s
o v I 53’ .
. 59,. 3.3::

. i ..

.3 3...:

o '52;

5.5.}.
x

:0: _
.. 33.5.3!
«:5?
x. 5.71.:
5:73.!

.. .1.lo
$.l

1:.

. .
a .. t
.; ‘.. a...
.»:.s:«,2
:

x. 3i! .c
333...}... in.
3:452... r
‘59:... ‘

3..
3...}: y In:
2:1. u. x 19

r1..v:l.lu.

D

a\....
... .9...

 

 

 

 

 

.1 117.5. I

:v 5sz

. 579:1...
:5. t! I 13:.
szvdufl
5... int
‘.. 2

3:}... 5
a

Afr

:

tan... 1a..

: A :‘.
3 .Liu

.

.3. .
952,13...
x. A‘W.

.......w

:ivzl.n.au

:2wyzznvnelz
x . ‘

3 ii“:

...xn‘

e

I Q}. a .53

£32.29. ...~.o.i|

72‘: 51V
3;

£3:
.3: 3.5. 9

I $1. 2
a 1.. ,
7:... rt.
- .1:
-

will y

“3931.3...
i.:.vv.
:

7r
343:5! I. l.
a a. u I. 1 .

3533.2. 0 .7...» .
u, in:

 

Tl-‘ESL‘S

300i

 

LIBRARY
Michigan sag-3333
University

w

 

This is to certify that the

dissertation entitled

George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Historical

Consciousness: A Case Study in Historicism

presented by

Michael Ian Carignan

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

 

 

Ph.D. degree in History

Major pWor

 

8 20 1
Date / /0

 

MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0-12771

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE

DATE DUE

DATE DUE

 

aEthiitrzgos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/01 cJCIRCIDatoDuogGS-nts

 

 

GEORGE ELIOT AND NINTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS:
A CASE STUDY IN HISTORICISM

By

Michael Ian Carignan

AN ABSTRACT OF A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fiJlfillment of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of History
2001

Professor Peter Vinten-Johansen

ABSTRACT
GEORGE ELIOT AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY HISTORICAL
CONSCIOUSNESS: A CASE STUDY IN HISTORICISM
By

Michael Ian Carignan

This dissertation responds to the following question: Why did George Eliot, in the
midst of a promising career as an editor, translator, and reviewer of philosophy, science,
and history in the 18405 and 1850s, turn to fiction? The evidence suggests that Eliot
undertook novel writing because she saw its potential to be an alternative form of
historical representation and a tool of historical inquiry. Eliot’s correspondence,
manuscript diaries, journals, notebooks, and novels indicate that she used fiction to
illuminate the social and cultural complexities of the major historical turning point she
believed had occurred in Europe in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, Eliot challenged
the academic distinctions between literature and history—at the very moment of their
disciplinary delineation at the English universities in the 1870s—with her view of history
that was increasingly complicated by the subjective dimensions of historical interpretation
and the fictive elements of realist historical narrative.

Two forms of nineteenth-century historicism contextualize Eliot’s evolving
treatment of history in her fiction. One form derived fiom the Herderian romantic critique
of Enlightenment understandings of history by stressing the importance of development
and celebrating the historically unique. Eliot’s version of Young Hegelian historical

philosophy, which followed Hegelian notions of dialectical development, situates her in

this tradition. Eliot’s fictional depictions of the complex ways people in the English
provinces responded to the emerging modern world in the early 18303 derives from this
Young Hegelian historicist perspective. The other form, “crisis historicism,” refers to late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of the implied temporality of all
cultural forms, including cherished western values, and the apparent impossibility of
understanding the process of history fi'om outside that process, i.e., objectively. Eliot’s
later fiction used narrative strategies that extended the limits of realism while probing
problems similar to those found in the historical philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey, commonly
associated with the crisis of historicism.

This dissertation widens the current scholarship on nineteenth-century historical
thought, and especially on historicism, which tends to focus on German historians and
historical philosophers. While contributing a much needed English example, this study
also ofl‘ers a view of a novelist using fiction to develop historicist perspectives sensitive to
dimensions of cultural struggle at moments of historical transformation, and to represent
the past in ways that the new academic historians could not. Eliot’s understanding of the
blurred relationship between fiction and history adds to current theoretical debates on the
literariness of historical knowledge and writing because it suggests that historical
knowledge can be expanded through alternative literary forms. Furthermore, Eliot’s
challenge to objective history in the 18703 suggests that theoretical concerns with the
subjectivity-objectivity tension, which the profession now addresses, are as old as the

profession itself.

Copyright by
MICHAEL IAN CARIGNAN
2001

I dedicate this dissertation to my parents and to Paula,
all of whom showed me the extraordinary patience and
love I needed to complete this project

Acknowledgements

Many people belong on the by-line of this dissertation, for they have contributed to
my intellectual development in ways that significantly shaped this project. Convention
insists, however, that one acknowledge these kinds of contributions in the following way.

I first must thank Peter Vinten-Johansen whose trust, patience, and attention to my
growth as a scholar and as a person is more than anyone can safely expect from a mentor.
I cannot adequately thank him for everything, so I limit myself to mentioning that I am
gratefirl for his teaching me how to write. I would also like to thank Betty Vinten-
Johansen for tolerating my sometimes intrusive need of Peter’s attention, for her general
warmth, and for a couple of very well-timed hugs.

I want to thank the members of my dissertation committee, each of whom read my
work more carefirlly than I dared to expect. In addition to their willingness to discuss my
work and their many helpfirl suggestions, I would like to thank Professor David LoRomer
for his years of encouragement, without which I would not have chosen history as a
profession, Professor Richard Peterson for teaching me how to read Hegel (no small feat),
Professor Judith Stoddart for teaching me how to read Eliot (an important contribution, to
say the least), and Professor Christopher Celenza especially for taking the time to help me
develop a more SOphisticated understanding of German traditions in historical and
philological scholarship in the nineteenth century.

I finally must thank Paula and my parents, George and Yolaine, for more than I

can ever say. It is to these three I dedicate this work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables viii
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. A Young Hegelian Historicist 39
Chapter 2. The Mill on the Floss: A Natural History of English Life,

or, Eliot’s Riehlism 69
Chapter 3. Analogy, Veracity, and Eliot’s Middle Novels 88
Chapter 4. Middlemarch: A Young Hegelian Historical Experiment 128
Chapter 5. Daniel Deronda and Appropriating the Past 155
Conclusion: Looking Backward 183
Notes 189
Bibliography 209

vii

List of Tables

Table 1 2

Table 2 28

Table 3 171

viii

AB

Essays
FH
Haight
MF
Mm

R
Scenes

Abbreviations Used for In-Text References

Adam Bede

Daniel Deronda

Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney

Felix Holt

George Eliot: A Biography, by Gordon S. Haight
The Mill on the Floss

Middlemarch

Romola

Scenes of a Clerical Life

ix

Introduction: George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness

Surely the difference between the historian and the novelist is narrower than what
we may have been accustomed to think: but this has happened because of the
growth of historical consciousness in the West, because historical thinking afl‘ected
the novelists more profoundly than the novel afi‘ected historianship. (John Lukacs,
1968)1 .

I become more and more timid—with less daring to adopt any formula which does
not get itself clothed for me in some human figure and individual experience, and

perhaps that is a sign that if I help others to see at all it must be through the
medium of art. (George Eliot to Dr. Joseph Frank Payne, Jan. 25, 1876)2

***

The year was 1856 when Marian Evans, at the age of 36, made the significant
decision to write historical fiction. On September 23, in a typically austere journal entry,
she wrote: “Began to write ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,’ which I
hope to make one of a series called ‘Scenes of a Clerical Life.’”3 After years of writing
and editing articles and reviews on a wide range of philosophical, literary, and scientific
topics, during which time she also translated monumental works by Strauss, Feuerbach,
and Spinoza, Evans tried her hand at a completely different way of writing. Under the
pen-name George Eliot, “Amos Barton” appeared in 1857, and within the year two more
short stories completed the series published together as Scenes of a Clerical Life. These

were sufliciently popular as to invite solicitations from her publisher. By the end of 1860

1

“George Eliot” had published two more works of historical fiction, the novels Adam Bede

and Mill on the Floss, which distinguished her as a major author (already more popular

than Dickens), enabled her and George Henry Lewes, her pseudo-husband, financial

independence from piece-work journalism, and ensured the opportunity to devote her

professional life to the writing of novels. But why did George Eliot turn to historical

fiction?4

Table l

Eliot’s Fiction and Their First Serial Publication

Publication Publisher
Scenes of a Clerical Life Blackwood ’3 Magazine

“Sad Fortunes of the Rev.

Amos Barton”

“Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story”

“Janet’s Repentance”
Adam Bede Blackwood ’s
The Mill on the Floss Blackwood ’s
Silas Marner Blackwood ’s
Romola Cornhill Magazine
Felix Holt Blackwood ’s
Middlemarch Blackwood ’s
Daniel Deronda Blackwood ’5

Year

1857

1859
1860
1861
1862-63
1866
1871-72

1876

Nineteenth-century Europeans were perhaps the most historically minded in

Western civilization. Auguste Comte observed at mid-century that “the characteristic of

the present century will be the overwhelming importance it assigns to history, by the light
of which philosophy, politics, and even poetry will be pursued.” For someone who
interpreted human history as a series of stages with inherent, identifying characteristics,
and who assumed that his own time was a kind of culmination of the development of
human consciousness, history was indeed a significant rubric in his epistemology. But
Comte was on a band-wagon of sorts in that most philosophers, social theorists, men and
women of letters, and novelists in the nineteenth century wrote works that were animated
by historical dimensions. Most of the best-known philosophers of the nineteenth
century—Hegel, Comte, Saint-Simone, Marx, Nietzsche, for example—grounded their
systems in specific perspectives on historical transformation. This was true of creative
literature, too. Sir Walter Scott was the most widely read author of the nineteenth
century, and all over EurOpe the most widely read books were also historical fiction.
Dickens’s T ale of Two Cities, Hugo’s Les Miserables, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi, were
each national treasures. Eliot’s turn to historical fiction, in light of this literary context,
seems not surprising, for historical novels were extraordinarily popular. If she was to try
fiction at all, historical fiction was a reasonable, if not obvious, choice.

However, if we view Eliot’s novels against the backdrop of the works of
nineteenth-century historians, philosophers, and social theorists—i.e., the kinds of works
she had been reviewing and editing for the Westminster Review since 1851—then the
choice of fiction is more perplexing. How was writing fiction going to contribute to
historiography? What theoretical basis was there behind the view that an art-form could
develop our understanding of the past? How can Eliot say, as her last novel was

appearing in serial publication, that “ifI help others to see at all it must be through the

medium of art”?

Eliot’s expansive intellectual interests have given Eliot scholars a wide variety of
possibilities by which to analyze her fiction. Major undertakings that situate Eliot in an
intellectual milieu have tended to focus on her philosophical association with science in
general and positivism in particular. Sally Shuttleworth’s George Eliot and Nineteenth-
Centwy Science traces Eliot’s use of organic models—in which individuals are seen in
harmony with their environment—employed in the natural sciences to study social
situations. It argues that in the course of her career, Eliot explored the effectiveness of the
organic model through a method of experimental novel-writing, and that her later fiction
began to examine implications of the failure of organic models to account for the
psychological dynamics of her characters. Peter Alan Dale’s In Pursuit of a Scientific
Culture plots Eliot’s work within a wider story of Victorian explorations in positivism that
culminated in an aestheticized worldview. Dale argues that Eliot’s later fiction articulates
a potential incompatibility between mental constructs that attempt to understand the world
and the structure of the world itself. He associates Eliot’s examination of the moral
implications of this perspective with pragmatism. Shuttleworth and Dale both suggest that
Eliot held philosophical views that made imagination not merely compatible with scientific
advancement, but especially useful when studying social dynamics, and that her novels
represent experiments in that endeavor.

While most Eliot scholars seem to recognize that her interest in history was a
significant feature of her novels, few have isolated Eliot’s historical thinking for analysis.
A recent exception is Neil McCaw, whose George Eliot and Victorian Historiography

(2000) analyzes her fiction in terms of a desire to invent a national, English past, and as it

reflects tensions between Whiggish and Carlylean interpretations of history. Suzanne
Graver’s George Eliot and Community indirectly treats Eliot’s historical view as it
examines the social ramifications within the context of Gemeinschaft-Gesellschafl
tensions. Graver’s work focuses on Eliot’s concern with the nineteenth-century social
transformation associated with modernization, and how Eliot looked for ways to maintain
Gemeinschafl sensibilities in a world that was becoming increasingly dominated by
Gesellschafi values. By placing two novels at the turn of the nineteenth century, and three
more around 1830, Eliot tried to understand how preindustrial social networks provided a
basis of community feeling and a sense of historical interdependence, and how those
communities experienced the disintegrating influence of modernity. More directly
concerned with historical representation, Sophia Andres’s analysis of Middlemarch
suggests that the novel “challenges” monological Victorian historiography by presenting
dissonant and multivalent perspectives.’ These approaches ofl‘er provocative ways to
begin considering Eliot’s historical thought, but none seem to figure in the Young
Hegelian historicism that inspired Eliot as a young woman and was so central to the way
she conceived the past in (and with) her fiction. The significance of Hegelian and Young
Hegelian historical philos0phy in Eliot’s work is generally underdeveloped in the
scholarship.6

This dissertation places Eliot’s historical philosophy, which I identify with certain
trends of historicism, at the center of her worldview because it provides a vantage point
fiom which her novels fall into a pattern of development that extends fiom her earlier
career as a progenitor of Young Hegelian historical philosophy through her last published

work. Rather than compare her to other novelists, which many literary critics have done

and continue to do, this study examines Eliot’s novels in the context of the
transformations in historical philosophy and the emerging, scientifically inclined profession
of history in the latter halfof the nineteenth century. Eliot’s career as a writer of historical
fiction—spanning the 18505, ’603, and ’70s—coincided with major shifts in historical
thinking. Three notable shifts form a dynamic set of tensions within which Eliot’s
historical perspective developed and her novels appeared. First was the rise of historicism
as a general philosophical orientation to the relationship between the past and the present.
Second was the scientific transformation of historical writing within the emerging
discipline of history at the English universities after mid century. Third was the
development in historical philosophy of a critique of objective history from the proto-
modernist, perspectivism that we associate with Friedrich Nietzsche, and the
hermeneutical critique of historical reason associated with Wilhehn Dilthey, both of which
challenged scientific claims to truth and objective access to reality, such as those made by
the new professional historians.

Eliot designed her novels to be tools of historical inquiry in a Young Hegelian-
historicist perspective. Though her conception of the relationship between fiction and
history evolved through her novel writing career, Eliot always strove, through the use of
fiction, not merely to add to the store of knowledge about the past, but to understand how
the present evolved out of that past, and to experiment with the literary basis of that
understanding. In the way she practiced it, Eliot’s historical fiction ofi‘ered representations
of the past that enabled her to convey a historicist perspective (especially with respect to
the historicity of cultural forms), in ways the emerging analytical-empirical historiography

of the young historical profession could not. In her final exammes, a proto-modernist

rejection of the Rankean legacy of obj ectivist history became explicit. As an alternative,
Eliot proposed a kind of neo-romantic perspectivism that centralized the roles of
consciousness and imagination in appropriating history as they construct a past, which has

suggestive parallels to the historical philosophy of Dilthey.

Nineteenth-Century Historiography

For much of Western history, history itself has been considered a branch or special
form of literature, an art-form. The first written histories fiom ancient Greece, for
example, though they were intended to be more than mere entertainment, were written to
be performed. Even into early modern times, historians were distinguished fiom scholars
and antiquarians by the fact that they were writers.7 From the times of the ancients,
questions of historical method were often questions of narrative style and presentation. It
was not until the Enlightenment that the question of objectivity—which concerned the
nature of the relationship between viewer and object viewed—was systematically
considered by philosophers such as Hume and Kant. Two responses to this “problem”

arose, beginning in the latter part of the eighteenth century and continuing through the

first half of the nineteenth century. One came fiom the romantic and German idealist

perspectives, which distinguished history from the natural sciences. The other, developing
in the twilight of the romantic period, was comprised of positivist and utilitarian theories,
which tried to make history another of the natural sciences. While there are important
exceptions and qualifications to be made, for the most part the historical profession
emerged afier 1870, in the English-speaking world, as an empirical enterprise in which
practitioners assumed that the past was a reality independent of the consciousness of the
historian who could represent it objectively.8 Though it has been increasingly
problematized in the last quarter-century, the obj ectivist perspective, with respect to both
the relationship between the historian and the object of analysis and to the separation of
history from literature, has dominated the profession ever since.

Many historians in the first half of the nineteenth century—sometimes lumped
within the category of romanticism—maintained the view that history was a branch of
literature. Romantic historiography was motivated by a search for continuities with the
past and origins of present conditions, and was usually guided by presentist concerns.
According to Lionel Gossman, romantic historians thought of history as the “means of
restoring contact with origins and of reconstituting what was experienced as a fractured
totality.”9 Implied in this conception is that no individual can experience a comprehensive
consciousness of selfin the historical flow. Through reflection and writing, that “fractured
totality” can be reconstituted into a coherent narrative. In the romantic perspective the
challenge for the “historian-genius,” as it was for the poet-genius, was to connect specific,
individual experiences to a totalizing conceptualization of the human historical experience.
Michelet, for example, connected French political struggles in the middle of the July

Revolution to his history of ancient Rome, as if they were part of a single continuity. 1°

Herder and the Grimm brothers had earlier given the sense that their present moment
belonged to a larger narrative of German and human history. As Romantics, most of these
writers were not bothered by the idea that individual consciousness shaped the
conceptualization of that narrative.

Hegel’s philosophy helped organize the idea that the past was organically
connected to the present and that its coherence depended on the consciousness of the
historian. Hegel was no Romantic, however; the significance of Idealism in his philosophy
parallels much of the romantic movement in many of its manifestations. For Hegel the
central story of human history was the expansion of consciousness that absorbed previous
modes of understanding and stages of development into its own new perspective: this was
the Absolute Mind, or Spirit, striving to resolve itself in its own self-awareness. He
famously insisted that “[t]he fimction of our own and of every age [is] to grasp the
knowledge that already exists, to make it our own . . . to make of it something difi’erent
from what it was before.”11 This parallels the romantic orientation to the relationship
between the perceiver and what is perceived, which in this case is the historian and the
past. In this sense, history is not the actual experience of what happened, but the
construct developed by a later age for its own needs. It was understood by Hegel and
romantic historians alike that studying the past involved a kind of “appropriation,”
reflecting the desire for a coherent, totalizing narrative of the past that could not otherwise
be experienced as a totality. In this conception, the perspective of the inquirer was not
considered a problematic, but as the necessary, animating force behind the representation
of coherence.

The view that history is a branch of literature dominated romantic historiography

in the 1820s and 183 Os, and many of the well-known historians of this period strove to
write grand narratives that were appealing as literature. In England, for example, T. B.
Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle both wrote histories that were intended to be read as good
literature. In Macaulay’s mind, the historian’s talent “bears a considerable aflinity to the
talent of a great dramatist.”12 At a time of increasingly rapid industrialization, the English
reading public was keenly aware of change and had an intensified need for histories that
presented continuities with the remote past. ‘3 Questions of objectivity and strict
adherence to documents were the questions of a later generation of professional
historians, as the discipline embraced scientific tendencies. The early Victorian historians,
according to T. W. Heyck, “concerned themselves more with the truthfulness of a
historical account as a whole, with judging the essence of an interpretation, rather than
with testing the correspondence of propositions to individual facts. . . . The Victorian idea
of testing historical evidence (or ‘authorities’) for truth was not so much correspondence
with facts as compatibility with preconceived principles or interpretations.”“ This
romantic conception of historical truth prizes the quality of the narrative construction
more than the reliance on documentation. Histories written in the first halfof the
nineteenth century had to have a poetic quality that not only celebrated the historically
specific, but connected those specificities to a sense of totality. Their totalizing narrative
constructs had to resonate with the reading public more than the minute details had to
withstand the close scrutiny that late nineteenth-century historians would want to apply.

Leopold von Ranke, the German historian credited for establishing the principles
of scientific analysis of the past adopted by the English and American historical

professions, was also linked to the generation of historians and historical philosophers who

10

believed history was a branch of literature. Ranke did think history was a specialized kind
of literature that had to make a commitment to report on the past “as it actually
happened.” But this famous dictum is often uncritically taken to mean that Ranke was a
historical empiricist, or proto-positivist, largely because the scientific historians of the
latter part of the century adopted him as a father to the new profession. He would have
been surprised at what he has come to symbolize for the historical professions in England
and the United States.15 In the tradition of German Idealism, Ranke’s conception of
history held that historical development was the same thing as the perpetual unfolding of
God’s work. History should be the study of the past so as to illuminate this unfolding and
thus be closer to God. 1‘ For Ranke, wie es eigentlich gewessen meant that the past
needed to be properly contextualized; that things needed to be related to some sense of a
wider worldview or larger narrative. Ranke believed the historian’s most important task
was to write “great, comprehensive narrative.”l7 So in terms of the relationship between
history and literature, it might be best to view Ranke as a transitional figure who
developed methods of historical inquiry, especially the devotion to original sources, which
fit in well with the scientific worldview of historians in the second halfof the nineteenth
century. But he also held common views with those who saw own history as a specialized
branch of literature.

The impact of science on the practice of history was first and most keenly felt in
Britain after mid-century. Through the latter half of the nineteenth century, the writing of
history had become dominated by professional historians who actively sought to
distinguish the scientific study of the past fi'om literature. J. B. Bury, for example, in his

1902 inaugural address as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, declared

11

that though history “may supply material for literary art or philosophical speculation, she is
herself simply a science, no less and no more.”18 According to Heyck, it was the “impact
of science” that led to the professionalization of history at the English universities. The
famous successes and prestige that science had gained in the natural sciences suggested to
many that all fields of inquiry should adopt the methods and outlook of scientific
investigation. After 1850, some were beginning to apply this principle to history.
According to Gossman, a similar transformation began in France after 1848, which
accompanied the disillusionment caused by the revolution of that year, and exemplified by
Tocqueville’s L ’Ancien Régirne.19 While the best known works of history from the first
halfof the nineteenth century had been written by people with a talent for storytelling and
for drama, professional standards adopted later dispensed with, or stopped valuing, these
literary qualities.

The transformation in historical writing in the mid- to late-Victorian period is
characterized by a desire to remove the presentist bias and didactic functions of history,
and to study the past for its own sake. Taking their inspiration fi'om the natural sciences,
Victorian historians of the latter half of the nineteenth century, such as Bury, H. T.
Buckle, J. R Seeley, William Stubbs, E. A. Freeman, and John Richard Green, assumed
that history could be a science as well. In order to make it one, these historians sought to
distance history’s association with literature. In striving to be objective, they wanted
history to not serve any specific present purpose, because that would indicate the taint of
bias. The past wasf'interesting in itself, a playground for antiquarians, and under their
leadership, historians now had a duty as scientists to report on their findings.20 History

therefore deserved its own departments at the universities—which was achieved at both

12

Oxford and Cambridge in the 187OS—and a corps of professional practitioners who were
trained in scientific method and would continue the work of mining the past for its data.

Eliot took a different direction with her method of historical inquiry. While
working on her last novel in the mid 18703, Eliot made an entry into one of her personal
notebooks that reads like desiderata for writing historical fiction. She called the passage
“Historic Imagination” in the margin of the notebook.

The exercise of a veracious imagination in historical picturing seems to be capable
of a development that might help the judgment greatly with regard to present and
fixture events. By veracious imagination, I mean the working out in detail of the
various steps by which a political or social change was reached, using all extant
evidence and supplying deficiencies by carefiil analogical creation. . . . Utopian
pictures help the reception of ideas as to constructive results, but hardly so much
as a vivid presentation of how results have been actually brought about, especially
in religious and social change. And there is the pathos, the heroism often
accompanying the decay and final struggle of old systems, which has not had its
share of tragic commemoration. What really took place in and around Constantine
before, upon, and immediately after his conversion? Could a momentary lash be
thrown on Eusebius in his sayings and doings as an ordinary man in bishop’s
garments? Or on Julian and Libanius? There has been abundant writing on such
great turning-points, but not such as serves to instruct the imagination in true
comparison. I want something difi’erent from the abstract treatment which belongs
to grave history from a doctrinal point of view, and something different from the
schemed picturesqueness of ordinary historical fiction. I want brief, severely
conscientious reproductions, in their concrete incidents, of pregnant movements in
the past.21

There are three complementary notions at work in this very rich passage that enabled Eliot
to represent her historical worldview in a fictional format. As an historian Eliot was first
of all concerned with particular dimensions of “great turning-points,” such as the given
examples of early ecclesiastical history (an interest of hers that dates back to her youth),
which are left out of the typical writing of history. These are the dimensions that make
key moments pregnant. Much of her historical fiction can be viewed as devoted to

enhancing the reader’s sense of this pregnancy, or what we lately refer to as “thickness.”

13

Eliot indicates that “Utopian pictures” have their value, but not, as was true for Marx and
Saint Simon, in helping us understand how things have come to be the way they are. Eliot
wanted to help people see how religious and social change develops in moments when the
historical people caught up in the given transformation do not yet know what form the
changes will take, nor is it clear which concepts will win the day. Her career was-shaped
by the belief that historical fiction, if done veraciously, could do this better than anything
else.

Another notion from the “Historic Imagination” passage concerns Eliot’s
understanding of the role of analogy in the creation of historical knowledge. It is this
aspect of Eliot’s historical philosophy that allowed her to see her fiction as a legitimate
alternative to the “grave” and “doctrinal” history of the emergent profession. The passage
asserts the problem familiar to all historians that extant evidence can only go so far in
generating pictures of past moments of interest. It cannot, for example, tell us ‘Vvhat
really took place” in Constantine’s mind as he converted to Christianity. Only “carefiil
analogical creation” can fill out the “deficiencies” in the record. As I discuss in more
detail in chapter 3, Eliot’s use of “analogy” is contextualized by nineteenth-century
discourses on epistemology. J. S. Mill, for example, viewed analogical reasoning—“the
inferring one resemblance from other resemblances without any antecedent evidence of a
connection between them”—-—as valid but imperfect substitute for induction, the only

“positive” or “scientific” form of truth.22 Historical fiction meant to be taken seriously
depends on the emcacy of analogical creation. According to Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton,

an historical novelist whom Eliot had read as a girl and to whose work she referred while

working on her own novels, “analogical hypothesis” is required to provide the

14

pwchological motives and “modes of thought” behind the acts of important historical
figures, which are usually available in the extant evidence.23 Few would have been
shocked by his description of the usefirlness of historical fiction because he was not
suggesting that what he wrote was history, only that it could efi’ectively add to it. For
Eliot, however, the distinction became, in the course of her career, more obscure.
Furthermore, her later fiction began to theorize, in effect, this obscurity. I argue that the
philosophical context of this orientation can be highlighted by considering a number of

intellectual modes of inquiry that gather under the problematic rubric of historicism.

Historicisms in the Nineteenth Century

The underlying orientation in the “Historic Imagination” passage isolated in this
dissertation is the historicist conceptualization of the rise and fall of systems of thought.
Historicism is a term used variously throughout the twentieth century to describe a
number of threads in historical philosophy from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries. The most general theme is described in the Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a post-Hegelian “insistence on the historicity of all

knowledge and cognition.”24 In other words, there is no permanence to any particular

15

cultural form: “historicity” implies a birth and a death, or a waxing and waning. This
dimension of the historicist worldview grew out of early German romanticism, chiefly
fi'om Johann Gottfiied Herder, and was later systematized by Hegel. The wide variety of
nineteenth-century historians and historical philosophers who embraced this Herderian
orientation makes it impossible to identify any single historicist “movement.” This point is
especially apparent when we consider that “historicism” has been used to describe an
Hegelian view of historicity as well as Ranke’s and the German Historical School’s
rejection of Hegelian metaphysics, in favor of objective, empirical approaches to the study
of the past.25 But the more general, Herderian view of historical specificity does provide
one of the meanings of historicism, which I call “romantic historicism,” used to describe
Eliot in this dissertation.

The historicity dimension of romantic-historicism derives from the wholly romantic
themes of historical specificity and development. Franklin Baumer calls these “twin
ideas,” for they are complementary parts of the romantic critique of the Enlightenment.26
Early Romantics, such as Herder, Goethe, and Burke, wanted to preserve the dignity of
bygone ages, especially the medieval world. Herder’s work in particular comprised a
great critique of Enlightenment assumptions about human nature, culture, and history. The
mechanistic framework of Enlightenment versions of history, Herder believed, tended to
suppress the historically unique and ignore the fiindamentally developmental character of

history.27 He, along with Goethe and other Sturm und Drang figures, tapped into the
power of poetry and fiction to reestablish contact with the special qualities—the
individuality—of specific historical cultures and to articulate continuities between those

cultures and their current time. Hegel’s historical dialectic likewise insisted on the organic

16

unity of past cultures, to which he assigned particular characteristics that formed the basis
of his periodization, as he tried to show how the present historic moment developed out of
previous stages of development. According to Friedrich Meinecke, who wrote the classic
account of the rise of “historismusjm no one exemplified the historicist spirit better than
Goethe, who wanted to let past ages enjoy (so to speak) their own dignity, and to
celebrate their individuality, rather than subsurning them into a presentist teleology like
Hegel’s.29 Meinecke also credits Ranke for resisting teleologies that would flatten the
historical field:

Ranke . . . could not subscribe to any belief in a steady upward trend of human

progress (apart fiom in material matters) if one was to allow the moral and

spiritual values produced by each epoch to have their own proper and distinctive

weight. Otherwise one would have to mediatise each of the earlier epochs and

reduce its importance to that of a mere stepping-stone to higher things.30
The general romantic tendency to celebrate the historically unique perhaps had the most
profound impact on the nineteenth century of any single intellectual movement or cultural
trend. Meinecke called it “one of the deepest and most incisive revolutions in the history
of Western thought in general, whereby the Western genius worked out its own
individuality in distinction fiom that of the ancient world without, however, losing the
thread of continuity that bound them together?”1 Cultural manifestations fi'om
architectural styles and literary fashions to the study of philosophy, law, languages, and
religion exhibited the influence of this historicist quality; even the rise of nationalism had at

its core the belief in the historical uniqueness of the nation.32
As romantic-historicism began to afi‘ect historical scholarship in the nineteenth

century, however, it became more than the mere appreciation of historical individuality.

Donald Kelley argues that romantic historicism

l7

did not so much establish a philosophical program as cultivate a variety of cultural

insights—including the discovery, or rediscovery, that poetry does not merely lie,

that mythology may be (as Herder said) the “oldest history,” that imagination is a

portal to a kind of historical truth not accessible to pure reason, and that history

promises a sort of wisdom as well as knowledge not accessible to abstract

thought.33
Historicism, in this sense, was a kind of attitude descriptive of a wide variety of
approaches to old and new fields of inquiry. Kelley’s point is that “mythistory” was an
essentially historicist approach practiced by a number of nineteenth-century scholars who
viewed law, language, and the stories of ancient mythology as the symbolic
representations of past ages. This orientation emphasized the importance of a poetic
imagination for historical interpretation. “Through the imaginative reconstruction of
cultural remains—and especially of law, language, and symbolsr—the historian could plumb
the depth of the ‘well of the past. ”’3‘ The romantic drive to resuscitate the vitality of lost
ages was served by confidence in the ability of imagination to make the kinds of
connections that the mechanistic worldview was unable to do. But, as Kelley need hardly
mention, the historical profession followed Ranke’s emphasis on empirical, quantifiable
remains, and the mythistory approach was for the most part abandoned.

The group that perhaps most famously sought to find truths about history in
religious mythology was, again, the Young Hegelians. David Friedrich Strauss and
Ludwig Feuerbach took the bold steps of applying the mythistorical approach of their
professors, who had opened up new fields in the study of ancient Greek and oriental
mythologies, to Christianity.” For example, the miracles of the gospels were, for Strauss,
best understood as myths, or the “poetry” of the first Christian community that contains a

view of that community’s spirit.36 The Hegelian historical framework, with its emphasis

on the unfolding essence of Spirit in history, was perfectly suited for mythistorical

18

interpretation. But the inspiration behind the work of the Young Hegeliarrs was not the
antiquarian interests of the Romantics so much as it was the desire to understand the
“essence” of humanity, which would suggest the possible directions that future social
progress and consciousness expansion might take. One can see Hegel’s teleology leaking
through. Nevertheless, the Young Hegelian orientation to Christianity held it to be the
“jewel” of the medieval stage of human consciousness; if we are to understand how the
human Spirit grew and grows, they believed, the very best thing we can do is examine how
it expressed itself at the Christian stage.

The “Historic Imagination” passage indicates that even to the end of her career,
Eliot held a Young Hegelian, historicist worldview.” Before her career as a novelist, Eliot
had introduced the English-speaking world to Young Hegelian thought by translating
Strauss’s and Feuerbach’s seminal works, respectively The Life of Jesus in 1846 and
Essence of Christianity in 1854, and to a large degree adopted their historicized view of
Christianity. Towards the end of her career as a novelist we can see that this is a central
animating feature of her goals as an artist. According to the “Historic Imagination”
passage, Eliot wanted to dramatize, to revivify, the transitional historical periods, or more
precisely, people in moments just before major transformations. Her point was not to
condescend to a more simple-minded past: Eliot wanted to “enlarge our sympathies” by
showing readers the “heroism often accompanying the decay and final struggle of old
systems, which has not had their share of tragic commemoration.” In finding integrity in a
decaying system, Eliot called upon her readers to tap into a romantic-historicist impulse to
appreciate the historically specific for its own sake and as an episode in the developing

consciousness of humanity. Casaubon and his antiquated “Key to All Mythologies,” in

19

Middlemarch, is a prime example of Eliot’s “commemoration” of those heroes who would
end up on the losing side, and her novels are fill] of others. The Young Hegelian
framework, which featured Hegel’s dialectic of history, contributed to Eliot’s peculiar
sensitivity to the developmentality of human history, by insisting that the triumph of any
system of thought includes the absorption of the previously dominant mode. In order to
better understand the human “essence” at work in the modern world, Eliot followed the
Young Hegelian path of examining the preceding developmental stage to see how that
essence manifested itself there.

The origins of Eliot’s general Hegelian dialectical perspective are subject to
speculation, because it is not clear that she ever read Hegel. The very few scholars
interested in the connection, Sara Putzell-Korab and Lisa Ann Montanarelli in particular,
are satisfied in thinking Eliot would have known about Hegel through her correspondence
with John Sibree, the first English translator of Hegel (though no letter survives that
addresses Hegelian philosophy), through Lewes’s sketch in his Biographical History of
Philosophy,” or through her general experiences as a mid-Victorian intellectual who
simply would have had to know about something as significant in German thought as
Hegelian philosophy.” These speculations are apt enough to make a case for Eliot’s
tapping into a small but general dissemination of Hegelian thought in England around mid-
century. However, there is more to say about the way Eliot came to an Hegelian way of
thinking, indirectly and yet so thoroughly, through Feuerbach.

Though Feuerbach was critical of his master’s metaphysical predilections, the
Essence of Christianity closely followed Hegel in the way it centralized the dialectical

development of consciousness in the story of both individual growth and human history.

20

[R]eligion is man’s earliest and also indirect form of self-knowledge. Hence,
religion everywhere precedes philosophy, as in the history of the race, so also in
that of the individual. Man first of all sees his nature as if out of himself, before he
finds it in himself. His own nature is in the first instance contemplated by him as
that of another being. Religion is the childlike condition of humanity; but the child
sees his natureh—man—out of himself; in childhood man is an object to himself,
under the form of another man. Hence the historical progress of religion consists
in this: that what by an earlier religion was regarded as objective, is now
recognised as subjective; that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshipped
as God is now perceived to be something human.40
F euerbach’s analysis of Christianity follows the dialectical pattern of Hegel’s
Phenomenology in which the developing consciousness advances through successive
stages by objectification and reabsorption of the object into self. In this manner, the
subjective and the objective are seen as identical in the context of the historical
process—an insight at the root of the Hegelian version of historicism. For Hegel,
Christianity and his philosophy held the same content, in the sense that both recognized
the union of man in the divine. In the former case, the union is represented in the symbol
of Christ.‘1 F euerbach, however, turned this orientation upside-down, arguing that the
opposite had happened—that the divine has now been reabsorbed into man. The Young
Hegelians all seemed to agree that their master’s philosophy had favored too much the
metaphysical or theological side, and proposed instead what they called “anthropology” in
order, as Marx said, to stand Hegel right-side-up. Feuerbach was thus more willing to
describe Christianity as representing an outmoded (historicized), immature (metaphysical)
perspective. Despite the increasing remoteness from her 1854 translation of the Essence
0f Christianity, as her career advanced Eliot seems to have become increasingly
Feuerbachian in her portrayal of the development of individual consciousness and in its

Synecdochic relation to human history within an Hegelian-historicist fiarnework.

Another important form of historicism contextualizes Eliot’s later fiction

21

particularly well. “Crisis historicism” refers to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
philosophical inquiries into the nature of the relationship between human consciousness
and the past.42 The “crisis” arose as theorists such as Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, and
Ernst Troeltsch began to articulate the apparent epistemological solipsism of self-
referential knowledge and the implied relativity of all values given that they are historically
conditioned and subject to change.“3 Dilthey’s line of inquiry presents especially striking
parallels to the development of Eliot’s fiction in her last two novels. Throughout his
career, Dilthey sought a philosophical basis on which to establish a scientific study of
history that was sensitive to the centrality of subjective experience in knowledge creation.
Because the nature of that experience is historically conditioned, this basis always seemed
to elude Dilthey. The “facts of consciousness” (die T atsachen des Bewusstsein) on which
he believed any knowledge system must rest, were fluid and inherently unstable.

Dilthey’s historicist perspective corresponds closely to the way some Eliot critics,
such as J. Hillis Miller, have read her later fiction. In his influential article, “History and
Narrative,” Miller takes the Jamesian premise that a novel’s narrator must act like an
historian for the novel to work, and uses it to demonstrate the ways in which the
Middlemarch narrator undermines his own objective authority as an historian through
shifting perspective. Senses of multiplicity and uncertainty derive from the instability of
the apprehending consciousness of the narrative-historian, as it were. As I discuss in
chapters 4 and 5, I find Miller’s characterization of the unstable narrative perspective of
Midcflemarch to be a better description of Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s next novel. Whatever
the case, Eliot’s late explorations into the ways in which the past itself changes as the

shifiing consciousness of the narrator parallels Dilthey’s crisis historicism, which suggests

22

that Eliot’s novels follow an important nineteenth-century trajectory in historical

philosophy concerning the nature of historical knowledge.

Realism, Objectivity, and Historical Representation

Cultural and literary scholars employ realism as an analytical concept in varying
ways, which makes it dificult to find a stable definition of the term. Baumer, for example,
attends to the artists of the nineteenth century who rejected certain romantic excesses and
focused on the quotidian as the more real experience. Realist painting sought both a
commoner subject, such as Courbet’s peasants, rather than the grand allegories of
someone like David, and a commitment to photographic accuracy in representation, which
was shared by literary realists. Baumer follows Proudhon in associating realism with
science and Comtean Positivism, which together try to reject metaphysics in favor of
describing only what is observable; a mimesis of the actual, the real.“ However, the
literary scholar George Levine considers it a naive realism that presumes an external
reality that is wholly independent from the language used to describe it. In his analysis of
nineteenth-century literary realists, Levine argues that the “serious” realists were aware of
their ironic position in using “language to get beyond language?“ In a similar orientation,

Hayden White views realism as the central problem of nineteenth-century historiography

23

and historical philosophy, both of which looked for ways to get around the seeming
irreconcilability of subjective consciousness and objects of historical analysis. In both
Levine’s and White’s applications, realism was a method employed to overcome, or
transcend, the problem of subj ect/object duality that, at the very same time, ironically
reenforced that duality.

Levine’s treatment of literary realism highlights the philosophical problem of
subject/object duality that inheres in representations that use words to describe reality.
For him realism took the form of a “quest for unmediated experience” that was
permanently elusive.‘6 It was a “struggle to avoid the inevitable conventionality of
language in pursuit of the unattainable unmediated reality.” The irony arises because “[n]o
major Victorian novelists were deluded into believing that they were in fact ofi‘ering an
unmediated reality; but all of them struggled to make contact with the world out there,
and even with their knowledge of their own subjectivity, to break from the threatening
limits of solipsism, of convention, and of language.”47 To limit mediation, realist novelists
shifted focus to the small rather than the large, or suggested the general by focusing on the
particular. Their quest was to make the ordinary seem significant, and in so doing, they
made the novel an instrument of knowledge.“ But in the hands of Levine’s “serious”
realists—and Eliot is one of them—realism always had the inner contradiction of ‘positing
the reality of the external world [while] it self-consciously examines its own fictionality.”"9
The epistemological orientation implied in realist prose is that there is an “external world”
that can be depicted accurately, but in the explorations of the realist novelists, that
philosophical position—vis-a-vis objectivity—was also undermined.

