: Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2016), 95–206, 199. 80. Wacław Borowy, “O Młynie nad Flossem pani George Eliot,” in Studia i szkice literackie, vol. 2. (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1983), 477–484. In her interpretation of Emancypantki, Janina Kulczycka-Saloni also pointed to Eliot’s views: she quoted the introduction to Adam Bede, but she did not explore this issue further. See Janina Kulczycka-Saloni, “Z dziejów Dickensa w Polsce: Emancypantki a Bleak House.” Prace Polonistyczne S. 5 (1947): 145–181. 81.  Tomasz Sobieraj, “Twórczość Bolesława Prusa a konwencje powieści rozwojowej,” in Bolesław Prus: Pisarz, publicysta, myśliciel, edited by M. Woźniakiewicz-Dziadosz and S. Fita (Lublin, Wydawnictwo: Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2003), 38. 82.  Małgorzata Grzegorzewska, “Czytając jakby w zwierciadle. Problem naśladowania w powieściach: Młyn nad Flossą i Emancypantki.” Studia Bobolanum 3 (2008): 97–118, 114. 83.  Ibid. 117. “pozwala zrozumieć istotę pragnienia metafizycznego i dostrzec jego zgubne metamorfozy.” 84.  Aneta Mazur, “Magdalena Brzeska i Maggie Tulliver – wiktoriańskie siostry? O niektórych paralelach Emancypantek Bolesława Prusa i Młyna nad Flossą George Eliot,” in Wiktorianie nad Tamizą i nad Wisłą, edited by E. Paczoska and A. Budrewicz. (Warszawa: Uniwersytet Warszawski, 2016), 246. “I Eliotowska, i Prusowska fabuła realizują schemat inicjacji oraz, częściowo, powieści rodzinnej. Dotyczą dojrzewania dziewcząt, których nietypowa wrażliwość zostaje wystawiona na szwank w obliczu przemian różnych etosów, funkcjonujących w przestrzeni publicznej. […] Równocześnie obie historie przekraczają determinanty historyczne, urastając do rangi przypowieści o jednostkach wyjątkowych, zniszczonych przez obojętność i hipokryzję świata,” 244–260. 85.  Ursula Philips, “Narcyza Żmichowska —Margaret Fuller—George Eliot. Utopijny feminizm a materialne kobiety.” in Literatura, kultura i język polski w kontekstach i kontaktach światowych. III Kongres Polonistyki Zagranicznej. Poznań, 8–11 czerwca 2006 roku, edited by M. Czermińska, K. Meller, and P. Fliciński, (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, 2007), 331–341 and “Women’s Lives and Everyday Experience in Narcyza Żmichowska (1819–1876) and George Eliot (1819–1880),” in Codzienność w literaturze XIX (i XX) wieku.

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Od Adalberta Stiftera do współczesności, edited by A. Mazur and G. Borkowska (Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski, 2007), 300–329. 86. Ursula Philips, Narcyza Żmichowska: feminizm i religia, trans. K. Bojarska (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL, 2008). 87. Philips, Narcyza Żmichowska: feminizm i religia, 514: “reintegracji materialnego ja kobiety, jej ciała, uznanie jej ciała fizycznego jako integralnej i esencjonalnej części jej tożsamości.” 88. Ilona Dobosiewicz, Ambivalent Feminizm: Marriage and Women’s Social Roles in George Eliot’s Works (Opole: Uniwersytet Opolski, 2003).

