George Eliot and Victorian Historiography: Imagining the National Past

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George Eliot and Victorian Historiography Imagining the National Past

Neil McCaw

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography

10.1057/9780230286948 - George Eliot and Victorian Historiography, Neil McCaw



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Imagining the National Past Neil McCaw Lecturer in English Studies King Alfred’s College Winchester




First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

ISBN 0–333–74932–4 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–23413–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCaw, Neil, 1969– George Eliot and Victorian historiography : imagining the national past / Neil McCaw. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–312–23413–9 1. Eliot, George, 1819–1880—Knowledge—History. 2. Literature and history– –Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Historiography—Great Britain– –History—19th century. 4. Historical fiction, English—History and criticism. 5. National characteristics, English, in literature. 6. History in literature. I. Title. PR4692.H5 M37 2000 823'.8—dc21 00–024679 © Neil McCaw 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire



A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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To Mum and Dad



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Acknowledgements

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Introduction: ‘Those Far-Reaching Visions of the Past’

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George Eliot and the (Meta)Narrativity of History

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Imagining the National Past

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A Natural History of English Life

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A Carlylean Counter-Paradigm

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Theodicy and History

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Imagining the National Present

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Unwritten Landscapes: Imagining the National Future

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Conclusion: Beyond Victorian Historiography

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Contents

The journey towards this book has been a rather long and arduous one, but the fact that it has been completed is as much due to the invaluable assistance of others as it is to my own ability to pound the keyboard, rummage the archives and sit looking blankly into space for hours on end. In the chronological order in which they stimulated, cajoled, reassured and (warmly) criticized, I would like to thank the following: Margaret Hamer, Terry Lovell, Mick Jardine, Christopher Mulvey, Andrew Blake, Inga Bryden and Fran Mason. In addition, a debt of gratitude is owed to all of the staff within the School of Cultural Studies of King Alfred’s College, Winchester (for, among other things, sitting patiently through staff seminars in which I worked through some of this material), and also to the College itself for the financial support without which my initial enthusiasms would have come to nothing. Finally, particular thanks to my family, especially Tracey (whose patience, though severely tested at times, just about managed to hold), and to Charlie and Alfie, for providing the most glorious distraction.

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Acknowledgements

The celebrated opening to L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, ‘the Past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’,2 implies a particular relationship between history and national identity. The past is identified as foreign Other in relation to the metaphorical and dominant nation of the historical present. This notion of the past as foreign Other identifies the ability to write history, to narrate the group experience, as ideologically crucial. For, whosoever writes the history speaks for the foreign country that is the past. Historiography is therein implicated in postcolonial theories of the nation as narrative, a collective story to be told. It is, on the one hand, part of what Edward Said calls ‘the method colonised people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history’.3 Reciprocally, history as narrative can be suppressed, or else loaded against the active acknowledgement and participation of subordinate groups. The narrative historiographical ‘imagining’ of the past equates with such an imagining of the national community. This is imagined, as Anderson has pointed out, ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.’4 The community between the present and the past is imagined in just such a sense: as an illusory, ideologically loaded forum for the formation of particular identities. The prominent tendency within postcolonial critical discourse(s) towards configuring the national, group experience as a collective narrative thus also suggests a theoretical framework through which to approach historiographical realization, something implicit, for instance, in the title of Homi Bhabha’s Nation and Narration (1990). It follows that in the struggle to forge a coherent notion of national 1



Introduction: ‘Those Far-Reaching Visions of the Past’1


identity the power of control over the development and emergence of national narratives, ‘the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging’, 5 is key. The conflict is about the extent to which prescribed national narratives can take their place both in, and indeed in some cases as, the national consciousness. As such this provides for a particular critique of the connection between history (or History6) and national identity, viewing historiography as part of the evolving process of cultural colonization of the past, wherein the power to narrate amounts to the power to control/fashion/rewrite identity. The writing of history sees the past colonized in the various images of the particular present from which it emerges, fashioned in light of prevailing ideological currents. In this study, this will become evident in the relationship between Victorian historiographical trends and George Eliot’s fiction, which is to be contextualized in relation to nineteenth-century debates concerning history and historical meaning (what is now understood as metahistory7). The pervasive fascination with history, Dwight Culler’s seemingly uncomplicated ‘relation of the present to the past’,8 has long since been acknowledged as a dominant characteristic of nineteenthcentury British identity. Indeed, there has been so much scholarly work written in this area that it has almost become a cliché to refer to the historicity of nineteenth-century culture. As Peter Allan Dale says in The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History, the fact that this period ‘was dominated as no period before or since has been by the “historical sense” is a truth of intellectual history sufficiently well established to need no extended reiteration’.9 And yet, a vague notion such as ‘historical sense’ serves us poorly in marking out elements of a coherent epistemic temper across this period. Georg Lukács attempted to clarify matters in terms of a nineteenth-century historical sense which manifested itself in history as a ‘mass experience’,10 when people began to ‘comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned’ and ‘to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them’.11 The catalyst to this wider, more developed self-consciousness, he argues, was a momentous transformation of social life. This was so vast and allencompassing as to lead inevitably towards a perception of human existence as increasingly shaped by inexorable movements outside the control and influence of individual human agents, namely Industrial Capitalism. Thomas Carlyle displayed just such a self-consciousness in his statement ‘we do nothing but enact history’.12 For him, this immersion



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was complete, even, for example, ‘our very speech is curiously historical’.13 Thus the importance of history ‘never stood higher than in these times of ours’.14 This sense of being in the simultaneous presence of past and present (and by the later century a Wellsian vision of the future) is the foundation of the so-called Victorian ‘mirror of history’. This is what Culler has called: ‘the habit of drawing analogies between their own age and various historical periods in the past and attempting to understand their problems, and their place in history, in terms of these analogies’.15 Hence the cult of Medievalism as an invocation of the most potent of the many nineteenth-century Golden Ages. This ‘acutely historical’16 mindset was behind the University recognition of the validity of the discipline of History by the middle of the century, and the resultant shift away from the predominant band of gifted amateur historians towards the professionalization of historical studies and the awarding of History degrees. It was an intellectual movement influential enough to impact upon the epistemological foundations of other disciplines also, becoming manifest in what J. S. Mill called the ‘historical method’17 that overtook the social sciences. The key focus was on changes across time, which was measured so as to deduce invariable, universally applicable historical laws. As Mill was aware,18 Auguste Comte was a central figure in this development. Comtean sociology was an example of the way in which the academic disciplines of the age began to encompass what Buckley calls ‘temporal methodologies’.19 Comte’s sociological systematization, indeed totalization, of the historical process centred on his conception of the three stages of historical development: theological, metaphysical and positive. The positive stage is the telos of his philosophy of history, a society in which facts reign supreme and where reality is empirically ascertained. It is an end-stage reached via intellectual reform, which is the basis of all wider social reform, involving in part a synthesis of all the sciences and more generally the formation of a positive culture and politics. As such Comte was ‘the sociologist of human and social unity’, viewing history as a ‘single entity’.20 The impact of scientific theories of historical development on George Eliot’s fiction has been the subject of a great deal of critical comment. Notable and perceptive full-length studies include Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983), Sally Shuttleworth’s George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (1984) and



Introduction


George Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (1991). Eliot’s model of society and human character is seen as derived from key tenets of nineteenth-century scientific thought, especially her theory of historical development and social dynamics, which is (so the story goes) rooted in organic, evolutionary principles.21 Gillian Beer, for example, notes how especially in Eliot’s later novels ‘we have an imagination permeated by scientific ideas and speculations’.22 And Sally Shuttleworth details the way in which ‘she adheres to the scientific and artistic creed she had earlier outlined in her essay “The Natural History of German Life”’.23 Certainly there is a great deal of textual evidence to authenticate this interpretation. On numerous occasions the development of history is seen to take on a structured, mechanistic and unalterable quality. Note for instance the following representation of human mental processes in Adam Bede: Was there a motive at work under this strange reluctance of Arthur’s which had a sort of backstairs influence, not admitted to himself ? Our mental business is carried on much in the same way as the business of the State: a great deal of hard work is done by agents who are not acknowledged. In a piece of machinery, too, I believe there is often a small unnoticeable wheel which has a great deal to do with the motion of the large obvious ones.24 This reinforces an organicist perception of social existence, with interrelated units contributing towards a greater whole. The ‘small unnoticeable wheel’ is paradigmatic of the way change occurs, with unnoticed and unnoted individuals silently contributing to a broader evolution. It contributes to the ethos of exploratory science evident from Eliot’s definition of her task in Middlemarch as being to detail ‘the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time’.25 However, such a critical focus on the perceived influence of scientific thought on Eliot’s fiction, though enlightening, fails to come to terms adequately with an evident textual essaying for a coherent sense of a totalizing narrative of the explicitly national past (and therein national identity). In effect, the scientific framework does not provide the totality Eliot strove for. As she noted in a letter to Mme Bodichon, scientific theory was not spiritually reassuring: ‘To me the Development theory and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the



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processes.’26 Her attempts to solve this ‘mystery’ are central; there was more to her History than the stated scientific principles of Darwin or Spencer. Similarly, there are questions as to the particular influence of the scientism of Comte who, as a consequence, will not be a focus in this study. Eliot did indeed recognize him as a ‘great personage’,27 acknowledging ‘the illumination Comte has contributed to my life’.28 And, as G. H. Lewes revealed, he and Eliot found much of value in Comte’s explanation of History. ‘With regard to History I venture to say that no philosopher has ever laid so much emphasis on it, no one has more clearly seen and expressed the truth, that the past rules the present, lives in it, and that we are but the growth and outcome of the past.’29 Yet, the significance of this influence is questionable. What might be read, for instance, from the fact that the Positivist Dr Richard Congreve selected Eliot’s poem ‘Oh May I Join the Choir Invisible’ as the conclusion to a speech he delivered to the Positivist School on New Year’s Day 1876?30 The Comtean influence has been widely discussed, ranging from more general considerations of influence found in Neil Roberts’s George Eliot: Her Beliefs and Her Art (1975) and Terry Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology (1978), to those with a more specific focus on particular elements of Comtean Positivism. These include T. R. Wright’s essays ‘George Eliot and Positivism’31 and ‘From Bumps to Morals: the Phrenological Background to George Eliot’s Moral Framework’,32 and his full-length study, The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (1986). However, although it would be fair to say that any discussion of Eliot’s relationship with totalizing configurations of historical experience would be insufficient if it entirely overlooked the influence of Comte, I am increasingly convinced that it would be a comparable mistake to overstate this influence. For though certain critics have viewed Eliot’s positivist credentials as self-evident, in her letters she conceded that positivism was ‘onesided’. And, when urged directly by Frederic Harrison (a leading Victorian Positivist) to create a literary work founded directly and entirely in the positivist philosophy (he was dissatisfied with The Spanish Gypsy), she declined. For her the danger in this was in lapsing ‘from the picture to the diagram’, something she found ‘offensive’.33 Thus, not only did she not view her own personal philosophy as that of an unqualified positivist, but self-proclaimed positivists remained unconvinced as to her own loyalty to their cause. 10.1057/9780230286948 - George Eliot and Victorian Historiography, Neil McCaw


Introduction


However, the key reason for not making Comte a central focus in this study is that, as is the case with Darwinian evolutionary theory and scientific theory more generally, the Comtean explanation of George Eliot’s personal philosophy and literary fictions is too limiting and limited. This is particularly so for the way in which it fails to come to terms with the issue of nationalism and representations of English national history and identity. Comtean Positivism envisaged history as a human totality in which the idiosyncrasies and particularities of human identity are subsumed and silenced: ‘we are suffering under an utter disagreement which may be called universal’.34 As a consequence difference and dissimilarity were erased, leaving issues of nationalism and ethnicity unresolved. The whole thrust of Comte’s philosophy amounts to a denial of difference, an ironing smooth of the historical metanarrative that worked to remove metaphysics and spirituality from the processes of interpretation. As Bernard Paris has pointed out, Positivism left Eliot with no answers to questions ‘of meaning, end, and value, in giving man a sense of religious orientation in the cosmos’.35 This dissatisfaction is apparent from Eliot’s relationship with perhaps the most well known Victorian Positivist historian, H. T. Buckle. Buckle’s The History of Civilisation (1857) displays an insistence to impose a Comtean Positivist philosophy onto collected historical evidence and thereby ensure that it conforms to a predetermined pattern. This philosophy, and indeed philosophizing, was not highly regarded by Victorian historians and critics: ‘the chance that his work will be a mere Cyclopean ruin is incalculably great’.36 Thus although Buckle enjoyed ‘instant and almost overwhelming fame’ as a consequence of the publication of his History,37 his form of historical reconstruction was not particularly influential in the longer term. Soon after the publication of Buckle’s famous work Eliot wrote to Charles Bray, calling it ‘a suggestive book’.38 A month later, in another letter to the Bray family, she notes how ‘there are strangely unphilosophic opinions mixed with its hardy philosophy’. For instance, she claims, ‘he holds that there is no such thing as race or hereditary transmission of qualities’. ‘It is only by such negations as these’, she concludes, ‘that he can find his way to the position which he maintains at great length – that the progress of mankind is dependent entirely on the progress of knowledge, and that there has been no intrinsically moral advance.’39 This issue of ethnic/national characteristics comes to the fore in her rebuttal of the Positivist interpretation of history. Buckle is thus suggestive, but his overarching metanarrative



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draws explicit and fundamental criticism. The (non)representation of ethnic/national characteristics is deemed particularly problematic. His work is seen as markedly flawed. To Sara Hennell Eliot wrote: ‘He [Buckle] is a writer who inspires me with personal dislike; not to put too fine a point on it, he impresses me as an irreligious, conceited man.’40 This personal hostility contributed to an already apparent suspicion, and soon after the publication of Silas Marner Eliot criticized Buckle again. This time the objection was that his work prescribed the antithesis of a Wordsworthian ideal: I am very far behind Mr Buckle’s millennial prospect, which is, that men will be more and more congregated in cities and occupied with human affairs, so as to be less and less under the influence of Nature – i.e., the sky, the hills, and the plains; whereby superstition will vanish, and statistics will reign for ever and ever.41 The positive modernity of Buckle’s philosophy, his mapping of an intellectual progress, was thus rejected. There is even a suggestion that a vaguely metaphysical ‘superstition’ was seen as preferable to ‘statistics’. When faced with the Positivist totalizing framework Eliot shows noticeable hostility, engaging with the ongoing critique of Buckle’s work. This is further evidenced by the copy of John Stuart-Glennie’s critical ‘Mr Buckle’s Contribution to the New Philosophy of History’ in her library.42 The absence of what Duncan Forbes has labelled ‘Liberal Anglican’ historiography from this study can similarly be traced to its tangible connections with nineteenth-century science, particularly in the case of the espoused ‘science of history’.43 For, while rooting itself in an orthodox Christian worldview, an ‘assertion of a purpose governing the whole past’,44 the so-called Liberal Anglicans relied on a scientific invocation of society as ‘a growing organism’. It was possible, it was claimed, to achieve a science of historical process.45 This is implicit in Thomas Arnold’s statement that: ‘States, like individuals, go through certain changes in a certain order, and are subject at different stages of their course to certain peculiar disorders.’46 The assumed scientific basis for history transcended national boundaries, towards a recognition of the ‘bond of universal brotherhood’, and away from an ‘exclusive affection for our relations, our clan, or our country’.47 The parameters of historical evolution were broad enough to encompass humanity in all its forms, thereby avoiding the narrow



Introduction


consideration of particular national groups. The broadly scientific thrust towards a universal history of all nations (à la Comte) is to be displaced here by a consideration of the particular nationalism of George Eliot’s reconstruction of History. This will work to refute what Andrew Sanders has called Eliot’s attempt ‘to consider the humanity beyond the hedges of an AngloSaxon garden, and in circumstances which altered the tenor of the whole of Western civilisation’.48 The concern here is with the explicitly (and particularly) English dimension of her historical reconstruction. The background of this discussion is the development of the historical novel, the most overt manifestation of the Victorian historical sense. A product of the increasing interest in the relations between past and present, historical fiction embodied the new demands for what Hilary Fraser calls ‘precision and verisimilitude’.49 It related, or had its correlative in, the increased emphasis on accuracy in historical representation within nineteenth-century historiography.50 Historical fiction rooted itself in a fundamental concern with ‘recording’ historical events or characters, and giving what Andrew Sanders has called ‘substance’51 to the actors of history. As Harry E. Shaw points out, in his The Forms of Historical Fiction (1983), there is as such an identifiable relation between the historical novel and the realist novel. Historical fiction ‘shares the conventions’52 of its realist ‘cousin’, including an overriding concern with the actual and the feasible, even if it tends to privilege actual historical events both more explicitly and in more detail. The key similarity is the privileging of a history that can be narrated. George Eliot was writing her self-confessed ‘realist’ fictions in the aftermath of the most prominent wave of historical fiction, the era of Scott’s Waverley (1814) and Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi (1835). Indeed, her own personal fascination with history manifested itself as a key aspect of her realist methodology. As a consequence her novels stand in very close relation to the genre of historical fiction. Notably, she was actively engaged in the process of recreating, as far as possible, what might (rather uncritically) be regarded as actual historical societies, with her novels set at least a generation in the past. To date this parallel with historical fiction is only usually critically discussed in relation to Romola (1863), the historical tale of Renaissance Florence. However, even in the case of this novel there has been much contention about the degree to which Eliot satisfies the criteria of the historical novel. The critical debate has often tended to centre on the extent to which



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she was able to authentically recreate the historical past in Romola, the dominant view being that expressed by Henry James, who saw the novel as ‘pre-eminently a study of the human conscience in an historical setting’.53 This view accords with that of Leslie Stephen: If . . . we venture to drop the history, or to consider it as a mere conventional background, we can still be interested in the real subject of the book . . . the tragedy of a high feminine nature exposed to such doubts and conflicting impulses as may still present themselves in different shapes.54 The suggestion is that the novel exists at a distance from the concerted details of historical contextualization that saturate the novel. As K. M. Newton has said, ‘the Florentine dimension fails to come to life. It is . . . difficult to believe in Tito or Romola as fifteenthcentury characters; their consciousnesses seem too modern.’55 Perhaps the most effective criticism is that of Eliot herself, who acknowledged (at an earlier stage of her career) that ‘the finest effort to reanimate the past is of course only approximative – is always more or less an infusion of the modern spirit into the ancient form’.56 The dominant critical wisdom has been that George Eliot’s representation of History in Romola, and indeed throughout her literary career, is fundamentally inauthentic. John Bayley, for instance, in his essay ‘The Pastoral of Intellect’, suggests that Eliot’s use of the ‘historical pastoral’ ensures that ‘history for her becomes a timeless present, the source and inspiration of culture and morals that would otherwise have to be built on vacancy’.57 It provides stability and sure knowledge. U. C. Knoepflmacher also highlights the way in which she creates a figurative ‘annulment of time’,58 and David Morse sees her realism as ‘the suppression . . . of cultural change’.59 Eliot fails, in these terms, to recreate an authentic sense of historical change. There is a failure to encapsulate development within the novels and, as Morse concludes, a tendency ‘to suspend time; to draw a magic circle around a particular time and place and to transform it into a kind of shimmering dream of unchangeableness’.60 The representation of historical change poses particular problems for Eliot (as will emerge). However, it would be erroneous to suggest that as a consequence Eliot creates the impression of constancy and equilibrium. Both John Goode, who has highlighted what he calls the ‘apparent dehistoricization of social reality in George Eliot’s work’,61



Introduction


and Arnold Kettle, who remarks on how in Felix Holt there is ‘nothing musty about the history, no sense of a retreat into the past’,62 offer such an interpretation. Therein they fail to address the question as to whether it is the problematics of representation that cause this, i.e. historical process is in fact beyond representation, or whether Eliot actually imagines such a constancy. They also ignore the strenuous effort, within the novels, to successfully embody just such a process. The assessment as to the degree to which Eliot is successful in realizing an authentic sense of the past in Romola, or for that matter any of the other novels, is of little relevance to this study. Indeed, Romola is to be a less focal element of this study than the other fictions. This is primarily because the overarching concern here is with Eliot’s imagining of the English national past. Thus, although much critical comment on Romola has seen the text as a disguised realization of Victorian England, something approaching Victorian culture in fancy dress, the historical sources accessed during the writing of the novel were primarily concerned with Italian history and culture. As such it is not feasible to analyse the relationship the novel has with trends in the Victorian historiography of England in the same way as is possible in the case of the other fictions. The fundamental concern here is with the method by which George Eliot sought to recreate history within her fiction, and the ideological implications of this. Ostensibly, all of Eliot’s fictions are seen to fulfil the criteria of what might be called the historico-realist novel, striving to encapsulate past historical societies through the medium of fiction, despite the reservations that might be voiced about the effectiveness of this (re)presentation of History. Bernard Semmel goes some way towards accepting this, noting that ‘all of Eliot’s novels but one . . . were historical romances set at least a generation earlier’.63 It is a point similarly made by G. H. Lewes, who stated in a letter to John Blackwood of 1861: ‘As I often tell her most of the scenes and characters of her books are quite as historical to her direct experience, as the fifteenth century of Florence.’64 However, the overriding concern is with illustrating how Eliot’s fiction goes beyond such a broad historical realism and achieves a new (for the time) degree of historicity. In this sense Eliot defines the parameters of what might be called the historiographical novel: all the novels (with the exception of Daniel Deronda) are set more than a generation in the past, they deal centrally with the interaction of present and past, and they attempt to achieve a fictionalized recreation of history much akin to that more usually associated with



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historical fiction in its more overt form. Yet, what is most crucial is Eliot’s exceptional research into the historical specifics of her novels, research that was rooted in secondary source materials and therein pervading historiographical trends. And, with the exception of Romola and certain scenes in Daniel Deronda, Eliot narrates a landscape that is peculiarly English. Her liberal philosophy may seem to offer itself as inclusive to peoples of differing cultural backgrounds, and her scientism implies a universal historical process, yet it is notable how quintessentially English the novels are. As a consequence, the historiography from which she constructs English history is of central significance. It will become clear that there is a tangible imprint of the dominant discourses of a particularly British historiography on her work, which has distinct ideological implications. The objective façade of History is thus problematized. Its status as a configuration used as a means of making sense of a disparate and confusing world, a configuration that can also serve as a discourse to legitimate ‘the dominant social order or status quo – the existing relations of domination and subordination’,65 will be key. The fashioning of history as part of what Dollimore and Sinfield have identified as the strategies of ‘consolidation, subversion and containment’ will become particularly evident.66 During the nineteenth century, for instance, historical writing embodied ‘a law of development . . . the counterpart of natural law’, leading ‘“inevitably” to the present order and thereby ratifying it’.67 History becomes apparent in the novels through the privileging of contextual detail that works to anchor the fictional narratives to what is seen to be a more ontologically stable base. Eliot uses what was a typical narrative device of formal realism, but in a way that was qualitatively different from other authors. The degree to which Eliot’s works are enmeshed in historical research, and as a result in the prevailing discourses of historiography, is striking. And, her obsessive research process and profound and overriding interest in the philosophy of history highlight a unique literary methodology. As Peter Coveney says, ‘we feel at once the presence of a mind which possesses the power of all creative history, to see any present in the context of an accumulated past’.68 This is particularly evident because George Eliot was not just concerned with the specific historical details, but also with the processes by which change occurred and through which people were, as she saw it, inextricably linked to their pasts. This represented a desire to recreate the philosophical foundation, as well as the



Introduction


atomistic details of history/History. It was a form of literary (re)presentation rooted in a research methodology typical of the increasing professionalization of the writing of history in England during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This marked a movement towards archival research and towards the detailed and laboured reconstruction of the past. This was influenced by the evolution of historiography in Germany, such as that of Leopold von Ranke, who was (in this respect) followed by professional British historians such as William Stubbs. As such Eliot’s work is noticeably unliterary in its privileging of history, more Historical than a historical novel for the way in which the drive towards authenticity of Historical reconstruction appears to predominate. U. C. Knoepflmacher has even suggested that it might be ‘a new form . . . a history that is a fiction’,69 a form that prompted Henry James, at the time of the publication of Middlemarch, to ask: ‘if we write novels so, how shall we write History?’70 Eliot’s rationale for this profound concern to recreate History is central. A developed sense of history was paramount, a history that was to be accurately and authentically embedded within the parameters of the fictional worlds. This has a deep psychological-spiritual justification. History (namely a particular imagining of the past) was the twilight world wherein human existence and especially English national identity were meaningful and spiritually enlightened. The reassuring, cohesive narratives of England’s past found in Victorian (Whig) historiography offered solace to combat the doubts and insecurities of Eliot’s mid-Victorian present, as will emerge. Therein they worked as a replacement for a coherent religious faith. As Benedict Anderson has argued, ‘nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary’ than the passing of religion.71 History, as narrative, offered hope and refuge in unity and meaning, to bolster a world of lost faith. This is apparent in Eliot’s later fiction, in which unity and meaning is absent. It is no coincidence that Daniel Deronda is simultaneously both the most contemporary and also the most bleak of the novels. Therefore, this study has three interlinked foci: the method by which Eliot attempted to recreate history in her fictions, the influence of nineteenth-century British historiography on her perception of the details and processes of History, and the ideological implications of her representation of History, particularly in terms of the politics of national and gender identity. This will work broadly within the territory marked out by more recent Eliot criticism such as Hilary Fraser’s



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discussion of Romola in The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (1992) and Jim Reilly’s Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot (1993). Both of these privilege a problematized, theorized conception of History, and seek to understand not just the type of discursive influences Eliot’s literary texts betray, but also the means by which such influence is exerted and can be understood. Fraser’s discussion, for instance, situates itself within the context of a wider assessment of ‘the historical, political and mythical status of the Renaissance in Victorian England’,72 recognizing Eliot’s historical vision as one which ‘challenges the didactic simplicity of Pugin’s or Ruskin’s or Carlyle’s contrasts between past and present’.73 The originality of Jim Reilly’s study of George Eliot, on the other hand, comes with his alignment of her work and modern radical historiography. He offers perceptive re-readings of her work, Romola and Middlemarch (for example) seen as ‘novels that are unpicking themselves’,74 as they simultaneously deconstruct the very notions of History and historicity that they for the most part privilege. His overarching thesis relates closely to the focus of this study: ‘The central, explicit topic of twentieth-century artistic discourse is its own inability to represent historical events and furthermore that this is the implicit – emergent, unacknowledged, repressed – topic of nineteenth-century discourse.’75 Clearly George Eliot was herself consumed, especially by the end of her career, by just such doubts as to her ability ‘to know’ and ‘to represent’ history in whatever form it could be found. George Eliot was not ‘in a position to produce a final totalization’76 of historical existence, she was unable to free herself from the defining philosophical/historiographical influences of her own episteme. This influence is apparent in the oscillation between attempts towards a ‘horizon of totalization’ with ‘a single meaning’77 (as Robert Young puts it), and a perception in which the meaning and form of History remain unclear or indecipherable. That said, questions of influence, particularly of how to define, and even ascertain, such, should not be taken for granted. The Victorian cultural polyphony of competing and complementary voices, articulated at varied decibel levels through a variety of texts, makes the task of crystallizing the particularity of one voice in relation to others one that requires immense labour, perception and probably no small degree of deduction. Even where there is an overt, espoused authorial indebtedness, it is unwise for such a declaration to be taken at face value. As Christopher Parker has contended, ‘it is always difficult in intellectual history to distinguish



Introduction


between a direct causal relationship linking schools or traditions of thought and a mere sharing of common characteristics.’78 The situation is made more difficult if the focus of the study, in this case George Eliot, stands in close relation to an almost inexhaustible array of socio-cultural materials. Eliot’s sheer intellectual range, traversing the parameters of historical, social, cultural and even linguistic subject fields, ensures difficulties. Any attempt at isolating specific areas of knowledge, and establishing the exact nature and degree of the impact this had on the production of her literary fictions, should thus be carried out with a due sense of its own limitations. That she was not an author who wholeheartedly allied herself with any single ideological perspective is clear. The sheer multiplicity of her reading lists gives us little assistance in narrowing down her fields of knowledge. As Semmel has indicated, she ‘saw herself as an opponent of ideological thinking, while continuing to be aware of the seductive charms of doctrinal creeds for vulnerable intellectuals’.79 Throughout her career she proved herself to be the most critical of thinkers. As such the fact of her reading a particular text, or even of it becoming a particular favourite of Eliot and Lewes, can be taken as little more than a sign of a general interest, and certainly not necessarily as evidence of intellectual influence or adherence. That is not to say that areas of influence have not been delineated in other critical discussions of Eliot. However, a notable absence has been the study of the influence of British historiography, especially of the nineteenth century, even though studies exist which focus on continental, notably German historiography. This is partly due to the vast range of her knowledge, and the accompanying enthusiasm of critics for viewing Eliot’s influences on this wider intellectual scale. It also indicates a reluctance to situate Eliot within the context of the more narrow, perhaps even parochial field that is ‘British historiography’, with identifiable (and separate) assumptions and practices, divorced from wider European spheres of historiographical writing and thinking.80 Nevertheless, it is this narrower field of historical writing that is to be the focus here. More specifically, this study will relate Eliot’s work to key trends in British historiographical thought. Earlier chapters will examine the ways in which signs of the Whig interpretation of History are apparent in her fictional narratives, and will highlight ideological tensions between the influence of this and that of Thomas Carlyle, who acted as a check on the broad optimism of the Whig narrative. This will feed into a consideration of the later nineteenth-century and



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twentieth-century reaction against such grand narrative history, and how this relates to the textual–ideological tensions apparent in Eliot’s work, particularly in her representation of the mid-Victorian present. The final chapter will examine the ways in which this ongoing debate about the nature of the English past and present becomes displaced, in the later writing, by a consideration and projection of a national future. This will be situated in relation to an emerging trend of female nineteenth-century historical writing in which the imagining of the future stands as a subversive strategy for escaping, or reconfiguring, the restrictive (phallocentric) metanarratives of the past. The first chapter, however, will highlight the significance of notions of narrative and totality in relation to Eliot’s conceptualizing of History and the historical process. It will as such mark out the ground for the critical discussion of specific historiographical discourses/positions in succeeding chapters, and will attempt to illustrate how and why history plays such a key role in her work. It will, overridingly, essay to understand the rationale and effect of Eliot’s detailed historical research.



Introduction


George Eliot’s1 concern to produce a History that was coherent and unified within her fiction manifested itself in attempts towards a narrative, totalizing conception of the past. As she acknowledged, historical recreation requires ‘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 careful analogical creation [my italics]’.2 That is, by configuring a parallel and complementary narrative wherein gathered evidence is collated into a deduced pattern, the impression is created of an ongoing historical process. Furthermore, the writer/historian is given licence to overcome the deficiencies of this evidence, and thus at the heart of the reconstructive process is a certain artistry; formally, this tends towards a narrative analogy. Eliot’s journalistic and critical essays make clear the extent of the historical dimension of her worldview, and they also display her intention to encapsulate this in literary representation(s). Fundamentally, this was to be a fresh form of representation, dealing with a previously underrepresented subject matter. Her perception of culture and society was towards its historical aspect, and how this could be narrated. Her theory of the real in art, her ‘tough-minded, critical realism’,3 was founded in this perception. With the notable exception of chapter seventeen of Adam Bede, this is most apparent in her critical writings prior to Scenes of Clerical Life (1858). In these essays and reviews the concern with the need for authorial sincerity and sympathy, and the attempt to define the ideal (but not idealized) subject matter, were first delineated. There is an evident striving towards a coherent and inclusive theory of the historically real in art. There are several key constituent aspects that Eliot saw, once 16



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combined, as producing the most important quality of literary art, which is authenticity. Authenticity, in George Eliot’s schema, is that which allows art to be given the compliment of ‘real’, towards which every artist must strive. It is the sum of a series of subordinate, though vitally important, aspects of the realist artist’s method. Perhaps the most characteristic aspect of the literary approach Eliot promoted, one which on the continent was more associated with painting,4 was its privileging of a more apparently ordinary, common, humble subject matter. This obvious echo of Romantic themes, with the focus on humble life reflecting particularly Wordsworthian notions of human value,5 implied a rejection of the epic and the ideal as it had been depicted in previous art forms. The intention was to depict life as it was, not as it should be. This is apparent in Eliot’s praise of Goethe: Everywhere he brings us into the presence of living, generous humanity – mixed and erring, and self-deluding, but saved from the utter corruption by the salt of some noble impulse, some disinterested effort, some beam of good nature, even though grotesque or homely. And this mode of treatment seems to us precisely that which is really moral in its influence.6 It is this sphere of human existence that was to be narrated. However, Eliot stopped short of advocating the inclusion of all aspects of ordinary life within artistic work: ‘No one can maintain that all fact is a fit subject for art . . . the sphere of the artist has its limits somewhere.’7 Tellingly, she was less clear about where exactly this limit was to be placed. This valorization of ordinary life is what Raymond Williams has called Eliot’s project of restoring ‘the real inhabitants of rural England to their places in . . . a socially selective landscape’. Her attempts to configure this collective narrative are judged to be flawed for, in the novels themselves, ‘she does not get much further than restoring them as a landscape’.8 Although she features aspects of human existence that had been underplayed in other fiction, she is seen to make the plethora of individual voices into a chorus, and as such to misrepresent the individuality of ordinary life. This homogenization sees regional life as a unified and coherent experience, perhaps a typical consequence of the assertion of narrative totality where in reality there was none to be found. The failure to recognize and acknowledge diversity equates to what





Daniel Cottom has identified as Eliot’s project ‘to aggrandize the power of middle-class interpretation’, her method of inserting ‘the fable of the middle classes’ into ‘the being of the lower classes’.9 Eliot’s attentions were not directed towards a problematic peasant or working class but to what Simon Dentith has called ‘classes decidedly more respectable’,10 evidenced by the privileging of the type of man represented by the eponymous Adam Bede over that represented by a character such as Wiry Ben. There is an inherent class-bias in Eliot’s perspective, whereby working-class life is ironed-smooth within the ongoing narrative so as to achieve a more apparently universal humanist picture, the values of which are essentially bourgeois. Even in the later fiction, where the chorus of humanity begins to disintegrate, there are still signs of such a middle-class default position; the characterization of Daniel Deronda is a case in point.11 In the attempt to achieve this apparent and hallowed authenticity, George Eliot’s theory of art demanded the sincerity of authors. They were to be faithful to their ‘own sensibilities or inward vision’, to never ‘break loose’ from the truth of their ‘own mental state’.12 In her view ‘truth’ was empirically perceivable, and artists could portray it accurately if they were sincere and diligent enough. This was vital if an artist was to avoid the grandiloquence that Eliot found so objectionable in Edward Young. She criticized him for not being serious enough, for not working rigorously, and as a result for never producing work that encapsulated the historical essence of existence. He gave a ‘factitious grandeur to empty wordiness’13 because, rather than being content to depict tangible, material aspects, writing with an object in mind, he ruminated on metaphysical abstractions at the level of the immortal and the eternal. Her objection was to ‘schemed picturesqueness’ which she wished to be replaced by conscientious reproductions, ‘in their concrete incidents’, of ‘pregnant movements in the past’14 (movements that were both realizable and representable). The desired outcome of this prescribed artistic methodology was to be the creation of authentic artistic works that were rooted in specific historical circumstances. It was important that a ‘true representation of the realities of life [history]’15 was given. Eliot lamented the absence of this quality in art in the essay ‘The Natural History of German Life’ when she asked: Where in our picture exhibitions, shall we find a group of true peasantry? What English artist even attempts to rival in truthfulness



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For her there was a marked absence of detailed historical contextualization allied to the strict observance of particulars. It was not enough to depict humble subject matter detached from particular historical conditions: ‘Even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of features . . . treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and prepossessions rather than of direct observation.’17 Authentic depiction was for Eliot a sacred task, art taking on a quasireligious significance with ‘falsification’ seen as ‘far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life’.18 The historical dimension of this authenticity manifested itself in Eliot’s profound interest in the relations of past and present. Even before she began writing fiction she noted how ‘it would be a very serious mistake to suppose that the study of the past and the labours of criticism have no important practical bearing on the present’.19 She was, she claimed, writing of a civilization descended ‘from distant ages, with living ideas, the offspring of a true process of development’.20 A year after this, in the ‘Prospectus of the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review’, Eliot wrote21 that ‘the fundamental principle of the work will be the recognition of the law of progress’. However, this conviction must be ‘modified by the experience of the past and the conditions of the present’.22 For her, History provided moral lessons. The Review itself would engage with the historical process by acting as a tribune for progressive reform,23 and thus furthering the historical narrative of which it was a part. Eliot’s pervading concern with the relation of past and present is evident in the critical essays and reviews. In ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, this is described in its broadest of conceptions: ‘I, at least, hardly ever look at a bent old man, or a wizened old woman, but I see also, with my mind’s eye, that Past of which they are the shrunken remnant.’24 In ‘German Wit: Heinrich Heine’ Eliot traces the origins and development of humour and wit since the Ancient Hebrews, Egyptians and Assyrians. She extrapolates this into seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. It is said to be an attempt to further ‘the study of men, as they have appeared in different ages’.25 In ‘The Natural History of German Life’ she is more specific. She compares the English tenant farmers of the late eighteenth century with their successors in the mid-nineteenth century. The purpose is to draw out the ‘historical characteristics of the peasant’.26 In so doing



such studies of popular life as the picture of Terniers or the ragged boys of Murillo?16


she identifies a close relation between culture and a wider history. Language, for instance, is seen as having both an internal and an external dynamic of change that denies systematic categorization. The essay centres on a recognition that European history ‘has its roots intertwined with the past’.27 The insistence on authenticity was linked directly to an empirical methodology, with art intended to ‘produce in the mind analogous emotions to those produced by the object itself’.28 The artist was to refrain from unnecessarily imaginative portrayals, and was to concentrate instead on depicting people ‘as they actually were’. They were to have no qualities incompatible with their station in life: The German novelists who undertake to give pictures of peasantlife fall into the same mistake as our English novelists; they transfer their own feelings to ploughmen and woodcutters, and give them both joys and sorrows of which they know nothing.29 The historical dimension of existence could be recreated, Eliot was convinced, through the detailed particulars of human existence located in historical circumstances. Such accuracy of portrayal was the best way to convey the truths of human existence. The methodology was to work from the particular to the universal, not vice versa, and to feature the ‘special case of oppression’30 rather than abstractions, so that the artist could ensure that ‘every heart will throb’31 and not ‘leave his audience cold’.32 The desire to feature the particular aspects of human existence necessitated the privileging of actual (in the sense of verifiable through evidence) historical details. This historical detail was inextricably linked to the moral purpose of art, as Eliot saw it. Authenticity in art was advocated not as an end, not as the ultimate aim towards which all artistic effort should be directed, but rather as a means to achieving the end. This end was the widening of cultural sympathy through art, a ‘mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot’.33 This implicated realism not as the objective towards which art should strive, but rather as the means of achieving that objective. An artist had to be authentic so that the moral dimension of art could be realized. The intention was to convince the readership that they were witnessing a narrative of actual existence, an existence with which (to that point) they had been unfamiliar. The intention was to reassure through familiarity. It is one of the chief characteristics of the characterization of Romola,



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who is deemed historical because of her ‘sympathy with aged sorrows, aged ambition, aged pride and indignation’.34 The realist author was, according to Eliot, to become a form of moral teacher, a teacher ‘in the sense in which every artist is a teacher – namely, by giving us his higher sensibility as a medium . . . bringing home to our coarser senses what would otherwise be unperceived by us’.35 By embedding specific historical referents within her fictions, Eliot strove to forge an inescapable link between history and morality; the former as the servant of the latter. The use of exact dates and historical events is, as Leo Bersani has argued, fundamental. It ‘not only serves the illusion of historical authenticity’, it also ‘allows us the luxury of assigning precise beginnings to experience, and of thereby making experience more accessible to our appetite for sense-making distinctions and categories.’36 It provides a comprehensible, restricted field of reference through which the sympathies of the readers can be appealed to. For Eliot such a positioning of history within the frame of the novel was inevitable (rather than contrived), the necessary consequence of a worldview that was implicitly historical.37 It was a quality much appreciated in Victorian fiction by literary critics, including Arthur Tilley, who noted Eliot’s ‘scrupulous reverence for the truth’.38 Little sympathy was shown for ‘those deluded searchers for the “ideal” who preferred to substitute the creations of their imagination for the roast beef realities of the world about them’.39 George Eliot was an author who strove for just such an ‘air of reality’ and ‘solidity of specification’.40 The wealth of specific historical detail evident in her novels was the result of copious research. The aim was to contribute to the true-to-life quality of the texts, and to avoid resemblance to and association with what Bann has called the ‘pseudo-historical forgeries’41 that proliferated during the early to mid Victorian period. For Eliot this included the modern-antique42 species of fiction, in which the historical backdrop was arbitrary and contrived and bore little organic relation to the unfolding of the narrative. Her notebooks and library lists reveal an impressive amount of primary and secondary source material consulted in the extensive research process that preceded the writing of each of her fictions.43 The rigour with which she researched Adam Bede, for example, was extraordinary. Sources included the Gentleman’s Magazine, from which she drew a wealth of detail. This ranged from background information to the portrayal of Arthur Donnithorne’s coming-of-age party (which came from a report of the





actual events surrounding a similar party for John Henry, Duke of Rutland), to contextual information she gleaned relating to the position of the monarchy. It also included various details pertaining to the specifics of local and district life in late eighteenth-century rural England.44 This research from contemporary journals, matched by research in newspapers and other publications, was intended to help recreate the exact milieu.45 However, it was more than just a case of authorial diligence; the acute and intense effort to achieve the apparent historicity of the fictional narratives goes beyond such. Eliot was so keen to be authentic, to be accurate in her fictions (and in so doing perhaps displacing anxiety as to the moral earnestness of writing fiction) that, for example, she even researched into the prevailing weather of the historical period within which Adam Bede was set. The meteorological conditions of specified days within the fictional narrative were matched with the weather of the actual days they were supposed to correspond to and represent.46 It was a concern for authenticity that was also evident in the preparation of later novels. The detailed use of the Annual Register for Eliot’s research into inundations,47 for The Mill on the Floss, is typical. So is the wealth of research into Renaissance Florence for Romola,48 the diligence apparent in wading through newspaper archives for Felix Holt,49 and the copious notes on gambling and superstition researched from Cornhill50 (later used in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda). This reveals an extraordinary concern for ‘the truth’, an attempt to ensure that, as far as possible (and beyond attempts at verisimilitude prevalent in other comparable literary works), Eliot’s literary fictions were accurate, and thus realistic. This was crucial, as it was only then that the moral mission of the novels had a chance of being fulfilled. The central concern of this study is with the large amount of secondary historical material Eliot consulted in the process of preparing each literary work. For, of the many sources she accessed during her research (for example during the period between January 1868 and December 1871, she consulted at least three hundred works, many with numerous volumes),51 the vast majority of her notes, as Pratt and Neufeldt make clear, ‘come from historical works’.52 The particularity of George Eliot’s placing of history and the historical process (bearing in mind the multiplicity of writers engaged in analogous fictional projects) is in the vast number of sources she quarried. History was not merely a matter of contextualizing allusions to politics or past events; Eliot’s immanent historical narrative shows signs of something more