The rise of realism as an artistic style in the nineteenth century dovetailed with the

24

romantic-historicist impulse to celebrate examples of historical specificity. Gossman and
White have argued that the emergence of historical writing in the nineteenth century
occurred within a realist literary program. Gossman suggests that historians turned to
realism in order to celebrate the specific, and that this was a romantic development
occasioned by the French Revolution. The Enlightenment style of writing history had
employed strategies that “reconciled” individual experiences and unique events with
greater forms of social and historical continuity, but the appearance of radical historical
change wrought by individuals called for a new way to write history. “Writing history at a
time when ‘life,’ in the guise of new individual and collective energies, had triumphantly
asserted itself against prevailing social forms, the romantic historian had to come to terms
with an especially acute sense of the uniqueness and originality of historical phenomena,
and therefore of rupture and discontinuity.” The romantic historians turned to realism as a
descriptive form that produced a sense of immediacy—i.e., veiled mediation—with
individual phenomena and conveyed the specificity of their moment; a technique,
according to Gossman, that they “borrowed from the contemporary novel.’”°

White’s discussion of nineteenth-century historians and historical philosophers
employs the same literary perspective on the inherent irony of realist prose. In his
conception, all historiography is involved with making narrative choices that shape the
way the material fi'om the “historical field” is arranged and comprehended, but which is
couched in a language (realist prose) that tries to veil that subjective condition. He places
the birth of the ironic “problem” in the eighteenth century, during the Enlightenment.
Most of the major Enlightenment figures tried to work out what they perceived as the

special problems inhering in historical knowledge. They believed that all truth had to be

25

based in reason, and therefore, historical truths needed a set of principles that established a
basis for constructing narratives that avoided falsity and fantasy. Voltaire coined the
phrase “philosophy of history” to describe his own attempts to provide rational principles
on which historical knowledge could be based. He and Bayle, Montesquieu, Hume,
Gibbon, and Kant, all failed to articulate such critical, “metahistorical” principles by which
historical truth could be established independently fiom human consciousness." For
White, this failure constituted the Enlightenment “crisis” in historical thought, for without
a rational basis to distinguish between truth and fantasy in history, all written history that
purported to be truthful could only do so ironically.

“Realism” was the chosen method of historical representation of the nineteenth-
century historians in White’s analysis that developed out of the romantic repudiation of
Enlightenment mechanism, which failed to appreciate historical individuality and
specificity. For many Romantics who followed Herder and Goethe, a more “realistic”
view of the past could be achieved by focusing on the individual and specific as historical
facts, which represented ideal unities or coherencies. Just as each individual plant is a
manifestation of Goethe’s “Urpflanze,” events could be understood as representations of a
deeper story of human history. Though romantic inspirations began to fade in the middle
of the nineteenth century, historians still employed realism as the best way to describe the
individuated facts from the past. Levine would call the realism of White’s “master
historians”—Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt—naive, so long as they did
not apprehend the ironic position of their writing. According to the plot of Metahistory, it
was not until Nietzsche in the early 1870s that the irony of realistic historical narrative was

fiilly faced. The achievements of Levine’s literary figures, however, suggest that ironic

26

consciousness in general had been faced earlier, even if they had not addressed history
writing specifically. But then there is the case of George Eliot, whose novels were tools
of inquiry that eventually employed experimental modes of historical representation that
probed the self-contradiction of realism by centralizing the role of imagination in

developing historical awareness.

The Evolution of George Eliot’s Historicism

I have divided the evolution of Eliot’s historical thought into three phases: an
initial historicist phase, an early-novels phase, and a mature-novels phase. (See Table 2)
The first phase, discussed in chapter 1, follows Eliot’s acquisition of an historicist’s flame
of mind through her emersion into higher criticism and Young Hegelian historical
philosophy, which used conceptions of past ages as organic unities and a dialectic mode of
change that assumed the Christian stage had passed and a new one had been, and was
being, born in a modern world. The major moments that contribute to the character of
this early phase include: Eliot’s joining the Coventry circle of higher critics and her reading
of Charles Hennell’s Origin of Christianity in 1841; the repudiation of her Christian faith

based on an historicized view of religion and human spirituality the same year; and what

27

.000 .3802 .0056»
653008 .030 .2330
£02.00 :33 0095
2200.50.35: E208
.03 Scan 058% 082

00503000500 320302
98 80:02 «0 0008—0003
00 020803200

03000 5300030 0008 me
3058 6.3093 wash;

£03m. ushehagfi
§oa0Q ~0~§Q
$35330“:

“New 030k

m 08am

E0wa0E0 mm 350.008
00:? do: 0:0 cog—0.. mo >03
-0005 05 $528309“: com £0.80m

BESS; 03080.0: 80:02 030:
0:802 330: .meouficoto
Rotoamfifiafiomwo—oaofiufi
.0838 03:03 E 0000005 30:
£5 8&0:an 5:033 meme»

05:: 85.
sea as 8 :3

030 =83.

0N5 30.205 0.3 00:00.”
scuba 8 ES 2:.
3583: a a5.

3285 :02 0o Essa

N 820

N 0308

0? 5550-089 .0358
.300 00 .9550 £5000£ Z

Emmotoufi cam—03$ w§o>

5030020..” no nous—meek
30.50% a0~w£§w0§ wezmcm
.3300: we 3030M

magnum mo 5:20:89
sausage .8 802880
.9305 mag—0:00: mam—0.00M
£0503 98 0.3.5 w50002

_ 00.0.:

8:8009005 Row—80mm

Enema—Ea 32.585

30:00:32— 98 3e0>m

Eases» .8 082V

28

might be called the onset of a dissemination mode from the mid 1840s to the mid 18505.
The Strauss and Feuerbach translations, appearing respectively in 1846 and 1854, are
major elements of this period of dissemination in which she also expanded her reading in
many subjects and became a reviewer and editor at a hub of intense intellectual activity by
progressive British and European critics, including Lewes, contributing to the Westminster
Review. The end of Eliot’s stint at the Westminster in 1853 coincided with the start of her
life with Lewes, with whom she shared a number of expanding intellectual interests.
Though there was no formal collaboration in any of their published work, their frequently
converging intellectual pursuits and deep mutual support were beneficial for all of their
subsequent work.

The second phase began at such a moment of converging interests on the north
Devonshire coast, and spanned the next five years as Eliot developed her brand of
historical fiction. Eliot’s decision to try writing historical fiction, and to use it as a tool of
historical inquiry, has origins in the naturalizing trip she and Lewes made in the summer of
1856. She wrote a review of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, “The Natural History of German
Life,” on this journey, and as I suggest in chapter 2, her beach-combing and early fiction
went hand-in-hand with Riehl’s version of historical-naturalizing. Eliot’s own
mythistorical orientation to the ways in which social and cultural forms endure through
successive generations derived from her immersion in Young Hegelian thought, and she
recognized a similar orientation in Riehl. But Riehl’s recorded impressions of German
societies also had another sort of appeal to Eliot. At a time when the well known
successes in fields of natural science encouraged many to try to apply natural-scientific

methods to social analysis, Riehl’s work seemed to her like good social science: he wrote

29

as if he were a naturalist increasing the store of observations in a great inductive project to
understand German societies. For the translator of Strauss and Feuerbach, Riehl’s
ethnography complemented the kind of anthropology the Young Hegelians were trying to
theorize and develop. They perceived a compatibility between the intuitive dimensions of
the mythistorical perspective and inductive science, which the new genertion of scientific
historians in the latter halfof the nineteenth century did not share. Insofar as Eliot also
assumed this compatibility, she could move toward fiction as a serious method of
historical representation and inquiry.

Eliot began acting on her hope that someone should apply his methodology to the
English social classes. In the Rich] review, she raised—in terms of her career as a fiction
writer—the most significant methodological problem in pursuing this line of inquiry.
Riehl’s analysis of German social classes was done in an environment that was, in many
ways, preindustrial and precapitalist. In the review, Eliot noted that to study English
peasants one has to look to the past, because the social relations that maintained a
peasantry were, by 1856, nearly gone. Therefore, Riehl’s method of ethnographic
observation was not appropriate for the English case. This was a key moment when
Eliot’s sociological interests posed an historical-methodological problem. As she
acknowledged in the review, one must go back 50 years, before modernization had thrown
social and cultural forms into flux, in order to understand the nature of traditional English
social classes. When Eliot turned to fiction, she translated the naturalist’s observational
perspective she found in Riehl, which she had practiced herself on the beaches of
Ilfracombe, into a narrative voice in her first short stories and then into her early novels.

The “turn” also manifested her philosophical position that there was a usefulness in

30

fiction, which she applied specifically to the study of the early nineteenth century. In one
important respect the short stories in Scenes of a Clerical Life resemble most of Eliot’s
later work: there is a sense of lost continuity with the not-so-remote past. A quick look at
the opening lines that establish the setting of two of these short-stories evidences Eliot’s
economy in transmitting that sense. “Shepperton Church was a very different-looking .
building five-and-twenty years ago [1832],” (Scenes, 41) which opens “Amos Barton,” is
a breathtakingly simple sentence that still manages to convey Eliot’s central historical idea
that connects all the novels she set in this period. The extensive changes that visited the
English countryside between the early 18305 and the late 18503 reflect but one part of a
major historical turning point in which the religious sentiment in country parishes was
undergoing deep transformation and the mental and emotional lives of ordinary people
were subject to the dramatic effects of these convulsive changes. The passage establishing
the setting in “Janet’s Repentance” is similar.
More than a quarter of a century has slipped by since then, and in the interval
Milby has advanced at as rapid a pace as other market—towns in her Majesty’s
dominions. . . . Milby is now a refined, moral, and enlightened town; no more
resembling the Milby of former days than the huge, long-skirted, drab great-coat
that embarrassed the ankles of our grandfathers resembled the light paletot in
which we tread jauntilly through the muddiest streets. . . . ” (Scenes, 252-53)
Less naive, less backward, less quiet, less gemeinschafrlich, more fashionable,
cosmopolitan and bourgeois are the small towns of the English countryside in the 18503.
For Eliot the predominant leitmotif of the three novels she later set in the period was that
it was an historical watershed.
Eliot’s first full-length novel, Adam Bede, set at the turn of the nineteenth century,

demonstrates her interest in the period before industrial intrusion. Though a more quiet

time, in Eliot’s mind, she knew this period had some movement of its own. She first

31

treated this period in the second “scene,” “Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story,” which looks back from
the end of the title-character’s life in the late 18205 to the time of his prime in the 17905.
On the heels of the critical success of Scenes, Eliot went to work on a treatment of the
Wesleyan movement. Adam Bede added tremendous popular success to Eliot’s critical
acclaim. Two years later, afier completing The Mill on the Floss, she returned to this
period in her third novel, Silas Marner: 77w Weaver of Raveloe. Perhaps it was the near-
pastoral shades these turn-of-the-century works evinced that appealed to the mid-
Victorians, whose memories of a preindustrial past were no doubt shaped by nostalgia.
Bede the carpenter and Marner the weaver are able craftsmen whose trades had been
rapidly replaced by industrial technologies and were becoming rare in the world of Eliot’s
readership. The sense of simple, community-feeling that Eliot strove to create in a number
of the scenes in Adam Bede in particular seem idealized. Yet, Adam Bede also represents
a kind of Young Hegelian study of religious sentiment among ordinary provincials. The
dialectical dimension is implied in the way Eliot, in her post-Christian consciousness, could
sympathetically portray the religious fervor of a female Methodist preacher. The kind of
seriousness and compassion of a character like Dinah, who tries to guide people toward
spirituality through ‘Tellow-feeling,” is what Eliot believed was the positive aspect of
Christianity. In Hegelian terms, she believed it was the “truth” of the Christian stage that
would outlive Christianity itself By isolating it in an earlier stage of religious
development Eliot wanted to maintain the positive aspect after the negation of theology.

I use Eliot’s first novel-length treatment of the time of her childhood, The Mill on
the Floss, to represent her early novels and the second phase in the development of her

historical thought. As I discuss in chapter 2, Mill is a concerted application of the hopes

32

and methods she identified in the Rich] review. The narrative voice is that of a naturalist-
historian studying a human ecosystem. As a Young Hegelian historical inquiry, the novel
depicts strained religious, family, and community feelings that industrial-modernization
caused among (once again) ordinary provincials. In comparison to later novels set in the
same period, Mill does not represent those forces of modernization with the same
specificity. And it would seem that the naturalist’s objective eye cannot locate, and his
narrative voice is unable to articulate, historical self-awareness in the characters, who are
always “ant-like” in their work and in their ignorance of the wider world.

The third phase of Eliot’s development, the mature-novels phase, emerged in the
18603 as she modified her technique for writing novels. In the context of Eliot’s evolving
thinking about the relationship between history and its representation, as I discuss in
chapter 3, her fourth and fifth novels, Romola and Felix Holt, show an intensified interest
in and a determined use of source material to develop accurate pictures of their respective
historical periods. Due mostly to its remote setting, Romola was in many ways Eliot’s
most difficult novel to write. Her developing idea of the usefulness of fiction in historical
representation prized faithfirlness to the documentary record, and her initial unfamiliarity
with late fifteenth-century Florence led to a stifling obsession with veracity. She
experienced, in the summer and fall of 1861, a syndrome familiar to all historians: she kept
putting off the writing of her work as she continued to find new sources on the history of
the period that she felt compelled to read. So unsure of her mental conception of the
world of Savonarola, Eliot poured through vast amounts of secondary sources (in French,
Italian, German, and English) and a long list of primary materials (in Latin and Italian) to

avoid errors in her representation. This intense commitment to avoid contradiction with

33

extant evidence carried over into Felix Holt, which was set in the more familiar time of her
childhood, but which nevertheless needed to be researched if she was to accomplish the
kind of verisirnilitude she believed was required.

Whereas Eliot’s initial turn to fiction represented an interest in historical study that
was clearly different from the Rankean methodology ascendant in Britain, her
methodological shift with Romola and Felix Holt has the appearance of an orientation to
documentation that would be canonized by the profession a decade later. In terms of
objectivity, this is a false impression. The experience of writing novels with the help of
intense research and commitment to veracity only helped Eliot to clarify her conception of
the role of imagination and intuition in historical representation. Furthermore, Romola
and Felix Holt also show an emerging ironic stance with respect to objectivity and
historical representation. This ironic stance, which distinguishes her mature fiction,
emerges in the feminized history narrated at the end of the novel by Romola herself, as a
counterpoint to the political history that is male-dominated, represented earlier in the
novel by her husband, Tito. The novel thus implies that there are many potential ways to
recount the past and to connect to one’s origins. In Felix Holt Eliot advanced the idea of
organic development at the level of individual and of community. Her commitment to
veracity had her consult 77w Times, the Annual Register for 1832 and 1833, and almanacs
to help her portray the political upheavals associated with the passage of the first Reform
Bill. And yet the trial scene that again challenges the notion that the past can be recounted
in a completely objective and unbiased way gives Felix Holt its ironic stance vis-a-vis
historical representation.

Eliot’s treatment of the Reform Bill period in consecutive novels is indicative of

34

her continued interest in that period as a significant historical turning point. Middlemarch
is in many ways an expansion of her synchronic view of a period whose historical
character and significance is unfolded in the many manifestations of reform. There is
much in common with the other two novels set at this time: the steady advancement of
modernity in its many manifestations is welcomed by some, resisted by others, and the
pervasive sense of inevitable transformation. The ant-like Dodsons and Tullivers have
their counterparts in Felix Holt and Middlemarch, but the more cosmopolitan Dorothea,
Lydgate, and Ladislaw, and to a lesser extent, Felix Holt, all seem to have the broader
perspectives that help them to divine the direction of historical change, even if some of
them cannot participate directly in its flow. And “reform” as a specific historical topic
emerges only in Felix Holt, in which the expanded franchise and the riotous election of
1832 are portrayed as evidence for proceeding with caution in political reform. As I
discuss in chapter 4, Middlemarch represents two other, more subtle, manifestations of
the dominant character of this period by portraying Dorothea’s social-reformist efforts and
Lydgate’s efforts at medical reform.

Midcflemarch shows a secular world emergent in the reform bill period. That is to
say, Eliot’s unwavering insistence on the importance of religious feeling in life now
focused more sharply on the post-Christian elements she believed were taking seed in the
provinces at this time. The dominant character of this synchronic portrait is the condition
of historical transition. The historical conception behind the St. Teresa experiment holds
many of the same historicist assumptions that Eliot acquired from the Young Hegelians.
But this mature work, written almost 20 years after the F euerbach translation, suggests a

direction in her thinking that paralleled new developments in German historical thought.

35

In the cases of the theorist Dilthey and the historian Burckhardt, their general historicist
frames of mind led them to explore certain problems in conceiving and representing the
past as they tried to overcome what many thought to be the pernicious effects of
Hegelianism. Burckhardt’s approach to cultural history shunned progressive teleology
and any overture to “Universal History” then commonly associated with Hegel.$2
Dilthey’s hermeneutical Geisteswissenschaft was an attempt to conceive of past cultures
as organic unities that strove to go beyond the excesses of romantic and idealist
conceptions of history. Dilthey’s interest in thinking about history “fi'om the inside” is
related to the old Hegelian problem of the world-historical figure’s consciousness (or lack
thereof) in moments of historical significance. For Dilthey, the most important aspect of
historical consciousness is that it must be achieved within the flow of history itself. ’3
Eliot’s fiction shows an increasing interest in this problem, and it is centralized in her St.
Teresa experiment. The world-historical woman could see how to apply herself to reform
in late sixteenth-century Spain because, in Eliot’s mind, that world of “coherent social
faith” was easier to comprehend fi'om the inside than Dorothea’s world. Because
Dorothea’s world is in flux, and because it seems to be less welcoming of women’s
influence (this point is subdued), her reforming spirit must find subtler ways of efl'ecting
change. The narrator’s self-reflective discussions of historical representation in
comparison with other historians, such as Herodotus, and novelists, such as the early
realist, Fielding, interjects into Middlemarch the ironic view that telling a story as it
actually happened involves narrative choices that no historian can avoid.

Of all Eliot’s novels, Daniel Deronda presents an historical worldview that was

most challenging to the perspective adopted by the new historical profession. As I discuss

36

in chapter 5, the sharper focus in the novel on the role of the intuitive consciousness that
“fills in the gaps” between phenomena that are otherwise unconnected has an important
parallel in Lewes’s work. The novel’s avoidance of any single, objective account of the
plot in favor of multiple perspectives, provided by the characters who often use
indeterminate, literary categories to interpret meaning in their lives, combine to form a
modernist, perspectivist aesthetic orientation that reflects Eliot’s view of history as an art-
form. Daniel Deronda can be read as a continuation of Eliot’s mode of historical inquiry
within a Young Hegelian fi'amework, in that she was interested in the pregnant movements
of the past. But her last novel has significant new twists. Its setting in the 18603 makes it
less remote for her readers who may have found comfort in the historical distance of all
her other fiction. The occasional departures from the realism that had kept her previous
work anchored in a genre more closely related to romantic historiography must have been
as disconcerting as the wholly modern scene of “dull, gas-poisoned absorption” that opens
the novel, or the “problematic sylph” the reader is asked to consider, or the Jewish theme
of the Deronda story, which many critics wished she had left out. In the end, Deronda’s
impassioned search for his origins and his appropriation of his Jewish heritage is the
vehicle for the theoretical argument that subjective historical consciousness drives our
interest in the past, and that history must be written from the standpoint of the desire for
self-knowledge, i.e., from within.

Ifwe follow Levine’s distinction between naive and ironic realism, a clearer picture
of Eliot’s historiographical critique emerges. Whereas the scientifically inclined profession
of historians, with an anti-romantic perspective on subject/object duality, would describe a

past reality as if it were unmediated by language, Eliot acknowledged the realist irony and

37

called for active imagination in developing an understanding of the past as she came to see
history as an appropriation made by the needs of human desire. Far from wanting to tell
lies, Eliot believed that historical fiction, in the way she practiced it, ofl‘ered a deeper
instruction about the meaning of the past than history written from an ostensibly objective
perspective—the “grave” and “abstract” history writing mentioned in the “Historic
Imagination” passage. Such histories lacked, in her view, the “concrete incidents”: the
firlly contextualized details that enrich an historical picture of a “great turning-point.”
Andres refers to Eliot’s desire to portray concrete incidents as a pursuit of the
“significance in everyday life, particularly in occasions of dissension and resistance to
tradition.”" Eliot’s realism reveals a plurality of experiences that constitutes her
“challenge” to monological Victorian historiography by demonstrating a multivalent
conception of history at work in her novels. While Eliot’s work does represent
multivalence, her deeper challenge to Victorian historiography comes from a Young
Hegelian historicist vision of “great turning points,” which determined the shape of the
“concrete incidents” she chose to contextualize.

The medium of the novel guided her considerations to specifically literary
examples of historicist relativism and to imply that the problem of narration reflects the
problem of the historian’s relationship to the past and to the history he writes. While I.
Hillis Miller associates the shift to a potentially relativistic worldview implied in the later
novels with Nietzsche’s aestheticism, Eliot’s historicist perspective is closer to Dilthey’s
philosophy of history, in which he sought to carve out a role for the subjective

consciousness of the historian in writing about the past.

38

Chapter 1. A Young Hegelian Historicist

The construction of this brief biography is guided by the needs of the dissertation.
While there would be, and have been, many ways to tell George Eliot’s life-story, this
outline is based on what her biographers regard as major intellectual turning points, or
watershed moments. There is an implicit teleology in this construction that does not
reflect her own experience: it is not useful to say that George Eliot was “destined” to
write historical fiction. This sketch emplots her life as an evolution of an historical
novelist, which centralizes those moments when a developing historical consciousness is
discernable. For students of nineteenth-century intellectual history, perhaps the most
important moment occurred in 1856, when Eliot decided to write historical fiction. That
was the moment when Marian Evans became “George Eliot.” The fact that we refer to a
“George Eliot” even before she adopted that pen-name is indicative of the way our
hindsight insists itself upon our arrangement of the past into “plots” that have meaning for
us. We care about George Eliot nowadays because she wrote interesting novels, and this
is why we bother to reconstruct the years that precede that career; we look for the
developing novelist in those years. This chapter, however, describes the emerging
historicist, and so it concentrates specifically on those aspects of Eliot’s developing

perspective that culture has historicity—that systems of thought and social forms come into

39

and go out of existence.

Eliot’s historicism began to develop at the moment when her youthful, religious
fervor collided with the higher criticism of her Coventry neighbors in the early 18403, and
the former gave way. Her work in translating Strauss into English further developed an
historicist orientation to the distant past of early Christianity, and a wider world of
scholarship that included continental influences began to open up for her. Eliot’s joining
with John Chapman to edit the Westminster Review in 1852 positioned her at the hub of
an intellectual elite in London (with ties throughout Europe) and gave her exposure to
European and American literature, evolutionary theories, Comtean philosophy, and the
latest histories written by a new generation of historians in England, France and Germany.
Then in 1856, with the encouragement of her new lover, Lewes, Eliot tried her hand at
historical fiction. This move represents a culmination of a series of experiences that led
Eliot to develop a perspective that centralized historical processes in determining the
nature of human afi’airs, and which suggested that fiction could provide a useful means by
which to advance our understanding of the historicity of systems of thought, and to
illuminate historical periods and cultures.

Mary Anne1 Evans was born on November 22, 1819, near the town of Coventry in
the rnidland shire of Warwick. Her father was a prized land-manager for the baronet at
Arbury Hall, Francis Parker-Newdigate. Robert Evans was a successful surveyor, builder,
land evaluator, and arbitrator frequently consulted in his parish. Not much is known about
Eliot’s mother, Christiana Pearson, who died in 1836. It was then, at the age of sixteen,
that Eliot took over domestic duties and began to tend to her aging father, which she

continued to do until his death in 1849.

40

A3 a young girl, Eliot attended two boarding schools, and Maria Lewis, the
governess of the first, became a significant older-sister figure through Eliot’s teens. Lewis
impressed her own sentimental evangelicalism on Eliot, which is reflected in all of the
remaining correspondence from this part of Eliot’s life. Eliot made numerous references
to the bible as a guide for living in her letters to her former teacher, and fiequently
espoused a fervent aceticism. At age 18 she confessed:

I do not deny that there may be many who can partake with a high degree of zest

of all the lawful enjoyrnents the world can offer and yet live in near communion

with their God; who can warmly love the creature, and yet be carefirl that the

Creator maintains His supremity in their hearts; but I confess that in my short

experience and narrow sphere of action I have never been able to attain this; I find

. . . total abstinence much easier than moderation. (Letters, 1, 6)

Though Eliot would outgrow this theocentric worldview, the austerity of lifestyle
suggested by “total abstinence” characterizes the post-Christian Eliot as well as it does the
young Miss Evans. Eliot maintained a regular and intimate correspondence with Maria
Lewis until the early 18403, when the two began to drift apart and their letters became
politely phatic.

At the second boarding school, Miss Franklin’s in Coventry, Eliot studied English,
French, history, math, music, and drawing, and generally began to demonstrate her
intellectual strengths in composing both prose and verse.2 Students at Miss Franklin’s
school were also permitted to read novels, a fieedom that was unusual in nridland girls’
schools of the 18303. Eliot described herself as a “voracious” reader of novels and
especially enjoyed the historical fiction of Sir Walter Scott, which she routinely read to her
father in the evenings of his waning years. In a letter of 1839 to Maria Lewis, Eliot

commented on the narrow usefirlness of fiction, which both evidences her austerity and

anticipates her later contributions to realism and historical fiction.

41

As to the discipline our minds receive fi'om the perusal of fictions I can conceive
none that is beneficial but may be attained by that of history. It is the merit of
fictions to come within the orbit of probability; if unnatural they would no longer
please. Ifit be said that the mind must have relaxation, “Truth is strange-stranger
than fiction.” When a person has exhausted the wonders of truth, there is no other
resort than fiction; till then I cannot imagine how the adventures of some phantom
conjured up by fancy can be more entertaining than may safely draw inferenc-

es. . . . Religious novels are more hatefirl to me than merely worldly ones. They
are a sort of Centaur or Mermaid and like other monsters that we do not know
how to class should be destroyed for the public good as soon as born. The
weapons of the Christian warfare were never sharpened at the forge of romance.
(Letters, 1, 23)

Though Eliot was soon to renounce Christianity as her doctrinal faith, the fervency of her
religious feeling, and even the crusader mentality suggested by this censorious jeremiad,
maintained throughout her career as a novel writer. The dismissive view of mere romance
and what is merely fictitious also remained until her death, although the orientation to the
relationship between truth and fiction articulated here was problematized by her later
novels. It is suggestive to note that at this early age Eliot found the only “benefit” derived
from fiction was its potential to teach history, for this perspective may have guided her
towards writing historical fiction 17 years later.

Eliot continued her studies in earnest after she left boarding school. In 1839 she
engaged an Italian language instructor to give weekly lessons, which no doubt helped her
independent study of Latin. In the next year she began studying German. The widowed
mistress of Arbury Hall permitted Eliot unlimited access to its ever increasing library,
which she exploited, according to Haight, in developing a project to construct a Chart of
Ecclesiastical History. Eliot described this chart, which does not survive, to Lewis in an
1 840 letter.

The series of perpendicular columns will successively contain, the Roman

Emperors with their dates, the political and religious state of the Jews, the bishops,
remarkable men and events in the several churches, a column being devoted to

42

each of the chief ones, the aspect of heathenism and Judaism toward Christianity,
the chronology of the Apos[tolical] and Patristical writings, schisms and heresies,
General Councils, eras of corruption, under which head the remarks would be
general, and I thought possibly an application of the Apocalyptic prophecies,
which would merely require a few figures and not take up room. I think there
must be a break in the chart after the establishment of Christianity as the religion of
the Empire, and I have come to a determination not to carry it beyond the first
acknowledgment of the supremacy of the Pope, by Phocas in 606 when
Mahommedanism became a besom of destruction in the hand of the Lord, and
completely altered the aspect of Ecclesiastical Hist[or]y. (Letters, 1, 44-45)
Nowhere in her correspondence does Eliot say why she undertook this project, which
occupied a great deal of her time from November 1839 to well into 1840. It must have
helped her to organize the tremendous amount of information she was trying to absorb in
her avid reading of Church history. She described herself as a “glutton” with books
“hurrying through one course that I may be in time for the next and so not relishing or
digesting either” (Letters, 1, 11), and another time, when construction of the Chart was
underway, as “surrounded by unread books” that she felt in dire need to get to (Letters, 1,
34). Eliot had intentions to publish the Chart, according to another letter to Lewis
(Letters, 1, 40), but was beaten to it by the publication of a similar chart by Seeley and
Burnside about which Eliot remarked, with characteristic modesty, “[it] has been executed
much better than if lefi to my slow fingers and slower head” (Letters, 1, 51).

Several months later, she recommended the Seeley and Burnside chart to Lewis
and her students for its effectiveness in “presenting epochs as nuclei round which less
important events instinctively cluster” (Letters, 1, 64). It is possible that an historical
understanding of the Church was a chink in the edifice of her Christian faith. Her studies
for the development of the chart, and her admiration of the one published by Seeley and

Burnside, suggest a parallel to the contemporaneous Young Hegelian movement. It was

through their historical interpretations of Jesus and Christianity that Strauss and Feuerbach

43

had established a post-Christian perspective. Eliot was not yet a Young Hegelian, but the
major intellectual transformation she was about to make was partly prepared for by her
developing historical perspective.

In 1841, Eliot and her father moved fi'om her childhood home, Griff House near
Arbury Hall, to a house at Foleshill, about a mile outside of Coventry. Several of Eliot’s
biographers mark the move as a watershed, for it was through connections she made in
her new home that Eliot became acquainted with a peculiar branch of the intellectual
movement known as “higher criticism.” The Evans’s new house was attached to another
house that was the home of Abijah Hill Pears and his wife Elizabeth Bray Pears. Elizabeth
introduced Eliot to her brother, Charles Bray, and his wife Caroline Hennell Bray, with
whom she formed a close fiiendship (Haight, 36-3 9). Charles Bray’s Philosophy of
Necessity, which espoused a deterministic, materialistic worldview that bolstered his
enthusiasm for phrenology, was in the process of being published at this time. Caroline
Hennell Bray’s brother, Charles Hennell, another member of this Coventry circle, had
published Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity in 1838, which Eliot read shortly
afier moving to F oleshill. Haight reports that Elizabeth Bray Pears’s motivation for
introducing her to the Brays was to see whether Eliot’s serious evangelicalism might have
some effect on the rather independent way of thinking her brother and sister-in-law had
cultivated (Haight, 38-3 9). The effect was quite the opposite, however, as the Brays and
Hennells helped Eliot to overcome an evangelical worldview that she had already begun to
question.

The impact of Hennell’s Inquiry on Eliot is difficult to estimate, but as one of her

first tastes of “higher criticism,” the work conforms with the attitude and direction she

44

would soon take in her intellectual pursuits. The Inquiry began as a response to a plea
made by Hennell’s sister, Caroline Bray, who was disturbed by the materialistic
determinism of her husband’s book, and its implications for the miraculous foundations of
Christian faith (Haight, 38). Hennell thought, at the outset of the project, that he would
be able to reassure his sister by finding a basis for a belief in the miracles in the Bible. His
textual analysis, and comparison between books within the Bible, revealed certain
discrepancies suggesting that the various books had been written at different times, by
people with different motivations, who probably were not eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus
anyway.3 Hennell constructed a secularized history of Jesus, accounting for his deeds with
explanations in conformity with natural laws. For example, the resurrection is explained
as a conspiracy between Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who secretly removed the
body of the fallen leader from its tomb and told the disciples that he had risen and gone to
Galilee, hoping the disciples would disperse. When the disciples saw the body gone, they
began to believe that he was the Messiah, and that his return to establish the earthly
kingdom of heaven was immanent.4 There is some disagreement about the significance of
Hennell’s book on Eliot’s discarding of evangelism. Basil Willey describes the Inquiry as
a “bomb” dropped into the young woman’s “mental conglomerate.”5 However, Haight
sees many antecedents of shaken orthodoxy to Eliot’s reading of the Inquiry and her
“inevitable” secular turn (Haight, 40).‘5 The ecclesiastical history chart may also have
prepared Eliot to view the events and people in the Bible historically and to infer the
historicity of Christianity. Nevertheless, there is general agreement that her joining the
intellectual circle of the Brays and Hennells shaped the direction of Eliot’s development.

Ernst Renan, Eliot’s French contemporary, reflected at the end of his life, “My faith was

45

destroyed by historical criticism, not by scholasticism or logic,” in reference to his Parisian
education in the 18303, which undermined Christianity not by Enlightenment principles so
much as through historicism.7 Historical criticism similarly effected Eliot’s divergence
from Christianity, but it also led to problems at home.

Eliot’s embrace of new, historical orientations to Christianity, the Bible, and Jesus
were at the root of a nasty squabble with her father. What she described as a “holy war”
erupted when Eliot announced to her father in January 1842 that she would not be
attending church with him anymore. Eliot described her position to Elizabeth Bray Pears
as wanting “to be among the ranks of that glorious crusade that is seeking to set Truth’s
Holy Sepulchre fiee fi'om a usurped domination” (Letters, 1, 125). Her father was furious,
and suspected Unitarian influences fi'om the Brays. Haight enumerates many close fiiends
and relatives enlisted by Mr. Evans to help “bring Mary Ann to her senses,” efforts that
she continued to resist (Haight, 40). They lived together for some time under the strain of
Eliot’s rebellion. It must have been a great strain, for Eliot eventually had to explain
herself to her father in a letter because they were unable to speak to each other
“unobstructed by feeling.”

I wish entirely to remove from your mind the false notion that I am inclined visibly

to unite myself with any Christian community, or that I have any affinity in opinion

with Unitarians more than with other classes of believers in the Divine authority of
the books comprising the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. I regard these writings
as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish
much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider
the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life and drawn as to its materials
from Jewish notions to be most dishonourable to God and most pernicious in its

influence on individual and social happiness. (Letters, I, 128)

The influence of Hennell’s book is apparent in the way Eliot describes the scriptures as

“histories mingled with truth and fiction.” This does not mean, to her or to Hennell, that

46

scriptures are without value. Hennell argued that “[m]any of the finer thoughts and
feelings of mankind find a vent in fiction, expressed either by painting, poetry or the poetic
tale; and the perception of historical inaccuracy does not prevent our sharing the thoughts
and feelings which have embodied themselves in this manner.”8 By understanding
scriptures from a mythological perspective, they could be appreciated as stories of human
thought and feeling without being understood literally or dogrnatically.9 But insofar as the
church represented a “system of doctrines” derived fi'om mingled truth and fictions, which
Eliot considered “pernicious,” she would not attend services anymore.

The letter seems to have had little effect on her father who, after several months of
the feud, was sufficiently embarrassed in his parish as to want to turn his daughter out of
the house, and to remove himself from Coventry all-together. Through the mediation of
family members, this rash act was delayed, and Eliot went to stay with her brother Isaac
and his wife, back to her childhood home of Grifi’ House. After a month of exile, and
continuous efi‘orts by her brother and her Coventry friends to soflen Mr. Evans’s resolve,
Eliot and her father reached a compromise. Haight describes the arrangement as one in
which Eliot “agreed to attend church with him as ususal, and he tacitly conceded her the
right to think what she liked during service” (Haight, 44). What she thought during those
services is a matter of pure conjecture, for once she had returned to her father at Foleshill,
there is no more mention of the matter in her correspondence. Given the direction of her
subsequent work, however, one can guess that Eliot did not recant her historicized
conception of Christianity, for she soon began the work of disseminating a German

version of this perspective.

The exchange of ideas on biblical criticism between the English and the Young

47

Hegelians in the 18403 began with the reception of Hennell’s book in Germany by the like-
minded scholar, Strauss, who upon reading the Inquiry immediately arranged for its
translation into German. Writing the preface himself, Strauss indicated his own surprise at
finding an Englishman who could not read German and was therefore ignorant of his own
Das Leben Jesu (1836) and most German biblical criticism since Schleiermacher, but
could nevertheless develop so compatible an orientation to scripture.

[T]he subject is treated in the earnest and dignified tone of the truth-seeker, not

with the rancour of a passionate polemic; we nowhere find him deriving religion

from priestcrafl, but fiom the tendencies and wants of human nature. . . . These
elevated views, which the learned German of our day appropriates as the firm of
the religious and scientific advancement of his nation, this Englishman, to whom
most of the means at our command were wanting, has been able to educe entirely
from himself. 1°
Strauss had come by Hennell’s work via another Englishman, Dr. Robert Herbert Brabant,
a German scholar who sent the Inquiry to him. Brabant admired Strauss’s work and had
his daughter, Rufa, begin translating Das Leben Jesu in 1841. In an all-too-tidy
coincidence, Rufa married Charles Hennell, shortly after which she gave up the translation
project, and in 1844 she recommended that Eliot take it over (Haight, 52-53).

Eliot enthusiastically seized upon the project and worked exclusively on Strauss
for the next two years.11 Though she had battled recurring headaches before beginning the
translation, Eliot appears to have suffered keenly fiom them throughout the project, and
by the end had grown tired of the whole business. The sometimes tedious work of
translation was often almost too much for her to bear. At times of weakness, she
“sicken[ed] at the idea of having Strauss in my head and on my hands for a lustrunr,

instead of saying good bye to him in a year.” In better moments she did not “regret either

that the work has been begun, or that I have undertaken it. I am only inclined to vow that

48

I will never translate again if I live to correct the sheets for Strauss” (Letters, 1, 176). She
not only managed to finish the work in the spring of 1846, but undertook two more major
translations in the next seven years. It seems that the act of translating Strauss did little
for her admiration of his work. She found the last 100 pages, “totally uninteresting”
because Strauss had “anticipated in the earlier part of his work all the principles and many
of the details of his criticism, and he seems fagged himself’ (Letters, 1, 207). Eliot also
appears to have been a bit fagged at this point.

In Strauss’s work Eliot did find a more systematic treatment of the new testament
as a collection of mythology than in Hennell’s Inquiry. For those well-read in the early
nineteenth-century German tradition of biblical criticism, the Life of Jesus ofl‘ered little
that was new in the way of biblical interpretation. Strauss’s achievement, according to
William Brazill, was synthetic. He brought the numerous examples of biblical criticism
and historical research together within Hegelian philosophy. “Strauss first accepted the
truth of the [Hegelian] philosophical system and then sought to use the conclusions of
biblical exegesis to demonstrate not only the truth of the system but also the passage fi'om
the age of religion to the age of philosophy.”12 In other words, Strauss’s mythological
approach to biblical exegesis augmented the historicization of Christianity begun by Hegel,
but which the Young Hegelians, of whom Strauss was the first leader, were to continue
with great enthusiasm.

The general sense of a “passing” that Eliot found in Strauss is probably the most
pervasive characteristic in the intellectual history of the first halfof the nineteenth century,
and it does help to contextualize Eliot’s intellectual development in the 18403 and 18503.

Since the late eighteenth century, increasing numbers of literary figures and philosophers

49

wrote with the sense that things were changing in rather permanent ways—-and not
necessarily for the better. For many, the French Revolution was the watershed, after
which it was easier to doubt and challenge all certainties about systems of political
organization and social relationships. Hegel developed his philosophy in this environment,
and explicitly associated his system with the French Revolution. For him the Revolution
was the dawn of an epoch in which man’s reason, not arbitrary will, would rule nations.
The political revolution in France accompanied the philosophical revolution in Germany,
marked by the passing of the “theological” stage of consciousness to the “philosophical”
stage. Saint Simon and his followers in France, including Comte, had a similar conception
of the passing of the ancien regime during what he called a “critical” period, which was to
be followed by an “organic” period of general progress and reduction of human suffering
through the rational organization of society.
Beginning with an Hegelian historical fiamework, the Young Hegelians, in the

18303 and 18403, set out to study the elements of the theological stage of history, i.e.,
Christian history and the Bible, as antecedents to their own philosophical age. Hegel’s
dialectical model for historical change had special resonance among his students and
followers. In the hands of the Young Hegelians, who were comprised of the more liberal
of Hegel’s many adherents, the dialectic became the framework for interpreting the
historicity of Christianity—the jewel of the theological stage—which arose out of the
ashes of the Roman world. According to Hegel, the theological stage had been in decline
since the Reformation and especially since the Enlightenment. ‘3 The subsequent stage in
the development of consciousness was characterized as philosophical, because it was

philosophy that created the new understanding of humanity as the history of the unfolding

50

of its Spirit, a.k.a. Reason, into its explicit form since the Revolution.14 So while Hennell
had introduced Eliot to the historicization of Christianity, Strauss’s Life of Jesus brought
her out into the wider intellectual movement that assumed the Christian-theological period
of human development had passed. This is an implied assumption in Strauss, and one
which Eliot was now poised to incorporate into her own worldview.

After the publication of the Strauss translation in 1846, Eliot’s energies once again
became diffuse as she returned to wide reading and began to develop her skills as a writer.
In 1847, she made several contributions to the Coventry Herald, which Bray had recently
purchased. Collectively entitled “Poetry and Prose, From the Notebook of an Eccentric,”
the pieces are mild attempts at humor and philosophical and artistic observations, with an
occasionally didactic tone. Apart from a short poem in 1840, these comprise Eliot’s first
published original writing.15

In 1848 Eliot began a brief but intense correspondence with John Sibree, who later
translated Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, with whom she shared her
opinions on intellectual and political topics. She described their correspondence to Sara
Hennell as “one purely moral and intellectual carried on for the sake of ghostly edification,
in which each party has to put salt on the tails of all sorts of ideas on all sorts of subjects”
(Letters, 1, 244). The topics included Disraeli’s fiction, theories of races, and art. In a
long letter dated March 8, 1848, Eliot endorsed the recent revolution in France, indicating
a political orientation that might surprise readers of Felix Holt, which condemns political
revolt and revolution. “1 would consent . . . to have a year clipt ofl’ my life for the sake of
witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the barricade bowing to the image of Christ

‘who first taught fi'aternity to men. ”’ Furthermore, she had

51

little patience with people who can find time to pity Louis Philippe and his
moustachioed sons. Certainly our decayed monarchs should be pensioned off: we
should have a hospital for them, or a sort of Zoological Garden, where these wom-
out humbugs may be preserved. It is but justice that we should keep them, since
we have spoiled them for any honest trade. Let them sit on soft cushions and have
their dinner regularly, but for heaven’s sake preserve me fi'om sentirnentalizing
over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions of unfed souls and bodies.