Bibliography A. N. “Kobiety na Zachodzie” [Women in the West]. Prawda [Truth] 8, no. 40 (1888): 473. Adams, James Eli. “The Reception of George Eliot.” In A Companion to George Eliot, edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw, 219–232. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. Blind, Mathilde. George Eliot. London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1883. Borkowska, Grażyna. Dialog powieściowy i jego kontekst (Na podstawie twórczości Elizy Orzeszkowej) [Dialogue in Novel and Its Context. On the Basis on the Work by Eliza Orzeszkowa]. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1988. ———. Wokół (kilku) nowszych koncepcji realizmu powieściowego. Komentarze i uwagi. [Several Newer Concepts of Fictional realism. Comments and comments.] In Realiści, realizm, realność. W stulecie śmierci Bolesława Prusa [Realists, Realism, Reality. On the centenary of the death of Bolesław Prus], edited by E. Paczoska, B. Szleszyński, and D. M. Osiński. Warsaw: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, 2013. Borowy, Wacław. “O Młynie nad Flossem pani George Eliot.” [Mill on the Floss Mrs. George Eliot.] In Studia i szkice literackie [Literary Studies and Sketches], vol. 2, 477–484. Warsaw: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1983. Buda, Agata. Powieść wiktoriańska i jej dwudziestowieczne życie. [Victorian Novel and Its 20th Century Afterlife.] Radom: Uniwersytet TechnologicznoHumanistyczny, 2014. Budrewicz, Aleksandra. Dickens w Polsce: Pierwsze stulecie [Dickens in Poland. First Centenary.] Kraków: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego, 2015. ———. “Przekład, parafraza czy plagiat? ‘Nie-Boska komedia.’” [Translation, Paraphrase or Plagiarism? ‘Non-Divine Comedy.’] Zygmunta Krasińskiego po angielsku [Zygmunt Krasinski in English] “Wiek XIX” Yearbook 7 (2014): 23–43.

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Index

A abortion, 204, 209 accidents, 197–201, 203–209, 279 Ackermann, Louise-Victorine, 279 Adam Bede, 8, 24, 27, 42, 66, 98–100, 102, 107–111, 141, 152, 159, 168, 180, 199, 202, 203, 208, 213, 214, 217–219, 254, 267, 268, 270, 276, 277, 280, 283, 290 Adams, James Eli, 13, 283 Ademollo, Agostino Marietta de’ Ricci, 70 Albert, Prince, 201 Allen, Walter, 7 ambiguity, 189, 204, 205, 207, 232, 250 Anderson, Amanda, 12, 13, 283 Androgyny, 249, 258, 282 aphorisms, 24 Aristotle, 199, 275 Arnold, Jean, 11, 133, 142 Arnold, Matthew, 30, 39 Ashton, Rosemary, 7, 12, 133, 135, 159, 188 Asnyk, Adam, 273

Athenaeum, 24, 34, 36, 38, 39 Auerbach, Nina, 224, 227 B Bachelard, Gaston, 233, 241–243 Beer, Gillian, 10, 132, 139, 140, 146, 158, 180, 188 Bellringer, Allan, 239, 243 Bennett, Joan, 5 Biggs, Maud, 276 Blackwood, John, 21, 29, 37, 38, 41, 55, 65, 91, 213 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 145 Blind, Mathilde, 278 Bodenheimer, Rosemary, 7 Bojarska, Katarzyna, 283, 291 Borkowska, Grażyna, 280 Borowy, Wacław, 281, 290 Bray, Cara, 57 Bray, Charles, 260 British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), 140 British Museum, 89 Bronte, Charlotte

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 J. Arnold and L. Marz Harper (eds.), George Eliot, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10626-3

321

322  Index Villette, 207 Buda, Agata, 289 Budrewicz, Aleksandra, 9 Bulwer Lytton, Edward Rienzi, 70 Butkiewiczówna, Irena, 286 Buyniak, Victor, 278 C canine, 11, 213–215, 217, 221–223, 225, 226 Casaubon, 105, 106, 127–129, 142, 225 Cassidy, Rebecca, 203, 209 Cecil, Lord David, 5 celebrity, 36, 43, 44, 49, 54 Century Magazine, 34 chain of being, 140, 148 Chambers, Robert, 166, 187 Chase, Cynthia, 189 Chez, Keridiana W., 214, 226 Christian mythology, 102, 103, 108 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 71 commonplace books, 6, 22, 72, 87, 98, 144 community, 9, 10, 43, 84, 97, 101, 141, 149, 153, 154, 157, 166, 205, 220, 238 Comte, August, 271 Continuity, 248, 252, 253, 261 Corbett, Mary Jean, 179, 188 Cornhill Magazine, 64, 173, 174, 177, 262 Crompton, Margaret, 7 Cross, John, 51 D Daily News, 27, 38 danger, 11, 123, 140, 197, 201, 206, 232–236, 239, 240, 261 Daniel Deronda MSS 707, 711, 83, 84