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concerted and considered. As J. C. Pratt has indicated, there is evidence of attempts to ‘quite consciously and methodically . . . investigate and assess as many different historical theories as possible’.53 Her literary texts are enmeshed in discourses of historiography, and in various questions concerning the nature of history/History. This, as Jim Reilly perceptively puts it, is evidence of nineteenth-century fiction as a ‘site of interrogation and dramatisation’ of issues ‘which this historiographically saturated century has thrown into focus’.54 The particular relation of fictional narrative and factual historical detail in Eliot’s work is akin to what David Lodge has called the ‘essentially metonymic’ nature of realist fiction. This is notable for the way ‘it tends to imitate, as faithfully as discourse can, the actual relations of things to each other in space-time’.55 Characters, background and actions are all ‘knitted together by physical contiguity, temporal sequence and logical cause and effect, and are represented in the text by a selection of synecdochic detail – parts standing for the whole’.56 The prime vehicle for this is narrative configuration. The implied narrative of History is interwoven with the fictional storyline. It acts as a foundation made up of (supposedly grander scale) political and military events so that, with a deft reference or allusion here or there, the impression is created that there is an interaction of fact and fiction. This is a familiar element of literary attempts to achieve realistic representation.57 History becomes a ‘a guarantee of ontological realism’,58 largely because it is imagined as an embodiment of objectivity, truth and reality. It is prioritized, in existential terms, over the fictional narrative. Thus, it offers a ‘realist mooring point’,59 a ‘parallel story [my italics]’60 (the term ‘story’ reflecting the fact that both history and text are found in narrative forms). This provides a means by which to validate and authenticate the fictional narrative. Thus the fictional narrative relates to a wider Historical narrative (as encapsulated within the novels) ‘by adjacency, not sequentially or dynastically’.61 This metonymy ensures that George Eliot’s characters generally have only a limited historical experience, events occurring without their direct involvement. It is what Jerome Beaty has called Eliot’s history ‘by Indirection’,62 history that is presented ‘dramatically, within the story, as part of the lives of the characters’, not presented ‘directly to the reader as history’.63 Significant fictional events are dramatized in ways that play down the importance of the wider historical dimension, which amplifies the ontological significance of the fictional dimension. This distancing of the historical frame from the fictional (and self-





confessedly social) sphere is characteristic of Eliot’s fiction. Early in Scenes of Clerical Life it is evident when the narrator identifies an interval ‘in which Evangelicalism and the Catholic Question had begun to agitate the rustic mind with controversial debates’64 as only a temporary and benign interval of agitation. It is the same sense of change and historical moment (tinged with irony) in the reference to the ‘Old Guard [the Imperial Guard of Napoleon (c. 1804)]’ who are compared to Amos Barton’s teeth: ‘few in number, and very much the worse for wear’.65 There is ironic difference here, the basis of which is an acceptance of the absurdity of the particular relation of the local (fictional) realm and the more grandly historical ((f)actual) realm. It is presented with less cutting irony in the comparison made between the ‘conflicting thoughts and passions’66 of the summer of 1788 in France and those within Caterina’s ‘little breast’ that is noted in ‘Mr Gilfil’s LoveStory’. However, the irony is still there: ‘The poor bird was beginning to flutter and vainly dash its soft breast against the hard iron bars of the inevitable.’67 In Adam Bede, the relationship between the people of Hayslope and a wider history is one in which national events are of no more importance than matters of local interest and gossip; the village is not significantly touched by them. Mrs Irwine, for example, is seen as a ‘graceful subject for conversation in turn with the King’s health, the sweet new patterns in cotton dresses, the news from Egypt’.68 Joseph Gerhard equates this with the way that Eliot rarely introduces ‘larger political [historical] events’ in her fictions. And, when she does so, she ‘interrupts them with signifying fictional actions’ such as a death or marriage, so that ‘macrocosmic history creates the impression of being relatively unimportant’.69 There is an implied privileging of one narrative over another, which is intended to be unifying and to substantiate the fictional realm. It is perhaps no coincidence that one of the few occasions on which this parallel, validating narrative configuration is compromised (apart from the notably exceptional Daniel Deronda) is in Romola, a novel that works on a far grander historical scale than Eliot’s English novels.70 There is no apparent separation of the grand historical and the fictional narrative. The reader is informed, for instance, how ‘the fortunes of Tito and Romola were dependent on certain grand political and social conditions which made an epoch in the history of Italy’.71 Eliot’s attempts to establish Romola as a more overtly selfconscious historical fiction create a more explicit portrayal of the determinism inherent in the relationship between the fictional and



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the implied historical narratives, as the lives of Tito and Romola are more firmly rooted to the metanarrative of historical actuality. In the other novels, however, Eliot’s History becomes ‘the essential reference’ in a literary narrative ‘which is supposed to report [or rather in this case ‘include’] “what really happened”’.72 This makes the logical connection, as Roland Barthes has noted, between literary realism and a perception of History that volunteers its own inherent objectivity. As such literary realism validates itself by incorporating allusions to a discourse whose existential status is seen as indisputable. For, as Philippe Hamon, in his critical ‘pell-mell’73 of the ‘realist discourse’, has observed, this History doubles, illuminates and predetermines the narrative, creating in the reader a series of lines that mark out the path of least resistance, foreshadowings, a system of expectations, by referring back implicitly or explicitly (via a quotation, an allusion etc.) to an already written text that the reader knows.74 The fictional narrative is set ‘in motion on top of a mega (extra) history that lies just beneath the surface’,75 a history that is implied in the process of its unfolding. The relationship is essentially metonymic, of contiguity, which is flagged through the introduction of specific historical details. This relationship of contiguity implies a History that has a narrative identity, the ‘already written text that the reader knows’. The interwoven yet distinct nature of this relationship is evident in the opposition between ‘monotonous homely existence’ and ‘worldstirring actions’76 in Adam Bede. It is inherent in Eliot’s discussion of the ‘type’ of man that Adam Bede represents: Their lives have no discernible echo beyond the neighbourhood where they dwelt, but you are almost sure to find there some good piece of road, some building, some application of mineral produce, some improvement in farming practice, some reform of parish abuses, with which their names are associated by one or two generations after them.77 Adam is a man who ‘had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him’.78 Hayslope is a place that is even immune to most of





the ill-effects of war, a wider historical event that only becomes prevalent during the Harvest Supper,79 and this only when there is a lengthy communal discussion about ‘the Peace’. Even this is conducted at the level of xenophobic prejudice and misinformation. The separation of history and society is present throughout Eliot’s English novels. The depiction of St Ogg’s in The Mill on the Floss shows a town where the ‘men who busied themselves with political questions [. . . were] regarded with some suspicion as dangerous characters’.80 The situation is metaphorically represented through the dissimilarity between the Rhine castles, ‘the grand historic life of humanity’, and the ‘dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhône’. The latter illustrate a human life that is ‘a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate’ and is ‘swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers’.81 The parallel is with the life of the community of St Ogg’s, with Maggie Tulliver as the only character ‘to be sensitive to the complexity of the past and present around her’.82 Such a sensitivity sees her privileged (by Eliot) above all other characters in the novel. The effect of the allusions to the historical field beyond ‘lend to the imaginary the guarantee of the real’.83 They attempt to establish fictional event and historical event on the same existential level. In Adam Bede, Hayslope is a village in which ‘the news that “Bony” was come back from Egypt was comparatively insipid, and the repulse of the French in Italy was nothing to Mrs Poyser’s repulse of the old squire.’84 The description of the Donnithorne house as ‘nothing but a plain square mansion of Queen Anne’s time but for the remnant of an old abbey to which it was united at one end’,85 and the picture gallery in the house, ‘banished for the last three generations’,86 is morally loaded. It serves as an indictment of the Victorian manifestation of the Donnithorne family. History has effectively been banished from the family, implying a loss of purpose, direction and, ultimately, honour. However, just as history validates it can also invalidate, as Hugh Witemeyer points out. History, he notes, is ‘the informing context of the individual life, which tends to lack meaning precisely to the extent that it lacks a sense of historical mission or duty’.87 This is generally so in George Eliot’s novels, where the historical dimension stands in ironic relation to fictional society, casting a critical eye on individuals and communities. The crucial aspect of the historical allusions, as Hamon reveals, is the bridging of the gap between the historical and the fictional



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narratives. Thus, in Middlemarch the descendants of Oliver Cromwell88 are mentioned in the context of Dorothea’s family tree, the controversy surrounding Peel’s Catholic Emancipation Act89 features as communal gossip, and the death of George the Fourth and the dissolution of Parliament90 are matters for social comment. Furthermore, the impinging effects of industrialization on provincial life (notably the railroad)91 represent, as Simon Dentith has pointed out, an attempt to ‘trace the movement of a society’, to ‘link up its smallest minutiae with the wider currents of social life’.92 They mark points of intersection between the path of the fictional narrative and the implied historical narrative of industrial and political evolution (nay progress). The effect of the metahistory, the implied metanarrative of History, is significant and particular. Being framed by historical events the fictional narrative is forced into the position of having to keep to the realms of the possible, even the likely or the foreseeable (problematic as these notions are). This excludes actions or events that deny the ‘truth’ of what is viewed as the objective historical setting, aspects that Hamon identifies as ‘agrammatical’,93 in the sense of being outside the grammar of realism. The literary narrative is shaped and restricted by actual historical events, a narrative of events which defines any escape from its ‘all-inclusiveness’94 as ‘wish-fulfilment, impossibility, something freakish and fitful, something delusory’.95 This ‘shaping’ of fictional events by the historical metanarrative occurs subtly. For instance, when Adam Bede informs Dinah of the contents of a letter sent by Arthur Donnithorne, he notes: ‘“it’s pretty certain, they say, that there’ll be a peace soon, though nobody believes it’ll last long.”’96 Within the context of the novel this displays profound insight: the 1802 Treaty of Amiens was indeed short-lived. The connection between the two men in this sense represents the interaction between the (meta)narrative of history and the fictional narrative, one informing the other, despite the fact that the wider historical narrative is ultimately discredited by its association with the actions of Donnithorne. Similarly, in Felix Holt, the ramifications of industrialization (especially the canal and the coalmine) are subtly worked into the fabric of the history of Treby Magna.97 The historical details of industrialization serve as celebratory mooring-points in a fictional narrative seeking to ensure its own ontological stability. Despite what has been implied about the existential status of the textual History, it would be a mistake to assume that it was a homogeneous, unified entity within Eliot’s fiction. The realist illusion of





objectivity belies the fact that the representation of history was founded on historical research that was itself distinctly subjective, subjectively drawn from ideologically loaded sources. The historiographical influences that impacted upon Eliot’s historical illusion are thus crucial, indicating a History that is discursive, with its own ideological baggage. It is what Hayden White has identified as ‘a product of consciousness’s efforts to come to terms with the problematical domains of experience’.98 The literary texts themselves are in this way (due to the parallel narrative configuration) shaped by the fact of their adjacency with the product of various discourses and configurations of historical actuality,99 bearing certain philosophical imprints. The copious amounts of research that preceded the writing of each of George Eliot’s novels in a bid to authentically reconstruct the historical setting of each work thus led to a recreation of a history that was eminently textual, eminently historiographical. It was textual partly at least in the sense that it was perceived in a narrative form, and historiographical because it was derived from the implicit influence of historical writing (as Eliot’s major source material). As one contemporaneous reviewer put it, ‘more than any other English novelist, she deserves to be taken seriously as an historian’.100 The ‘cobwebs of topical allusion’ and ‘that dry and chitinous murmur of footnotes’101 evident in her work and the researched and carefully placed allusions to historical events serve as indicators of a coherent, underlying Jamesonian ‘master narrative’102 of history. They illustrate Eliot’s concerted attempt to recreate a feasible history within her fictions. This metanarrative seeks, as J. M. Bernstein has pointed out, ‘to narratively articulate and legitimate some concrete first-order practices or narratives’.103 It tends towards making sense of the fictional events of the texts, to contextualize, explain and understand. However, within these fictions the metanarrative does not work in the same way as that which Colin MacCabe identifies as the ‘metalanguage’ typical of the ‘classic realist text’.104 As will increasingly emerge, the wide disparity of discursive historiographical positions ingested during Eliot’s copious research ensures this. The generic modernist text that MacCabe defines, lacking a ‘dominant position’ and providing a reading and interpretative process that is ‘constantly threatened with dissolution’,105 bears closer resemblance. The realist text, seen to encompass a narrative discourse (metalanguage) which functions ‘simply as a window on reality’106 (which can as such interpret all other discourses), stands in distinct contrast. In Eliot’s fictions there is no overarching narrative discourse that entirely, and in an



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unqualified way, interprets and understands all other discourses. The novels lack an entirely dominant position, never establishing certainty and confidence, and regularly being undermined by fundamental doubt as to the epistemology and ontology of historical existence. There is both a privileging and then a deconstruction of notions of narrative and totality, for example. This ambiguity in Eliot’s work arises from her partial and hesitant acceptance that the past can be ‘directly apprehended’.107 This is identified by Kuzminski as the ‘anti-interpretative’ and ‘antiexplanatory’108 approach to historical reconstruction that concentrates on ‘the past as it exists in the present as evidence’.109 This evidence is stitched together into a self-justifying narrative. In George Eliot’s case, however, this is subsequently undermined. The use of historical allusions does not concede or draw attention to the fact that they are already ‘narrative-laden’.110 They necessarily bring with them the implications of the (narrative) interpretations of history from which they have been plucked. Each detail stands in synecdochal relation to a framing narrative configuration that is inevitably subjective. As such Eliot implies that each allusion, or ‘referent’, can, in Barthes’ terms, ‘speak all on its own’111 while simultaneously engaging in an act of selective interpretation. Furthermore, this assertion of the objectivity of history is undermined by expressions of doubt as to the possibility of understanding and representing historical process. Crucially, she appears more confident as to the ability to portray history in its atomistic details, and far less confident in the representation of its dynamics of process. This might explain the tendency towards narrative history as the ‘only appropriate vehicle’112 (as Harriet Gilliam has argued) for depicting and understanding coherent historical change. Narrative is the vehicle for conveying what is knowable and comprehensible, providing the existential basis for imagined historical communities. Eliot’s work is especially symptomatic of what Henry Kozicki calls ‘the old unsolved problems of nineteenth-century historiography’.113 He identifies these as the relationship between individuals and their contexts, between events and the ‘systemic structure’114 of which they are part, the position and perspective of the historian, the importance of ideology and the role of methodology. Christopher Parker has similarly pointed to ‘the individuality of past event, action, or person, the “course of history”, and what can be “known”’,115 as key debates. Narrative History acts to overcome such problems, providing a ‘fictive substitute for authority and tradition, a maker of concords between





past, present, and future, a provider of significance to mere chronicity’.116 Therein lies its attraction. The historiographical dialogue within George Eliot’s fiction thus manifests itself as a particular interest in the development and course of history. There is an especial stress on reconciling what E. H. Carr has identified as the binary of Mysticism (where meaning lies outside History – theology or eschatology) and Cynicism (where History has no meaning, multiple meanings or arbitrarily assigned meanings).117 The concern is with how history develops, its dynamics, and the role of human agency in this. It is more than simply an interest in the past and in the means by which it can be represented in the present. This ‘philosophical manifestation of the historical sense’,118 according to Peter Allan Dale, indicates ‘an attempt to think seriously about the meaning of historical process’,119 centring especially on matters of causation, pattern and telos. Eliot’s fictions stand as attempts to discover the ‘underlying designs, polarities or “deep structures” beneath the actual tale’,120 and as such as historiographical documents in their own right. Furthermore, the engagement with what Hayden White has called the ‘master narratives’ of history from which ‘Western [wo]man may choose’, ultimately sees the privileging of an almost Hardyesque ‘Immanent Will’121 directing history. It takes Eliot’s History from the level of contextual allusions to that of a sustained consideration of the dynamics of change, of process.122 In Eliot’s case, as will become clearer in subsequent chapters, the privileged grand narrative is one that attempts to combine a religious dimension with a bourgeois progressivism, but one that ultimately fails to do so coherently. It is part of a process of ‘imaginatively reconstructing’ society in what Graham Martin calls a ‘preferred pattern’,123 a manifestation of Eliot’s ‘utopian impulse’.124 It accords with a broader Victorian attempt to achieve unity and meaning through fiction, as Deirdre David has suggested. ‘Certain nineteenth-century novels engaged in a complex series of mediations between the social actuality they represented and the desires of their predominantly middle-class readers that things not be the way they were in that actuality.’125 This study relies on a series of interrelated theoretical assumptions. There is an acceptance, in the first instance, of what Ricoeur calls the ‘quasi-fictive’ nature of History and the ‘quasi-historical’ nature of fiction, whereby ‘the unreal events that it relates are past facts for the narrative voice that addresses itself to the reader’.126 This connects with Edward Said’s view of national narratives as inextricably linked



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to the writing of fiction and History (a point also recognized by Ricoeur): ‘stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world.’127 It is this use of History, and the accompanying narrativizing of society, that ‘give the novel its force’;128 it also reveals deep ideological imprints. The issue of totality, the extent to which the national experience/History can be viewed as coherent and homogeneous, is central to this. For Eliot ‘the nostalgic desire for totalization’129 (as Robert Young puts it) works to provide an inclusive framework for a historical ‘Englishness’. And, just as British historiography of the early to mid nineteenth century was dominated by attempts to narrate the national past, to configure the maelstrom of historical events as a narrative unity, so Eliot’s literary career can also be seen as an ongoing project of attempting to narrate totalizing histories of England.130 Not only are her fictional narratives separate interpretations of the national past in themselves, but moreover they attempt to establish and embed parallel grand narratives of national historical actuality within them. Just as Homi Bhabha has argued, the narrative ‘of the modern nation’ produces ‘a symbolic structure of the nation as “imagined community” which, in keeping with the scale and diversity of the modern nation, works like the plot of a realist novel’.131 Jennifer Uglow rightly recognizes the paradox of Eliot’s fictional realization of English national identity. This is no more in evidence than in the opening of Felix Holt, which initially offers ‘a nostalgic celebration of old England’, but gradually becomes clouded by contrary perceptions. As George Eliot asks us to imagine the stage-coach travelling across the Midlands, from the liberal wilderness of the hedgerows into a mosaic of farm land and market towns, mines and canals, she moves us, into a landscape imbued with menace.132 However, the romanticizing or heroicizing of England past returns in Middlemarch, where the same ‘sort of movement and mixture’ is identified as occurring in old England ‘as we find in older Herodotus’.133 The oscillation between positive and negative visions of England is sustained. There is on the one hand a narratable, totalizing vision of national history and identity, what Jameson has called an ‘allegorical narrative signified’ that reflects ‘a fundamental dimension of our collective thinking and our collective fantasies about history and reality’.134 On the other there is a bleaker, often fragmented concep-





tion of the English past bleeding into the present. This will be situated in relation to particularly Whiggish and Carlylean visions respectively. When Eliot sustains her vision of a totality of English history her tone is positive and hopeful; when she does not she is negative and doubtful. Such intellectual wrangling is implied in Romola: ‘It belongs to every large nature . . . to suspect itself, and doubt the truth of its own impressions, conscious of possibilities beyond its own horizon.’135 The fundamental nature of this doubt bears out Radhakrishnan’s assertion about the problematic relations of national consciousness and national narrative. How can the narrative ‘pre-know its subject, which has itself to be the product of the narrative?’136 he asks. Thus the question as to the feasibility of Eliot being able to write from a position of sure knowledge (as to the character of the national narrative) when it is the implied task of her fictional narratives to establish this character in the first instance, is answered in the negative. The fact that this comes in the midst of her philosophical questioning as to the nature of English national identity only serves to make the task more difficult. The consequence is profound tension within the text(s) as Eliot imagines a particular national past and then finds herself deconstructing this in light of persistent intellectual and spiritual doubt. The central issue here is the way in which Eliot imagines English history as a narrative totality, and the consequences of this imagining. It is this tendency towards narrative, towards Cottom’s ‘figuration of totality’,137 that relates closely to Eliot’s project of recreating history in so-called realist literary art. History as narrative better lends itself to literary representation, and provides a vehicle to establish what Raymond Williams has called ‘knowable community’.138 The central intention of Eliot’s reconstructive project was, as such, to achieve something akin to what Jameson has called ‘concreteness in art’. This is what ‘permits life and experience to be felt as a totality: all its events, all its partial facts and elements . . . immediately grasped as part of a total process’.139 This represents an attempt to achieve totality in the sense that every historical period or moment was to be endowed with a ‘complex, but coherent unity’.140 Totality is, in this sense, an assertion not just of wholeness, but of meaning and direction. Moreover, it is value-laden, politically and philosophically blinkered, and often noticeably partisan. This is most obvious in the privileging of the coherent Whiggish narrative of English national history, which will be the concern of the following two chapters.



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It is the task of the next two chapters to illustrate the ways in which Eliot’s fiction betrays the evolution of a particular way of thinking about England as a historical nation. Crucially, this evolution will be seen to be informed by a pervasive English nationalism derived from a dominant trend of British historiography, namely the so-called Whig Interpretation of History. In the first of these chapters the qualified presence of Whiggish perceptions of Englishness will be traced through the earlier novels, especially as it impacts upon the embedded historical metanarrative, and in the second the summit of this influence will be seen to be the more coherent crystallization of the Whig Interpretation towards the conclusion of Eliot’s literary career. The difficulties inherent in establishing the influence of the historiographical perspective defined by Herbert Butterfield’s seminal The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) are numerous. In the first instance, care is needed so as not to collapse nineteenth-century historical writing into a broad-church category labelled ‘Whig historiography’, which would narrowly limit difference and privilege similarity. Factors such as subject field, methodology, social background and the relative professionalism of the historian are all relevant signifiers of difference. They divide historians such as Freeman, Green, Macaulay, Stubbs and Acton (who will feature in these chapters) from each other just as much as they do from other key nineteenth-century historians such as Carlyle or Froude (who will feature later). The subject field of Victorian historical writing is a polyphony of overlapping, while also distinctly individual, voices. That said, it is also clear that the Whig narrative of English history was predominant across a range of very different historical works. Even where differences of methodology or emphasis are ascertained, 33





the broader thrust of the Whig view of the past often still permeates through. Even Anthony Brundage, whose recent study of J. R. Green attempts to establish particularity by rescuing the historian from the perceived pejorative of ‘Whig historian’, cannot help but reinforce the connection, even if only by association: While constitutional development was certainly an important theme in the Short History, Green’s presentation of it stressed its connections to broader popular culture, and his analysis was markedly more radical than that of his Whiggish predecessors and contemporaries.1 He goes on to claim that Green ‘enlivened the measured phraseology and expanded the limited framework of the Whig constitutional approach’.2 As such the difference is one of methodology and emphasis, but there is no attempt made to show how Green’s broad conclusions contradict those, say, of E. A. Freeman or perhaps William Stubbs. The aim here is to illustrate the extent to which George Eliot’s perception of the English past accorded to, and was shaped by, the view prevalent in Whig historiography. Hence, Eliot’s writing will be cross-referenced with that of Macaulay, Green, Freeman, Stubbs and Acton. The historians featured are seen as representative (acknowledging their various differences) of a broad interpretation of the English past that is at heart ‘Whiggish’, one that has generic similarities to that held up for public scrutiny by Butterfield so many decades ago. Commonly, as J. P. Kenyon has shown, these historians viewed history ‘in light of present politics’.3 The work of Macaulay, especially his History of England, was most prominent in Eliot’s studies of English history.4 The History, identified by Butterfield as ‘a useful introduction to an enquiry into the origins of the Whig interpretation’,5 was read and re-read by Eliot and G. H. Lewes.6 In a letter to Sara Hennell, Eliot wrote of Macaulay’s History: ‘I thought of Mr H. [Hennell] all through the book, as the only person I could be quite sure would enjoy it as much as I did myself.’7 Indeed, other British historians that Eliot read tended to rely on such a generically Whiggish model of the English national past, even if they did so in a less overt fashion than Macaulay. Freeman and Stubbs, for example, were studied diligently. Freeman’s Old English History for Children (1869), ‘Stray Thoughts on Comparative Mythology’ (1870) and Comparative Politics: Six Lectures at the Royal Institution8 all appear



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in Eliot’s notebooks or on her reading lists. Her knowledge of the written work of Stubbs was supplemented by a first-hand familiarity with the man and his views, for he was a friend of G. H. Lewes.9 Both Freeman and Stubbs portrayed a far less grandiose and celebratory history than Macaulay and yet, in the final analysis, there can be little doubt that the view of England’s past that they offer has many features in common with Macaulay’s narrative. The dominating trend in George Eliot’s reading of the nineteenth-century histories of England certainly appears to be of a Whiggish character. The power of this trend of interpretation was that even professional historians, such as William Stubbs, ever more fixated with the rigour and integrity of archival research, still succumbed to the Whig theory of the Ancient Constitution. The notion of the history of England shared by many historians was one in which gradual but definable progress was evident, one in which constitutional democracy and personal liberty were the hallmarks, and one which illustrated clearly the continuity between an Anglo-Saxon, Protestant England past and the Victorian present. It is a history that J. W. Burrow has called ‘an invitation to national jubilation at which the shades of venerated ancestors are honoured guests’.10 The problem of establishing a chronology of the emergence and predominance of this History is that there is a strong case to be argued that the Whig narrative never really ceased to be prevalent, for a variety of social, cultural and psychological reasons. Burrow has, for example, pointed out how ‘the class of purposive and justificatory historical myths of which English Whig histories are a distinguished sub-species is unlikely to be dispelled by any changes in the professional practice and ethics of historians’.11 The reason for this is that such myths prove just too appealing to the national self-perception, massaging the national consciousness and bolstering the collective ego. Thus, despite the later nineteenth-century reaction against this type of historical narrative of ‘evolving freedoms’,12 the longevity of the Whig myth has been remarkable. It still survived, as P. B. M. Blaas has revealed, post-1880s, and has even been prevalent in the twentieth century. Christopher Parker has claimed that Whig history’s ‘pedagogical role’ not only survived the reaction against it, but it ‘expanded until it dominated the history degrees of very nearly all British universities, old and new, in the 1930s, and it mostly retained and extended this position for thirty years thereafter’.13 This view of academic dominance is reiterated by Alun Howkins, who notes how in many modern





exam syllabuses ‘the interpretive structure is broadly speaking a “Whig” one . . . history is seen as an account of how things were bad and are now better’.14 Anyone who has enthusiastically engaged with the insistent fable of British advancement in a secondary-school classroom knows this to be true. It is a narrative of success that is also eagerly appropriated within late twentieth-century political rhetoric: ‘The most unreconstructed and uncompromising form of Whig history which survives today is that preached from 10 Downing Street by Tory Prime Ministers.’15 The longevity of the Whig narrative is partly explained by the way in which, once it is made ‘historically imprecise and symbolic’, it ‘is presumably perennial’.16 The progressive forward movement of the national history, keeping within the parameters set by its own traditions, can be viewed as paradigmatic. As such it is equally applicable to present and future societies. Once taken out of the specific context, the comforting, reassuring principle of the English progressive movement, rooted in the form of a constitutional framework, is one that instils hope for the future, even in light of a less desirable present. This, so Hugh Witemeyer has claimed, is what occurs in Eliot’s Romola. She offers a ‘Whiggish or liberal-progressive’ view of Savonarola’s contribution to history, implicating the ‘Italian Risorgimento’ of her own time as ‘the long-delayed completion of a movement that began in the days of . . . Savonarola’. It is a movement ‘toward national unification, independence from foreign and papal tyranny, and democratic reform’.17 Graham Martin also sees such Whiggish principles as inherent in Middlemarch, in the way in which the local forming of the constitution is highly prominent, showing how ‘men made the landscape, anonymously, and by unaccountable unplanned acts of improvisation and adjustment, unrecorded except in their results’.18 This encourages a view of the novel as a significant ‘reinterpretation of Whig history’.19 The longevity of the Whig myth is also explained in the way in which it is ‘ironed smooth’ into a narrative which conveys ‘a stress on the linearity of history’20 with ‘order triumphing over chaos’,21 and in which history converges ‘beautifully’22 on the present. A view such as Macaulay’s that since the revolution, ‘the regular course of government has never been for a day interrupted’,23 amounts to a manipulation of national and racial identity into tight and manageable packages, therein reflecting the human tendency towards textualizing, narrativizing human existence. The present therein resides at the summit of human (historical) experience, within a



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totalized national history and experience that is very attractive to human perception. As far as George Eliot’s earlier novels are concerned the influence of Whig historiography is partial and paradoxical. The primary reason for this is that Eliot was increasingly pessimistic about the prosperity, both economic and moral, of Victorian England. As such she began to see the Whig myth almost exclusively in relation to an inspired past, and a potential future, but as having almost no feasible relation (other than one of negative contrast) with the present. Yet, this present was at the summit of the Whiggish pyramid of historical experience. This explains why, on occasion, Eliot’s reconstruction of the English national past is eminently compatible with the Whig Interpretation; as the earlier novels were all set in the historical past this was far more sustainable. However, in implying (and ultimately in Daniel Deronda in drawing) a national present, Eliot is doubtful and hesitant. She undermines or critiques the implied Whiggish present-centredness, either directly or on its implications. This paradox characterizes the novels up to (and in some senses including) Middlemarch. However, as suggested it finds its most overt manifestation in the schism inherent in Daniel Deronda. The ongoing inherent tension between the confident, totalizing characteristics of the Whig narrative and Eliot’s doubt, not just as to the validity of the narrative in its conception of England and Englishness, but also as to the feasibility of totalizing narratives per se, is fundamental. The dilemma is encapsulated in ‘Looking Backward’, one of her final essays, in which she writes: Perhaps the England of my affections is half visionary – a dream in which things are connected according to my well-fed, lazy mind, and not at all by the multitudinous links of grave, sadder fact, such as belong everywhere to the story of human labour.24 The particular aspects of the Whig Interpretation were not exclusive to it. For instance, notions of an evolving national constitution, of social progress, of racial superiority, were in themselves rather commonplace. However, when taken in combination the existence of a particular discourse is clear, contributing towards an interpretation of the English past that was highly pervasive. This pervasiveness is evident in the claim that Macaulay ‘won gain as well as glory, wealth as well as immortality’ from writing his History25 as the interpretation he offered ‘expressed ideas which just then were universally popular’.





Perhaps most vital was his expression of these ideas ‘in such a way that it flattered the self-esteem of the English people’.26 Most attractive to the readership was the comparison he made not between England present and other civilizations related at comparable points of historical development, but between England present and the English ‘civilization in an earlier stage’.27 The national present was seen as arising out of a glorious past via shared political mechanisms. This indicates an overriding Whig concern with what Culler has called ‘those elements in the past that lead towards the present’.28 And yet, this explanation of Macaulay’s success, that his philosophy closely matched a Victorian cultural temper, tends to underplay his impact (and that of other Whig historians). It reduces them to the status of conduits through which the existing dominant cultural perspective was articulated. It is important to recognize that though they did articulate views that were widely held in some respects, their particular synthesis of constitutional progress and Whig nationalism was itself an influence on public perceptions of English nationality and history. The defined sense of Anglo-Saxon identity it embodied, the particular view of the relationship of past and present and the implicit Protestantism were all key features of this. The Anglo-Saxonism of the Whig Interpretation of History amounts to what Francesca Klug has called the ongoing ‘attempt to construct the nation around the myth of a continuous line of Anglo-Saxon people with unique rights to claim Britain [and especially England] as their “homeland”’.29 This continues the line of interpretation delineated most overtly in Macaulay’s writing, asserting the truth that ‘eventually something approximating a common English identity was forged through a combination of shared experience, the fusion of different tongues into the English language and the practical constraints of living side by side.’30 This is seen to occur as a result of the fact that pre-feudal England (the anachronism is noted) was invaded and colonized by Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans respectively. The result is what Samuel has called the myth or national fiction of ‘the freeborn Englishman’, the man who traces his ancestry ‘to the “free” Anglo-Saxons and the “peasant commonwealths”’. These ‘flourished before the imposition of the Norman yoke’,31 the time of (as Eliot identifies in Silas Marner) the ‘ancestors in the days of King Alfred’.32 In Adam Bede, Eliot has much to say on the subject of just such an English national character, largely as it is illustrated through the eponymous hero. Adam is ‘a Saxon, and justified his name’,33 a



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character who personifies everything that is good and noble in the English race. The magistrate Townley remarks on this to Mr Casson when he says how ‘we want such fellows as he to lick the French’.34 The near binary opposition is clear between the dominant masculine brother, Adam, and the slightly emasculated Seth. Adam’s masculinity is seemingly indivisible from his Englishness, to the extent that he even pays his savings to prevent Seth having to join the army. Adam himself, as an Englishman, never misses an opportunity to perform national service.35 However, it becomes increasingly apparent that Eliot’s particular notion of a historical Englishness fractures. Adam’s dominant characteristics are now (i.e. in the Victorian present) largely ‘obsolete’.36 The view that this type of Englishman or even England is passing away recurs in the novel, with the use of a particularly apposite metaphor to convey the sense of change. Adam sits absent-mindedly in Bartle Massey’s schoolroom waiting for the schoolmaster to conclude his teaching for the evening, and it is noted how, ‘from the place where he sat, he could make nothing of the old map of England that hung against the opposite wall’. The reason for this, we are told, is that ‘age had turned it of a fine yellow-brown, something like that of a wellseasoned meerschaum’.37 The poignancy of this scene comes with the realization that just as is the case with the ‘yellow-brown’ map that has become distorted with age, the vision of England that Adam could once recognize and was a part of was now (for Eliot) also blurring out of focus. There is a similar sense of the transience of an idealized historical England in The Mill on the Floss, with Uncle Pullet being described as belonging ‘to that extinct class of British yeomen’.38 This is coupled with a vague and hopeful idea that essentially the Englishman is still at heart different from the foreigner: ‘Is not the striving after something better and better in our surroundings, the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute . . . that distinguishes the British man from the foreign brute?’39 Yet this is not wholly convincing. It is a refraction of the coexistence of a national pessimism and an espoused English nationalism. Susan Lynn Meyer, who points to how ‘the books of the novel devoted to Maggie’s childhood’ offer ‘an ironic perspective on British “civilization”’ notes this. In contrast, the later books of the novel, in which Maggie reaches adulthood, ‘falter in their resistance to the gender as well as the racial hierarchy, and increasingly value the existing norms of British society’.40 Meyer perceptively delineates what is the central battleground of George Eliot’s fiction,




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A town which carries the trace of its long growth and history, like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot . . . from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it . . . and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the land.41 The town existed at the inception of what is known as England. It also played a role during the most formative times in English history, during the ‘troubles of the civil wars when it was a continual fighting place where first puritans thanked God for the blood of the loyalists and then loyalists thanked God for the blood of the puritans’.42 This, as Raphael Samuel has claimed, implies a line of English ancestry ‘descending from Magna Carta’, one that defines itself through the historical longevity of the constitution. This constitution stands as the defence of the Englishman’s ‘immunities and privileges against the encroachments of central government and the crown’.43 Herbert Butterfield has identified (notably in The Englishman and his History (1944)) this constitutional myth as taking up a central position within developing discourses of English nationalism. It has permeated the national psyche to such an extent that it is often almost subliminal in the national self-perception, he claims: We shall not treat it [the Whig narrative] as a thing invented by some particularly wilful historian, but as part of the landscape of English life, like our country lanes or our November mists or our historic inns. Along with the English language and the British constitution and our national genius for compromise, it is itself a product of history, part of the inescapable inheritance of Englishmen. We can say that it moulded Englishmen before anybody moulded it or began to be conscious of it at all.44 It is interesting how, admittedly within the context of the Second World War, even Butterfield himself is seduced by the Anglocentric rhetoric of the Whig narrative. Though he acknowledges that the Whig Interpretation is a particular, partisan perspective, his own rhetoric (echoing as it does with the Heimat themes of German



wherein Eliot’s own liberal attitudes sit awkwardly with inherited, distinctly illiberal prejudices. The Anglo-Saxon heritage apparent in the description of St Ogg’s reinforces the historicity of the mourned Englishness:

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Romantic nationalism) both romanticizes and glorifies the nationcommunity in an overtly nationalistic fashion. It is a representation of the nation that he evidently finds overpoweringly seductive.45 That he critiques the narrative while also celebrating the iconography and characteristics of the Whig national landscape is testament to the allure of the particular myth. Eliot’s privileged Anglo-Saxon myth relies on a notion of the national constitution (whether written or unwritten) as the foundation of national development. It is this constitutional origin, within Whig historiography, that provides ‘the sole explanation for the development of English history as such’.46 The growth and development of English institutions since Anglo-Saxon times is seen to have ‘gone on almost in obedience to a natural law’.47 This is reflected in Macaulay’s general assertion that events occur because of an inherent property: ‘what had happened elsewhere would assuredly have happened here . . . they must inevitably have become despots.’48 This inherent quality is implicit in his reflection as to how, by 1697, the ancient constitution ‘was adapting itself, by a natural, a gradual, a peaceful development, to the wants of a modern society’.49 The guiding principle of such ordained, constitutional change, according to Freeman, was the harnessing of both the spirit of democratic Athens and the particular form of Teutonic democracy. As an example he lauds the Swiss cantons as never having departed from the ‘primaeval model’ of ‘the institutions of our own forefathers, the institutions which were once common to the whole Teutonic race’.50 However, he emphasizes the way in which this takes on a particularly English conception when found in its truest, most pure form. This principle, once ‘transplanted to a new soil . . . grew and flourished, and brought forth fruit richer and more lasting than it brought forth in the land of its earlier birth’.51 What Freeman appears to suggest is that though the constitution originated in continental Europe, it was not until it was transplanted to England that it came to full fruition. It found soil much more conducive to its well-being in England, as is evidenced by the Reform Bills of the nineteenth century. This explains the ready association of England and progress. The theory of progress is synonymous with the Victorian era, not exclusive to the Whig narrative. Whether manifestations of the socalled ‘confident complacency’52 of the period, or else a mask disguising anxiety and doubt beneath, it is evident that the dictum of Progress was (to quote Jerome Buckley) ‘a primary dogma’53 of leading thinkers ranging from Arnold, Mill, Morley, Kingsley and Huxley (and





many more). Progress existed as an ersatz religion, a ‘sanction for a secular humanism held with great moral fervour’.54 However, its quasi-religiousness differed to that implicit in Christian doctrine; Macaulay looked ‘not to a rapidly approaching utopia but to an indefinite continuum of progress’.55 This we might call the ‘developmental thesis’, the notion of a continual, ongoing and inexorable forward movement of history. These notions of progress and growth were central to the predominant sense of English national identity evident in a project such as the Great Exhibition, what Raphael Samuel calls the common perception of ‘national greatness’.56 In liberal circles, and Whig historiography, this sense of national identity was identified particularly in terms of national freedom, referring to the implied development of representative institutions, religious toleration, and the advance of knowledge. As John Plamenatz has argued, the nationalist sense is ‘a phenomenon peculiar to peoples who share a cosmopolitan and secular culture in which the belief in progress is strong’.57 The confident perception of progress is sporadically present in George Eliot’s fictions. There is no simple ‘static theory of order’ such as Sally Shuttleworth sees in Eliot, tending ‘to exclude the dimension of change or progress’.58 In ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton’ progress is seen as manifesting itself in material terms, with the New Police force, the Tithe Commutation Act and the penny post, all of them ‘guarantees of human advancement’. The narrator is clear in his assertion that it is only an imagination that ‘does a little Toryism by the sly’59 (such as his) that can possibly regret this progress, thereby hankering after the past. Adam Bede also notes material or industrial improvement when he remarks: ‘“Look at the canals, an’ th’ aqueducs, an’ th’ coal-pit engines, and Arkwright’s mills there at Cromford; a man must learn summat beside Gospel to make them things, I reckon.”’60 These significant developments in eighteenth-century engineering stand as landmarks within the assumed narrative of technological advance. They are matched, Eliot suggests, by certain improvements in the standard of living: ‘These were dear times, when wheaten bread and fresh meat were delicacies to working people.’61 The suggestion is clear, in modern times such ‘delicacies’ are viewed as a matter of (main) course. At the same time as there is deemed to be an ongoing material development, there is also an implied intellectual advance. It is said, for example, of Mr Pullet in The Mill on the Floss that ‘it is difficult for people in these instructed times to believe in uncle Pullet’s igno-



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rance’.62 Indeed, throughout the childhood of Maggie and Tom Tulliver there is an implied assumption that there is a dissimilarity between the period of the first reform bill and that in which the novel was written. It is what Terry Eagleton refers to as the ‘ideological contention between “tradition” and “progress” inscribed in the figures of Tom and Maggie’.63 Of the incident with the gypsies, for instance, it is noted how ‘Maggie Tulliver, you perceive was by no means that well-trained, well-informed young person that a small female of eight or nine necessarily is these days.’64 Here Eliot offers (albeit ironically) a view of her present (the period in which the novel was written) as providing more opportunity for young women than it did in the period of Maggie’s childhood. This apparently progressive view of female education was rooted in the Comtean notion that education should be provided equally to all, regardless of gender, the motivation behind Eliot’s donation to Girton College. This support is, however, qualified by the fact that the size of the donation was relatively small. As Gordon Haight has argued, her attitude towards female education ‘was always conservative’.65 The narrator of The Mill on the Floss reflects throughout on this ‘onward tendency of human things [that] have risen above the mental level of the generation before them’.66 The implied sense of intellectual progression is manifested in the fact that history and politics are not deemed important in St Ogg’s; they are of little relevance because ‘ignorance was much more comfortable than at present’.67 This association between the past and greater ignorance is also present in the view of the world as being ‘more ignorant of good and evil by forty years than it is at present’.68 This implies history as a kind of gradual revelation whereby the simple accumulation of lived experience constitutes an improvement on that which went before. The identified mental development, a progress of consciousness that might in isolation be regarded as Comtean, does, however, have a moral dimension. There is no unqualified depiction of moral progress, but more an acknowledgement that some moral advance has occurred across time. It is evident in references to the so-called ‘enlightened age’ of the present, and the ‘more barbarous times’ of the past in Adam Bede. It is also implicit in the depiction of Hetty Sorrel, refused a mitigating speech from her defence counsel by ‘those stern times’.69 The most stark avowal of the wonders of moral progress paralleled with material progress comes, however, in Eliot’s depiction of Milby in ‘Janet’s Repentance’. The narrator notes how ‘more than a quarter of a century has slipped by since then, and in the interval 10.1057/9780230286948 - George Eliot and Victorian Historiography, Neil McCaw