(Letters, 1, 253-4)

Eliot’s enthusiasm for the February Revolution may have been exaggerated to please her
correspondent, who was “just as sansculottish and rash as I would have you,” but she
supported what she believed to be a genuine working class uprising in France.

Eliot’s interpretation of the significance of the 1848 Revolution betrays a sense of
historicist perspective. She told Sibree, “I thought we had fallen on such evil days that we
were to see no really great movement—that ours was what St. Simon calls a purely critical
epoch, not at all an organic one—but I begin to be glad of my date” (Letters, 1, 253, GE’s
italics). St. Sirnon’s conception showed history as a series of alternating epochs of
philosophical crisis and harmony, or organic unity. The critical periods consisted of
reevaluation and disintegration and the organic periods represented relative unity in
thought. For example, the medieval period was thought of as a time of organic unity
insofar as most people (in Europe) followed a Christian faith and a feudal social
orientation, while the Reformation and the Enlightenment were critical movements that
undermined that faith and unity. As I discuss in chapter 4, Eliot maintained this
generalization, in modified form, in Middlemarch. The French Revolution struck another
serious blow to feudalism, and alter the Napoleonic wars, many Europeans were hoping
for and anticipating a new kind of organic unity.“S

Eliot’s reference to St. Simon and his historicist framework suggests a parallel to

the Young Hegelian movement. The St. Sirnonian conception of history was in many ways

52

compatible with the Hegelian system of historical philosphy, and most of their
adherents—from Strauss, F euerbach, and Marx, to Auguste Comte—believed that a new
age of coherence was dawning in their lifetimes, in the wake the “double revolution.”"
Eliot joined in this sentiment upon hearing the news of the Parisian revolt in 1848 and the
overthrow of Louis Philippe.

Eliot’s father died in the following year, immediately after which she joined the
Brays on a trip to the continent. By the time the Brays were angling for home, Eliot had
decided to remain on the continent and stayed in rented rooms for a year in Geneva.
Returning to England in the late spring of 1850, Eliot visited various members of her
family and, of course, the Coventry circle of fiiends. In the fall, John Chapman, a fiiend of
Bray’s and the publisher of Eliot’s Strauss translation, came to visit the Brays with Robert
William Mackay, whose The Progress of the Intellect, as Exemplified in the Religious
Development of the Greeks and Hebrews Chapman had just published. While there, it
became apparent to Chapman and Mackay that Eliot would be an able reviewer of
Progress of the Intellect, and she was invited to do so for the Westminster Review, of
which Chapman was a financial backer and soon to be its owner. Published in January
1851, Eliot’s review opened the door to a brief editing career and was itself an indication
of her expansive awareness of the leading intellectual endeavors at nrid-century.

The untitled and anonymous review of Progress of the Intellect was highly
laudatory, and the translator of Strauss found much in common with her own thinking in
Mackay’s intellectual history. Progress of the Intellect treats the texts of Greek
mythology and the old and new testaments as containing the symbolic forms of

cosmologies, moralities, and epistemologies appropriate for their specific historical

53

moments, which are now gone forever. Eliot’s review defended Mackay’s project because

she shared his belief that human progress was retarded by adherence to the theological

worldview:

Our civilization, and, yet more, our religion, are ananomalous blending of lifeless
barbarisms, which have descended to us like so many petrifactions from distant
ages, with living ideas, the offspring of a true process of development. We are in
bondage to terms and conceptions which, having had their root in conditions of
thought no longer existing, have ceased to possess any vitality, and are for us as
spells which have lost their virtue. The endeavour to spread enlightened ideas is
perpetually counteracted by these idola theatri, which have allied themselves, on
the one hand with men’s better sentiments, and on the other with institutions in
whose defence [sic] are arrayed the passions and the interests of dominant classes.

(Essays, 28-29)

Eliot wields her historicist outlook in the first part of this passage in a way that recalls the

message she gleaned fiom Strauss about the historicity of religious systems. Eliot never

hinted at supporting class warfare in England, and the identification of resistance to

“enlightened ideas” with the “dominant classes,” from the latter part of the passage, did

not develop into a class-based social philosophy in her work. Instead, this review marks

the early stages of Eliot’s desire, which continued into her novel-writing career, to educate

the public about the relationship between historical processes and the decay of certain

forms of thought. By studying those forms, one can gain more than the antiquarian’s

satisfied curiosity because one can appreciate the historicity of systems of thought and

faith.

[T]hough the teaching of positive truth is the grand means of expelling error, the
process will be very much quickened if the negative argument serve as its pioneer;
if, by a survey of the past, it can be shown how each age and each race has had a
faith and a symbolism suited to its need and its stage of development, and that for
succeeding ages to dream of retaining the spirit along with the forms of the past, is
as firtile as the ernbalming of the dead body in the hope that it may one day be
resumed by the living soul. (Essays, 29)

What one learns, in other words, is that if a system of thought or belief was suited for

54

times long gone, those forms are now empty shells into which the present mind cannot fit.
Mackay’s work is an historicist interpretation, what Kelley calls “mythistory,” in the way it
subjugates the Greek and Christian belief systems to the historical process that has
subsumed them: they are each a “negative argument,” which clarifies what legacies the
present age retains to its detriment. It is worth noting that this passage bears a striking
resemblance to the implied historicism of Eliot’s “Historic Imagination” journal entry from
near the end of her career as a novelist. In the latter, Eliot indicated that she wanted her
fiction to dramatize those moments when decaying systems of thought were in their death
throes. In the Mackay review 25 years earlier, Eliot seemed to be linking herself to the
“endeavours” of the group of intellectuals who were trying to educate the public and show
them the shape of the new age: Bray, Hennell, Carlyle, Strauss, and now Mackay.

Another suggestive comparison between Eliot’s fiction and her interpretation of
Mackay concerns the theme of experimentation. The point of Mackay’s history is to
understand the historicity of systems of thought, to place them in their own historical
contexts to see how they might not be suitable for new circumstances. “[E]very past phase
of human development is part of that education of the race in which we are sharing; every
mistake, every absurdity into which poor human nature has fallen, may be looked on as an
experiment of which we may reap the benefit” (Essays, 31). The allusion to science is no
accident, for it is in just this way that Eliot and other historicists thought of history as a
science around mid century. The decaying systems of thought in history are a set of failed
experiments fi'om which humanity can learn, most importantly, the historicity of systems of
thought. This formulation runs deeper than the adage that “those who don’t learn from

their mistakes are destined to repeat them,” because this concerns the evolution of

55

worldviews. The message that Eliot underscores in the review is that we must dispense
with the worn out systems of thought, for their historical ages have passed. The
theological and metaphysical stages of human history have prepared the way for the new
age of positive philosophy and historical investigation.

The positive philosophy that Eliot mentions is indeed a reference to Comte, and
the Mackay review is the first indication that she knew about positivism. She uses it first
as a kind of foil, to say that while positive philosophy, i.e., inductive, scientific
investigation, is the characteristic of the present age and its fundamental task, the study of
history will be able to contribute to that project. Eliot was not a Positivist, she found
Comte’s system “one-sided” (Letters, III, 43 9), but she did support the notion that
systematic investigation was the key to human progress. Historical investigation like
Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect, she argued, makes an important compliment to
positive science.

Six months after the Mackay review, John Chapman began making arrangements
to purchase the Westminster Review, and he wanted Eliot to write the prospectus and be
the managing editor. Her decision to move away from her fiiends and family in Coventry
and take on this huge enterprise in London suggests that she had a burgeoning desire to
join progressive intellectual efl’orts in a more cosmopolitan environment. Her work was
done anonymously because Chapman wanted to pitch himself as the joumal’s fiont man,
and probably because it was thought that her being a woman would raise doubt in the
eficacy and seriousness of the project. However, the other side of the problem was that
people who knew Chapman also knew he was not intellectually equipped to carry on the

journal with the high standards with which it had begun in 1824, under its founders Jeremy

56

Bentham and John Mill, and its later editor, John Stuart Mill. In June 1851, Eliot
suggested that “it will perhaps be the best plan for you to state, that for the present you
are to be regarded as the responsible person, but that you employ an Editor in whose
literary and general ability you confide” (Haight, 91).18 By the fall of 1851, Eliot was in
London, living at Chapman’s house at 142 Strand, and busily working on all aspects of the
first number of the new series, which appeared in January 1852. There is no record that
she was ever paid for her services. Haight suggests that her room and board at 142 Strand
were probably given in exchange (Haight, 91). Iftrue, these arrangements are another
indication of Eliot’s personal commitment to the project itself.

The move to London and her central role in the Westminster led to associations
with the leading lights of mid-Victorian literary and philosophical culture. Though she had
met J. A. Froude and Harriet Martineau before 1851, she was now in frequent contact
with them as they contributed to the early numbers of the new series, along with the
phrenologist George Combes, and jack-of-all-trades George Henry Lewes. Chapman’s
house at 142 Strand was a meeting place for London’s liberal-minded literati. Herbert
Spencer, who had recently published the influential Social Statics (1851) and worked
across the street as a sub-editor for The Economist, was a frequent visitor at 142 Strand
and became a close fiiend of Eliot’s.19 She met article contributors Thomas Henry Huxley
and Richard Owen, the French historian Louis Blanc, the exiled Italian Giuseppe Mazzini,
even Dickens made an appearance. Chapman’s house was a meeting-place of progressive
thinking and writing in the 18503 where Eliot must have felt like she was a contributing
agent.

The constant bustle of Chapman’s house had disadvantages, however, and in the

57

 

early fall of 1853 Eliot found new lodgings near Hyde Park. Now away from the many
watchful eyes at 142 Strand, Eliot was able to cultivate a relationship with Lewes in
relative privacy. They were never able to marry because Lewes was legally trapped in his
marriage to Agnes Jervis. Before she and Lewes became estranged, Agnes had borne a
son in 1850 by Thornton Leigh Hunt, a close friend and colleague of Lewes. Apparently
aware of the child’s origins, Lewes nevertheless acknowledged him as his own, and
thereby closed the door to the only recourse for pursuing a divorce available at that time:
the claim of adultery. By the time he and Eliot began their serious intimacy in the summer
of 1853, Lewes was firmly separated from his wife, who continued her afi’air with Hunt
and bore two more of his children (Haight, 131-35).

Lewes was a polymath who applied himself to a wide variety of interests. He
wrote articles, plays, and novels, and in 1845-46 he published a four volume set entitled A
Biographical History of Philosophy. In 1849, for example, be accompanied Manchester
and Edinburgh performances The Merchant of Venice, in which he played Shylock, with a
lecture series on the history of philosophy. He wrote a review column for the Leader,
which he and Hunt had started, and was invited by Chapman and Eliot to write a section
on French literature for the Westminster Review; Lewes was one of the few regular
contributors to the Westminster Review in the 18403 who continued to do so under the
new editorship.

Eliot’s activity in the early 18503 constitutes a striking conjuncture, with respect to
the various continental intellectual movements, the new Westminster Review, and her own
efforts to disseminate progressive philosophy in England. Many of the characteristics of

this combination are associated with the nrid-century perspective that has come to be

58

called the Religion of Humanity. The Religion of Humanity is usually a reference to the
Comtean cult of Positivists in France, and more especially to the English movement led by
Richard Congreve, fi'om which the name derives.20 Baumer argues that the Religion of
Humanity is a perspective that should also apply to the Young Hegelians and the
Philosophical Radicals, like J. S. Mill, all of whom held the common belief that a new
secular religion must replace the now outmoded Christianity. Unlike skeptical
Enlightenment critiques of Christian dogma and superstition, the Religion of Humanity
was more historically oriented, more sensitive to the developmental nature of human
consciousness. Whereas Christianity “had been thought to deal with the unobservable,
and [was] therefore . . . unscientific, . . . the new Higher Criticism represented Christianity
not as imposture, but as myth, not as pathology, but as psychological projection or
‘alienation.”’21 The distinction is crucial for it highlights the degree to which historicism
had come to shape nrid-nineteenth-century perspectives on philosophical problems that the
Enlightenment’s static view of human nature was unable to resolve. In the Religion of
Humanity perspective, Christianity was the expression of an earlier spiritual stage that
nwded to be raised to its secular fulfillment, a new religion of man. There were significant
difl‘erences among the individuals and groups adhering to the Religion of Humanity,22 but
they shared a set of views that formed a powerfirl cultural force: that Christianity had
served spiritual needs under other historical circumstances; that those needs have not
disappeared, but have been transformed by changing circumstances, i.e., modernization. A
new form of secular religion that does not contradict known laws of nature, e. g., no
miracles, and which focuses on social problems and the relief of human suffering, needs to

replace theocentric forms of religious convictions and metaphysical philosophy. One of

59

the very few places in Europe where the various national versions of the Religion of
Humanity converged was on George Eliot’s desk at 142 Strand.

Another sentiment shared by the adherents to the Religion of Humanity
perspective was that the public should be exposed to the updated way of thinking. When
Eliot said in the Mackay review that the past is “part of that education of the race in which
we are sharing,” she meant that the development of mankind depended on studying the
past in a way that revealed the nature of changing spiritual needs. She used an example
from Lyellian geology to illustrate the point:

A correct generalization gives significance to the smallest detail, just as the great

inductions of geology demonstrate in every pebble the working of laws by which

the earth has become adapted for the habitation of man. In this view, religion and
philosophy are not merely conciliated, they are identical; or rather, religion is the
crown and consummation of philosophy—the delicate corolla, which can only
spread out its petals in all their symmetry and brilliance to the sun, when root and

branch exhibit the conditions of a healthy vigorous life. (Essays, 31)

This passage presents a heady celebration of positivism, where knowledge is both
grounded in the minute, observable details, and soars to a level of religious feeling. The
conciliation and identification of religion and philosophy was the high hope of Comte, and
the guiding principle of the Religion of Humanity. The assumption was that philosophy
had finally emerged fi'om its mistaken adherence to metaphysics by evolving into a science
of positive laws proven by observation, which elevated religion itself from its theological
stagnation. In this the Young Hegelians agreed. Strauss and Feuerbach did not seek to
abandon religion or philosophy, but to supercede their theological and metaphysical
stages, represented by Christianity and Hegel, respectively. This striking convergence of
perspectives of the French Comtists (and their English adherents) with the Young

Hegelian movement in Germany seems to have occurred without much, if any, association

6O

between the two groups. Eliot represents perhaps the earliest effort to explicitly weave
together these two movements.

Under the new editorship of Chapman and Eliot, the Westminster Review was
committed to introducing the English reading public to the latest continental intellectual
movements, like those related to the Religion of Humanity. One of the results of this
commitment was the fiequent review and discussion of the work of Auguste Comte, for
which the editors were obliged to call on Lewes. Lewes was one of the early English
exponents of Comtean thought. Though neither were Positivists, Lewes and J. S. Mill
together had developed an interest in Comte’s positive philosophy in the 18303 and 18403.
Lewes’s Comte ’s Philosophy of the Sciences was a freely translated exposition of Comte’s
Philosophie positive, which appeared in 1853—the same year that Harriet Martineau’s
abridged translation of the same work was published.

As Eliot began to think of leaving the Westminster, she undertook her second
major translation. The reasons for deciding to translate Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des
Christentums are not explicit in her correspondence. There was a budding tension
between herself and Chapman that bloomed when he printed an announcement that he
would publish a translation of F euerbach, “by the translator of Strauss.” Eliot had told
Chapman of her desire to leave the Westminster in the fall of 1853, and Chapman
successfirlly convinced her to stay on until the following April (Letters, 11, 127-28).
According to Rosemary Ashton, Eliot was beginning to think of making a living as a
writer because the editorship provided no income. Moving out of 142 Strand into a rented
space on Cambridge Street presumably strained her finances.23 The Feuerbach translation,

which Chapman announced as forthcoming in his “Quarterly Series,” would not add much

61

to her income either. In an angry letter dated December 2, 1853, Eliot castigated
Chapman for advertising the translation, in addition to an original work, “The Idea of a
Future Life,” which was never pursued. It is not clear fi'om the letter why Eliot was so
upset with the advertisement. Perhaps she was feeling less gratuitous with her time for
Chapman’s benefit. Chapman’s own finances were in desperate shape by this time, and it
must have been understood that he might not be able to pay Eliot for her translation.

I bitterly regret that I allowed myself to be associated with your Series, but since I

have done so, I am very anxious to firlfil my engagements both to you and the

public. It is in this sense that I wish you to publish Feuerbach, and I beg you to
understand that I would much rather that you should publish the work and not pay
me than pay me and not publish it. I don’t think you are sufficiently alive to the
ignonriny of advertising things, especially as part of a subscription series, which
never appear. . . . [You must] consider the question of Feuerbach as one which

concerns our honour first and our pockets after. (Letters, H, 130-31)24
Eliot did the Feuerbach translation, for which Chapman paid £30 and published in the
summer of 1854 (Haight, 158). By this time her editorial tenure was over, she was
composing articles for the Westminster and other London periodicals for pay, and she
living openly with Lewes.

One way to explain Eliot’s decision to translate Feuerbach is to consider the milieu
in which she was working when she undertook the project. The progressively edged
Westminster Review, whose seemingly fearless (if occasionally ignominious) owner was
willing to put into print all kinds of counter-orthodoxy, was a cell for rethinking the firture
after the passing of the theological stage of human history. As the managing editor,
George Eliot was the nucleus of this cell. While her new fiiends Spencer, Lewes, and
Harriet Martineau were advancing scientific and positivistic perspectives, Eliot’s strength

and experience in the German language made Feuerbach a likely candidate for her next big

project, and a usefirl contribution to the progressive discourse of these several years.

62

F euerbach’s own intellectual framework had developed like so many others who
attended Hegel’s lectures at the University of Berlin in the 18203. Feuerbach went there
in 1824 to study theology, but, according to his own account, he learned from Hegel that
philosophy, not theology, was the right line of inquiry.25 Hegelian historicism was one of
the most important characteristics that guided Feuerbach’s investigations and writing for
the rest of his life. Hegel’s insight, that all of the various worldviews of mankind were
born in and appropriate to specific historical moments in the general development of
Spirit, was the historicist view that Feuerbach eventually turned back against Hegel’s
philosophical system, arguing that the system itself was a product of its milieu. However,
he and his Young Hegelian contemporaries did not throw out the system, but steered it
away from its overemphasis of the Ideal while maintaining the central story of the
expansion of consciousness.“

After Strauss, F euerbach led the way in making new paths of inquiry for the
Young Hegelians. The most popular manifestation of his activity was Das Wesen des
Christentums in 1841. The Essence of Christianity led intellectuals of the 18403 “forward
from the views of Strauss to this new piece of radicalism that was concerned not with the
content of dogma [as with Strauss] but with the origin of dogma in human aspirations and
fears.”27 With a rhetorical style that seemed to turn all theological dicta upside-down,
Feuerbach asserted that everything humanity associated with the divine was nothing more
than the best of human striving. The creation of the Christian God, for this Young
Hegelian, was humanity objectifying its own essence; a self-alienation rationalized and
maintained by theology. Theology must be replaced by anthropology in order to return

the Spirit of humanity to humanity. What Feuerbach meant by “anthropology” was a

63

humanistic interpretation that showed religious beliefs and practices as dimensions of
psychological needs and desires.

Feuerbach’s anthropology is nearly the same approach that Kelley identifies as
“mythistory.” Kelley relates an internal contradiction in nineteenth-century historicism in
which he opposes the source-intensive approach of Ranke with the mythistory approach of
people like Wilhelm von Humboldt, the Grimms, Michelet, and Cruezer. The distinction
goes back, according to Kelley, all the way to Thucydides’s critique of Herodotus, for
whom he coined the term “mythistoria” to describe Herodotus’s search for origins that lay
beyond memory or what the documentary evidence cannot support. In the nineteenth-
century version of this critique, Ranke insisted that “[h]istory cannot discuss the origin of
society,” and that historians would be “over-bold who should venture to unveil the
mystery of the primeval world.”28 The mythistorians saw the living symbols of older
cultures, in law, language, and religion, but they had to exercise their intuition in order to
interpret the characteristics of those cultures. “Through the imaginative reconstruction of
cultural remains . . . the historian could plumb the depths of the ‘well of the past. ”’2’
While Kelley focuses on Creuzer and Michelet, who themselves focused on language and
law, respectively, the Young Hegelians studied Christianity in the same mythistorical vein.

F euerbach was an important figure for many of his contemporaries because he
articulated the humanistic credo of a new generation. Engles reflected, “Enthusiasm was
general: we all became at once Feuerbachians.”3° Eliot’s was among this general
enthusiasm, but she worried over the reception of her translation in England. She told her
fiiend Sara Hennell, who had helped with the Strauss translation and was, in the early

spring of 1854, reading the whole of Eliot’s new translation, “It is considered the book of

64

the age [in Germany], but Germany and England are two countries” (Letters, 11, 137). As
the manuscript neared completion Eliot asked Sara,

I am so far removed from the popular feeling on the subject of which it treats that I

cannot trust my own judgment. With the ideas of Feuerbach I everywhere agree,

but of course I should, of myself, alter the phraseology considerably. Before I do
this however, I want you to tell me what I must leave out. Mind, I want to keep in

as much as possible. (Letters, 11, 153)

Eliot’s feeling of being “far removed” is an indication that since leaving Coventry three
years earlier, her intellectual development was beginning to isolate her fi'om the
mainstream. F euerbach’s sometimes bald attacks on orthodox belief, Eliot thought, might
be too abrasive for the English reading public, but she could no longer be sure since
joining the legion of counter-orthodoxy. ‘

When Eliot’s translation was published in the summer of 1854, she was already on
the continent, having taken the dramatic step of a pseudo-elopement with Lewes. They
spent the next eight months in various German towns and cities where Lewes was able to
gather material for what became his most popular work, The Life of Goethe. Eliot wrote
several articles and reviews for the Westminster Review and the Leader, translated long
passages of Goethe for Lewes’s book and halfof Spinoza’s Ethics, which was never
completed. And she read furiously. John W. Cross, her first biographer and second
husband, lists three pages of works she read, either silently to herself or out loud in the
evenings to Lewes. The list includes Goethe, Rameau, most of Shakespear’s plays (she
spent time comparing Schlegel’s translations to the original), Lessing, Spinoza’s
correspondence, numerous German scholars and critics, Heine, and Macaulay’s History of

England.31 Upon her return Eliot began a productive period in which she wrote numerous

articles reflecting the breadth of her reading. Within the next year, between the summer of

65

1855 and the early fall of 1856, the topics of Eliot’s articles ranged fiom Liszt and Wagner
to Milton, fi'om Tennyson and Carlyle to Evangelism, fiom ancient tragedy to
contemporary philosophy and biblical criticism. There is perhaps no thread that connects
all of Eliot’s writing in this period. However, those on topics of German cultural
developments are most numerous: “Three Months in Weimar” and “Liszt, Wagner, and
Weimar” in Fraser ’3 Magazine, “The Morality of Wilhelm Meister” and “The Future of
German Philosophy” in the Leader, and “German Wit: Heinrich Heine” and “The Natural
History of German Life” in the Westminster Review.

The last of these, “The Natural History of German Life,” reflects Eliot’s continuing
efforts to combat Germanophobia in the English-spealdng world,32 and an emerging
interest in realism and the problem of representation. “The Natural History of German
Life” is a review article for two books by Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl, Die burgerliche
Gesellschafi (1851) and Land and Leute (1853), in which he studied social classes in
various German regions with an approach he called Naturgeschichte. Eliot heaped praise
on Riehl’s empirical rigor and methods of “picturing,” using his portrayals of the German
peasantry as the best examples, which for her highlight how the British are lacking in
accurate representations of the nation’s social classes. “What we are desiring for
ourselves has been in some degree done for the Germans by Riehl . . . and we wish to
make these books known to our readers . . . as a model for some firture or actual student
of our own people” (Essays, 273). Many Eliot scholars refer to the article because it is
apparent that she was forming ideas about how to represent social groups in
writing—ideas which she then developed in her fiction. The temporal proximity of this

article and her first fictional foray supports this interpretation: the article was published in

66

July, 1856, two months before she began the first of her “Scenes.”33
Shuttleworth argues that Eliot was developing her own “commitment to Natural
History” at this time, and that the sense of history she derived from Riehl and applied to
her first novel, Adam Bede, was a static one.34 This view is consistent with the practice of
natural history in the nineteenth century, for it was hardly historical and emphasized the
observation of nature in its particular aspects. Riehl’s natural history of German peasantry
recorded the details of their appearances, and not an account of the historical conditions
that make them the way they are. In fact, he stressed the tirnelessness of their
characteristics. Eliot contrasted Rie ’3 “accuracy” with the English tendency to idealize
and romanticize images of laborers.
The notion that peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in
a smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound teeth,
that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children necessarily rosy and
merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from the artistic mind, which looks for
its subject into literature instead of life. The painter is still under the influence of
idyllic literature, which has always expressed the imagination of the cultivated and
town-bred, rather than the truth of rustic life. (Essays, 269)
Eliot provides other similar examples of bad generalizations to stress the point that if art is
to help “exten[d] our sympathies,” it must strive for better accuracy.3s She argued that
Riehl’s generalizations derive inductively from the “facts” of his observations, which
represent his “contribution to that knowledge of the German people” (Essays, 291).
Eliot’s celebration of Riehl’s work fell in line with her interest in doing something
similar in the English case. As I discuss in the next chapter, Eliot was sensitive to the fact
that Riehl’s study of peasants in particular could not be replicated in the English case.

One would have to look back to a time before industrialization had transformed not only

the English countryside, but also the nature of social relationships, because English

67

peasants had nearly disappeared. This posed a kind of problem familiar to historians of
every age: how to tap into lost frames of reference. Eliot’s solution to this problem was
historical fiction. Two months after the Riehl article was published, Eliot began her career
as a writer of fiction by developing “scenes” from earlier in the century that explore
varieties of religious sentiment: two fi'om the 18203 and one from around the turn of the
nineteenth century. The first of these, “The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton,”
begins with a passage the speaks to Eliot’s keen sense for the historicity of cultural forms:
“Shepperton Church was a very difl’erent-looking building five-and-twenty years ago”
(Scenes, 41). The opening line of her first novel, Adam Bede, which begins with a
different kind of lost form—the artisan’s workshop—indicates that Eliot believed fiction
had a kind of power for historical conjuring:
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. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen I will show you the
roomy workshop of Mr Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in the village of
Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.
(AB, 7)
When she began writing the three short stories that comprise Scenes of a Clerical Life,
Eliot could not have known that she was going to make a career of it. But the decent
reception of Scenes encouraged her publisher, John Blackwood, to solicit a hill-length
novel. Eliot began Adam Bede in 1858, and its publication the following year met with

instant critical and popular success. With this further encouragement, she set about right

away on her next novel, The Mill on the Floss.

68

Chapter 2. The Mill on the Floss: A Natural History of English Life,
or Eliot’s “Riehlism”

[Riehl] sees in European society incarnate history, and any attempt to disengage it
from its historical elements must, he believes, be simply destructive of social
vitality. What has grown up historically can only die out historically, by the
gradual operation of necessary laws. The external conditions which society has
inherited from the past are but the manifestation of inherited internal conditions in
the human beings who compose it; the internal conditions and the external are
related to each other as the organism and its medium, and development can take
place only by the gradual consentaneous development of both. (Eliot, “The Natural
History of German Life,” in Essays, 287)

The excerpt in this epigraph highlights Eliot’s historicist flame of mind as she
reviewed Rie ’3 “natural history of German life” the summer of 1856. The purpose of the
passage in its original context was to explain Riehl’s philosophical conservatism, which
disposed him to oppose radical reforms that sought to erase social forms that had
developed historically and “consentaneously,” with the “internal conditions” of human
sentiments and needs.1 The analogy of the “organism and its medium” projects a
conception of the relationship between individuals and their social milieus as dynamic and
evolutionary, as well as sensitive to the destructive tendencies of revolution. By
“incarnate history,” Riehl suggests that European society embodies the historical

development of customs, which are themselves a connection to a remote past in the

69

mythistorical orientation. Individuals who live with and reproduce those customs thus
manifest the history of their society. In this, Eliot’s sense for the historical dimension of
the organic relationship between individuals and their environments embodies the
romantic-historicist ideas of development and historical uniqueness.

Riehl’s anthropological method for studying and writing about German peasants
appealed to Eliot on a number of levels, the most fundamental of which was the historical.
This appeal inspired Eliot, in part, to try to write historical fiction in 1856, and was still a
major animating force behind her second novel. The notion of “consentaneous
development” is an especially important component of Riehl’s appeal to Eliot, for it
characterizes her conception of how unique, individual experiences can be related to
general historical changes.

Eliot began writing The Mill on the Floss almost immediately after finishing Adam
Bede in 1859, and chose for its setting the provincial world of her childhood. It is
generally agreed that The Mill on the Floss is at least partially autobiographical, and the
spirited, intelligent heroine, Maggie Tulliver, has often been compared to Eliot in her own
childhood.2 The obvious parallel is their age: Eliot and her brother Isaac were born in the
same respective years as Maggie and Tom, and grew up in provincial England in the
18203. While a hill comparison between Maggie and her author can be interesting, the
focus of this chapter is the setting of the novel and the narrative strategy that reflects
Eliot’s interest in Riehl’s anthropological, or natural history, approach to history.

Like Eliot’s other early fiction, The Mill on the Floss is narrated from the
perspective of a natural historian studying people—an anthropologist, which is the

predominant characteristic of the second phase of development in her historical thought.

70

St Oggs is a riverside town described as if it were a colony of ants next to a tidal pool, and
the Tullivers and Dodsons as families of ants more or less oblivious to the wider world of
apparently monolithic historical and natural forces, except as these forces disrupt their
own lives. Many critics who sense a general transformation in Eliot’s fiction consider The
Mill on the Floss to be the last novel of the first phase of her development. A number of
these critics argue that Eliot is still under the heavy influence of Riehl, and they read the
early novels as attempts to do her own brand of “natural history of English life.”3 Many
elements in The Mill on the Floss bear this out. The natural history approach manifested
itself in a narrative strategy that was omniscient, anthropological, and apparently
objective. From the standpoint of conceptual complexity, The Mill on the Floss resembles
Eliot’s other early fiction, for the dynamic between individuals and their historical milieu is
more one-sided, i.e, dominated by the historical, than one sees in her later work.
Furthermore, the narrator’s perspective on St Oggs is one of uncomplicated objectivity.
But if we centralize history in Eliot’s thinking, we can see that she employed the natural
history approach in The Mill on the Floss to serve an historicist purpose. That purpose
was to describe provincial English life before the flood of industrialization, especially
inner, religious sentiments in ordinary people who faced the destructive forces of that
transformation. Whereas Riehl studied German social classes, which, as “incarnate
history,” offered access to the past, Eliot “observations” had to be fictional because by the
late 18503, industrialization had transformed the English social classes so much that it was
not possible to read the past as clearly in them as one could have during the time that

coincided with her childhood.

71

As I discussed in the previous chapter, Eliot’s laudatory review of Riehl’s work
commends his ability to describe German classes in their social setting. Eliot makes no
efi’ort in the review itself to disguise her own desires to continue this line of work in
English cases. Before even mentioning Riehl in the review, Eliot spends a great deal of
time (six book pages) discussing a number of the wrong ways the laboring classes are
represented in various English artistic media. Often misrepresented in paintings, on stage,
and in literature, peasants especially have been hopelessly idealized.

Idyllic ploughmen are jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic shepherds

make bashful love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers dance in the chequered

shade and refresh themselves, not immoderately, with spicy nutbrown ale. But no
one who has seen much of actual ploughmen thinks them jocund; no one who is
well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry. (Essays,

269)4
Eliot calls for remedying this problem of idealized, badly generalized, conceptions by
collecting observations and establishing a “real knowledge of the People” by which
someone might write a book like those of Riehl, “well nourished with specific facts,” so
that it ‘Would be a valuable aid to the social and political reformer.” But the English case
held a special problem if one wanted a study of peasants, for they had been disappearing
for at least a century. Eliot acknowledged this disparity between the German and English
experiences of industrial transformation of social classes, adding that for access to
preindustrial social relations in England, one would have to go back 50 years.

Eliot began looking for that access in the Riehl article itself.

In order to appreciate what Riehl says of the German peasantry, we must

remember what the tenant-farmers and small proprietors were in England halfa

century ago, when the master helped to milk his own cows, and the daughters got

up at one o’clock in the morning to brew,—when the family dined in the kitchen
with the servants, and sat with them round the kitchen fire in the evening.

72

This stream continues as Eliot weaves together a number of images, such as the “quarried
parlour . . . innocent of carpet,” where farmers’ daughters were “spinning their future
table-linen,” (Essays, 273). Eliot appears to be almost carried away with this sort of
depiction and one cannot help anticipating her turn to fiction several months later. With
her imagination tweaked, she fleshed out the contrasts between the more cosmopolitan
farmers of the mid-18503, ‘those style of living and mental culture are often equal to that
of the professional class in provincial towns” and those of the preindustrial countryside
beginning to change at the turn of the century. In this, Eliot is animated by the romantic-
historicist impulse to seek out the charms of lost ages and cultures, and found in Riehl a
kind of methodology for revivifying what was lost.

Eliot especially admired Riehl’s methodology for studying people, and she used the
review to make an argument against a priori speculation and conjecture, and a call for a
more inductive approach to understanding social classes. However, in her representation,
Riehl seems to carry (a priori) assumptions of his own, especially with respect to the
German peasantry.

In Germany . . . it is among the peasantry that we must look for the historical type

of the national physique. In towns this type has become so modified to express the

personality of 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 longer-legged, in another a
broader-shouldered race, which has inherited these peculiarities for centuries.

(Essays, 274)
Eliot admires what she takes to be Riehl’s contribution to the natural history of German
people. The observations of “types,” and the assumption of the tirnelessness of physical
qualities and characteristics, resembles the kind of “naturalizing” that was a passion among

many amateur British naturalists who had been combing the fields, forests, and shores of

73

the British isles while enjoying the feeling that they were contributing to science.5 Eliot
scholars point to the naturalist expedition that she and Lewes made in the late spring of
1856 to Ilfi'acombe on the Devonshire coast as a precursor to her early commitment to
realism.‘ The main reason for the trip was Lewes’s new work on scientific investigation
that culminated in a piece called Sea-side Studies.7 He was probably stimulated by his
admiration of Goethe’s version of Naturphilosophie. Eliot’s interest in natural history
sharpened as she tagged along.

I never before longed so much to know the names of things as during this visit to

Ilfracombe. The desire is part of the tendency that is now constantly growing in

me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct, vivid

ideas. The mere fact of naming an object tends to give distinctness to our

conception of it-we have then a sign that at once calls up in our minds the
distinctive qualities which mark out for us that particular object fiom all others.

(Letters, II, 251)

Eliot was, in fact, writing the Riehl review while in Ilfi'acombe. Together, her journal and
the review reflect a joy in identifying types, whether they be a particular species of sea-
weed or a specific trait of “national physique” among Hessian peasants. Eliot’s “desire”
for accuracy while traipsing along the rocky shores of Ilfi'acombe, looking for sea
anemones, is intimately related to her admiration of Riehl, a naturalist of the German
pe0ple.

Eliot responded especially to the way Riehl’s work on German peasants enabled
contact with the remote past. Though today we may bristle at the huge leaps of
generalization and apparent condescension that pepper Riehl’s work, it does represent an
early anthropological assumption that “primitives” could give insight into the past of

human development. Eliot’s romantic-historicist imagination, which had been stimulated

in a similar way by F euerbach’s version of anthropology, was eager for that kind of

74

insight. Her inspiration swelled as she followed Riehl in thinking that peasants have
basically remained unchanged for centuries.

In the cultivated world each individual has his style of speaking and writing. But

among the peasantry it is the race, the district, the province, that has its style;

namely, its dialect, its phraseology, its proverbs and its songs, which belong alike
to the entire body of the people. This provincial style of the peasant is again, like
his physique, a remnant of history to which he clings with the utmost tenacity. In
certain parts of Hungary, there are still descendants of German colonists of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who go about the country as reapers, retaining
their old Saxon songs and manners, while the more cultivated German emigrants in

a very short time forget their own language, and speak Hungarian. (Essays, 27 5)
In this passage the peasants of central Europe are an undifi’erentiated “race” in contrast to
the “cultivated world” of individuation. As a “remnant of history,” the peasants’
“provincial style,” if carefully described, provides access to the remote past.

The concept of “incarnate history” is an example of the romantic-historicist
perspective that Kelley calls mythistory. Kelley argues that before the various national
versions of the historical profession gravitated toward empirically-based analysis of the
past in the nineteenth century, there had been a lively field of historical research that held
an important role for the imagination. Herodotus used “tall tales,” or mythology, in his
attempts to trace the origins of the Persian wars back to points beyond living memory.8
The romantic critique of the limitations of Enlightenment historiography operated within
the same tension (see introduction). Ranke, who admired many of the accomplishments of
romantic historiography, nevertheless articulated a nineteenth-century version of
Thucydides’s criticism in saying, “History cannot discuss the origin of society, for the art
of writing, which is the basis of historical knowledge, is a comparatively late invention.”9

Ranke’s famous devotion to documents is apparent in his claim that if something is not

written, it is not within the province of history. Romantic-historicists fi'om the early types

75

like Herder and the Grimms to a later generation that could include Riehl and Eliot,
however, did not submit themselves to this restraint. Law, language, and mythology were
vestiges of the past that afforded insights into origins that are not available in records, but
that required the use of imagination to reconstruct the historic cultures.10 For Riehl and
Eliot, preindustrial social classes were “incarnate history,” or vestiges of the past that
could provide means for reconstructing European culture from many centuries ago. “

Eliot was well prepared for the mythistory orientation implicit in Riehl from her
work on Feuerbach and Mackay, and in order to explain the historicist principles that
undergird Riehl’s work, she used a mythistory notion of “historical language” in her
review.

The historical conditions of society may be compared with those of language.
It must be admitted that the language of cultivated nations is in anything but a
rational state; the great sections of the civilized world are only approximately
intelligible to each other. . . ; one word stands for many things, and many words
for one thing; the subtle shades of meaning, and still subtler echoes of association,
make language an instrument which scarcely anything short of genius can wield
with definiteness and certainty. Suppose, then, that the efl‘ort which has been . . .
made to construct a universal language on a rational basis has at length succeeded,
and that you have a language which has no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, . . . no
hoary archaisms . . . which effects the purpose of communication as perfectly and
rapidly as algebraic signs. Your language may be a perfect medium of expression
to science, but will never express life, which is a great deal more than science.
With the anomalies and inconveniences of historical language, you will have parted
with its music and its passion, with it vital qualities as an expression of individual
character. . . . Language must be left to grow in precision, completeness, and
unity, as minds grow in cleamess, comprehensiveness, and sympathy. And there is
an analogous relation between the moral tendencies of men and the social
conditions they have inherited. The nature of European men has its roots
intertwined with the past, and can only be developed by allowing those roots to
remain undisturbed while the process of development is going on, until that perfect
ripeness of the seed which carries with it a life independent of the root. (Essays,
287-8 8)

Like Riehl, Eliot is now opposed to social revolution12 because her conception of the

relationship between “moral tendencies” and “social conditions”—which she earlier called

76

“internal and external conditions”—is developmental. Her language analogy suggests that
just like the efforts in the natural sciences to establish a rationalized, universal language for
the purposes of clarity would destroy the “music and passion” of historical language,
efforts to establish a rational society through radical means (and she mentions the
socialists specifically in the next paragraph) would destroy social systems that have
evolved historically and in dynamic relation with individuals within.13 Eliot’s orientation
to language is quintessentially historicist because it takes the customs of speech to be

remnants of past knowledge, out of which current knowledge springs.

When developing a narrative strategy for The Mill on the Floss, Eliot turned to the
tidal pool perspective—a “Riehlist” approach—she gleaned in the summer of 1856 on the
shores of Ilfi'acombe and in the Riehl review. In careful narrative interventions, the
depiction of the town of St Ogg’s resembles the natural history approach discussed above.
Chapter 12 of Book I is especially important in this respect, for it very explicitly draws a
long historical view of St Ogg’s, within which the actors are more or less ignorant of their
place in that history.

It is one of those old, old towns, which impress one as a continuation and

outgrth of nature as much as the nests of the bower birds or the winding

galleries of the white ants: a town which carries the traces of its long growth and
history, like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot
between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legions turned
their backs on it fiom the camp on the hill-side, and the long-haired sea-kings came

up the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the land. (MF, 181)

The narrator is very much the naturalist observing an “outgrowth of nature,” which is, in

this case, St Ogg’s. Compare this depiction with one Eliot made on a walk, during the

77

naturalizing expedition, of a small village near Ilfracombe: “Lee is a tiny hamlet which has
lodged itself, like a little colony of A urora Actiniae [a species of anemone], in the nick
between two ranges of hills, where the sea runs in and makes a miniature bay” (Letters, II,
244). The narrator’s perspective in The Mill on the Floss is the same as Eliot’s voice in
her llfracombe notebook, with respect to the object under observation. The reader is to
see St Ogg’s as if it were like a “little colony” that naturally lodged itself “between the
river and the low hill.”

The naturalist-narrator in The Mill on the Floss is also an historian whose gaze
spans the centuries as well as the landscape of St Ogg’s. He catches glimpses, for
example, of the “Saxon hero-king” and the “gloorrrier shadow of the dreadfiil heathen
Dane” coming up the river. Then the gaze comes to rest for a moment on the “old Hall.”