Dante Alighieri “Dantesque phrases”, 72, 75, 89 D’Arpentigny, Casmir, 166, 187 Darwin, Charles Origin of Species, 139, 141, 166, 188 Relationship with George Eliot, 139–142, 155 David Copperfield, 238 Defoe, Daniel History of the Devil, 234 Demaria, Joanne, 252, 257, 259, 263 Dickens, Charles Bleak House, 155, 208 Martin Chuzzlewit, 201 Dillane, Fionualla, 23, 37, 54 Dobosiewicz, Ilona, 268, 282, 283, 288, 291 Dobrzycka, Irena, 268 Dorking, Englefield Green, Hastings, 63, 90 hands, 181–182 ill health, of Eliot, 42 Kabbalah, 181, 182, 184, 185 Polly, 49, 90 Dorlcote Mill, 232, 233 Dorothea, 21, 105–108, 120, 123–130, 134, 201, 207, 224, 248, 256, 259, 274 Drumont, F., 287 drunkenness, 199 Du Chaillu, Paul, 167 Duchińska, Seweryna, 275 Dyboski, Roman, 268 E Ecosystem, 153, 154, 156 Edgworth, Maria, 275 Education Act (1870), 23 Egyptian mythology, 10, 12, 97–99, 101–103, 105, 107–109, 142 Eile, Stanisław, 283 Eliot, George

Index

-Adam Bede, 24, 27, 42, 99, 100, 102, 108, 111, 141, 159, 202, 214, 217, 226, 227, 267, 268, 270, 276, 277, 280, 283, 290 Daniel Deronda, 27, 42, 43, 46, 47, 51, 53, 55, 84, 99, 102, 104, 107–109, 161, 179, 180, 189, 215, 225, 247, 250, 252, 259, 270, 274, 276, 277 epigraphs, 43, 46, 47, 53, 55, 152, 153 Felix Holt, 10, 42, 83, 139, 152, 153, 161 -The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 34 Janet’s Repentance, 144, 198 knowledge of horses, 197, 198, 201, 207, 208 -The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, 41, 42, 45, 47 -Lifted Veil, 46, 55, 198, 200, 208, 255 Middlemarch, 5, 7, 11, 12, 21, 27, 37, 42, 43, 46, 82, 83, 99, 104, 105, 107, 108, 112, 120–123, 126, 127, 159, 201–204, 208, 209, 224–226, 256, 259, 268, 269, 273, 274, 276, 278, 286 The Mill on the Floss, 11, 42, 99, 102, 103, 112, 125, 145, 160, 168, 169, 214, 222, 231, 243 “Natural History of German Life”, 142, 159, 188 “Recollections of Ilfracombe”, 144 -Romola, 10, 42, 63, 67, 69, 71, 80–83, 87, 95, 97, 99, 104, 105, 108, 170, 173, 174, 184, 247, 249, 268, 270, 276 -Scenes of Clerical Life, 23, 141, 145, 151, 159, 160, 209, 215, 226, 257

  323

Silas Marner, 5, 42, 198, 199, 208, 258, 259, 270, 278, 288 empiricism, 132 epigraphs, 43, 46, 47, 51, 53, 55, 87, 152, 161 evolution/evolutionary, 10, 45, 66, 132, 139–142, 147, 148, 150, 152, 158, 160, 166, 168, 170, 171, 178, 179, 187, 188, 239 evolutionary theory, 165 extracts, 19–22, 24, 27, 28, 30–34, 37, 38, 50, 67, 72, 73, 89 F Felix Holt, 8, 10, 42, 46, 83, 139, 141, 151–153, 155, 161, 180, 184, 201, 202, 256, 259, 261 Fenn, Alice Maude, 34 Feuerbach, 6 Feuerstein, Anna, 159, 214 Fidelis, Cassandra, 82 Flegel, Monica, 214, 226 Fliciński, Piotr, 290 flood, 6, 11, 103, 232, 235, 238–242 Florence Eliot’s second trip to (1860), 67 expatriate community in, 84 Florentine families, 69 genealogy of, 69 histories/chronicles of, 67, 69, 86, 170 in the Renaissance, 65, 66, 249 Republic of, 67 topography of, 69 Florentine Notes headings in, 72, 88 “Hints and Queries” in, 77 lists in, 77, 79 orientation of, 77, 79 quarries, 70, 72, 74, 77, 80, 87, 90