Milby has advanced at as rapid a pace as other market-towns in her Majesty’s dominions.’70 It has a railway station (which provides both jobs and easy access to the town), a resident rector and an enlarged church (both of which tend to the community’s spiritual needs), and there is a thriving grammar school (which provides education for the male children of the middle and upper classes). ‘In short’, it is noted, ‘Milby is now a refined, moral, and enlightened town.’71 However, as Buckley has argued, by the later Victorian period leading thinkers had ‘made the questioning of progress so familiar a pursuit that not even the most convinced apologists for science could affirm the idea with the original naive certainty’.72 Although progress tended to be seen as ‘an ideal force, deep within the national character, and capable of universal dissemination as England’s special gift to the world’,73 there was inherent doubt as to its validity. This is apparent in George Eliot’s attitude towards notions of positive national advancement, which was increasingly qualified; there is an inherent difficulty in sustaining such a view of historical evolution when there is a lack of faith in the present, which has, after all, to be seen as the summit of this progression. Eliot’s scepticism as to the feasibility of progress narratives tended towards a questioning or else an overt critiquing of assumptions of beneficial social change. Thus though Milby may be called an ‘enlightened town’, the notion of progress it embodies is seen as pertaining almost exclusively to the dominant group in society. The inherent implication is that progressive change does not encompass the whole range of society. Narratives of progress that attempt to totalize the socio-cultural experience and to collapse difference and divergence into homogeneity therein fail to acknowledge those who lie outside this historical flow. By setting her fictions at a historical distance, allowing the benefit of hindsight, Eliot was able to engage poignantly in the ongoing dialogue concerning the (progressive or otherwise) character of history. Past societies were viewed from the standpoint of a present that was supposed to be the product of historical progress. The chronological distance between the date of publication and the chronology of the setting provided a formal mechanism for the questioning of progress within fictional societies through ironic contrast. This is the outcome of doubt as to the feasibility of the progress metanarrative, doubt resulting from an inability to reconcile a notion of positive advance in history with what Eliot saw as the problematic nature of the mid-Victorian present. This is coupled with epistemological doubt as to the human ability to establish and understand such



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a progression, even where it may have occurred. So, Eliot simultaneously represented conflicting interpretations of historical development through her use of irony. By discussing progress in an ironic fashion there is a dual assertion of the existence of advance or improvement, and also a simultaneous undermining of it. It is not necessarily a loss of faith in progress entirely, more a rejection of the unqualified optimism that typified texts such as H. T. Buckle’s History of Civilization in England.74 Buckle viewed progress as occurring uninterrupted, according to scientific law, ‘whether our Kings are good or whether they are bad’.75 The hesitancy prevalent in Eliot’s novels, whereby progress is represented in conflicting aspects, illustrates an oscillation between certainty and doubt that Buckle would have found inexplicable. In Scenes of Clerical Life the narrator notes how the ‘well-regulated mind’ is that which ‘unintermittingly rejoices’ in the changes he announces (with a tinge of irony) as ‘Immense Improvement!’76 The inherent assumption of progress is followed by an ironic contrast, just as when, in Adam Bede, Eliot writes of ‘the progress of civilisation’77 and then illustrates this in terms of making ‘breakfast or a dinner an easy and cheerful substitute for more troublesome and disagreeable ceremonies’.78 This is continued in the light mockery of the particular idiosyncrasies of the progressive, modern and, so it would appear, ‘pampered’ society: We take a less gloomy view of our errors now our father confessor listens to us over his eggs and coffee. We are more distinctly conscious that rude penances are out of the question for gentlemen in an enlightened age, and that mortal sin is not incompatible with an appetite for muffins; an assault on our pockets, which in more barbarous times would have been made in the brusque form of a pistol-shot, is quite a well-bred and smiling procedure now it has become a request for a loan thrown in an easy parenthesis between the second and third glasses of claret.79 The sense of progress and civilization as notably flawed continues in The Mill on the Floss. Of Mrs Pullet it is noted: ‘It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the complexity introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilisation – the sight of a fashionably drest [sic] female in grief.’80 Mrs Pullet and the society to which she belongs are at once the targets of this mild barb, while at the same time the irony rests on a broad cultural acceptance of the idea that an acknowledged or





perceived shift toward something called ‘civilization’ has occurred. The development of this civilizing historical process is implicit in the description of the polished oak stairs at the Pullet home. These are stairs that ‘might have served in barbarous times as a trial by ordeal from which none but the most spotless virtue could have come off with unbroken limbs’.81 In Middlemarch the signifiers of this civilization are held up to further ridicule, the Keepsake being ironically identified as ‘the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress at that time’.82 The ironic critique of notions of national advance partially exonerates George Eliot from the dubious ideological presumptions inherent in national(ist) progress narratives. The worst excesses and chauvinisms are, however, evident in Macaulay’s laudation of England for its cultural achievement. Of the nations ‘to which the human race owes art’, he argued, all must concede that ‘the stock bequeathed by them to us has been so carefully improved that the accumulated interest now exceeds the principle’.83 England was perceived as having made a significant improvement on the standard of cultural achievement as a whole. Indeed, the very whiff of Englishness was enough to bring about the transformation of cultural stature, even to the extent that works translated into English were seen as having been improved in the process of so doing. The English language is therein identified as standing at the peak of the cultural-linguistic hierarchy. Eliot’s qualification of progress and national identity ensures that such a virulent partisanship is not realized. However, even her implied (and qualified) sense of English progressivism does lead into difficult territory. For, inherent in the constitutional Anglo-Saxon identity she projects is a notion of an exclusively Protestant English historical identity. This is evident in the (non)portrayal of subordinated religions, notably Roman Catholicism, and subordinated national identities such as the Catholic Irish. The omissions or silences are a consequence of the fact that Eliot’s perception of Englishness is inextricably bound up with Whig notions of the national history, and this tends towards silencing or overlooking the foreign Other. Though her personal philosophy is underwritten by a liberal recognition of the validity of difference, of a necessary, healthily heterogeneous national culture, her fiction betrays the tell-tale signs of the influence of a more restricted, more partisan cultural perception. The Protestant nationalism of the Whig myth of Englishness makes its presence felt. This leads to subtle silences such as in Eliot’s allusions to the English Civil War and the English Revolution, where the notable absence is



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the role of religion, and particularly tensions with Roman Catholicism that lay at the heart of conflict. Indeed, the Catholic question more generally is a notable absence from the fiction – it is never included explicitly. The 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act is mentioned,84 but this is identified as relating more directly to the careers of Peel and Wellington (as English politicians). Similarly, in The Mill on the Floss the period in which the fictional events are set is seen as ‘sober times when men had done with change’.85 The Catholic Question had precipitated ‘a slight wind of controversy to break the calm: the elderly rector had become occasionally historical and argumentative’.86 The personal is privileged over the political, and Catholicism disappears into the historical background. This reluctance to confront the implications of Catholicism is inherent in Eliot’s essay ‘Evangelical Teaching: Dr Cumming’. Cumming is criticized for his bigoted anti-Catholicism. Yet, Eliot’s defence of the Catholic religion is hardly vigorous: ‘We identify ourselves with no one of the bodies whom he regards it as his special mission to attack: we give our adhesion neither to Romanism, Puseyism, nor to that anomalous combination of opinions which he introduces to us under the name of Infidelity.’87 At no stage is there a direct defence of Catholicism, part of a reluctance to address Catholicism specifically that is also apparent in both Romola and Middlemarch. Of the former Simon Dentith has claimed that Eliot’s portrayal in the novel of a Catholic procession marks a note of religious tolerance.88 However, Eliot does not actually note the Catholic nature of this procession, it is only implied. Similarly, Eliot never actually draws explicit attention to the Catholic character of the Renaissance setting, even if the novel carries a broader implication that Catholic Florence was part of a larger human evolution at a spiritual and cultural level. In Middlemarch, similarly, there is a curious reticence when Eliot draws comparison between Dorothea and the Catholic St Theresa without noting the possible incongruity. She displays no apparent sense that such a comparison may be problematic. This is also evident during the honeymoon in Rome. The depiction of Dorothea in a great historical city is poignant and powerful, and yet very little is made of the Catholic nature of the city and the implications this might have for Dorothea. Eliot is certainly aware of these implications, as the depiction of the heroine begins by acknowledging a possible tension. The ‘gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories’.89 Yet this is





not explored, and the clash of religions is no more than a side issue to the breakdown of the relationship with Casaubon. It has been said that this implicates Eliot’s novel-writing as a ‘secularizing project’, one in which ‘religious categories were subsumed in a wider humanist vocabulary’.90 However, it is difficult to agree with T. R. Wright’s conclusion that the novel ‘recognises the place of Catholicism in the moral development of humanity’.91 For to recognize surely one must first have to acknowledge. Eliot explicitly acknowledged the presence of other religious denominations, including contentious dissenting sects such as the Methodists (notably in Adam Bede). Even allowing for the particular contentiousness of Catholicism, writing in the wake of the Oxford Movement and the conversion of Newman, this still poses questions as to why it was that Eliot had an insurmountable difficulty in confronting Catholicism in her fiction. It is a difficulty that inevitably introduces the possibility of a degree of sectarian bias, if only subliminal. Eliot herself disavowed organized Protestant religion for most of her life and expressed no particular hostility towards Catholicism. And yet it does appear as if her default position, as far as religion was concerned, was that of a broad acceptance of a Protestant interpretation of historical evolution. A sense of this is evident from her essay ‘The Natural History of German Life’, where Eliot noted how ‘though our English life is in its core intensely traditional’, it was clear that ‘Protestantism and commerce have modernized the face of the land and the aspects of society in a far greater degree than in any continental country.’92 This may be unsurprising, bearing in mind the (Protestant) cultural context, but it certainly reinforces the point made by Terry Lovell that ‘the discourse of radical patriotism’ also tends to be ‘that of Protestantism’.93 The lack of enthusiasm in confronting Catholic issues parallels the textual reticence on Irish matters. Though the Irish may not have been a significant aspect of Eliot’s understanding of English rural community life, it is perhaps something of a puzzle as to why she displayed no more sympathy than ‘of the water toast kind’.94 Throughout her literary career there were no visible signs of sympathy for a national group she later described as the ‘troublesome Irish’,95 and yet elsewhere there were expressions of a wider political sympathy. Eliot’s personal interest in Ireland seems to have been stimulated by a liberal desire to bridge the divides, religious, economic and cultural, between the Protestant English and the marginalized (Catholic) Irish population. This liberal ideal was an encapsulation of



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her wider humanitarian ethos allied to a more direct Republican sympathy. She displayed her support for the cause of Irish Nationalism, for instance, by attending a pro-Repeal speech by Daniel O’Connell on 18 March 1844.96 A more general humanitarian concern for a people decimated by famine was expressed in a letter to Mrs Henry Houghton, in which Eliot wrote of her simple wish ‘that by this time Henry [Houghton] is come back with good news about Ireland’.97 Here the humanitarian impulse predominates, and there is no attempt to deliberate on the political ramifications of the famine to any extent. It was in a much later letter, to the wife of Richard Congreve in April 1868, that Eliot most openly articulated her own political position vis-à-vis Ireland. Celebrating Congreve’s pamphlet-essay ‘Ireland’, she wrote: ‘All protests tell, however slowly and imperceptibly, and a protest against the doctrine that England is to keep Ireland under all conditions was what I wished to be made.’98 The essay she valued so highly supported the cause of Irish Republicanism, rejecting the interfering role of the English colonizers. Congreve began by acknowledging the ‘real ground for that discontent and disaffection’99 among the Irish towards the English. He urged the ‘reconstitution of Ireland, as a self-existent state’, no longer to ‘assimilate her to ourselves, to mould her into our image, or retain her in her present inharmonious connection with ourselves’.100 His fundamental critique was of the Union itself: ‘[this] so-called Union of England and Ireland . . . constituted by difference of race and religion’, illustrated the ‘patent undeniable fact that it never has been, in any fairly approximate degree even, a union’.101 The dissimilarities between the Irish and English people, disparities of essential national constitution, could never provide for harmony and accord. The plans for a projected (Irish-flavoured) Napoleonic War novel102 reveal that Eliot was at least planning to partially redress the imbalance between her political interest in Ireland and her textual reticence. This reticence is most notable in Adam Bede. For, despite the fact that the events of the text are supposed to occur in the period 1799–1802, and although Eliot provided a range of topical historical allusions to further the realistic effect of the novel, the crisis that was occurring in Ireland during these years is absent. What is most remarkable is that one of the central characters (Arthur Donnithorne) exiles himself in Ireland and joins a militia; this occurs within the parameters of the dramatic, romantic narrative, and yet no connection is made to the wider political situation. Eliot was content to use





contemporary events in Ireland as a means by which to remove Donnithorne from Hayslope, and England, but at no point is there an engagement with the political and religious tensions of Ireland during this time. This amounts to a fundamental, if subliminal, acquiescence with a Protestant Anglocentrism that denies the diversity of British History and national identity. The Whiggish nature of Eliot’s perception of English History is partially articulated throughout her earlier fiction. There is a general tendency towards broad Whig concerns as to the nature of Englishness, even when there is also dissension due to the pessimistic perception of the Victorian present. However, by the time of Eliot’s later writing this relationship was both more explicit and less qualified. The perceived national historical narrative becomes, as will emerge, directly compatible with that articulated in Whig historiography. This compatibility comes despite an increasing perceptual divide between Eliot’s romantic perceptions of a Whig England past and her gloomy fears and anxieties about a distinctly non-Whiggish midVictorian present and future.



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Early in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, the concluding essay of George Eliot’s Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1878) (and as such the finale of Eliot’s literary career), the narrator makes an implicit allusion to J. R. Green. This is disguised in the apparently innocuous mention of ‘one of our living historians’.1 At first glance it may not appear to be a particularly significant allusion, as Green was a popular historian of the mid–later nineteenth century. His A Short History of the English People (1874) achieved significant commercial success. Indeed, George Eliot’s own personal familiarity with Green’s work at this particular point in her career is clear. A Short History featured in her notebooks2 and, in a letter to her friend Eugène Bodichon, she noted how she was ‘deep among the gravities now. I have been reading aloud Green’s first vol. of his new larger History of the English People.’3 As such, an allusion to Green does not stand out as especially unusual. However, the ramifications of Eliot’s laudatory paraphrase of Green are distinctly significant. For this paraphrase centres, ostensibly, on Green’s inherently questionable, quasi-mythical notion of English national history: ‘Let us’, he virtually says, ‘let us know who were our forefathers, who it was that won the soil for us, and brought the good seed of those institutions through which we should not arrogantly but gratefully feel ourselves distinguished among the nations as possessors of long-inherited freedom, let us not keep up an ignorant kind of naming which disguises our true affinities of blood and language, but let us see thoroughly what sort of notions and traditions our forefathers had, and what sort of song inspired them . . . . these seafaring, invading, self-asserting men were the English of old 51




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Here Eliot employs what Haight has called a ‘dubious analogy with the Anglo-Saxons’ conquest of the ancient Britons’.4 This ‘dubious analogy’ is noteworthy for its blemished Whiggish complexion, and for the way in which it crystallizes Eliot’s vindication of the English Anglo-Saxon origin as partially fleshed out in novels such as The Mill on the Floss. The incongruity of such a wholehearted celebration of the Whig historical narrative of English national identity is apparent, bearing in mind the partial realization (and that is all) in the earlier fiction. In the essay ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, notably, a more unqualified adoption of the Whig myth is in evidence. Eliot’s reliance on this confidence-laden encapsulation of national glory, what Dwight Culler has called a ‘hymn of thanksgiving, a celebration of triumphal change’,5 implies a confidence and faith in this perception of the nation. That an author so characterized by personal scepticism and fragile confidence should privilege such is certainly puzzling. The motivation in citing Green is, in the first instance, far from clear. Furthermore, Eliot’s reading of British and European historiography was rigorous and wide-ranging, her notebooks and letters revealing the extent of this. Quite why, at this point in her career, she offered such a narrowly partisan (Whig) notion of English history, in a far more explicit way than in any of the earlier writing, is debatable. Her deep familiarity with non-Whig or even anti-Whig historiography, such as that of Thomas Carlyle and J. A. Froude, which tended to openly disavow notions of a confident, liberty-driven national progress, would appear to act as a counterbalance. That Green should be privileged in this particular fashion suggests the contrary. The significance of the Whig myth of national identity in relation to ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ goes beyond the single allusion to Green. In fact it is an essay founded in the Whig Interpretation of History. Consequently, it privileges all of the prejudices and discriminations inherent in it, as will become evident. It displays an innate nationalism, it sacrifices the value of the past to the needs of the present, and it is at times overbearing and complacent. This is particularly clear in relation to Eliot’s attempt at representing, and thereby privileging, Jewry. For ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ is an essay in which the author confronts issues of national identity in an attempt



time, and were our fathers who did rough work by which we are profiting. (p. 145)

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to vindicate the position of the Jews, and also to deconstruct and ultimately undermine anti-Semitic prejudice. Yet she does so only by elaborating on the interrelation of Judaism and a privileged notion of Englishness, thereby making a direct association between Whiggish progressivism and what Bryan Cheyette has identified as ‘the prophetic politics of an authentic “chosen race”’.6 This association is laden with ethnic discrimination. Ultimately, Eliot’s reliance on the Whig Interpretation fundamentally undermines her espoused commitment both to the improvement of Jewish rights and to the contemporaneous movement for the Restoration of Palestine. The problem is effectively one of divided loyalties, of trying to assist the Jewish national group while holding fundamental perceptions about Jewish history and culture that were fashioned from a dominating, colonizing English ideological viewpoint. What Eliot is unable to do is to fully recognize Jewish particularity, and thus throughout her essay she tends to subordinate Jewry to her mythical imaginings of the English past. This perception of intertwined Jewish and English identities has been recurrent in English literature. In William Cowper’s poem ‘Expostulation’, for example, he asks (with reference to Israel): ‘What nation will you find, where annals prove so rich an int’rest in almighty love?’7 Cowper offers a perception of the Jewish homeland and people akin to that also expressed by Robert Browning in his poem ‘Holy-Cross Day’: they were ‘the children of the chosen race’.8 The perception is that there is something implicitly noble about the biblically ordained Jewish people and their history, something meriting the status of chosen. But crucially, it is the English who are the modern chosen. A manifestation of this notion, the view of Israel as England’s ‘ideal example’,9 occurs in works as diverse as Pope’s ‘Messiah’ (where he associates the appearance of the son of God on Earth with ‘Ye Nymphs of Solyma’10) and Milton’s Paradise Regained, where he confidently states ‘the Kingdom shall to Israel be restor’d’.11 The Jews appear as a paradigm of moral, resolute historical existence, encapsulating just those Hebraic values defined in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869). The inherent preference for these values is apparent in Romantic conceptions of the noble (national) subject. There appears to be an ongoing lament about the inequity of the Jewish situation. Byron asks, in Hebrew Melodies, ‘when shall Zion’s songs again seem sweet?’12 Wordsworth, on the other hand, acknowledges that this would only occur when the Jews and their ‘proud Jerusalem’13 were justly





restored. This conceptualized literary-historical Jewishness exists as what Said has called ‘a considerable dimension of modern politicalintellectual culture’, and ‘as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world’.14 In essence, the Jewish people are seen as inherent aspects of Western European culture (rather than as an ancient archetype or paradigm), as forming a trope of an idealized Whig Englishness rather than explicitly relating to the Eastern homeland. Theophrastus Such, as narrator, begins ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ by attacking the ‘prevalence of that grosser mental sloth which makes people dull to the most ordinary prompting of comparison – the bringing things together because of their likeness’ (p. 143). Though this is a far more simple mental exercise, he claims, than ‘the discerning of diversity amidst general sameness’ (p. 143), the majority of English people are far more concerned with the latter than with the former. There is little or no attempt made amongst the population at large to appreciate or discern similarities between the Jewish people and the English, between the two cultural and religious traditions. Instead the surface differences are focused on and used as reasons to exclude and persecute the Jews. This is what he calls the ‘neglect of resemblances’ typical of ‘the prejudiced, the puerile, the spiteful, and the abysmally ignorant’ (p. 143). Unless people begin to see the Jews as having a fundamental relationship with the dominant English majority instead of simply emphasizing their difference, then such unfounded prejudice will never die out, he suggests. George Eliot’s15 objective here is thus to focus on cultural and historical similarities rather than on differences, to view history as a unified and unifying totality. She wishes ‘to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs’16 because towards the Jews the Western Christian nations ‘have a peculiar debt and . . . a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious and moral sentiment’.17 It is an intention akin to that stated, but also qualified, in Romola, in which she notes how ‘we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history’.18 This concentration on similarity across historical divides, an effective collapsing of difference and diversity into an ironed-out, present-centred narrative, is characteristic of Whig historiography. Freeman, for example, concerned himself with the similarities that joined peoples across geographical and chronological divides, and was



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little concerned with the differences that divided them. He stressed ‘the continuity of our national life’,19 the way in which, despite internal and external upheavals such as wars or conquests, the ‘continued national life of the people . . . has remained unbroken’.20 In perceiving national historical experience as a smooth, linear narrative, Freeman insisted on a homogeneous identity that marked out the characteristic English experience. One consequence of this is to allow easy contrast with Edward Said’s ‘strange regions of the world’21 that do not display discernible Western (English) characteristics. However, more fundamentally, the impact of this perception of homogeneity is to introduce what Karl Löwith calls ‘a meaning in history’, i.e. ‘a purpose or goal toward which the larger historical movements are aiming’.22 History has a metanarrative, implying a direction and purpose that sanctions a particular mode of human existence, in this case English national identity. The links between Jews and European nationals are clear, Theophrastus argues. He highlights, for example, the way in which the commonplaces of national identity, particularly spirit and consciousness, have been common to the histories of most national groups. The specific modern examples of the creation of a ‘free modern Greece’ (p. 144) and also the unification of Italy in 1870 illustrate this. The essence and dynamic power of national identity is the social unit, the common populace, which accords with Green’s contention that ‘the great impulses of national feeling, and not the policy of statesmen . . . formed the ground-work and basis of the history of nations’.23 This broad-based national feeling is the determining factor in the actions of peoples and communities, and as such is the motor of historical change. Judaism, for Theophrastus, embodies the ideal of this form of national (self-)consciousness in the later nineteenth century. The triumph of the priorities of this collective consciousness over individualism is seen as the sign of a totalizing national spirit. This continues a recurrent theme of Eliot’s regarding the self-sacrifice required of an individual citizen if they are to play their full role in the development of the national organism. It is a perception of individual and national existence reflected on by Gerald Newman in The Rise of English Nationalism. He notes: Nationalism is an ideology; its primary facts are facts of human consciousness; and its movement is towards an ideal if unattainable goal of uniform collective consciousness, and hence concerted




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This is exactly the point being made by Eliot, that the chief effects of national identity are felt mentally/psychologically, spheres in which the individual must be subordinate. Indeed, Newman himself notes the similarity, identifying ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ as: ‘a fine exposition of this relationship between “national consciousness” and individual “self-repression and discipline”’. ‘It would be hard to find in the modern scholarly literature on nationalism’, he continues, ‘a more acute description of its psychological significance and shaping power.’25 Thus the prerequisite for anyone who wishes ‘to be harmoniously great’, Eliot contends, is to recognize such a sense of nationhood. The nation need not have a material existence in the present time, it can exist ‘in memory, as a departed, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored’ (p. 147); however, the most important point is that it exists as a felt idea. It needs to be collectively imagined. In this sense ‘national consciousness’, as a totalizing force or influence, is inherent in ‘the nobleness of a nation’ (p. 147), and also the nobleness of ‘each individual citizen’ (p. 148). Notably: Our dignity and rectitude are proportioned to our sense of relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant with high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration to selfrepression and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and more attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal ease or prosperity. (p. 148) Eliot comes very close in this passage to delineating a notion of the ‘imagined communities’ of national identity as conceptualized by Benedict Anderson. This nationality, he has argued, can never be any more than the sense of belonging to ‘an imagined political community’, with ‘imagined’ referring to a sense of being ‘both inherently limited and sovereign’.26 The bonds that constitute a national identity are constructed, both culturally and individually. Anderson highlights the communal dimension of nationalism in a psychological-spiritual sense, the way it is predicated on a notion of a shared, common, totalized existence. This leads him to view the rise of nationalism as coterminous with the fall of religion, the nation existing as ‘a substitute god’27 and national history as the framing metanarrative. It is the logic played out in Green’s definition of the hierarchy of nation and 10.1057/9780230286948 - George Eliot and Victorian Historiography, Neil McCaw


discipline and action for the good of the whole.24

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state. For him the nation is that all-consuming mental reality ‘you can neither make nor destroy’, with the state purely as artifice: ‘accidental, it can be made or unmade, and is no real thing’.28 Within his paraphrase of Green, Theophrastus points out that the nationalist struggles of foreign nations such as Greece and Italy have a connection to the historical plight of Jewry, that the battle for national liberty is ongoing and, in certain senses, common. This is where Daniel Born, in The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel, misreads Eliot. He claims that she ‘puts the entire enterprise [of Zionism] within the context of successful Greek and Italian revolutionary upheaval’.29 In fact, what she does is to position (and thus subordinate) the case for Zionist nationhood, and for that matter the independence struggles of Greece and Italy, within the context of a narrative of English history and national identity that is both mythical and highly partisan. The English people are placed at the summit of the pyramid of nations, as the ‘strongly marked inheritors in language and genius of those old English seamen who, beholding a rich country with a most convenient seaboard, came, doubtless with a sense of divine warrant, and settled themselves’ (p. 145). Significantly, the English are founded in a similar, and yet somehow superior, historically determined sense of national consciousness as the Jews: They [the English forefathers] had virtues which incorporated themselves in wholesome usages to which we trace our own political blessings. Let us know and acknowledge our common relationship to them, and be thankful that over and above the affections and duties which spring from our manhood, we have the closer and more constantly guiding duties which belong to us as Englishmen. (p. 145) The sense of the divinity of the English nation is apparent. Even the language and imagery employed here compare with that evident in Whig historical writing. Theophrastus’s reference to the ‘good seed of those institutions’, for example, is in tune with Freeman’s comment as to how the ‘lover of freedom, the lover of progress . . . need never shrink from tracing up the political institutions of England to their earliest shape’.30 It is also in keeping with his appreciation of how England ‘has never been left at any time without a National Assembly of some kind or another’.31 The English parliament, viewed by Whiggish historians as ‘immemorial; it grew step by





step out of the older order of things’, contrasts with the situation in France, where ‘the older order of things utterly vanished’.32 The ‘good seed’ that Theophrastus refers to has sprouted forth and provided glory and national pride for the English. This originating aspect of the constitution of England has also developed in other directions, containing ‘the germs of that out of which every free constitution in the world has grown’.33 Because of this, as Freeman pointed out, there was a ‘common political heritage which belongs alike to Swabia and to England’,34 despite the fact that the constitution was particularly suited to the English. As such it had taken on a more pronounced form in England than in any other country. Theophrastus particularly values the legacy handed down through the ages, a legacy that demands responsibilities of successive generations. This view of the relations of past and present is implicit in the Whig identification of English historical change as ‘at once conservative and progressive – conservative because progressive, progressive because conservative’.35 Tradition and the past are the foundations of all present change, and the national constitution is the precedent for all future action. The stress is on ancient principles, those implicit in everything that the English forefathers stood for, and change is to be in accordance with these. As William Stubbs pointed out, ‘the thread of national life is not to be broken’.36 Historical change amounts to ‘the careful repairs of an ancient building’, and certainly should never go as far as ‘the pulling down of an old building and the rearing up of a new’.37 Ultimately, it is the inherent constitution of the Jewish people that is identified in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ as the aspect that most explains their resolution in the face of prejudice and oppression. It is the most important factor in their facility to maintain their national identity while hostile elements around them attempted to erase all traces of Jewishness. The phrase ‘constitution of their race’ (p. 157), and particularly the notion of a national ‘constitution’, is poignant because of its semantic fluidity. At once it refers to an inherent quality that determines nature and character, while also to the relative healthiness, strength and vitality of the physical and spiritual unit. These both have a resonance in terms of the especial resilience and resolution that the Jews are seen to have displayed in the face of persecution. Furthermore, ‘constitution’ also introduces the notion of the fundamental principles according to which a nation state or body politic is constituted and governed. Evidently, this latter sphere of meaning



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relates to the notion of the constitution at the heart of the Whig perception of English national existence. This is resolutely constant: ‘it has lived through many storms and it has withstood the attacks of many enemies’, but ‘it has never utterly died out’.38 It provides for the narrative of constitutional resilience that begins with Magna Carta, discussed in Chapter 2. This historical moment is seen by Freeman as when: ‘England finally assumed those constitutional forms which, with mere changes of detail, she has preserved uninterrupted ever since’,39 and by Green as illustrating ‘the transition from the age of traditional rights . . . to the age of written legislation’.40 This makes the Great Charter a key signifier of a historical narrative made up of, as Raphael Samuel points out, ‘unified subject matter, consecutive narrative, familiar landmarks, well-marked periods and a sequence of causes and effects’.41 In effect, history and experience is totalized around key totems of national consciousness. In highlighting the English as ‘distinguished among the nations as possessors of long-inherited freedom’, George Eliot effectively collapses English history into myth. As Freeman pointed out, this mythical history of England is one in which ‘freedom is everywhere older than bondage’.42 For him, by the reign of Edward I, ‘all the great principles of English freedom were already firmly established’.43 Macaulay was yet more explicit about the place of freedom in this narrative of history: The law has never been borne down either by popular fury or by regal tyranny. Public credit has been held sacred. The administration of justice has been pure. Even in times which might by Englishmen be justly called evil times, we have enjoyed what almost every other nation in the world would have considered as an ample measure of civil and religious freedom. Every man has felt entire confidence that the state would protect him in the possession of what had been earned by his diligence and hoarded by his self-denial.44 With England identified as the land of freedom, Theophrastus asserts the English as ‘a prosperous people’ (p. 146). He is keen to make the association not just between English history and liberty, but between English history and inherent progress, gradual and undeniable improvement. Each successive age thus builds on the labours and achievements of that preceding it, and the nation’s history becomes a gradual revelation of (relative) national glory. As Macaulay cheered,





with his celebratory totalizing narrative of English progress: ‘The history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.’45 ‘No man who is correctly informed as to the past’, he went on, ‘will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.’46 This is a seductive and popular myth, in which the ‘originators’ referred to as ‘our fathers thirteen hundred years ago [who] worshipped Odin’ (p. 146) are initiators of the grand narrative of the development of English national history and national identity. As was revealed in the previous chapter, these progressive notions carry with them dubious ideological assumptions. The central flaw in the character of the modern Englishman, according to Theophrastus, is his failure to recognize and acknowledge a defined national consciousness as a positive aspect of Jewish history and culture. Such a national consciousness is valued in principle, and in relation to the English, yet it is overlooked in relation to the Jews and Judaism. There is no sympathy for another people that, in a tangible way, share a comparative sense of national identity and, moreover, are taking steps to return this national sense to its former glory in the form of a restored homeland. It is not that the Jews are absolutely the same as the English, more that once the ‘superlative peculiarity’ of the Jews is acknowledged, the ‘affinity with them is only the more apparent’ (p. 148). English and Jewish origins share certain common features, with ‘more likeness than contrast between the way we English got our island and the way the Israelites got Canaan’ (p. 150). Even English religious practice displays this influence, with the Jews’ ‘very verbal forms . . . on our lips in every prayer which we end with an Amen’ (p. 163). It is an influence vouchsafed by the Whiggish Lord Acton, who saw ‘the Hebrew nation’ as that which ‘laid down the parallel lines on which all freedom has been won’,47 the ‘doctrine of national tradition and the doctrine of the higher law’.48 The connection between English and Jewish history is found by Theophrastus to be most evident during the period of the English Revolution. This is the time when ‘the Puritans, asserting their liberty to restrain tyrants, found the Hebrew history closely symbolical of their feelings and purpose’ (p. 150). It is just the relationship reflected on by Linda Colley, who notes the predominance of the ‘apocalyptic interpretation’ within English historiography ‘in which Britain stood in for Israel’49 as a means of ‘calling for radical change’.50 At a fundamental level the founding principles of both the English and Jewish nations are deemed compatible; the Civil War, the supposed catalyst



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for increased liberty and constitutional justice, is closely related to the wisdom and divinity of Hebrew writings. Therein Puritanism is simultaneously identified as closely related to the sentiment and philosophy of ancient Jewish writing, while also being at the heart of English national development. For Green it was the ‘one dominant influence [that] told on human action’, and ‘the whole temper of the nation felt the change’51 and, as such, ‘the whole history of English progress . . . on its moral and spiritual sides’ can be seen as ‘the history of Puritanism’.52 Within the worldview (the irony is duly recognized) of the Whig narrative of history, Englishness and Jewishness are thus closely related: ‘We must rather refer the passionate use of the Hebrew writings to affinities of disposition between our own race and the Jewish’ (p. 150). These ‘affinities of disposition’ link the English ‘ancestors who resisted the oppressive acts of our native Kings’. And, ‘by resisting [they] rescued or won for us the best part of our civil and religious liberties’ (p. 151), with those ‘brave and steadfast men of Jewish race’ (p. 151) who fought for the same principles in the history of their own people. The fundamental Jewish strength, the reason the Jewish national spirit has survived in spite of the fact that its people have long been dispersed among the countries of Europe and have suffered widespread abuse and maltreatment, is seen as a ‘predominant kindliness’. This ‘must have been deeply ingrained . . . to have outlasted the ages of persecution and oppression’ (p. 157). Evidently this compares with Macaulay’s assessment of the national kindness that marked the progress of the English people. ‘It is pleasing to reflect that the public mind of England has softened while it has ripened, and that we have, in the course of ages, become, not only a wiser, but also a kinder people.’53 There is seen to be an underlying compatibility of sensibility and temperament between the Jewish and the English, one apparent despite the fact that both peoples have at times faced distinctly different historical circumstances. The adhesive that binds the English together in their common national consciousness, Theophrastus concludes, is the belief that ‘England itself shall not be subject to foreign rule’. This is because ‘there is a national life in our veins . . . there is something specifically English which we feel to be supremely worth striving for, worth dying for, rather than living to renounce it’ (p. 160). Despite the heterogeneity of the national community, in the final analysis Englishness brings with it certain loyalties and responsibilities. George Eliot looks to a national history that is totalizing in its fundamental assumptions





and perspectives. This is identified by Macaulay as ‘the spirit of Englishmen, that sturdy spirit which no king of the House of Stuart could ever be taught by experience to understand, swelled up high and strong against injustice’.54 The point Eliot makes is that English history centres (or at least should centre) on a notion of national identity that acts to unite individuals in relation to the national unit in a way similar to that apparent in the Jewish Diaspora. She lauds this sense of unity, of totality, as the ideal, and in highlighting the sense of national consciousness that the English share with Jews she tends towards viewing them as part of similar narratives, and thus a comparable, equitable, totality. Yet, this is not a relationship of equals. Throughout ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ there is an overriding assumption (and indeed assertion) that Jewishness is implicitly subordinate to Eliot’s ideal of Englishness. This is something rooted in the overarching rationale of her fictions. For it was Eliot’s intention to ensure that her readers felt sympathy for her subject matter, whether it was ‘common’ people, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Methodists or fifteenth-century Florentines. In the case of Daniel Deronda (1876), the novel written immediately before ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, sympathy was to be inspired for the Jews in just the same way. She wished, as she revealed to David Kaufmann, to ‘contribute something to the ennobling of Judaism in the conception of the Christian community’. The aim was that her readership would arrive at a ‘clear perception of the relation between the presentation of the Jewish element and those of English Social life’.55 This was reinforced by George Henry Lewes, in a letter to Eliot’s publisher John Blackwood: ‘I have reflected that [as] she formerly contrived to make one love Methodists, there was no reason why she should not conquer the prejudice against the Jews.’56 Blackwood’s subsequent response illustrates the perceived parallel of her portrayal of Jewry in Daniel Deronda and her portrayal of English characters in previous fictions: ‘Your intuitions as to Jewish character are as true as all the world admit them to be when you are painting your own countrymen and women.’57 These apparently noble motives should not disguise the fact that, in seeking to widen sympathy for Jewry, Eliot actually supplies the reader with an accommodation of Judaism into a dominant and dominating narrative of the English past. She privileges a particular notion of Judaism and Jewish history that does not challenge, and indeed is ultimately appropriated by, an ideal of English national identity that is derived from the influence of Whig historiography. Therein she falls



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into the trap of Said’s Western European Orientalism, the ‘way of coming to terms with the Orient’ that is ‘based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience’.58 This Orientalist perspective is characterized by certain typifying, stereotyping and totalizing tendencies characteristic of Western culture as it attempts to come to terms with nations and peoples of the East. As such both Daniel Deronda and ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ stand as what Said identifies as ‘an acceptable [to the West] grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness’.59 The Englishness of Daniel Deronda’s upbringing ensures that his Jewish quest is filtered through the ideology of Western Imperialism. As Said points out, ‘everything the Zionists did in Palestine they did of course as settler-Colonialists’.60 As such Zionism and European colonialism share ‘common origins’: ‘The early Jewish settlers in Palestine ignored the Arabs in the same way that white Europeans in Africa, Asia, and the Americas believed the natives of those places to be non-existent and their lands uninhabited.’61 This voyage, by which Deronda is to transplant himself and his English education and manners into the land of his people in the East, echoes with contemporaneous Victorian, masculine imperialist ideas about exporting civilization to primitive and barbaric peoples abroad. This parallels the attitude towards the translation of foreign literature into English expressed by Macaulay (and discussed in the previous chapter). This colonizing ‘mission’ falls under the umbrella of a wider bourgeois paternalism, and the imperialistic nature of the ideological framework through which this is articulated is apparent from the silencing of the resident inhabitants of Palestine, who are denied even the privilege of being acknowledged. This echoes with Said’s claims that the ability to narrate ‘is very important to culture and imperialism’. Palestine is the empty Other of the quasi-imperialist project.62 These undifferentiated, unpopulated but religiously sacred acres are to be claimed by their rightful owners, led by an Englishman63 who has been fundamentally shaped by Western culture. The fact of there being an indigenous people does not ever enter the consciousness of the novel. The political paradigm is imperialistic, articulated with the accent and idiom of a Western European. The problem is created, in part, by the fact that the plight of the Jews in England during the nineteenth century had become bound up with liberal notions of social and political progress. Effectively it was an important plank of the liberal political agenda during this period, an agenda that was profoundly Anglocentric. This identified the





restoration of the Jews to Palestine as an ultimate triumph of English liberty, because it was a restorative project that was rooted in a Western myth asserting the unqualified right of a people to collective freedom. The relationship between Macaulay and the campaign to remove civil restrictions from the Jews in the 1830s illustrates this. His essay ‘Civil Disabilities of the Jews’ is seen to be a seminal work, defining the parameters of the entire debate about the Jews, and ‘the main statement of the Jewish case’.64 And yet, implicit in Macaulay’s argument was his notion of Whig Protestant Englishness. He viewed Jewish emancipation as necessary because of the favourable light it would shed on the English nation, and by supporting the removal of Jewish disabilities he felt he was ‘supporting the honour and the interests of the [Western] Christian religion’.65 Hence the nature of the representation of the movement for the restoration of the Jewish homeland, an element of the Jewish experience that within the novel is not seriously addressed even as a possible project for the majority of the Jews. It takes a Jew (Deronda) who has first been educated in the ways of the English aristocracy to engage with it actively. He is the only person who acts on his inclinations and beliefs. It may well be the prophetic words and knowledge of Mordecai that inspire Deronda, leading him in the direction he ultimately takes. His later revealed Jewishness also plays a key part in his full conversion to the national cause. However, there is no escaping the fact that he is a man who has grown up within the English education system.66 So, the chief consequence of George Eliot’s attempt to conceptualize Judaism and Jewry so as to promote sympathy and understanding among her English reading public was that she undermined Jewish national identity in the name of a Whig narrative of Englishness. Her assertion of Judaic particularity is fundamentally weakened because her perception of Jewish history is a trope of an idealized English past. This Jewish trope was one in which the symbiosis of national and individual consciousness at the heart of the Whig Interpretation of English history was translated into a narrative of Judaism. In Daniel Deronda, this tropic, romanticized Jewish nationalism usurps the dominant position of the English, who are pilloried for their moral bankruptcy and sloth. Eliot rejects the perceived intellectual and spiritual vacuum of modern England for her own Jewish organic ideal, and thus transports Deronda out of the bankrupt English upper class and sends him on a restorative project of Jewish national glory. However, because this organic ideal is fundamentally a troped Whig-



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English one, the overall effect is that Eliot paradoxically implies that this English past represents the paradigm for an ideal national existence while at the same time countering this with an assertion that it is only the Jews (or rather her own idealized notion of Jewry) that have the potential to live out this paradigm. Despite the detailed research that contributed to an understanding of Jewish history and culture, marking George Eliot’s concerted attempt to be authentic, her perception and depiction of Judaism was thus inevitably problematic. Inherent and yet silent in both the justification of the Jewish plot of Daniel Deronda, and also the positioning of Jewry in her final essay, was a particular perception of England and the English past. Judaism is justified as relevant and significant because of the way in which it compares to, and can be contained within, an idealized narrative of Englishness. As Christina Crosby rightly points out, as ‘objects’ of investigation Eliot’s Jews are thus ‘stripped, exposed, [and] discarded in a thoroughly objectifying operation’.67 Her recognition of Judaism is one fundamentally weakened by an accompanying implicit motivation ‘to overcome it, to transcend it, [and] to spiritualize it in making it over into something else [my italics]’.68 It is this ‘something else’ that illustrates the pervasiveness, the profound seductiveness and the sheer contentiousness of the myth-like Whig Interpretation of History, even for a writer as sceptical, and as intellectually rigorous, as George Eliot.