It was the Normans who began to build that fine old Hall, which is like the

town—telling of the thoughts and hands of widely-sundered generations; but it is all

so old that we look with loving pardon at its inconsistencies, and are well content
that they who built the stone oriel and they who built the gothic facade and towers
of finest small brick-work with the trefoil ornament, and the windows and
battlements defined with stone, did not sacrilegiously pull down the ancient half-

timbered body with its oak-roofed banqueting-hall. (ll/H7, 181-82)

The “old Hall” is just one of the more conspicuous of those “galleries of the white ants,”
which is an architectural cacophony built on the ruins of older structures. The cacophony
is forgiven, however, fiom an historical standpoint. Indeed, architecture was another of
the historicist’s tools for “plumbing the depths of the past,” as Kelley points out, where
one can read the remains, as the narrator here does, and infer—even speculate—much
about their construction. For like German peasants, architecture is a kind of incarnate

history, insofar as structures still visible represent a connection to a former age.“ There is

again another striking parallel in the Ilfracombe notebook.

78

But when one sees a house stuck on the side of a great hill, and still more a
number of houses looking like a few barnacles clustered on the side of a great
rock, we begin to think of the strong family likeness between ourselves and all
other building, burrowing house-appropriating and shell-secreting animals. The
difl’erence between a man with his house and a molusc with its shell lies in the
number of steps or phenomena interposed between the fact of individual existence

and the completion of the building. (Letters 11, 242)

The comparison between human architecture and the shelter-building of sea critters
encourages one to think of human beings as just another of the world’s animals, just as the
narrator’s first observation of St Ogg’s compared its buildings to “the nests of bower
birds.”

The narrator’s view of architecture arises later in a way that brings together the
novel’s realism and its historicism. In a very important chapter entitled “A Variation of
Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet,” the narrator establishes a comparative analogy by
taking the reader on a brief journey down the Rhéne, where the river’s occasional flooding
has left only “remnants of commonplace houses, which in their best days were but the sign
of a sordid life, belonging in all its details to our own vulgar era” (MF, 361). The narrator
contrasts his vantage with the scenery one enjoys while floating down the Rhine, whose
crumbling castles are in “harmony” with the surroundings that “seem to have a natural
fitness.”

[N]ay, even in the day when they were built they must have had this fitness, as if

they had been raised by an earth-bom race who had inherited fi'om their mighty

parent a sublime instinct of form. And that was a day of romance! Ifthose robber
barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres, they had a certain grandeur of the
wild beast in them—they were forest boars . . . not the ordinary domestic grunter.

(ll/IF, 361)

Here again we have the naturalist’s view of animals in their domiciles. However, the

contrast between the grand ruins of a romantic day and the remnants of the “commonplace

houses” of the Rh6ne gives a sense of historical depth that is augmented by the attribution

79

of a “certain grandeur” with Rhineland barons’ primitive wildness, much preferred (so it
would seem) to quotidian, grunting, domesticity associated with “our own vulgar era.”
The narrator further insists that feudal times were times of “colour when the sunlight fell
on glancing steel and floating banners: a time of adventure and fierce struggle—nay, of
living, religious art and religious enthusiasm. . . . Therefore it is that these Rhine castles
thrill me with a sense of poetry: they belong to the grand historic life of humanity, and
raise up for me the vision of an epoch” (W, 361-62). The poetry of the medieval world
whose ruins are still visible on the Rhine, fi'om the narrator’s perspective in the nineteenth
century, form a discrete “epoch” now gone—given way to a more prosaic, less heroic
world represented by the remains on the Rhfine. And it is, of course, the type that
occupied those that Eliot’s fiction describes.

The natural historian’s perspective and descriptive language in The Mill on the
Floss is not limited to the passages that establish the setting. The action of the characters
is related to the activity of animals, as if to provide objective distance. Clams, birds, and
toads are variously used as referents, but the most recurring metaphor of this kind is of
ants. Not only is the built environment of St Ogg’s likened to the “winding galleries of the
white ants,” but as we zoom in, the two main families of the story, the Dodsons and the
Tullivers, are described as “emmet-like,” i.e., ant-like, in their ignorance of the “beatings
of the world’s mighty heart” (MF, 363).

Though the chapter begins with a nod to the Byronic taste for medieval castles and
the kind of life they symbolized, The Mill on the Floss is really concerned with the kind of
mundane, forgotten life represented by the Rhfine and depicted on the Floss. The narrator

actually pauses to apologize for making the reader “irritated” with “this sense of

80

oppressive narrowness” (MF, 363). But in order to make an effective natural history of
this little community, the story of the Tullivers’ demise is precisely what needs to be told.

[I]t is necessary that we should feel [their pain], if we care to understand how [the

force of history] acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie—how it has acted on young

natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human things have
risen above the mental level of the generation before them, to which they have
been nevertheless tied by the strongest fibres of their hearts. The suffering,
whether of martyr or victim, which belongs to every historical advance of mankind,
is represented in this way in every town and by hundreds of obscure hearths: and
we need not shrink from this comparison of small things with great; for does not
science tell us that its highest striving is after the ascertainment of a unity which
shall bind the smallest things with the greatest? In natural science . . . there is
nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which every
single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely the same with the

observation of human life. (ll/IF, 363)

This passage explicitly links the project of the novel with natural history as it justifies
realism in art. As the nrid-century realists turned their attention to the lives and
environments of ordinary people, they perhaps had no better excuse than the one Eliot
offers here. Just as Riehl’s work illuminated the conditions and circumstance of ordinary
Germans, this natural history of “obscure hearths” will fill out our understanding of
ordinary provincial people on the eve of an “historical advance.”

The novel itself provides the very sort of wider, historical perspective that the ant-
like characters lack. According to the narrator, The Mill on the Floss is a “history of
unfashionable [ordinary] families,” (ll/IF, 385). Maggie and Tom represent a mix of the
more respectable Dodson family with the suspect clan of the Tullivers. Though Tom has
the fair complexion of the Dodsons, he unfortunately did not inherit the quicker wits of the
Tullivers. Maggie, also unfortunately, is quite the opposite. “It seems a bit of a pity,”
according to her father, “as the lad should take after the mother’s side istead o’ the little

wench. That’s the worst on’t wi’ the crossing o’ breeds: you can never justly calkilate

81

what’ll come on’t” (MF, 59). He would prefer that Tom were sharper, for it would help
him to succeed in a career, a need made keener by Mr Tulliver’s own troubles. Maggie’s
intelligence, on the other hand, can only come to “mischief’ because she is female. Mr
Tulliver’s sense of husbandry, however, and his immanent financial ruin, for that matter,
are within a narrow frame of reference that is somewhat obviated by the narrator’s more
historical perspective that can take in more than the immediate generations and see beyond
the horizons of St Ogg’s.

The litany of disasters that the Tullivers face overcomes the “oppressive
narrowness” that the narrator apologizes for. Mr Tulliver’s troubles, which become
Tom’s and Maggie’s, are caused by a new enterprise nearby. Various family obligations
and his own struggling business have already strained the family’s finances when he learns
that the sale of the farm upiiver of Dorlcote Mill will bring about bad consequences.
Purchased by Privart, “a new name,” i.e., backed by new capital, the farm was to be
expanded by irrigation innovations that would drain the water, and thus the power, from
Tulliver’s mill. His failed lawsuit against Privart ensures the family’s ruin, which
precipitates Mr Tulliver’s stroke. While Tom’s decision to pay off the family’s debts out
of the principle of his and Maggie’s annuity is seen as honorable, it becomes obvious that
his dearly bought education will not result in a profession. At the age of sixteen he must,
as he sees it, start over again as an apprentice to his merchant uncle. Maggie’s Thomas a
Kempis-inspired resignation, in the wake of this disaster, to an utterly selfless life, which
her fiiend Philip Wakem perceives as “unnatural,” produces a severe psychological
conflict that eventuates in her taking a headlong plunge into an apparent elopement with

Stephen Guest. This causes Tom to estrange her from the house. Their eventual

82

in

it

mi

reconciliation lasts but a moment as the flooded F 1033 unleashes some machinery fi'om a
nearby wharf that plows them under, where they drown in each other’s arms. As the
family experiences this series of tragedies, it is impossible for them to understand it as a
part of an historical context; but that is just what the natural-historian provides in the
narration.

What Eliot had been interested in since translating the Young Hegelians, and what
the narrator of The Mill on the Floss says this “history of unfashionable people” is about,
are the workings of religious feeling in a particular historical context. Afier excusing this
story as natural history, the narrator bones in on the Protestant variation “unknown to
Bossuet”" that is “too specific to be arrived at deductively.” Instead, conscientious
“observation” is needed, the details of which are provided by Eliot’s imagination. In the
case of the Dodsons and Tullivers, their religion, with only a “tincture of theology,” was
more “of a simple, senri-pagan kind.” While the Dodsons’ religion “consisted in revering
whatever was customary and respectable,” the Tullivers’ had the “same sort of traditional
belie ,” but which was “carried in richer blood, having elements of generous irnprudence,
warm affection and hot-tempered rashness” (another allusion to Maggie’s unfortunate
inheritance) (W, 363 -65). This description of a religious variant follows the
anthropology that Feuerbach called for in Essence of Christianity, which was the kind of
natural science Eliot wanted to advance.

This natural history of religious sentiment is animated by Eliot’s historicism, which
insists on the specificity of the historical context. The “religion” of the Dodsons and
Tullivers was a sort of syncretic amalgamation that was practical only until the

modernizing world began encroaching upon the British provinces.

83

If such were the views of life on which the Dodsons and Tullivers had been reared
in the praiseworthy past of Pitt and high prices, you will infer from what you
already know concerning the state of society in St Ogg’s that there had been no
highly modifying influence to act on them in their maturer life. It was still possible,
even in that later time of anti-Catholic preaching, for people to hold many pagan
ideas and believe themselves good church people notwithstanding. (ll/IF, 365)
In the absence of the “highly modifying influence” of modernity, whose notable sign in this
passage is the reference to the Corn Laws, which were an attempt to regulate the price of
corn for the benefit of provincial landed interests,“ the Dodson and Tulliver ancestors had
been under no pressure to change their semi-pagan version of Protestantism. But just
what the specific elements requiring modification were is not quite clearly articulated in
the novel. Perhaps this is an intended effect, so as to activate our sympathy and feel the
Tullivers’ bewilderment in their rapid demise, but this would undermine the natural
historian’s purpose of trying to understand and thoroughly describe organisms in their
environment. Recall Eliot’s organicism in the Riehl review:
The external conditions which society has inherited fiom the past are but the
manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human beings who compose it;
the internal conditions and the external are related to each other as the organism
and its medium, and development can take place only by the gradual
consentaneous development of both. (Essays, 28 7)
With this orgarricist orientation, one would expect Eliot to want to be specific in
describing how modernity was forcing a modification in religious feeling in the 18203. It
could be that in 1859, Eliot was herself unsure, and hence unable to depict, the nature of
the modifying influence.
Instead of precise definitions of the historical forces at work in the novel, we are
left only with the vague sense that whatever changes do come to St Ogg’s come up the

river. This is where the narrator imagined the approach of the sea-kings, the invasions of

Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, each of which had to undermine the existing social

84

order in some way as they settled in as the new rulers. The river also links St Oggs to the
new capital culture of international trade. The loss of the mill forces Tom to seek a new
line of work down by the wharfs, where his uncle Deane’s company engages a wider
world of modern commerce. These same wharfs house the fatal machinery that floated
away in the flood and killed Tom and Maggie. The river is thus more than a symbol for
change, it literally conveys the historical forces that disrupt life in St Ogg’s.

The conclusion of the novel seeks to appease our sorrow for Tom and Maggie by
contextualizing their fate in a wider natural-historical flow. Whether or not this is
satisfactory depends on the interests of the individual reader. But it is nevertheless the
perspective of the tidal-pool naturalist that Eliot concludes with, which provides a sense of
meaning to the srnall-scale tragedies we have just read.

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. The fifth autumn was rich in golden com-stacks, rising in

thick clusters among the distant hedgerows; the wharves and warehouses on the

Floss were busy again, with echoes of eager voices, with hopefirl lading and

unlading. (MF, 656)

So we are to understand that despite the loss of the Tulliver line (Tom and Maggie’s only
cousins were Dodsons), St Ogg’s will go on as before; its natural activity erasing all traces
of the flood in a mere five years. Ifthe narrator were to leave us with this, it would seem
as if time made all things the same, that history was nothing but a flat surface that
rhythrrrically refreshes itself in an endless cycle of repetition. But the narrator continues:

Nature repairs her ravages—but not all. The uptom trees are not rooted again—the

parted hills are left scarred: if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as

the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past

tending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair. (W,

656)

The naturalist-historian narrator owns the eyes that dwell on the past, and all of Eliot’s

85

fiction seeks to do the same. The point of writing a “history of unfashionable families” is
to keep a memory of the kinds of small-scale suffering and victimization that usually seems
to get washed away without a trace. The careful naturalist of people, however, has the
kind of perspective that will notice the scars on the hillside, and the marks of “past
rending.” With The Mill on the Floss, Eliot became that naturalist-historian, whose
historicism led her to see the period of her childhood as coinciding with seismic change—a
watershed, perhaps. In this novel, the last of Eliot’s objective natural-historian phase, the
sharp focus on how the Tullivers experienced the early moments of modernization left
vague the specifics of that change. When she returned to the provinces of her childhood
in Felix Holt, she was beginning to experiment with narrative voices other than the
objective naturalist, and a new penchant for research helped her develop a sharper vision
of some of the specific historical forces that railroaded the premodern, English

countryside.

Imagine a thirty-five-year-old Marian Evans walking along the craggy beach at
Ilfracombe on the Devonshire coast with Lewes in June of 1856. It is 17 June, to be
precise, and Marian is walking a little lighter today, despite being laden with glass jars and
other containers of various sizes for holding their quarry, because the Riehl article and
another review article for the Westminster Review have just been dispatched to London.
She is now “delightfirlly at liberty and determined to pay some attention to sea-weeds” in
abundant beauty at Ilfracombe. Imagine firrther that as they meander among the rocks in

search of sea anemones and barnacles, Marian and George find a passage-way to a littoral,

86

a tidal pool, which is usually pay-dirt for gathering seaweed.

Happy to get away fiom the rising tide on the windy beach, they follow the path to
the semi-protected pool. They begin combing the “miniature bay” for interesting species,
and as Marian struggles to learn the names of some of the varieties, she nearly treads on a
busy colony of ants. She pauses to watch in amazement at their single-mindedness as the
ants dart to-and-fro, working tirelessly on projects they no doubt believe to be of the
utmost significance to their underground galleries. Perhaps Marian begins to imagine
what sorts of trials and struggles face an individual family of these little ants. Just then,
the ever-rising tide reaches the entrance to the littoral and sends a high wave into the tidal
pool. Marian has time to anticipate the impending doom as the advancing wave make its
steady way toward the colony of unsuspecting ants who are carrying on as before. The
wave, now only a large ripple on the surface of the tidal pool, is nevertheless a deluge
from the perspective of an ant, and with a cold, indifferent splash, the colony is washed
away, its galleries flooded, its members drowned or hopelessly dispersed. How terrible,
how tragic this must seem, Marian imagines, to the surviving members of the colony who
have lost their world along with all of their relatives in the blink of an eye. Yet, how
insignificant to the life of the ecosystem formed by the tidal pool. Indeed, a tidal pool is
dependent on these occasional refreshments, and will go on much as before despite the
loss of one of its ant colonies. There will of course be more, for “nature repairs her

ravages—but not all?”7

87

Chapter 3. Analogy, Veracity, and Eliot’s Middle Novels

She is “drinking in” Florence, and as far as the old past life can be restored she
will, I am certain, restore it, if only fiom the wonderful intuition with which genius
throws itself into all forms of life. (G. H. Lewes to John Blackwood, 28 May 1861.
Letters, H1, 420)

Most Eliot scholars agree that Eliot’s fourth and fifth novels bear a new character
that indicates a modification on the techniques she employed in her early works. In terms
of historical representation, two important developments emerged in her method she
prepared and wrote Romola and Felix Holt: the Radical. From 1861, when she began her
research of Savonarolan Florence, to 1865, when she began Felix Holt, Eliot
demonstrated an intensified interest in and a determined use of source material to develop
accurate pictures of their respective historical periods. Due to the remoteness of its
setting, Romola challenged Eliot in ways that none of her other novels did. Her
commitment to realism—in terms of accuracy—became an obsession with veracity that led
to an almost Rankean orientation to documentation. Perhaps it was because of this
obsession that the question of the relationship between the imagination and the past

clarified. But despite the clarification, and the suggestion at the end of the novel there

could be a number of ways to tell the history of Savonarolan Florence, Romola maintains

88

the epistemological presumption of objectivity implied in a natural-historian/narrator. The
novel should therefore be viewed as a transitional piece in between Eliot’s second and
third phases of development (see Table 2). In Felix Holt Eliot returned to the more
comfortable period of her childhood, in which her own memories could facilitate the
accuracy and realism in representing the lives of ordinary people during the reform bill
debates of 1832. She did not merely rely on her memories, however, for the method of
researching late fifteenth-century Florence carried over, with many fewer pains, into
preparing Felix Holt.

The idea for Romola initially occurred to Lewes during a May 1860 visit to
Florence, where he proposed that Eliot write a novel depicting Girolamo Savonarola’s
meteoric rise to and fall from fame and power in the 14903 (Haight, 326). Later that
summer she told Blackwood that she was “rather fired with the idea,” but would hold off
until she completed her next “English novel,” which became Silas Marner (Letters, III,
339).1 In the spring of 1861, after Silas Marner was finished, Eliot and Lewes returned to
Florence, where they both took extensive research notes in the Magliabecchian Library
and at various sites intended to help Eliot develop an accurate picture of the city and its
inhabitants at the end of the fifteenth century. She augmented this research with standard
readings on medieval Europe: Gibbon, Hallam, Sismondi, and Michelet; not to mention
the primary sources: Petrarch, Boccaccio, Politian, Machiavelli, and Vasari. She read
biographies of Savonarola and two volumes of his sermons she found in a London
bookshop. She consulted maps of the city both in Florence and back home at the British
Museum. Because the novel’s main villain, Tito, is Greek, Eliot was compelled to

research medieval Greece too. Despite the efforts, Eliot was nagged by doubt and held off

89

the actual writing of Romola for months as she found new sources to mine. Six months
after their return from Florence, Lewes wrote to Blackwood, who was soon expected to
visit their London home:

Polly [Eliot’s nickname] is still deep in her researches. Your presence will

I hope act like a stimulus to her to make her begin. At present she remains

immovable in the conviction that she can ’t write the romance because she has not

knowledge enough. Now as a matter of fact I know that she has immensely more
knowledge of the particular period than any other writer who has touched; but her

distressing diflidence paralyses her. (Letters, HI, 473-73)

“Polly’s” growing expertise in the history of Savonarolan Florence seemed only to
enhance her sense that there was more left to discover.

Eliot’s commitment to veracity led to unexpected difficulties in the summer and fall
of 1861. Blackwood shared one example with his wife: “Her great dificulty seems to be
that she, as she describes it, bears her characters talking, and there is a weight upon her
mind as if Savonarola and fiiends ought to be speaking Italian instead of English” (Letters,
III, 427). Eliot combated this particular insurmountable obstacle to complete authenticity
by pouring through phrase books for Italian colloquialisms, which occur frequently in the
novel.2 She went so far as to check some of the phrases and other points of doubt with
Thomas Trollope, brother of the famous writer and a fellow-Italophile, who apparently
possessed some authority in Eliot’s mind. A recurring difficulty was that Eliot’s use of
fifteenth-century colloquialisms sounded odd to the modern Italian ear. Trollope
remarked on one of Eliot’s choices:

Boto for voto is a Florentinism which may be heard to the present day, though the

vast majority of strangers would never hear it, or understand it if the did. George

Eliot no doubt met with it in some of those old chroniclers who wrote exactly as

not only the lower orders, but the generality of their fellow citizens, were speaking

around them. And her use of it testifies to the minuteness of her care to reproduce
the form and pressure of the time of which she was writing.3

90

“U

35c

Eliot’s decision to place the title character in an historical family, the Bardi, caused her
more headaches as she strove for authenticity in describing this family’s popolani origins.
Trollope suggested that her source for this detail, Lastri’s L ’03servatore F iorentino,
might be interpreted difi’erently than she had done, but was nevertheless impressed with
the “great care she took to make her Italian novel historically accurate.”4

It may come as only a small surprise that Romola was a commercial
disappointment and, in the minds of some critics, a failure. Besides learning antiquated
Italian expressions, readers are obliged to notice the colors and fabrics of the characters’
clothing, the names of the streets they turn down, and piazzas they enter. Motivated
readers may also look up the references to the countless historical figures whose names
pepper the novel, or those that play small parts in the story, such as the political
commentaries ofi’ered by Machiavelli and Bernardo Rucellai, or the intuition of Piero di
Cosimo, whose intuition and painterly eye anticipate significant plot turns. Except for
experts in this period in Florentine history and ardent Eliot fans, perhaps, the seemingly
inessential details make Romola a labor to read. One anonymous reviewer said that
finding interest in “old political struggles,” was like “attempting to feast on the bread and
wine found in the ruins of Pompeii.”5 After the first chapters appeared in Cornhill in the
summer of 1862, Anthony Trollope, who would have heard of Eliot’s immense labors and
fastidiousness fiom his brother, wrote her a note of encouragement that carried a
significant warning: “Do not fire too much over the heads of your readers. You have to
write to tens of thousands, and not to a single thousands.”6 Trollope was not specific
about what he thought was outside the grasp of the “tens of thousands.” He may have

been thinking what other reviewers thought; that Eliot’s firller purposes—i.e., the

91

depiction of cultural and generational tensions between the humanist scholarship of Bardo
and Tito, and the fervent spirituality associated with Savonarola and Romola—were not
discemable in the first part of the novel. R H. Hutton urged readers of the serial
publication to reread the novel as a unified whole in order to appreciate the achievement,
though he knew that Romola “will never be George Eliot’s most popular book.”7 The
question remains whether Eliot could have represented the cultural struggle without
heaping so many of the peripheral details that only serve to indicate her faithfulness to her
sources, which very few could acknowledge with authority anyway. The answer is
“probably,” but not while her commitment to veracity had become obsessive.

Whereas Eliot’s initial turn to fiction represented an interest in historical study that
was clearly different from the Rankean methodology now ascendent in Britain, her
methodological shift with Romola has the appearance of a move toward the orientation to
documentation that would be canonized by the academy a decade later. In terms of
objectivity, this is a false impression. The experience of writing a novel with the help of
intense research and commitment to veracity only helped Eliot to clarify her conception of
the role of imagination and intuition in historical representation. On the day after she and
Lewes returned from their 1861 trip to Florence, Eliot made the following impression on
Blackwood:

I never heard anything so good as her distinction between what is called the real

and the imaginative. It amounted to this, That you could not have the former

without the latter and greater quality. Any real observation of life and character
must be limited, and the imagination must fill in and give life to the picture. ‘Silas

Marner’ sprang fi'om her childish recollection of a man with a stoop and expression

of face that led her to think that he was an alien fi'om his fellows. The dialect of

Lisbeth in ‘Adarn Bede’ arose from her occasionally hearing her father when with

his brothers revert to the dialect of his native district, Derbyshire. She could not

tell how the feeling and knowledge came to her, but when Lisbeth was speaking
she felt it was a real language which she heard. (Letters, III, 427)8

92

Afier a month of copious note-taking, which was about to be followed by the six-month
obsession with accuracy, Eliot still privileged the intuitive part of historical representation.
Using examples from his prized author’s earlier works to illustrate the point, Blackwood
seemed to understand Eliot’s view that imagination not only fills in the inescapable gaps in
the tangible evidence, it animates it, “give[s] life to the picture.” Imagination is thus
necessary for thinking about past. Eliot must have believed this when she first turned to
fiction, but her early works were not reliant on the kind of research she undertook for
Romola, and then again for Felix Holt. Blackwood’s account is the first clear (if
mediated) articulation of the relationship between the real and the imaginary that animated
Eliot’s mature fiction. Lewes similarly expressed the relationship in the passage quoted in
this chapter’s epigraph.

The depiction of the role of imagination in historical representation in the
Blackwood passage is remarkably like that of Edward Bulwer Lytton, whose historical
fiction Eliot had admired in her youth and whose novel Rienzi she “ran through” while
working on Romola.9 Witemeyer makes much of the connection between Lytton’s work
and Romola in particular, in a way that sheds some light on Eliot’s general theory of
historical fiction. Lytton, who sometimes prefaced his historical novels with explicit
theoretical discussions of the genre, argued that the psychological motives of the historical
figures he represented in his novels had to be provided by an imagination that was faithful
to whatever was known about the particular subject. ‘0 In the preface to The Last of the
Barons, Lytton insisted that “fiction is permitted that liberal use of Analogical Hypothesis
which is denied to history, and which, if sobered by research, and enlightened by

knowledge of mankind . . . tends to clear up much that were otherwise obscure, and to

93

solve the disputes and difficulties of contradictory evidence by the philosophy of the
human heart.”” Witemeyer is correct to point out the clear affinity with Eliot’s “Historic
Imagination” passage from the mid-18703, where she argued that the imagination needs to
supply the “deficiencies” in the “extant evidence . . . [with] careful analogical creation”
(Essays, 446). Lytton’s “analogical hypothesis” provided the otherwise unknown motives
behind the actions of historical figures, while Eliot’s “analogical creation” describes her
method for showing the complex network of causation hidden from a merely empirical
survey of extant evidence. Witemeyer argues that Lytton and Eliot shared the assumption
of “essential continuity” between their own and their contemporaries’ mental states and
those of people in any other time period. This continuity enables analogizing between
historical periods, and Eliot lays this out at the beginning of Romola.
The great river courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed;
and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts,
pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought
follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad
sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its
history—hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death. (R, 44)
Coming at the end of the novel’s first paragraph, this passage sounds almost defensive
about the remote setting and the huge leap backwards the reader and the narrator are
about to take, which the author has, with great trepidation and colossal effort, already
taken. For Eliot the past may be, like Italy itself, a foreign country. But there is, after all,
some hope of historical empathy, given the “sameness of the human lot.” Witemeyer
firrther suggests, but does not substantiate, that Eliot analogized Savonarola’s reform
movement with the Italian Risorgimento, which she followed fiom home and while

working on Romola in Florence, and that her interest in the “old reforming priest” had

something to do with the Reform Bill period in which she set her next two novels. These

94

loose associations with contemporary political developments are less than helpful in
discerning what Eliot meant by “analogical creation.”12

To describe what Eliot may have meant, it is usefirl to consider some available
usages of the word “analogy” in the nineteenth century. The OED has nine different but
related meanings, with contexts ranging from mathematics to linguistics. “Proportion,
agreement of ratios, likeness of relations, and similarity” are among its common
definitions. One interesting example, under the category of “Logic” is taken from J. S.
Mill: “The word Analogy as the name of a mode of reasoning is generally taken for some
kind of argument supposed to be of inductive nature but not amounting to complete
induction.” Here is a usage that corresponds with the “Historic Imagination” passage.13
Eliot devoted her ‘Veracious imagination” to the ‘yvorking out in detail of the various
steps by which a political or social change was reached, using all extant evidence and
supplying deficiencies by careful analogical creation.” Whereas the extant evidence
enables genuine induction, there are wide and plentiful gaps in what it can provide. This is
where “analogical creation” enters to make connections and suggest motives hidden fi'om
any faithful record of observations—to “fill in” as Blackwood put it—based on one’s
experience of connectedness and understanding of psychological dimensions of
personalities.

For Mill, analogy was a legitimate form of reasoning, even as an imperfect
substitute for induction. The passage quoted in the OED is extracted from Mill’s
discussion, “Of Analogy,” in his System of Logic, where he described the various strengths
and weaknesses of analogical reasoning. Settling for a broad definition of analogy,

whereby inferences are made about the possible characteristics of one thing based on the

95

known characteristics of another with which it shares other characteristics, Mill argued
that when properly used, analogical reasoning can be powerfirl.
Since the value of an analogical argument inferring one resemblance from other
resemblances without any antecedent evidence of a connection between them,
depends on the extent of ascertained resemblance, compared first with the amount
of ascertained difference, and next with the extent of the unexplored region of
unascertained properties; it follows that where the resemblance is very great, the
ascertained difference very small, and our knowledge of the subject-matter
tolerably extensive, the argument fi'om analogy may approach in strength very near
to a valid induction.“
Usefirl as it may be, according to Mill, analogical reasoning can only come close to “valid”
induction, which for him is the only “positive” or “scientific” form of truth." Though its
greatest usefirlness in scientific inquiry is apparent when it can form testable hypotheses,
analogy can also provide “probabilities” that are, if done carefirlly, the next-best thing to
provable assertions. I

Another example of “analogy” in the OED is more pejorative: “Analogy, however,
is not proof, but illustration.” This usage is provided by none other than William Stubbs,
an early British champion of objective, scientific history. The passage is extracted fiom
the close of the introduction to Stubb’s monumental Constitutional History of England,
and was meant in its original context to qualify a metaphor he used to describe the origins
of English constitutional history. “The German element is the paternal element in our
system, natural and political. Analogy, however, is not proof, but illustration: the chain of
proof is to be found in the progressive persistent development of English constitutional
history from the primeval polity of the common fatherland.”16 In this case, Stubbs’s
“paternal” metaphor analogizes family ancestry with historical development. But we are

to understand that this is merely an illustration. Stubbs provides his “chain of proof’ in

the chapters that follow by unpacking his wide reading in original sources, with ample

96

documentation. According to Heyck, Stubbs’s Constitutional History, which remained
standard reading on the subject well into the twentieth century, “taught [historians] that
history should be rooted in original sources, balanced and temperate in judgement, highly
detailed and analytical, and severe and austere in tone.”17

Stubbs’s lessons in severity and austerity of tone are perhaps what Eliot referred to
as “abstract treatment which belongs to grave history” in the “Historic Imagination”
passage. Stubbs’s measured use of analogy, and his general disdain for literary alfectation
in writing history,18 might lead to the kind of history that someone like Eliot would find
“grave.” If Eliot’s use of the word “analogy” is close to Mill’s and Stubbs’s, i.e., a mode
of reasoning one resorts to when induction is not possible, then her embrace of its
usefulness in thinking and writing about the past is an open rejection of the new, soon-to-
be-acadenric history. She came to View her fiction (analogical creations) as a deliberate
alternative to, or even an improvement on, the kind of inductive history that Stubbs
promoted in the 18503 and 18603, and that the new profession of history advanced in the
18703 and beyond. That Eliot began to attend to extant evidence in the early 18603
suggests that she was not opposed to inductive reasoning. Instead, she was opposed to an
epistemology that insists that induction is the only way to create useful knowledge.

As Eliot adopted historical research methods that the new scientific historians were
canonizing, Romola also shows an emerging ironic stance with respect to objectivity and
historical representation. This ironic stance is the primary characteristic of her mature
fiction and is only deeply embedded in Romola. In offering Romola as an alternative to
formal history, the novel implies that there are many potential ways to recount the past

and to derive meaning fi'om it. The narrative histories of the Florentine republic as

97

humanistic scholarship began to wane, at the time of Charles VIII’s Italian invasion and
Savonarola’s brief moment of power, which can be found in Sismondi, Hallam, Michelet,
Gibbon, etc., constituted a familiar kind of public history that any of Eliot’s readership
could look into themselves. But the inner lives of the principle characters in those familiar
stories, and the secondary and tertiary figures, whose courses were shaped by great events
but are not accounted for by the historians, had to be “filled in” by Eliot’s imagination.
Romola makes this point more obvious at the end of the novel. Having taken over the
leadership of Tito’s illegitimate family, she tells young Lillo that the glory and happiness
he seeks in wanting to become a “great man” will not come in the way he expects.
Romola draws from three personal experiences, which for reader are the historical
narratives of Bardo, Tito, and Savonarola, in order to teach Lillo what does not yet see.
The stories of her own father, ‘yvho chose poverty and obscurity rather than falsehood”;
Tito, who “cared for nothing so much as his own safety,” and thus never made the world a
better place; and Savonarola, whose “greatness which belongs to a life spent in struggling
against powerfirl wrong” could not prevent his own horrible end (R, 674-75), are
instructive in the hands of Romola. They are instructive in ways that Sismondi, for
example, could not be in describing the power struggles in Florence after the 1594
expulsion of the Medicis. ‘9 In this way the novel shows both the political history and its
usually unknown counterpoint. The novel thus represents Eliot’s budding critic of
historiography in the nineteenth century, and perhaps only a faint suggestion of her later

irony.

98

In her fifth novel, Eliot returned to the much more comfortable setting of her
childhood. Whereas The Mill on the Floss addressed provincial experiences of
monolithic, emergent modernity in provincial England circa 1830, Felix Holt, the Radical
treats a more specific dimension of this period of critical transition. Felix Holt is Eliot’s
only novel explicitly about politics and political transformation: it is both an historical
novel about politics and a politically-edged novel about historical transformation. When
she began writing her new novel in March 1865, she also began a flesh round of research
that included Mill’s Political Economy, F awcett’s Economic Position of the British
Labourer, and The Times and the Annual Register for 1832-33.

Eliot’s treatment of the political tumult of 1832 is dominated by her romantic-
historicist outlook. This version of historicism stressed the developmentality of societies
and was opposed to revolution. Eliot’s opposition to radical reform, first articulated in the
Riehl review (see previous chapter), derived fi'om an organic view of individuals in their
environment, and a concomitant view that societies and individuals evolve together
(“concentaneously”) and gradually. In Graver’s view, Eliot’s opposition to the second
Reform Bill derived fi'om a sensitivity to the loss of community when a new, heightened
sense of selfish class-interest began to dominate political culture in the nineteenth century.
Felix Holt reflects this opposition more directly than any other of her novels. As such, it
represents an historicist’s project to illuminate a moment in the early stages, around 183 2,
of a political development that was in firll flower when she wrote it in the mid 18603, on
the eve of the second Reform Bill.

The novel’s “argument” is formed by two complementary threads concerning

historical change, one private and the other social. The first is the sense of the organic,

99

personal connection with the past, brought out through the question of Esther Lyon’s
inheritance of the Transome estates, and in the troubled relationship between Mrs.
Transome and her son Harold. The other main thread has to do with the meaning of
political change associated with the first Reform Bill of 1832. This thread is developed
through the dialogue concerning the vote, the riot, and through the character of Felix
Holt, the so-called “radical,” in his critique of the general direction of political reform that
arises in a context of class interest and antagonism. These two threads together form an
argument against political revolution, a position based in Eliot’s gradualist view of history
and change in human society and the organic interdependence among the classes.20

The specific historical problem of Felix Holt is this: How did the expanded
franchise, under the Reform Bill of 1832, affect people in provincial England? The answer
to that question is constituted by the action of the novel. The Reform Bill is the central
contingent event that shapes every major turn in the plot. The novel’s conclusion seems
to be that the expanded fi'anchise in 1832 ignited civil unrest that nearly turned into a
catastrophe, and that this was not the best way to achieve social justice and human
progress. Instead, what was needed in 1832, and presumably still in the mid 18603, was
the kind of reform that the title character is devoted to: the education of the poor and
working classes. The novel suggests that without education, the new electorate will vote
merely on their selfish, private interests rather than with the good of the whole of British
society in mind. Education was for Eliot, as it was for J. S. Mill, the more immediate
need.

Underlying her own version of liberalism, which feared revolution in Britain and

opposed expanding the franchise to the uneducated, was Eliot’s gradualist perspective on

100

 

historical change, that was consistent with Young Hegelian ideas on the historical process.
As she worked on Felix Holt, Eliot manifested an understanding that societies evolve
organically through time, and each new social form has to grow out of and supersede its
predecessor, while trying to maintain what was good and abandoning what was harmful or
unjust. According to Graver, Eliot’s entire corpus stresses the danger of losing the
community-oriented, preindustrial kinds of relationships in the wake of the industrial
revolution; that Eliot sought to revitalize Gemeinschaft sensibilities in a Gesellschaft
world.21 Eliot was not interested in turning back the clock to reinstall already superseded,
preindustrial forms of social relations. Rather, she wanted to maintain feelings of
community she associated with the period of her youth in the 18203, but in the new
industrial society of the nrid-Victorian period.

Eliot used Felix Holt as an historicist’s tool to teach an audience, engaged in
1865-66 in a new reform bill debate of its own, about the near catastrophe at the time of
the first Reform Bill. Using a recalled (and researched) experience from her youth, when
she witnessed the 1832 election-day riot in the town of Nuneaton, Eliot pointed to a
narrowly escaped revolution in England when the nation’s political power seemed up for
grabs. Like Treby Magna, the fictitious town in Felix Holt, Nuneaton was a new polling
site under the reforrrred-borough system inaugurated by the 1832 Reform Act. While Eliot
might have simply recreated her experience of that riot from memory, she instead
“researched” it by spending a great deal of time in 1865 in the National Library, reading
through the Times from 1832 and 1833.

In terms of representing the Reform Bill period, two primary and paradoxically

related qualities distinguish Felix Holt from The Mill on the Floss. The first is Eliot’s

lOl

developing sense of veracity—that there was some objective truth about the dangerous
moments surrounding the election under the new, expanded franchise in 183 2, which
inclined her to use actual accounts of the election-day riots to inform her portrayal of the
riot in the novel. This quality can be seen as a new extension of the natural-history
approach of her early fiction. The second quality has to do with explicit questioning of
whether a single objective account of an historical event can be produced. As the trial
scene shows, a number of different versions of the riot can be made compelling with

anything but blind logic to arbitrate among them.

The lineage and inheritance of Esther Lyon is a synecdoche—the part that signifies
the whole—of the novel’s historical “problem,” which concerns the nation’s organic
connection to its past. Esther’s decision not to take over the Transome Estate is based on
her perception that the manor house, and by implication, the manorial system, is an
antiquated form. It is also based on her perception that to accept the inheritance would
amount, ironically, to an abandonment of her own past. Her turn away from the
inheritance is coupled with her turn toward Felix Holt, and the forward-looking nature of
his vision and work to educate the working class. The novel depicts her growing
understanding—her expanding consciousness—of herself vis-a-vis her own past, which
helps her to overcome the prejudice against her adoptive father’s pious and meager life. It
is this expansion of consciousness that enables the forward-looking choice she makes at
the end of the novel.

Initially Esther is discontented with her humble circumstances, believing that she is

102

 

somehow entitled to something more “noble” (FH, 159). Still ignorant of her parentage,
Esther loves and respects Reverend Lyon as her father. But his lifestyle had “selected
everything that was least interesting and romantic in life and history,” and is somehow
unworthy of her. Esther’s mother, she imagines, would have been someone more like her,
and “she wished she could have remembered that mother more thoroughly” (FH, 161). If
she had this memory of a mother more like herself, then her own feelings of incongruity
with Reverend Lyon could be explained. The absent mother represents Esther’s past that
she longs to know, but which is for the moment veiled from her consciousness. The
discontent arises because, the reader is led to understand, a stable sense of self is
dependent on a historical self-consciousness.

Esther’s gradual awakening from ignorance, which follows an Hegelian pattern of
advancing consciousness, coincides first with her acquaintance and courtship with Felix.
Their relationship begins with her uncomfortable self-reevaluation, because Felix harshly
criticizes Esther for her attitude towards her father. “You must know that your father’s
principles are greater and worthier than what guides your life. You have no reason but
idle fancy and selfish inclination for shirking his teaching and giving your soul up to trifles”
(FH, 210). While outwardly outraged, Esther was “seriously shaken in her self-
contentment,” and felt that she would now be “haunted by self-criticisnr,” and “dogged by
inward questions.” She was “stung . . . into a new consciousness concerning her father”
(FH, 214). Esther’s progress toward a higher consciousness of selfin the world begins in
the Hegelian manner of self-critique. According to Hegel’s Phenomenolog of Spirit,
individual self-consciousness emerges only in the presence of an other with competing

claims. The former selfish consciousness, in which one believes her own perspective to be

103

the only perspective, gives way under self-doubt and a re-estirnation of the situation when
a new view presents itself.22 In the novel, Felix’s is the new perspective that challenges
Esther’s. Whereas she had assumed Lyon’s inferiority, because she saw him as unrefined
and devoted to irrelevant pursuits, Felix awakens her from that view by demonstrating its
superficiality and suggesting that the things she held to be important were but trifles.

Reverend Lyon’s disclosure to Esther of her origins and relationship to the
Transome family is the culmination of a slow unraveling of the complicated inheritance
and a major step in her maturation as a “sympathetic” person. Here, historical awareness
is associated with moral grounding. Since the berating she took from Felix, Esther had
been growing more tender with Reverend Lyon. “And in the act of unfolding to her that
he was not her real father . . . the odd, wayworrr, unworldly man became the object of a
new sympathy in which Esther felt herself exalted” (FH, 354). While Reverend Lyon had
expected that the truth about her past would alienate Esther from him, it had the opposite
effect of increasing her love for the man who raised and loved her as his own. Her
growing respect for Lyon takes the form of appreciating his willingness to live meagerly,
like a ‘Xvorking man,” because he had lived by some “great and strong feeling.” Eliot’s
sympathetic treatment of devout members of the clergy goes back to her first forays into
historical fiction. Most recent to the publication of Felix Holt was the character of
Savonarola in Romola, whose fervency Eliot admired, but whose egotism brings about his
downfall in the novel. Esther now sees that there is something special in the way that
Lyon’s life is guided by a spiritual passion.

Esther’s admiration, however, does not go so far as to lead her to adopt his

Christian worldview, and this qualification allows Eliot to make another historical

104

observation. There is an historical transformation at work that cleaves Esther’s generation
from Lyon’s, and it parallels Eliot’s own early development away fi'om her father. When
Eliot broke fi'om the church in 1841, after her exposure to “higher criticism” in the
Coventry circle, she nearly permanently estranged herself from her father. Compelled by
her love for him, however, she eventually ended her “Holy War” and returned to her
father, attended church with him, and cared for him in his old age (see chapter 1). The
parallel between Eliot and Esther does not concern open revolt, and is limited to the
difl‘ering worldviews. Mr. Lyon attributed his way to “supreme devotedness to the Divine
Will.” However, for Esther these ‘Vvords did not fit on to the impressions wrought in her
by what he had told her” (FH, 356). Like Eliot’s, Esther’s mind is one that will be mature
through the mid-nineteenth century, and will potentially be shaped by higher criticism and
the religion of humanity. In setting the expansion of consciousness at this particular
historical moment, Eliot puts a non-theistic spin on Esther’s development and makes an
historiographical point by associating the new “feeling” with Esther’s generation. The
new, critical understanding was available to those born in the first two decades of the
nineteenth century, and is an adaptation of, and development fi'om, the pious kind of
devotedness of Mr. Lyon’s generation, born before the French Revolution.