324  Index form(s), 5, 22, 28, 29, 32, 33, 36, 45, 46, 48, 50, 54, 65, 72, 87, 99, 120, 124, 126, 127, 130, 131, 134, 143, 153, 156, 170, 174, 207, 218, 222–224, 242 Forster, E.M., 5 Fortnightly Review, 36 French, 10, 66, 72, 81, 149, 233, 269, 272, 278, 282 Fuller, Margaret, 290 Fyfe, Paul, 11, 199, 205, 208 G Gardner, Monica, 278, 288 Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 22, 37 gems and intagli, 81 gender roles, 235, 248, 258, 260 the George Eliot Birthday Book, 20, 24, 28, 30, 49 The George Eliot Letters, 5, 7, 13, 37, 38, 52, 110, 159, 188, 207, 226 George Eliot’s Life, 12, 24 German translations, 269 gift books, 28 Gissing, George Odd Women, 198 Whirlpool, 205, 209 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang biography by G.H. Lewes, 43, 141, 150, 151 -Iphegenia in Taurus, 142 -Metamorphosis of Plants, 151 Goodbody, John, 23, 37 Grabowski, Tadeusz, 279, 289 Grabowski, Zbigniew, 269, 283 Gray, Beryl, 208, 221, 226 Gray, Donald, 23, 37 Great Thoughts, 31 Greek, 10, 66, 89, 100, 105, 107, 181, 257 Greek mythology, 10, 97–99, 103, 108 Grzegorzewska, Malgrozata, 281, 290

Guedalla, Haim, 43, 50 H Haight, Gordon, 5–7, 37, 134, 207 Hardy, Barbara, 5, 226, 227 Hardy, Thomas -Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 198 -Woodlanders, 207 Harper, Lila Marz, 10, 97, 110, 139 Harper’s Monthly, 34 Hayhoe, Joseph, 202 Hebrew mythology, 10, 97, 98, 107 hedgerow, 140, 151, 153–156 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 125, 134 Henry, Nancy, 11, 12, 42, 49, 121, 133, 197, 249, 260 historical novel in crises, 64 History Chronology of Florentine History, 77, 88 Enlightenment and Romantic revival of, 67 Florentine history, 69, 77, 88 historiography, 69 interest in, 108 literary history, 69 Holloway, John, 9, 13, 151, 161 horses accidents, 198, 199, 201, 204, 207 racing, 202, 203, 206, 207 Hughes, Kathryn, 7, 48 Hughes, Linda, 21 Hugo, Victor, 31 Huxley, Thomas Henry Man’s Place in Nature, 147 Reviews, 141, 149 I Imperialism, 98, 103, 109 The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 34

Index

index subject index to Osservatorefiorentino, 79 thematic index, 86 industry/industrial, 11, 98, 153, 165, 188, 231 Inheritance, 128, 155, 156, 179 Interpretation, 4, 12, 55, 70, 84, 103, 108, 132, 182, 189, 199, 204, 205, 214, 217, 218, 223, 225, 237, 274, 277, 278, 281, 290 Italian language Florentine, 67 Tuscan dialect, 65, 201 Italian novel, 63, 83, 85, 90 Italy Risorgimento, 67, 84 J Jabłonowski, Władysław, 267 Jacobs, Joseph, 34, 39 James, Henry “Figure in the Carpet”, 207 Jankowski, Edward, 284, 289 Jellenta, Cezary, 289 Jersey, 144, 202 Jewish Chronicle, 43 Jezierski, Feliks, 272, 285 Jones, R.T., 7 Jumeau, Alain, 243 K Karl, Frederick, 7 Kasztelowicz, Stanisław, 283 Keats, John, 45, 46 Kisber, 202, 203 Konopnicka, Maria, 271, 273 Kovalevskaia, Sophia, 206 Kozłowski, W.M., 288 Krajewska, Wanda, 268, 283

  325

Krasiński, Zygmunt, 278 Kraszewski, Józef Ignacy, 278, 279, 288 Kreilkamp, Ivan, 214, 226 Krzyżanowski, Julian, 278, 288 Kulczycka-Saloni, Janina, 290 L Landry, Donna, 208 Lange, Antoni, 283 Lastri, Marco, 67, 72–74, 79 Latin, 10, 66, 72, 146 Lawrence, D.H., 290 Leavis, F.R., 5, 155 legend(s) legend of St. Ogg, 102 Leighton, Frederic, 64, 85, 91, 173, 174, 177, 249 Letissier, Georges, 214, 226 Levine, Caroline, 134, 170, 188 Levine, George, 37, 132, 134, 158, 190, 214 Lewenthal, Samuel, 276 Lewes, George Henry Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences, 141, 149 conversation with, 82, 143, 173 Lewes and horses, 201, 202 Sea-Side Studies, 141, 143, 144, 159, 261 Life and Works of Goethe, 43 literary history, 69 literary legacy, 41 London London Library, 86 Lytton, Robert, 278 M Macmillan, Alexander, 51 Macmillan, 55, 131, 243, 285