4

With the exception of ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, and by implication the Jewish aspect of Daniel Deronda, the coherence of the Whig narrative of Englishness within George Eliot’s fiction is disturbed by a contradictory, disputatious voice. This voice problematizes the smoothness of the narrative, particularly in its rejection of Whiggish optimism and self-congratulatory present-centredness. The fissures in the realization of the Whig Interpretation arise out of a harshly critical perception of the Victorian present. The effect of this is to allow only a qualified vindication of Whig principles, principles that are themselves subject to critique and even censure. Hence the awkward imagining of a privileged Anglo-Saxon identity (the retrospective apotheosis of Victorian Englishness), and the paradoxical reinforcement of the dominant progress narrative. Neither of these is fully sustainable in the light of a deeply pessimistic vision of the present. In the next two chapters this significant other voice will be the focus of analysis. It will be seen to be broadly Carlylean in nature, a refraction of the influence of the Great Sage on Eliot’s perceptions of England and English national identity. Signs of the impact of Carlyle’s social commentary and historical criticism will be read as standing in oppositional relation to the Whiggish voice discussed in previous chapters, largely because of the mid-century England they indict. Carlylean doctrine acts as a counterweight that produces (at least in part) the paradoxes and ambiguities of Eliot’s evocation of the Whig myth, particularly in the earlier fiction. Thomas Carlyle was a violently passionate thinker; he perceived in extremes, and saw history as the grand arena within which the will of God was in competition with the errant moral tendencies of flawed human selves. It is this vivid, graphic, tumultuous historical landscape 66




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that bleeds from every pore of his grand definition of the History of the French Revolution (1835), earning him the reputation as ‘the most aggressive man of his age’.1 His juxtaposition of the prophetic and visionary with a detailed (if flawed) revelation of historical circumstances became notorious during his lifetime as each successive public exclamation of his philosophy was published, illustrating in equal measure disenchantment, disapprobation and disgust in what Rosenberg has called his ‘uncanny moments of temporal montage’.2 Carlyle straddled the ideological divide between Romantic notions of self and community and emergent Victorian conceptions of the same. Sartor Resartus (1833–4) was a particular articulation of a philosophy of ‘Romanticism half-way down the road to renouncing itself, an early Victorian “Two Voices” in which doubt has become the precondition for tenable belief’.3 It matched hope with fear, optimism with veracious pessimism, encapsulated in the oppositional nature of ‘The Everlasting No’ and ‘The Everlasting Yea’. This opposition is rooted in an inherent oscillation between two social models, one associated with visions of modern Englishness, and another with a romantically imagined past. Either there is a society in which ‘worldlings puke up their sick existence, by suicide, in the midst of luxury’, because ‘Doubt has darkened into Unbelief’,4 or else a society wherein ‘the mad primeval Discord is hushed’ and replaced by ‘a blooming, fertile, Heaven-encompassed world’.5 However, with the exception of J. A. Froude, the influence of Carlyle on the development of mainstream British historiography is questionable. Even Froude himself is only a qualified exception as he was also subject to the sustained criticism of other historians: ‘From the beginning Froude’s work was better received by the general public than by the critics.’6 His perceived relationship with Carlyle was a significant factor in this; he was identified as having ‘opinions [that] verged so close to Carlyle’s as to be indistinguishable’,7 which marked him out as a ‘Carlylean and a Tory Radical’.8 Froude’s own estimation of the influence of the Great Sage on his own work bears this out. He notes that ‘Carlyle to me spoke as never man spoke’.9 And yet, despite much criticism, Carlyle was one of the most prominent voices shaping nineteenth-century perceptions of history and the historical process. His increasingly doom-laden philosophizing impacted upon the public mindset in unique ways, perhaps more than that of any other single figure. This particular chapter will focus upon the effect Carlyle had on George Eliot’s perception of the modern national condition and history, and how this manifested itself in her





writing. Ultimately, this will serve to reinforce the claim that ‘there is probably not an educated man under forty years of age . . . that can honestly say he has not been more or less affected’10 by Carlyle’s influence. Carlyle was not a university historian, and in some respects his contribution to the evolution of British historiography was rather marginal.11 However, his religious conceptualization of the mechanics of the historical process, and his gloomy prognostications about the unfolding of English history, had a significant impact. Indeed, they affected George Eliot’s own imagining of historical metanarratives within her fictions quite tangibly, as will emerge. The influence Carlyle had on Victorian writers and thinkers was at times profound and wide-ranging, and furthermore, as Jonathan Arac has noted, ‘not just Victorians are illuminated by Carlyle, but Americans also’.12 That said, the task of delineating the exact nature of the intellectual relationship between Carlyle and George Eliot, a novelist so self-consciously engaging with ideas of both her present and past, is highly problematic. Indeed, if Rosenberg is correct, and Eliot’s thinking ‘bears the marks of Carlyle’s influence more subtly [than most] and they have gone largely unnoticed’,13 then the task of identifying feasible intellectual similarity should be seen as particularly difficult. The problem with assessing the influence of Carlyle, as William Oddie has noted (writing specifically of Dickens), is that one reason for the relative infrequency of contemporary attributions to the sage of some of the more Carlylean ideas . . . is to be found, perhaps, in the nature of Carlyle’s massive influence, not over Dickens merely, or even over literary circles, but over his whole age.14 His ideas constituted a pervasive mindset, and his anti-utilitarian, spiritually declamatory voice contributed towards a Victorian attitude deeply troubled by the consequences of industrial change. The paradox is that the pervasiveness of Carlyle’s quasi-Romantic critique of huge and sweeping cultural change stands in contradictory relation to his infamy for being contrary, for deliberately taking up antithetical positions concerning the commonly accepted wisdoms of the day. He was a man, it has been claimed, ‘trained and developed into opposition to the reigning influences of his time’.15 Yet, at the same time, he was one of those very influences. To look at George Eliot’s reading lists and notebooks, and to



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illustrate her reading of Carlyle, is in some respects useful. But, as she read such an impressive range of materials, both of her own historical time and that written previously, such an illustration struggles to be anything more than indicative. This is more acutely problematic than it is in the study of other writers, notably Dickens, who, as Philip Collins says, ‘was not well acquainted with the philosophers, nor even with the “thinkers” or “sages” of his day, except for Carlyle’.16 To make matters worse, Eliot read most of the German idealists to whom Carlyle was most indebted, including Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Fichte, Schlegel, Novalis and Richter.17 Even if, as Dale admits, Carlyle doesn’t ‘show any evidence of ever having grasped . . . their specifically aesthetical doctrine’,18 it is evident that his own philosophical thinking was crystallized by his reading of these continental influences. He lacked the scientific rigour of the historiographical tradition influenced by Niebuhr and Ranke (he was notorious for his failure to rigorously research his work, not using archival sources even in a work as vast as his History of the French Revolution),19 but areas of continental influence exist. This influence is felt, for instance, in the notion of historical periodicity20 that Carlyle (at least in part) developed from his reading of the Saint-Simonians. It is perhaps more apparent in his reworking of Schiller’s notion of the translation of Thought into Action, and his invocation of key components of Fichtean thought. These include his exposition of the spiritual nature of all existence, the immanence of the divine in the actual, the symbolic significance of Nature, the outflowering of finite forms from the Infinite, the function of history as revelation, the alternation of periods of belief with those of unbelief, the divine mission of the hero [. . . and] the moral significance of action.21 However, as C. F. Harold rightly points out, ‘when Carlyle began the study of German writers, he already had a fundamental point of view, which he wished confirmed’. As such ‘he was “influenced” less by actual ideas than by the spirit of German thinkers as they clothed old concepts in new forms’.22 Their influence was most explicitly felt in the process of intellectual crystallization. Eliot was not only very familiar with this continental philosophy, as Anthony McCobb has contended, but her research methodology owed a lot to German historicism with Niebuhr and Mommsen central figures of interest. Mommsen in particular was ‘the influential





historian whose History of Rome George Eliot regarded as a Bible’.23 In light of this, extrapolating similarities in philosophy between Eliot and Carlyle into claims of direct influence must be carried out with due reservation. Indeed, for some Victorian contemporaries there was no apparent similarity between them at all: Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot . . . represented two intellectual eras: the great Englishwoman who has made fiction the vehicle of an impressive moral doctrine belongs wholly to the present; the great Scotchman who has done the like by history belongs to a phase of development we have already left far behind us.24 Nevertheless, although the complex of Victorian responses to Carlyle’s work makes the difficulty of translating familiarity, knowledge, affiliation and dissension into a concrete assessment of knowable influence difficult, it depends somewhat on the notion of influence that is applied. This is a point made by George Eliot herself, who denied the possibility of there being direct influence on her thinking, and vigorously defended herself against perceived (probably imagined) accusations of intellectual/philosophical borrowing. In a lengthy plea of mitigation, she wrote: The writers who have most profoundly influenced me . . . are not in the least oracles to me. It is just possible that I may not embrace one of their opinions, that I may wish my life to be shaped quite differently from theirs. For instance it would signify nothing to me if a very wise person were to stun me with proofs that Rousseau’s views of life, religion, and government are miserably erroneous – that he was guilty of some of the worst basenesses that have degraded civilized man. I might admit all this – and it would be not the less true that Rousseau’s genius has sent the electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which has awakened me to new perceptions, which has made man and nature a fresh world of thought and feeling to me – and this not by teaching me any new belief. It is simply that the rushing mighty wind of his inspiration has so quickened my faculties that I have been able to shape more definitely for myself ideas which had previously dwelt as dim ‘ahnungen’ in my soul – the fire of his genius has so fused together old thoughts and prejudices that I have been ready to make new combinations.25



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For Eliot, influence is not necessarily felt through a direct correspondence of perspective, but in the form of a catalyst for further thought in vital, previously unexplored intellectual directions. The ‘electric thrill’ is that which awakens ‘new perceptions’ and promotes the crystallizing of previously held, but insufficiently clarified, beliefs and ideas. What is of concern in this study is the extent to which the respective theories of history delineated by Eliot and Carlyle shared common elements, and the extent to which Carlyle’s writings can be deemed to have acted as catalysts to developments in Eliot’s own perceptions. The stress is on isolating the quintessentially Carlylean characteristics of his philosophizing, viewing these as a significant strand within the gamut of nineteenth-century ideas about history and the processes of historical change, and holding them up to the scrutiny of Eliot’s own work. These ideas, as Oddie puts it, offered ‘an imprecise but consistent structure of ideas and opinions’ that presented Eliot ‘with a nucleus around which’ her ‘own ideas could form and also, perhaps, with a mirror by which [. . . she] could recognise their shape.’ Therein Carlyle will be seen to act as an intellectual catalyst, providing a disturbing counterbalance to the persuasive reassurance of the Whig narrative of English history to which Eliot was so susceptible.26 Perhaps the simplest aspect of the relationship between Eliot and Carlyle to establish is her own deep familiarity with his work. From her letters it is clear that he was a much-favoured reading matter. The letters are rich with allusions to Carlyle’s words and ideas. She quotes, for instance, from ‘Chartism’: ‘Carlyle says [‘Chartism’, 1839, ch. 4] that to the artisans of Glasgow the world is not one of blue skies and a green carpet, but a world of copperas-fumes, low cellars, hand wages, “striking”, and gin.’27 Here Carlyle is authority, providing sure knowledge of the unfamiliar. Elsewhere Eliot defends his Life of Sterling on its own terms, although increasingly aware of the eccentricities of the author. She notes that ‘there is a severe attack on Carlyle’s Life of Sterling in yesterday’s Times [1 November 1851, p. 7] – unfair as an account of the book but with some truth in its general remarks about Carlyle.’28 The implicit acknowledgement of the Sage’s fallibility suggests both balance and perception on Eliot’s behalf, sympathy and not a submission to his philosophy. The assistance Eliot gave to Lewes in his research for an article on Carlyle, ‘we read Cromwell’s Letters again at Scilly, with great delight, and Mr Lewes wrote an article on them which you will see in the





Leader [Leader, 23 May 1857, pp. 496–7]’,29 is indicative. It saw her engage with Carlyle’s vision of the state of the nation and the role of writer/historian in the process of change at a particularly gloomy point in his thinking, and a particularly momentous point in her career. The introduction to the letters reflects on an English nation that has ‘wandered far away from the ideas which guided us . . . in all preceding centuries’.30 A manifestation of this is the tendency of the historian (Mr Dryasdust) to drift away from what should be his true objectives: ‘to distinguish well what does still reach to the surface, and is alive and frondent for us’.31 The letters were re-read just at the time when she was working on Adam Bede.32 This evolving, increasingly detailed knowledge provided Eliot with a wide frame of Carlylean reference, and direct quotations from Carlyle’s works became part of her common vocabulary. In a letter to Charles Bray, for instance, she quotes Past and Present (part III: Ch. 12): ‘the higher the Wisdom, the closer was its neighbourhood and kindred with mere Insanity’.33 And, later she writes of ‘stupid Jopling at Reading [the figure from ‘Hudson’s Statue’, no. 7 of the ‘Latter-Day Pamphlets’ (July 1850, p. 16)] or elsewhere [who] thinks nothing of giving a guinea for a work which he will simply put on his shelves’.34 This utilization of Carlylean vocabulary to articulate her own perceptions of the state of the nation bears witness to a particular form of allusion and knowledge. The justification Eliot offers for her initial appreciation of Carlyle is clear. It is his humanity that attracts her: Have you, dear Patty, read any of T. Carlyle’s books ? He is a grand favourite of mine, and I venture to recommend to you his Sartor Resartus. I dare say a barrister of your acquaintance has it.// His soul is a shrine of the brightest and purest philanthropy, kindled by the live coal of gratitude and devotion to the Author of all things. I should observe that he is not ‘orthodox’.35 Sartor Resartus was a very important text for Eliot. She identified it as part of her ‘leaning slightly to the doctrines of Carlyle and Emerson’36 at this time. This was typified by a shared worship of Rousseau’s Confessions, as revealed in correspondence between Eliot and Emerson: ‘inasmuch as Carlyle had told him that very book had had the same effect upon his mind.’37 Sartor Resartus is, along with the ‘On History’ essays, central to an understanding of Eliot’s relationship with Carlyle. Crucially, it makes the most explicit statement of the 10.1057/9780230286948 - George Eliot and Victorian Historiography, Neil McCaw


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Clothes Philosophy and the nature of the Providential metanarrative he envisages as being paramount. It is to be the focus of the following chapter. Eliot valued what she saw as Carlyle’s thorough respect for the truth of things, as she wrote to John Sibree: You and Carlyle (have you seen his article in last week’s Examiner) [‘Louis Philippe’, Examiner, 4 March 1848, pp. 145–6] are the only two people who feel just as I would have them – who can glory in what is actually great and beautiful without putting forth cold reservations and incredulities to save their credit for wisdom.38 Ironically, she praises his ability to celebrate, in an unqualified way, the writing and thinking of others and various forms of human experience. It was a characteristic few others saw in his work. Eliot’s review of Carlyle in Leader (1855) thus enshrines a deep knowledge, a profound admiration and a ready willingness to admit difference and dissension. There is ‘hardly a superior or active mind of this generation that has not been modified by Carlyle’s writings’, she wrote, and hardly ‘an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived’.39 As a consequence, ‘ideas which were startling novelties when he first wrote them are now become common-places’.40 Although there is an apparent readiness to quarrel with Carlyle’s assessment of past and present in some respects, there is also an accompanying insistence that his stature and quality as a thinker cannot be denied. He ‘glances deep down into human nature, and shows the causes of human actions; he seizes grand generalisations, and traces them in the particular with wonderful acumen; and in all this he is a philosopher’.41 However, the nature of Eliot’s perception of Carlyle altered as his bleak, violent pessimism set in during his later career. As she says to her publisher, in response to criticism of Carlyle’s gloomy prognostications on modern existence: Your critic was not unjustly severe [on] the Mirage Philosophy [‘Carlyle. Mirage Philosophy. History of Frederick’, Blackwood’s, 85 (February 1859, pp. 127–54)] and I confess the Life of Frederic was a painful book to me in many respects: and yet I shrink, perhaps superstitiously, from any written or spoken word which is as strong as my inward criticism.42




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I confess that I think the least excusable portions of his book [James FitzJames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873)] are chiefly due to an inoculation of that shallow undiscriminating scorn, made to seem profound by a ‘rimbombo’ of rhetoric (like the singing into big jars to make demon-music in an opera) which is the disease of Carlyle’s later writing.43 This is much in accord with later Victorian perceptions of Carlyle. He was increasingly seen as a man who ‘inspired an affection that in those who knew him best was blended at once with pity and with reverence, and we could fancy that even his faults deepened the peculiar kind of interest which was thus roused in a small circle’.44 Paradoxically, there is evidence from other letters and writings that although Eliot’s articulation of disappointment and distress at Carlyle’s turn of mind became more sustained, in actual fact her own perception of the national condition was itself growing ever more Carlylean. A similar sense of impending doom is perceived. This is revealed in a letter to Mme Eugène Bodichon (1859): It is depressing to witness this reaction towards barbarism. One would like one’s life to be borne on the onward wave and not the receding one – the flow and not the ebb: yet somebody must live in the bad times, and there is no reason, I suppose, out of our own esteem for ourselves, why the best things in the lot of mankind should fall to us in particular.45 This is laden with pessimism, even if it is articulated without quite as much vitriol as might have been expected of the Great Sage. It illustrates a Carlylean influence in the way in which it implies a cyclical perception of historical development, a form of periodicity. History oscillates between phases of regeneration (or cultural achievement) and phases of barrenness (or cultural regression). Carlyle’s own vision of the oscillation between the organic and the critical, crystallized through his reading of continental philosophy, saw just such a pattern of historical development vis-à-vis the English nation state. The impact of the Carlylean vision of history on Eliot, as such, is evident in what has been called a ‘local response to certain sub-head-



Her reticence disguises the true level of disquiet she felt with the text. What is clear, however, is that her perception of the Great Sage has changed:

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ings of Carlylean doctrine, taken separately and out of context’.46 It comes in the tone, and at times the philosophy of her imaginings of the national past, and yet, at other times she voices deep reservations about his philosophizing. This oscillation is particularly apparent in Eliot’s perception of the Victorian narrative of progress. For although there are numerous occasions within the Eliot canon when progress is implied, and even mildly celebrated, the depiction of progress is often undercut by an overriding scepticism that at the very least questions, or else fundamentally rejects, notions of social progression. Therein a Carlylean perception provides an antidote to Whig progressivism, and acts as a counterbalance to signs of unchallenged optimism. Not only do Eliot’s fictions offer ironic portrayals of progress at times, but they also delineate perceived retrogressions in the historical process. Such a perception of progress is evident in Carlyle’s own indictment of the mid-Victorian present. Note the opening to Past and Present, for example, in which the façade of progress is undercut by the social hardship beneath: England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind; yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blossoms and grows; waving with yellow harvests; thick-studded with workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers . . . and behold, some baleful fiat as an Enchantment has gone forth, saying, ‘Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit!’47 Eliot’s own questioning of the consequences of so-called progressive historical development is apparent in Scenes of Clerical Life, in the description of the new parish that Amos Barton is forced to move to. It is a ‘large manufacturing town, where his walks would lie among noisy streets and dingy alleys, and where the children would have no garden to play in, no pleasant farmhouses to visit’.48 As the narrator of Adam Bede argues, the modern age has tangible drawbacks, massive social reorganization bringing with it undesirable cultural consequences. These include the passing of ‘leisure’: ‘gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons’; life has grown increasingly fast, to the extent that ‘even idleness is eager now’. 49 In Felix Holt, Eliot is found striking an even more sceptical note 10.1057/9780230286948 - George Eliot and Victorian Historiography, Neil McCaw




regarding progress. As early as the author’s introduction to the novel England is seen in terms of the ‘five-and-thirty years ago [when] the glory had not yet departed’.50 The intervening years have seen the passing of the ‘departed evils’ of pocket boroughs, the inadequate representation of Birmingham in Parliament, the unrepealed Corn Laws, ‘three-and-sixpenny letters, [and] a brawny and many-breeding pauperism’.51 However, there is a less confident, more nostalgic perception of historical change here, for what is most notable is that ‘there were some pleasant things too, which have also departed’.52 The tension is between the efficiency, speed and technology of the present (Mechanism), and a romantic, relaxed, more aesthetic mode of life (closer to Carlylean Dynamism). Of modern travel, for example, it is noted how ‘the tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative’.53 A vague sense of progress is still a part of the essence of the English historical experience: ‘As to all that wide parish of Treby Magna, it had since prospered as the rest of England had prospered. Doubtless there is more enlightenment now.’54 However, Eliot’s faith in this conception of development is partial and hesitant. In Middlemarch the feasibility of ultimate progress is more rigorously questioned. Patrick Brantlinger has perceptively written of the way in which ‘the reform optimism of the early Victorians [is] dissected so thoroughly’,55 but it goes beyond this. Differing views as to the nature and extent of historical development are introduced continually throughout the novel, and these are adroitly deconstructed. Each of them is critiqued and never allowed to achieve a position of dominance. Just as Mr Brooke, for instance, notes how ‘some say, history moves in circles’,56 Ladislaw confronts the implications of historicism in his attack on history as ‘a set of box-like partitions without vital connection’.57 Naumann, on the other hand, promotes a notion of historical disconnection from a privileged grand narrative in which ‘successive ages’ stand as ‘spectators’ to the ‘supreme events’58 of the past. The effect of this is, as Hillis Miller has pointed out, ‘a dismantling of various versions of the metaphysical system on which the traditional idea of history depends’.59 The novel also offers a direct critique of progress. Caleb Garth’s comment to the dissenting labourers, ‘“you can’t hinder the railroad”’,60 works in two ways. It serves both as an expression of the need to accept, address and accommodate the inevitability of the process (so-called progress) of industrialization, and at the same time as an illustration of the manifest threat that this process poses to the lives of the agricultural workers. It asks the reader to question what



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exactly it is that ‘progress’ means, asking ‘can there be progress if some are disadvantaged by the process of change?’ In so doing it is effectively pulling ‘the rug out’61 from under the progressive assumptions on which the novel is founded. There is an evident parallel with Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), in which the metaphor of the railway does not stand for either progress or else a yearning after a lost past, but perhaps neither (or else both). Eliot offers the reader contradictory and ambiguous messages about social and historical change. The fundamental reappraisal of the concept of progressive development includes an ironic portrayal of the notion of progress per se, and an acknowledgement that retrogression is also part of the unfolding of history: ‘Suffering, whether of martyr or victim . . . belongs to every historical advance of mankind.’62 Progress is indicted as an unfeasible type of totalizing, an ‘all-encompassing encounter with a universal norm and its realization’.63 This type of inclusiveness is seen to be unfeasible, and any attempt to establish, depict or understand ongoing advance or development across history as a flawed project. The gender implications of this will be discussed in a later chapter. As Eliot points out in Middlemarch: ‘We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos . . . the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.’64 This is the uncertain Eliot, a temper ‘by no means confident’, doubting its ability to ‘trace the outlines of human progress in the details of ordinary life’.65 The Carlylean tone is further evident in the essay ‘Shadows of the Coming Race’ (within Impressions of Theophrastus Such). From the outset, Theophrastus Such bemoans the ‘fearful vision of the human race evolving machinery which will by-and-by throw itself fatally out of work’.66 It is another incarnation of Carlyle’s competitive and cyclical opposition between the Dynamic and the Mechanical, a manifestation of a paranoid fear of a time when ‘this planet may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock’. This would create a world ‘without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse’, a world of ‘mute orations, mute rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy the silence’.67 Humanity is to gradually lose its soul, to end up devoid of a coherent, organic spiritual identity and to be literally and metaphorically bankrupt. This was precisely the complaint made in ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829), in which Carlyle castigated the Mechanical character of the age, an age unduly concerned to find tools to achieve every human





end, with an absence of direct and natural behaviour. Primarily, everything was seen to occur via something else, with no spontaneity, and too much calculation and contrivance. This is opposed to the Dynamic life of man; such dynamism might identify itself more with the past than the present, but it was to reappear as part of the inevitable cycle of History. Hence the return of ‘the primary, unmodified forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of Love, and Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, Religion, all of which have a truly vital and infinite character’.68 Within Dynamic periods the greatest achievements of man occurred. The pessimistic worldview of the present and future in Eliot’s essay accords with that of Carlyle, and more broadly with the Victorian quasi-Romanticism of which Carlyle was the intellectual father. Fundamentally, this anti-Utilitarian ethos lamented the passing of the spirituality of humankind in the face of a hostile industrializing world, a world that was judged as fundamentally flawed.69 Carlyle was the defining influence of this perception, and the philosophical foundation of texts such as Dickens’s Hard Times (1854).70 The tone and attitude of Eliot’s representation of Victorian manifestations of constitutional democracy also bears the imprint of a Carlylean sensibility. There is little reverence for Parliament in particular, which stands as either an irrelevance or else as contributing negatively to social cohesion and harmony: ‘a palavering and imaginary entity as it has now grown to be . . . at one time a quite solid serious actuality’.71 Eliot shared the view articulated by Froude, that pure (Whiggish) constitutionalism detached people from their sense of moral responsibility.72 Hence in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss there is little interaction between Hayslope, St Ogg’s and political matters generally, although the remnants of a parliamentary authority still exist. When Eliot does eventually address these political issues more directly, in Felix Holt and Middlemarch also, her attitude toward parliamentary democracy is ambiguous. In Adam Bede the standard of parliamentary honour and integrity is evident in the veiled criticism of the Donnithorne family. Their banishment of a portrait of a leader of the parliamentary troops in the Civil War, General Monk ‘with his eye knocked out’,73 serves as an indictment of the family. However, this is a Parliament of the past, and here and elsewhere there is none of the unqualified celebration of the Victorian Parliament as that present in (say) Whiggish rhetoric. Such rhetoric was founded in claims that, for example, by the eighteenth century ‘every free constitution, save one, had gone down’



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whereas in England ‘the Parliament was infinitely more powerful than it had ever been’.74 The corruption at the heart of the democratic process is, moreover, on full display. In Felix Holt, with candidates’ agents bribing the workingmen with beer to cause a riot, and self-seeking, self-interested candidates predominating, there is little to suggest that the author has faith in the evolving constitutional democracy of which she was a part. Her political activists are just those ‘eloquent high-lackered pinchbeck specimens’ that Carlyle indicted, those ‘expert in the arts of Belial mainly . . . fitter to be markers at some exceedingly expensive billiard-table, than sacred chief-priests of men!’75 The central political message of the eponymous hero-character is, as a consequence, a deeply conservative one: that the working man should only be given the vote when he has been educated as to how best to use it. As Felix Holt himself says: ‘Our getting the franchise will greatly hasten that good end in proportion only as every one of us has the knowledge, the foresight, the conscience, that will make him well-judging and scrupulous in the use of it.’ 76 The fear of social change inherent in this is clear from Eliot’s notion that ‘each class should be urged by the surrounding conditions to perform its particular work under the strong pressure of responsibility to the nation at large’.77 Eliot’s philosophical assertion of the need for a social framework within which every individual knows (and accepts) their place, with decisions made by an elite minority, is typically Carlylean. Note his dismissal of Chartist claims for universal suffrage: If masses of the desperate common men before the mast do invoke Chartism rather, and invite the iceberg counsellors to nudge him – cannot we too well understand it? I hope, in other quarters of the ship there are men who know wiser courses, and instead of inviting the iceberg counsellors and Six Points, will direct all their strength to fling the Phantasm Captain under hatches.78 This sense of the hypocrisy, if not moral bankruptcy, endemic in the reforming political system is portrayed in Middlemarch, with Brooke standing on a reform ticket while at the same time acting with complete disregard for his tenants. This reflects a view of the spread of democracy akin to what Carlyle called ‘this stormful rising-up of the inarticulate dumb masses everywhere, against those who pretended to be speaking for them and guiding them’.79 It is the antithesis of Whig celebrations of the inherent and overriding democratic success at the





heart of English history. It is only at the conclusion of the novel, when the reader is informed that Ladislaw has found a career in politics that the profession, and indeed the parliamentary institutions themselves, achieve any degree of respectability. Dorothea’s enlightened second husband, favoured and presented to her by Eliot as recompense for her abortive marriage with the mentally and physically impotent Casaubon, should be seen as a partial vindication of the occupation of Member of Parliament more generally. Yet, the overall tone reflects a lack of conviction shared by Carlyle, whose proclamation that in its present form, and ‘historically speaking’, ‘there was no Nation that could subsist upon Democracy [alone]’80 offers a particular gloss to Eliot’s fictions. Carlyle’s articulation of his ideal of religious existence giving meaning and value to human society was an attempt, as he saw it, to protect modern man against the threatening erosions of the established orthodoxies and valued traditions represented by the movement for reform. This protection was perceived as necessary by those apprehensive of radical cultural change, with such change perceived to be fearful and confusing. George Eliot encountered just such fear and confusion, as ‘Shadows of the Coming Race’ reveals. For Carlyle the solution came in submission to an overarching, divinely ordained metanarrative, a religiously sanctioned (and sanctioning) sphere of existence wherein the deified master plan was revealed only in its culmination. In the first instance, ‘the secret of man’s being is like the Sphinx’s secret – a riddle that he cannot read’.81 Thus the underlying nature of the divine master plan was only revealed at the moment of its fulfilment. This illustrated the epistemological uncertainty of human knowledge in the present: About the grand Course of Providence, and his final Purposes with us, we can know nothing, or almost nothing: man begins in darkness, ends in darkness; mystery is everywhere around us and in us, under our feet, among our hands. Nevertheless so much has become evident to every one, that this wondrous Mankind is advancing somewhither; that at least all human things are, have been and forever will be, in Movement and Change.82 For Eliot this unnameable ‘other’ was problematic. This is revealed by her attempts to reconcile a questioning intellectualism with a metaphysical worldview in a way that would make the process of naming the unnameable feasible. However, for Carlyle epistemological



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uncertainty was just that, partial knowledge that in no way was to be seen as a justification for ontological questioning. There was no doubt that ‘the Beginning holds in it the End, and all that leads thereto; as the acorn does the oak and its fortunes’.83 It was more of a case that language, as the primary matter of discourse, tended towards narrative configuration, and thus it denied the possibility of adequately reflecting the multiple complexity of the ‘real’ world. Ultimately, this world was too complex in form and content to be represented in a narrative form, as Carlyle’s famous dictum: ‘narrative is linear, Action is solid’84 reflects. Man can only perceive successively, suggesting narrative causal relationships, whereas History occurs simultaneously and its events are born of multiple parents. This was not to say that there was not a wider framing narrative, a frame through which the ‘Chaos of Being’85 made sense and was unified into a revelatory development, more that the character of this was inevitably disguised from the mortal participants in the grander scheme. Most History was ‘lost without recovery’.86 George Eliot’s attempts, particularly in Middlemarch, to find a more complex (feasible) configuration of social and historical existence, hence the ‘particular’ web, amount to an organicist acknowledgement of the wisdom of Carlyle’s words. Carlyle’s view accords with that of Michel Foucault who, in The Order of Things, notes the organic perception of history that emerged in the later eighteenth, early nineteenth century. This implied that historical events ‘cannot be reduced to . . . representation’, for ‘outside representation, beyond its immediate visibility, is a sort of behind-the-scenes world even deeper and more dense than representation itself’.87 Eliot rejects the linear simplification typical of Casaubon’s intellectual magnum opus, whereby ‘the Key to All Mythologies would kill myth into history by viewing all Greek, African, and South Sea myths as perverted copies or mere shadows of a single source, namely, biblical revelation.’88 The fictional narrative strands tend to deny the validity of simple linear configurations. However, simultaneously Eliot was striving to achieve an overarching historical metanarrative to provide ontological sustenance to her fictional narratives, and to lend the virtue of coherence to the complexity of ordinary (fictional) human life. The catalyst to this narrative configuration appears to be Eliot’s concerted attempt, most un-Carlylean, to ‘know’ everything. Carlyle attacked those who believed that ‘all things in Heaven and Earth must be computed and ‘accounted for’, as there must be some things that are allowed to be ‘the Unknown, the Infinite in man’s life’.89 However, Eliot strove to understand, to appreciate, and to depict




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Her wide cast of characters from the various provincial classes, her several analogous plots suggest that she is working for something like Hegelian all-inclusiveness, that she wants to interpret her field of vision fully, that she wants to show everything there is and how it all works.92 Georg Lukács’s notion of ‘intensive totalities’ is relevant here. The fictional narratives act as ‘an accurate reflection of the total process of objective reality’.93 Part of this, implicit in George Eliot’s fictional narratives, or rather perhaps overarching them, is a perception of history and the historical process that sees it as a coherent narrative itself. The significance of such a narrative perception is that it is an effective way of conveying the totality of existence, and therein is a method of attempting to overcome epistemological doubt. For, as Lyotard has pointed out, narrative can act as ‘the quintessential form of customary knowledge’,94 establishing ‘the validity of knowledge’95 through a narrator displaying conceptual mastery. Eliot’s identification of events as taking place within a wider historical movement has two key aspects. On the one hand, she associates her fictional events with ‘what really happened’ by carefully, if indirectly, delineating a relationship with a narrative of contextual historical allusions. The configuration of this two-tier narrative arrangement was the focus of Chapter 1. However, this is only the first stage. There is still the question of historical process. This is the task, as Jameson has noted, of tracing an ‘uninterrupted narrative’ and then restoring ‘to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history’.96 This ‘repressed and buried reality’, the essence of the historical process, is to be imagined in a way that provides coherence and meaning. A particular sign of the attempt to provide coherent meaning is the way in which Eliot tends towards a typically, though not exclusively, Carlylean typology of social signs. His sophisticated ‘blending of Old Testament sacred drama and German Idealist philosophy’97 founded itself in the clothed spiritual significance of the apparently ordinary and everyday aspects of human life. This is what Chris Brooks has called the ‘emblematic structure denoting a higher spiritual reality’.98



human existence as a totality. This requires historical existence to be comprehensible and to exist in a form that can be represented in an artistic medium.90 As Joseph Gerhard has noted of Eliot’s so-called ‘cognitive ambitiousness’:91

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The signs can, very literally, be taken for wonders. In Eliot’s case this is subtly worked into the texture of the novels. In Scenes of Clerical Life, for example, the narrator describes the ‘golden sunlight [beaming] through the dripping boughs’99 as ‘Shechinah’, a Hebrew word indicating the visible presence of God. The implication (albeit figuratively) is of an unquantifiable presence, a manifestation of biblical divinity. The same is apparent, albeit through character dialogue rather than narrational commentary, in Adam Bede, when Dinah Morris tells Seth Bede that Hayslope is ‘Goshen’100 in comparison with the industrializing Snowfield. Goshen refers to the plentiful area lived in by the Israelites before the Exodus, thereby playing on biblical notions of Edenic rural life in opposition to the harsh other produced by hostile social change. She also notes the appearance of Reverend Irwine as ‘a worldly Sadducee’,101 a member of a wealthy and aristocratic Jewish religious sect. Therein he is characterized in biblical terms. Moreover, Dinah’s position is not ironically treated – indeed she is one of Eliot’s privileged characters. As such her perspective is given a validity that makes the typological referents significant. The cumulative effect of these allusions is to project a historical metanarrative equating with Carlyle’s notion of History as ‘palimpsest’.102 There is an implied prophetic manuscript disguised and overladen by the specifics of (fictional) social life. As Sussman has noted, like Carlyle George Eliot ‘violates decorum to show “high” moral significance in the facts of “low” life’.103 Individual lives are decoded as to how they stand in relation to the broader scheme, from which implications are drawn onto the larger scale. It is a form of ‘typological exegesis’ that ‘sees a person or event in the Old Testament as a type prefiguring a person or event’. As a consequence ‘the facts of nature, of history, even of contemporary life can become through the intensity of their representation radiant with transcendent meaning’.104 Eliot’s use of Old Testament language thus works metonymically to imply the interrelation/coexistence of a fictional, figurative England and a divinely sanctioned life. The paradox of Eliot’s use of Biblical vocabulary within the context of her self-confessedly non-Christian worldview is obvious. The implied parallel between the unfolding fictional narrative and an implicit biblical or Providential metanarrative is symbolic, but the philosophical rationale behind it is unclear. Eliot appears to work very much within Feuerbachian territory, depicting a ‘consciousness of God [that] is nothing else than the consciousness of the species’. Therein religious imagery can be read as merely metaphorical, as a





tropic representation of humanity. And yet, even if ‘the substance and object of religion is altogether human’,105 as Feuerbach argued, the conundrum of Eliot’s sustained recourse to Old Testament language is not fully explained away. This conundrum will be the focus of the next chapter. In particular, this will concern Eliot’s relationship with Carlylean notions of English historical process. Carlyle’s perception of (English) humanity in its relation to the spiritual realm, inherent in his typology, saw the religiosity of history as a means of solving the chaos of modern civilization. His ideal England is never one of the present, only the past or (potentially) the future. ‘There will again be a King in Israel; a system of Order and Government; and every man shall, in some measure, see himself constrained to do that which is right in the King’s eyes.’106 Eliot’s typology, and her allusion to generic metaphysics of change such as Destiny and Providence, implies an exterior guiding force shaping historical evolution. This provides the most fundamental area of dialogue between her historical philosophy and that of Carlyle. In spite of her well-known abandonment of orthodox Christianity and its inherent metanarrative, the metaphysical nature of Eliot’s perception of history lingered throughout her career. This is apparent across the range of her fictions.



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The Carlylean imprint on George Eliot’s perception of the Victorian present works to destabilize the surety and confidence of the Whig myth of Englishness embodied in her work. And, although the ‘symbolic realism’1 of Carlyle (as Chris Brooks has called it) and George Eliot’s particular historical imagining differ as far as their philosophical-religious foundation is concerned, they also overlap in the way that historical process is realized. The implied Carlylean Providential metanarrative, the backdrop for events in the human sphere, and the dynamics of historical change such as Providence and Destiny that are imagined within Eliot’s fictional narratives, both offer metaphysical rationales for historical change. They also mark attempts to unify and assign moral-spiritual meaning to human experience in the face of a confusing, dispiriting present. This realization of history will be the central focus of this chapter. The crucial difference between the two is that in Eliot’s case generic, metaphysical narrative configurations mask a void or metaphysical question mark, a figurative façade which belies the fact that Eliot was engaged in defining the process of History amid deep personal doubt and uncertainty. As such she implies direction and meaning while lacking belief. Effectively she projects history as an ‘absent cause’, what Frederic Jameson, in ‘Cognitive Mapping’, identifies as ‘the fundamental realities of life that cannot any longer be represented or even adequately emerge into the presence of perception’.2 The dynamics of change are implicit, rather than explicit, latent, rather than manifest. Yet, by absenting historical forces the effect is to render all notions of process suspect. Destiny and Providence make their presence felt as figurative metaphysics of change within the fictional narratives. They serve as 85





surrogate religious narratives of historical process, and are the necessary correlative of Eliot’s reconstruction of her History through historical-contextual details, which are themselves imagined to exist in a narrative form. The consideration of process marks a development from the concern with what happened, to one of how or why it happened. It marks George Eliot’s attempts to fully narrativize history, to textualize and totalize in a concerted effort to name the unnameable. The configuration of historical events into a coherent underlying narrative of process leads, as Peter New points out, to ‘both deliberate action and chance event’ being seen to have something akin to ‘providentially ordered meaning’.3 This is evident in the relative fates of Dunstan and Godfrey Cass in Silas Marner, who are punished ‘precisely according to desert’.4 Eliot leaves the reader in little doubt that the transgressors are punished and the righteous rewarded within her moral fable. Indeed, at the end of the novel this is emphasized when Silas, and as a consequence the reader, is prevented from contemplating the apparent chance happenings of the text. When he returns to Lantern Yard looking for answers as to why the random drawing of lots many years previously pronounced him guilty (and thus led him to Raveloe), the whole area has disappeared. It has been swallowed up by industrialization. The effect of this is to gloss over the chance element in Silas’s life, and to reinforce the view that his fate has been beneficently directed. In The Mill on the Floss there is a more hesitant representation of exterior forces guiding events. The narrator talks of ‘Providence, or some other prince of this world’,5 and in so doing acknowledges that any notion of Providence can be manipulated to justify a multiplicity of chosen actions. ‘By adopting the point of view of a Providence who arranges results or of a philosopher who traces them, we shall find it possible to obtain perfect complacency in choosing to do what is most agreeable to us in the present moment.’6 Therein Eliot simultaneously asserts and yet distances herself from the view of history as providentially directed, implying ironic distance and sure knowledge while being charmed by the seductiveness of the ordered narrative framework. This embodies a long-standing tension between confidence as to the nature of things and doubt as to the existence of imagined implicit meanings. Just as there is an ‘assertion of a purpose governing the whole past’,7 Eliot herself is not explicitly able to sustain the belief in the Christian God or an orthodox Christian faith. This ongoing discourse about the meaning of the historical process



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is evident in Romola when, in the Proem, the narrator notes how ‘Lucretius might be right’8 in believing that the world could be explained without recourse to divine intervention. The critique of metaphysical assumptions is continued when Eliot notes how ‘the awe of Divine Nemesis’ is understood ‘by the mass of mankind as a vague fear at anything which is called wrong-doing’.9 In other words, it disguises a process of interpretation in which individuals for specific, often egotistical, reasons read events so as to accord with a particular agenda. The paradox, what New has called the ‘inconsistency with her own agnosticism’,10 is that this masks an oscillation between belief and doubt as to the feasibility of metaphysical assumptions. It is what Nietzsche made the centrepiece of his critique of Eliot’s work, claiming that she wished to have the best of all worlds by retaining Christian ethics while rejecting the Christian God. The full implications of this will be considered in the next chapter. Middlemarch is the novel in which the providential aesthetic is, it has been argued, far less prominent. Indeed, it has perhaps been jettisoned altogether. Leland Monk sees it replaced by ‘a realist aesthetic informed by scientific principles’.11 His claim is that in this novel Eliot relied on a notion of chance happening (as scientific as that is) much more explicitly, for example in the character of the aptly named Raffles. This is supported by T. R. Wright, who notes how ‘nowhere in George Eliot’s work is the absence of God so noticeable as in Middlemarch’,12 and Hillis Miller who sees it as a novel ‘governed by no ordering principle or aim’.13 And yet, surely this wholly secular view of the text is undermined to a large extent by the ways in which Eliot implies, within the narrative itself, the existence of a historical supra-force exerting influence on human lives. This is hardly undermined by the fact that this historical influence is not entirely realized within the novel. It is an influence beyond the ‘rush of unintended consequences’,14 and draws parallels with that evident in Eliot’s earlier fiction. The perception of an exterior dynamic, even partially drawn, is inherent in the narrator’s reflection that: ‘any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another . . . destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand’.15 It is destiny that stands by, the director with the cast list of human existence, and thus destiny is the one that shapes the way in which the script unfolds. Central to Eliot’s perception of this exterior guiding hand is a clash between a positivist rebuttal of metaphysical theories of historical





development, and a deep-rooted psychological-spiritual craving for such comforting and seductive explanations. There is a reluctance to identify exactly what it is that precipitates historical change, but regular (though vague) allusions to something that does. Eliot appears unable to reconcile herself to either a complete rejection of, or a complete submission to, metaphysical explanations of historical process. In The Mill on the Floss, for instance, Mr Tulliver is seen to have ‘a destiny as well as Oedipus, and in his case he might plead, like Oedipus, that his deed was inflicted on him rather than committed by him’.16 The indefinable element of the dynamic of the historical process is implied in the way in which the path or ‘tragedy’ of our lives ‘is not created entirely from within: “Character” – says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms – “character is destiny”. But not the whole of our destiny.’17 The message here is that things happen despite, and outside, ourselves; our direction is externally directed. The Mill on the Floss offers a lengthy exemplification of this truism in the case of Maggie Tulliver. Her destiny, the narrator comments at one point, ‘is at present hidden, and we must wait for it to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river: we only know that the river is full and rapid, and that for all rivers there is the same final home.’18 This notion of a final home, a final revelation of the overarching meaning of the developing narrative at the point of its realization is fundamental and quasi-Biblical (in a Carlylean sense). It is borne out as the events unfold, especially when Maggie boards the boat with Stephen Guest. She is moved ‘by this stronger presence that seemed to bear her along without any act of her own will, like the added self which comes with the sudden exalting influence of a strong tonic – and she felt nothing else. Memory was excluded.’19 As an early reviewer of the novel noticed perceptively, ‘the notion of a predestined calamity . . . is vaguely hinted at from the commencement and never lost sight of throughout the narrative’.20 The beginning presumes its end, fuelled by the inherent resolve of destiny. By the end of the novel the implied guiding force has made its presence felt, and Maggie has been carried away to her death. The reader is struck by the fact that the author’s metaphysical assumption about the development of human life and English history is weighted significantly against female protagonists such as Maggie. Her drowning does not simply mark what Mary Jane Lupton calls a ‘romanticized solution for disposing of the heroines’.21 Eliot’s depiction of a quasireligious historical process embodies a force that maintains, rather