Esther encounters the need for historical continuity in the context of her
relationship with Reverend Lyon. Whereas inheriting Transome Court would fulfill her
childhood day-dreams, and satisfy the inklings she had that she properly belonged to a life
of wealth and ease, the thought of removing Lyon from his small house next to the chapel
he administered to the manor house she would occupy was, for Esther, out of the

question. It would mean “forsaking his vocation, and vulgarly accepting an existence

105

unsuited” to a man who had the “grandeur of his past sorrow and his long struggling
labours.” Esther now recognizes the “incongruity of that past which had created the
sanctities and affections of her life with that future which was coming to her.” Lyon’s
sacrifices had made it possible for Esther to feel afi’ection and love. To divorce him fi'om
the life that she was just beginning to feel in harmony with, to appreciate as her past,
would be a “mockery.” (FH, 476)

Esther’s problem is suggestive of the larger concern that with revolution, a nation
disconnects itself from its past. It is in this sense that Esther is a synecdoche for
humanity’s emerging historical consciousness through the self-critical study of religious
and political beliefs during the reform period. Shuttleworth, for example, sees the novel as
making explicit a set of conservative implications of organicism; that industrial progress
and democratic reforms alienate British society from a communal heritage of the rural
village.” This perspective is echoed by Graver who views Eliot’s work as an effort to
recall Gemeinschaft sensibilities before rebellion and revolution sweep away all memory of
it.24 While Shuttleworth considers Eliot’s organicism as “conservative,” it is so only in
the sense that Eliot thought a hasty reconstruction of the British polity could be
dangerous. She was not a conservative in the sense of wanting simply to return to a
golden past.

Eliot advanced her idea of “concentaneous development” and organic change, as
opposed to political revolution, through Esther’s relationship with Mrs. Transome and
Harold. Through her introduction to the Trarrsomes, Esther becomes aware of a negative
example of the privileged life she had longed for. When Harold Transome learns of

Esther’s legal right to the estate he had returned from Greece to manage, he invites her to

106

stay at Transome Court under the pretense of her becoming acquainted with the place.
Harold’s plan was to woo her into marriage so as to avoid losing the estate. Esther
encounters surprises at Transome Court that her youthfirl daydreams of wealth and leisure
did not anticipate. One was Harold’s half-wit father, Mr. Transome: “To Esther the sight
of this feeble-minded, timid, paralytic man, who had long abdicated all mastery over the
things that were his, was something piteous” (FH, 493). This description would seem to
apply to the diminishing control of the aristocracy in general over British society, an
historical movement for which the Reform Bill of 1832 can be considered the
centerpiece.24 It is the character of Mrs. Transome, however, that makes the major
negative example of aristocratic life. She was
in bloom before this century began . . . [and] in the long painful years since then,
what she had once regarded as her knowledge and accomplishments had become
as valueless as old-fashioned stucco ornaments, of which the substance was never
worth anything, while the form is no longer to the taste of any living mortal. (FH,
106)
As with the image of Mr. Transome, Mrs. Transome seems to symbolize the lost vitality of
a bygone age whose forms are no longer fashionable. Having a life fill] of disappointment,
especially recently with the reappearance of Harold, who was not the kind of man she
hoped he would be, Mrs. Transome had a rather “gloomy” view of things. The ways in
which she tried to understand her life did not mesh with the world of the nineteenth
century. When Harold told Esther that he hoped to make Mrs. Transome’s last years as
pleasant as possible, it became clear to Esther “what it would be to abandon her own past,
and what she would enter into in exchange for it; what it would be to disturb a long

possession, and how difficult it was to fix a point at which the disturbance might begin, so

as to be contemplated without pain” (FH, 496). The prospective transfer of the estate to

107

Esther is a “disturbance” that she is disinclined to initiate, and her choice to marry Felix

instead of Harold further grounds her commitment to the organic, historical vision.

The Esther story, especially her rejection of the inheritance works as a parallel to
Eliot’s political message about reform and revolution. Eliot’s political stance, and its
context within the mid-18603 debate on the second Reform Bill, was explicitly articulated
in a curious resurrection of the character of Felix a year after the novel was published.
Blackwood, in October 1867, attended a Benjamin Disraeli speech in Edinburgh that
defended the second Reform Bill, which was going to extended the fi’anchise beyond the
1832 Reform Bill.” Blackwood believed that the readers of his publications would like to
know what Felix Holt, who represents the working class of 1832 in the novel, had to say
about parliamentary reform in 1867 . Lewes, ever-protective of Eliot’s literary talents and
efforts, had recommended against the idea. But Blackwood persisted: “I am excessively
anxious that you should do an Address to the Working Men as I am thoroughly convinced
that no one could do it so well. When the new Reform Bill comes into operation the
working man will be on trial and if he misconducts himself it will go hard with the
country” (Letters, IV, 398). Blackwood could not have taken a more persuasive line of
entreaty. “Misconduct,” in the form of a rebellious working-class mob, on the occasion of
the first Reform Bill, was the primary evil in Felix Holt. Eliot complied, and the “Address
to the Working Men, by Felix Holt” was published in the January 1868 issue of
Blackwood ’s Magazine.

The “Address” concerns the expanded fi'anchise of the second Reform Bill, and its

108

rhetoric indicates a fear of class-based antagonism and civil unrest. Felix cautions the
working classes to use restraint in exercising their new power of the ballot and to be wary
of those who claim to have the workers’ interest in mind.

After the Reform Bill of 1832 I was in an election riot, which showed me clearly,

on a small scale, what public disorder must always be; and I have never forgotten

that the riot was brought about chiefly by the agency of dishonest men who
professed to be on the people’s side. . . . Let us, I say, show that our spirits are too
strong to be driven mad, but can keep that sober determination which alone gives
mastery over the adaptation of means. And a first guarantee of this sanity will be
to act as if we understood that the fundamental duty of a government is to

preserve order, to enforce obedience of the laws. It has been held hitherto that a

man can be depended on as a guardian of order only when he has much money and

comfort to lose. But a better state of things would be, that men who had little
money and not much comfort should still be guardians of order, because they had
sense to see that disorder would do no good, and had a heart of justice, pity, and
fortitude, to keep them from making more misery only because they felt some

misery themselves. (Quoted in appendix to FH, 618)

Felix recalls the dangers of the mad mob fiom the memorable scene in the novel to insist
that class warfare is not in the interest of the workers, and that everyone has a stake in the
maintenance of order. The main fear is that more rioting, like that of the 1832 elections,
would break out when the new electors, untrained in the political process, will be swayed
by those who “professed to be on the people’s side.”

The “Address” manifests the influence of Eliot’s gradualist historical consciousness
as it shaped her political perspective. In her mind, sudden, convulsive change had too
much potential for catastrophe. The problem with revolution was that it wiped away
social and intellectual forms that were of some use before anything had been brought in to
replace them. “Just as in . . . the irrigation of a country, which must absolutely have its
water distributed or it will bear no crop; there are the old channels, the old banks, and the
old pumps, which must be used as they are until new and better have been prepared, or the

structure of the old has been gradually alter ” (my italics, “Address,” appendix to FH,

109

616). By the mid 18603, Eliot had become a sort of“ adualist” in her thinking about
historical change. “Gradualisrn,” the geological theory associated in the mid nineteenth
century with Charles Lyell, had come to be accepted over its older rival, “catastrophism.”
In the gradualist view, geological change occurred slowly, over many thousands or
millions of years. The other assumed the Earth’s geology was formed at a specific,
catastrophic moments. Eliot was not a participant in that debate, but her historical
sensibilities and fear of catastrophe—the wiping away of “old channels, banks and pumps”
without a ready system to replace them—parallel the gradualist framework for change.26
Eliot’s gradualism is consistent with the ideas of “consentaneous development” she
discussed in the Riehl review (see previous chapter), which also resonated with the Young
Hegelian view of historial change.

Felix manifests Eliot’s understanding of consentaneous development in his
discussion of class. Class is the specific form of social order in the “Address,” which
instructs people as to their duties, and therefore, it is a system which should not be turned
on its head. The sudden removal of class distinction would produce a kind of disjunction
that leaves people without a moral compass and only their own selfish interests to judge
by.

Now changes can only be good . . . in proportion as they put knowledge in the

place of ignorance, and fellow-feeling in the place of selfishness. In the course of

that substitution class distinctions must inevitably change their character; and
represent the varying Duties of men, not their varying Interests. But this end will

not come by impatience. (Appendix to FH, 617)

In this passage and throughout the “Address,” duty and interest form the basic tension that

dictates whether one will either contribute to the community, or live for himself and his

own selfish interests, which destroys communities. Individualistic self-interest is what

110

inhibits the sense of organic belonging, of community-feeling, in all of Eliot’s novels.
Each novel features characters who live for personal gain and individualistic satisfaction or
are in the process of developing into a person who acts selflessly and for the benefit of the
people around them.” When Felix refers to “Duties” in the “Address” he is employing the
organic model of social order that is based in class division. The problem with
“impatience,” which means radical reform in this context, is that radical change without
the necessary moral education would undermine the basis for individuals’ sense of duty.
Eliot feared that eradicating the traditional system of class-based duties, already strained
by industrialization, would produce a non-system based simply and disastrously on
individual interest.

While Haight expresses surprise at the contrast between Eliot’s earlier enthusiasm
for the 1848 revolution in France and her thinking about political reform in the mid-18603
in Britain, there is a significant continuity that underlies the apparent difference.” In the
March 1848 letter to John Sibree Jr., Eliot praised “the mind” of French people, which
was “highly electrified—they are full of ideas on social subject—they really desire social
reform.” She wished she could have witnessed “such a scene as that of the men of the
barricade bowing to the image of Christ ‘who first taught fraternity to men.”’ However,
she told Sibree she thought British society was not fertile ground for a conscientious
revolutionary movement. “Here there is so much larger a proportion of selfish radicalism
and unsatisfied, brute sensuality (in agricultural and mining districts especially) than of
perception or desire of justice, that a revolutionary movement would be simply
destructive—not constructive.” (Letters, 1, 253-54) For Eliot, individualistic desire, on the

part of the English working men, makes a progressive, class-based movement in England

111

 

unlikely, or just dangerous. This is the same mind as that behind the character of Felix
Holt almost twenty years later; keenly sensitive to social injustice, but equally sensitive to
rampant individualism and the potential for mere destruction of social order and the forms
that tend to preserve it.

Eliot’s developmentalist historicism animated her greatest fear that rebellion and
revolution could cause the destruction of historical continuity—the organic connection to
the past. In terms of specific dimensions of cultural heritage, the “Address” prizes the
intellectual historical elements of the “common estate of society” over the physical
manifestations that we associate with bourgeois domination, like “buildings, machinery,
produce, shipping, and so on. . . .” The greater 1033, argues Felix, would be of “that
treasure of lmowledge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, feeling, and manners, great
memories and the interpretation of great records, which is carried on from the minds of
one generation to the minds of another” (Appendix to FH, 621). The “great memories
and interpretation of great records,” are the stufl‘ of historical consciousness. Their
generational conveyance exemplifies the organic conception of historical continuity
applied to historical consciousness in particular. Felix refers to the “treasure of
knowledge” as an “inheritance,” to which the working class is entitled but has been
denied access. Thus, ignorance is the main problem with the working class, not pauperism
or the vote. His argument, and Eliot’s too, is that revolution can only damage or destroy
that “treasure,” but education can bring about a solution to the lacking access.

Consistent with his “Address,” Felix’s “radicalism” in the novel is antidemocratic
and opposes mere erasure of class lines. He represents a kind of “radical” who is sharply

contrasted with the character Harold Transome, who seeks a parliamentary seat as a

112

 

 

member of the Radical Party. As a member of the working class, Felix is keenly aware of
injustice and exploitative relations associated with both the traditional social stratification,
as well as new kinds of relationships emerging along with British industrialization. His
self-righteousness stems from a peculiar consciousness that led him, prior to the action in
the novel, to reject a career in the medical profession, for which his father had arranged an
apprenticeship. Instead, Felix found a nobler occupation in working as an artisan watch-
maker and repairer. But it is from his position within the working class that his opposition
to the expanded franchise has more force.

The political dimension in the novel is developed through a view of Felix among
the laborers and the newly enfianchised in a setting like the kind that Eliot had told Sibree
had a concentration of “radical individualism” and “brute sensuality.” The novel seems to
suggest that the potential for volatility is due to quickening industrial transformations.
Sproxton, a village near Treby Magna, is undergoing industrial transformation in
conjunction with the discovery of rich coal mines there. A major canal for transporting
the coal is under construction, and the increased activity has created a small working class
population of colliers, stone-cutters, and navvies, who meet of a Sunday for drink, either
at the Blue Cow, or at William Chubb’s establishment, the Sugar Loaf.

Eliot’s view that rampant individualism tended to dominate the British working
class is manifested in the scene with Felix and the Sproxton workers. F elix’s efforts to
bring a bit of literacy to poor laborers in Sproxton requires that he recruit these people at
their drinking establishments, and convince them to bring their families to his weekly
meetings. On one such recruiting trip to the Sugar Loaf, Felix encounters the shady Mr.

Johnson, who works for the Radical candidate, Transome. Johnson’s aim is to garner

113

support for Transome from these laborers so that they might be enlisted to make noise and
cause some tumult at both the next hustings, and at the election. “That’s the way a man
who has no vote can yet serve himself and his country: he can lift up his hand and shout
‘Transome for ever’—‘hurray for Transome’” (FH, 229). Johnson’s strategy, in addition
to treating these workers to more pots of ale, is to play into their selfish desires by offering
the vague promise that a Radical representing Sproxton will ensure that these chaps never
drink bad ale or whisky again. “Bad liquor will be swept away with other bad articles.”
The owner of The Sugar Loaf, Chubb, has similarly indicated, now that he is eligible to
vote as a £40 freeholder,29 that it will be for purely individualistic considerations that he
will decide how to cast his vote. In Chubb’s mind, “[t]he coming election [is] a great
opportunity for applying his political ‘idee,’ which was, that society existed for the sake of
the individual, and that the name of that individual was Chubb” (FH, 217). The general
temper at The Sugar Loaf, with respect to the reformed election, is shaped by concerns for
individual returns and self-advancement.

Eliot animated the subtleties of the political historical transformation of the Reform
Bill period in her depiction of Harold Transome’s motivations, and his choice to run as a
Radical. From the perspective of his own class and the Tory press, Transome’s political
beliefs are described “in opposition to all the traditions of his family,” and his example
constitutes a “defection in the inheritor of a family name which in times past had been
associated with attachment to right principle.” The liberal newspaper, on the other hand,
viewed his “defection” as a “decisive guarantee of intellectual pre-errrinence, united with a
generous sensibility to the claims of man as man, which had burst asunder . . . the

cramping out-wom shell of hereditary bias and class interest” (FH, 195). But the narrator

114

dismisses these widely contextualized interpretations in favor of a psychological one. As
the second son, young Harold was forced to make his own fortune in the world and “turn
his back” on his family’s estate. Like many second sons of the elite and middle classes,
Harold made his fortune through the enormous British imperial influence, by running a
successfirl plantation in Greece. And the experience shaped his “innovating and moderate”
personality. “The years had nourished an inclination to as much opposition as would
enable him to assert his own independence and power . . . he was addicted at once to
rebellion and to conformity” (FH, 197). In his return to England, after his brother’s death,
Transome was guided not by a keen sense of injustice and exploitation of the poor, but by
a more vague sense of pride in his own individual ruggedness, which ran counter to
ancestral pride. In a way, the narrator is more in line with the Tory press, but with a
deeper understanding for how individual contexts and small contingencies are at work in
potentially major movements and historical moments.

Eliot portrayed Felix articulating his peculiar version of “radicalism” in an
encounter on nomination day. The nearby town of Duffield is the location of the
nominations, on December 15, for the election in North Loamshire. This is where
Johnson’s work at The Sugar Loaf was to have its payoff. He is proud of his own
cleverness at having purchased the enthusiasm of the colliers to “demonstrate” for
Transome, despite the fact that the owner of the mines in which they work, Mr. Garstin, is
running for the Whig nomination. And this they accomplished through “the bustling and
the pelting, the roaring and the hissing, the hard hits with small missiles, and the soft hits
with small jokes” (FH, 392). This kind of scene is repeated inMiddlemarch with a bit

more detail, indicating perhaps that Eliot found some dramatic cache in presenting this

115

kind of public event. It also is evidence that Eliot’s study of the reformed elections left
her unconvinced of the efiicacy of the expanded fi'anchise. Felix’s disgust with the
nonsense, and especially with Johnson, the man responsible for the mood and inebriation
of the colliers on nomination, day stems fiom his sense of honesty. “It was a little too
exasperating to look at this pink-faced rotund specimen of prosperity, to witness the
power for evil that lay in his vulgar cant, backed by another man’s money, and to know
that such stupid iniquity flourished the flags of Reform, and Liberalism, and justice to the
needy” (FH, 393) Though Johnson’s work is designed to help Transome, the Radical
candidate who suppossedly represents the poor, leading the poor through chicanery is a
clear sign to Felix that no one has their welfare in mind.
The novel’s political argument is most explicit in the nomination-day chapter.
Felix’s “radical” vision is clarified by the contrast with the unnamed speaker, who is
speaking with a more conventionally radical vision of Reform on behalf of the workers.
But I say, the Reform Bill is a trick - it’s nothing but swearing-in special constables
to keep the aristocrats safe in their monopoly; it’s bribing some of the people with
votes to make them hold their tongues about giving votes to the rest. I say, if a
man doesn’t beg or steal, but works for his bread, the poorer and the more
miserable he is, the more he’d need have a vote to send an inspector to
parliament—else the man who is worst off is likely to be forgotten; and I say, he’s
the man who ought to be first remembered. . . . I say, if we working men are ever
to get a man’s share, we must have universal suffrage, and annual parliaments, and
the vote by ballot, and electoral districts. (FH, 396-97)
The speaker articulates a skeptical view of the Reform Bill: one that sees it as simply
ofl‘ering a wider sanction—an expanded legitirnation through the extended fi’anchise—for
the status quo. His solution is universal suffi’age so that the property-less have a chance to

look out for themselves, rather than to rely on the wealthy and middle classes, in their

supposed benevolence, to look out for them. The speaker is actually voicing Chartist

116

by... _..._

principles which can be found in the “People’s Charter” of the Working Men’s
Association. Though a bit anachronistic, since the Chartists first meeting was in 1836 and
the “People’s Charter” was not written until 1838,30 this speaker represents Chartist
sentiment and its radical line of demands, which serves as a foil for Felix Holt’s
extemporaneous response."

F elix’s rejoinder to the unnamed speaker is the central moral and political
statement upon which the apparently conservative position of the novel rests. The vote,
according to this oration, is not going to be the source of power for working men to
improve themselves and the country. It will only increase their power to do “mischief,”
which is the precise representation later given to the riot, because Felix believes that the
majority will vote with their appetites rather than with a sense of what will do the most
good for everyone. But the main thrust of his speech has less to do with articulating an
alternative vision than decrying the shortsightedness of the notion that voter-eligibility
equals power.

The way to get rid of folly is to get rid of vain expectations, and of thoughts that

don’t agree with the nature of things. The men who have had true thoughts about

water, and what it will do when it is turned into steam and under all sorts of
circumstances, have made themselves a great power in the world: they are turning
the wheels of engines that will help to change most things. But no engines would
have done, if there had been false notions about the way water would act. Now,
all the schemes about voting, and districts, and annual parliaments, and the rest,
are engines, and the water or steam—the force that is to work them—must come out

of human nature—out of men’s passions, feelings, desires. (FH, 400)

Felix’s impassioned plea mobilizes a physical science analogy with industrial connotations.
According to Felix, acquiring “true thoughts” about national politics is like learning how

steam works. The application of principles from the physical sciences to the

understanding of social problems is a page out of the Positivist’s book, and was the

117

ambition of most of the social theorists in the early- to mid-Victorian period.32 Comte also
believed that passions, feelings, and desires constituted the impetus behind all scientific
knowledge. But how to acquire these true thoughts?

Besides recommending temperance in the election process, F elix’s main
prescription for the working classes is education, and as such, embodies Mill’s sense for
progress. Felix claims, in the “Address to the Working Men” that one of the oldest
problems facing any polity is how to regulate life according to the “truest principles
mankind is in possession of,” and that “[t]he solution comes slowly, because men
collectively can only be made to embrace principles, and to act on them, by the slow
stupendous teaching of the world’s events.” (Appendix to FH, 625) The simple idea here
is that those who will be making choices about how to govern ought to know something
about how the world works. Mill held the same perspective, for like Eliot, he witnessed
two major expansions of the franchise to people he believed were not ready for it. One
month after she began writing Felix Holt, Eliot recorded in her diary that she was reading
“again” Mill’s Principles of Political Economy,33 where she would have encountered his
argument that the firture of the laborers was grounded in their independence from their
employers, and that this future would be enabled by their education. “Of the working
men, at least in the more advanced countries of Europe . . . the patriarchal or paternal
system of government is one to which they will not again be subject. That question was
decided, when they were taught to read, and allowed access to newspapers and political
tracts.”34 Like Eliot, Mill looked to the continent for examples of working-class
movement and action. And in 1868, according to Felix, the working class will have to

learn the “nature of things” in order to guard against mischief and those who profit by it in

118

subsequent elections, as had happened in 1832.

In the novel, the election-day riot chapter presents the most vivid description of
Eliot’s worst fears about expanded franchise and political revolt. The epigraph for the
chapter, Shakespeare’s “Mischief, thou art afoot,” recalls Felix’s warning that expanding
the vote to those without developed political consciousness would lead to mischief.
Initially, the agitated crowd in Treby Magna, partially the product of Johnson’s work,
lacked any “mischievous design,” except the thorough hassling of voters who came to
support either the Whig candidate, Garstin, or the Tory candidate, Debarry. As such, its
presence was enough to have forced the adjournment of the polling. The crowd, however,
then began to look more like a riotous mob as it failed to disperse after a constable read
the Riot Act. Another constable’s official standard appeared to “move about fitfully,
showing as little sign of a guiding hand as the summit of a buoy on the waves.”
Elsewhere, “The movement [of the crowd] was that of a flood hemmed in; it carried
nobody away. Whether the crowd would obey the order to disperse themselves within an
hour, was a doubt that approached nearer and nearer to a negative certainty” (FH, 422).35
The narrator’s employment of water metaphors puts an ironic spin on Felix’s earlier
statement about knowing how water behaves under certain conditions. Unlike controlling
the conversion of water into steam and steam into power, the unreasonable crowd is not
given to an observer’s comprehension or a leader’s control. As windows start getting
smashed, and property fiom the town shops gets redistributed, Felix jumps into the throng
with the hope of steering the crowd away from more serious damage to property or harm
to helpless individuals. In choosing this path of trying to lead the mob, Felix had all

appearances of an accomplice, even an instigator of the riot. The unfortunate accident in

119

which Felix deals Tucker a fatal blow while trying to protect Spratt suggests that the riot
is impossible to control or direct deliberately. The mob instead developed a new purpose
once some opportunistic members of the crowd who ‘Vvere not so much richer as they
desired to be, for the pains they had taken in coming to the Treby election,” and with
plunder in mind shout “Let us go to Treby Manor!” (FH, 430).

F elix’s disappointment in not being able to stem the tide, and the general horror of
the scene, serve as a critique of the expanded franchise for its potential to unleash
individualistic appetites. As Felix was whisked along to Debarry’s manor house, he
reflected that the day’s “multitudinous small wickednesses of small selfish ends, really
undirected towards any larger result, had issued in widely-shared mischief that might yet
be hideous” (FH, 431). The force of the criticism on the problem of selfishness has been
carried through from Felix’s first encounter with the workers at The Sugar Loaf through
to the riot, where the dangerous tumult is blamed on “selfish ends” that have the potential
to gain revolutionary coherence. This view of the novel is consistent with Eliot’s declining
to contribute to a firnd established, at the time she was writing Felix Holt, by British
supporters of Giuseppe Mazzini. She and Lewes claimed to have a “real reverence” for
Mazzini, having met him at Chapman’s house on the Strand in 1852. However, she feared
the money might be used to promote conspiracy or “acts more unsocial in their character
than the very wrong they are directed to extinguish” (Letters, IV, 199-200). She may very
well have been thinking of the kinds of people represented in the character of Johnson,
who use firnds of political figures behind the scenes to foment discord or generally try to
create opportunistic circumstances.

Eliot’s anti-revolutionary sentiments and fear of disorder correspond to a

120

developmental view of history that had connections to the romantic elements of
nineteenth-century historicism. With political change, this frame of mind suggested a
gradualist position that harkens back to her notion of “consentaneous development”
articulated in the Riehl review. In the novel, it is the story of Esther, the discovery of her
lineage, and her inheritance that manifests Eliot’s gradualistic perspective of historical
change. The political dimension of the novel told through Felix and the election-day
fiasco needs to be read along side the message of Esther’s refirsal of the inheritance of the
Transome estate. For someone who flaunted marriage convention for most of her adult
life, Eliot has puzzled critics who expect her to be more critical of other traditions.” But
if we respect the depth of the romantic-historicist vision of social development, then her

antirevolutionary attitude is easier to understand.

Felix Holt contains elements that indicate Eliot’s self-questioning about the form
of the historical novel which speak to the problem of historical narration and the way to
describe the past. From the beginning of her career as a novelist Eliot’s narrators stress
the remoteness of the period in which each novel is set fiom the readers’ perspective.
When establishing the setting in Felix Holt in chapter 3, Eliot’s “historical project”
emerges as the narrator articulates the significance of the Reform Bill to a provincial town
on the fiinge of early industrialization. Felix Holt is cast at a moment of transition in
England, when certain traditions are just beginning to break down as “progress” makes its
steady way out into the countryside in the late 18203 and early 18303. Treby Magna was

passing fi'om being a relatively isolated rural district, “where the trade was only such as

121

had close relations with the local landed interest,” into something more complex, “brought
by mines and manufactures, which belong more directly to the great circulating system of
the nation than to the local system to which they have been superadded” (FH, 126). By
becoming integrated (superadded) into the national “system” of capital, Treby Magna is
susceptible to the political tumult and the not-quite-clearly defined class antagonisms
commonly associated with British industrialization in the Reform Bill period. 37

Eliot’s specific view of the historicity of the Reform Bill period can be seen in the
narrator/historian’s keen awareness of the ways in which provincial England was
becoming modernized. Treby Magna, for example, was unafl’ected by the French
Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, and “remained unmoved by [Thomas Paine’s] The
Rights of Man,” and seems to have been left out of the political revolution around the turn
of the century. These symbols of the end of the old order and the Ancien Regime did not
affect every place at the same time. But around 183 2, Treby Magna “began at last to
know the higher pains of a dim political consciousness; and the development had been
greatly helped by the recent agitation about the Reform Bill” (FH, 127-28). The novel
thus makes, by the third chapter, a kind of historiographical argument in which a more
subtle understanding of the dissemination of the influence of the political revolution in
France, and its association with the industrial revolution, takes more than thirty years
before it reaches the British provinces.

With Felix Holt, Eliot continued to show interest in the abilities of historical fiction
as a form of historical writing, to depict the subtle impact and contingency of major
historical trends for the lives of ordinary, “unfashionable,” or historically insignificant

people. A passage in chapter three, where the narrator zooms in fiom the general

122

historical discussion of social changes to the characters of the novel, demonstrates this
strength. For while those changes were “public matters, and this history [the novel] is
chiefly concerned with the private lot of a few men and women . . . there is no private life
which has not been determined by a wider public life, from the time when the primeval
milkmaid had to wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she milked was
one of a herd which had made the pastures bare” (FH, 129). This image gives the sense
that the milkmaid, in her ant-like ignorance, might not appreciate how a herd depletes a
pasture, but does know that her cow is migrating and that she must move with it or starve.
According to the narrator, the historical contingency of this moment, which will shape the
lives of the main characters, is reform and the Reform Bill, and the choice is either to
follow the herd (in the opposite sense to today’s pejorative meaning) and move with the.
times, or be left behind.
As to the weather of 1832, the Zadkiel [almanac] of that time had predicted that
the electrical condition of the clouds in the political hemisphere would produce
unusual perturbations in organic existence, and he would perhaps have seen a
fulfilment of his remarkable prophecy in that mutual influence of dissimilar
destinies which we shall see gradually unfolding itself. For if the mixed political
conditions of Treby Magna had not been acted on by the passing of the Reform
Bill, Mr Harold Transome would not have presented himself as a candidate for
North Loarnshire, Treby would not have been a polling-place, Mr Matthew J errnyn
would not have been on affable terms with a Dissenting preacher and his flock, and
the venerable town would not have been placarded with handbills. (FH, 129)
What the narrator cannot say in the third chapter, but what the rest of the novel
demonstrates, is how all of the action is shaped by the historical context of reform.
“Without a reformed election in Treby Magna, Esther’s inheritance and her relationship to
Reverend Lyon would have remained secret, Felix would not have gotten caught in the

riot, Harold Transome might not have returned home fi'om Greece if the election process

had not been reformed making Treby a new polling-place, etc,. Eliot’s challenge to

123

Victorian historiography is in this construction of historical contingency within the lives of
ordinary people. Andres argues that Eliot “challenged” Victorian historiography in
Middlemwch by resisting “monological history,” the history of great moments and great
men, through the presentation of “unauthorized” voices, like Dorothea’ s, which “ofl’ered
her readers access to epochal phenomena and historical events through individual
consciousness?“ This is just as true of Felix Holt.

Eliot’s challenge to mere objectivity in historical representation in her last two
novels has an important antecedent in the trial scene of Felix Holt. At stake is Felix’s
culpability in the death of the constable who had attacked him during the riot, which spins
on the question of his motivation in being the apparent leader of the riot. As with any
murder trial, the key question concerns truth about what happened. And also as in any
trial, the way the truth is established is the main part of the contestation The narrator is
careful to depict the apparent impossibility of doing this completely objectively. Those
witnesses against F elix’s character, who “tended to show that he had a virulent feeling
against the respectable shop-keeping class,” have been coached.

No one else knew — the witnesses themselves did not know fully — how far their

strong perception and memory on these points was due to a fourth mind, namely,

that of Mr John Johnson, the attorney, who was nearly related to one of the Treby
witnesses, and a familiar acquaintance of the Duflield clerk. Man cannot be
defined as an evidence-giving animal; and in the difficulty of getting up evidence
on any subject there is room for much unrecognised action of diligent persons who

have the extra stimulus of some private motive. (FH, 563)

Man cannot be expected to be completely objective where there is some “private motive,”
however unrecognized it might be. The depiction of the rest of the trial follows this

insight. Felix’s testamony is unpersuasive because of the “predominance of Tory feeling in

the court, and the human disposition to enjoy the infliction of a little punishment on an

124

opposite party” (FH, 567). Esther’s surprise testamony, which provides a perspective
unique to herself that shows Felix’s motives and whereabouts immediately before the riot,
is effective for similarly subjective reasons: because there ‘\vas something so naive and
beautiful in this action of Esther’s, that it conquered every low or petty suggestion even in
the commonest minds” (FH, 573). The general interpretation of Felix as leader of the mad
mob, which had helped witnesses against him arrange their stories accordingly, was
quickly given up in light of Esther’s appearance. The narrator thus augments his point:
“Even the bare discernment of facts, much more their arrangement with a view to
inferences, must carry a bias: human impartiality, whether judicial or not, can hardly
escape being more or less loaded” (FH, 573-4). The trial does not produce a clear and
totalizing narrative about what happend at the riot so much as it produced an adequate
feeling among the jurors that Felix must be a decent fellow if Esther likes him, and
therefore, he need not receive corporal punishment.

The tricky interplay of narrative authority is also suggested in the opening of the
novel, which establishes the sense that comprehension of the total picture of the story will
be difficult. The reader is brought into the environs of Treby Magna on a stage-coach
whose driver describes certain residents. Even the narrator comments on the narrative
authority of the coachman: “He was an excellent travelling companion and commentator
on the landscape; he could tell the names of sites and persons. . . .” As with the beginning
of most of Eliot’s novels, the introductory chapter tries to get the mid-Victorian audience
to think about, or recall, how different things were at a particular moment in the past. In
Felix Holt, this is accomplished while also undermining the narrative authority of the

coachman. “His view of life had originally been genial, . . . but the recent initiation of

125

 

railways had embittered him: he now, as in a perpetual vision, saw the ruined country
strewn with shattered limbs, and regarded Mr Huskisson’s death as a proof of God’s anger
against Stephenson” (FH, 81)."9 As called for in the “Historic Imagination” passage,
Eliot’s historical sympathy leads her to try to feel for those who clung to vanishing forms
of thought and ways of life. In 1832, when the railroad was very new in England, it could
still be treated as something potentially eradicable, especially in view of the gruesome

accident of Mr. Huskisson. But this is not so in 1865.

In Felix Holt, Eliot experiments with various ways for the narrator to infirse
himself into the novel with the possible reflexive purpose of suggesting some of the
difficulties in representing the past. As with Eliot’s other novels, the narrator is often self-
conscious and appears to be making choices about how to tell the stories. Even within the
individual characterizations, problems are posed about how one’s memory of the past is
shaped by present concerns. These examples reflect on the general problem of historical
narrative that Eliot experimented with in each of her novels. In the case of Felix Holt, the
narrator is not quite objective, the knowledge of motives is not always clear, but there is a
sense of relative omniscience that Eliot problematized more explicitly in her last two
novels. Felix Holt thus represents Eliot’s emergence into a mature stage in the
development of her view of fiction and historical representation.

Felix Holt is also a kind of commentary on an important political debate, which
eventuated in the second Reform Bill in 1867 , but using the historical antecedent, the first

Reform Bill of 1832, as the related subject. Eliot’s anti-revolutionary attitude is a

126

consequence of the shape of her historicist flame of mind, which was developmental,
organic and evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary. What Eliot feared, and what

almost every one of her main characters have to deal with is the danger of severing oneself
fi'om one’s past. She believed that revolution brings about a social severance fi'om a
group’s history, and Felix Holt “argues” that expanded fianchise will amount to allowing
people to vote with their individualistic concerns and appetites in mind, a kind of anarchy,
or a system which could lead to more civil unrest or revolution. At a time when
industrialization was quickly and radically transforming the way people lived, when, as
Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air,” many people like Eliot was concerned about
lost forms and forgotten ways of knowing and living.

Together, Romola and Felix Holt constitute a period of transition into the third
phase of Eliot’s historicist development. These two middle novels reflect a simultaneous
desire for greater specificity and accuracy of historical details, and the Eliot’s first
experimentations with the more ironic stance vis-a-vis historical representation and realist

prose that emerges in her mature fiction.

127

Chapter 4: Middlemarch as Experimental Historicism

Middlemarch begins with a strange question:

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture

behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on

the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the

little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to

go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? (Mm, 25)
Why did Eliot introduce a book set in the late 18203 and early 18303 with a focus on a
figure from the sixteenth century? Perhaps the best answer is suggested in the opening
line itself: that Eliot was conducting a peculiar kind of experiment. She placed a woman
with the emotional force of will and reforrnative spirit of St. Teresa into provincial
England circa 1830 to see what would happen. The reasons Eliot wanted to conduct such
an experiment are overlapping and all relate to her own peculiar historicist worldview now
in maturity in the early 18703 as she wrote her penultimate novel.

All of Eliot’s novels imply a question to the effect of: “What might it have been
like for these sorts of people in this particular time and place?” Still, Middlemarch is more
explicitly experimental than her previous novels. It shows Eliot, at the height of her

powers, utilizing the realist-novel form to conduct historical inquiry in a manner she called

“analogical creation,” that is firmly within an historicist perspective. In this case, the

128

proposed analogy is between the lives lived by essentially the same person under different
historical circumstances—one in which the milieu is coherent, the other in which general
social and cultural transformation is the dominant character. Following Mill’s usage of
“analogy” (see introduction), we could say that the life of St. Teresa and her times are the
known qualities, and the circumstances of the late 18203 and early 18303 are also known:
the experiment yields a view of what St. Teresa’s life might have been like in an provincial
English town before the first reform bill. The Christian world of St. Teresa—a time of
“coherent social faith”—has vanished, and one way to find out what replaced that world is
to reincamate her in the modernizing world. The results of this “experiment in Time” are
the mutually reflective stories of Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, in which the two
are unable to match up their visions of effecting reforrnative change in their community
with the particular historical circumstances of provincial English life at this time—where
modern reform had not yet taken hold. Their lives seem ordinary, the kind not recorded.
They must therefore be created analogically, e. g., in a fictional format.

St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) was a Carmelite nun, mystic, and reformer, whose
life served Eliot as a basis for a comparison between premodem life, and Dorothea’s and
Lydgate’s relationships to their respective historical contexts. St. Teresa had indeed been
driven by an “ardently willing soul” and by the strength of her faith to reform the religious
orders in Spain founded reformed convents and monasteries. As a nun of the Carmelite
order in mid-sixteenth-century Spain, St. Teresa was in an unusual position from which a
woman could exert reforrnatory influence in her society. The Carmelite order had been
ear-marked by Phillip H for reform, and the nuns in Avila held some degree of respect in

their community. Despite opposition fiom local political and ecclesiastical leadership, and

129

the Spanish Inquisition, St. Teresa gained the support of prominent members of the
Church in Spain, the King and the Royal Council, and sanction fi'om the Roman Curia, and
was able to oversee the founding of sixteen convents and monasteries in the last twenty
years of her life.1

Though St. Teresa’s reforms were the accomplishments that led to her fame and
canonization, Eliot refers in the opening passage to a legendary story fi'om Teresa’s
childhood. When she was twelve, Teresa and her brother had become inspired while
reading about the heroic and glorious lives of Christian martyrs, and “agreed that we
should take off for the land of the Moors, begging our way for the love of God, so that
they would cut our heads off there.”2 It is not surprising that the two never got far fi'om
home, and their attempt seems like a mere childish whim. However, Eliot appears to have
been taken by the inspiration that the young girl must have felt to have entertained such a
choice. It is this intense passion, which momentarily inclined a young girl to risk her head
to attain martyrdom, that Eliot wished to animate in the 1830 context. For Eliot, the
“coherent social faith” of sixteenth-century Spain enabled Teresa to follow her passionate
predilections, from melodramatic martyrdom to sweeping reform. In the Christian context
of St. Teresa’s lifetime, martyrdom seemed the highest of heroics and her actions had
meaning and effect.

One could say that Middlemarch argues—that is, the conclusion drawn from the
experiment is—either that Christian martyrdom is not possible in provincial England circa
183 0, or that the martyrdoms of Dorothea and Lydgate are unremembered since they rest
in “unvisited tombs.” For certain types of people in the unfolding post-Christian context,

harmonious integration into the flow of social life is not as easy as it might have been for

130

Teresa in her day. “Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life
wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; . . . for these later-bom
Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the
function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul” (Mm, 26). Dorothea’s and Lydgate’s
stories converge in the idea that their passion to do good things in the world are inhibited
by the various circumstances of their positions, opinions, social environments, and in
Dorothea’s case, her gender. For Eliot these obstacles characterized a period that was the
beginning of a new historical epoch with new contexts that needed examination. While
writing her sixth novel, she was comfortable with the idea that her brand of fiction was
useful in performing the historical examination of the rise of modernity.3 Eliot continued
to employ a dialectical framework for critical historical consciousness and understanding.
In Middlemarch, this framework bears the stamp of the Young Hegelian sensibilities
concerning the waning of the “Christian centuries” and the nineteenth-century emergence
of “higher criticism,” as well as the striving for a human-centered religion, the “religion of
humanity.” Dorothea’s personal grth is a synecdoche of the dialectical development of
humanity at the historical moment of advancing self-consciousness that Eliot associated
with the time of the novel’s setting.

But Eliot’s continued use novels for historical inquiry had begun to raise questions
about the nature of historical narrative and the subjective dimensions of historical writing.
In Middlemarch Eliot faced the epistemological problem of objectivity and historical
narrative more directly than in her previous novels. A deconstructive reading such as J.
Hillis Miller’s shows that Middlemarch, as a pretend-history, resists naively objective,

monological historical interpretation, which implies a critique of naively objective

131

historiography.‘ As such, Middlemarch reflects a new direction in Eliot’s thinking about
the nature of historical consciousness with rough parallels to the subjective dimensions and
potential for relativity of Wilhelm Dilthey’s “critique of historical reason” and his efl‘orts to
establish a theoretical basis for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). Dilthey
insisted that any historical science would have to incorporate the subjective dimension of
the historical consciousness engaging in the inquiry, a consciousness which itself is
undergoing historical transformation. Eliot’s previous novels did not explicitly undermine
the stability of the historical interpretation and the position of the interpreter, except in
experimental, isolated cases like the trial scene in Felix Holt (see chapter 3). The narrative
structure of Middlemarch, however, begins to seriously undermine the possibility for
alristorical narrative position (i.e., a locus standi outside historical processes), and
therefore, objective knowledge, in a manner akin to Dilthey’s critique of historical reason.
Eliot achieved the Diltheyan insight—that the instability of the apprehending
consciousness affects the nature of the knowledge created, thus making any historical
knowledge impermanent—through the process of writing historical novels, and gave it full

manifestation in Middlemarch.