326  Index Maggie Tulliver, 125, 213, 232, 237, 281 Mahawatte, Royce, 256 Main, Alexander, 20–22, 28, 30, 31, 34, 37, 38, 49 Manni, Domenico, 72, 86 Manzoni, Alessandro I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), 65 Marcus, Sharon, 256, 263 Marine Invertebrates, 143, 144, 159 Martineau, Harriet, 31, 149 Mazur, Aneta, 281 Macchiavelli, Niccolò, 93 McCormack, Kathleen, 48, 56, 260, 263 McSweeney, Kerry, 7 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 65, 69, 85 Meller, Katarzyna, 290 metaphor(s)/metaphorical, 3, 10, 11, 21, 27, 28, 125, 130, 139–142, 145–148, 151–153, 155–158, 160, 202, 222, 231, 234, 250, 252, 258 Mickiewicz, Adam, 276 Middlemarch, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 21, 27, 37, 42, 43, 46, 66, 82, 83, 99, 104, 105, 107, 108, 112, 120–124, 126, 127, 130–132, 142, 157, 159, 161, 198–205, 208, 209, 224–226, 256, 258, 259, 268, 269, 273, 274, 276, 278, 286 The Mill on the Floss, 8, 11, 42, 99, 102, 103, 112, 125, 134, 145, 146, 151, 152, 160, 168, 169, 178, 198, 202, 213, 214, 216, 222, 231, 242, 268, 270, 281, 282 miscarriage, 198, 204–206 Mitchell, W.J.T., 178, 188 molecules, 119–122, 126, 127, 134 Moore, George Esther Waters, 207

moral/morality, 4, 9, 34, 43, 46, 49, 53, 98, 110, 112, 122, 126, 127, 129, 130, 134, 135, 145, 146, 149, 152, 157, 217, 227, 231, 232, 237, 239, 247, 248, 250, 254–256, 258, 261, 276, 278 moral philosophy, 134, 135, 247, 248, 262 moral spectrum, 248, 256 Muratori, Ludovico, 67, 77 mythology, 10, 12, 97–103, 105, 107–110, 142, 152 N Nahorski, Stanisław, 270 Napoleonic Wars, 84, 91 Nardi, Jacopo, 85 narrative, 11, 21, 23, 24, 38, 43, 65, 70, 84, 98, 99, 107, 109, 123, 124, 126, 127, 130, 146, 153, 158, 174, 180, 181, 184–188, 197, 199, 207, 214, 215, 217, 221, 224, 226, 231, 232, 235, 241 narrator, 23, 28, 99, 106, 124, 125, 128, 145, 146, 168, 173, 176, 178, 183, 184, 186, 198, 200, 203–206, 215–220, 222–225, 227, 232, 233, 235, 236, 238, 252, 255, 280 natural history, 10, 12, 110, 139–142, 146, 149, 151, 152, 156 nerves/nervous system, 120, 121, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130 neural processes, 121, 131 New Journalism, 10, 19–22, 30, 36, 37, 39 Newmarket, 202, 209 Newnes, George, 19, 21, 31–34, 37, 39 newspapers, 19, 21, 22, 24, 30, 31, 47, 166, 278

Index

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 276 Niewiadomski, Stanisław, 285 Noah, 235, 242 Nord, Deborah Epstein, 189, 259 Notebooks chronologies in, 80 commonplace books, 6, 22, 72, 87, 98, 144 copying, 80 cross referencing within a notebook, 74, 76 different notes from one source in, 89 quotations into different notebooks, 80 note taking abridgement (epitome), 71 annotation, 6 cross referencing within a notebook, 74, 76 different notes from one source in, 89 extraction, 24 marginalia, 71 marking of books, 91 organization of information, 70 over writing, 80 page numbers, 74, 76 in pen, 80 in pencil, 80, 83 quotations into different notebooks, 80 summarising and paraphrasing; (adversaria), 71, 83 Nottinghamshire Guardian, 27 O Obrębska, Maria, 276 Oliphant, Margaret Ouida, 207, 273 “Mr Sandford”, 206, 209 In Trust, 207 Under Two Flags, 207