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than challenges the status quo. It justifies the present by implying a past that inevitably and necessarily leads to it in an evolving continuum. As Penny Boumelha points out, ‘within the conventions of realism, the novel can offer Maggie – or the middle-class woman in general – no vocation, no meaningful work’; as she rather depressingly puts it: ‘we are back at the crossroads: marriage or death.’22 The references to fate, destiny and Providence mask what is the ‘formal-cum-ideological impasse that the novel has reached by virtue of its concentration on the development of a woman for whom no meaningful future . . . can be imagined’.23 The portrayal of exterior guiding forces suggests the vindication of the iniquities of the fictional past, judged by the rigid moral conventions of the author’s present. Across the range of her fictions George Eliot’s notion of the guiding hand that moves history ever onwards shapes and influences the lives of her fictional characters in ascertainable ways. It is represented as more than a form of determinism rooted in an organic perception of history and society, where the system or organism can tend to appear as if it were ‘beyond human control’ (even if it is in fact, as Jeanette King has argued, ‘the cumulative result of individual wills’).24 It may be a framework of interrelationships, as such dominated by the recurrent nexus of cause and effect, for Eliot’s notion of fatalism was one in which the individual’s actions bring about certain results, relying on what she called the ‘invariability of sequence which can alone give value to experience’.25 However, it is also more than this. These narratives are ideologically loaded. Hetty Sorrel and Maggie Tulliver are obvious examples of female characters who are sacrificed, according to Eliot’s realized Destiny, or whatever, within this ‘system of human relationships’ because of their moral indiscretions. Male figures such as Bulstrode and Arthur Donnithorne, however, who are both shown as active rather than passive in acts of apparent immorality, are not punished as harshly. Both suffer ignominy and ostracism, but neither of them suffer in the quite the same way because of their ill doing; crucially, none of them pay with their lives. And, in the case of Arthur Donnithorne, the ultimate fate is one of redemption. There is a notable imbalance here, an imbalance that reflects a perception of the inequalities at the heart of the society within which George Eliot lived. By implying or suggesting that events and fates unfold according to Destiny or Providence, Eliot ensures that her depictions of female suffering and incarceration only serve effectively to further naturalize this status quo. As J. Russell-Perkin has said, there





is an ‘ahistorical stasis’ produced by Eliot’s ‘totalizing vision’ which has profoundly conservative implications. Her ‘idealized myth of community’ is maintained for ‘specific ideological reasons’,26 reinforcing Nietzsche’s critique of the ‘present [Victorian] adoration of the natural and the real’.27 This is seen as marking a cultural tendency to regard that which is ‘real’ (the present state of things) as somehow ‘natural’ (inevitable and inviolable). However, Eliot’s ‘tendency to see all people and things within large containing social organizations’28 (in the broadest sense of the term) ensures that the sense of being controlled by forces outside the self, and perhaps suffering in the process, is not in itself reserved entirely for her female characters. Silas Marner incorporates both male and female characters in this position. Godfrey Cass feels ‘the iron bit that destiny had put into his mouth’,29 just as Molly’s death ‘was charged with the force of destiny to certain human lives that we know of, shaping their joys and sorrows even to the end’.30 Within the novel there is a clear assertion that though certain events appear to occur according to chance,31 in fact there is actually a purpose or a just guiding hand behind them. In Carlylean terms, this can only be revealed at their culmination. In Felix Holt this exterior dynamic of history applies to the physical geography of the town of Treby Magna itself as well as to the people. There is little explanation of historical change, except to say that change seems to have a momentum of its own, as is the case with the ‘new conditions [especially the canal, the coal-mines, and the saline spa]’.32 This echoes with the impersonal and inevitable change typically labelled within Victorian culture as progress. Eliot qualifies this depiction of social progression by illustrating the way in which cultural change complicates Treby Magna’s relationship with ‘the rest of the world’, gradually ‘awakening in it that higher consciousness which is known to bring higher pains’.33 The implication of this appears to be that once the town moves from the simplicity of the preindustrial lifestyle, necessarily it becomes weighed down with the worries and complexities of industrial life. The benefits may be wideranging and indeed profound, but they do not come without both a social and a personal cost. As Carlyle argued in ‘Chartism’, ‘the progress of things is everywhere tending as to the final goal and winning-post’, and yet ‘there is nothing yet won – except emptiness’.34 What is apparent, as the Middlemarch Notebooks reveal, is that Eliot’s ongoing interest in the degree of control individuals have over their



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own destinies, and the metanarrative with which they can engage, pervaded her fictions. As J. C. Pratt and V. A. Neufeldt remark, ‘this idea permeates Middlemarch, and is summed up in the “Finale”.’35 There is a strong similarity between such a quasi-religious view and Bulstrode’s belief in the ‘divine scheme’.36 However, Eliot’s task is to portray this ‘scheme’ so as to make it appear to develop naturally, organically from the interaction between characters and place (rather than to implicate an exterior influence shaping developments in an explicit fashion). It is broadly successful: as a nineteenth-century reviewer noted, ‘things do not always go pleasantly in real life’, but ‘the fate that befalls Dorothea is very natural’, even if ‘not very welcome’.37 It would, however, be wrong to suggest that Eliot saw destiny as unalterable in the way that critics such as Barbara Hardy have suggested. Hardy identifies Eliot’s ‘use of coincidence’ as showing her ‘occupied with personal destiny as something fixed and determined’.38 This view of the inevitability of personal destiny is reinforced by E. A. Baker, though he perceives this as originating inside rather than outside the individual subject: ‘Her characters [are found] bearing their destinies within them in the master-tendencies of their appetites and wills.’39 And yet, Eliot’s characters are not all fixed, unalterably, into a historical narrative that has already been decided for them; she may not have believed that man had absolute and unqualified free will, but there is a belief that the individual, as Bernard J. Paris has indicated, ‘has the ability to choose the better over the worse course if his motive and determination . . . are powerful enough’.40 The grander-scale evolution of history may occur despite the individual, but they have some choice as to the extent to which they engage with (submit to) it. As such there is room in Eliot’s schema for a degree of individual influence as to how destinies unfold, even if complete autonomy is denied. This is evidenced in her notes towards the long poem ‘Timoleon’ (1869) which was intended, as Gordon Haight reveals, ‘to show the influence of personal character on destiny’.41 The issue that is less clear is whether or not Eliot believed that ‘the individual is impelled to what is “good” or “bad” by factors originating outside him, hereditary and environmental’,42 or whether individuals really were seen as having a significant degree of free will. A key aspect of this is the question as to whether or not ‘motive and determination’ are themselves what Paris calls ‘the products of antecedent courses’.43 This includes the characters who intervene wilfully and achieve that





will and those that thwart the ‘destiny’ of others, such as Rosamond Vincy; Lydgate chooses her and thwarts his destiny, whereas conversely in Eliot’s final novel Daniel Deronda chooses destiny and thwarts Gwendolen Harleth. A concern with the relationship of free will and exterior determination is evident and yet contradictory, aptly encapsulated in what Christine Crosby has called ‘the paradoxical relations of individual will and historical determinism’.44 In attempting to depict a coherent historical process, Eliot strove for a totalizing, spiritual explanation as to the nature of the historical process, as to the actual process of change. Hence the succession of interlinked historical allusions combining to form a narrative of development. However, as has been noted previously, in some cases the narrative configuration is not made apparent until the final revelation. It is not until the final act of the fictional narrative that the reader becomes aware, or at least the author most overtly articulates, the closure of the particular metanarrative. This is evident in the case of Maggie’s drowning in The Mill on the Floss, implicated as her destiny, and with Bulstrode’s ostracism in Middlemarch, defined as his Nemesis. This leads to epistemological uncertainty as to the ability of knowing and not knowing history, an uncertainty explicit in Scenes of Clerical Life: There are unseen elements which often frustrate our wisest calculations – which raise up the sufferer from the edge of the grave, contradicting the prophecies of the clear-sighted physician, and fulfilling the blind clinging hopes of affection; such unseen elements Mr Tryan called the Divine Will, and filled up the margin of ignorance which surrounds all our knowledge with the feelings of trust and resignation. Perhaps the profoundest philosophy could hardly fill it up better.45 The problematics of reading the signs and symbols causes uncertainty. This is amplified in Romola where referential plenitude is added to the list of ongoing perceptual difficulties. God’s sign, it is acknowledged, may ‘not to be supposed [to] have only one meaning’.46 As such Eliot’s utilization of vaguely defined dynamics of process, the implication of an underlying narrative and metaphysical rationale to the processes of history, can be seen as reinforcing Jameson’s identification of fictional (meta)narrative configuration as an inevitable symptom of an age riven with doubt.47 Eliot’s oscillation between an all-encompassing worldview and extreme doubt as to the validity of



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such a worldview bears the hallmarks of such a cultural anxiety. Thomas Vargish, in The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction (1985), takes this further. He argues that Eliot ‘has no basis in a conviction about the ultimate order of things’. Her privileging of the Providential narrative is seen only in terms of ‘a pool of literary conventions and techniques accessible to artistic manipulation’.48 The central point is that Providence acts in Eliot’s work as an aesthetic, structuring principle, a means by which characters and events are located within an overarching narrative framework. Indeed, figurative metaphysics of process offer structure and meaning to the unravelling of historical narrative. However, Vargish’s explication fails to explain quite why Divine Providence or quasi-religious Destiny could be satisfactorily invoked at all bearing in mind Eliot had personally rejected the metaphysics of Christianity. It also fails to acknowledge the characteristic doubt at the heart of Eliot’s conceptualization of history. If Vargish is correct, Eliot was manipulating a figurative narrative of Providence or Destiny for her own artistic, formal ends. Yet there is no evidence of this, and it certainly contradicts everything Eliot ever wrote about her own artistic process. It would imply a notable confidence in her handling of history, undermining any projected thesis that Eliot was suffering extreme doubt and uncertainty as to the nature of the historical process. Or, it would suggest that she was happy to abandon her ongoing quest for textual authenticity in the name of an easy, contrived textual unity. The ideological fissures in novels such as The Mill on the Floss, Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda49 would tend to undermine the effectiveness of such a contrivance, if indeed it had occurred. The stated intention of Eliot’s critical essays was to strive for sincerity and to avoid undue artistic manipulation of fictional reality in the authentic representation of life. If taken at face value, this rules out the main thrust of Vargish’s thesis, for it explicitly rejects the possibility of such conscious contrivance. George Levine offers a more convincing interpretation of the rationale for Eliot’s generic labelling of her fictional dynamics of change. He recognizes the presence of a philosophical oscillation in her work, particularly in the way that she often ‘appears to be taking a fuzzy, religio-metaphysical libertarian position’ in relation to the determinism of Providence while simultaneously ‘attacking some of the cruder positions which determinism might produce’.50 For Levine she is not rejecting the notion of Providence per se, but more its most crude manifestations. This would explain why it is privileged in the first





instance, and also why she expresses reservations. The unaddressed issue concerns the use of a narrative of Providence at all, bearing in mind Eliot’s own religious (non-) affiliation. Similarly, Simon Dentith and Terry Eagleton point to the figurative, metaphorical and ultimately secular nature of Eliot’s depiction of an exterior guiding hand, while failing to explain adequately why she employs such a metaphysical mask in the first instance. For Dentith, Eliot’s notion of destiny, particularly in Middlemarch, is a figurative representation masking the intricate workings of the social organism; it is ‘the product of the inescapable laws of cause and effect, of action and reverberating reaction’.51 As such realism stands as ‘a secular and totalising project’,52 with destiny a key tool in achieving the nonChristian totality. Yet if the secular organicism of the novel is so all consuming, why is the tricky philosophical question of a metaphysics of process not resolved ? Why does the natural evolutionary principle not suffice (which it clearly does not)? This echoes with Eliot’s own words about the ‘mystery that lies under the processes’ of Darwinian theory. Eagleton sees Middlemarch as an ironic ‘triumph of aesthetic totalisation’, highlighting particularly the fact that Eliot was ‘deeply suspicious of ideological totalities’ as the reason for the displacement of the problem of totality into an aesthetic question of form. These suspect, critiqued ideological totalities include the personal philosophies of the leading characters, especially Casaubon, Lydgate, Bulstrode and Dorothea. The conclusion Eagleton comes to is that ‘the novel . . . formally answers the problem it thematically poses’;53 it resolves ideological tensions formally. And yet, there is still the question as to why Eliot does this. There is a vexing irresolution of the dilemma of totality in her work, which pulls in multifarious, even antithetical, directions simultaneously. If Dentith and Eagleton judge correctly then Eliot’s attempts to fudge totality can at best be seen as well-intentioned failures. But, this fails to acknowledge the chasm between the author’s psychological-spiritual desire for totality, and her rigorous intellectual rationalizing which deems such resolution implausible. It is a chasm between the need for belief and the inability to believe. Felicia Bonaparte’s explanation of Eliot’s privileging of quasi-religious metanarratives, though maintaining the fact of Eliot’s ‘thoroughly atheistic vision’,54 at least allows for the possibility of a more generic metaphysics of understanding. ‘We must not imagine that Eliot was merely calling things by their old, residual names that



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continued to haunt her secular philosophy with ghosts, personal and cultural, of an abandoned faith,’ she contends. Eliot’s faith ‘is indeed abandoned’, but her maintenance of a religious vocabulary is seen as deliberate and self-conscious: ‘it distinguishes morality, Eliot’s morality, from mere ethics, and places it in this halfway house of myth.’55 The distinction between myth, religion and secularity is a very subtle one. It is crucial in the process of marking out the ‘dangerous territory’ that lies on either side of myth, which itself stands as an adequate spiritual compromise between faith and faithlessness. The point is that although Eliot’s rejection of orthodox Christianity would imply an accompanying rejection of notions of providential interference, there was a lack of confidence as to what filled the void the loss of faith left behind. The silence left by the rejection of Christian metaphysics, the metaphysical question mark with no ready answer, casts a shadow over the novels. Scientific-evolutionary, and Whiggish-constitutional explanations of the dynamics of process do not provide a spiritual satisfaction. The attempts to imply vague and undefined metaphysical myths of process, in which events are linked together in an unfolding plot, stand as attempts to remedy this. The fiction displays little of the apparent spiritual certainty of Carlyle, but the implied relation of characters and an evolving quasi-religious metanarrative driven by partially identified exterior forces bears resemblance. This History suggests a more generically religious version of the Jamesonian narrative of ‘vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot’.56 The consequence of Eliot’s quasi-religious metanarrative is that she clouds the distinction between History and theodicy, and approaches a figurative embodiment of Carlyle’s view of History as a chronicle of supra-intervention revealed in the human world. Despite the rejection of the Christian worldview, the ostensible shunning of the plausibility of divine intervention, there is an apparent inability to overcome the predominance of such an all-encompassing, reassuring perception of history, and to provide an alternative account for historical change that entirely discounts the possibility of exterior influence. At its crudest, this comes with the recantation of Carlyle’s Great Man theory in Daniel Deronda. Carlyle’s lecture series On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840) offers his most explicit articulation of the dynamics of the historical process. This process implies the interrelation of two distinct realms of existence, namely the mortal human realm and the divine, metaphysical realm. The catalyst for historical change, Carlyle





claimed, could be seen across history, in the form of the most gifted men of each age (even though he recognized ‘the contributions of the life of the common man to the life of nations’57). These heroic, gifted men ranged from Divinities, Prophets, Poets, Priests, Men of Letters, and Kings, but they were united by a common connection with the Christian God, who provided the energy, the inspiration and the direction of Work. As such ‘Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here’,58 and ‘the History of the world . . . was the Biography of Great Men’.59 The Hero is God’s representative on earth, in the mortal realm, sent to carry out his will and to instruct his fellow human beings likewise: ‘a messenger he, sent from the Infinite Unknown with tidings to us’.60 This conception of the dynamics of historical change is embedded within the particular interaction of the individual and history in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. This is unlike the earlier fiction, especially Middlemarch, where Eliot makes explicit attempts to portray an almost antithetical conception of historical change to this, one in which ‘unintended consequences’ and ‘incalculably diffusive . . . unhistoric acts’61 predominate. The conceptualization of historical process in Daniel Deronda, on the other hand, shows tangible evidence of a Carlylean influence. The portrayal of Deronda himself appears to reinforce, very specifically, Carlyle’s interpretation of historical change. He is a Great Man ‘predestined to be a saviour and redeemer’,62 whose very presence bears out the Carlylean claim that: Find in any country the Ablest Man [truest-hearted/justest/noblest] that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him; you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit. It is in the perfect state; an ideal country.63 As such the Zionist quest becomes closely, and ultimately solely, identified with one prominent male individual. The effect of this is to play out what Jameson has called the ‘reduction of the alien collective’ to the ‘valorized individual biography’.64 The understanding and accommodation of the foreign group comes through the reduction of its particularity and diversity to an individual life of a particular, significant member. This member is valorized for the way in which they exhibit qualities that further the pervading ideology of the textual



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world, which serves as the brand of the genuine historical activant. In Daniel Deronda the anxiety at the heart of the textual representation of England is represented through a symbolic face-off between contrasting masculinities.65 Eliot transposes her profound concern about the state of the nation onto a clash of differing conceptions of masculine identity, one of which is her own Great Man. Implicit in this is an acknowledgement that Victorian masculinities are not ‘consensual or unitary formations’ and, furthermore, they are acutely in tension.66 One, shown in Henleigh Grandcourt, is spiritually barren and nihilistic. It is also destructive, manipulative, deceitful and morally bankrupt. In this guise manhood is a means by which to exploit and abuse others, with profoundly negative social consequences. The conflicting vision of masculinity, expressed through the character of Daniel Deronda, blends a radical nationalism with a more conservative metaphysics of belonging. This is represented as distinctly positive, giving coherence to fragmented, previously impotent social forces, and providing the quasi-religious locus for fundamental political and social change. It is a version, or reinvention, of Carlyle’s model of heroic historical actors, the ‘leaders of men . . . the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain’.67 However, in Eliot’s case this sees a more secular religiosity of nationalism replacing the explicitly Christian foundation more typical of Carlyle. So, ultimately, both the catalyst for Jewish success, and also the panacea for England’s ills, is characterized as a multifaceted but ideologically problematic conception of Victorian masculinity. Part gentleman, part religious leader, part political activist, part humanitarian liberal, Daniel Deronda is the type of man on whom enlightened, progressive nations must rely, so Eliot believes. It is only a man such as this who can provide the potent combination of spiritual wellbeing and political organization that is most lacking from the mid-century nation with which she is so disillusioned. For her, political praxis relies on just such a dynamic spiritualism. It is only when the profound qualities of this very particular male individual are publicly acknowledged, and individual wills and aspirations are suppressed for the collective good, that the imaginary community of the nation can finally be (re)materialized. It is only then that the dispiriting national identity so typical of the English aspects of Daniel Deronda, which itself has much in common with Carlyle’s own vision of the national condition, can be radically transformed into a coherent, organic ersatz religion. As is implicit in the Great Sage’s vision of





the shift from the critical to the organic phase of nationhood, it is the hero figure who comes to the rescue of Eliot’s inorganic England. Eliot does not express an unreserved faith in the metaphysics of such exterior guiding forces. In the earlier case of her generic narrative of Divine Providence this is clearly not the case. However, through her novels she seeks symbolic answers to doubts as to the underlying nature of the historical process. The novels seek to answer the questions by imagining History as such a textual narrative. It is a recognition on Eliot’s part that any attempt to understand history as process ‘necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization’,68 and this makes it manageable and comprehensible. As Jerome Buckley has noted, Eliot’s vague implication of a ‘preconceived theory or metaphysical assumption’69 was not untypical in the evolution of British historical writing during much of the nineteenth century. It was a symptom of an attempt on the part of the historian (or for that matter the novelist) to achieve a sense of order when confronted with apparently unconnected or meaningless historical evidence. The idea was to bring continuity where there was chaos. However, Eliot’s fiction amounts to more than an example of a broad tendency towards what Edward Said calls the ‘common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human’.70 The inclination to move away from the disorientating and the unmanageable towards digestible and comprehensible narratives of knowable human existence is certainly paramount. The emphasis for Eliot (and indeed for many nineteenth-century historians) is not on displaying how seemingly unconnected ‘phenomena’ can ‘be made comprehensible by a unifying theory’.71 There is no unifying theory for its own sake. Instead, this can only be established after a genuine, rigorous examination of the feasibility of such a narrative configuration of historical existence via the detailed gathering of evidence. However, in Eliot’s case part of the process of realizing this evidence is the configuration of a narrative driven by an implied metaphysical dynamic of historical change, and this is quasireligious in nature. It may not, in the final analysis, be Carlyle’s metanarrative wholly in character, but in its implications it is very close to it. It is a metanarrative to be read through its laden symbols, the clothes of everyday existence, and its ultimate meaning is largely hidden from the fictional human participants who engage with it. It provides the psychological and spiritual succour to fend off (with varying levels of success) doom-laden visions of the present from



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within the context of a morally flawed present. It offers a vision of grand historical processes which encourages human participation (albeit through submission in most cases). It is a vision that may not have come unmediated from the Great Sage, but nevertheless it stands in very close relation. It is Carlyle without the self-righteousness, Carlyle hampered by nagging and incessant doubt that ultimately leads to a questioning of the possibility of truly knowing anything. Therein Eliot’s fictions bear out her own claim that there was hardly ‘an English book written for the last ten or twelve years that would not have been different if Carlyle had not lived’.72




6 ‘A philosopher is the last sort of animal I should choose to resemble. I find it enough to live, without spinning lies to account for life.’ (Piero di Cosimo, Romola)1

This poignant rejection of metaphysics should stand as the epigraph to the English aspect of Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. For, by the time of her last novel, George Eliot was showing distinct signs of just such a scepticism towards grand, all-encompassing philosophies. Moreover, whereas such philosophizing was problematized in the earlier fictions through an oscillation between perceptions of coherence and incoherence, at this later stage fracture and fragmentation was predominant. The problematization of history in Daniel Deronda is thus far more acute. Hence the predominance of Chance as the dynamic of the historical process in the English aspect of the novel, a dynamic that tends towards a rejection of the narrative perception of history partially sustained in earlier work. Chance stands both as a method of representing the moral bankruptcy at the core of English society, with characters relying on Chance and not actively engaging with history in order to shape their own destinies, and also as the chief signifier of the absence of a coherent historical process. History unfolds, it would appear, without meaning or particular direction; at least if there is an inherent direction, then it is beyond human perception. This latter aspect is essentially Carlylean, recognizing a Chaos of Being that cannot adequately be known. However, Eliot’s epistemological crisis actually led to a loss of confidence in the ability to perceive the nature of existence that went beyond Carlyle’s epistemological doubt coupled with ontological certainty. Paradoxically, despite her acknowledgement of the unfeasibility of establishing a coherent narrative of the evolution of modern England, Daniel Deronda marks the attempt to reconcile this fundamental epistemological and ontological doubt with a desire for totalizing conceptions 100




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of history, for identifying and naming the absent cause that is history. This occurs through the representation of an evolving narrative of Jewish history, the coherent, providentially ordained collective that acts as a counterweight to Victorian Englishness in the novel. Just as in previous fictions, in which Eliot privileged historical dynamics such as Providence, at this later stage there are concerted attempts to name the unnameable, to quantify the unquantifiable: namely, historical process. These attempts occur despite a growing acceptance that there might actually be no inherent meaning to be found in history at all. This is evidence of what Roland Barthes has explained as ‘literary writing [that] carries at the same time the alienation of History and the dream of History’.2 In Eliot’s case this contradiction is resolved through a clear identification of the ‘dream of History’, the ideal Other, as exactly that, Other: associated with something outside (foreign, Past) the modern England. Hence the idealized Jewish narrative. This awkwardly co-exists with non-linear, fragmented ‘alienation of History’ seen through the indicted mid-Victorian domestic present. The textual schism formally reinforces the philosophical rationale of the novel, the denial of the feasibility of an all-encompassing (English) historical process. The reaction against grand linear, narrative histories was characteristic of the development of British historical writing in the later nineteenth century. It resulted in what A. J. P. Taylor has labelled ‘Tory History’.3 The grand narratives were displaced by the ‘accidental view’,4 an explicit avoidance of ambitious philosophies of history. Note, for example, Sidgwick’s unwillingness to make grand claims as to the status of historical writing: ‘We shall, I submit, more clearly and easily learn the real lessons which it has to give, if we avoid asking from it instruction which is beyond its power.’5 The increasing professionalization of the discipline of History brought with it increasing specialization and a greater focus on the need for academic rigour and research technique. The reluctance to assert overarching coherence, unity and direction thus implied that there were ‘no tenable ideas about the course of history or the dynamic forces of social change or the structure of society’,6 or at least that these should be outside the considerations of the modern historian. ‘Tory History’ simultaneously denied the scientism of Comte, Buckle and Harrison, the progressivism of Macaulay and Green, and the ready unity of Arnold and Stanley. Conspicuous advocates of this new perception of history included J. H. Round, T. F. Tout7 and F. W. Maitland. For Round, ‘the truest





history, like the truest art, is that which is least influenced by motives external to itself’. As such, ‘Freeman has shown us the danger of writing as a politician’, and ‘Harrison would have us increase the danger by writing from the necessarily subjective standpoint of a philosopher with a system’.8 A historian should follow neither path, but should work with the archival evidence available and thereby piece together as vivid a picture of historical actuality as possible. This echoes with the notions of objective historical reconstruction articulated by von Ranke, and then Stubbs, in the earlier Victorian period. Tout appositely sums it up: ‘We investigate the past, not to deduce practical political lessons, but to find out what really happened.’9 George Eliot’s increased scepticism as to the viability of grand metaphysical explanations of history, as to history as ‘a causally connected story’,10 taps into this wider movement in the Victorian writing of history. The discursive trend was towards viewing history as consisting of distinct areas for specialized study, not as units within a framing metanarrative. As Maitland puts it: ‘some of the best because the truest history books are those which are professedly fragmentary’;11 as such the chief fault in historical writing was seen as the ‘too frequent attempt to obtain a set of “laws” by the study of only one class of phenomena’.12 Eliot’s own reaction against such law-making projected a history that was atomistic and lacking in fundamental meaning and direction. The wider philosophical context of the view of history as denying metanarrative configuration is apparent in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, which notably contains a damning indictment of George Eliot. Nietzsche criticized Eliot because, he argued, her personal philosophy, her religious humanism, was paradoxical, even hypocritical. Religious humanists are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency . . . in England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably aweinspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.13 Nietzsche’s contention was that though the English ‘suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality’, Christian morality ‘has truth only if God is the truth – it stands and falls with faith in God’. In religious humanist discourse ‘we . . . witness



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the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgement and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion.’14 Although Nietzsche’s general point is borne out by aspects of this study, the depiction of mid-century Englishness in Daniel Deronda stands in stark contrast to his fundamental critique of Eliot’s work. For it lacks the underlying Christian moral framework that he identified as ubiquitous, and as such acts as a rebuff to his criticism (ironically, to the same extent that Eliot’s vision of Jewishness accords with the critique). It would be difficult to encapsulate a more faithless society than that which Eliot portrays as modern England. Nietzsche claimed that Eliot was unable to free herself from the shackles of the Christian religion she once adhered to, and in a sense he was correct. However, his unwillingness to accept that ethics and spirituality could exist separately from organized institutional Christianity, meaning that in his eyes Eliot was the archetypal religious humanist, was delimiting. It ensured a vision of the author as apparently disavowing Christian religion while clinging to a moral code which he believed ‘has truth only if God is the truth – it stands and falls with faith in God’.15 The English aspects of the novel illustrate ways in which Eliot was able to work outside the parameters of such a religious framework; furthermore, the Jewish dimensions of the text actually make clear that the paradox Nietzsche so gleefully seized upon is not in fact a paradox at all. For he overlooked the possibility of a fundamental transposition of faith from one object to another. In Eliot’s case this was from a godhead to a national unit as an alternative spiritual foundation. This allowed for the maintenance of a dominant moralspiritual authority in the midst of a sustained rejection of an overarching, explicitly Christian metanarrative. By collapsing all faith in metaphysics into belief in the Christian worldview Nietzsche both disallows this possibility, and also creates a simplistic, totalizing binary opposition between an exclusively Christian morality and an avowedly nihilistic atheism. Daniel Deronda encapsulates the transposition of faith that Nietzsche denied. Bleak, quasi-Nietzschean nihilism is confronted and ultimately thrown aside in favour of the metaphysical comfort of a national spiritualism. This is Eliot’s remedy for the soulless, spiritually bankrupt wasteland of mid-century England, characterized by ‘the automatism of moral and political reflexes’.16 It is prescribed for its potent combination of national and spiritual identity, providing religious sustenance and ideological invigoration, via the conflation of the Judaic faith and the Zionist political imperative. However, it is





only in the Jewish aspects of the text that Eliot is able most effectively to work through her philosophical resolution of the crisis of Englishness that she represents through Grandcourt. The novel is thus riven by division and dissension, on the one hand marking the end of totalizing narrative configurations of historical process and on the other offering the most coherent historical narrative to appear anywhere in her fiction. The latter stands as a fraught attempt to resolve the fracture of the former. It is an England that embodies all the doubts and anxieties that had just about been kept under control in the previous novels. By this later stage of Eliot’s career, in contemplating the modernity of mid-Victorian culture, such a containment is impossible. Pessimism permeates the whole, actively contesting supremacy with an opposing idealist vision of the future. The philosophical dichotomy of Daniel Deronda had its origins in Eliot’s long-standing and contradictory relationship with Judaism. The evolution of this relationship marked a shift away from an initial anti-Semitism towards a philo-Semitism that had, as its accompaniment, an increasingly disillusioned view of Victorian England. The initial anti-Semitism was marked by a profound hostility. For example, in 1838, while still a committed Christian, Eliot wrote: ‘I humbly conceive it to be little less than blasphemy for such words as “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ” to be taken on the lips of such a man as Braham (a Jew too!).’17 The hostility Eliot felt is even more apparent in her vitriolic attack on the Jews in a letter to John Sibree: I bow to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, but much of their early mythology and almost all their history is utterly revolting. Their stock has produced a Moses and a Jesus, but Moses was impregnated with Egyptian philosophy and Jesus is venerated and adored by us only for that wherein he transcended or resisted Judaism. The very exaltation of their idea of a national deity into a spiritual monotheism seems to have been borrowed from the other oriental tribes. Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.18 During the period immediately following the writing of the letter to Sibree, Eliot abandoned her Christian faith. Crucially, the less dogmatic retention of Christian principles, the loss of what Haight describes as her ‘evangelical severity’,19 led to a shift away from the previous anti-Semitism. The Jews were no longer disparaged as being of low grade, with a corrupted or base culture and history, for Eliot



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found a way of accommodating them into her worldview. They were celebrated as a noble, divinely inspired, providentially ordained race of people (as the later ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ reveals). Part of this special status related to their historical existence as persecuted minorities within a multiplicity of hostile majority cultures.20 This sense was expressed in 1854, after a visit to see Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, a play with a central message of the need for religious tolerance toward the Jews. Eliot wrote: ‘it thrilled me to think that Lessing dared nearly a hundred years ago to write the grand sentiments and profound thoughts which this play contains . . . . in England the words which call down applause here Germany would make the pit rise in horror.’21 The subsequent publication of Daniel Deronda saw George Eliot at the forefront of the literary-artistic reaction against antiSemitism, a reaction that was, to an extent, against a previous incarnation of herself. The position of the Jews in England was seen as a barometer of nineteenth-century English advancement, the restoration of Palestine as an ultimate triumph of liberty and of the freedom of the individual nation or race to achieve the fulfilment of their destiny. This accords with Bryan Cheyette’s identification of the Jews as ‘at the heart’ of Eliot’s ‘understanding of liberal progress’.22 Eliot’s identification of the fate of the Jewish people as inextricably connected to an idealized, historicized English has been discussed in a previous chapter. It is implicit in her publisher John Blackwood’s announcement of Daniel Deronda as ‘George Eliot’s New Story of English [my italics] Life’.23 The novel in which she proposed a historical resolution of the Jewish situation was also concerned with fictionally remodelling the social landscape of England. Therein Eliot identified the defined characteristics implicit in her notion of the ideal of national identity, and openly acknowledged that it was only within the contemporaneous Jewish Diaspora that they could be found. The Jews were applauded for their steadfastness, and inherent capacities for duty, honour and humanitarianism, providing a rebuff to the privileging of Hellenism over Hebraism in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. It marked an attempt to subsume the moral and spiritual vacuum perceived to be at the heart of the modern English nation within the Jewish organic ideal. It was an attempt to establish the viability and feasibility of a totalizing narrative of historical process to displace the fractured dominion of Chance. The proto-Zionist quest is thus the counterbalance to the bleak representation of English cultural life evident in the other spheres of the novel. Deronda’s desire is to return to the homeland, and to fulfil





a role that is strictly in accordance with ancient biblical wisdoms, represented by the figure of Joseph Kalonymos. This quest drowns out other elements of Jewish existence, for example the assimilating, working-class life of the Cohens. These are clearly viewed as less esteemed examples of Jewish existence. The romance and restoration narrative is privileged over the narrative of working-class Jewish immigrant life in Victorian London. This is evident, for example, in the way in which George Eliot represents Daniel’s view of Ezra Cohen: [His] phraseology was as little as possible like that of the Old Testament; and no shadow of a Suffering Race distinguished his vulgarity of soul from that of a prosperous pink-and-white huckster of the purest English lineage.24 In terms of what is valued most in the Jewish race, Cohen simply does not meet the specification. He is not special enough. There is no divinity in his form of national identity, no identification of this type of man as divinely chosen. As such, there is a marked favouring of the type of Jewish male who engages with the proto-Zionist quest, namely the Sephardim influenced by the Kabbalah. It is a quest that is easily absorbed within a linear narrative configuration. The most desirable Jews are seen as those that wish to leave England and return to their biblically ordained homeland. Those Jews that remain in England, the Ashkenazim or reformist Jews who are engaged in the active process of a gradual, slow assimilation into mainstream English society, are viewed as somehow less Jewish. Proto-Zionism stands as a trope for Eliot’s ideal of national identity, whereas assimilative Judaism falls short of this ideal. The predominance of the words and beliefs of the Restorationist Mordecai leave the reader in no doubt as to where the author’s real sympathies lie. There is a bravery, a romance, an honour in the Zionist quest as it manifests itself in the novel, whereas there is a dullness, a resigned and ignoble condition humaine of the Jews who are attempting to assimilate into English society. The representation of England, on the other hand, is the antithesis of the purposeful, driven and coherent Zionist narrative found in the other aspects of the text. There is a dominant perception of incoherence, accident and Chance that is detrimental to social cohesion and historical advancement. The profoundly hostile nature of Eliot’s critique of mid-century Englishness is clear from her attack on prevailing attitudes towards Jewry in a letter to Harriet Beecher Stowe (1876):



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Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called ‘educated’ making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting ? They hardly know that Christ was a Jew. And I find men educated at Rugby supposing that Christ spoke Greek . . . . to my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion. The best that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness – in plain English, the stupidity, which is still the average mark of our culture.25 This same tone is evident throughout the depiction of the English dimension of Daniel Deronda. It is what E. S. Shaffer has called ‘the harshest social satire’, an ‘unflinching indictment of English society’ as extreme as that found ‘anywhere in the English novel’.26 The central element of this is the creation of Henleigh Grandcourt as the epitome of ‘English’ upper-class masculinity. He becomes a metaphor for his times, the most pronounced example of the impact of a debauched aristocracy on the national psyche. This characterization serves to reinforce the negative stereotype of the upper-class publicschool ethos, personifying what Mangan has called the ‘godless world of cold, hunger, competition and endurance’.27 On the surface, Grandcourt appears to share the maxim of Bulwer’s dandy ‘Pelham’, who resolves ‘never to be unpleasantly employed, even in thought, if I can help it’.28 However, the virulence of Eliot’s character goes far beyond the paradigm of the Regency Dandy figure. Grandcourt is symptomatic of the pervading moral bankruptcy of English society, a man who has ‘no idea of a moral repulsion’ (p. 734) because he lacks a pervading morality to make the basis of such a judgement. The paradox is that, though beyond influence, he enjoys a social position that is maintained by a circle of patronage. Nevertheless, there is still nothing in life that moves Grandcourt into a course of action that conflicts with his desire for personal gratification. As Badri Raina has noted, this compares to a Schopenhauerian ‘motiveless, disembodied Will’, a ‘realized vision of pure power’.29 To live is to crave each ‘gratification of mere will, sublimely independent of definite motive’ (p. 187). Even when Sir Hugo offers his nephew a handsome cash sum to surrender rights to the family estate, a sum





that would ensure his financial security, Grandcourt does not accept the offer simply because he is aware that others wish for such an acceptance. The power-drive even overcomes a wider concern for his long-term personal fate. His sexual misdemeanours are, it seems, common knowledge among male society, a world in which, as Mr Vandernoodt points out, ‘such stories get packed away like old letters’ (p. 488). This is an action that simultaneously condemns it by highlighting the way in which, beneath surface appearances, it is little more than what Irving Howe has called ‘a system of dehumanized personal relations [original italics]’.30 This provides the reader with a personification of ‘all those elements in the psychology of aristocratic rulers . . . that destroy human affections, spontaneity of feeling, and mutual respect’.31 As the plot-narrative unfolds this begins to take on even greater dimensions. Ultimately Grandcourt takes the form, in both his moral obtuseness and in his lack of sympathetic imagination, of a Victorian incarnation of Mephistopheles.32 He represents a hyper-masculinity in which dominant male characteristics, notably an overt sexual drive and an intimidating physical presence, are perverted into a caricature of both national and masculine identity. This explains the tangential relationship he has with history, the broad canvas of male-oriented public events. For both the sense of alienation and estrangement that permeates the depiction of England and the profound (and evident) national indolence are indicative of a particular, corrupted dynamic of the historical process (if dynamic is really the correct word here). ‘Grandcourt’s importance as a subject of this realm was of the grandly passive kind which consists in the inheritance of land’ (p. 644). As such this is a corrupted and corrupting, process. Inheriting rather than earning wealth encapsulates exactly the passivity of the almost incidental effect that he and his kind have on the unfolding of the grand historical narrative. As the narrator comments, ‘political and social movements touched him only through the wire of his rental, and his most careful biographer need not have read up on Schleswig-Holstein, the policy of Bismarck, trade-unions, household suffrage, or even the last commercial panic’ (pp. 644–5). Grandcourt cares nothing for this public, historical dimension of existence. When Gascoigne suggests he take up a career in politics this is obviously an absurdity; he is a man who has ‘worn out all his natural healthy interest in things’ (p. 456). This withdrawal from social engagement is symptomatic of a life disconnected from the historical flow: ‘his long narrow eyes expressed



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nothing but indifference’ (p. 146). However, it is not just a personal alienation, for Eliot makes a direct connection between this vision of masculine (in)activity and a debilitating nation state, a state peopled by individuals who have no defined historical consciousness. This stands in clear contrast to Deronda who is both catalyst and activant. This characterization is inextricably related to Eliot’s ongoing crisis in understanding the historical process, and her attempt to create a meaningful history. This comes despite what K. M. Newton calls a rejection of ‘transcendent significance or purpose in life’, a belief that there is ‘no God or divine providence, no objective order in the world, no authority beyond the human for reality’.33 It typifies her efforts to represent history within her fictions, something that in the earlier novels tended towards an implied narrative conception of the historical process which was internally critiqued and undermined. However, by the time of Daniel Deronda this oscillation between confidence and doubt has become even more polarized. George Eliot juxtaposes her faith in such a linear conception of historical existence, as it manifests itself in the Jewish narrative, with a complete rejection of such configurations in the English (anti)narrative. Therein she implies that any faith ‘in the natural veracity of any narrative form’ is ‘a false faith’.34 Rather than simply problematizing prescribed narratives, she creates a grand fissure in the text by, on the one hand, asserting the validity of such a historical configuration and, on the other, entirely negating such. The extreme philosophical doubt implicit in the conception of Daniel Deronda is apparent from the first epigraph: 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. . . . No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out. (p. 35) There is, at first glance, something Carlylean about the way in which Eliot draws particular attention to the fact of the fictionality of beginnings and endings, and the arbitrary way in which the human mind attempts to compartmentalize experience into easily manageable packages. It echoes with the implications of his ‘Narrative is linear; Action is solid’ dictum. In so doing she addresses similar





concerns as Edward Said in Beginnings: Intention and Method. Said reflects on the way the human mind needs ‘to conceive a point in either time or space that marks the beginning of all things’; underlying this quest, he claims, is ‘an imaginable and emotional need for unity’.35 The opening epigraph of Daniel Deronda is a reworking of the statement in Middlemarch that ‘every limit is a beginning as well as an ending’,36 wherein narrative closure is unfeasible. However, its implications go far beyond the epistemological questionings of Carlyle and the implicit hesitancies of Middlemarch. Eliot doubts not only her ability to know or to understand, but moreover whether or not there is a coherent process to know or understand. The questioning has moved from the epistemological to the ontological. In terms of the novel’s narrative form, the consequence of these doubtful and sceptical comments is a problematization of linear arrangements and an exhibition of extreme doubt as to the possibility of truly ‘knowing’ anything. There is a resistant, disputatious quality, bearing out George Levine’s claim that Victorian narratives often ‘do not acquiesce in the conventions of order they inherit but struggle to reconstruct a world out of a world deconstructing, like modernist texts, all around them’.37 The opening epigraph leads into a text with a narrative that opens half-way through the chronology of the story, then turns back on itself, has no resolved closure, and concludes with the vague, unspecified futures of both Deronda abroad and Gwendolen at home. There is a complicated disjuncture between fable and subject unparalleled in the Eliot canon. As Sally Shuttleworth notes, it is a text in which Eliot recognizes (because origins cannot be known), that ‘the comfort of certainty must be exchanged for an openness to the unknown’.38 In doubting the possibility of knowing Eliot exhibits a profound lack of confidence akin to what F. W. J. Hemmings has called the ‘vague mistrust of the future’ that became implicit in middle-class culture towards the end of the nineteenth century.39 Daniel Deronda is a novel founded in such an intellectual–spiritual fracture. It is not simply (or even) the case that George Eliot finally lost all semblance of her religious humanist faith, more that her doubt about the status of Knowledge in mid-Victorian culture was increasingly difficult to suppress. There is an increasing unwillingness to accept inherited notions of value and meaning. Crucially, this manifests itself in the representation of England and of the history of England. There is no totalizing philosophy of history rehearsed in the English sections of the text. The perception of history is characterized