Sophia Andres has addressed the notion that Middlemarch offered a “challenge” to
Victorian historiography. In her conception of Eliot’s historiographical contribution,
Middlemarch “voices resistance to monological history” by representing the lives of
“unhistoric” people who nevertheless experience “epochal phenomena and historical

events,” and the novel thus makes a case for a “multivalent” conception of history.

132

Andres sees Casaubon as the symbol of monological history, and Dorothea’s emergent
critical perspective as an insistence on a multiplicity of historical voices. Andres’s is a
usefirl approach for interpreting Eliot’s fiction as a form of social history, and is
incidentally a great improvement on the brief characterization Hayden White made in “The
Burden of History,” where he argues that Eliot’s portrayal of Casaubon and Dorothea
indicates an antihistorical theme, corresponding to Nietzsche’s hostility to the authority
history had achieved in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately,
White’s view of Casaubon simply as a representative of an historical flame of mind misses
Eliot’s point. Casaubon represents not the authority of history, but a pre-Young Hegelian
version of historical thinking. Dorothea’s rejection of Casaubon and eventual marriage to
Ladislaw symbolizes the intellectual-historical transition to a new historicism. Neither
Andres nor White acknowledges the significance of Young Hegelian historicism that Eliot
had embraced, and which animates the Casaubon-Dorothea dynamic. Dorothea may
represent multivalency in the face of Casaubon’s antiquated conception of history. But
when one considers Eliot’s enthusiasm for and participation in the Young Hegelian
movement, Dorothea takes on the aspect of a post-Christian consciousness that is aware
of the historicity of the theological stage of human development. I argue that this
interpretation better follows Eliot’s life-long commitment to disseminate the implications
of Young Hegelian historicist thought.’

It is usefirl to recall the “Historic Imagination” passage that Eliot had written
sometime shortly after completing Middlemarch. She indicated a desire to work out the
details of “the various steps by which a political or social change was reached,” to offer a

“vivid presentation of how results have been actually brought about, especially in religious

133

and social change,” as well as a presentation of the “heroism ofien accompanying the
decay and final struggle of old systems, which has not had its share of tragic
commemoration” (Essays, 446-47). The reform bill period was for her pregnant with
historical movement, of which the reform bill itself is just one example. As a synchronic
history, Middlemarch clusters around the general theme of transition political reform,
social reform, industrialization and social fluidity, modernization of commerce and the
transformation of the countryside (symbolized by the railroad), and changes in medical
knowledge and practice.

Yet another historical movement of this period close to Eliot’s heart was the rise
of Hegelian historicism. Eliot’s portrayal of Dorothea’s first husband, Edward Casaubon,
and his life’s work, a “Key to All Mythologies,” serves as an entree into the significance of
Young Hegelian thinking in Middlemarch as well as a view of the intellectual
transformation she associated with the rise of Hegelian thought in Germany. Dorothea
learns from Ladislaw that Casaubon’s project is obsolete because he does not take into
account the German “higher criticism.” Eliot was of course aware of Strauss’s version of
German higher criticism, but Ladislaw’s mentioning of it in 1829 predates the 1835 Das
Leben Jesu. Perhaps she uncharacteristically incorporated an anachronism. But Eliot may
also have been thinking of the generation of theologians that included Schleiermacher, de
Wette, and F. C. Baur, who were developing methods of mythological analysis and critical
reading of the old testament, not to mention the new wave of classical scholarship in the
wake of Friedrich August Wolfs Prolegomena to Homer.“3 In the late 18203 and early
183 03 Strauss, Feuerbach, and Theodor Vischer began to synthesize a mythological

(higher critical) view of the bible with Hegelian philosophy.7 Had Eliot been writing an

134

historical novel on German higher criticism, she might have been more specific about
whom and what she knew of the pre-Young Hegelian iterations of the movement. For the
novel she did write, the mere suggestion of it served the purpose of drawing Casaubon’s
limits.

Casaubon’s approach to mythology represents an older perspective that was
insensitive to the historicity of mythological forms. His belief, and the driving principle of
his doomed, life-long project, was that “all the mythical systems or erratic mythical
fiagments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed” (Mm, 46).
Historicist perspectives generated by critical approaches to the bible undermined the idea
of a perverted original tradition by insisting that systems of thought and culture have
historicity.8 Casaubon’s assumption—that he could generate a “key” that unlocked the
meaning of some perennial truth that underlay the many and various ancient
mythologies—is not possible within the new orientation developed by the German higher
critics. These theologians, Schleiermacher, Baur, and de Wette being among the best-
known, began to suggest that old testament stories were a mythology that articulated
certain perspectives appropriate to, or characteristic of, their respective stage of
intellectual development and in their peculiar historical circumstances. Eliot had said in
the 1851 review of Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect that “England has been slow to use
or to emulate the immense labours of Germany in the departments of mythology and
biblical criticism” (Essays, 30). Casaubon represents this slowness. As Ladislaw says,
Casaubon’s immense labors were wasted, “as so much English scholarship is, for want of
knong what is being done by the rest of the world. If Mr Casaubon read German he

would save hirnselfa great deal of trouble” (Mm, 240). Eliot, as we know, was not only

135

keenly aware of this English myopia, especially with respect to German thought, her
translations and a number of her articles, as I discuss in chapter 1, were specifically
devoted to overcoming it.

The extent to which Casaubon and his dated approach are represented
sympathetically exemplifies Eliot’s desire to portray the pregnancy of transitional historical
moments and to extend sympathy to both sides of historical struggle. His aloof,
dispassionate character offers little to like. His letter of marriage proposal to Dorothea is
an hilarious caricature of the dry-as-dust scholar who, as Casaubon elsewhere admits, lives
“too much with the dead” (Mm, 40). He is, furthermore, utterly incapable of warmth and
affection, and his last act of cruelty upon Dorothea and Ladislaw make him despicable.
Still, his story is meant to efi’ect sympathy for a scholar who missed the boat. As she
indicates in the “Historic Imagination” passage, Eliot thought her fiction could perform the
historical firnction of representing that which other kinds of history neglected. As she put
it, “there is the pathos, the heroism ofien accompanying the decay and final struggle of old
systems, which has not had its share of tragic commemoration.” The Casaubon story
addresses this imbalance. Whereas the reader must share some of Ladislaw’s dislike for
Casaubon, Dorothea shows him (and us) the possibility for pathos. “If it [Casaubon’s
obsolescence] were as you say, what could be sadder than so much ardent labour all in
vain?” (Mm, 254) In contrast to Ladislaw’s disnrissiveness, Dorothea laments “in her
saddest recitative” that she did not learn German while at school in Lausanne so that she
might help her husband. “There were plenty of German teachers. But now I can be of no
use” (Mm, 241).9

Lydgate’s story concerns another intellectual historical transformation: the

136

evolution of medical science. This thread dramatizes the historical struggle between the
old system of country physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries whose medical knowledge
and treatment was based on the humoral paradigm, and the rise of new systems of analysis
and diagnosis being taught in Edinburgh, London, and Paris since the French Revolution.
Lydgate’s story is a much fuller treatment of a theme that received minor attention in Felix
Holt: the resistance to new medical knowledge based on the practices in the cosmopolitan
centers of Europe. Felix was shown to object to his mother’s sale of potions, which he
knew were of no medical use, but were eagerly purchased by her neighbors who believed
they had restorative powers. Lydgate’s medical perspective leads him to question the
traditional system of medical practice, especially the dispensing of useless drugs, in place
in Middlemarch.

Lydgate’s attitude toward the medical establishment in Middlemarch is dismissive.
Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch a young man of twenty-seven, fresh from medical training
in Paris, and idealistic about how he might help transform provincial medical treatment,
which he believed was “painfirlly” backward.

Yes, — with our present medical rules and education, one must be satisfied now

and then to meet with a fair practitioner. As to all the higher questions which

determine the starting-point of a diagnosis — as to the philosophy of medical
evidence — any glimmering of these can only come from a scientific culture of
which country practitioners have usually no more notion than the man in the moon.

(Mm, 153)

The “scientific culture,” by which Lydgate means the cosmopolitan schools, is set off
against “country practitioners” whose medical knowledge, it is subtly suggested, is
comparable to the belief in the man in the moon. In Medicine and the Making of Modern

Britain, 1 700-1920, Christopher Lawrence characterizes the struggle for recognition

among those educated in Edinburgh and Paris as a debate that was increasingly about

137

what constituted science. Lydgate invokes this appeal to science, which he believed
would be enough to carry the day. His idealism is attributable to the fact that he views his
struggle, in the early-going of the novel, as an intellectual one. But he never comes to
firlly understand that the real tension between old and new intellectual frameworks is also
found in a social context.

One of Eliot’s devices for demonstrating the social context of resistance to medical
advancement in the novel is the debate over and construction of a fever hospital in
Middlemarch. The main reason Lydgate agreed to come to relative backwater town of
Middlemarch was the prospect of directing the proposed fever hospital with Bulstrode.
Specialized hospitals, like a fever hospital, were an alternative way, after the Napoleonic
Wars, for British medical men to “promote their advancement,” because the way of
traditional medical practice was at least partially closed to them. 1° Lydgate’s own general
practice, which he purchased from a retiring doctor, dwindled as many Middlemarchers
grew to distrust the “exotic” ways of this new medical man. Still, he remained encouraged
by the research he might do in the fever hospital, where “real medical reform” could take
place.

The small community of physicians and apothecaries who make a living by
dispensing drugs, correctly view Lydgate’s practice of not prescribing drugs as a direct
criticism of the way they have practiced medicine for decades. Mr. Wrench, one of the
more respected surgeons in town, puts it this way:

[W]hat I contend against is the way medical men are fouling their own nest, and

setting up a cry about the country as if a general practitioner who dispenses drugs

couldn’t be a gentleman . . . I say, the most ungentlemarrly trick a man can be

guilty of is to come among the members of his profession with innovations which
are a libel on their time-honoured procedure. (Mm, 487)

138

The social dimension of medical practice is here mobilized by Wrench’s reference to
himself and his colleagues as “gentlemen,” who are respectable and therefore above
reproach. Lydgate’s medical judgement is thus viewed as a personal insult by members of
the provincial medical community. Their friendship he could live without. However,
when they effectively resist the reforrnative plans he has for the new hospital, Lydgate is
stuck. Furthermore, Lydgate was compelled to link his fortunes to Bulstrode, who is
widely despised in Middlemarch. Bulstrode’s scandalous demise sinks Lydgate’s dreams
of medical reform in the provinces. One of the great charms of Middlemarch is the skill
with which Eliot wielded the complex social nexus of the town. And indeed it was her
explicit desire, according to the “Historic Imagination” passage, to represent the
complexity of historic struggles. In this case, she constructs a plausible connection
between Bulstrode’s questionable past and Lydgate’s dificulty in performing medical
research.

Above all his other struggles, Lydgate’s marriage to Rosamond Vmcy is the one
that bests his efforts to work against the medical establishment. Her expression of
revulsion to the idea of autopsies is a critical moment in the novel when Lydgate begins to
recognize that his charming wife was going to be a hindrance. The scene is worth a close
examination, for in it Lydgate actually calls up a medical hero, a world-historical figure of
medical science, fiom the past to explain his ambitions to his wife.

“His name was Vesalius. And the only way he could get to know anatomy
as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night, from graveyards and places of
execution.”

“Oh!” said Rosamond, with a look of disgust on her pretty face, “I am very
glad you are not Vesalius. I should have thought he might find some less horrible
way than that.”

“No, he couldn’t,” said Lydgate going on too earnestly to take much notice
of her answer. “He could only get a complete skeleton by snatching the whitened

139

bones of a criminal fiom the gallows, and burying them, and fetching them away by
bits secretly, in the dead of night.”

“I hope he is not one of your great heroes,” said Rosamond, half-playfully,
half-anxiously, “else I shall have you getting up in the night to go to St Peter’s
churchyard. You know how angry you told me the people were about Mrs. Goby.
You have enemies enough already.”

“So had Vesalius, Rosy. No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch are
jealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon Vesalius
because they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen was wrong. They
called him a liar and a poisonous monster. But the facts of the human fiame were
on his side; and so he got the better of them.”

“And what happened to him afierwards?” said Rosamond, with some
interest.

“Oh, he had a good deal of fighting to the last. And they did exasperate
him enough at one time to make him burn good deal of his work. Then he got
shipwrecked just as he was coming fiom Jerusalem to take a great chair at Padua.
He died rather miserably.”

There was a moment’s pause before Rosamond said, “Do you know,
Tertius, I often wish you had not been a medical man.” (Mm, 497)

Andreas Vesalius was the sixteenth-century anatomist who used his own observations of
internal anatomy to overturn some of the assumptions of the Galenic system. 1‘ Until his
time, the usually taboo practice of dissecting human bodies occurred at few learning
centers, and often as an exercise to confirm the predictions of ancients like Galen and
Aristotle, not for the purpose of challenging the dominant paradigm.12 One such center
was the University of Padua, where Vesalius had studied and lectured in the late 15303
and early 15403. He was, as Lydgate mentions, returning to Italy fiom a pilgrimage in
Jerusalem in 1564, when he died after a shipwreck.l3 By invoking Vesalius, Lydgate is
telling his new wife that he is willing to engage the kind of “fighting” his hero had
endured, and to be ostracized in order to challenge received medical knowledge in the
provinces. This is the last thing Rosamond wants to hear. She merely wants a

respectable, well-endowed husband and to avoid the kind of scandal Lydgate had already

caused by asking Mrs. Goby’s family if he could do a post-mortem examination on her. “I

140

do not think it is a nice profession, dear,” (Mm, 498). To the extent that Lydgate’s
ultimate failure to advance medical reform in the provinces is his own fault, and not simply
the fault of his environment, is typified by the way he is characterized in this passage as
“going on too earnestly to take much notice of her answer.” Lydgate’s earnest desires
blind him to the specific qualities of his historical circumstances within which he must, but
cannot, work.

The “bone-snatcher” scene captures the tension between an emerging science of
medicine and the resistance to it that was grounded in long-held habits and traditions.
Renaissance Padua not withstanding, the practice of post-mortem examinations did not
really take off until the French Revolution. Rosy herself aspires to respectable society and
adopts, with the kind of vehemence shown often by aspirants more so than
representatives, the view that a tradition such as honoring the sanctity of a human body
after death should not be transgressed by her husband. Many of the reforms that came
from Paris since the Revolution were likely viewed as dangerous and, as Mr. Brooke
would say, “going entirely too far,” in the English provinces. As for Lydgate, he
succumbed to Rosamond’s desires, and spent his short career working on wealthy patients
and their ailments. And though he wrote a treatise on gout, “he always regarded himself
as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do” (Mm, 893).

Lydgate’s fi'ustrations and ultimate failure to realize his dreams of directing a
provincial research facility constitute Eliot’s “historic imagination” applied to the
advancement of medical science. Her own research into medical history was extensive.
The “Folger Notebook,” which Eliot used while preparing for and writing Middlemarch,

contains entries fi'om John Thomson’s An Account of the Life, Lectures, and Writings of

141

William Cullen, M.D. , Charles Knight’s The English Cyclopaidia, Pierre Victor
Renouard’s Histoire de la Medecine, Emile Littre’s Medicine et Medicins, all of which
concern ground-breaking discoveries and the advancement of medical science. " But these
medical histories still lacked that sense of the moment when the struggle was in doubt and
time had not yet distinguished between triumphant and vanquished. Eliot’s historic
imagination tried to fill that historiographical gap by suggesting that the common struggles
of individuals in their social milieux played a significant part in the pace of historical
transformation.

By showing Lydgate’s failure to work in harmony with his specific historical
circumstances, Eliot demonstrates an important dimension of the Hegelian historicist
fiamework. One may be able to lead a people into a new age, like Napoleon, but one
cannot live outside of his milieu. Isaiah Berlin paraphrased this Hegelian principle aptly:

Reform must spring from historically prepared soil; otherwise it is doomed to

failure, condemned in advance by the forces of history which move in accordance

with their own logic in their own time and at their own pace. To demand freedom
from these forces and seek to rise above them, is to wish to escape from one’s
logically necessary historical position, form the society of which one is an integral
part, fiom the complex of relations, public and private, by which every man is
made to be what he is; to which an escape from this is to wish to lose one’s proper
nature, a self-contradictory demand, which could be made only by one who does
not understand what he is demanding, on whose idea of personal liberty is
childishly subjective.ls
This is just what Lydgate cannot see. His demand that the established medical community
of Middlemarch forget its time-honored practices without sufficient exposure to the new
medical science, against which the physicians are prejudiced anyway, is what Berlin would
call “childishly subjective.” While the reader, who knows that Lydgate is on the side of

progress in medical reform, may sympathize with his frustrations, Middlemarch is

142

nevertheless a very long way from Paris. It was not yet “historically prepared soil.”

While both the Lydgate and Dorothea threads provide examples for historical
pathos that Eliot called for in “Historic Imagination,” Dorothea is also the synecdoche for
developing humanity in the Hegelian and Young Hegelian pattern. Her progress through
the novel from a naive state of yearning to one of firller awareness and wider wisdom is
told in Hegelian terms of the dialectic development of expanding consciousness.“ In the
Phenomenology, Hegel posited three stages of increasing human self-awareness. The first
is exemplified in the “master-slave” dialectic, in which one’s understanding of self as an
individuated consciousness depends upon, and is determined by the nature of, one’s
relationship to another or to others. ‘7 The next stage culminates in what Hegel
characterized as the “Unhappy Consciousness” in which self and the world are taken to be
wholly alien. The final level is characterized by the appearance of Reason and the rational
self-consciousness, where a “moral view of the world” is finally possible. ‘3 Progress
through these stages is driven by critique, during which the mind “negates” the immature
forms of understanding through reflection and revaluation. Hegel implicitly associated
these levels of individual grth with stages of historical development in the
Phenomenology, but made this more explicit in lectures on world history. ‘9 His
interpretation of human history therefore reads like a coming-of-age story of a single
mind, which he called the “Absolute Spirit.”

The way that Dorothea’s growth follows the pattern of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit
emerges in the honeymoon chapters. There is a suggestive conjuncture of perspectives at
the moment of her despondency and initial alienation from Casaubon. While Dorothea

broods in the Vatican Museum over her recent quarrel, the German artist, Naumann,

143

becomes captivated by her beauty. “What do you think of that fine bit of antithesis? . . .
There lies antique beauty, not corpse-like even in death, but arrested in the complete
contentment of its sensuous perfection: and here stands beauty in its breathing life, with
the consciousness of Christian centuries in its bosom” (Mm, 220). Naumann’s observation
activates the synecdochic device. He gives the sense that as one looks upon Dorothea,
one glimpses the “Christian centuries” that have expired, as well as something of ancient
form. In Naumann’s eyes, Dorothea symbolizes the Hegelian concept, which was so
fi'uitfully embraced by Feuerbach, of historical pregnancy and humanity in dialectical
change. She embodies antithetical, historical worldviews: she is, according to Naumann,
“antique form animated by Christian sentiment—a sort of Christian Antigone—sensuous
force controlled by spiritual passion” (Mm, 221). As a Christian Antigone, Dorothea
represents a new form or quality that has absorbed the earlier historical stages.

For Hegel and the Young Hegelians, the impetus for the advance of consciousness
from one stage to the next is the critical perspective that generates movement and
transition. So, for example, the ego-centric consciousness of the individual is transformed
into a more comprehending consciousness in Hegel’s master-slave encounter by the
critique of the former state of consciousness that did not embrace the notion of a
differentiated, independent other. It was Hegel’s sense for the centrality of criticism—the
self-reflective act that recognizes the immaturity of the old consciousness (and thus
negates it)—in the dialectical progress of humanity that the Young Hegelians embraced
most closely in their own work.20 For Hegel and the Young Hegelians, the important
lesson for their own time—the final stage of development, some assumed—was the

recognition that the dialectic itself was the process of history, and that this process is the

144

reflection of the human mind. The Enlightenment, for example, is sometimes described as
a criticism—a negation—of the Christian world view, and before that, the Christian stage
negated antiquity. Hegel and the Young Hegelians viewed the Reformation and the
Enlightenment as manifestations of the Christian age engaged in self-critique. In this way
criticism is the prime mover of Spirit in history.21 In Berlin’s understanding of Hegel, “the
sole method by which those who have the good of society at heart can improve society, is
to develop in themselves and in others the power of analysing themselves and their
environment, an activity later called criticism, the grth of which is identical with human
progress.”22 A greater sense of self must include the critical consciousness in the
individual, and likewise, general social progress will arise only through a critical, historical
perspective.

The role of criticism in Dorothea’s development in the honeymoon chapters is
especially similar to that in the progress of the Spirit in Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness
stage. In Hegel’s narrative of advancing self-consciousness, the self achieves a degree of
self-awareness at the master-slave stage. But the inherent identity of the self-
consciousness of the two is as yet unknown to either. The description of the first
argument between Dorothea and Casaubon has the central features of this Hegelian stage
of consciousness. “She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers; she had not yet
learned those hidden conflicts in her husband which claim our pity” (Mm, 232). From the
master-slave stage, the self has been trying to get to know the world in relation to itself.
With the help of Ladislaw, Dorothea gains the awareness that she had idealized Casaubon,
and that her hope to join him in his great work was a subjugation that cannot have the

anticipated efl’ect.

145

Today she had begun to see that she had been under a wild illusion in expecting a

response to her feeling from Mr Casaubon, and she had felt the waking of a

presentiment that there might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as

great a need on his side as on her own. (Mm, 243; my italics)
Eliot’s use of “sad consciousness” is perhaps a coincidence with Hegel’s Unhappy
Consciousness, and she was probably not thinking of Hegel in particular. But the
coincidence is all the more striking because, as with Hegel, the sad consciousness is a kind
of middle term in a dialectic logic between the two “sides,” Dorothea and Casaubon. The
moment is developmentally significant, for it “changed [Dorothea’s] longitude
extensively,” and that “changed all prospects.” (Mm, 234) The new prospects brought
about by the higher consciousness constitute Dorothea’s altering view of her own firture
with Casaubon. “She was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and
over the English fields and ehns and hedge-bordered highroads: and feeling that the way in
which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as it had been”
(Mm, 235). The tidy picture that Dorothea held of her firture life was becoming blurred by
new revelations enabled by critical perspective. In dialectical terms, the two who
supposedly had been united in marriage have just experienced an alienation—a critical
distancing—in the form of an argument, which reveals a new perspective of opposition. It
also represents Dorothea’s more comprehending understanding that her life might be more
complicated than one in which she could bridge the gap she perceived between herself and
the world of knowledge simply by marrying a scholar.

Whereas Dorothea had previously assumed that in marriage to Casaubon she
would become a part of something greater than herself—his great project—the new

consciousness of individuation was the first step in the emergence from a state of moral

naivety. The honeymoon chapters conclude with the sense that she is maturing in a

146

manner similar to Hegel’s system.
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our
supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge fiom that stupidity, but yet it
had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr Casaubon,
and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that
distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the
directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent center of
self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain distance. (Mm,
243)
Dorothea’s emergence from “moral stupidity” comes through her understanding of
Casaubon’s “center of self’ as distinct from, and yet like, her own. In Hegel’s
Phenomenology, morality is a final stage of development in a process in which the self
began with a consciousness that did not differentiate itself fi'om the world, i.e., the world
as an “udder to feed our supreme selves.” The stage of differentiation has unpleasant
manifestations, but eventually gives way to a higher consciousness of mutual, universal
interdependence that is necessary for morality, according to Hegel.23 So if Casaubon and
Dorothea were ever to have a full relationship in the Hegelian sense of mature
consciousness, they would have to recognize each of themselves in the other. In this
construction, individuated self-interest is childish, given that the other is a kind of self-
reflection, which yields the moral insight that to harm the other is to harm oneself. Eliot’s
central moral principle of sympathy thus has much in common with the Hegelian path to
moral consciousness.
Dorothea’s continued grth after achieving a critical view of Casaubon involves
overcoming illusions by reconciling her own ideas about how she can fit into the world
with the specific realities of her circumstances. After Casaubon’s death, Dorothea

struggles against his “dead hand,” the symbol of his control over her from the grave, and

specifically, his presumption that she would continue his work. She now sees ‘Vvith a

147

judgement that was truer than his” (Mm, 519) not only the project, but that the man to
whom she had imagined a union as a fitting life-purpose, is “lower than she had believed”
(Mm, 535). Free fiom the “Key,” Dorothea turns to her own projects, but only as they
become adjusted to circumstances. The cottages at Lowick are not in need of
refirrbishment, so she goes to work on those at Freslritt. Casaubon’s codicil prevents her
from helping Ladislaw financially, but she finds another good cause in Lydgate’s fever
hospital. As a woman in 1830 provincial England, Dorothea cannot lead great social or
political reform, but her energies and aspirations are quietly subsumed into Ladislaw’s
parliamentary career. As St. Teresa represented for Eliot a kind of world-historical figure
who encapsulated the single-mindedness of an age, Dorothea’s example highlights the
cacophony of her own.

In developing Dorothea’s growth as an overcoming of illusion, Eliot seems to be
following the Young Hegelian critique of Hegel’s favoring the ideal side of the dialectic.
Feuerbach differentiated his own approach from Hegel’s by insisting that his was “the
direct opposite of [metaphysical] speculation” because his “generates thought fiom the
opposite of thought, from Matter, from existence, fi'om the senses?“ Lewes joined the
general positivist critique of Hegel’s metaphysical excesses that led Hegel to ignore certain
features of the real world if they did not conform to his system. Lewes went so far as to
say that Hegel’s philosophy of history was “fiction, not history?” Dorothea’s ability to
reevaluate her circumstances and change her course of action accords with the general
positivist critique of metaphysics. Although Lewes’s simple opposition between fiction

and history does not withstand in Middlemarch.

148

As J. Hillis Miller’s influential reading of Middlemarch indicates, the novel
efl’ectively dismantles the conceptual opposition between fiction and history.26 Miller’s
argument derives fi'om a premise that was articulated by Henry James, a great devotee of
Eliot in his early career: novels work only insofar as they seem to be history. As James
himself said, “It is impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he
regards himselfas an historian and his narrative as history.”27 Realist novels and histories
have in common a more or less omniscient narrator who tells a story from a “locus
standi,” from which a more or less totalizing picture of the various cause and effect
relationships is rendered. While Middlemarch ostensibly reads like a story told by a
conventional historical narrator positioned in a “locus standi,” Miller reads the cumulative
effect of the “demythologizing” that takes place—such as Dorothea’s new critical view of
Casaubon—as undermining the narrator’s solid ground. Miller further argues that this has
implications for history.

The effort of demythologizing in Middlemarch . . . can be defined as a dismantling

of various versions of the metaphysical system on which the traditional idea of

history depends. In spite of its recourse to the conventional locus standi of
defining itself as a displaced form of history, the novel, so to speak, pulls the rug
out fi'om under itself and deprives itself of that solid ground without which, if

Henry James is right, it is “nowhere.” Her fiction deprives itself of its ground in

history by demonstrating that ground to be a fiction too, a figure, a myth, a lie, like

Dorothea’s interpretation of Casaubon.28
For Miller, Middlemarch achieves a kind of modernist aesthetic, with respect to the
destabilized narration. Because of the inherent similarity between (if not identity of) the
narrative voice in novels and those in histories, Middlemarch implies that history cannot

be told fiom a position of objective permanence, i.e., from solid ground.

Though Eliot had always appreciated the J amesian insight regarding historians and

149

fictional narrators (indeed, James probably developed this insight while reading Eliot, his
favorite realist), the problem of narration and depicting the past is one that she treated
with increasingly sharper focus. Middlemarch highlights the parallels between historians
and fictional narrators in a number of places. In one example, the narrator mentions
Herodotus in the context of making narrative choices. While describing the rise of social
fluidity in the early nineteenth century, the narrator observes that “much the same sort of
movement and mixture went on in old England as we find in older Herodotus, who also, in
telling what had been thought it well to take a woman’s lot for his starting-point” (Mm,
122-23).29 The reference is to lo and Dorothea as the “starting-points” of the two
respective stories. The loose and uncertain connection between the abduction of lo and
the Persian Wars make Herodotus’s choice seem more arbitrary than starting
Middlemarch with “Miss Brooke,” the central heroine of the novel. But the narrator
suggests that in either case, a narrative choice had to be made—implying that the story
might be told in any number of ways, which, by further implication, could yield any
number of meanings. This highlights Eliot’s understanding of the significance of the
subjective dimension of the historian’s craft: that the concerns of the given writer of
history will bring to light selected details pertinent to their interests.

The narrator makes another explicit connection to the historian’s craft in the
opening of chapter 15. This time a contrast is made that speaks to historiographical
concerns.

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be

dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi

whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his
c0pious remarks and digressions as the least irnitable part of his work, and

especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he
seems to bring his arrn-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty

150

ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time,

like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious,

and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not
linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin
and eager, as if delivered fiom a camp-stool in a parrot-house. I at least have so
much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven
and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this
particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the

universe. (Mm, 170)

Here the historian’s problem, as Eliot understands it, is plainly faced: that innumerable
things may have relevance to a history of “human lots” and it is the modern historian’s
painful job to be selective about what to leave out. The criteria for selection derive from
the “needs” of the particular historical culture. Fielding, the eighteenth-century novelist,
seems to have anticipated the J arnesian insight that the narrator is an historian.30 This
passage indicates the narrator’s awareness that there could be many ways to tell this story,
and that he has to make the choices that story-tellers like Fielding, and historians like
Herodotus had to, within the contexts of aesthetic concerns, expectations of the
readers/listeners about things like amount of detail or narrative logic.

Eliot’s growing interest in the efl’ects of narrative subjectivity on representing the
past has a striking parallel with Dilthey’s “critique of historical reason.” Dilthey’s work
attempted to address the potential relativism associated with the “crisis of historicism” that
arose from the kind of condition that Miller identifies in Middlemarch: the lack of a stable
ground fiom which to describe the past puts the past itself into flux. The “crisis”
concerned the apparent relativism implied in the nineteenth-century historicist orientation
to the nature of historical knowledge. Unlike the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaflen),

Dilthey argued that knowledge in the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) had to have

its basis in what he called “the facts of consciousness.”

151

Only in inner experience, in facts of consciousness, did I find a firm anchorage for
my thinking. . . . All science is a science of experience, but all experience has its
original constitution and its validity in the conditions of our consciousness, in
which experience takes place—in the totality of our nature. We call the
standpoint—which logically sees the impossibility of going beyond these
conditions, which would be like seeing without an eye or directing the knowing
look behind the eye itself—the epistemological standpoint; modern science can
recognize no other.31
Dilthey’s struggle to establish a stable basis—an epistemological standpoint—for historical
knowledge seemed always thwarted by his insistence that this basis had to be in conscious
experience, behind which one cannot see, and which itself was a part of the historical flow
and therefore always unstable. Permanent historical truths are thus impossible given the
historicity of their foundation in the experience of consciousness. Dilthey was perhaps
writing ironically when he described his finding a “firm anchorage” for his thinking in the
ever-fluctuating facts of consciousness, for it was the lack of firm anchorage in concrete,
external reality in Dilthey’s system that constituted the crisis of historicism.

The apparent solipsism in Dilthey’s fi'amework for knowledge of history derives
fiom the importance he placed on the subjective side of experience. Knowledge of the
world in general is always self-referential for Dilthey, because we live, as he put it, in a
“mind-afl’ected world.”32 Keenly aware of this problem, Dilthey devoted much of his
career to resolving it.

Thus, on the one hand, the comprehending subject creates this mind-affected world

and, on the other, tries to gain objective knowledge of it. Hence we face the

problem, how does the mental construction of the mind-affected world make

knowledge of mind-affected reality possible? Earlier I have described this task as a

critique of historical reason.33
Dilthey believed that his critique of historical reason had the potential for establishing
“universally valid interpretation” (allgemeingiiltigen Interpretation) sensitive to the

historicity of the apprehending consciousness.34 Dilthey thus hoped to establish a

152

permanent interpretive framework (hermeneutic) for history that showed the apprehending
consciousness in dynamic relation to the world “affected” by its own apprehension. The
standpoint for understanding history is within the historical process, not outside it, as the
objectivist historians would want.

It is Dilthey’s sense of the dynamic interpretive standpoint that Eliot begins to
approximate in Middlemarch and the narrator, when engaged in establishing the setting,
activates something like the Diltheyan critique of historical reason. The narrator
frequently reminds readers that 183 03 provincial England is in many ways unlike the world
of the early 18703. A long excerpt acknowledges the affect of modern social fluidity on
perception and interpretation.

Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement [of individuals
between social classes]: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young
professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children
for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly
shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of
interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people
denied aspirates, gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs;
some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found
themselves surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or
families that stood with rock firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly
presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of
self and beholder. Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of
connection — gradually, as the old stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the
worship of the solar guinea became extinct, while squires and baronets, and even
lords who had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the
faultiness of closer acquaintanceship. (Mm, 122)

The narrator alludes to the social-historical modemization topics treated in Mill on the
Floss and Felix Holt; expanding political consciousness and the spread of capitalist
economy (symbolized by the savings-bank) being the more important transformations that
occurred in this period. There is also, hiding in plain sight, an articulation of the

awareness of the instability of perspective in the modern maelstrom. Corresponding with

153

social fluidity, those families who “stood with rock firmness” nevertheless were seen to
change from the altering perspectives of everyone else: “the double change of self and
beholder.” This is precisely the kind of destabilization Miller identifies with the novel, and
it corresponds to Dilthey’s insight regarding the foundation of historical knowledge in the
experience of consciousness. As self-consciousness shified in the historical flow of the
early nineteenth century, “new aspects” emerged “in spite of [apparent] stability.”
According to Miller, the instability of the narrator’s subjectivity in Middlemarch
becomes the dominant character of the history that is told. In my mind, however, this
quality better describes the narration in Daniel Deronda. The narration in Middlemarch
still clings to the objective pretense conveyed by a “locus standi,” even as it describes
shifting perceptions. The characters, not the narrator, suffer fiom unstable perspective.
Either way, Eliot’s explorations into the instability of consciousness—whether the
narrator’s or the main characters’—marks a significant development in her historicist

worldview that led to some surprising manifestations in her last novel.

154

Chapter 5. Daniel Deronda and Appropriating the Past

Insofar as a novel “deconstructs” the assumptions of “realism” in fiction, it also
turns out to “deconstruct” naive notions about history or about the writing of
history. (J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative and History”)

“Was she beautifirl or was she not beautiful?” Daniel Deronda opens with an
uncertainty that strikes the dominant tone of Eliot’s final novel. In a complex scene that
takes place in a casino, the reader’s gaze is that of Daniel Deronda, who is watching the
“problematic sylph,” Gwendolen Harleth, lose her money at an alarming rate at a roulette
table. Few of Eliot’s legions of fans could have been prepared for the opening scene of
Daniel Deronda. Whereas her other novels congenially ask readers to travel back and try
to remember a more quiet and pleasant time on the edge of memory, before the railroad
had perforated the English countryside, or even earlier, when craftsmen worked and kept
time by the rising and setting of the sun rather than by watches, Deronda confronts them
with the uncertain mood of modernity. As Deronda surveyed the “scene of dull, gas-
poisoned absorption” he thought “Rousseau might be justified in maintaining that art and

science had done a poor service to mankind” (DD, 9). Even progress is dubious.

155

Furthermore, as the modern casino brought together the “distant varieties of Europe,”
there was a “certain uniform negativeness of expression which had the efl’ect of a mask—as
if they had all eaten some root that for the time compelled the brains of each to the same
narrow monotony of action” (DD, 8-9). The grim spell arresting Gwendolen and the
other players is “superstition”: in this case, a belief that “Providence” on your side—that
one’s luck is superior to that of all the others. Superstition and doubt combine in the gas-
lit spectacle to provide a suggestive overture to Eliot’s final historical experiment.

The gambling theme unfolds in the novel in a number of surprising ways. Besides
the opportunity for the simple moral rejection of greed on the grounds that one’s profiting
from another’s loss is the opposite of “fellow-feeling,” gambling also provides a metaphor
for the central philosophical problem of novel: How does one act with conviction when
the future is and can only be uncertain? Insofar as Deronda represents the best striving of
humanity, it is historical consciousness that provides the best light in the uncertain
darkness of time unfolding. The basis of social improvement and human progress,
according to the novel, is in our understanding of the past. However, it is not in the sense
that the past provides a road map for how things will unfold in the firture, but because it
guides us in self-discovery, from which progressive action derives.

Many literary critics regard Daniel Deronda as a departure from the realism of
Eliot’s other novels because it contains many unlikely coincidences, as well as a mystical
visionary whose expectations are always on the mark, and because the plot structure is
more like a romance, which the realist orientation rejects as fantasy.l Furthermore, the
many scenes in which the narrator avoids presenting an objective account of what is seen

and known, by describing only what the characters think and feel about each other is more

156

than a deferment of objective understanding. In many of those cases, those characters
employ literary categories (modes of emplotment) for organizing their understanding of
the events they are witnessing, or they sometimes use other art forms, like music, painting,
and theater, as referents in their understanding of what is happening to the other
characters, which only adds to the sense of instability and uncertainty. As an alternative
form of history, the novel has a Diltheyan irony, whose story told by a potentially fallible
narrator aware of this condition and relies on the uncertain and sometimes contradictory
perspectives of the characters, as with the opening line.

While Eliot scholars agree that Deronda is a major departure from realism and
represents a new direction in Eliot’s experimentation with fiction and the novel, there is
considerable variance on the nature of Eliot’s departure. Shuttleworth calls it the
“breakdown of the organic idea.”2 Where her previous fiction examined how attaining
organic social unity could be possible, Deronda abandons that possibility in favor of a
“fi'agmented” vision of society in which it makes more sense, for example, to work on
establishing a Jewish nation-state rather than finding purpose in a sense of commitment to
the more abstract ideal of humanity as a whole.3 Similarly, Graver argues that the novel
begins with disunity, fragmentation, and lack of community, and offers Deronda’s story as
the best possibility for attaining community, and Gwendolen’s isolation at the end as the
negative example." They both seem to recognize that history is somehow significant, and
Shuttleworth rightly acknowledges Feuerbach as a guiding influence on the novel’s
conception of the historical development of humanity.

If, however, we view all of Eliot’s fiction as experimental history-writing in a

Young Hegelian framework, it is possible to view the shift in Deronda as a new path in

157

historical inquiry, developing out of the complexity of Middlemarch, and taken to a point
that undermines the kind of objective history that was gaining institutional sanction as she
composed the novel. Heretofore, Eliot’s fiction already implicitly challenged the new
objective history by carving out a role for the imagination in historical thinking in which
her “historical picturing” and complex plots vivified those “pregnant moments” of the
past. Deronda, however, advances a perspective that admits that because our perception
and consciousness are unstable, the past too can be indeterminate, except insofar as it is
appropriated by impassioned inquiry. From this Dilthey-like conception of understanding
history from within its flow, Eliot more directly rejected the idea of understanding history
as if one was outside the process, which was the underlying assumption of the scientific

style of history-writing the new academic historians were enshrining.

By the 18703, Eliot was long past her active enthusiasm for the German Young
Hegelians, but the plot structure of Deronda indicates that certain features of Hegelian
thought were permanent fixtures in her worldview. In particular, Eliot still used the
pattern of consciousness expansion found in Hegel’s Phenomenology for the development
of individual characters, and the Religion of Humanity orientation of the Young Hegelian
philosophers remained as her guiding purpose for writing historical fiction. Gwendolen
Harleth and Daniel Deronda, in their attempts to find firlfilling life-paths, engage struggles
shaped by their difl’ering levels of sympathy. Gwendolen is the “spoiled child,” always
encouraged to believe that the world and everyone in it would bend to her will. Deronda,

on the other hand, is equipped with a unique ability to sympathize and those he encounters

158

are “glad to have been born” because of their knowing him. Gwendolen’s and Deronda’s
respective developments resemble different stages of Hegel’s system, but in the novel form
they take on symbolic significance that makes their stories comparable to the work of the
Young Hegelians insofar as they represent the spiritual advancement of humanity. If
Deronda represents the essence of humanity (in the Young Hegelian sense) in the modern
world, then Eliot’s last novel insists more than all of the others on the centrality of
historical consciousness in the progress of humanity.

Gwendolen Harleth’s retarded development represents the early Hegelian stage of
consciousness in which self is barely differentiated fi'om other. In the first book of Daniel
Deronda, “The Spoiled Child,” Gwendolen’s whims rule her entire family. She has high
expectations for a life filled with the adoration of others, as if she were an actress on stage.
She judges Offendene, the house into which her family moves, in terms of its fitness as her
“background” (DD, 26). “I am determined to be happy—at least not to go on muddling
away my life as other people do, being and doing nothing remarkable” (DD, 29). Most of
the young men she meets find her irresistible, and while she enjoys their attention—and
more importantly, her mastery of them-her selfishness disposes her against returning
affections. “I shall never love anybody,” she confesses to her mother. “I can’t love
people. I hate them” (DD, 82). It turns out that Gwendolen would rather remain
independent and imagines marriage only as a new venue for her mastery. Her initial
interest in Grandcourt, for example, is inspired only by the thought of his potential titles
and her wider visibility as the wife of a baronet, or if the right sequence of deaths occur,
the wife of a peer.