  327

Origin, 90, 141, 143, 146, 148, 152, 153, 155, 158, 161, 166 Orzeszkowa, Eliza, 270–272, 276, 279–281, 284, 289 Osiński, Dawid Maria, 288 Ouida (nee Maria Louisa Ramée), 273 P Paczoska, Ewa, 281, 288, 290 Pater, Walter, 269 Pawlicki, Stefan, 285 perception, 3, 12, 41, 43, 52, 120, 125, 133, 142, 145, 146, 214, 222 perspective, 98, 103, 109, 120, 127, 129, 142, 144, 152, 153, 160, 201, 202, 205, 206, 214, 215, 218, 225, 253, 269 pets, 214, 217, 224, 226 Philips, Ursula, 282 Philip Wakem, 236–239 physiology, 11, 12, 119, 131–133, 149, 182 The Physiology of Common Life, 120, 179, 180, 189 Pietkiewicz, Zenon, 286 Pinion, F.B., 272 Pinney, Thomas, 4, 5, 13, 111, 261 Poe, Edgar Allen, 31 Poems, 22, 30, 42, 43, 45, 47, 48, 51, 67, 257, 285 poetess, 53 Poet Laureate, 42, 47, 51, 57 prediction/predictability, 185, 201, 205, 207, 239 Price, Leah, 30 Problems of Life and Mind, 120, 121, 131, 133 Professionalization, 141, 148–151 Prus, Boleslaw, 272, 276, 281 The Psychonomy of the Hand, 167

328  Index

Q quarry, 70, 71, 87 Quarry for Romola, 66, 88, 89

Romola Notebook tables in, 77 title page, 74 verbatim quotation, 81 Roscoe, William Lorenzo de’ Medici, 69 Rosenberg, Tracey, 260 Russel Perkin, James, 268

R radiation, 121, 132 Rare Bits, 31 Raulff, Ulrich, 207, 209 reader response, 215, 219 Realism, 3, 4, 11, 12, 100, 102, 107, 120–122, 126, 130, 133, 142, 159, 185, 189, 190, 227, 269, 272, 275–277, 280 recognition, 47, 52, 102, 182, 199, 215, 218, 222, 282 Reconciliation, 235, 240, 241 Redinger, Ruby V., 7 Renunciation, 102, 103, 175, 236, 238–240 reviews, 6, 7, 24, 27, 28, 34, 37, 47, 133, 139, 148, 150, 159, 161, 231, 268, 272 Riehl, Wilhelm, 179 Rignall, John, 133, 270 Rignall, John, 133, 284 Rilett, Beverley Park, 260 Romola, 268, 270, 276 costume in, 72 criticism of, 8, 82, 170 epigraphs, 87 female protagonist in, 82 historical detail in, 10, 63, 66, 70, 83, 85, 87 “Italian novel”; plotting for, 82; research for, 10, 63, 66, 83, 95, 173; scholarship in, 67, 82

S sage, 9, 10, 13, 20, 23, 27, 42, 47, 48, 161 Salmon, Richard, 31, 39 same-sex, 247–250, 253–257, 260–262 Sand, George, 276 Savonarola, Girolamo, 69, 77, 79, 85, 88, 172, 173, 175, 176, 178, 180, 250 trial of, 69 Scenes of Clerical Life, 23, 141, 143–145, 151, 159, 160, 209, 215, 226, 256, 276 science/scientific, 4, 6, 9–12, 48, 65, 122, 130–133, 135, 139–143, 145–153, 158, 160, 166, 167, 180, 182, 189, 190, 205, 207, 225, 237, 261, 269, 271–274 scientific rhetoric, 139, 141, 153 scissors-and-paste journalism, 30 Scott, Walter Old Mortality, 64 Waverley, 64 Sea-Side Studies, 141, 143–145, 150, 152, 159, 261 Secord, James, 149, 160, 187 self/self denial, 4, 10, 27, 41–43, 47, 48, 51, 52, 82, 99, 122, 128, 172, 204, 205, 233, 236, 237, 241, 252, 253, 256–258 Sex Role Inventory, 258