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by an awareness of the fact that, as Said points out, ‘spatial distance between things’ implicates ‘time’ as ‘an illusion of succession, as a promise of unity or of a return to the Origin’.40 There is no prospect of a coherent and authoritative narrative of progress in this society. This places the text in closer relation to modernist writing (in the Lukácsian sense), writing that implies ‘the negation of any meaning immanent in the world or the life of man’.41 This precipitates the paradox of the presentation of history in the novel. A progressive narrative of a providentially sanctioned Judaism sits in uneasy relation with a pessimistic, doubt-ridden view of England. Bryan Cheyette rightly notes this ‘sense of the difficulty of achieving a homogeneous narrative’ in the novel, and explains it in relation to the fact that ‘the universal “language” of liberal progress no longer adequately represents the future’. So George Eliot ‘increasingly utilises the particularist vocabulary of “race” and “nation’’’.42 This pushes the text beyond the status of one that ‘examines the present . . . but ardently longs for the future’,43 for the central debate is not solely concerned with the extent to which the language of liberal progress can adequately represent the future. It is also concerned with its ability to represent the present, and this is the key site of struggle. This is evident from the way in which the profound cultural complexity of the Jewish past, its dense hybridity, is ultimately denied in Eliot’s totalizing project to create a homogeneous present. William Baker has noted how there is a particular problem for Eliot in terms of her attempt to reconstruct Judaism and Jewish history as a homogeneous entity because the Jewish scholarly and cultural tradition is an especially cumulative, highly complex one, involving ‘the long traditions of Jewish historical interpretation’.44 Furthermore, as Jacob Neusner has pointed out, Jewish history is ‘anti-narrative or antisystemic – a complex tradition in which individual events have no meaning in themselves’.45 As such the project of recreating the Jewish past in a ready narrative form is fraught with difficulties, despite the careful, detailed research that went into the creation of the novel. Indeed, despite Eliot’s knowledge of the subject matter and research into Hebrew and modern English sources, the latter including Henry Hart Milman’s The History of the Jews from the Earliest Period down to Modern Times (1829),46 the articulation of Jewishness is a partial and particular one. The influence of figures such as Emanuel Deutsch,47 an assimilated Jew, and the wider research into Jewish historiography contributed towards this





selective notion of Judaism. Out of the eight historians that Eliot utilized, only two, Zunz and Geiger, were assimilationists; the rest were to a greater or lesser extent committed to the Zionist quest.48 The consequence of this, as Crosby has pointed out, was effectively to turn ‘all Judaism into Zionism’.49 Eliot conflated Jewish experience into a linear historical narrative, an unbroken ‘continuum of practically unchanging spiritual development’.50 In so doing she achieved the unity, the knowability and the totalizing configuration that she aspired to in the earlier fiction. Just as the Jewish aspect of the text marks the triumph of History as narrative, the English aspect marks the triumph of Chance as the (anti)metaphysics of process. The significance of this dynamic of Chance is established through its relation to the narrative of destiny that is predominant in the Jewish aspect. Zionism, as ‘a concept of life as Destiny, a Destiny which transcends the personal ambitions and desires of individuals and represents human life as governed by a very long-term historical purpose’,51 stands in stark contrast to the view of life as chance-happening. It is the difference between the view that history has a particular meaning and direction and the view that there is no particular meaning or direction. Furthermore, as Anderson has noted, ‘it is the magic of Nationalism to turn Chance into Destiny’.52 This embodies the difference between history as knowable and achievable, and history as indecipherable and unquantifiable. Daniel Deronda realizes a bifurcation in the understanding of Chance, seeing it both as a phenomenon in itself that has its own particular, unpredictable effect on events, and also as a convenient term for explaining what cannot be explained. In the latter sense it is not necessarily, in itself, a ‘causative agent’.53 The question is whether Chance can be seen as the dynamic of History or else as a generic label for a dynamic of history that cannot be established. In either sense it is a movement from a depiction of Destiny or Providence as what cannot be known to a more faithless nomenclature, indicating dark resignation. Chance inevitably implies either epistemological or ontological crisis (or possibly both). This bifurcation, as Eliot was aware,54 has its origins in classical philosophy. Empedocles, particularly, was concerned with Chance for the way it offered a dissension from the religious notion of ‘an invariable arbitrary guidance’.55 Epicurus concurred with this view, but saw Chance as ‘the intervention of an unaccountable force which to some extent thwarts natural law’.56 These notions of Chance are relevant to the analysis of the England of Daniel Deronda both in the way that



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George Eliot reacts against the Whiggish, Providential and scientific metanarratives with which she engaged in her earlier works, and also in the way that chance-happenings characterize the novel. Note the collapse of the Harleth family finances precipitating Gwendolen’s return to England (just in time to collide with Grandcourt), and the wonderfully coincidental boating accident that brings about his death. These accidents serve conflicting purposes (although perhaps necessary and welcome), whereas the coincidences of the Jewish sphere, such as the meeting of Daniel and Mirah in the Thames, and the collision of Daniel and Mordecai, all concur within the unfolding narrative of Jewish destiny. The Aristotlean conception of Chance also relates to the working of the novel. His view of Chance was that in itself it was ‘not the cause – without qualification – of anything’,57 that as a term it tended to be applied only when ‘the limits of the human understanding make it impossible for us to determine what the cause is’.58 This relates closely to the sense of epistemological crisis that predominates in Daniel Deronda where Chance can be seen as what Buckle, in his History of Civilization in England (1857), calls the ‘name for the defects of our knowledge’.59 Its presence acts as an acknowledgement of Bertrand Russell’s dictum that ‘since all knowledge . . . is doubtful, the concept of “uncertain knowledge” must be admitted’.60 For George Eliot the certainties of the past are exactly that, past. The privileging of Chance encapsulates profound epistemological doubt as to the nature of the English present, and reacts against impressions of ‘cognitive and conceptual mastery over reality’.61 Chance, by its very nature, problematizes notions of cause and effect. It implies either that there is a cause that cannot be fully defined, one that lies beyond the scope of human perception, or else that events are not the necessary consequence of specific and defined causes. The configuration of events in terms of the cause/effect binary is seen as artificial. However, in itself Chance is not necessarily opposed to ‘cause’. It opposes fate or destiny, and other conceptions of predestined or preordained development, but chance-occurrences in themselves may at the same time, along with accidents, serve fate and narrative closure, just as in the case of the Jewish aspects of the text. This paradox of Chance poses particular problems for representation. For, as Leland Monk has highlighted, the phrase ‘chance in narrative’ is oxymoronic: ‘It is the nature of narrative to render chance as fate so that “what happens” in a story becomes indistinguishable from the more evaluative “it was meant to happen”.’62 Chance is ‘that





which cannot be represented in narrative’.63 The authorial attempt to embody the workings of Chance in narrative is, in a sense, unfeasible, but the attempt to do so does at least result in innovations in narrative form, hence the staggered plot-narrative of Daniel Deronda. This was certainly innovative in terms of the George Eliot canon, and shows, as Levine points out, ‘how far outside the conventions of Victorian narrative her art had developed’.64 The effect is to disrupt the linear plot-narrative, to blur the distinction between cause and effect, and thereby prevent a linear reading of the text.65 The cause and effect binary is problematized in a kind of Nietzschean reversal of the ‘hierarchical opposition of the causal structure’,66 in which cause and effect no longer exist in a stable, knowable relation. The most apparent manifestation of the role of Chance in the novel comes in relation to the character of Gwendolen Harleth. Gwendolen begins the novel as a woman who ‘believes she can conduct her entire life as she conducts herself in the casino’.67 She attempts to affect some form of control over her destiny by placing her bets ‘with an air of firm choice’ (p. 38) but from an early stage it is apparent that there is actually no control at all. And, just as she loses her own private funds in the course of gambling, sacrificing them to the God of Chance, so her mother does the same when the family is financially ruined by their ill-advised speculations in the financial markets. The collapse of these investments, so Ellen Rosenman has claimed, not only stands as an allusion to the actual collapse of the House of Overend, Gurney and Co. in 1866, but also as a subtle indictment of the workings of the capitalist market and chance-happening.68 Eliot again shows herself, as she did in earlier novels, to be unsympathetic towards figures such as Gwendolen, those ‘young, childish, ignorant souls’ in whom ‘there is constantly this blind trust in some unshapen chance’.69 Hetty Sorrel is a particular example of this. However, in Daniel Deronda Eliot is especially critical of the individual who believes that events do not happen randomly, that there must be a beneficent rationale lying behind everything. ‘“Faites votre jeu, mesdames et messieurs?”, said the automatic voice of destiny from between the mustache and imperial of the croupier; and Gwendolen’s arm was stretched to deposit her last poor heap of napoleons. “Le jeu ne va plus” said destiny’ (p. 39). Here Eliot’s previous use of Destiny is perverted into an ironic commentary on the meaninglessness of human existence. The ominous, omniscient power of this voice, looking with disdain at the impotence of the gamblers to act with consequence in their 10.1057/9780230286948 - George Eliot and Victorian Historiography, Neil McCaw


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own interest, has a much wider resonance. The scene is a microcosm of the more general human relationship with the absent processes of history in the English aspects of the novel. The demonstrated power of the croupier and roulette wheel over the gamblers is the same power that is held over the human subjects by the dictum of history (as Chance). Even a character such as Grandcourt, who appears for the most part to be free from the constraint of outside influences, ultimately suffers at the hands of chance-happening in the freakish accident that precipitates his death. Gwendolen sees her loss of fortune as the root cause of her problems; there is a belief that continued success on the roulette wheel would have supported the family through their financial crisis. This is extrapolated into the accusing finger pointed at Deronda for interrupting her concentration and thereby precipitating the turn of fortune. Deronda becomes the personification of the negative influence of Chance, ‘watching her with exasperating irony’ (p. 46). However, this is a misrecognition; he is in actual fact the embodiment of destiny, the inverse of Chance, and as such belongs to the other demi-sphere of the text. Nevertheless, the image of him looking at her with distaste, with the wheel dividing them, is one that recurs in Gwendolen’s mind when she later laments her change of luck. It haunts her, and she begins to believe that Chance is working its influence to the detriment of her enjoyment of life. This marks an inability to affect her own destiny, something that is most apparent when she is driven to despair by Grandcourt’s behaviour and attitude. It is then that the only ‘gleams of hope’ come in ‘the form of some possible accident’ (p. 736), the notion of an inherent beneficence to the historical process is rejected, and she instead courts her old flame, Chance. This personal regression away from an initial ‘unbroken confidence and rising certainty’ (p. 44) undermines the notion of individuality; Gwendolen eventually loses her resolution to be different. ‘Other people allowed themselves to be made slaves of, and to have their lives blown hither like empty ships in which no will was present: it was not to be so with her’ (p. 69). Confidence and certainty is lost, leading to an appreciation of English life as fragmented and without essential movement, direction and meaning. This crisis of belief is fundamental; it leads Eliot herself to doubt her own ability to describe history and human life: ‘attempts at description are stupid: who can all at once describe a human being?’ (p. 146), she asks. This comment typifies the temper of the novel, a sense that human capabilities are no longer adequate to cope with the multiplicity of life and that the





wider historical world lacks unity, shape and purpose. It shows her, as Swann rightly points out, trying ‘to pull together the parts of a world that had been shattered when she lost her faith in transcendentalism, a loss that forced the burden of meaning on the individual mundane consciousness’.70 The bleakness of the perspective is evident throughout. The gambling scene with which the novel opens encapsulates the wider moral and spiritual bankruptcy that is prevalent in the English dimension of the text as a whole. The scene is situated ‘in one of those splendid resorts which the enlightenment of ages has prepared’, and is a ‘suitable condenser for human breath’ (p. 35). This ‘enlightenment of ages’, however, is not viewed in a positive light: ‘the atmosphere was well-brewed to a visible haze’ (p. 35). Within this ‘civilised’ setting, the dominant noise was ‘an occasional monotone in French, such as might be expected to issue from an ingeniously constructed automaton’71 (p. 36) conveying a sense of a soulless, heartless congregation. In spite of the fact that there is a wide range of European nationals here, Eliot’s disparaging glance is cast most openly at the English; it is they who are most overtly indicted. There is, for example, the English Countess, who condescends just enough (and no more) to allow herself to sit near a woman she regards as ‘a slight metamorphosis of the vulture’ (p. 36). The condescension and sense of racial and national superiority in her behaviour is implicit, conveying clearly the degree to which, in this particular case, masculinity and femininity are equally complicit in the patronizing and offensive behaviour of the pervading English nationals. The accompanying sense of national decay is apparent in the description of the Englishwoman who is a ‘dry-lipped feminine figure prematurely old’ (p. 36), and the gamblers themselves who, it is noted, display ‘a certain uniform negativeness of expression which had the effect of a mask’ (p. 37). They appear like zombies, automata moving mindlessly through their lives. The pessimism vis-à-vis the English nation that characterizes the gambling scene also manifests itself in the scathing, ironic tone present in the description of the archery meeting at Cardell Chase. It is a gathering ‘almost as little penetrated by a feeling of wider relations as if it had been a puppet-show’ (p. 186). There is a defined air of decadence, a society in which ‘the advantages of the world are taken with that high-bred depreciation which follows from being accustomed to them’ (p. 186). The sense of historical disconnection evident through Grandcourt is prevalent in the lives of all the English characters.



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Grandcourt lapses, sloth-like, into this state, Gwendolen is forced into it for specific (largely gendered) reasons, and they are joined in their alienation from the grand narrative by the other human subjects. This is symptomatic of a wider English malaise. It is apparent, for instance, with the failure of Rex Gascoigne to join the flow of emigration to Canada. In historical actuality, this resulted in the creation of the Federation of British North America in 1867. However, his connection with this pronounced historical trend is ultimately denied; he does not actually emigrate. The denial of the relationship between historical trend and individual character also encompasses his sister. Both characters stand in ironic relation to the narrator’s claim that ‘I like to mark the time, and connect the course of individual lives with the historical stream’ (pp. 121–2). They highlight not connection but discontinuity. The typical English experience in the novel is one of isolation from spheres of importance, and the dominant characteristic is self-interest. As is said of the arrival of Grandcourt at Diplow Hall: ‘[it] had no reference to the results of the American War [which ended in 1865]’ (p. 122). The point is reiterated in the contrast between the heroism of the wives and mothers of the Confederate dead and the self-indulgent sentimentalism of the English. This laudation of the wider historical event over a parochial English culture highlights an existence with no broader dimension, marked by narrowness, inversion and a strictly limited perspective: ‘the history in its present stage concerns only a few people in a corner of Wessex’ (pp. 123–4). It is a culture permanently trapped in the mirror-stage, eternally reflecting in on itself. As Bernard Semmel has said, the ‘forces of modernity’ appear to be ‘robbing Britain of its national inheritance’ in the sense of its identification with, and validation by, history, and as such George Eliot was ‘on all sides’ witnessing a culture experiencing ‘what was for her a trauma of disinheritance’.72 This confirms Eliot’s own claim in ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ that the consequences of an undermining or loss of national identity are that the national group ‘may be in danger of lapsing into a cosmopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism, and of missing that inward identification with the nationality immediately around them’.73 Eliot’s pessimism as to the nature of the English nation–state is not the only sign of her increased doubt as to the nature of the historical process in Daniel Deronda. For her lack of faith leads her to question not just the extent to which England as a nation had progressed or regressed through history. More fundamentally, there is doubt as to





whether any notion of progress was actually feasible, moving from the qualified ironic implication of forward advance in the earlier novels, to an ultimate questioning of the very validity of ‘progress’ as a notion. There is a clear distinguishing of the cumulative passing of time, on the one hand, and progress, on the other. ‘Extension . . . is a very imperfect measure of things; and the length of the sun’s journeying can no more tell us how life has advanced than the acreage of a field can tell us what may be active within it’ (p. 771). Though change still occurs this no longer constitutes progress. Eliot further problematizes the notion of progressive development when Gwendolen asks Deronda: ‘Do you admit that we can’t help things . . . I mean that things are so in spite of us; we can’t always help it that our gain is another’s loss?’ (p. 383). Progress can never happen in absolute terms, it is essentially relative and what is advance or betterment for one is inescapably retrogression for another. The particularly gendered implications of this will be discussed in the following chapter. This notion of historical change as inevitably relative, as having no true value in itself, is also apparent in Eliot’s poem ‘A College Breakfast Party’. This poem was written immediately prior to the writing of Daniel Deronda. Through the character of Rosencrantz Eliot problematizes and ultimately rejects the concept of progress, scientific evolution, and definable metaphysical processes in history per se. It marks an explicit abandonment of transcendentalism. Simultaneously, through the character of Laertes, Eliot also offers a more optimistic, confident perception of history. It is the same central tension evident in Daniel Deronda. At one point, for example, Rosencrantz says of Laertes (and more generally of advocates of progress): You chant your hymns To Evolution, on your altar lay A sacred egg called Progress: have you proved A Best unique where all is relative, And where each change is loss as well as gain?74 Laertes rejects this ‘blasphemous nihilism’, and asks that he ‘admit at least’ that there might be ‘a possible Better in the seeds of earth’.75 However, Rosencrantz, Eliot’s mouthpiece, is unable to do so. As far as the later-century English nation is concerned, totalizing configurations and progress narratives have become unjustifiable and unsustainable.



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The ‘scathing indictment of the state of English society in the 1860s’ that is implicit in Daniel Deronda identifies Eliot’s perception of her nation as akin to what Russell Perkin calls ‘a decadent civilisation whose culture has atrophied even as it embarks on its imperialistic venture’.76 Within this culture Gwendolen ‘is abandoned by Deronda, and English upper-class culture is abandoned by Eliot’;77 there is a displacement of meaning and value out of English society. It is evidence of William Baker’s assertion that George Eliot ‘increasingly saw English society as withered and to be escaped from’,78 and as such she tended increasingly to set her works outside it as her career developed (for example in Renaissance Florence and in Christian Arabic Spain). The prevalence of authorial doubt and pessimism so evident in Daniel Deronda is a marked shift from the compromising spirit and tone of much of Eliot’s other work. Even in Middlemarch, a text that offers a relatively bleak view of human potential and existence, there are few signs that the immorality of Bulstrode or Raffles, or the exclusion from public life that Dorothea faces, are symptoms of wider, all-encompassing cultural malaise. There is the compensatory honesty and loyalty of Mary Garth to offer stark contrast, or the honourable nature of Mr Farebrother (in spite of textual wisdoms about the immorality of gambling) to act as an effective counterweight. Even though the novel works to collapse ideological totality and deny overarching meaning, it offers hope. The noticeable and sustained critique of, for instance, the idealism of Casaubon, the rationalism of Lydgate and the Evangelicalism of Bulstrode79 is depicted within the context of a textual society that balances the negative with the positive aspects. Morality and immorality coexist, tending towards a compromising vision of darkness and light. As one nineteenth-century reviewer recognized: ‘George Eliot . . . is theoretically no pessimist; and yet the picture she presents to us of the world we live in almost exactly answers to the description given of it by Schopenhauer, as nothing better than a “penal settlement”.’80 In Daniel Deronda there is no such point of contrast. Rather, the contrast between morality and immorality cannot be sustained within English society, and so the author imagines her characters and History out of this ‘penal settlement’ to find an alternative moral centre to act as counterweight. The English society in Daniel Deronda displays all the characteristics of what Suzanne Nalbantian has called the later nineteenth century: ‘aesthetic of transition expressing a crisis in values and language in the Western world’. This is the sensitive response of artists to the





‘gruelling moral traumas’81 of their age. As such the novel explores ‘the repercussions of a divestiture of a tradition of Western moral criteria and of a decline in established religious, aesthetic and philosophical values of the Western world’.82 It witnesses the decline of a particular perception of the English nation state, with no prospect of positive social change within the context of the national historical present. The representation of English society in the novel privileges a history that had ‘lost its national Whig myths and found nothing with which to replace them’,83 a society in which meaning and value is radically reassessed: ‘a sudden poverty of all things needful – spiritual, intellectual, idealistic’.84 Hence Eliot’s drift away from comforting narratives of Englishness, towards a proto-Modernist vacuum in which intellectual and spiritual certainties are abandoned, and in which the consequences of profound cultural change are mourned rather than celebrated.



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Unwritten Landscapes: Imagining the National Future

After the completion of Adam Bede (1859), George Eliot wrote the following: ‘I have arrived at a faith in the past but not a faith in the future.’1 This faith in a particular imagining of the national past has been discussed in the earlier chapters of this study. However, Eliot’s belief in an inherited, Whiggish notion of English history was, as has been revealed, only partial. It masked an inherent oscillation between a confident, totalizing perception of Englishness (of the past) and its negation, a doubt-laden, fragmented notion of national identity (associated with the Victorian present). Crucially, the issue of the national future is still to be addressed. It is the aim of this chapter to examine how, in the later fiction (and especially Daniel Deronda), Eliot seeks to imagine a national future in light of both her scepticism as to the nature of the English present and her idealization of England’s historical past (what might be called her mythotrope). It is a future, as will emerge, with distinct gender implications. The issue of narrating beyond the past is crucial to an understanding of Eliot’s imagining of nationhood. As Rachel Du Plessis has contended, ‘to write a narrative that includes future vision is, even crudely, to break the reproduction of the status quo’.2 Hence the depiction of social and political change is facilitated through a portrayal of the present, and ultimately the fictional future, as in the backdrop to Daniel Deronda. In so doing Eliot threatens ‘critical dissent from dominant [English] narrative’:3 firstly, in her depiction of the Zionist quest, and secondly, in her portrayal of the potential future of Gwendolen Harleth. It is only by opening up the future as a vista beyond the novel that Eliot is fully able to address Gillian Beer’s question as to whether ‘the female self [can] be expressed through plot or must it be conceived in resistance to plot?’4 Eliot displaces her 121



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sustained study of the past with a prophetic anticipation of the future. This builds on the implied future radicalism of Romola, a text which offers what Nancy Paxton calls a ‘radical feminist alternative of the matriarchal family’.5 This is no Comtean invocation of female education, in which the utility of the education is directed towards providing informed and subordinate helpmates for men; rather it is intended to allow for the establishment of an alternative social framework. Eliot’s particular gendering of the national future (especially in a feminine Englishness) can be seen as a contribution to an evolving tradition of female historiography in the mid–late Victorian period. This gendered writing of the future stands in contrast to the evolution of British mainstream historiography during this time. The identity of the historian was interwoven with contemporaneous notions of masculinity (rigour, objectivity and sober judgement). This is reflected in the gender-exclusive title of J. P. Kenyon’s late twentieth-century analysis of trends in British historiography, The History Men (1983). However, the predominance of male historians should not disguise the fact of a counter-tradition beginning to emerge. Following on from the work of renowned figures such as Catharine Macaulay and Germaine de Staël in the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century saw a variety of historical works. These included Anna Jameson’s Celebrated Female Sovereigns (1832), Agnes and Elizabeth Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England (1840–8) and Lives of the Queens of Scotland (1850), Anna Marsh’s The Protestant Reformation in France and the Huguenots (1847) and Harriet Martineau’s History of England During the Thirty Years’ Peace: 1816–1846 (1849). There was also Lucy Aikin’s Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (1818), Hannah Lawrance’s Historical Memoirs of the Queens of England (1838–40) and Julia Kavanagh’s Women in France during the Eighteenth-Century (1850). These more orthodox (in terms of their focus on political and monarchical subjects) studies of particular periods and figures were supplemented by detailed studies of specialized, previously unrealized, subject fields. These included Elizabeth Stone’s history of needlework (1840) and Fanny Palliser’s History of Lace (1864).6 Some of these female historians were working in distinctly different subject areas to established male writers of history, and therein alternative models for writing the past were being established. Much of this work focused on aspects that did not feature in mainstream, phallocentric historiography, such as dress, diet and education (which later became aspects of the emerging genre of social history). Palliser’s



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study of lace and needlework, for example, developed an alternative historical narrative that ran both parallel, and at times contrary, to more orthodox narratives of historical evolution. This duality is evident in her discussion of the use of Lagetta: ‘Of this material a cravat was presented to King Charles II by the Governor of Jamaica; and at the Exhibition of 1851 a dress of the same fibre was presented to Queen Victoria.’7 The parameters of the narrative are familiar, but the specific focus is different. For C. A. Senf it is just such a difference evident in Middlemarch. It is George Eliot’s implication, it is argued, that ‘readers should re-evaluate their notions of history and understand that it is not simply a record of the lives and actions of great men’.8 Generally, this alternative historiographical emphasis led towards what has been called a revisionist or else ‘corrective’9 approach in female writing. Hence Strickland and Jameson’s privileging of the lives of Queens (as opposed to Kings), with an emphasis on the significance of their position in gender terms: for ‘female domination was [largely] held in scorn’,10 we are told. This ‘corrective’ is only partially qualified by the fact that some female historians utilized the modes of presentation characteristic of male historians. These included the tendency to concentrate on ‘great women’, for example, in a similar way to that in which Whig and Carlylean narratives had previously heralded the lives of significant men. Thus the celebration of ‘the biographies of Royal Females who have played distinguished parts in the history of a country’,11 and the ‘progressive chain of national events’ in which ‘the royal ladies in our series of queenly biographies [have] been inextricably linked’.12 The development and utilization of alternative methods of presentation and evidence gathering was ultimately an important element of this counter-tradition. One of the central problems women’s historians faced was inadequate access to some source materials, particularly where their focus was the lives of less prominent, and hence less well documented, women. The evidential anxiety is implicit in even the more orthodox examples of women’s historiography. Note Strickland’s keenness to make it clear that ‘I have been favoured with access to the charter-chests of many of the historical families of Scotland.’13 The subclause of the title of her Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest also illustrates a need to establish the evidential validity of her work, identifying the volumes as ‘now first published from official records and other authentic documents, private as well as public’.14



Unwritten Landscapes


The ambition of female historians to write a new history of those previously absent from historical accounts, and therein to foster an alternative vision of the past, is less apparent in the work of Strickland than it is in, say, the work of Palliser or even Anna Jameson.15 It was the latter who impishly noted how ‘women are illustrious in history, not from what they have been in themselves, but generally in proportion to the mischief they have done or caused’.16 Perhaps characteristically, this ambition is only partially realized in George Eliot’s writing also. Critics from Henry James to U. C. Knoepflmacher have celebrated Eliot for acting more like a historian than a novelist. But, the notion of historian they have applied has seen her praised for the masculine qualities associated with this role, such as the rigorous concentration on archival detail and the importance placed on authentic reconstruction. The unprecedented detail of the research process and the laboured reconstruction of the minutiae of history were not characteristics critically associated with the emerging genre of female historical writing (hence the anxiety of Agnes Strickland). Indeed, this is implied by Eliot’s criticism of Harriet Martineau’s History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace: ‘[I] gave up Miss Martineau’s History last night after reading some hundred pages in the second volume. She has a sentimental rhetorical style in this history which is fatiguing and not instructive.’17 Sentimental and uninforming, Martineau’s text stands as part of ‘that toy-box history of the world adapted to young ladies’ that Eliot rejected in Middlemarch.18 However, although in certain ways George Eliot’s restorative project was orthodox in character, and illustrated only a partial similarity with the concerns articulated by an emergent female historiography, her polyphonic articulation of history ensured that aspects of the phallocentrism of Victorian historiography were deconstructed. For instance, her characterization in ‘Janet’s Repentance’ is of a cyclical historical development, ‘apt to repeat herself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume’.19 This is gender loaded. The nature of the change is directed by Nemesis, who ‘stretches out her huge left arm and grasps her victim. The mighty hand is invisible, but the victim totters under the dire clutch.’20 This works in two complementary ways. Firstly, Eliot characterizes History as female, as Nemesis the goddess, rather than the god, of retribution. Secondly, the history Eliot characterizes as female is also defined as cyclical. This offers a comparison with the way in which, in their attempts to react against the predominance of male-oriented narratives of history, some feminist critics and historical writers have been



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keen to posit the cyclical model as more conducive to female participation than the more orthodox cause–effect linear narrative interpretation. Bonnie G. Smith, for example, has noted the way in which women’s histories tend to be anti-narrative because they lack ‘an accepted (or acceptable) storyline’,21 and argues instead for a recognition of ‘the cycles of women’s . . . lives within cycles of productive development’.22 The cyclical model stands as an alternative method of ‘telling’ history,23 one that is not tarnished (as is the case with the linear narrative model) with having been largely associated with malecentred spheres of influence and action. This reinforces Laura Mulvey’s argument that ‘distrust’ of the narrative configuration was a chief characteristic of the feminist avant-garde from the first.24 The question here concerns the extent to which subordinated groups can imagine a History of their own. Across the Eliot canon the implication is that at its essence History deals far more harshly with women than with men. As was illustrated in an earlier chapter, this is suggested (consciously or unwittingly) as an inevitable state of affairs. As soon as Providence or Destiny are invoked as dynamics of historical change the consequences are restricted female lives, the ‘stifling of individual intuitions and emotions’25 inherently justified. As Larry M. Robbins has noted, Eliot ‘judges her characters’26 in part by allotting them particular fates, with an implication that they each reap what they sow. However, George Eliot’s broad philosophical doubt about the notion and nature of the progress narrative is partially represented through the perceived, problematic implications it has for Victorian gender identity. For instance, Dorothea Brooke stands as a strongminded, intelligent and motivated young woman whose aspirations are ultimately suffocated by the limitations of the implied evolving narrative of reform/progressive social change. Her fate is that of Ladislaw’s helpmate, only indirectly connected to this positive social change through the assistance she gives her husband in his fight for electoral reform. Ultimately Dorothea has influence, but it is strictly delimited to what the narrator calls the ‘incalculably diffusive’ effect of the ‘faithfully . . . hidden life’.27 Eliot’s women are, in this way, contained within the sphere of the unhistoric act, the only form of historical articulation that English society can offer them. The conclusion of the novel serves to accentuate the restriction and denial of female achievement within traditional notions of progress, notions hostile to female participation and engagement. As has also





been said of Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda, ‘perhaps most crucial’ to an understanding of the central and overriding message of the text is the lead female character’s ‘subjection to a man’s world and its values’.28 Middlemarch may begin with an image of Dorothea’s dynamism, but it ends with the potency of this life being nullified. This makes attempts by critics to view the ending in a feminist light particularly difficult to sustain. Jennifer Uglow, for example, notes how, at the end of the novel, what is recognized is ‘not . . . achievement’, but ‘capacity, the incalculable quality which can survive even the direst historical constraints’.29 Mildred S. Greene develops this notion further in her illustration of the way in which ‘Will’s attraction for Dorothea is that he is a malleable lover, a man whom she can mould into her own ideals of service to the community’.30 Both critics tend to rewrite the novel in a way that undermines the potency of a textual reading wherein Eliot is seen to indict Victorian society for its treatment of Dorothea. If the ending is not viewed as a complete denial of female self, then how can this denial be mourned? On the other hand, if the poignancy of Eliot’s critique is not overlooked and appropriated as part of a quasi-feminist agenda, then the inherent exclusivity at the heart of the assumption of beneficial social advance can be more directly interrogated. ‘The male-created myth of historical progress’,31 as Bridget Hill has called it, the male-centred, masculinist celebration of achievement measured in terms excluding the possibility of active female participation, can be seen as indicted by Eliot. A progress measured in relation to industrial, scientific and political spheres of influence is rejected, for it is in these terms that Dorothea is judged to fail. Female exclusion from the narrative of English progress is interrelated with a wider exclusion from broader narratives of English national (historical) identity.32 Certainly some feminist critics have had problems with English national history for the way in which it has tended to exclude or play down the importance of women. History, they claim, centres on the view that ‘women are . . . unchanging’, their ‘activities [are] much the same whatever the environment’.33 As Jane Mackay and Pat Thane have argued, this universality transcends national boundaries: ‘a clearly defined, uncontested, image of the English woman is surprisingly elusive’.34 Furthermore, ‘the qualities of the perfect Englishwoman were publicly discussed, but they were not generally perceived as being specifically English’.35 Rather they were those qualities believed to be commonly held by women.



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Not only have women been universalized in this fashion, but they have also been seen as playing ‘no part in that grand advance of history’,36 and thus ‘denied any part’ in a ‘historical tradition’. With the exception of high-profile women who have achieved success within traditional male spheres, this leads (it is claimed) to a form of womanhood ‘virtually shorn of a national identity’.37 Similarly, George Eliot offers a perception of English national identity divorced from notions of conspicuous female experience. There is no specific encapsulation of a feminine Englishness in any of the earlier novels that matches the depiction of Adam Bede’s masculine AngloSaxonism, for example. And, although the marginalized and potentially hysterical femininity of foreign Otherness is portrayed (notably in the case of Caterina Sarti), the accompanying visions of English womanhood do not wear their national characteristics on their well-drawn sleeves. The narrow gendering of Eliot’s imagining of national identity is most apparent in Daniel Deronda. Deronda, who is a product of the English aristocracy, has effectively been sponsored and patronized by the upper classes. Without this patronage the ultimate Zionist quest could and would not even have been considered. The bankrupt upperclass English society is eventually rejected, with the Jewish quest seen as embodying everything that is lacking in mid–late nineteenthcentury England; however, Deronda has first had to be educated by it. His maturation as a quasi-Englishman, as a version of the English gentleman, has provided him with the enhanced powers of discrimination and perspicacity that underpin the decision to reject England. Paradoxically, England has supplied the means, intellectual, psychological and even material, by which it could itself be rejected. This bears witness to a conversion that is part of a transfiguration of Jewishness into a notion of Judaism, an ersatz religion directly and explicitly related to the fundamental concerns of Victorian, masculinist England. The fashioning of this ersatz religion of nationalism centres on a masculine identity that takes the form of an intoxicating blend of political dynamism and an overarching spiritual liberalism. The pilloried masculinity of the decadent British Empire (embodied in Grandcourt) is thrown over for a motivated, humanitarian, essentially spiritual reconfiguring of an imperialist national identity wherein to be male (hence to be on the inside) is everything. This tends towards the silencing or exclusion of the less overtly masculine characters, which explains the inability of Mordecai to carry his religious





philosophizing to a material conclusion. His lack of the requisite masculine dynamism is illustrated by his frail physical health. The unsuitability of Lapidoth and the Cohen family to engage with this restoration project is also made apparent: in the former case through an unspiritual immorality, and in the latter case through an evident lack of social standing and politico-spiritual awareness. This results in the identification of Daniel Deronda as the only person who can bring about fundamental change. Jewish nationalism is, in this sense, portrayed as what Hoch calls ‘religion as an assertion of collective manhood’. It sees the ‘combative masculinity’ of an identified individual ‘raised to the communal level’,38 acting as the catalyst to a new national state, i.e. a Jewish Palestine. The English masculinity of Grandcourt is displaced, and Eliot redefines the masculine through a privileging of a religious dimension that allows not only for personal development and growth, but also communal progress towards a defined destiny. It is an idealized, spiritualized view of the male subject that denies the association between Christianity and ‘a feminine piety and emotionalism’.39 Eliot’s reconstructed East–Western maleness is to be aspired to at a personal level, and in achieving the ideal the individual becomes a prime mover in the unfolding group narrative. The Great Man of History that she creates becomes the catalyst for wider communal change. Crucially, this change can only be imagined as occurring outside the English national unit, hence the removal of Daniel Deronda to the far reaches of Palestine. Therein the doom-laden textual England reveals a deep anxiety in the mid-Victorian English psyche; as Gillian Beer has pointed out, it is ‘a novel haunted by [among other things] the future’.40 However, it is not only the less ideally masculine characters that are disempowered, female characters experience an even greater lack of influence. George Eliot ensures the dominant masculine nature of the Zionist-Jewish quest on which Deronda embarks through the differential of the male and female relationship with the Restoration movement. This differential acts as a signifier of gender status within her conceptualization of Judaism, most obviously encapsulated in the relationship between Deronda and Mirah Lapidoth. For, despite the fact that Mordecai is her brother, Mirah has a tangential relationship with the key Restorationist philosophy and debate at the heart of the novel, and even less purchase on the resettlement quest itself. Significantly, almost every occasion on which Deronda learns about his Jewishness, or Judaism more generally, Mirah is not present. Most



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conspicuously, she does not visit the Cohen family with him, nor the ‘Hand and Banner’, and he is on his own when he experiences his final revelation in Genoa. Though Mirah is the one person who is identified most clearly in relation to her religion in the early stages of the novel, she is excluded from the type of Judaism with which Daniel becomes synonymous. The quest to restore the homeland is his quest, and she travels to the East with him as his wife and vassal: necessary only because it is through women such as her that the Jewish race must be sustained. She is just one of the many women who act as ‘gate-keeping elements for the boundaries of the national collectivity’.41 Reina Lewis, in Gendering Orientalism,42 argues that if Eliot had portrayed the assimilationist tradition of Jewry in greater detail, she might have offered more opportunity for Jewish women to actively engage with Jewish history and notions of Jewish ethnic identity. For her it is the grand scale of the historical narrative with which Deronda engages that prohibits active female participation. However, because of the Jewish matrilineal succession, whereby women are inextricably associated with and defined by the act of childbirth, there appears to be little to suggest that Jewish women within the assimilationist tradition would fare any better than women such as Mirah. Indeed, the depiction of the female characters in the Cohen family suggests quite the opposite. Within the framework of the privileged ideal of national identity delineated in the novel the opportunity for women to engage with power structures is fundamentally limited. The overriding obligation is to contribute to the social and national organism, an organism Brennan calls a ‘trope for such things as “belonging”, “bordering”, and “commitment”’.43 Women are contained within traditional areas of participation in ethnic and national histories, as biological reproducers, the chief socializers of children or as signifiers of difference and as nurturers of men in their many and various political struggles.44 As such Eliot privileges what Newman calls a ‘mythic ideal of personal and collective redemption’. This is founded on the ‘individual identification with the group, the historic group with its glorious . . . past, its present claims upon individual volition, its mission toward future power and freedom’.45 Within this context, any form of overt political or social articulation is seen as out of the question for women. It is a form of national history and national identity that is produced, as Christina Crosby points out, as ‘man’s truth, the truth of a necessarily historical Humanity’. It places





women ‘outside history, above, below, or beyond properly historical and political life’.46 This is evidenced in the novel most clearly through the character of the Princess Halm-Eberstein. The only way in which she is able to express herself and find any level of individual autonomy is by abandoning her Jewish roots, and this is what leads her to place her son in the care of Sir Hugo. It is her wish for Daniel to suffer none of the hardships and handicaps that she endured because she was born a Jew. To be a singer, a performance artist in one of the less-esteemed spheres of performance, she had to escape the rigidity and restrictions of her Jewish faith. The Jewish social ideal Eliot offers in opposition to English culture is as such an acutely conservative one. It evidences what Katherine Bailey Linehan has identified as ‘making patriarchally based family ties the paradigm for humane social relations’.47 A significant consequence of this is a re-establishment of ‘social hierarchies’48 which restrict personal (especially female) development. The character of the Princess allows George Eliot to confront a familiar theme, the metaphorical incarceration of female individuals within the fixed parameters of male-oriented social structures, leading to the subordination of female talent and potential to male desire. The invocation of Judaism sees her sympathetically identify with a restrictive paradigm that works to maintain the social hegemony of Victorian England (in this implied form).49 This recurrent Eliot theme of female social incarceration is poignantly confronted in the poem ‘Armgart’ (1870), when the eponymous heroine states: I will not take for husband one who deems The thing my soul acknowledges as good – The thing I hold worth striving, suffering for, To be a thing dispensed with easily, Or else the idol of a mind infirm.50 It is this more radical notion of female subjectivity that is embodied in the Princess. She may not be Eliot’s ‘only portrait of a feminist figure [my italics]’,51 as Deborah Heller suggests, but she is placed in distinct opposition to women such as Mirah. Obviously, in spite of all his mother’s attempts to the contrary, Deronda becomes aware of his origins and decides to engage with his past; he gives up his English life to live in accordance with his Jewish heritage and to take up the mantle left by Mordecai. However, despite this the Princess retains an



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identity of her own, a form of autonomy, and the capacity to refuse to submit to the dictat of her patriarchal family traditions. The paradox of the relationship between George Eliot and her gendered ideal of national identity is profound. Her understanding of national history and national identity, shown in the novels to be ‘the necessary condition of life’,52 inevitably acts to ‘consolidate one norm, one standard, one reality’ 53 (and one which would, in a practical sense, severely restrict her). The problem is, in Cottom’s terms, that ‘she identified herself with a form of thought she considered to be neutral’; however, in fact ‘she identified with a form of thought that systematically demeaned women as well as other groups of people’.54 In terms of the privileged notion of Judaism this is evidenced in the restricted roles open for women within a culture and a history that, to all intents and purposes, excludes them. They play a fundamental role because of the matrilineal succession, but this is where their influence (in anything other than a domestic sense) ends. This is just an illustration of the ambiguous relationship George Eliot’s work continues to have with feminist criticism. She can be, and is at times, seen as an example of the way in which women could, even if only in small numbers, produce work that becomes highly valued within a resistant male-dominated critical establishment. Yet she also presents the feminist critic with a host of paradoxes that make it impossible for her to be viewed as an unqualified feminist icon. The fact that most of Eliot’s female characters find themselves ultimately restricted by a lack of social opportunity is a key site of dissatisfaction. They are either limited in terms of marriage (even in the most enlightened of senses such as that between Dorothea and Ladislaw), dead (in the cases of Hetty Sorel and Maggie Tulliver most notably), or else given power only within symbolic, even mythical (and thus politically less poignant) realms (Romola). As Kate Millett famously contended, Eliot ‘lived the revolution . . . but she did not write of it’,55 implying a dissimilarity between the opportunities and successes that George Eliot as an author was able to access and achieve, and the denial of all such opportunities for her female characters. The implication is that Eliot’s fictions endorse rather than expose patriarchy. The complexity of Eliot’s response to ongoing Victorian debates about the nature of female selfhood and feminine identity is perhaps most evident in her characterization of Gwendolen Harleth. Furthermore, Gwendolen is of especial significance in relation to Eliot’s representation of the relationship between nationality and gender. She is the only individual, with the exception of Deronda,





who even begins to see mid-Victorian England for what it has become. And her eventual position outside the parameters of conventional notions of national and gender identity, precipitated by the death of Grandcourt and her (well, partly) economic self-sufficiency, offers an opportunity to imagine an alternative future. It is a future she can, to an extent, write herself, beyond orthodox expectations. This future amounts to what Epstein has called ‘an overthrow of the specious narrative coherence implied in the concepts of a “life” and a “universal” history’.56 Daniel Deronda is the novel in which Eliot acknowledges ‘that under the Victorian code and in Victorian society, women’s altruistic sacrifices are sometimes [entirely] fruitless’.57 Whereas characters such as Dorothea and Mary Garth are allowed limited successes, in her final novel Eliot writes with a much more profound tone of ‘alienation and bitterness’58 towards Gwendolen’s condition; therein she displaces her into a different realm. Gwendolen is unique within the Eliot canon, more like the modernist subject Baruch Hochman defines as ‘a beingin-the-world, who must struggle to be himself [or indeed herself] and define his world in whatever terms are available to him [her]’.59 Eliot depicts the gradual shrinking of a woman’s personal space when she falls outside the totality, the ‘tired, spirit-less . . . femininity’60 of the culturally prescribed marriage and domesticity trap, and introduces her to what lies on the other side of the morally prescribed silence. Crucially, this outsider status is not without ultimate potential. Gwendolen is distanced from history and historical process through the fracturing of the coherent totality of English history, and through her rejection by the unified narrative of the Zionist quest as personified by Deronda. Whereas Grandcourt rejects or ignores history, Gwendolen is rejected by it. Therein Eliot poignantly captures the sense of her heroine’s isolation while also writing her the space in which to exist on her own terms. This isolation is apparent in Klesmer’s uncharitable reaction to Gwendolen’s singing, of which it is remarked: ‘was there ever so unexpected an assertion of superiority? at least before the late Teutonic conquests?’61 Eliot uses history ironically, with the web of historical allusions that authenticate her fictional narratives marking out the insignificance of these (non)events. The impression of just how important this rebuttal is to the egocentric Gwendolen is aptly created, and thus shows just how insignificant she is in terms of the bigger picture. The construction of an English femininity standing at a distance from national history is sustained and surely deliberate. At one point,