Gwendolen’s first encounters with criticism and with situations she is unable to

159

control begin to awaken in her a higher level of consciousness, characterized by the
differentiation of self from other. In the Phenomenology, Hegel depicts the birth of
consciousness at the moment of encounter with another consciousness, when the previous
understanding of self alone is revised. Gwendolen’s youthfirl fantasy was that she would
live life as a kind of heroine-princess, and Grandcourt’s interest in her seems to make that
a possibility. These hopes are subverted, however, when the appearance of Lydia Glasher,
makes Gwendolen realize that the fulfilment of her own desires will come at the expense
of Grandcourt’s children, because it is assumed that her marriage would alienate the
illegitimate children from his legacy. Unable to fathom this new reality, Gwendolen flies
to the Leubronn casino and entertains the fantasy that she can be the “queen of the
roulette table,” which is undermined by odds over which she has no control. Faced with
her family’s financial ruin, she then imagines her beauty and voice could lift them out of
difficulty with the pleasant side-efl’ect of celebrity and public praise. But the judgement of
Herr Klesmer, who she “dreaded. . .as part of that unmanageable world which was
independent of her wishes” (DD, 251), compels her to see that her gifts were admirable
only “fi'om a drawing-room stancmunkt” (DD, 256), and that her notion to become a rich
and famous stage-performer has “no more resemblance to reality than a pantomime” (DD,
258). Klesmer’s criticism is “epoch” making for Gwendolen, who had “a vision of herself
on the common level, and had lost the innate sense that there were reasons why she should
not be slighted, elbowed, jostled-treated like a passenger with a third-class ticket” (DD,
262). The “spoiled child” was not prepared to think of herselfas anything but exceptional,
but nevertheless is forced to see herself simply as one among others, which corresponds to

the first moment in Hegel’s Phenomenology (see previous chapter).

160

Deronda exists at a much more advanced stage in the dialectic of Spirit. His
supreme sympathy not only enables him to commiserate with others, he makes them feel
“happy to have been born.” However, his enormous ability for sympathy is also a
disadvantage. In carefully unpacking Deronda’s intellectual background and proclivities in
order to describe his first awakening interest in Judaism (long before there is any suspicion
of his origins), the narrator says he has a “many-sided sympathy, which threatened to
hinder any persistent course of action. . . . His imagination had so wrought itself to the
habit of seeing things as they probably appeared to others, that a strong partisanship . . .
had become an insincerity for him. His plenteous, flexible sympathy had ended by falling
into one current with that reflective analysis which tends to neutralise sympathy” (DD,
364). “Sympathy” is the center of Eliot’s moral philosophy, but it has its potential pitfalls:
if too diffuse, it can paralyze action. Whereas Dorothea’s wide ability for sympathy was
checked by her marginalized gender in Middlemarch, Deronda has been unable to commit
to any particular cause because by taking on “strong partisanship,” he gains the negative
side of rejecting the opposition, for which he can also find sympathy. In terms of Hegelain
dialectics, Deronda would be seen to have perfect consciousness of all competing
arguments in the process of becoming. He is thus unable to commit to any of the
temporary movements.

The association of the narrator’s description of Deronda’s wide sympathetic ability
with his becoming acquainted with the history of Judaism not only foreshadows his later
self-discovery, it also forms the crux of Eliot’s point concerning historical consciousness.
One important dimension of Deronda’s ability is “historic sympathy.” An instructive

example of this ability occurs in his discussion with Grandcourt on a rebellious uprising in

161

the British colony of Jamaica. Grandcourt believes “the Jamaican negro was a beastly sort
of baptist Caliban.” Deronda, however, “always felt a little with Caliban, who naturally
had his own point of view and could sing a good song,” and firrthermore, he believed if
the problems in the colony were caused by racial mixing, “the whites had to thank
themselves for the half-breeds” (DD, 331). Here Deronda shows his knack for feeling for
the opposition: though raised as an Englishman, he seems to be keenly aware of how the
English can be viewed by colonized people as the source of problems. Despite this ability,
however, it is not until his contact with Mirah that Deronda begins to change his
perspective on Judaism, in which he had previously assumed it to be “a sort of eccentric
fossilised form which an accomplished man might dispense with studying, and leave to
specialists” (DD, 363). Mirah, for whom her religion “was of one fibre with her
afi’ections,” (DD, 362) makes Deronda consider that “Judaism was something still
throbbing in human lives, still making for them the only conceivable vesture of the world”
(DD, 363). A subsequent trip to Frankfurt affords Deronda the opportunity to visit a
synagogue where he begins to look at “human types there; and his thought, busily
connecting them with the past phases of their race, stirred that fibre of historic sympathy
which had helped to determine in him certain traits worth mentioning for those who are
interested in his firture” (DD, 363). That firture is Deronda’s appropriation of the history
of Judaism as his own.

The description of Deronda’s sympathetic flame of mind contains subtle clues that
Eliot wished to oppose his “historic sympathy” to the objectivist approach to history that
was becoming more wide-spread in the 18703. The “specialists” to whom Deronda would

previously have left the history of Judaism may refer to the new professional. According

162

to Heyck, the major movement in the direction of specialization in natural and social
sciences resulted in the delineation of new university disciplines: history was separated
from law at Oxford in 1873, and fi'om moral sciences at Cambridge in 1875. While the
first Regius Professors of history at Oxford and Cambridge, Thomas Arnold in 1841 and
Charles Kingsley in 1859 respectively, were “men of letters” who wrote popular histories,
subsequent professional historians were obliged to make their developing discipline seem
as scientific, objective, and empirical as possible in order for it to be considered a
legitimate area of inquiry.5 To bring this about, many historians believed they needed to
distinguish their discipline fi'om literature so that the taint of literary afl’ect would not mar
the objective presentation of facts. In the move to make history more scientific, British
historians like Buckle in the late 18503, Seeley and Stubbs in the 603 and 703, and an
increasing number of new professional historians thereafter, sought to divorce history both
from its super-disciplines at Oxford and Cambridge, and from its real parent, literature."
The “reflective analysis which tends to neutralise sympathy” might very well
describe Eliot’s impression of the new academic historians. The unimpassioned approach
makes history seem like a “dwelling-place of lost souls, that dead anatomy of culture
which turns the universe into a mere ceaseless answer to queries, and knows, not
everything, but everything else about everything-as if one should be ignorant of nothing
concerning the scent of violets except the scent itself for which one had no nostril” (DD,
365). Instead, Deronda, for whom “[a] too reflective and difi’usive sympathy was in
danger of paralysing in him that indignation against wrong and that selectness of
fellowship which are the conditions of moral force,” began to long for “either some

external event, or some inward light, that would urge him into a definite line of action, and

163

compress his wandering energy” (DD, 364-65). The weakness of the “reflective analysis”
that “rreutralised sympathy,” in Eliot’s view, represents the kind of disinterest that the new
professional history sought to achieve in its bid to be respected as a science.

One could argue that Deronda had no choice but to accept Jewish history as his
own, that appropriation does not accurately describe one’s relationship with his past.
What has happened, after all, has already happened, and we do not have the choice to alter
the past; as Deronda tells Mordecai, “What my birth was does not lie in my will” (DD,
502). The novel, however, poses a counter-argument in the character of Princess Leonora
Halm-Eberstein, Deronda’s mother. Born to an insistent father with strict ideas about the
way Jewish girls and young women ought to live, Deronda’s mother associated being
Jewish with stifling obligation. She rejected her Jewish heritage, and gave her baby up for
adoption in order to follow her calling to the stage. The Princess has no regrets about
turning her back on Judaism, and though she was born a Jew, Deronda’s mother is, for all
practical purposes, no longer Jewish. This example suggests that one is not bound to
accept the heritage into which she is born. However, there is no mistake that her decision
also to turn her back on her child is a grave one. By denying herself and her son that
peculiar kind of filial love, her sacrifice seems rather severe. Furthermore, Deronda’s
active adoption of the heritage that she rejected for fame makes her seem supremely
selfish.

Deronda’s appropriation of Jewish heritage begins with his relationship with
Mordecai. The consumptive Jewish mystic is “a fi'ail incorporation of the national
consciousness, breathing with difficult breath” (DD, 517). Mordecai feels that his soul is

inhabited by a medieval cabalist who “had absorbed the philosophy of the Gentile into the

164

faith of the Jew, and . . . still yearned toward a centre for our race” (DD, 498), and is
convinced that Deronda is the next heir to this soul. So he begins to teach Deronda about
his visions of the firture of Judaism. These visions are indelibly linked to the Jewish past.

The world grows, and its frame is knit together by the growing soul; dim, dim at

first, then clearer and more clear, the consciousness discems remote stirrings. As

thoughts move within us darkly, and shake us before they are fully discerned—so
events—so beings; they are knit with us in the growth of the world. You have risen
within me like a thought not firlly spelled: my soul is shaken before the words are

all there. The rest will comchit will come. (DD, 501)

Mordecai’s conception is a Feuerbachian construct that is sensitive to the growth of ideas
becoming manifest. The “growing soul” is Hegelian Spirit gaining higher levels of
consciousness.

The weighty significance of the past is the central theme of the chapter depicting
Mordecai’s “Philosophers” club. Mordecai describes a “faint likeness” between his
companions and “the great Transmitters, who laboured with their hands for scant bread,
but preserved and enlarged for us the heritage of memory, and saved the soul of Israel
alive as a seed among the tombs” (DD, 521). But the comparison is ironic because the
topic of the evening’s discussion—the “law of Progress”—occasions some (who call
themselves “rational”) to advance their impression that human progress tends away fiom
Jewish nationalism and toward the assimilation of Jews into the dominant cultures of their
respective European countries. The only one to disagree is Mordecai, who does so based
on a specific conception of the relationship between the past and the present.

But what is it to be rational. . . ? It is to see more and more of the hidden bonds

that bind and consecrate change as a dependent growth—yea, consecrate it with

kinship: the past becomes my parent, and the future stretches towards me the
appealing arms of children. . . . When it is rational to say, “I know not my father
or my mother, let my children be aliens to me, that no prayer of mine may touch

them,” then it will be rational for the Jew to say, “I will seek to know no difference
between me and the Gentile, I will not cherish the prophetic consciousness of our

165

nationality—let the Hebrew cease to be, and let all his memorials be antiquarian
trifles, dead as the wall-paintings of a conjectured race.” (DD, 528-29)

Mordecai’s appeal to Jewish national sentiment rests on the common feeling of kinship
and inter-generational love, the kind that Deronda’s mother forsook. To ignore one’s
Jewish heritage would be to trivialize all that one’s ancestors held dear, to make
memorials into “antiquarian trifles,” and to somehow disown one’s children.

Mordecai’s forceful speech also contains an indirect critique of the dispassionate
approach of the new historical profession. Heyck describes an “antiquarian influence” at
Oxford just after mid-century, in which the interest in the past for such historians as
Freeman, Stubbs, and Green, was for its own sake, i.e., they were driven to study the past
simply because they loved the architecture, languages, and other forms of antiquity. In
their minds, according to Heyck, this antiquariarrism “dovetailed” with the prescripts of

”7 Their conception

natural science in “promoting the idea of knowledge for its own sake.
of history as a science like any other natural science led them to think of writing history as
contributing to the “sum total of historical knowledge itself?” Whereas Eliot may have
been more sympathetic to the “Oxford School” perspective on history at the time of its
emergence in the 18503——which coincided with her review of Riehl and her enthusiasm for
the idea of a “natural history” of societies—the several examples in Deronda, such as
Mordecai’s dismissal of “antiquarian trifles,” indicate that by the mid 18703, she had
rejected that perspective in favor of one which looked to the past with keen personal
interest.

The sense of appropriation of the past in Daniel Deronda has a number of parallels

to Nietzsche’s philosophy of history, but is ultimately too committed to the Hegelian

historical dialectic to be as creative/destructive as in Nietzsche’s sense. What Nietzsche

166

called the “disadvantage” (Nachteil) of history—that forms a repressive yoke, diminishing
creative life—Eliot viewed as dialectical origins that informed self-knowledge and
instructed sentiments. F oreshadowed as the “final necessary piece,” Deronda’s
appropriation of Jewish heritage is completed by learning of his parents and grandparents,
and the circumstances of his birth. Once he can fully identify himself with a 1500 year-old
struggle he is then able to apply himself to a cause: he calls it “restoring a political
existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre such as
the English have.” (DD, 803). Being dumb to the past begets a state of consciousness like
Gwendolen’s, whose selfishness is alienating and whose choices are always a gamble
based in fantasy. Deronda’s mother resembles a kind of Nietzschean hero who
consciously, and destructively, turns her back on her past because for her it would have
been a heritage that prevented her from developing her artistic genius. I would suggest
that Deronda does not fully examine the implications of the Princess’s choice.9 But she is

certainly the anti-hero in contrast to Deronda’s example.

The perspectivist dimensions of Daniel Deronda parallel what Hayden White has
described as the highest achievement in nineteenth-century historical imagination: the
Nietzschean realization of our ironic historical condition.10 The condition is ironic
because the kind of historical interpretation that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth
century involved a prosaic pretense to realism, i.e., the nature of historical prose at this

time assumed that there is one best way to shape the chaos of the historical record into a

167

narrative form, yet we realize (after Nietzsche)ll that there is no permanent basis for
establishing the truth of any particular account. Since truth claims are thus beside the
point—and White himself is operating within this Nietzschean flame of mind—his analysis
of the work of major historians and philosophers of history focuses on the tropes and
modes of emplotrnent that inhere in their writing because he sees these literary factors as
fundamental to our conceptualization of any narrative. The Nietzschean rejection of the
scientific claim to objectivity in general, and the importance of the appropriation of the
past for self-development in particular, manifests what White has called the ironic self-
awareness of our historical condition. Dilthey’s work represented an early efl’ort to
systematize the study of the past while maintaining the self-awareness of this ironic
condition. The extent to which he was unable to do so produced a sense of “crisis” for
those who felt that historicism had undermined the possibility for truth claims. Eliot
approached the same problem of the irony of prosaic, objective truth claims in Daniel
Deronda, and Deronda’s historical appropriation and his decision to join the cause of
Jewish nationalism constitute a possible “solution” to that problem.

The sense of crisis historicism for Eliot was thus a literary problem, and the best
way to contextualize her achievement in Deronda is to consider the implications of her
shitting use of realism. Like realism in painting, literary realism presented ordinary scenes
of contemporary, usually lower and middle class, life—as opposed to the allegorical,
mythological, and classical topics of the romantic styles. It is often linked with various
anti-metaphysical philosophies, especially Comte’s, around the mid nineteenth century. ‘2
Many believed that “philosophy,” by which they meant metaphysical philosophy, focused

too much on the imaginary and not enough on “concrete,” material things. According to

168

M. H. Abrahms, literary realism is supposed to represent reality as an imitation, or to use
Erich Auerbach’s word, a “mimesis,” of the real world.13 The intended efl’ect is that the
reader recognize the descriptions of people and events as ordinary, common, and likely.
In order to produce the sense of the individual experience through language, realists such
as Fielding, Jane Austen, Balzac, and Tolstoy tried to make their readers feel like they
shared the experience. Realism involves the writer’s “selection” of a number of elements
so as to produce the “illusion” of ordinary lived experience and is thus a fictive act.”
Maupassant, at the end of the nineteenth century, had recognized this very well.

The realist, if he is an artist, will endeavor not to show us a commonplace

photograph of life, but to give us a presentment of it which shall be more

complete, more striking, more cogent than reality itself. To tell everything is out of
the question: it would require at least a volume for each day to enumerate the
endless, insignificant incidents which crowd our existence. A choice must be

made-and this is the first blow to the theory of ‘the whole truth . . .’ Whence I

conclude that the skilled Realists should rather call themselves illusionists. 1’
While there is a dimension of realism that represents a human striving for sharing
individual experience, there is another dimension that seems, when we read Maupassant’s
comment, like a parlor trick. Levine’s take on realism assumes that best examples of
nineteenth-century realism were written by authors who had Maupassant’s ironic self-
awareness that their ability to relate experiences of reality were illusory.“

Eliot’s approach to historical fiction had all along assumed a kinship between
fiction and history, and the realism of her earlier fiction helped to suggest that veracious
historical fiction was a way to do history. Her departure fi'om realism in Deronda into a
style that might be called perspectivism implies that historical writing could also move

beyond the limits of realist prose.

Eliot’s familiarity with the parallels between fiction and history, developing in her

169

previous novels, make some of the moves in Deronda seem keenly opposed to the
pretense of objectivity of the professionalizing community of historians in the 18703. The
novel begins by challenging a narrative convention of chronological sequence. Even
before the reader encounters Deronda’s uncertain gaze on Gwendolen, the epigraph to the
first chapter highlights the subjective nature of narrative and human knowledge.
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the
strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point
in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at
Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to
start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very
different from his; since Science, too, reckons backwards as well as forwards,
divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in
medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; it is but a fiaction of
that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out. (DD, 7)
This passage does many things, and its location at the beginning of the novel is a clear sign
that Eliot was, at the very least, complicating the notion of historical interpretation,
because even though readers’ comprehension of the novel’s action is at “Nought,” they
should know that we are starting in the midst of an historical flow. The first two chapters
take place in Leubronn. In the latter, Gwendolen is called home to Offendene after her
family’s fortune is lost. (See Table 3) The third chapter goes back almost a year to
describe Gwendolen and her family moving into Offendene. From here the chapters
proceed chronologically through Gwendolen’s courtship with Grandcourt until chapter 14,

when Gwendolen flies to Leubronn, and in chapter 15 we learn that Grandcourt was on his

way to look for her just as Deronda was observing her for the first time in chapter 1.

170

Table3
Chapters 1-2 3-14 15 16-20 21-70

Chronology of Events III II HI I IV

Chapters 16-20 discuss Deronda’s upbringing by his adoptive father, Sir Hugo Mallinger,
his years at school, and his finding of Mirah. Chapter 21 then describes Gwendolen’s
return from Leubronn, the moment suspended since chapter two. We look backward and
forward from the position of present awareness of the “all-presupposing fact.” The
epigraph makes explicit that the flashback tactic of the novel reflects historical inquiry,
which begins with the present mind—we look back with interest. The histories of
Deronda and Gwendolen will be of interest because we know fi'om the outset about the
middle part of the story, when their two streams meet at Leubronn. By chapter 20, that
moment has become enriched by knowing the personal-historical circumstances and their
states of mind. As “background” to that scene in the casino, the histories of Gwendolen
and Deronda are arranged to explain that moment and set up the interpretation of the turns
of plot that follow.

The first chapter’s epigraph stresses the subjective dimension of human perception
and knowledge by focusing on how science relies on conventions of narrative structure.
We are asked to consider the way “Science” constructs narratives that “reckon forward
and backwar ” from in medias res. The specific example in the epigraph reminds us that
it was an arbitrary moment, in the context of cosmic time, when we on Earth set our
sidereal clocks at “Nought,” and “pretend” that this is the beginning of a new cycle, while

the star of reference is in its ‘firnceasing journey,” unrelated and unaware that anything

171

new (like the “make-believe unit” of an Earth year) has begun. Truth is therefore relative
to the position of the stars as viewed from Earth. Knowledge and “Science,” represented
here by astronomy, seem like a systems that merely organizes experience in local human
terms, and in doing so, they must employ the narrative strategy of “the make-believe of a
beginning,” for “men can do nothing without it.”
In a later chapter, Eliot employs another astronomy analogy that insists on the
central role of imagination in developing historical narrative and knowledge. With a
metanarrative sense that Eliot is reflecting on her own dificulties in composing the novel,
the epigraph to chapter 16 reads:
Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The astronomer
threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so for every visible arc in
the wanderer’s orbit; and the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the
same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and
thought which lead up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense
sufl’ering which take the quality of action—like the cry of Prometheus, whose
chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea and sky he invokes and the
deity he defies. (DD, 164)

This epigraph introduces a chapter describing the peculiarities of Deronda’s childhood,
which were invisible to us at the casino. Those peculiarities were his ignorance of his own
origins, his sensitivity to that circumstance, and the simultaneous development of a
“passion for history” and a tendency to speculate on what his origins were. He had been
“making conjectures about his own history, as he had often made stories about Pericles or
Columbus, just to fill up the blanks before they became famous” (DD, 168). The historical
“blanks” are the “hidden pathways” and “invisible histories” referred to in the epigraph,
and in the context of this chapter, they are Deronda’s feelings. Ifthey are to be

“threaded,” the unobservable “invisible histories” must be developed with an imaginative

faculty, like Eliot’s “historic imagination” or Deronda’s conjectures.

172

Eliot’s view of historical imagination, used to “fill up the blanks,” gives subjectivity
a significant role in knowledge creation, a view that her husband had begun to theorize ten
years earlier. Lewes wrote that all perception depends on “mental vision,” i.e.,
imagination, which “supplies the deficiencies of ocular vision,”" or what the senses fail to
provide. Eliot applied this understanding to historical knowledge, reasoning in the
“Historic Imagination” passage that ‘Veracious . . . historical picturing” involved
“supplying deficiencies by careful analogical creation” that the “extant evidence” was
unable to provide. The “ and elements of history require the illumination of special
imaginative treatment” because physical evidence alone cannot provide the historical
connections—the “threads”—between objects, people, and events (Essays, 446-47). As if
to demonstrate the emcacy of imaginative approaches to reconstructing the hidden
passages of the past, Deronda’s early speculations about his origins turn out to be close to
the mark. When Sir Hugo suggested to him that he might consider a career as a great
singer, Deronda, who had singing talent, recoiled: “That Sir Hugo should have thought of
him in that position for a moment, seemed to Daniel an unmistakeable proof that there was
something about his birth which threw him out fiom the class of gentlemen to which the
baronet belonged” (DD, 170). The revelation that his mother had herself been a great
singer confirmed Deronda’s conjecture, made possible by his considerable imaginative
faculties.

The same notebook in which the “Historic Imagination” passage appears contains
a number of writings that show Eliot working out her understanding of narrative and its
centrality in historical inquiry. An entry she called “Story-Telling,” in particular, raises

several concerns that are addressed in one way or another in Deronda. The passage poses

173

the question: “What is the best way of telling a story?” The simple answer is that there is
no “best” way, but “many good ways” depending on the “interest of the audience.” Eliot
then defends the approach she came to use in Deronda by associating the “fragmentary
and unchronological way” of telling a story with the ways in which we develop knowledge
of the past. “[W]e get interested in the stories life presents to us through divers orders
and modes of presentation. Very commonly our first awakening to a desire of knowing a
man’s past or future comes from our seeing him as a stranger in some unusual or pathetic
or humorous situation, or manifesting some remarkable characteristics.” Our motivation
for learning comes from our “incompleteness of the first information.”18 Memory, she
says, works in a similar way: “[S]ome salient experience appears in inward vision, and in
consequence the antecedent facts are retraced fiom what is regarded as the beginning of
the episode in which that experience made a more or less strikingly memorable part”
(Essays, 444-45). The point of these opening remarks is to establish that knowledge
about the past is a combination of “processes of outward and inward life,” or objective
and subjective experiences, and the successfirl story-writer should keep that in mind before
presenting the elements of the story in mere chronological order.

The passage then turns to the theory of knowledge that Lewes had addressed in his
Principles of Success in Literature, in a section called “Psychology of Mental Vision.”
Lewes and Eliot both celebrate the ability to raise mental “images” to analytical power.
For Lewes, imagination is the “mind’s eye,” which sees what is not apparent to “ocular
vision.” Perception, inference, reasoning, and imagination are all kinds of this mental
visualization. One of his examples will sound familiar to those who have read the

epigraphs of Deronda.

174

A chain of reasoning is a chain of inferences: ideal presentations of objects and
relations not apparent to Sense, or not presentable to Sense. Could we realise all
the links in this chain, by placing the objects in their actual order as a visible series,
the reasoning would be a succession of perceptions. Thus the path of a planet is

seen by reason to be an ellipse. It would be perceived as a fact, if we were in a

proper position and endowed with the requisite means of following the planet in its

course; but not having this power, we are reduced to infer the unapparent points in

its course from the points which are apparent. We see them mentally. 1’

Because we cannot put ourselves in an actual position to trace the elliptical path of a
planet, we connect the “facts” of our observations into a shape drawn by our mind, the
“ideal presentation.” Imagination is that ability to “infer” or “perceive” what we do not
actually see. It is what Eliot meant in the epigraph describing the astronomer who
“threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so for every visible arc in the
wanderer’s orbit,” which was then associated with the narration of “human actions.” In
the “Story-Telling” notebook-entry, Eliot draws a distinction between the effective story-
teller who has a “superior mastery of images and pictures in grasping the attention,” and
the “desire for orderly narration,” which could characterize the kind of history writing to
which Eliot objected (Essays, 445).

Deronda contains many passing remarks by the narrator and various characters
that betray that Eliot was thinking, and even joking, about how the imagination “threads
the darkness” in ways that make sense in some narrative ideal. The Meyrick girls and
Gwendolen’s sisters, who seem to be an audience within the novel to the primary action of
the novel, provide references to literary styles and try to force their knowledge of the
other “characters” into storylines that fit, in particular, with romance. When the Meyricks

\
first meet Deronda, they “thoroughly accept him as an ideal” and Mab presciently
romanticizes that he is “Prince Carmaralzarnan,” fiom The Arabian Nights (DD, 184).

One imagines that they picked up this tendency from their mother, who reads the

175

newspapers for the list of marriages, which gives her “the pleasant sense of finishing the
fashionable novels without having read them, and seeing the heroes and heroines happy
without knowing what poor creatures they were” (DD, 726). When listening to Anna
Gascoigne describe familial connections hitherto unknown to the Meyricks, Mab insists
that she incorporate Deronda into the picture, “You must bring him in” (DD, 655), as if to
accomodate her idea of a good story. Gwendolen’s yachting trip with Grandcourt “made
a striking part of the sisters’ romance, the book-devouring Isabel throwing in a corsair or
two to make an adventure that might end well” (DD, 708, my italics). Gwendolen’s life is
her “sisters’ romance,” and through these continued suggestions by the narrator, the novel
becomes, in many ways, the reader’s romance as well. These light-hearted moments have
a serious point behind them, for they reflect the reader’s comprehension of the novel’s
plots, which must happen within literary frameworks.

The Gwendolen story poses the consequences, however, of what can happen when
literary fiameworks form a kind of trap by leading one to bad inferences, and then to bad
choices. Gwendolen’s dificulties arise because her consciousness is shaped primarily by
romance. When conjecturing, for example, where Grandcourt’s affections might lay, she
thinks that “men have been known to choose some one else than the woman they most
admired, and recalled several experiences of that kind in novels” (DD, 114). Gwendolen’s
“horizon” was for her a “genteel romance” in which she plays the heroine (DD, 53), and
everywhere likes to imagine herself on a stage, which is why Klesmer’s critique came as
such a blow. She wanted to be the “heroine of the gaming table” (DD, 272). She speaks
of herself with a “tragic air” as her family’s troubles start to weigh on her (DD, 276). The

trap of her marriage to Grandcourt was laid by her muddled imagination, which led her to

176

expect to be able to command a husband. Though she did not love Grandcourt, she did
anticipate a “fuller power of managing circumstance—with all the official strength of
marriage, which some women made so poor use of’ (DD, 355). But these thoughts were
nothing more than “the yeasty mingling of dimly understood facts with vague but deep
impressions, and with images half real, halffantastic” (DD, 354). Gwendolen’s life might
have been more like Deronda’s mother’s: the contrast between the two is direct, for the
Princess held absolute command over her husband, and had become a famous singer. Had
she better command of imagination, so that images “half fantastic” would not have
clouded her judgement, each of her choices would have been less like a gamble.

Deronda and Mordecai form the major positive example of effective imagination in
knowledge creation in the novel. We have already seen how Deronda’s historical
imagination enabled him to divine some of the circumstances of his birth. It also disposed
him to be open to Mordecai’s claim that they had a mysterious kinship.

This claim, indeed, considered in what is called a rational way, might seem

justifiably dismissed as illusory and even preposterous; but it was precisely what

turned Mordecai’s hold on him fi'om an appeal to his ready sympathy into a clutch
on his struggling conscience. Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, and
inner deliverance of fixed law: they are the voice of sensibilities as various as our
memories. . . . And Deronda’s conscience included sensibilities beyond the
common, enlarged by his early habit of thinking himself imaginatively into the

experience of others. (DD, 511)

The narrator makes an excuse for Deronda’s openness to Mordecai’s claim by suggesting
that because inner lives are not merely mechanical processes, our perception of outward
processes must be more than simple adherence to “fixed law.” In other words, Deronda’s
imagination enables him to see things that most others cannot. Eliot calls upon Aristotle

in the epigraph of this chapter to prepare the reader for what may seem impossible. “This,

too, is probable, according to that saying of Agathon: ‘It is a part of probability that many

177

improbable things will happen’” (DD, 509). Mordecai’s claim seems improbable only
because it is so extraordinary—beyond common experience. Deronda’s imaginative
sympathy, however, allows for the possibility.

Mordecai has imaginative power in spades, which gives him an apparent knack for
seeing into the firture. His mind was “wrought . . . constantly in images.” His ways of
thinking and speaking “often resembled genuine dreams in their way of breaking off the
passage from the know to the unknown” (DD, 473). Even when Mordecai was not
actually on his bridge gazing westward, “his imagination spontaneously planted him”
there. The vague representation of his longing became discemable through the “progress
of his imagination.” In his quest for an heir, he developed the image of a face “gathered
from his memory of faces seen among the Jews of Holland and Bohemia, and from the
paintings which revived that memory.” In this way Mordecai threaded the darkness of the
unknown and anticipated Deronda’s face before he ever saw him.

Reverently let it be said of this mature spiritual need that it was akin to the boy’s

and girl’s picturing of the future beloved; but 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. The visionary form
became a companion and auditor; keeping a place not only in the waking

imagination, but those dreams of lighter slumber. (DD, 474)

By relating Mordecai’s visions to a child’s unrestrained yet immature imagination, Eliot is
adding a new level to Lewes’s list of perceptive faculties that make the unwitnessed
connections and create knowledge. Perception, inference, reason, and imagination formed
a kind of hierarchy of complexity for Lewes,20 to which Eliot is now adding Mordecai’s
somnarnbulant, visionary ability.

Mordecai’s visionary ability, sometimes referred to as “second sight,” can be

viewed as Eliot’s daring experiment to see whether it is possible to characterize

178

realistically the apparently supernatural. She seems to have known that some readers
would want to dispute this new direction, for the chapter in which Mordecai is first
described at length opens with an “apology” for second sight. “‘Second-sight’ is a flag
over disputed ground. But it is matter of knowledge that there are persons whose
yearnings, conception-nay, travelled conclusions—continually take the form of images
which have a foreshadowing power. . . . [These persons are not] less sane than the
commonplace calculators of the market” (DD, 471). Mordecai’s anticipation of Deronda
is a demonstration of this “foreshadowing power.” The apologies continue as Mordecai’s
power to intuit the firture is further described as “a wise estimate of consequences . . .
fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes
in.” Here Eliot builds upon the theory of knowledge that includes perceptive imagination,
and goes one step further in stressing the subjective side. As if to legitimate the move, the
narrator continues:
The inspirations of the world have come in that way too: even strictly-measuring
science could hardly have got on without that forecasting ardour which feels the
agitations of discovery beforehand, and has a faith in its preconception that
surrnounts many failures of experiment. And in relation to human motives and
actions, passionate belief has a fiiller eflicacy. Here enthusiasm may have the
validity of proof, and, happening in one soul, give the type of what will one day be
general. (DD, 513)
Science, too, carries on by a “forecasting ardour,” where discoverers are guided by the
belief that their intuition is accurate. Copernicus and Columbus are the examples that
make the case. They advanced their respective searches with a passion that could only
come from a belief in their conceptions. Copernicus somehow had a vision of a solar

system with the sun at the center before his observations could be brought to bear on the

issue. Likewise, Columbus had a conception of the globe that led him to risk everything in

179

order to prove that one could sail west and reach India. The narrator argues that with
these heroic examples firmly rooted in the western view of science and progress, there is
little reason not to entertain the possibility that Mordecai has tapped into something that

allows him foresight.

The novel’s departure fi'om realism is one indication that Eliot had joined a number
of nineteenth-century figures in reassessing the subject/object duality implied by Cartesian
philosophy in general, and by objective history in particular. Shuttleworth reads Deronda
as Eliot’s application of new psychological theory that Claude Bernard was developing in
France in the 18603, which Lewes followed with great interest.21 Bernard described life as
a process, “the result of contact between the organism and its milieu?” suggesting that
self is transitory and that consciousness transcends the individual human organism. The
subject (the perceiving agent) and the object (another person or group, work, or culture)
are “abstractions” of the real thing, which is the process of experience. For Bernard,
electricity, which is what we call the process of charged particles interacting with their
environment, provided the appropriate metaphor. Dale argues that Eliot’s later career
represents an interest in “new physics” in which she abandoned the positivist hope to find
“exact correspondence between structures of mind and structures of nature, recognition of
the inescapability of metaphor/interpretation, pushes her towards an understanding of
mind as an independent expression of energy, constituting an order of its own, rather than
seeking to conform to some putative primordial order outside itself.”23 These

interpretations share not only a similarity of metaphor, but also the perception that Eliot

180

was moving into a post-positivist phase. If, however, we consider the significance of the
framework of Young Hegelian historicism behind Eliot’s worldview, and its parallel to the
crisis historicism of Dilthey, then a view of her uniquely literary approach to the problems
of nineteenth-century historicism emerges.

The Hegelian dialectical orientation of her previous novels is still crucial in Eliot’s
last novel because it continues to provide the model of process. Hegel’s own critique of
the one-sidedness of Enlightenment thought bears a striking resemblance to Eliot’s
critique of the one-sidedness of objectivist history in the 18703. Hegel tried to show that
the fundamental quality of the Enlightenment theory of knowledge—the Cartesian dualism
of subject and object—was an illusion by arguing that subject and object are merely
moments in the process of Spirit becoming. Eliot’s (and Lewes’s) theory of knowledge in
general, and of historical knowledge in particular, continues the struggle to overcome the
impression that what is known is really outside of the perceiving consciousness. Eliot
insists in Deronda that the creation of historical knowledge is a process involving the
imagination of the perceiving agent that “fills in the blanks” endemic to a merely objective
view.

But the Hegelian inspiration to historicize systems of thought has turned back on
itself. Once truth is historicized, uncertainty reigns. When personal development is
centralized within a worldview that has historicized truth, as it had for Eliot in the 18703,
perspective becomes multiple and unstable, as it does in Daniel Deronda. At the level of
the individual, action is a problem of self-consciousness in the Hegelian system : how does
one act according to the flow of history when one does not fully comprehend his

relationship to that history? That history itself is not fixed reflects back on the subjective

181

consciousness which, therefore, cannot be stable. Dilthey had reached a similar conclusion
with respect to subjectivity in locating the basis of knowledge in the “facts of
consciousness,” which carried this same dynamic relationship with history. Eliot realized
that there is a subjective element in any response to this condition, that any construction of
a history that one is trying to be connected to involves an appropriation—a shaping—of
the past with the use of imagination to “thread the darkness.” In the novel, Deronda
adopts a heritage fiom Mordecai (who happens to be looking for an heir), a move
facilitated by the discovery of his Jewish parentage, and he (re)appropriates the history of
the Jews as his own. Deronda follows his feeling to Palestine, with the deep resonance in

his perception that he belongs to a historical process.

182

Conclusion: Looking Backward

Most of us, who have had decent parents, would shrink from wishing that our
father and mother had been somebody else whom we never knew; yet it is held no
impiety—rather, a gracefirl mark of instruction—for a man to wail that he was not
the son of another age and another nation, of which also he knows nothing except
through the easy process of an imperfect imagination and a flattering fancy.
(George Eliot, “Looking Backward”)l

In this opening line from an essay in her last published work, The Impressions of
Theophrastus Such, Eliot touched on themes ubiquitous in her fiction with characteristic
economy. The passage advances the organic model of the relationship of an individual to
his milieu and to his past—one of the specific messages that runs through Eliot’s work.
The use of the parental example lends a poetic air to an implication of that central
message: that the responsible thing to do is accept one’s lot and view one’s
contemporaries as familial. The passage utilizes a romantic-historical fi'amework—in
which “another age and another nation” is a unique temporal-cultural unity—and criticizes
the over-idealization, the “imperfect imagination,” of the past, where the grass often looks

greener. Theophrastus Such, the narrator, is trying to avoid what we might call a

183

Burckhardtian syndrome, after the historian who saw the brief flower of the Renaissance a
mere reminder of a much greater culture of antiquity, both of which he seemed to prefer to
his own age. Such warns that if we do not feel connected to our own times and hold
sympathy for our contemporaries, “some attempt to regard them with the same freedom
from ill-temper . . . as we may hope will be felt by those who will call us ancient . . . [then]
the looking before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to
a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifl‘erence or bitterness than was
ever bred by the ascetic’s contemplation of heaven”2
“Looking Backward,” like much of Eliot’s fiction, looks back on the early
nineteenth century. Nearing the end of her life in the late 187 03, Eliot continued to search
for new ways to reconcile the historical transformation that occurred in the first third of
the nineteenth century with the memories of her youth in the 18203 and 18303 and what
she knew about the world of her father’s generation. In “Looking Backward,” Such
recalls the charms of the preindustrial English countryside—the world of his father just
after the turn of the century—in a consciously nostalgic manner. But the piece is
ultimately ironic from the standpoint of historical consciousness, for not only does it
question the ability to remember the past without sweetening it, “Looking Backward”
endorses the philosophical position that Eliot mobilized in her novels: the centrality of
imagination in developing historical awareness.
Perhaps this England of my affections is half-visionary,—a dream in which things
are connected according to my well-fed, lazy mood, and not at all by the multi-
tudinous links of graver, sadder fact, such as belong everywhere to the story of
human labour. Well, well, the illusions that began for us when we were less
acquainted with evil have not lost their value when we discern them to be illusions.
They feed the ideal Better; and in loving them still, we strengthen the precious

habit of loving something not visibly, tangibly existent, but a spiritual product of
our visible, tangible selves.’

184

The remembered past must be shaped by an ideal, an inner feeling that makes it a spiritual
product that also feeds back into the ideal itself. McCaw uses the first part of this
passage, ending with “human labour,” to support his argument that Eliot’s historical sense
was both Whiggish—i.e., liberal and present-centered—and self-aware of its
Whiggishness, thus creating a paradox.‘ The rest of the passage helps considerably to
draw a picture of the epistemological fi'amework of Eliot’s philosophy of history, which,
whether she was creating a “national past,” as McCaw argues, or a more general,
European history of the rise of modernity, it is something born from of the tension
between a spiritual ideal that is not tangibly existent and the “graver, sadder facts” of
prosaic, quotidian life.

Perhaps it was something like “Looking Backward” that Dilthey had in mind when
he called for the creation of historical knowledge based in the “facts of consciousness,” or
in a way that derived from life-experience. Such’s description of the act of remembering
the early nineteenth century is constantly burdened with/mformed by the self-awareness
that he infuses spiritual meaning into that past fi'om his own peculiar historical standpoint.
Eliot seems to have been aware, as Dilthey was, that history can only be understood from
a particular moment in time, and because the basis of consciousness is within the historical
process itself, it also is subject to the shifting orientations wrought by historical change.
Such indicates a sensitivity to the Diltheyan insight: “To me . . . that parental time, the
time of my father’s youth, never seemed prosaic, for it came to my imagination first
through his memories, which made a wondrous perspective to my little daily world of
discovery?” Such’s qualification of his own historical awareness locates the standpoint (a

temporary locus standi) of his interpretation of the turn of the nineteenth century within a

185

specific set of life-experiences unique to his generation. The passage continues, “And, for
my part, I can call no age absolutely unpoetic: how should it be so, since there are always
children to whom the aconi and the swallow’s eggs are a wonder. . . 7”“ In stating that
the past will always undergo reinterpretation by new generations whose senses of wonder
and needs for appropriating a past are themselves historically determined, Eliot not only
parallels Dilthey’s effort to theorize how historical understanding is based in specific,
historically-determined experiences. She also advances the idea of the impermanence of
historical knowledge. In doing so, Eliot undermined the objectivist worldview of the
pseudo-scientific historical profession in the 187 03, reached a similar relativistic
conclusion to that of crisis historicism in the 18803, and anticipated the more general sense
of crisis, doubt, and uncertainty the permeated the fin de siecle.

This dissertation describes the route Eliot took to arrive at this point of critical,
ironic, historicist consciousness. The three phases I use to chart her development
represent various characteristics of her historical philosophy and views on historical
representation. The early phase, before Eliot turned to fiction, (discussed in chapter 1)
describes her acquisition of an historicist frame of mind through the Coventry circle and in
her translation of the Young Hegelians, Strauss and Feuerbach, in the 18403 and 18503.
The primary characteristic of the second phase is Eliot’s discovery of her talent for using
fiction to demonstrate the Young Hegelian historicist vision of historical change as
experienced by ordinary people (discussed in chapter 2). The early fiction itself resembled
narrative strategies gleaned from Riehl’s ethnography of German peasants, which she
applied as a “natural history of English life” in the early nineteenth century in a manner

that was naively objectivistic.

186

The final phase in the evolution of Eliot’s historical thinking corresponds with the
development of an ironic realism that implied a rejection of the objectivist principles that
were contemporaneously adopted by the emergent English historical profession at Oxford
and Cambridge in the 18703. A31 describe in chapter 3, the deepening commitment to
veracity and historical research helped Eliot to clarify the role of imagination (and
subjectivity in general) in developing historical representations. In treating a number of
themes in nineteenth-century history in her last two novels with greater detailed
specificity, Eliot challenged the possibility of permanant truth claims implied in the work
of the new “scientific historians” as she explored representational strategies indicative of
her concern with the problem of trying to understand the historical process fiom within
that process. In chapters 4 and 5, I associate this phase with the “crisis historicism”
philosophy of Dilthey, in which he, like Eliot, looked for ways to represent the past in a
manner sensitive to the inescapable fact that the perceiving consciousness that is trying to
describe the past is itself historically conditioned.