Przedpełska-Trzeciakowska, Anna, 283 Pulci, Luigi, 72, 85 purification, 235

Index

Shaw, Harry E., 12, 13, 283 Sheldon, Walter Lorenzo, 277 Shuttleworth, Sally, 4, 9, 10, 13, 131, 139, 158 Siemieniecki, J.H., 286 Sienkiewicz, Henryk, 272 Silas Marner, 5, 42, 63, 198, 199, 208, 255, 258, 259, 270, 278 Simcox, Edith, 49, 248, 249, 262 Sinko, Tadeusz, 278 Sismondi, J-C-L Sismonde de, 69 Smith, George, 64, 85, 262 Sobieraj, Tomasz, 280, 281 society journalism, 19 solidarity, 235, 248, 261 Sotheby’s sale, 87 Spain, 70, 83, 98, 104 The Spanish Gypsy/Spanish Gipsy, 22, 29, 42, 43, 47, 53, 56, 57, 83, 98, 99, 102, 104, 106, 107, 181, 184, 259 Spinoza, 6 Squires, Michael, 290 Stephen Guest, 216, 235–237, 239 Stephen, Leslie, 131, 278 Stockton, Kathryn, 256, 263 Studies for Neapolitan Drama, 83 Świętochowski, Aleksander, 284, 285 symbolism, 142, 182 sympathy, 45, 97, 134, 170–172, 178, 186, 187, 189, 199, 207, 208, 214, 217, 221, 223, 227, 231, 235, 256, 257 Szala, Alina, 268 Szirotny, June Skye, 261, 262 Szleszyński Bartłomiej, 288 T Taine, Hyppolite, 272, 273 Tarnawski, Władysław, 285 Taxonomy, 139, 143, 156, 159 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 119

  329

Theirauf, Doreen, 205 Thomas à Kempis, 281 A Thousand Tit-bits from a Hundred Authors, 20, 39 tidepools, 139, 140, 142–145, 153 Tit-Bits, 10, 19–21, 23, 30–34, 36, 39 Tolstoy, Leo, 275, 279 Tom Tulliver, 145, 202, 222, 235 transgendered, 260, 261 translation, 6, 53, 70, 72, 80, 81, 87, 90, 149, 267–269, 272, 273, 278, 281, 282 tree of life, 140, 147, 148 Trepka, Nekanda, 275, 276, 287 Trollope, Anthony, 31, 198 Trollope, Thomas Adolphus What I Remember, 84 Turgenev, Ivan, 202, 275 Tyndale, John, 132 U Uglow, Jenny, 238, 243 V Van den Broek, Antonie, 53, 111, 131, 152, 189, 257, 263 Vestiges of Creation, 150 vibrations, 122, 124–126, 134 Victoria, Queen, 200 Victorian, 3, 4, 6, 9–11, 13, 30, 37, 38, 53, 54, 56, 121, 122, 128, 131–133, 139, 142, 146, 147, 154–156, 158–160, 165–167, 187–190, 197, 199–201, 208, 209, 214, 220, 226, 227, 238, 263, 267, 269, 271, 276, 278, 280, 282 Villari, Pasquale Shefa Tal, Storia di Girolamo Savonarola, 69

330  Index W Wagner, Peter, 176, 188 Waleria, Marrené Mozkowska, 267, 276, 277 Waliszewski, Karol, 267, 275, 276, 283, 287 water, 11, 101, 103, 156, 157, 215, 220, 231–235, 237–242 Welsh, David J., 280 Westminster Review, 28, 38, 139, 141, 148, 149, 151, 160 White, Gilbert Natural History of Selborne, 146 usage in George Eliot, 146 Whitman, Walt, 260 Whitmore, Michael, 208 Will Ladislaw, 12, 124, 128, 256, 258 Wintle, Sarah, 208, 209 Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse, 20, 38, 49 Witemeyer, Hugh, 175, 188

The Works of George Eliot, 20, 24, 27, 36, 38, 49 Wormald, Mark, 205, 209 Y Yale/Yale University, 5–7, 13, 37, 208 Z Żeromski, Stefan, 283 Zgliński, Daniel, 286 Zimmerman, Bonnie, 257, 263 Żmichowska, Narcyza, 269, 282 Żmigrodzka, Maria, 280 Zohar, 182, 189 Zola, Émile, 272, 275, 277 Zyndram-Kościółkowska, Wilhelmina, 279