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for example, Gwendolen expresses an intention to go to the North pole, and also to be like Hester Stanhope. The fantastic nature of the first62 makes the irony clear. And the allusion to Lady Stanhope stands as a direct pillory of Gwendolen. For, as Billie Melman notes, Hester Stanhope, the niece of Pitt the Younger, a ‘traveller and eccentric, “Queen of the Orient”, and at last a pauper and a recluse’,63 lived an active, varied and colourful life. In other words, she led a life completely unlike that of Gwendolen. Ironically, Stanhope’s eventual fate was to leave England and to settle ‘among the Druse of Mount Lebanon, for the rest of her life’.64 So, not only does Gwendolen suffer by comparison with the vigour and energy of the celebrated traveller, but also because Lady Stanhope was able, in her life, to achieve precisely what Gwendolen was not: she did travel to the East, and ultimately settled there. Until the later stages of the novel this ironic criticism is delivered with little sign of sympathy. By the end, however, the tone of the critique has altered. Gwendolen becomes increasingly aware of her own insignificance, moving away from egoistic naïveté to a point at which ‘for the first time the conditions of this world seemed to her like a hurrying roaring crowd in which she had got astray’.65 She begins to taste the ‘bitterness of insignificance’,66 and in so doing at last enjoys the sympathy of the narrator. ‘This floating, gently-wafted existence . . . was becoming as bad as a nightmare to Gwendolen . . . could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl?’67 By the conclusion of the novel this situation has grown more extreme: abandoned by Deronda, haunted by the superficial empty shells of the human beings that surround her, Gwendolen is effectively alone. The world in which she lives cannot supply the intellectual and spiritual succour that her recuperation demands. Eliot leaves the reader with a vision of Gwendolen as destined to live in a state of eternal disconnection. She is the human individual in an unresponsive, fractured society: ‘There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives.’68 The earthquake has struck Gwendolen as she discovers how little her society values her, and she finds herself ‘for the first time feeling the pressure of a vast mysterious movement’.69 Her narrative is the ‘narrative of loss and disablement’ that Said identifies as embodied in the later nineteenthcentury novel, a narrative in which ‘tragically, or sometimes comically





blocked protagonists are brusquely and often rudely awakened by the novel’s action to the discrepancy between their illusory expectations and the social realities.’70 Bracingly, Eliot appears to offer Gwendolen no chance of redemption, little prospect of resolution. It is partly for this reason that Gwendolen Harleth is unlike any other character that appears in the Eliot canon. She is left entirely alone and isolated, and exists in a female space that can best be described, with an acknowledgement to Gillian Beer, as ‘beyond determinism’.71 On no previous occasion has the Eliot reader been confronted with such a desperate picture of female incarceration. Even Hetty Sorrel, who is ultimately transported to the colonies near the end of Adam Bede, can at least be viewed in relation to a patently unsympathetic legal system. As such she stands as the victim of a patriarchal double-standard in which women were punished more harshly for sexual indiscretion. Gwendolen’s fate is fundamentally different. Unlike the frustrated Dorothea, who (like many Eliot heroines) is married off, and Maggie Tulliver (who suffers a tragic death), Gwendolen is left significantly detached, sitting in a no woman’s land with no obvious prospect of change. The limitations of Gwendolen’s role as a woman in an uncaring and unresponsive world exemplify what Georg Lukács has identified as the contagion of modern society: ‘human activity is, a priori, rendered impotent and robbed of meaning’.72 She is given no compensation for her restricted womanhood, and as such the result of this quasimodernist social fragmentation and alienation is a textual conclusion haunted by ‘openness and uncertainty’.73 This evidences the most damning indictment of Victorian patriarchy, and its capitalist, imperialist underpinnings, articulated across the Eliot canon. It amounts to a sustained, poignant and frank study of a soulless patriarchal society that has distinct gender implications. However, Eliot does allow a gendered way forward. This comes not through the visionary potential of the Zionist quest and the unwritten landscape of that particular national future. For, as the case of Mirah illustrates, this requires only submission and duty from the participating women. There is instead an implication, albeit partially realized, that Gwendolen’s social ostracism may have more than simply negative consequences. She does not usurp a position of power or show clear signs of dissent and subversion, and yet, as was the case with Romola, she is (as George Levine puts it) ‘utterly on her own to choose which way to go. She has nothing to decide with but her own nature, her own sense of life.’74



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The detachment Eliot depicts for Gwendolen has emancipatory potential in a way that the portrayal of Romola does not. Romola fails to be realized as a feminist figure because the novel as a whole fails to reconcile its romance element with the rest of the fictional narrative,75 and so appears detached from a tightly delineated social framework.76 Romola is certainly left with a significant degree of emancipation at the end of the novel, effectively overseeing a matriarchal community.77 Yet, the foreign setting and the tendency Eliot has to take her heroine off into non-specific, even mythical realms means that the socio-cultural implications of this portrayal of emancipated femininity are not as profound as they may perhaps otherwise have been. Gwendolen, on the other hand, is ‘rooted in history’,78 even if she is also (paradoxically) separated from it. Her fate has an increased poignancy because there is a more overt sense of social critique in the novel as a whole. As Jennifer Uglow points out, George Eliot wrote ‘the more truthful and courageous ending for the women of her day’,79 but one which also allowed Gwendolen certain avenues of deviation from the norm. Though not wealthy she no longer depends on a male figure for her financial security. True, this has come as the result of inheriting a fraction of Grandcourt’s estate, an estate that is tarnished with the doubtful morality of their union and with the imperialist ideology that has created it. Such a passive inheritance is deemed (elsewhere in the novel) a corrupting process, and as such Gwendolen’s future bears the imprint of imperialist exploitation. Nevertheless she is liberated, in a qualified sense. And, although she is denied direct engagement with history, by the same token she no longer has her destiny mapped out, directed by exterior guiding influences. The relationship with Chance is finished, and Destiny has rejected her. This limited form of emancipation is crucial, and in relation to the rest of the female characters in the Eliot canon, unique. The potential for positive and formative action may only be latent, but it is a potential denied Hetty, Maggie, Esther and even Dorothea. This qualified emancipation is intrinsically related to the relationship Gwendolen has with English national identity. She is left alienated and alone when Daniel Deronda abandons her; as such she is disconnected from Eliot’s ideal of national identity. Zarca in The Spanish Gypsy, in speaking to Fedalma, articulates the ideal:





You belong Not to the petty round of circumstance That makes a woman’s lot, but to your tribe, Who trust in me and in my blood with trust That we call blind.80 Implicit in the sense of national identity that Zarca identifies is the potential benefit for women belonging to such a national group of surrendering to such a deep-rooted sense of national consciousness. However, in the fate of the character of Fedalma, Eliot ultimately rejects this interpretation of the way in which women can evolve their own sense of a beneficial national identity: the difference between female national identity and male national identity is duly acknowledged. Fedalma may be able to rise above the common lot of women, but she is unable to engage with the national narrative in the same way as a male character such as Daniel Deronda. Deronda forges ahead in his quest to restore the Jewish homeland, whereas the Zíncala tribe eventually begin to undermine the position of Fedalma as leader. Her quest for an African homeland is ultimately nothing more than a ‘faint tradition’.81 In this sense Gwendolen is portrayed as separated from a notion of national identity that would only serve to limit her aspirations. For, as Terry Lovell has highlighted, some women and feminist critics have seen a positive side to their exclusion from undesirable nationalist discourses (such as the Englishness of Daniel Deronda). They have seen ways in which they might turn this around to their own advantage. Lovell notes particularly how Virginia Woolf’s aphorism (‘as a woman I have no country’ from Three Guineas (1938)) has been ‘a comforting one for feminists, because, it fosters the illusion of (well, relatively) clean hands in relation to the less acceptable facets of radical patriotism, its racism and xenophobia’. The chief consequence of this is that ‘it has allowed feminists . . . to align women of imperialist nations with the victims of nationalism and imperialism’.82 Notably, Woolf’s phrase is very similar to one of Eliot’s own from The Mill on the Floss in which she notes how ‘the happiest women have no history’.83 For, if the History is an undesirable one, if it is seen to reflect badly on its associates and participants, or else if it is a restrictive and coercive one, then it is perhaps preferable that women did not engage with such a History at all. The corollary of this is clear. If women (such as Maggie Tulliver and especially Gwendolen Harleth) are denied an active and overt participation in their national history, then perhaps they need not feel as



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complicit in the moral crimes that have been committed in the name of the English nation state. So, despite the fact that Gwendolen is initially shown as engaged with an imperialist national culture, and her family has derived its wealth from the West Indies, her ultimate isolation from her society can be seen as a partial exoneration of her previous complicity. Whereas her manner and temperament in the earlier stages of the novel were linked to notions of imperialism, with mention of ‘Gwendolen’s domestic empire’84 and her aspirations as to ‘the possibility of winning empire’85 over Grandcourt, by the end of the novel these imperialist associations no longer pervade. The death of Grandcourt leaves her disconnected from the corrupt notion of Englishness of which he is the most graphic illustration. Ultimately, Gwendolen becomes extricated from the vision of England and Englishness that predominates in the novel, a vision about which George Eliot is so scathing. She is no longer indicted as part of the bankrupt English nation state and is clearly differentiated from the inorganic (anti)society that England has become. Orthodox notions of female selfhood are thus deconstructed, representing a movement away from a perception of women’s lives as easily absorbed within a homogeneous cultural history. Female life ceases to have a ‘coherent incorporable meaning’86 as it has become disconnected from a unifying national/historical narrative, and this serves to intensify the ‘sense of the singularity’87 of the position. This, as William H. Epstein has noted, marks the ‘overthrow of the specious narrative coherence implied in the concepts of a “life” and a “universal” history’.88 Finally, and at last, George Eliot has provided a means by which one of her female characters can escape the determinism of a restrictive culture. In relation to both notions of national identity present in the novel there are, as such, benefits to ostracism. Eliot accommodated two conflicting notions of national identity, and both are, in different ways, hostile to female participation. It poses the question, as Alison Light has noted, as to on ‘what terms . . . should modern women seek to enter the historical narrative?’. To what extent (if any) are they to engage with narratives of identity that are weighted against them? In Eliot’s other fiction women are either subordinated to, or excluded from, their national historical metanarrative, and even when they are allowed to positively engage with it, their influence is seen to be slight. However, for Gwendolen, the woman deemed outside the fractured, decomposing configuration of her own national identity, there is the possibility of negotiating her own position. As Light asks, ‘now





that there was a chance of writing it [the national narrative] for themselves, might not they want a different plot altogether?’89 This new mapping/emplotment, the imagining of an alternative national future landscape, is central to the portrayal of history in Daniel Deronda. George Eliot does not go as far as to fully realize this within the parameters of the novel, but the English landscape that is implied beyond the ending of the textual narrative offers radical potential for those involved. Eliot’s wider project becomes that of reconstructing a national history in light of a rejected present, rather than attempting to imagine coherence via a particular past. The template for her other historiographical fictions is therein significantly altered; the past is still paramount, as the foundation for positive growth, but it is no longer just the refuge of an author haunted by the spectres of the present. Ultimately, this foundation is seen as liberating, the ideal accompaniment of Eliot’s tendency towards the prophetic, the visionary and the eternally hopeful.



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As has been discussed, George Eliot’s fictions bear witness to an ongoing tension and struggle between conflicting notions of History. This is situated within the context of wider Victorian debates concerning historiography and the representation of the historical past. The novels act as arenas within which these debates about history/History and historicity are played out. The ongoing and fundamental concern with the dynamics of historical process is just one manifestation of this. It is not just historical novels, the most self-consciously historical genre of nineteenth-century literature, in which notions of historicity are paramount. Indeed, it has been the intention of this study to illustrate the particular significance of Eliot‘s ‘realist’ novels as examples of a sustained attempt at a historiographical recreation of the historical past within a literary format. This explains, in part, the stress on Adam Bede, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda (among others) as opposed to the more self-consciously historicized Romola. In particular and differing ways George Eliot’s novels are all historical novels: they are each concerned with the events, processes, theory and representation of history. The particular competition between Whiggish and Carlylean discourses has been identified as especially significant to Eliot’s imagining of the English national past, contributing to an inherent inconsistency. Notably, the multifaceted textual vision of history is incompatible with the quest for totality and narrative that she is engaged in. This is most evident in the later fiction. As such the most profoundly undermined, or deconstructing, of Eliot’s novels is Daniel Deronda, a novel which fractures under the strain of seeking to reconcile incompatible philosophies of the historical process. In highlighting how problematic History becomes within this novel, the infamous schism inherent in the novel has been cast in the 139



Conclusion: Beyond Victorian Historiography


form of a series of binary oppositions: England past/England present, totality/fragmentation, restriction/emancipation, progress/decadence, and optimism/pessimism. It is a novel centrally concerned with the ontology and epistemology of the historical process, and is especially illuminating as to the difficulty caused by George Eliot’s increasing reliance on an unstable and shifting perception of History within her restorative realist project. The explicit historicity of the fictions links Eliot not only with trends in nineteenth-century British historiography, but also with wider-ranging philosophical debates about the status and nature of history. This explains the references to Nietzsche, for example. The core issues are both ontological and epistemological. They centre on the nature of history and the historical process, and the means by which this can be understood and ascertained. They also include the consequences of the belief that, whatever history is or might be, it is not possible to truly comprehend it (let alone represent it). The Hegelian,1 and later the Marxist, claim that history stands as the totality within which all things must be understood, the structure which gives all things meaning, is obviously relevant. It relates closely to George Eliot’s own ongoing attempts to portray and understand social life within a totalized framework, especially her stress on the relations between individuals and the overarching structure they are contained by. Eliot’s clear reluctance to abandon this schematic despite her doubts as to its true validity (including an implied acknowledgement of the consequences of a totalizing framework for female subjectivity) illustrates just how powerful an attraction it held. The desire to totalize historical experience exists alongside increasing doubt as to the epistemological, and ultimately the ontological, status of the historical process. Eliot’s fiction strains with the effort of establishing a narrative conception of history because at the same time as it is doing so it is forced to acknowledge that in actual fact history is beyond representation. Narrative is not a feasible vehicle for the representation of infinite multiplicity and diversity, and thus fails to provide scope for the sheer epistemological and ontological range of history. This is the ongoing contradiction of what Jameson calls the ‘universalising pretense’2 of the artist who craves an absent totality. Eliot attempted to recreate a feeling of unity and interrelation within her social and national frameworks, and yet she did so knowing that such a unity was ‘not there in real life to begin with’.3 Faced with the choice of either portraying the absence of this social and national framework, or else attempting to simulate a sense of



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totality and wholeness, Eliot chooses the latter course in her fiction. The fictions stand as problematized attempts to achieve objective reality, and relate closely to what Lukács calls ‘intensive totality’. The ‘extensive totality of reality’ is recognized as beyond the grasp of the artist, but an ‘intensive’ reality is deemed feasible. This involves ‘the circumscribed and self-contained ordering of those factors which objectively are of decisive significance for the portion of the life depicted’.4 The artist attempts to accurately recreate the totality of the macrocosm within a microcosmic form. However, George Eliot does not explicitly concede, within the parameters of the earlier fictions, that such limitations or problems exist, and as a result fissures appear within the texts as the viability of the totalizing project becomes increasingly called into question. Poststructuralist scepticism has made attempts to ascertain a defined and coherent historical process almost unfeasible. History is now everywhere and nowhere, the ‘fragments, outlines, pieces, shards’ that make up the ‘tenuous elements [of life] whose unity, whose point of connection, always remains hidden in that beyond’.5 This fractured, pessimistic résumé equates with the (anti)philosophy of Daniel Deronda. Yet this is articulated not so as to replace the quest for totality, but rather to co-exist with it. Both sit in uneasy relation, evidence of the final collapse of the author’s attempts to unify conflicting perceptions. Paradoxically, it is the fragmented, anti-narrative, pessimistic representation of history that offers most for the feminist critic. For it is within the English society of Daniel Deronda that George Eliot places Gwendolen Harleth, the most impotent, and yet curiously the most emancipated female character in her canon. In the contrast between Gwendolen and Mirah Lapidoth Eliot adroitly encapsulates the fragmentation/totality binary that characterizes her own personal philosophical oscillations. Denied female autonomy is linked to a totalizing historical/social framework, in this case Mirah’s Judaism, and a qualified female emancipation is seen to arise out of the social collapse and bankruptcy that marks Gwendolen’s England. Although the nineteenth-century historiographical context of Eliot’s fictions is apparent, they clearly also straddle conflicting nineteenth-century/twentieth-century positions vis-à-vis notions of history. They simultaneously privilege the certainty that history can be ascertained and as a consequence represented, and also the doubtful epistemological uncertainty as to the possibility of ever ‘knowing’ history. It is the philosophical opposition between confidence as to the nature and direction of the history, and pessimism about the



Conclusion


nature of this direction or else about the lack of any inherent direction. At different times George Eliot writes the range of perspectives. Therein Eliot’s fiction stands as a microcosm of a wider nineteenthcentury and earlier twentieth-century crisis of faith as regards history, an alternative crisis of faith that focused on issues of ontology, of the status and existence of history, but that was arguably more concerned with epistemological matters. The novels stand as sites of struggle, as arenas within which significant philosophical battles are fought. At a personal level, this marks the consequences of Eliot’s own shift away from an orthodox Christian-religious faith, to a faith in History, and ultimately towards a position which acknowledges the problematics of all coherent and totalizing explanations of human existence. Eliot’s fictions are fundamentally concerned with the difficulties of defining and representing history, effectively with naming the unnameable. These difficulties lie behind her privileging of dynamics of historical process such as Providence, Nemesis and Destiny, while doubting their literal validity. They are attempts to configure meaning, to represent that which is unrepresentable, and as such a disguise for incomplete knowledge. Overridingly, Eliot’s fictions are characterized by an evolving acknowledgement that historical meaning is highly complex. They draw attention to the way in which, as Jim Reilly has noted, ‘as a sign, the term history gives a peculiarly emphatic stress to a contradiction operating within every sign. A sign simultaneously evokes the presence of the signified it posits and acts as the evidence of its absence.’6 Reilly’s Shadowtime, and Michael York Mason’s essay ‘Middlemarch and History’7 are critical works that focus on this dimension of Eliot’s novels; however, they represent a tiny minority within the Eliot critical canon. It is vital for an understanding of Eliot’s project of reconstructing the historical past to recognize the difference between history as signifier (as historiography or discourse of historiography), and history as signified (past event(s) or happening(s)). This dissolution of the separation between history as signified and history as signifier, between history as action/event and history as the representation of action/event,8 is seen by Foucault as the chief characteristic of the post-Enlightenment episteme. It is the recognition of this dissolution that draws attention to the way in which Eliot’s reliance on secondary source materials undermined her realist reconstructive project. The influence of such secondary interpretations of the past serves only to deny the privileged objectivity of history on which her novels apparently rely.



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This draws attention to the extent and nature of the influence of historiography, and especially discourses of historiography, on Eliot’s work. The relation of historiography and literary fiction implies an interdisciplinary methodology, but in fact the fictions in question undermine the distinctness of historical writing as opposed to fictional or imaginative writing by attempting (even if ultimately failing) to establish them on the same existential plane. History thus stands not as the objective guarantor of authenticity, but always and necessarily subjective, a selective and partisan perception of the past that undermines rather than guarantees objectivity and authenticity. An example of this is the particular susceptibility of Eliot’s work to the historiographical discourse known as the Whig Interpretation of history, a nationalist, sectarian, gender- and class-loaded perception of the English historical past. Though there is a defined ambiguity at the heart of the relationship between these fictions and the Whig historiographical discourse, it is nevertheless a highly significant relationship. The ambiguity of the way in which Eliot at times appears to adhere to this interpretation of the English past while also, and simultaneously, undermining and doubting it is further evidence of the tensions between her work and totalizing notions of history. The frequently qualified notion of progress that is apparent in the fictions, coupled with the awkwardness as regards non-orthodox religions, are both evidence of this tendency towards and withdrawal away from the totalizing Whig perception of history. For these reasons alone, the influence of the Whig narrative could be seen as particularly significant, in spite of the fact that it has been notably absent from previous critical studies of the author. However, the more overt influence of this Whig narrative is apparent in Eliot’s conception of Englishness as articulated in her later essay ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’. This perception of English national identity was inextricably linked to Eliot’s understanding and portrayal of Judaism. The nature of this relationship, effectively one of accommodating the Jewish historical narrative into an idealized English one, is evident in her call for an increased national sympathy for the position of the Jews. This was something she based on the fact of the similarities between Jewish and (Whig) English history. In the first instance, this strategy of accommodation relates directly to Said’s ‘Orientalism’, to the different ways in which the Occident has attempted to come to terms with the Orient as foreign Other. This orientalizing tendency has been the subject of some recent criticism of George Eliot, such as Patrick



Conclusion


Brantlinger’s ‘Nations and Novels: Disraeli, George Eliot, and Orientalism’ (1992) and Reina Lewis’s Gendering Orientalism (1996). However, in these works attention centres on Daniel Deronda. Little, as yet, has been made of the essay ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, and the importance of the Whig narrative of history in this process of orientalizing has been overlooked. And yet an awareness of the significance of this Whig narrative leads into contentious critical territory as far as George Eliot is concerned; issues of nationalism and national identity come to the fore because, as has been noted, the Whig Interpretation is a discourse of overt Protestant English nationalism. The influence of this discourse promotes selectivity, partiality and even partisanship in the representation of national and racial identity in Eliot’s work. When viewed in tandem with the influence of Carlyle, the landscape of a George Eliot novel becomes a complex, often contradictory terrain; it is a surface awash with doubts, contradictions and competing (and yet coexistent) interpretations and perspectives. Eliot’s fiction denies the definition of the conventional realist novel offered by Terry Lovell: The classic realist text is closed. The meanings which it generates are fixed and limited and depend on the reader’s acceptance of the position offered by the text . . . the constituted reader is passive, the consumer of pre-given meanings, not their active creator.9 For Lovell, when the reader accepts the dominant position offered by the text, ‘the text performs its ideological role’.10 However, George Eliot’s fictions do not offer such a single, uncontested position. The narrational voice is in fact fragmented, consisting of multiple viewpoints; at times these can be directly contradictory. This multiplicity of voices creates a Bakhtinian ‘polyphony’.11 Rather than an overarching, dominant authorial or narrational (textual) voice, the novels instead display the tell-tale traces of warring discursive positions. This polyphonic quality, whereby meaning is constantly fluctuating, goes beyond Henry James’s acknowledgement of the inherent frailties of literary realism: The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but



144

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145

For James the term ‘realist’ reflected a broad church, one containing within it a multiplicity of individual interpretations and representations. However, George Eliot’s fiction is not simply a particular, idiosyncratic manifestation of a general realist approach. Evidently, the acutely developed historiographical dimension of her work is key. In the case of Eliot debates about history and realism are played out within the context of the novels themselves. The conception of history is a fragmented, at times even kaleidoscopic perception. The reader is denied a stable, unchallenged viewpoint, constantly having the ground taken from beneath their feet just as meaning is being formulated. In illustrating the ways in which George Eliot’s novels explored the limits, indeed pushed back the parameters, of the discursive context from which they emerged, a challenge is made to certain entrenched critical positions. Leslie Stephen, for instance, lauded Eliot as ‘a female metaphysician of high rank’,13 and saw her as characteristic of a particular (Victorian) social and historical context. And yet, the ways in which Eliot anticipated certain developments in philosophical and historiographical thought imply a far greater radicalism than this, with implications beyond the immediate cultural context. The way, for example, that notions of narrative and totality are problematized, and the serious epistemological questions that are raised, all anticipate more recent intellectual trends concerning the status of history. These include the modern furore about the so-called ‘end of history’,14 critical attempts to fuse academic disciplines (including History) into a wider super-discipline,15 and hard-fought battles within the discipline of History itself about the status of evidence and the relevance of discourse theory.16 Eliot’s fiction can be seen to contribute to each of these debates. This more radical, anticipatory quality raises interesting questions about Eliot’s posthumous fall from grace as one of the ‘lawful and undisputed monarchs of literature’17 to the far less esteemed position she occupied during the earlier decades of the twentieth century. As Gerald Bullett lamented in his notable postwar biography of the author: ‘The once formidable figure of George Eliot has fallen from its pedestal, to be swept away in fragments by the discreet janitor.’18 This anti-reaction, as J. Russell Perkin has suggested in his A ReceptionHistory of George Eliot’s Fiction (1990), centred on the widespread



it is by the rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable is cut we are at large unrelated.12


assumption that Eliot’s work was old-fashioned, largely through being overly moralistic. Modernist writers19 especially tended to reject her novels, suggesting that in terms of subject matter, perspective and literary style, Eliot had little to offer the twentieth-century reader. This study contradicts such an interpretation. It tends towards a revaluation based on Eliot’s sophisticated anticipation of aspects of twentieth-century thought from within the context of key trends in British historiography of the nineteenth century. In a number of ways Eliot’s work characterizes a broadly defined Victorian mindset, but her work should not be delimited by this context. The inherent tendency of the novels to deconstruct themselves, the moments of doubt and angst when confidence makes way for doubt (only to be replaced by confidence (and so on)), produces a complex of notions of historical process. The past and even the future are imagined in the search for meaning and direction. However, ultimately Eliot is forced to recognize the subjective and delusory nature of both, and to come to terms with the inimitable confusions of her Victorian present.



146

Introduction: ‘Those Far-Reaching Visions of the Past’ 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

G. Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), with an introduction by Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 49. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), p. 7. The quote is also used, but to an entirely different effect, by William Baker, in ‘Memory: Eliot and Lewes “The Past is a Foreign Country: They Do Things Differently There”’, George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies, 24–5 (September 1993), pp. 118–31. E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. xiii. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 6. Ibid. Throughout this study a discrimination will be made between ‘History’ as signifier, i.e. the representation of past events (e.g. historiography), and ‘history’ as signified, i.e. the past events themselves. This implies a distinction between representation and historical event that is unfortunate (and probably, outside the context of this study, unsustainable). However, it is a vocabulary intended to reflect a separation in the minds of the philosophers and writers alluded to, not to reflect an inevitability. This distinction is also delineated, with great clarity and perspicacity, in Jim Reilly’s Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot (London: Routledge, 1993). Though this term has become definitely associated with one particular critic, Hayden White, the term metahistory does have a more general resonance, as highlighted in Adrian Kuzminski’s ‘Defending Historical Realism’, History and Theory, 18:1 (1979), pp. 326–49. Kuzminski sees metahistory as that strand of criticism whose subject matter is historiography: that which deals often, though not exclusively, with the rhetorical or structural premises on which historiography is founded. A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. viii. Unlike Georg Lukács, Culler implicates Walter Scott as being ‘primarily responsible for historicizing the imagination of the 147



Notes

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography English people’. Quite what influenced Scott himself in his interest in history, Culler is less forthcoming about. P. A. Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold, Pater (London: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 2. G. Lukács, The Historical Novel, translated from the German by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Pelican, 1981), p. 20. Lukács explains the development of this mass experience in terms of the French Revolution and its aftermath. Ibid., p. 22. T. Carlyle, ‘On History’, in A Carlyle Reader, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 56. Ibid. Ibid. Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History, p. vii. A. Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel 1840–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 1. J. S. Mill, ‘Of the Inverse Deductive, or Historical Method’, in John Stuart Mill: On Politics and Society, ed. Geraint L. Williams (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1976), p. 75. See J. S. Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (London: Longmans, 1865). J. Buckley, The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence (London: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 6. R. Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 63. See W. Baker (ed.), The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue of Their Books at Dr. Williams’s Library, London (London: Garland, 1977), p. xx (Table I). According to Baker 40 per cent of the books in the library were on broadly scientific themes. G. Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Ark, 1985), p. 154. S. Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The MakeBelieve of a Beginning (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. xii. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 218. G. Eliot, Middlemarch (1872), with an introduction by W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 25. GE to Mme Bodichon, 5 December 1859, The George Eliot Letters: Vols 1–9, ed. Gordon S. Haight (London: Yale University Press, 1954–78), III, p. 227. GE to Sara Sophia Hennell, 6 November 1858, The George Eliot Letters, II, p. 496. GE to Mrs Richard Congreve, 16 January 1867, The George Eliot Letters, IV, p. 333. GHL and GE to Sara Sophia Hennell, 9–10 July 1860, The George Eliot Letters, III, p. 320. See Frederic Harrison to GE, 12 June 1877, The George Eliot Letters, IX, p. 194. T. R. Wright, ‘George Eliot and Positivism’, Modern Language Review, 76 (1981), pp. 257–72. T. R. Wright, ‘From Bumps to Morals: the Phrenological Background to



148

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55.

149

George Eliot’s Moral Framework’, Review of English Studies, 33 (1982), pp. 35–46. GE to Frederic Harrison, 15 August 1866, The George Eliot Letters, IV, p. 300. A. Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte in Two Volumes, trans. Harriet Martineau (London: J. Chapman, 1853), I, p. 3. B. Paris, Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1965), p. 15. J. F. Stephen, ‘Buckle’s History of Civilization in England’, Edinburgh Review, 107 (1858), p. 466. J. P. Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England Since the Renaissance (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), p. 108. Kenyon explains that although Macaulay, Carlyle and Acton scoffed at his work, Spencer, Huxley and Mill craved his company. He was elected to the Athenaeum and gave a lecture at the Royal Institution (p. 133). J. W. Cross, George Eliot’s Life: As Related in her Letters and Journals (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1885), p. 232. Ibid., p. 235. Ibid., pp. 253–4. Ibid., p. 338. See Baker, The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Library, p. 196 (entry 2107). The essay, deeply critical of Buckle, appeared in Fraser’s Magazine, 87 (April 1873) pp. 482–99. In The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1952), Duncan Forbes discriminates between the Liberal Anglican ‘science of history’ (process) and the ‘philosophy of history’ (progress) (p. 60). Natural development is governed by laws whereas moral development was by free will (‘under God’s Providence’ (p. 145)). Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. 4. T. Arnold, ‘Essay on the Social Progress of States’ (1830), in The Miscellaneous Works of Thomas Arnold: Collected and Republished, ed. A. P. Stanley (London: B. Fellowes, 1845), p. 81. Arnold, ‘Essay on the Social Progress of States’, p. 111. Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel, p. 176. H. Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 38. H. Witemeyer, in ‘George Eliot’s Romola and Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi’ (Studies in the Novel, 15 (1983), pp. 62–73) has explained this demand for historiographical accuracy in relation to the dominance of empiricism within historical circles during this period. Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel, p. 3. H. E. Shaw, The Forms of Historical Fiction (London: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 30. H. James, ‘The Life of George Eliot’, in Essays on Literature: American Writers, English Writers, ed. Library of America (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 1005. L. Stephen, George Eliot (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 137. K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 14.



Notes


56.

G. Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, in George Eliot: Selected Critical Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 316. J. Bayley, ‘The Pastoral of Intellect’, in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 200. U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels – the Limits of Realism (Berkeley: California University Press, 1968), p. 22. D. Morse, High Victorian Culture (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 337. Ibid. J. Goode, ‘Adam Bede’, in Critical Essays on George Eliot, p. 37. A. Kettle, ‘Felix Holt the Radical’, Critical Essays on George Eliot, p. 99. B. Semmel, The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire: Theories of Imperialism from Adam Smith to Lenin (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 4. GHL to John Blackwood, 28 May 1861, The George Eliot Letters, III, p. 420. J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (London: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 6. Ibid., p. 10. Dollimore identifies these three as relating to, respectively, the ‘means whereby a dominant order seeks to perpetuate itself’, the ‘subversion of that order’ and the ‘containment of ostensibly subversive pressures’. Ibid., p. 7. P. Coveney, ‘Introduction’ to Felix Holt (1866) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 8. U. C. Knoepflmacher, ‘Fusing Fact and Myth: the New Reality of Middlemarch’, in Essays on ‘Middlemarch’: This Particular Web, ed. Ian Adam (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1975), p. 68. H. James, ‘Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life’, in Essays on Literature: American Writers, English Writers, p. 965. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 19. Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy, p. 2. Ibid., p. 34. Reilly, Shadowtime, p. 114. Ibid., p. 39. R. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 80. Ibid., p. 22. C. Parker, The English Historical Tradition Since 1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), p. 4. Semmel, The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire, p. 11. As Parker illustrates, in The English Historical Tradition, six ‘types’ of philosophy of History (chance, Divine Providence, decadence, progress, cycles and antithesis) are represented within British historiography; however, they are not exclusive to it (see p. 87 for instance).

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.



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Notes

151

1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

‘George Eliot’ will be used throughout, even when referring to material written prior to the adoption of the pseudonym. Although anachronistic, the intention is to provide clarity. G. Eliot, ‘Leaves from a Notebook’, in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 446. D. Carroll, ‘Middlemarch and the Externality of Fact’, in Essays on ‘Middlemarch’: This Particular Web, ed. Ian Adam (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1975), p. 73. Of the so-called ‘official Realists’ in French nineteenth-century art (a loose collective that included Tassaert, Ribot and Pils) Gustave Courbet is perhaps the most well known. Stephen Eisenman, in Nineteenth-Century Art: A Critical History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), sees such works as A Burial at Ornans, The Stonebreakers and Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair, in which colours are ‘earthen and clotted’ and the subjects treated ‘unflinchingly and so monumentally’, as marks of a distinct ‘kind of liberation from the reigning juste milieu’ (p. 212). This is a not unnoticed parallel. See Karen B. Mann’s ‘George Eliot and Wordsworth: The Power of Sound and the Power of the Mind’, Studies in English Literature, 20 (1980), pp. 675–94 and also Q. D. Leavis’s introduction to Silas Marner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). G. Eliot, ‘The Morality of Wilhelm Meister’, in George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, eds A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 309. Ibid. R. Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), p. 168. D. Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation, with a foreword by T. Eagleton (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987), p. 60. S. Dentith, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), p. 36. Eliot’s failure to realize an authentic working-class experience is surely inevitable; such an authenticity must always be mythical. As Sneja Gunew has perceptively argued, ‘the whole notion of authenticity, of the authentic . . . experience, is one that comes to us constructed by hegemonic voices’: ‘Questions of Multiculturalism’, in Sarah Harasym (ed.), The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 61. What is of concern in this study is the character of these hegemonic voices, i.e. the ideological imprints that are most apparent in Eliot’s attempt to achieve authenticity, and what the implications of these might be. Eliot, ‘Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young’, in Byatt and Warren (eds) (1990), p. 194. Ibid. Eliot, ‘Leaves from a Notebook: Historic Imagination’, in Pinney (ed.) (1963), p. 447. Eliot, ‘Westward Ho! and Constance Herbert’, in Pinney (ed.) (1963), p. 134. Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, in Pinney (ed.) (1963), p. 268.



Chapter 1 George Eliot and the (Meta)Narrativity of History


17. 18.

Ibid., pp. 268–9. Ibid., p. 271. She judges artistic production as more real, or rather less artificial than aspects such as ‘the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses’. Eliot, ‘R. W. Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect’, in Byatt and Warren (eds) (1990), p. 268. Ibid., p. 269. Though by this point the Westminster Review was under the ownership of John Chapman, critics have been in little doubt that the driving force behind the editorial policy for the magazine in these early stages (this article was published in January 1852) was George Eliot. Eliot, ‘Prospectus of the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review’, in Byatt and Warren (eds) (1990), p. 4. These areas included the extension of the franchise (with the ultimate aim of universality), the extension of constitutional government to the colonies, free trade, and judicial reform (especially the Court of Chancery). Ecclesiastical revenues were to be revised, a national education established, and university and public school discrimination on the grounds of sect abolished. Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, in Byatt and Warren (eds) (1990), p. 128. Eliot, ‘Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young’, in Byatt & Warren (eds) (1990), p. 164. Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, in Byatt & Warren (eds) (1990), p. 122. Ibid., p. 128. G. Eliot, ‘Ruskin’s Lectures’, in George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook (1854– 1879) and Uncollected Writings, ed. Joseph Wiesenfarth (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1981), p. 240. Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, in Pinney (ed.) (1963), p. 279. Eliot, ‘Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young’, in Byatt and Warren (eds) (1990), p. 198. Ibid. Ibid. Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, in Pinney (ed.) (1963), p. 271. G. Eliot, Romola (1863), with an introduction by Andrew Sanders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 182. Eliot, ‘Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!’, in Pinney (ed.) (1963), p. 126. L. Bersani, ‘Realism and the Fear of Desire’, in Realism, ed. Lilian Furst (London: Longman, 1992), p. 241. The interrelation of different subject areas and disciplines is placed in context by Noel Annan in his essay ‘Science, Religion, and the Critical Mind’, in 1859: Entering an Age of Crisis, eds Philip Appleman, William A. Madden and Michael Wolff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), p. 30. He says ‘today we think of knowledge as a set of different subjects, each with its own discipline; but when in 1852 Cambridge, responding to demands to broaden its curriculum, instituted the Natural Sciences and the Moral Science Triposes, the names reflected the implicit assumption that knowledge was a unity.’

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.



152

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

153

A. Tilley, ‘The New School of Fiction’, in A Victorian Art of Fiction, Vol. III, ed. John Charles Olmstead (London: Garland, 1979), p. 262. J. C. Olmstead, Preface to A Victorian Art of Fiction, Vol. II (London: Garland, 1979), p. xiii. H. James, The House of Fiction, ed. Leon Edel (London: Mercury, 1962), p. 33. S. Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 2. Bann sees the production of these ‘forgeries’, illconceived and executed historical recreations, as the most ‘distinguishing mark’ of the period 1750–1850 in England. See Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, in Byatt and Warren (eds) (1990). As Gordon Haight reveals in his George Eliot: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), this applies to all the novels. For instance, those critics who ‘draw a sharp distinction’ between the early novels, ‘inspired by imagination working through memory’, and the later ones, ‘contrived laboriously by intellect’, simply ‘do not realize how carefully George Eliot studied the background for the most natural of them, Adam Bede’ (p. 249). See ‘Interesting Intelligence from various parts of the country’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 69 (January 1799), ‘The Royal Excursion’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 69 (September 1799), and ‘Domestic Occurrences’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 69 (February 1799). These feature as items 62 and 63 in George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook, Wiesenfarth (ed.) (1981). See entry 68 of George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook. This includes ‘Proceedings in Parliament, 1801’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 71 (July 1801); ‘Proceedings of the last session of Parliament’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 71 (September 1801); ‘Residence of Clergy’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 71 (October 1801); ‘Dignity of Clergy’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 71 (December 1801), and ‘Appendix to the Chronicle’, Annual Register, 1799 (the latter regarding bread prices). See entry 63 in Wiesenfarth (ed.) (1981); J. Holt, ‘Meteorological Diaries for July and August 1799’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 69 (August 1799); ‘Meteorological Diaries for August and September 1799’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 69 (September 1799); ‘Meteorological Diaries for September and October 1799’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 69 (October 1799); ‘Meteorological Diaries for October and November 1799’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 69 (November 1799), and also ‘County News, September 8’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 69 (October 1799). Entry 69 in Wiesenfarth (ed.) (1981) illustrates how, in January 1859, George Eliot copied accounts of inundations from the register in the British Museum. For example, she notes how in November 1771 the weather ‘brought on the great floods’, and she looked up details on the River Trent to ascertain what the physical conditions of rivers were where inundations had occurred. In addition, the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library’s Eliot notebooks reveal that the Annual Register was accessed by George Eliot in 1852 (MS 707, entry no. 2), 1855 (MS 711, entry no. 2), 1856 (MS 711, entry no. 2), 1861 (MS 711, nos 1,2), 1865 (MS 711, entry nos 3–8),



Notes

48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography 1866 (MS 711, entry nos 1–11) and 1867 (MS 711, entry nos 1–3). See W. Baker (ed.), Some George Eliot Notebooks: An Edition of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library’s George Eliot Holograph Notebooks, MSS 707, 708, 709, 710, 711 (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1976–85). In addition to the five-week visit to Florence as a whole, Haight (p. 344) draws attention to the five solid days she spent in the Magliabecchian library. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, p. 381. Ibid., p. 469. The superstitions were discussed in Cornhill, 25 (June 1872) in an article by R. A. Proctor. The appendix to G. Eliot, Middlemarch Notebooks: A Transcription, eds J. C. Pratt and V. A. Neufeldt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), contains a list of all the works known to have been consulted during this period, though it concedes that it is far from exhaustive. Eliot, Middlemarch Notebooks, p. xxiv. Ibid. J. Reilly, Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 11. D. Lodge, Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 11. Ibid., p. 12. This is a view also expressed by Hillis Miller, ‘Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch’, in The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, ed. Jerome Buckley (London: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 126. The synecdochic method of representation is, he claims, the only way to reconcile an aim of artistic totality with the ‘infinite complexity’ of Victorian society (p.126). This counters the view, common in discussions of George Eliot, that her realism involves a static and non-historical conception of society. A rationale for this is offered by Edmund Duranty who, writing in the journal Réalisme, 2 (December 1856), suggested that ‘realism bans the historical in painting, the novel, and the theatre so that no lie can creep in’ (in Furst (ed.) (1992), p. 31). S. Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The MakeBelieve of a Beginning (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 51. P. Hamon, ‘Un discours contraint’, in Furst (ed.), trans. Lilian R. Furst and Seán Hand, p. 166. Ibid., p. 167. E. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 10. J. Beaty, ‘History by Indirection: The Era of Reform in Middlemarch’, Victorian Studies, 1 (1957), 173–9. Suzanne Graver also uses the phrase in her essay ‘“Incarnate History”: The Feminism of Middlemarch’, in Approaches to Teaching Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’, ed. Kathleen Blake (New York: MLA, 1990), p. 64. Beaty, ‘History by Indirection: The Era of Reform in Middlemarch’, p.175. G. Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, with an introduction by David Lodge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 43. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 147.