Like the literary historians from the early nineteenth century, Eliot did not see an
unbridgeable opposition between imagination and empirical data. While the new academic
historians defined themselves by repudiating the literary history of the early nineteenth
century, Eliot advanced a romantic, mythistorical, historical framework and developed an
alternative method of historical representation, which she called “analogical creation,” that
efi‘ectively collapsed the disciplinary boundary as it was first delineating. Only someone
with a sense for the paradox of language and a conception of historical picturing in a
nexus of the real and the imaginary, could turn to fiction as a legitimate and useful form of

historical representation. Eliot’s work was not a simple return to the romantic sense of

187

their relationship. With a firm footing in the old romantic view of history as a branch of
literature, she reformulated the point, especially in her mature fiction, by suggesting the
nature of historical knowledge was literary. And as her novels increasingly demonstrated,
Eliot’s realistic historical representations were made with the ironic sense that the
language and consciousness of the narrator-historian is always mediative.

George Eliot is thus an example of a major nineteenth-century intellectual figure
who made an unusual path through the medium of historical fiction writing to probe
philosophical and historical topics fi'om an historicist orientation. What is striking is that
this path led her to the same basic problems that other paths (historical philosophy,
history, philology) brought theorists like Dilthey and Nietzsche. Furthermore, in
suggesting the literary nature of history, Eliot’s work anticipated more recent
developments in the field of intellectual history associated with Hayden White. Eliot’s
example suggests that in lines of inquiry other historiography and historical philosophy, it
just might have been possible to achieve the heady, uniquely modern consciousness (which
White attributed to Nietzsche) of the inherent irony of our prosaic language that claims to
describe the past as it actually happend. I believe that the relationship between literary
forms and historiographical perspectives needs more examination so that we might better
understand how certain forms of history writing limit the varieties of historical
philosophies. How did realism come to predominate in historical scholarship? Why was it
conducive to the mobilization of a correspondence theory of language and an objectivistic
epistemology? Is there room today for professional historiography to incorporate Eliot’s

“analogical” approach to historical representation?

188

Notes for the Introduction

1. Lukacs, 115.
2. The George Eliot Letters, (hereafter cited in the text as Letters) VI, 216-17.
3. The Journals of George Eliot, 63.

4. Among the important scholarship on Eliot that places her work in intellectual-historical
contexts are Peter Alan Dale, In Pursuit of Scientific Knowledge; Daniel Cottonr, Social
Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation; Suzanne Graver,
George Eliot and Community; Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century
Science.

5. Andres, 79-95.

6. I have found only two works that focus specifically on the parallels between Hegelian
philosophy and Eliot’s fiction. These works are in the field of comparative literature, and
tend to value the exploration and identification of parallels, especially in metaphor,
between Hegel and Eliot. Sara M. Putzell-Korab has made a fascinating comparison
between Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Eliot’s fiction, showing that characters in
all the novels develop in a more or less Hegelian pattern of consciousness expansion. See
Evolving Consciousness: An Hegelian Reading of the Novels of George Eliot. Lisa Ann
Montanarelli also acknowledges this underdeveloped dimension in Eliot scholarship, and
compares Hegel’s use of the sun’s rising and setting as a metaphor for world history with
Eliot’s use of a similar metaphor in Daniel Deronda. See “Time in Person: History, the
Sun and the Ages of Life in Hegel’s Philosophy of History and George Eliot’s Daniel
Deronda,” 165.

7. Gossman, “History and Literature: Reproduction or Signification,” 4-5.

8. For brief synopses of this development, see Part I, “Objectivity Enthroned,” in Novick,
That Nobel Dream; and chapter 5, “The Impact of Science: The Case of History,” in
Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England.

9. Gossman, “History as Decipherment: Romantic Historiography and the Discovery of
the Other,” 23-57.”

10. Ibid., 27.
ll. Hegel, Hegel’s Lecutres on the History of Philosophy, 1:3.
12. Macaulay, Life and Works of Lord Macaulay, V, 144.

13. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, 122.

189

14. Ibid., 126-27.

15. For a discussion of how the American historical profession missappropriated Ranke
and made him the symbol of positivist history, see Novick, 26-31.

16. For a brief discussion of this dimension of Ranke’s conception of history, see Gilbert,
25.

17. Vierhaus, 61-62.

18. Quoted in Heyck, 122.

19. Gossman, “History as Decipherment,” 28.
20. Heyck, 138-150.

21. Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (hereafter cited in the text as Essays),
446-47.

22. Mill, System of Logic, 367-68.
23. Lytton, “Dedicatory Epistle,” in The Last of the Barons, 2.
24. See Thomhill, “Historicism” in The Routledge Encylopedia of Philosophy, 443 -46.

25. For a discussion of “historicism” and the German Historical School, see Iggers,
“Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,” 131-32, 142-43.

26. Baumer, 295.
27. See Herder, “Yet Another Philosophy of History,” in Against Pure Reason, 38-48.

28. Meinecke’s historismus was translated as “historism,” which is used interchangeably
with historicism.

29. Meinecke, 493-95.

30. Ibid., 505.

31. Ibid., 495.

32. See, for example, Anderson, 67-68.

33. Kelley, “Mythistory in the Age of Ranke,” 5.
34. Ibid., 19.

35. I say bold because both were forced to give up their academic positions because their
counter-orthodoxy put them at odds with the governors of the universities at which they

190

served.
36. Brazill, 109.

37. Brian Rosenberg argues that the “Historic Imagination” passage synthesizes the
greatest aspirations of the best-known Victorian historians and historical novelists. Using
Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Rosenberg argues that
their historiographical methods nrirror what Eliot articulated in “Historic Imagination.”
However, he does not believe that Eliot herself accomplished what she hoped for in her
novels. Unfortunately there is no analysis of her novels to substantiate this claim, and he
instead refers to the judgement of another literary critic, Avrom Fleishman, who said of
Romola, “[t]here is nothing in the main movement of the plot . . . that could not be
situated in another time and place” (quoted in Rosenberg, 5). According to Rosenberg,
this means that Eliot failed to successfirlly balance historical fact with imaginative vision.
In the chapters that follow, I will argue that her novels almost always do accomplish what
she had hoped to do with her “historic” imagination.

38. It is not likely that this sketch or its author would have encouraged Eliot to read
Hegel. See Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy, 715-39. While Lewes indicated
some value in Hegel’s systematizing the idea of the identity of subject and object, his
sketch is mostly derogatory towards Hegel’s philosophy, and frequently sarcastic. “Hegel
is very consistent; consistent in audacity, in absurdity” (731). “As for the system itself, we
may leave to all readers to decide whether it be worthy of any attention, except as an
illustration of the devious errors of speculation” (726).

39. Putzell-Korab, 10-24; Montanarelli, 163-65.
40. Feuerbach, 13.
41. See, for example, Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 105-6.

42. I borrow the term “crisis historicism” and its usage from Thomas Albert Howard’s
recent book Religion and the Rise of Historicism, 13.

43. Ibid.

44. Baumer, 308-310.
45. Levine, 6.

46. Ibid., 12.

47. Ibid., 8.

48. Ibid., 12-13.

49. Ibid., 21.

191

50. Gossman, “History as Decipherrnent,” 26-27.

51. One could argue that current debates on objectivity in history indicate that these
principles still elude us.

52. For a recent discussion of Burckhardt’s historical perspective as compared to Hegel,
see Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, 217-18, 247-48.

53. See Dilthey, Meaning in History, 161-68.

54. Andres, 80.

192

Notes for Chapter 1

1. Alternate spellings for “Mary Anne,” the one given in the parrish registry, appear in
Eliot’s correspondence: Mary Ann, Maryann, and Marian.

2. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (hereafier cited in the text as “Haight”), 11-13.

3. One possible exception is the aged John, whom Hennell believed may have been the
actual author of the book that bears his name. For Hennell’s di3cussion of the gospels, see
An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of Christianity, chapters 3-6.

4. Ibid., 48-54; 230-35.
5. Willey, 209.

6. Rosemary Ashton says that Hennel’s book merely “struck a chord” with Eliot. See
George Eliot: A Life, 38; or Frederick R. Karl’s assessment: “While the Brays and the
Hennells did not change the course of Mary Ann’s life themselves, they did insert their
views into hers and challenge what was already beginning to waver,” in George Eliot: A
Voice of a Century, 47.

7. Quoted in Baumer, 315, from Renan, Souvenirs de ’enfance et dejeunesse (1883),
chapter 4, Le Seminaire d ’Issy.

8. Hennel, 322-23.
9. See Kelley, “Mythistory in the Age of Ranke.”
10. Quoted in Willey, 219.

11. The Life of Jesus was a translation of the fourth German edition of his work, the first
appeared in 1836.

12. Brazill, 101.
13. See, for example, Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 412-57.
14. See “The Modern World” section in Hegel, Philosophy of History, 412-57.

15. “Poetry and Prose, From the Notebook of an Eccentric” are reprinted in Essays, 13-
26.

16. See Iggers, The Cult of Authority, 7-24.

17. See introduction to Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution.

193

 

18. This correspondence is not published in The George Eliot Letters but is quoted in
Haight’s biography. Presumably Haight, also the editor of the Letters, had not yet found
this letter, dated June 9, 1851, by 1954 when Eliot’s correspondence was published, but
did so before 1963 when the biography appeared.

19. They were constant companions in 1851 and 1852, and Spencer’s role as theater
review writer at The Economist entitled him to good tickets for all kinds of performances,
to which he usually brought Eliot. The level of their intimacy was and continues to be
subject to much speculation. See forthcoming work by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who sees
Eliot’s novels as a revenge on Spencer, who rejected her on Social Darvvinist principles:
he thought she was too ugly.

20. For an analysis of the British Positivists, see Wright, The Religion of Humanity: The
Impact of C omtean Positivism on Victorian Britain.

21. Baumer, 315.

22. For example, Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution draws a neat dichotomy
between essentially revolutionary orientation of Young Hegelian philosophy, as it is
manifested in Marx, and what Marcuse considered the antirevolutionary nature of
Comtean Positivism.

23. Ashton, 111.

24. For further evidence of Eliot’s anger towards Chapman, the close of this letter is here
quoted: “I have been making a desk of my knee so I fear some of my words may be
illegible, which will be a pity because of course you can’t substitute any halfas good.”
(Letters, H, 131)

25. Brazill, The Young Hegelians, 138.

26. Ibid., 144.

27. Ibid., 145.

28. Ranke, Universal History, ix.

29. Kelley, “Mythistory in the Age of Ranke,” 19.
30. Quoted in Brazil], 145.

31. Cross, George Eliot’s Life, 268-71.

32. For a discussion of Eliot and Lewes as the leaders of a second generation (after
Carlyle and Coleridge) of English scholars who introduced varieties of German thought to
a reticent English reading public, see Ashton, The German Idea, chapters 3-4.

33. See Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, 202; Graver, 28-79; Shuttleworth, 24-25.

194

34. Shuttleworth, 27-28.

35. Eliot offers Dickens as the best example of realistic representation, but who misses the
“psychological character” (Essays, 271).

195

 

Notes for Chapter 2

1. As Gossman argues, Riehl’s conservative political attitude derived fi'om his assumption
that the traditional social divisions among the classes were more or less permanent
features of the species. See Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, 257 .

2. See, for example, Haight, 5-7, 79; Karl, 17-20, 42-47.

3. See, for example, A. S. Byatt’s introduction (W, 12, 30); Graver, “Natural History and
the Recovery of Community,” (chapter 2), 28-79; Shuttleworth, “Adam Bede: Natural
history as social vision,” (chapter 2), 24-50.

4. “The Natural History of German Life” Westminster Review 66 (October 1856), 442-61.
Reprinted in Essays, 266-299, (citations in text refer to the reprinted version).

5. Eliot later personified this well-known British passion in Middlemarch as Reverend
Farebrother

6. See, for example, Haight, 199-200.

7. George Henry Lewes, Sea-side Studies at Ilfiacombe, T enby, the Scilly Isles, and
Jersey, Edinburgh, 1858.

8. Kelley, “Mythistory in the Age of Ranke,” 5-6.
9. Ranke, Universal History, ix.

10. Kelley efl’ectively describes the Romantic-Enlightenment historiographical tension
when he says that mythistoric Romantic historicism ‘ans the attempt to recreate the life
and thought of the remote past through a new combination of human faculties. For
mythistory required the union not of memory and reason, as in Baconian method or the
histoire raisonnée of the Enlightenment or perhaps the scientific history of Ranke, but
rather of memory and imagination, which was the basis, too, of Romantic hermeneutics.
Through the imaginative reconstruction of cultural remains—and especially of law,
language, and symbols—the historian could plumb the depths of the "well of the past’”
(ibid., 19).

11. It seems to me that Riehl’s “incarnate history” conception works in the same, Neo-
platonic way that Goethe’s Urplanze does: that the perceiving consciousness can
“imagine” the ideal, or the historical origin, that manifests itselfas some varietal form in
the present.

12. Recall the letter Eliot wrote to Sibree in which she indicated admiration and support
for the Parisian revolutionaries in 1848. This passage in the Riehl review, it seems to me,
is a clear reversal of that position.

196

 

13. For discussion of various efforts in Western history to establish a universal language
see Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language.

14. Kelley, “Mythistory in the Age of Ranke,” 6.

1’5. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, published Histoire des variations des
Eglise protestante in 1688.

16. See Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 35-3 7.

17. This last section is largely a creative reconstruction of my own derived from Eliot’s
example and based carefirlly on her own account in “Recollections of Ilfracombe 1856,”
but also informed by what she did in The Mill on the Floss. See especially Letters, H,

244.

197

Notes for Chapter 3

1. It is interesting to read Eliot’s correspondence to John Blackwood about Romola,
because it was the only novel she wrote that he did not publish. Lewes and Eliot accepted
Comhill’s offer of £10,000 for it in 1862. Believing it was the most anyone had ever paid
for a novel, they assumed Blackwood would never be able to match it (Letters, IV, 17-18;
34-35). Blackwood was initially furious about Comhill’s “bribe,” not the least because he
was obliged, through a previous arrangement with Cornhill, to advertise Eliot’s new novel
in the pages of his own magazine (Letters, IV, 38). Blackwood and Eliot were able to
mend their relationship in time to publish her next novel in Blackwoods in1866. For Felix
Holt Blackwood paid Eliot £5,000.

2. The two sources she mentions in this correspondence are BenedettoVarchi and
Giovanni Vallani. Eliot and Lewes owned Varchi’s Storiafiorentina and Villani’s
Chroniche di Firenze. (See Letters, IV, 431, n. 3, 8; and Haight, 344.)

3. Quoted in Letters, III, 432, n. 2.

4. Ibid., 431, n. 8.

5. George Eliot: A Critical Heritage, 196.
6. Ibid., 195.

7. The Hutton review presents an unusual opportunity to interpret Eliot’s intention with a
particular novel, for she responded to him by saying “I am confirmed in the satisfaction

. . at finding that certain chief elements of my intention have impressed themselves so
strongly on your mind. . . . You have seized with a firlness which I had hardly hoped that
my book could suggest, what it was my efi’or to express in the presentation of Bardo and
Baldassarre; and also the relation of the Florentine political life tothe development of
Tito’s nature” (Letters, IV, 96-97).

8. It is very likely that Blackwood was reiterating a moment from a conversation he had
with Eliot. Haight tentatively dates the letter to Mrs. John Blackwood June 15, 1861, the
day after Lewes and Eliot returned fiom Florence, when it is known that they met
Blackwood for lunch.

9. The George Eliot Journals, 100.

10. Hugh \Vitemeyer, “George Eliot’s Romola and Bulwer Lytton’s Rienzi,” 63-64. It is
curious that Witemeyer, who speculates that Eliot would have known Lytton’ s Rienzi,
does not seem to know that Eliot not only read it, she in fact did so while working on
Romola (see note 9).

11. Lytton, 2.

198

12. Witemeyer, 65-67.

13. We know Eliot had a copy of Mill’s Logic, for she lent it to Herbert Spencer in 1852
(Haight, 115).

14. Mill, System of Logic, 367.
15. Ibid., 368.

16. Stubbs, ll.

17. Heyck, 145.

18. See Heyck’s discussion of Stubbs and the Oxford School of historians, who provided
the main models of historical writing that were followed by the new professionals at the
universities (141-45).

19. For his account, which Eliot drew from, see Sismondi, 286-90.

20. Marx, another London resident at this time, was also highly concerned about social
change and revolution. But Eliot’s view, enabled by the fictional form, precluded her fi'om
sharing Marx’s philosophy on the necessity of revolution in the progress of humanity.
Whereas Marx reeled fi'om his own observation that “all that is solid melts into air,” Eliot
was greatly troubled by the prospect of lost forms.

21. See Graver, chpts. 1 and 3.

22. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 111-19.
23. Shuttleworth, 115, 124.

24. Graver, 109-49.

24. See, for example, David Thompson, 58, 73-76.

25. For the text of the speech see “Speech at Edinburgh on Reform Bill, Oct 29, 1867,”
470-89.

26. Pinney makes a similar connection between Eliot’s fiction and Lyellean geology in a
footnote to her review of Macay’s “Progress of the Intellect,” where she refers to laws of
geology. Pinney’s simply adds, “The analogy between the gradual, uniform processes of
character and action in George Eliot’s novels and the unifomritarianism expounded by
Lyell is a close one. (Essays, 31, n5).

27. Incidentally, Felix Holt, and Adam Bede from her first novel, are Eliot’s only main
characters with firlly developed moral attitudes who do not need to undergo any kind of
growth or maturation. See Shuttleworth, 116, for a discussion of Felix as an
unproblematic Christ figure.

199

28. According to Haight, “Her family would have been surprised to know how thoroughly
conservative Marian had become. The revolutionary sentiments of those years in the
Strand were gone forever” (395).

29. In addition to the £40 freeholder qualification, £40 copyholders and lease holders, £10
households, and £50 renters were now eligible. The Reform Act increased the electorate
in England and Wales by 49 percent. See Appendix 1, in J. R. Conacher, The Emergence
of British Parliamentary Democracy in the Nineteenth Century.

30. See Llewellyn, especially chapter 5, “The Chartists.”

31. The speaker’s list of demands include four of the “six points” advanced in “The
People’s Charter” of 1838. The firll title of that pamphlet provides enough for this
comparison: “The People’s Charter; Being the Outline of an Act to Provide for the Just
Representation of the People of Great Britain in the Commons’ House of Parliament:
Embracing the Principles of Universal Suffrage, No Property Qualification, Annual
Parliaments, Equal Representation, Payment of Members, and Vote by Ballot.”

32. For the legal dimensions of this novel, Eliot had obtained the advice and suggestions
of an attorney she was close fiiends with, none other than Frederic Harrison, Comte’s best
English exponent and the leader of British Positivism.

33. The Journals of George Eliot, 124..
34. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 756.

35. The Riot Act of 1715 stipulated that a crowd had one hour to disperse once it had
been deemed by authorities as riotous.

36. See, for example, Zelda Austin’s “Why Feminist Critics Are Angry with George
Eliot.”

37. See, for example, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.
38. Andres, 80-81.

39. Here is Linda Colley’s account, in Britons, of Huskisson’s death by Stephenson’s
“Rocket”

The accident happened on Wednesday, 15 September 1830. The show train had
stopped to take on water at a small quarry mid-way between Liverpool and
Manchester, and some of the gentlemen had jumped down onto the line, examining
the glittering new machinery, strolling around to admire the view and chatting idly
to the musicians who were to play “God Save the King” when they finally steamed
into the station. Those inside stretched their legs discreetly and consulted their
watches, wondering how long it would be before the other engine reached them.

“I think you had better get in,” called the Duke of Wellington to the loiterers

200

outside. Only then did they see the Rocket bearing down on them fast on the other
rails. There was not enough room, they suddenly realised, for them to stand safely
on the opposite side of the line, and no space either between the two sets of rails.
So men began scrabbling to open the saloon car doors of the stationary train,
desperately trying to haul themselves inside, for the carriage was high off the
ground and no steps had been provided. The former Secretary of State had
already tried to escape the oncoming train by crossing the track. He now ran back
in panic and was clutching at one of the doors when the engine caught him and
flung him on the rails. Even inside the carriage, Lady Wilton could distinctly hear
the crushing of bones, followed by Mrs. Huskisson’s piercing shriek.

The strange death of William Huskisson has become a set-piece in British
history because it seems so easily symbolic. Even at the time, there were
suggestions that the reason he had been wandering about the track so carelessly
was because he was used to getting out of his own coach whenever it stopped to
change horses. (334-35)

201

Notes for Chapter 4

1. For a fairly recent biography, see Victorian Lincoln, Teresa: A Woman.
2. Quoted in ibid., 12.

3. In a recent article, Henry Staten defends the aptness of Eliot’s historical portrayal of
class against recent critics, most notably Terry Eagleton, who find Middlemarch to be
dominated by bourgeois ideology, and this bias makes it alristorical. Staten shows that
underneath the narrator’s moralizing are extraordinarily subtle depictions of class,
especially ones that demonstrated the ways the bourgeoisie were “aristocratizing”
themselves, which other critics charge Eliot with overlooking. See “Is Middlemarch
Ahistorical?” However, Staten’s use of “historical” and “alristorical” are very difi’erent
fiom my own. Whereas he finds the novel “historical” because it is depicts the subtlety of
the actual historical experience and not something merely idealized by bourgeois ideology,
I use “alristorical” to mean something allegedly outside of history—something that is
presumed to have no historicity. For Eliot, things like archetypal human qualities, such as
an ardently willing soul or the impulse toward spirituality, are timeless and alristorical. It
is the shape of their manifestations that Eliot found to be historical.

4. As I discuss below, Miller’s “Narrative and Historyf’ and “Optic and Semiotic in
Middlemarch” both perform deconstructive readings of the novel in ways that can
highlight the nature of Eliot’s critique of the methodological approaches of the new
historical profession.

5. Middlemarch can be read as a revision of Felix Holt. It posits a relationship between
history and fiction that both lays the ground work for her last novel’s fuller exploration of
the conclusion, and anticipates late nineteenth-century theorizing about the relationship
between science and reality. Here, I am following Peter Allan Dale’s argument, from In
Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art and Society in the Victorian Age (1989), that
Eliot had reached a moment in composing Middlemarch when she had completed her turn
away fiom a positivist epistemology. Her new view, according to Dale, was of an
aesthetic consciousness akin to Kant’s position that all knowledge springs from an initial
“imaginary,” which is to say human, structure imposed upon experience. What is central
to this transition, in my view, and what Middlemarch can show us, is that it is most
fundamentally a historical consciousness that enables the kind of transition that Dale is
talking about. In other words, Eliot’s experimental, historicist imagination brought about,
in Middlemarch, Dale’s notion of the Kantian conclusion. While trying to come to terms
with the historical significance of the reform period, in her third novel on the subject, Eliot
had brought together the Romantic notion of perspectival limits to knowing reality, within
a realist descriptive style that tried to embrace the ideal of scientific objectivity, and yet
conveyed a sense of the historical moment with characters and events that were wholly
fictional.

202

m ‘V "a . .

6. Some consider Wolf to be the main progenitor of German higher criticism, for many
nineteenth-century German philologists found his method of treating the Odyssey and the

Iliad to have wide applicability. See Anthony Grafton’s introduction to F. A. Wolf:
Prolegomena to Homer, 1 795.

7. By 1829 Feuerbach, who had gone to Berlin to study theology with Schlierrnacher in
1824 but quickly became a committed devotee of Hegel, was teaching in Erlangen.
Strauss was finishing his degree at Tiibingen under F. C. Baur, and making plans to go to
Berlin to study under Hegel. He arrived the same month that Hegel died in November,
1831. See Brazill, 137-39; 102-5.

8. Thomas Albert Howard argues that the German theological tradition played a large role
in generating the scholarly historicism in the mid- to late nineteenth century. He lists many
important figures who began their studies in theology and then shifted to history or to a
generally historicist posture, e.g., Hegel, Schelling, Ranke, Droysen, Jakob Grimm,
Kugler, Strauss, Nietzsche, and Burckhardt (5).

9. My reading of Eliot’s representation of Casaubon contradicts Dominick La Capra’s
interpretation of Casaubon as unsympathetic in his analysis of the relationship between
Casaubon and the narrator, in “In Quest of Casaubon: George Eliot’s Middlemarch,”
which also discusses the historical figure Isaac Casaubon as a partial inspiration for Eliot’s
character.

10. Lawrence, 34.

11. Vesalius, born in Brussels to a family of court physicians and pharmacists, became a
lecturer in medicine at the University of Padua, where he gave his first lecture that
criticized the long accepted authority of Galen in 1539. For a scholarly biography, see
O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514—1564.

12. Scale and Pattison, 32.

13. For a description of the various conflicting accounts of Vesalius’s death, see
O’Malley, 304-12.

14. Cited in Haight, 413.
15. Berlin, 57-58.

16. Putzell-Korab, who reads the development— the “spiritual progress”——of many Eliot
characters against Hegel’s Phenomenology, treats Dorothea’s development in ways similar
to my own, with the major exception that my reading associates it with the representation
of the historical appearance of a specific stage of development. (30-43; 96-104)

17. Hegel’s complex understanding of recognition is at work in the master/slave dialectic.
The idea is that it is only by encountering another conscious being that one could
acknowledge or recognize herself as possessing consciousness. Seeing conscious behavior

203

in another enables a kind of objectification of one’s self-consciousness, or a projection of
it into the other, and vice-versa. Thus the appearance of “self-consciousness” is a two-
sided event, shared by two individuals when they interact.

18. Hegel, Phenomenology, 364-73.
19. See, for example, Hegel, Philosophy of History.
20. Brazill, 37.

21. Criticism is an essential dimension of Hegelian and Young Hegelian philosophy
because it is the basis for the movement of the Spirit. History is nothing but the Spirit
actualizing itself in ever-greater human self-awareness. The advancement through the
various historical stages is brought about by criticism, or the self-questioning of an age.
Another way to say it is that history is the process of Spirit critiquing each successive age
of development as it seeks to realize itself. The passage from one historical period to the
next, in the Hegelian conceptualization of history, is actualized by a critical perspective
which has the effect of self-negation. For example, the Enlightenment is usually described
as a criticism—a negation—of the Christian world view, and before that, the Christian
centuries negated antiquity. Hegel and the Young Hegelians understood the
Enlightenment as the Christian age engaged in self-critique. So criticism is the prime
mover of Spirit in history. For more on this see Hegel’s Philosophy of History. For more
on the elements of Hegel’s historical philosophy which his disciples embraced, see chapter
1 in Brazill’s Young Hegelians.

22. Berlin, 59-60.

23. Hegel, Phenomenologi, 364-82.

24. F euerbach, xxxv, original emphasis.

25. Lewes, Biographical History of Philosophy, 736.

26. See Miller, “Narrative and History.”

27 . James, 59.

28. Miller, “Narrative and History,” 467.

29. The first episode in Herodotus is the abduction of lo. See The Histories, 3—4.

30. I have not been able to find a passage in Fielding that corroborates Eliot’s reference.
31. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 72-73.

32. In The Philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey, H. A. Hodges explained Dilthey’s philosophy
as transcendental and described the concept of “facts of consciousness” thus: “Instead of
regarding consciousness as something which is inherent in minds and which therefore

204

occurs, like them, as an incident in nature, transcendental philosophy makes consciousness
the primary unit; it regards nature and minds alike as ‘facts of consciousness,’ constituents
of human experience; and the relations which it finds between mind and nature are not
ontic relations, but epistemological ones, i.e., relations which spring from unity of
apperception” (28-29).

33. Dilthey, Meaning in History, 67.

34. Dilthey, Gesarnmelte Schriften, 5: 329.

205

Notes for Chapter 5

1. Graver, 83-84; Shuttleworth, 176-77.

2. Shuttleworth, 201.

3. See Shuttleworth, “Daniel Deronda: Fragmentation and organic union,” 175-200.
4. Graver, 224-43.

5. See chap. 5, “The Impact of Science: The Case of History” in Heyck, 120-54.

6. Ibid.,135-50.

7.1bid., 141. l

8. Ibid., 144.

9. One cannot help thinking that if Eliot had lived long enough to write another novel, she
would have followed her pattern of taking a secondary character fi'om one novel and
developing her more firlly in the next and treated this theme in greater detail.

10. White, 41-42, and chapter 9, “Nietzsche,” 331-74.

11. The benchmark publication was Nietzsche’s Von Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fiir
das Leben, in 1874. See On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.

12. Baumer, 308-10.

13. See “Realism and Naturalism” in Abrams, 152-54.
14. Ibid., 153.

15. Quoted in Lukacs, 121.

16. Levine, 12.

17. Lewes, The Principles of Success in Literature, 30.

18. Finney, the editor of Essays of George Eliot, points out that this is exactly how
Deronda begins: “Was she beautifirl or not beautifirl?”

19. Lewes, Principles of Success in Literature, 31.
20. Ibid., 29.
21. Shuttleworth, 186-200.

206

 

22. Quoted in Shuttleworth, 19, (my translation).

23. Dale, 130.

207

Notes for the Conclusion

1. The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, in The Works of George Eliot, v, 260. First
published by Blackwood in 1879.

2. Ibid., 264.

3. Ibid., 277.

4. McCaw, 37 .

5. Eliot, Theorphrastus Such, 261.

6. Ibid.

208

 

Bibliography

Abrahms, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 5'’1 ed. Forth Worth: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, Inc., 1988,

Altick, Richard D. Victorian People and Ideas. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1973.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991.

Andres, Sophia. “The Unhistoric in History: George Eliot’s Challenge to Victorian
Historiography.” Clio 26 (1996): 79-95.

Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot: A Life. London: Penguin Books, 1997.

—. The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought,
1800-1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans.
Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.

Austin, Zelda. “Why Feminist Critics Are Angry with George Eliot.” College English, 37,
no. 6 (1976): 549-61.

Bambach, Charles R. Heideger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism. Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Baumer, Franklin LL Modern European Thought: Continuity and Change in Ideas, 1600-
1950. New York: Macmillan, 1977.

Beiser, Frederick C. “Hegel’s Historicism.” In Cambridge Companion to Hegel, edited
by Frederick C. Beiser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Berlin, Isaiah. Karl Marx: His Life and Environment. New York: Oxford University
Press, 3d edition, 1963.

209

Brazill, William J. The Young Hegelians. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

Burrow, J. W. A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Carignan, Michael. “Fiction as History or History as Fiction? George Eliot, Hayden White,
and Nineteenth-Century Historicism.” Clio 29 (2000): 395-415.

Colley, Linda Britons: Forging the Nation 1 70 7-183 7. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1992.

Comte, Auguste. The Positive Philosophy of A uguste Comte. Translated by Harriet
Martineau. New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1858.

Conacher, J. B., ed. The Emergence of British Pm'liarnentary Democracy in the
Nineteenth Century: The Passing of the Reform Acts of 1832, 186 7, and 1884-
1885. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1971.

Cottom, Daniel. Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary
Representations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Creeger, George R. George Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

Cross, J. W. George Eliot ’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals. New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1885.

Dale, Peter Alan. In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the
Victorian Age. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

Dilthey, Wilhelm. Gesammelte Schnfien. 20 vols. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht,
1 95 8-1 990.

. Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to lay a Foundation for the
Study of Society and History. Translated by Ramon J. Betanzos. (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1988).

 

. Meaning in History: W. Dilthey ’s Thoughts on History and Society. Edited and
translated by H. P. Rickman. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1961.

 

Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield. “Speech at Edinburgh on Reform Bill, Oct 29,
1867.” In Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable, the Earl of
Beaconsfield, edited by T. E. Kebbel. 2 vols. Vol. 11, 470-89. London: Longrnans,
Green, and Co., 1882.

Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language. Translated by James Fentress.
Oxford and Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd, 1995.

210

Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Edited by Stephen Gill. London: Penguin Books, 1980. First
published serially in Blackwoods Magazine, 1858-59.

. “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt.” Blackwood ’s Magazine, 103 (January
1868), 1-11. Reprinted in Essays of George Eliot, 415-30; also in appendix to
Felix Holt, the Radical, 607-27.

 

 

. Daniel Deronda. Edited by Terrence Cave. London: Penguin Books, 1995. First
published serially in Blackwoods Magazine, 1876.

. Essays of George Eliot. Edited by Thomas Pinney. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1963.

 

. Felix Holt, The Radical. Edited by Peter Coveney. London: Penguin Books,
1987. First published serially in Blackwoods Magazine, 1866.

 

. The George Eliot Letters. 6 vols. Edited by Gordon S. Haight. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1954.

 

. The Journals of George Eliot. Edited by Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

 

. Manuscript Diary, 1861-1877. George Eliot and George Henry Lewes
Collection. Section IV, box 17, item 3. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

 

. Middlemarch: A Study in Provincial Life. Edited by W. J. Harvey. London:
Penguin Books, 1985. First published serially in Blackwoods Magazine, 1871-72.

 

. Mill on the Floss. Edited by A. S. Byatt. London: Penguin Books, 1985. First
published serially in Blackwoods Magazine, 1860.

 

—. “The Natural History of German Life.” Westminster Review, 66 (July 1856), 51-
7 9. Reprinted in Essays of George Eliot, 266-99.

—. “Recollections of Ilfracombe 1856.” George Eliot and George Henry Lewes
Collection. Section IV, box 15, item 1. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

—. “Recollections of Ilfracombe 1856.” In The George Eliot Letters, 11, 238-53.

—. [Review of R. W. Mackay, The Progress of the Intellect] Westminster Review,
54 (January 1851), 353-68. Reprinted in Essays of George Eliot, 27-45.

 

. Romola. Edited by Andrew Sanders. London: Penguin Books, 1980. First
published serially in Cornhill Magazine, 1862-63.

211

 

. Scenes of a Clerical Life. Edited by David Lodge. London: Penguin Books,
1973. First published serially in Blackwoods Magazine, 1857.

. Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe. London: Penguin Books, 1996. First
published serially in Blackwoods Magazine, 1861.

 

. The Works of George Eliot. 10 vols. National Library Edition. New York:
Bigelow, Brown & Co., n.d.

 

Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Translated by George Eliot. New York:
Harper & Row, 1957. First published in 1854.

Gilbert, Felix. History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Goldstein, Doris S. “History at Oxford and Cambridge: Professionalization and the
Influence of Ranke.” In Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical
Discipline, edited by Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell, 141-54. Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1990.

Gossman, Lionel. Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas.
Chicago and London. University of Chicago Press, 2000.

——————. “History and Literature: Reproduction or Signification.” In The Writing of
History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, edited by Robert Canary
and Henry Kozicki, 3-40. Madison: University of \Visconsin Press, 197 8.

—. “History as Deciphennent: Romantic Historiography and the Discovery of the
Other.” New Literary History 18 (1986): 23-57.

Grafton, Anthony. “Polyhistor into Philolog. Notes on the Transformation of German
Classical Scholarship, 1780-1850.” In History of Universities, vol. 3 (1983), 159-
92.

Graver, Suzanne. George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional
Form. Berkeley: California University Press, 1984.

Gregory, Frederick. Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological
Traditions of the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Haight, Gordon S. George Eliot: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press,
1968.

Harding, Anthony J. “Sterling, Carlyle, and German Higher Criticism: A Reassessment.”
Victorian Studies 26 (1983): 269-85.

212

Hegel, Georg Wihelm Friedrich. Hegel ’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V.
Miller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

—. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Translated by H. B. Nisbet.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 197 5.

—. The Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. New York: Willey Book Co.,
1944. Sibree’s translation first published as Lectures on the Philosophy of History
in1849.

Hennell, Charles C. An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of Christianity. 2d edition.
(London, 1841). First published in 1838.

Herder, Johann Gottfiied. Against Pure Reason: Writings on Religion, Language, and
History. Translated and edited by Marcia Bunge. Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1 993.

Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt. Edited by John M.
Marincola. London: Penguin Books, 1996.

Heyck, T. W. The T ransforrnation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England. Chicago:
Lyceum Books, Inc., 1989.

Hobsbawnr, Eric. The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848. Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1962.

Hodges, H. A. The Philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey. London: Routledge, 1952. Reprint,
Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972.

Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind. New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1957.

Howard, Thomas Albert. Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M L. de Wette, Jacob
Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical
Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Iggers, Georg G. The Cult of A uthority: The Political Philosophy of the Saint-
Simonians; A Chapter in the Intellectual History of T otalitarianism. The Hague:
Martinus Nijholf, 1958.

. “Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term.” Journal of the History of
Ideas 56 (1995): 129-52.

 

Joseph, Gerhard. “Hegel, Derrida, George Eliot, and the Novel,” Literature-
Interpretation-Theory 1 (1989): 59-68.

213

Kelley, Donald R. Historical Inquiry: From Herodotus to Herder. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998.

—. “Mythistory in the Age of Ranke.” In Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the
Historical Discipline, edited by Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell, 3-20.

LaCapra, Dominick. History, Politics, and the Novel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1987.

Lawrence, Christopher. Medicine in the Making of Modern Britain, 1 700-1920. New
York: Routledge, 1994.

Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction fiom Frankenstein to Lady
Chatterly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Lewes, George Henry. The Biographical History of Philosophy: From Its Origin in
Greece Down to the Present Day. 2 vols. Library Edition. New York: D. Appleton
and Co., 1890.

 

. The Principles of Success in Literature. 3d ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1894.
First published in 1865.

Lincoln, Victoria. Teresa: A Woman: A Biography of Teresa of A vila. Albany: SUNY
Press, 1984.

Llewellyn, Alexander. The Decade of Reform: The 1830s. Devon: David & Charles
Newton Abbot, 1972.

Lukacs, John. Historical Consciousness: or the Remembered Past. New York: Schocken
Books, 1985, first printed in 1968.

Lytton, Sir Edward Bulwer. The Last of the Barons. London: George Routledge and
Sons, 1880.

Macaulay, Thomas Babbington. “History.” In The Life and Works of Lord Macaulay.
Edinburgh Edition, v. 5. London, New York, and Bombay: Longrnans, Green, and
Co., 1897. Essay first published in 1828.

Maehl, William Henry, Jr., editor. The Reform Bill of 1832: Why Not Revolution? New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967.

Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. New
York: The Humanities Press, 1954.

McCobb, E. A. “Daniel Deronda as Will and Representation: George Eliot and
Schopenhauer.” Modern Language Review 80 (1985): 533-49.

214

 

 

 

McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel: 1600-1 740. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Meinecke, Friedrich. Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook. Translated by J.
B. Anderson. London: Routledge & Kegal Paul, 1972. Translated fi'om Die
Enstehung des Historismus, Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1959.

Mill, John Stuart. Principles of Political Economy. New York: Longrnans, Green and Co.
Ltd., 1926. First published in 1848.

. A System of Logic, Raciocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the
Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation. London:
Longrnans, Greene, and Co., 1900. First published in 1843.

 

Miller, J. Hillis. “Narrative and History.” English Literary History 41 (1974): 45 5-73.

—. “Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch.” In The Worlds of Victorian Fiction.
Edited by Jerome Buckley. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1975.

Montanarelli, Lisa Ann. “Time in Person: History, the Sun and the Ages of Life in
Hegel’s Philosophy of History and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.” Ph.D. diss.,
University of California, Berkeley, 1998.

Myers, William. The Teaching of George Eliot. Bath: Leicester University Press, 1984.

Newton, K. M. George Eliot: Romantic Humanist; A Stuay on the Philosophical
Structure of Her Novels. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Translated
by Peter Preuss. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980.

O’Malley, C. D. Andreas Vesalius, 1514—1564. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1964.

Paris, Bernard. Experimean in Life: George Eliot ’3 Quest for Values. Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1965.

Putzell-Korab, Sara M. The Evolving Consciousness: An Hegelian Reading of the Novels
of George Eliot. Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitat
Salzburg, 1982.

Ranke, Leopold von. Universal History. The Oldest Historical Group of Nations and the

Greeks. Translated by D. C. Tovey and G. W. Prothero. New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1885.

215

 

 

 

’3,

Rosenberg, Brian. “George Eliot and the Victorian ‘Historic Imagination, Victorian

Newsletter, Spring 1982, 1-5.

Rosenthal, Abigail L. “The Intelligibility of History,” Journal of the History of
Philosophy, 15 (1977): 55-70.

Seale, Clive, and Stephen Pattison, eds. Medical Knowledge: Doubt and Certainty.
London: Open University Press, 1994.

Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of
a Beginning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Sismondi, J. C. L. de. A History of the Italian Republics. Garden City, NY: Anchor
Books, 1966.

Staten, Henry. “13 Middlemarch Ahistorical?” PIl/[LA 115 (2000): 991-1005.

Strauss, David Friedrich. The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined. Translated by Marian
Evans. New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1860. First published in 1846.

Thomson, David. England in the Nineteenth Century, London: Penguin Books, 1991, first
published, 1950.

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon, 1963.

Thomhill, Christopher. “Historicism.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited
by Edward Craig. 10 vols. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

Vierhaus, Rudolf. “Historiography between Science and Art.” In Leopold von Ranke and
the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, edited by Georg G. Iggers and James M.
Powell, 61-69.

White, Hayden. “The Burden of History,” History and Theory 5, no. 2 (1966): 111-34.

—————. Figural Realism: Studies on the Mimesis Eflect. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999.

. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

 

—————. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” In On Narrative,
edited by W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981.

Willey, Basil. Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold, London: Chatto
& Windus, 1955.

216

Witemeyer, Hugh. George Eliot and the Visual Arts. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1979.

—. “George Eliot’s Romola and Bulwer Lytton’s Rienzi.” Studies in the Novel 15
(1983): 62-73.

Wolf, F. A Prolegomena to Homer, 1 795 . Translated and edited by Anthony Grafton, et
al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Working Men’s Association. “The People’s Charter.” 1838. Facsimile in Working Men ’3
Association, The First Convention and, The National Association. New York:
Garland Publishing, Inc, 1986. Part of the series, Chartism: Working-Class
Politics in the Industrial Revolution, edited by Dorothy Thompson.

Wright, T. R. The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian
Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 1986.

217

      

M IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

run][1]]!!![1111111711111]!!!