154

67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

155

Ibid. G. Eliot, Adam Bede, with an introduction by Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 110. The ‘news from Egypt’ came in August 1798 when Nelson destroyed a French fleet in the mouth of the Nile. J. Gerhard, ‘Hegel, Derrida, George Eliot, and the Novel’, Literature–Interpretation–Theory, 1(1989), p. 66. Erwin Hester, in his essay ‘George Eliot’s Use of Historical Events in Daniel Deronda’, English Language Notes, 4 (1966), pp. 115–18, disagrees. He notes a progression across the Eliot canon in which the relationship between the fictional narrative and history becomes increasingly complex. He is right to note how the increasing complexity of the novels makes the text/history relationship increasingly problematic. However, apart from Romola and Daniel Deronda (and even these are qualified exceptions), the indirect nature of the relationship is still broadly maintained. Eliot, Romola, p. 267. R. Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in French Literary Theory Today: A Reader, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 15. Hamon, ‘Un discours contraint’, p. 166. Ibid., p. 167. This is viewed by Hamon as just one of fifteen characteristics of the realist discourse. Ibid. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 223. Ibid., pp. 258–9. Ibid., p. 341. Ibid., p. 566. G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, with an introduction by A. S. Byatt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 185. Ibid., p. 362. J. King, Tragedy in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 81. Furst, Introduction to Realism (1992), p. 10. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 396. Ibid., p. 299. Ibid., pp. 300–1. H. Witemeyer, ‘George Eliot’s Romola and Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi’, Studies in the Novel, 15 (1983), p. 70. G. Eliot, Middlemarch, with an introduction by W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 29. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 392. Ibid., p. 598. S. Dentith, A Rhetoric of the Real: Studies in Post-Enlightenment Writing from 1790 to the Present (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1990), p. 10. Hamon, ‘Un discours contraint’, p. 167. G. Beer, ‘Beyond Determinism: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf’, in Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 81.



Notes


95. Beer, ‘Beyond Determinism: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf’, p. 82. 96. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 528. 97. G. Eliot, Felix Holt, with an introduction by Peter Coveney (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 124. 98. H. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 4. 99. See J. W. Burrow’s A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Burrow identifies 1848–78 as years of ‘a remarkable flowering of English narrative history’ (p. 1). Notably, these years very closely mark the boundaries of Eliot’s writing career. 100. This comes as an editorial comment on a review of Eliot in The Times of 7 March 1873, in George Eliot and Her Readers, eds L. Lerner and J. Holmstrom (London: Bodley Head, 1966), pp. 117–18. 101. F. Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 34. 102. In his foreword to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) Jameson notes the prevalence of the two master narratives of Science in culture and society. There is the ‘rhetoric of liberation’ and the ‘rhetoric of totality and totalization’ (p. xix). 103. J. M. Bernstein, ‘Grand Narratives’, in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 102. 104. C. MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 15. 105. Ibid., p. 14. 106. Ibid., p. 15. 107. G. McLennan, ‘History and Theory’, Literature and History, 10: 2 (1984), p. 141. 108. A. Kuzminski, ‘Defending Historical Realism’, History and Theory, 18: 3 (1979), p. 322. 109. Ibid., p. 341. 110. B. C. Hurst, ‘The Myth of Historical Evidence’, History and Theory, 20: 3 (1981), p. 278. 111. R. Barthes, ‘The Discourse of History’, Comparative Criticism, 3 (1981), p. 11. 112. H. Gilliam, ‘The Dialectics of Realism and Idealism in Modern Historiographical Theory’, History and Theory, 15: 1 (1976), p. 251. 113. H. Kozicki (ed.), Western and Russian Historiography: Recent Views, with an introduction by Sidney Monas (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 1. 114. Ibid. 115. C. Parker, The English Historical Tradition Since 1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), p. 242. 116. F. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 56. 117. E. H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 109. 118. P. A. Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold, Pater (London: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 3. 119. Ibid.



156

157

120. C. Guillén, Literature as System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 6. 121. The notion of the Immanent Will is present throughout Hardy’s works, perhaps most overtly in The Mayor of Casterbridge and the poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. In the latter, for instance, he notes ‘The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything’: The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy, 4th edn (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 289 (Stanza VI). Jerome Buckley sees such an immanent will as typical of Western philosophies of history, ranging across Kant (who saw progress toward rationalism), Marx (progress toward socialism), Comte (progress toward positivism), Spencer (progress toward heterogeneity), and Macaulay (progress toward constitutional liberty). See The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence (London: Harvard University Press, 1967. 122. H. White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 151. These are seen to be the inclusive grand narratives of historical development, which for White range from Greek fatalism, Christian redemptionism, bourgeois progressivism, to Marxist utopianism. 123. G. Martin, ‘Daniel Deronda: George Eliot and Political Change’, in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 135. 124. M. Rudnik-Smalbraak, ‘Women and Utopia: Some Reflections and Explorations’, in Between Dream and Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia, eds Dominic Baker-Smith and C. C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1978), p. 186. 125. D. David, Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels: ‘North and South’, ‘Our Mutual Friend’, ‘Daniel Deronda’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. xi. 126. P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III, eds Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988), p. 190. 127. E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. xiii. 128. Ibid., p. 93 129. R. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 80. 130. U. C. Knoepflmacher, among others, has seen this process embodied in the lives of Eliot’s characters. For him Lydgate is Eliot’s foil for the way in which he attempts to impose his own mental structures on the reality of Middlemarch. As such, it is argued, he is involved in the same process as Eliot herself. See ‘Fusing Fact and Myth: the New Reality of Middlemarch’, in This Particular Web. 131. H. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 308. 132. J. Uglow, George Eliot (London: Virago, 1987), p. 180. 133. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 123. 134. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 34. 135. Eliot, Romola, p. 309. 136. R. Radhakrishnan, ‘Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity’,



Notes

137. 138. 139. 140.

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography in Nationalisms and Sexualities, eds Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer and Patricia Yaeger (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 89. Cottom, Social Figures, p. 82. Williams, The Country and the City, p. 174. F. Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 169. E. Said, ‘Orientalism Considered’, in Europe and Its Others: Vol.1, eds Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Diana Loxley (Colchester: Essex University Press, 1985), p. 22. Said has identified this as a characteristic of Historicism.

Chapter 2 Imagining the National Past 1. A. Brundage, The People’s Historian: John Richard Green and the Writing of History in Victorian England (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), p. 2. 2. Ibid., p. 3. 3. J. P. Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), p. 154. 4. Entry 43 of George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook (1854–1879) and Uncollected Writings, ed. by Joseph Wiesenfarth (Charlottesville, VA: Virginia University Press, 1981) cites chapter 3, Vol. 1 (‘The State of England in 1685’). See also The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue of Their Books at Dr. Williams’s Library, London, ed. William Baker (London: Garland, 1977). The latter reveals that Eliot was also distinctly familiar with works written about Macaulay. These included François Auguste Marie Mignet’s Éloges Historiques: Jouffray, Baron de Gerando, Laromiguière, LaKaaal, Schelling, Comte Portalis, Hallam, Lord Macaulay (1864) and John Paget’s The New ‘Examen’: On Certain Passages in Macaulay’s History on W. Penn: Duke of Marlborough and Glencoe (1861). 5. H. Butterfield, The Englishman and His History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), p. 5. 6. On several occasions G. H. Lewes’s journal mentions Macaulay. For example, see The George Eliot Letters: Vols 1–9, III, ed. Gordon S. Haight (London: Yale University Press, 1954–78), p. 392 (fn 8): ‘Polly read Macaulay as we sat under the cliff’, and also The George Eliot Letters, VI, p. 240 (fn 9): ‘Polly unwell and kept in bed. Sat with her the greater part of the day – read aloud papers and Macaulay’s Life.’ Both History of England and the article ‘Machiavelli’ (Edinburgh Review, XCV (March 1827)) are also listed in Middlemarch Notebooks: A Transcription, ed. J. C. Pratt and V. A. Neufeldt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 284. 7. GE to Sara Sophia Hennell, 4 February 1849, The George Eliot Letters, I, p. 275. 8. The first two texts are listed in Middlemarch Notebooks, p. 214 and p. 282. The third is in The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Library, p. 68. 9. The GHL Diary of 19–21 May 1877 reads: ‘16 again at dinner – Stubbs, Bradley, Sir C. Trevelyan, Butcher etc.’, in The George Eliot Letters, VI, p. 375. 10. J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past



158

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

159

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 3. Ibid., p. 297. C. Parker, The English Historical Tradition Since 1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), p. 10. Ibid., p. 10. A. Howkins, ‘A Defence of National History’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity Vol. 1: History and Politics, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 19. D. Cannadine, ‘British History as a “New Subject”: Politics, Perspectives and Prospects’, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, eds Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 12. Burrow, A Liberal Descent, p. 297. Witemeyer, ‘George Eliot’s Romola and Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi’, Studies in the Novel, 15 (1983), 66. Burrow, A Liberal Descent, p. 107. G. Martin, ‘Daniel Deronda: George Eliot and Political Change’, in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. by Barbara Hardy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 140. P. B. M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. 15. Ibid., p. 16. H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965), p. 12. T. B. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II, 5 Vols, 3rd edn (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849–61), II, p. 669. G. Eliot, ‘Looking Backward’, in Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ed. Nancy Henry (London: William Pickering, 1994), p. 17. Apparently, in 1856 (after vols III and IV were published), ‘Longmans sold 26,500 copies of the work in ten weeks, and eleven weeks after publications the author received a cheque for £20,000 from his publisher.’ For this and further details see Sir Charles Firth, A Commentary on Macaulay’s ‘History of England’ (London: Frank Cass, 1964), p. 13. Ibid., p. 14. A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 20. Ibid., p. 31. F. Klug, ‘“Oh to be in England”: the British Case Study’, in Woman–Nation–State, eds Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 16. Ibid., p. 17. R. Samuel, ‘Introduction: the Figures of National Myth’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity Vol. 3: National Fictions, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1989), p. xxxii. G. Eliot, Silas Marner (1861), with an introduction by Q. D. Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 68. G. Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), with an introduction by Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 50.



Notes


34. 35.

Ibid., p. 61. See also S. L. Kayfetz, ‘Counterfeit Coins and Traffic Jams: Rewriting Masculinity in Adam Bede’, New Orleans Review, 24: 2 (1998), 62–72. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 209. Ibid., p. 278. G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), with an introduction by A. S. Byatt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 127. Ibid., p. 222. S. L. Meyer, Gender and Empire: Figurative Structures in the Fiction of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, DPhil Dissertation, Yale University, 1989, p. 44. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 181. Ibid., p. 183. Samuel, ‘Introduction: the Figures of National Myth’, p. xxxii. H. Butterfield, The Englishman and His History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), p. 2. It is interesting to note the overlap between German histories of England and dominant English trends. Ranke, for example, wrote (with a quasiWhiggish edge) that ‘nowhere have more of the institutions of the Middle Ages been retained than in England’ (A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, in six volumes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1875), I, p. vi). He also wrote of ‘the historical progress of England’ (V, p. 291). His chief dissension from the Whiggish paradigm comes in Vol. II, where he shows himself to be on the side of the monarchists during the revolution. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism, p. 34. E. A. Freeman, The Growth of the English Constitution: From the Earliest Times (London: Macmillan, 1872), p. 66. Ibid., I, p. 44. Macaulay, The History of England, IV, p. 808. Freeman, The Growth of the English Constitution, p. 8. Ibid., p. 18. J. Buckley, The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence (London: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 36. Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., p. 48. R. Samuel, ‘Continuous National History’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity Vol. 1: History & Politics, p. 12. J. Plamenatz, ‘Two types of Nationalism’, in Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea, ed. by Eugene Kamenka (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973), p. 23. S. Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The MakeBelieve of a Beginning (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 28. G. Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), with an introduction by David Lodge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 41. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 53. Ibid., p. 91. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 127.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.



160

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

161

T. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: NLB, 1976), p. 113. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 176. G. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 397. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 185. Ibid. Ibid., p. 219. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 481. Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, p. 252. Ibid., p. 253. Buckley, The Triumph of Time, pp. 50–1. R. Colls, ‘Englishness and the Political Culture’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, eds Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 30. This is a similar point as that made by Michael York Mason, ‘Middlemarch and History’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25 (1971), p. 427. Mason regards Eliot’s reservations about progress as ‘limited or isolated’, and that her irony was just an ‘undirected sniping’ at naive optimists such as H. T. Buckle. In History of Civilization in England: Vol. I, 2nd edn (London: J. W. Parker, 1858) Buckle wrote of England as ‘the land of opportunity’ (p. 180). Buckle, History of Civilization in England: Vol. II (London: Parker, Son, & Bourn, 1861), p. 37. Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, p. 41. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 207. Ibid.

79. Ibid. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, pp. 111–12. Ibid., p. 149. G. Eliot, Middlemarch (1872), with an introduction by W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 302. T. B. Macaulay, ‘Lord Bacon’, in Literary Essays Contributed to the ‘Edinburgh Review’ (London: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 301. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 31. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 184. Ibid., p. 185. G. Eliot, ‘Evangelical Teaching: Dr Cumming’, in Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, eds A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 43. S. Dentith, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), p. 59. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 225. S. Dentith, A Rhetoric of the Real: Studies in Post-Enlightenment Writing from 1790 to the Present (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1990), p. 10. T. R. Wright, The Religion of Humanity: the Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 190. Eliot, ‘The Natural History of German Life’, in Byatt and Warren (eds), p. 129. T. Lovell, ‘Gender and Englishness in Villette’, in Political Gender: Texts and



Notes

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography Contexts, eds Sally Ledger, Josephine McDonagh and Jane Spencer (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), p. 49. The point was first made by Raphael Samuel. GE to John Sibree, Jr, 8 March 1840, in The George Eliot Letters, I, pp. 254–5. Eliot, ‘Looking Backward’, p. 14. Eliot notes how at the end of the last century ‘the troublesome Irish were more miserable’. GE to Sara Sophia Hennell, 3 March 1844, The George Eliot Letters, I, p. 172. GE to Mrs Henry Houghton, 2 October 1852, in The George Eliot Letters, VIII, p. 62. GE to Mrs Richard Congreve, 17 April 1868, in The George Eliot Letters, IV, p. 430. R. Congreve, ‘Ireland’, in Essays: Political, Social, and Religious (London: Longmans, 1874), p. 179. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 189. In the Yale Notebook, found on microfilm in the British Library (M890), there is a section entitled ‘notes for a projected novel’. Some of these notes are drawn from W. Lecky’s A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (1878), and concern Irish history of the period. William Baker, in his article ‘George Eliot’s Projected Napoleonic War Novel: An Unnoted Reading List’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 29 (1975), 453–60, claims that this interest may have been sparked by the Fenian activity of the 1860s. Among other things, he notes, Eliot was interested in the legislation that forbade Catholics marrying Protestants, something he suggests may have become an aspect of the plot of this unwritten novel.

Chapter 3 A Natural History of English Life 1. G. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1878), ed. Nancy Henry (London: William Pickering, 1994), p. 144. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Page numbers will follow in brackets. Nancy Henry, the editor of this recent edition of the text, also identifies this reference to Green, p. 144 (fn 6). 2. See Some George Eliot Notebooks: An Edition of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library’s George Eliot Holograph Notebooks, MSS 707, 708, 709, 710, 711, Vol. III, ed. William Baker (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1985), p. 118. 3. GE to Mme Eugène Bodichon, 17 January 1878, The George Eliot Letters, Vols I–IX, ed. Gordon Haight (London: Yale University Press, 1954–78), VI, p. 6. 4. G. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 522. 5. A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 38. 6. B. Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 50.



162

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

163

W. Cowper, ‘Expostulation’, in Cowper: Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 47 (lines 165 and 166). R. Browning, ‘Holy-Cross Day’, in The Poetical Works of Robert Browning: In Two Volumes, with Portraits (London: John Murray, 1929), p. 429. F. Kobler, The Vision Was There: A History of the British Movement for the Restoration of the Jews to Palestine (London: Lincolns-Prager, 1956), p. 51. A. Pope, ‘Messiah. A Sacred Eclogue, In imitation of Virgil’s POLLIO’, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, Volume 1: Pastoral Poetry and an Essay in Criticism, eds E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 112. J. Milton, Paradise Regained, in The Poetical Works of John Milton: Vol. 2 ‘Paradise Regained’, ‘Samson Agonistes’, poems upon several occasions, ed. Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), p. 16 (line 36). Lord Byron, ‘Oh! Weep for Those’, Hebrew Melodies, in Byron: Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 78. W. Wordsworth, ‘A Jewish Family’, in William Wordsworth: The Poems Vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 651. E. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 12. An assumption is being made here that the narrative voice of Theophrastus embodies George Eliot’s own perceptions. This close relation of narrative persona and author is also confidently asserted by Frederick Karl in his recent biography of Eliot when he notes that the essay is ‘full of Eliot’s own perspectives’, George Eliot: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 605. GE to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 29 October 1876, The George Eliot Letters, VI, p. 301. Ibid., p. 302. G. Eliot, Romola (1863), with an introduction by Andrew Sanders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 44. E. A. Freeman, The Growth of the English Constitution: From the Earliest Times (London: Macmillan, 1872), p. vii. Ibid., p. 18. E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. xiii. K. Löwith, ‘The Question of Meaning in History’, in Nature, History, and Existentialism and Other Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. with an introduction by Arnold Levison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), p. 131. Alice Stopford Green, introduction to J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People (London: Macmillan, 1898), Vol. I, p. xix. G. Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), p. 55. Ibid. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 15. H. Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 465. Alice Stopford Green, introduction to A Short History of the English People, I, p. xvii. D. Born, The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel: Charles Dickens to



Notes

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography H. G. Wells (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 53. Freeman, The Growth of the English Constitution: From the Earliest Times, p. 19. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 55. W. Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England: In Its Origin and Development: Vol. III, 5th edn (London: Barnes & Noble, 1967), p. 634. Freeman, The Growth of the English Constitution: From the Earliest Times, pp. 55–6. Ibid., p. 18. E. A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest: Vol. I, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1870), p. 6. Green, A Short History of the English People, I, p. 240. R. Samuel, ‘Continuous National History’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity Vol. 1: History and Politics, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 10. Freeman, The Growth of the English Constitution: From the Earliest Times, p. viii. Ibid., p. 86. T. B. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II, 5 Vols., 3rd edn (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849–61), I, p. 280. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid. Lord Acton, Preface to The History of Freedom and Other Essays, edited with an introduction by J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1907), p. 4. Ibid., p. 5. L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 31. Ibid., p. 32. Green, A Short History of the English People, II, p. 937. Ibid., III, p. 1285. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II, I, p. 424. Ibid., II, p. 304. GE to David Kaufmann, 31 May 1877, The George Eliot Letters, VI, p. 379. GHL to John Blackwood, 1 December 1875, The George Eliot Letters, VI, p. 196. John Blackwood to GE, 7 September 1876, The George Eliot Letters, VI, p. 281. Said, Orientalism, p. 1. It would be a mistake not to acknowledge the ideological awkwardness of utilizing Said’s work in relation to Judaism; the thrust of his critique of Orientalist discourse speaks most overtly of the representation of Middle Eastern, and particularly Palestinian, national groups. However, there is nothing inherent in Said’s critique that should exclude a discussion of the Orientalism inherent in Western appropria-



164

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68.

165

tions of Judaism and Jewish experience. Ibid., p. 6. E. Said, ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims’, Social Text, 1 (1978), p. 12. E. Said, The Question of Palestine (London: Vintage, 1992), p. 150. This aspect of the novel is discussed at length in Said’s ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims’ (cited in note 60 above). In ‘George Eliot and Feminism: The Case of Daniel Deronda’ (in Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the English-Speaking World) Bonnie Zimmerman offers a contradictory viewpoint. Deronda is, for her, a conflation of male and female tendencies (p. 236). This is not an argument I am in agreement with, especially as it risks re-animating the age-old criticism of Eliot that she was unable to successfully create male characters. Introduction to T. B. Macaulay, Essay and Speech on Jewish Disabilities, ed. with an introduction by Israel Abrahams and the Rev. S. Levy (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, Hanson & Co., 1909), p. 10. Macaulay, ‘A Speech: Delivered in a Committee of the Whole House of Commons, 17 April 1833’, in Essay and Speech on Jewish Disabilities, p. 59. A similar point is made by Julian Wolfreys, ‘The Ideology of Englishness: The Paradoxes of Tory-Liberal Culture and National Identity in Daniel Deronda’, George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies, 26–7 (September 1994): ‘Daniel proposes a cosmopolitan variation of English Identity, but it is still a version of the Englishman’ (p. 16). C. Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘the Woman Question’ (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 15. Ibid., p. 27.

Chapter 4 A Carlylean Counter-Paradigm 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Anon., ‘Latter-Day Pamphlets. Edited by Thomas Carlyle’, The North British Review, 14 (November 1850), p. 1. J. D. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 19. Ibid., p. 10. T. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. by Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 124. Ibid., p. 149. R. Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), p. 135. This critical disdain is evident in Goldwin Smith’s reviews in the Edinburgh Review, for example ‘Froude’s King Henry VIII’, 108 (July 1858), pp. 206–52, ‘Froude’s Reply to the Edinburgh Review’, 108 (October 1858), pp. 586–94 and ‘Froude’s History of England, Vols. V-VIII’, 119 (January 1864), pp. 243–79. E. A. Freeman’s reviews of Froude were both more numerous and more scathing: see ‘Froude’s Reign of Elizabeth [First Notice]’, Saturday Review, 16 January 1864, pp. 80–2, and ‘Last Words on Mr Froude’, Contemporary Review, 35 (May 1879), pp. 214–36, for a flavour of this criticism.



Notes

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography Introduction to Froude’s Life of Carlyle, ed. with an introduction by John Clubbe (London: John Murray, 1971), p. 1. J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 235. W. H. Dunn, James Anthony Froude: A Biography Vol. I–1818–1856 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 201–2. Anon., ‘Latter-Day Pamphlets’, p. 4. Although A. Dwight Culler notes the significant impact he had on thinkers such as Ruskin and Morris (The Victorian Mirror of History (London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 66), others have painted a less complimentary picture of his influence. J. P. Kenyon, for instance, sees him as responsible for the revival of Cromwellian studies, but other than that ‘growing madder and madder, shriller and shriller’ (The History Men: The Historical Profession in England Since the Renaissance (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), p. 108. J. Arac, Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), p. 6. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the Burden of History, p. 38. W. Oddie, Carlyle and Dickens: the Question of Influence (London: Centenary Press, 1972), p. 2. Anon., ‘Latter-Day Pamphlets’, p. 3. P. Collins, ‘Dickens’ Reading’, Dickensian, LX (1964), 164. See A. McCobb, George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters (Salzburg: University of Salzburg Press, 1982). Perhaps unsurprisingly, bearing in mind G. H. Lewes’s biography (Life and Works of Goethe, published October 1855), Goethe appears to be the most read of the German influences (p. 165–88). The biography was dedicated ‘To Thomas Carlyle, who first taught England to appreciate Goethe’. However, Schiller was also prominent reading matter (pp. 238–44), Scheller (pp. 88–90), Fichte (pp. 23–5), Schlegel (pp. 89–93), Novalis (pp. 321–2), and Richter (pp. 349–56). McCobb discusses the influence of these philosophers on Eliot’s work at length. Furthermore, W. Baker, in The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue of their Books at Dr. Williams’s Library, London (London: Garland, 1977), p. xxviii [Table II], notes that though 40.5 per cent of the collection is in English, as much as 24.5 per cent is in German. P. A. Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold, Pater (London: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 19. See J. P. Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England Since the Renaissance (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), p. 101. He notes how Freeman, Buckle, Green and Carlyle did not use archives, whereas Stubbs and Froude did. C. F. Harold, Carlyle and German Thought: 1819–1834 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934) notes how Carlyle was ‘ambiguous and negligent’ (p. v) with his sources. See Hill Shine, Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians: The Concept of Historical Periodicity (New York: Octagon, 1971) for a more detailed consideration of this element of Carlyle’s thinking. Crucial, according to Shine, is the notion of oscillation between advance and recession, what the Saint-



166

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

167

Simonians called the Organic and the Critical periods. Harold, Carlyle and German Thought: 1819–34, p. 14. For an extended discussion of this see Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History, p. 39–48, Ashton, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), and Harold, Carlyle and German Thought. McCobb, George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters, p. 70. Anon., ‘A Study of Carlyle’, Contemporary Review, 39 (1881), p. 584. GE to Sara Sophia Hennell, 9 February 1849, in The George Eliot Letters Vols 1–9, ed. Gordon S. Haight (London: Yale University Press, 1954–78), I, pp. 277–8. W. Oddie, Dickens and Carlyle: the Question of Influence (London: Centenary Press, 1972), p. 150. GE to Maria Lewis, 22 October 1840, The George Eliot Letters, I, p. 71. GE to Sara Sophia Hennell, 2 November 1851, The George Eliot Letters, I, p. 372. GE to Sara Sophia Hennell, 22 May 1857, The George Eliot Letters, II, p. 330. T. Carlyle (ed.), Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches in Four Volumes: Volume I (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902), p. 1. Carlyle (ed.), Cromwell’s Letters: Volume I, p. 7. Entry 49 of George Eliot: A Writer’s Notebook (1854–1879) and Uncollected Writings, ed. J. Wiesenfarth (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1981) illustrates this. GE to Charles Bray, Richmond, 23 December 1857, The George Eliot Letters, II, p. 414/5. GE to Sara Sophia Hennell, 27 March 1858, The George Eliot Letters, II, p. 441. GE to Martha Jackson, 16 December 1841, The George Eliot Letters, I, pp. 122–3. See GE to Sara Hennell, 9 October 1843, The George Eliot Letters, I, p. 161–2 (fn 1). Cited in Haight, p. 65; for the original see The George Eliot Letters, I, pp. 270–1. GE to John Sibree, Jr, 8 March 1848, The George Eliot Letters, II, pp. 252–3. G. Eliot, ‘Thomas Carlyle’, in Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, ed. by A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 344. Ibid. Ibid., p. 345. GE to John Blackwood, 24 February 1859, The George Eliot Letters, III, p. 23. GE to Frederic Harrison, 20 June 1873, The George Eliot Letters, V, p. 422. Anon., ‘A Study of Carlyle’, Contemporary Review, 39 (1881), 585. GE to Mme Eugène Bodichon, 5 December 1859, The George Eliot Letters, III, pp. 227–8. Oddie, Dickens and Carlyle, p. 152. T. Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. A. M. D. Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921), p. 1.



Notes


48.

G. Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), with an introduction by David Lodge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 113. G. Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), with an introduction by Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 557. G. Eliot, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), with an introduction by Peter Coveney (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 75. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 604. P. Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1913 (London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 30. G. Eliot, Middlemarch, with an introduction by W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 39. Ibid., p. 244. Ibid., p. 245. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Narrative and History’, ELH, 41 (1974), p. 467. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 604. Hillis Miller, ‘Narrative and History’, p. 467. G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), with an introduction by A. S. Byatt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 363. N. Rotenstreich, ‘The Idea of Historical Progress and Its Assumptions’, History and Theory, 10: 1 (1971), p. 197. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 109. S. Dentith, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), p. 47. G. Eliot, ‘Shadows of the Coming Race’, in Impressions of Theophrastus Such, with an introduction by Nancy Henry (London: William Pickering, 1994). p. 137. Eliot, ‘Shadows of the Coming Race’, p. 142. T. Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, in A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, edited by G. B. Tennyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 42. Thomas Arnold was another philosopher-historian who mourned the ‘evils of our social condition’. However, there were aspects of mid-century England about which he was far more hopeful: for instance, he identified the Great Reform Act as ‘a measure of great necessity and great justice’. See ‘The Evils of our National State’ (1839), p. 485, and ‘Extracts from the Englishman’s Register: Reform’ (1831), p. 127, in The Miscellaneous Works of Thomas Arnold: Collected and Republished (London: B. Fellowes, 1845). The close textual similarities between passages from Hard Times and passages from Carlyle’s ‘Chartism’, for instance, are discussed at length in Oddie, Dickens and Carlyle: the Question of Influence (1972). T. Carlyle, ‘No. VI – Parliaments’, in Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) (London: Chapman & Hall, 1858), p. 191. See J. A. Froude, ‘Reciprocal duties of state and subject’ (II, 315), and ‘On progress’ (II, 382), in Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4 vols (London: Longmans, 1898). Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 301. T. B. Macaulay, ‘Hallam’, in Essays and Belles Lettres: Macaulay’s Critical

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69.

70.

71. 72.

73. 74.



168

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

169

and Historical Essays Newly Arranged by A. J. Grieve in Two Volumes: Vol. 1 (London: J. M. Dent, 1930), p. 31. Carlyle, ‘No. IV – The New Downing Street’, in Latter-Day Pamphlets, p. 129. Eliot, ‘Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt’, Appendix A to Felix Holt, p. 617. Eliot, ‘Address to Working Men’, p. 617. Carlyle, ‘No. VI – Parliaments’, in Latter-Day Pamphlets, p. 191. Carlyle, ‘No. I – The Present Time’, in Latter-Day Pamphlets, p. 12. Eliot, ‘Address to Working Men’, p. 617. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, p. 43. Carlyle, ‘Characteristics’, in A Carlyle Reader, p. 98. T. Carlyle, The History of the French Revolution, in Thomas Carlyle: Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 133. Carlyle, ‘On History’, in A Carlyle Reader, p. 60. Ibid. Ibid., p. 58. M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 239. S. Gilbert and S. Gubar (eds), The Madwoman in the Attic (London: Yale University Press, 1984), p. 502. Carlyle, ‘On History’, p. 62. This view of the realist novel as one in which the primary authorial intention is to represent real life is contradicted by Daniel Cottom in Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987). Cottom’s counter-argument is that George Eliot’s realism ‘was not intended to mirror life but to make life appear to possess the nature of her text’ (p. 81). This leads Cottom into drawing what is an unsustainable (and rather bizarre) conclusion, namely that George Eliot consciously manipulated the appearance of her mental reality so that it would mirror that which was privileged in her texts. J. Gerhard, ‘Hegel, Derrida, George Eliot, and the Novel’, Literature–Interpretation–Theory, 1 (1989), p. 66. Ibid. G. Lukács, ‘Art and Objective Truth’, in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin, 1970), p. 43. F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 19. Ibid., p. 31. F. Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 20. Burrow, A Liberal Descent, p. 252. C. Brooks, Signs for the Times: Symbolic Realism in the Mid-Victorian World (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), p. 11. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 184. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 139. Carlyle, ‘On History’, p. 61.



Notes


103. H. Sussman, Fact into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood (Colombus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), p. 21. 104. Ibid., p. 7. Sussman identifies Carlyle and Ruskin as the two most significant individual contributors to the typological tradition of representation in Victorian Britain. 105. L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1854) trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), p. 270 106. Carlyle, Past and Present, p. 225.

Chapter 5 Theodicy and History 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

See C. Brooks, Signs for the Times: Symbolic Realism in the Mid-Victorian World (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984). Symbolic realism is identified as the mode of artistic representation wherein all signs are laden with (deeply religious) meaning. They take their place within an overarching, broadly Christian metanarrative. F. Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 350. Though this term is derived, as Jameson acknowledges, from the writing of Louis Althusser (in fact the phrase originally appears in Spinoza), it is its Jamesonian manifestation that is of sole concern here. Whereas in Althusser, Jameson notes, the ‘absent cause’ is viewed as Capital, here it is being reinterpreted so as to apply to History. P. New, ‘Chance, Providence and Destiny in George Eliot’s Fiction’, Journal of the English Association, 34 (1985), 193. Ibid., pp. 191–2. G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), with an introduction by A. S. Byatt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 340. Ibid., p. 430. D. Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 149. G. Eliot, Romola (1863), with an introduction by Andrew Sanders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 48. Ibid., p. 168. New, ‘Chance, Providence and Destiny in George Eliot’s Fiction’, p. 193. L. Monk, Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 6. T. R. Wright, ‘Middlemarch as a Religious Novel, or Life Without God’, in Images of Belief in Literature, ed. David Jasper (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 139. J. Hillis Miller, ‘Narrative and History’, ELH, 41 (1974), p. 470. G. Eliot, Middlemarch (1872), with an introduction by W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 620. Ibid., p. 122. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. 198. Ibid., p. 514. Ibid., pp. 514–15.



170

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

171

Ibid., pp. 588–9. Unsigned review, The Atlas, 14 April 1860, in George Eliot and Her Readers, eds L. Lerner and J. Holmstrom (London: Bodley Head, 1966), p. 30. M. J. Lupton, ‘Women Writers and Death by Drowning’, in Amid Visions and Revisions: Poetry and Criticism on Literature and the Arts, ed. Burney J. Hollis (Baltimore, MD: Morgan State University Press, 1985), p. 100. P. Boumelha, ‘Realism and the Ends of Feminism’, in Realism, ed. Lilian R. Furst (London: Longman, 1992), p. 328. Ibid., p. 329. J. King, Tragedy in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 16. G. Eliot, ‘R. W. Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect’, in Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, eds A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 271. J. Russell-Perkin, A Reception-History of George Eliot’s Fiction (London: UMI, 1990), p. 47. F. Nietzsche, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: Random House, 1927), p. 982. G. Levine, The Realistic Imagination (London: Chicago University Press, 1981), p. 15. G. Eliot, Silas Marner (1860), with an introduction by Q. D. Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 80. Ibid., p. 178. Donald Hawes, in ‘Chance in Silas Marner’, Journal of the English Association, 31 (1982), 213–18, disputes this. His view is that the text is underwritten by a strong notion of chance happening, ‘virtually reversing George Eliot’s dictum’ (p. 215) of cause and effect. G. Eliot, Felix Holt (1866), with an introduction by Peter Coveney (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) p. 124. Ibid., p. 124. T. Carlyle, ‘Chartism’, in Sartor Resartus, Lectures on Heroes, Chartism, Past and Present (London: Chapman & Hall, 1888), p. 33. G. Eliot, ‘Middlemarch’ Notebooks: A Transcription, eds J. C. Pratt and V. A. Neufeldt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 10. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 570. Unsigned review, The Examiner, 7 December 1872, in Lerner and Holmstrom (eds), p. 87. B. Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot (London: Athlone, 1959), p. 135. E. A. Baker, The History of the English Novel Vol. IX: The Day Before Yesterday (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1950), p. 45. B. Paris, Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1965), p. 122. G. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 413. M. Larkin, Man and Society in Nineteenth-Century Realism: Determinism and Literature (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 94. Paris, Experiments in Life, p. 122. C. Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘the Woman Question’ (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 12.



Notes


45.

G. Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (1859), with an introduction by David Lodge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 374. Eliot, Romola, p. 89. F. Jameson, ‘Foreword’ to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. xxiv. T. Vargish, The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1985), p. 162. The divided nature of Eliot’s fiction has been the subject of much criticism. However, the most conspicuous debate has centred on Daniel Deronda. Victorian reviewers commented on the problematics of the structure of the novel, but the notion that the novel was fatally fractured was crystallized by F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition (1948). The history of Eliot criticism has since been littered with reworkings of what is in truth the same assumption. In the wake of Leavis came Maurice Beebe’s ‘Visions and Creators: The Unity of Daniel Deronda’, Boston University Studies (Autumn 1955), pp. 166–77, David Carroll’s ‘The Unity of Daniel Deronda’, Essays in Criticism, 9 (1959), pp. 369–80, and Jerome Beaty’s ‘Daniel Deronda and the Question of Unity in Fiction’, Victorian Newsletter, 15 (1959), pp. 16–20. More recently there have been Deirdre David, Fictions of Resolution (1981), Derek Cohen and Deborah Heller (eds), Jewish Presences in English Literature (1990) and David Morse, High Victorian Culture (1993). G. Levine, ‘Determinism and Responsibility in the Works of George Eliot’, PMLA, 72 (1962), p. 274. S. Dentith, A Rhetoric of the Real: Studies in Post-Enlightenment Writing from 1790 to the Present (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1990), p. 112. Ibid., p. 9. T. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: NLB, 1976), p. 119. F. Bonaparte, The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot’s Poetic Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 1979), p. 149. Ibid., p. 149. F. Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 20. R. Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), p. 62. T. Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, in Sartor Resartus, Lectures on Heroes, Chartism, Past and Present, p. 185. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., p. 219. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 896. E. Dowden, ‘Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda’, Contemporary Review, 29 (1877), p. 356. Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, p. 332. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 30. Jameson objects to this strategy, citing the re-reading of the Old Testament in light of the subsequent life of Christ as an undesirable example of this. In White Hero, Black Beast: Racism, Sexism and the Mask of Masculinity (London: Pluto, 1979), Paul Hoch argues that the dominant binary oppo-

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.



172

66.

67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72.

173

sition within nineteenth-century representations of masculinity was that between the ‘Playboy’ and the ‘Puritan’. This has some resemblance to the tension being delineated in this chapter. However, it fails to address the implications of what I believe to be the key issues, namely religion and nationalism. H. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 2–3. Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, p. 185. Ibid., p. 35. J. Buckley, The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence (London: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 29. This debate was central within nineteenth-century German historiography, especially in relation to Leopold von Ranke and the influence of the professionalization of the discipline of history in the 1870s in England. Ranke’s contention was that history would tell its own story, a story would emerge from the facts, and all the historian had to do was to depict history wie es eigentlich gewesen (‘as it really happened’). The apparent naivety of this remark has precipitated a great deal of hostile criticism for Ranke, with his words being interpreted as reflecting a grandiose arrogance which it is doubtful he intended. E. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 93. Levine, The Realistic Imagination, p. 269. Eliot, ‘Thomas Carlyle’, in Byatt and Warren (eds), p. 344.

Chapter 6 Imagining the National Present 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

G. Eliot, Romola (1863), with an introduction by Andrew Sanders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 247. R. Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology (London: Cape, 1967), p. 73. See A. J. P. Taylor, Essays in English History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976). P. B. M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. xii. H. Sidgwick, ‘The Historical Method’, Mind, 2 (1886), p. 219. C. Parker, The English Historical Tradition Since 1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), p. 17. Tout does show some inconsistency. He recognized himself as part of an emerging trend, ‘a reaction . . . against the tradition which would make the parliament the central point of English mediaeval political institutions’ (p. 6). Therein he rejected all-encompassing metanarratives of English historical evolution: ‘we no longer draw the deep dividing line between French and English history’ (p. 7). However, his guard slips somewhat on occasion: ‘We are still rightly proud of the English constitution, of the continuity between our modern democratic institutions and our parliamentary institutions of the middle ages, and of the way in



Notes

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography which in modern times the English parliamentary system has suggested the form of free institutions to nearly every civilised nation’ (p. 1). Perhaps more than anything else this illustrates the durability of the Whig myth of Englishness. See T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England: The Wardrobe, the Chamber and the Small Seals Vols. I-–IV (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1928). J. H. Round, ‘Historical Research’, The Nineteenth Century, 44 (1898), p. 1005. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Mediaeval England, p. 7. F. W. Maitland, ‘Body Politic’, in Selected Essays, eds H. D. Hazeltine, G. Lapsley and P. H. Winfield (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), p. 241. Ibid., p. 248. Ibid. F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 515. Ibid., p. 516. Ibid. M. E. Wohlfarth, ‘Daniel Deronda and the Politics of Nationalism’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 53 (September 1998), 189. GE to Maria Lewis, 6–8 November 1838, The George Eliot Letters: Vols. 1–9, ed. Gordon S. Haight (London: Yale University Press, 1954–78), I, p. 13. GE to John Sibree, Jr, 11 February 1848, The George Eliot Letters, I, p. 247. G. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 22. In both the Folger Shakespeare Library Notebook and the Yale University Library Notebook (copies of which are held as M892 and M890 of the British Library Microfilm Collection), the following quotation is present: ‘Out of the whole population of the world 31.2% are Buddhists, 13.4% are Brahamists, 15.7% are Mohammedans, 30.7% are Christians, 0.3% are Jews’ (the quotation is dated August 1868). These statistics indicate a sustained interest in the minority status of the Jews. GE to Charles Bray, 12 November 1854, The George Eliot Letters, II, p. 185. B. Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 43. This advertisement is discussed at greater length in Carol A. Martin, George Eliot’s Serial Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), p. 236. G. Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876), with an introduction by Barbara Hardy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 443. All subsequent page numbers from the novel are given in parentheses within the main body of the text. GE to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 29 October 1876, The George Eliot Letters, VI, p. 302. E. S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’: the Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 233. J. A. Mangan, ‘Social Darwinism and Upper-Class Education in Late Victorian and Edwardian England’, in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class



174

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49.

175

Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, eds J. A. Mangan and J. Walvin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 142. E. Bulwer-Lytton, Pelham, Or Adventures of a Gentleman (London: Routledge, 1885), p. 255. B. Raina, ‘Daniel Deronda: A View of Grandcourt’, Studies in the Novel, 17 (1985), p. 377. I. Howe, ‘George Eliot and the Jews’, Partisan Review, 46 (1979), p. 365. Ibid., p. 370. This point is made at greater length by Herbert J. Levine, ‘The Marriage of Allegory and Realism in Daniel Deronda’, Genre, 15 (1982), pp. 421–45. K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 13. Introduction to The Myths We Live By, eds Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 25. E. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 41. G. Eliot, Middlemarch (1872), with an introduction by W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), the Finale, p. 896. G. Levine, The Realistic Imagination (London: Chicago University Press, 1981), p. 4. S. Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The MakeBelieve of a Beginning (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 176. F. W. J. Hemmings, The Age of Realism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 360. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, p. 286. G. Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin, 1962), p. 40. Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society, p. 45. U. C. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 116. W. Baker, George Eliot and Judaism (Salzburg: Salzburg University Press, 1975), p. 21. J. Neusner, ‘The Historical Event as a Cultural Indicator: The Case of Judaism’, History and Theory, 30: 2 (1991), 152. See W. Baker (ed.), Some George Eliot Notebooks: An Edition of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library’s George Eliot Holograph Notebooks, MSS 707, 708, 709, 710, 711, ed. William Baker (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1976–85), Vol. III, MS 711, p. 15. The influence of Deutsch on Eliot’s creation of Daniel Deronda is dealt with in more depth in Mary Kay Temple, ‘Emanuel Deutsch’s Literary Remains: A New Source for George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda’, South-Atlantic Review (May 1989), pp. 59–73. Temple is concerned, for example, with the similarities between the character of Mordecai and Deutsch. W. Baker, ‘George Eliot’s Reading in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Historians: A Note on the Background of Daniel Deronda’, Victorian Studies, 15 (1972), 463. The essential difference between the two is that one is a religious conception of the Jewish nation and the other is a purely secular one. It is the difference between what Hugh Seton-Watson has identified as ‘a legal and political



Notes

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography organisation, with the power to require obedience and loyalty from its citizens’ (the state), and ‘a community of people, whose members are bound together by a sense of solidarity, a common culture, a national consciousness’ (the nation). See Nations and State: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 1. Many thanks to Irith Shaloor for crystallizing these differences for me. R. Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 213. P. New, ‘Chance, Providence and Destiny in George Eliot’s Fiction’, Journal of the English Association, 34 (1985), p. 197. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 19. W. G. Pollard, Chance and Providence: God’s Action in a World Governed by Scientific Law (London: Faber & Faber, 1958), p. 43. Eliot familiarized herself with the writings and thoughts of the Greek Atomists by reading Fleeming Jenkins’s article, ‘The Atomic Theory of Lucretius’, North British Review (June 1868), pp. 211–42, while she was working on Middlemarch (Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, p. 439). Jenkins’s statement that ‘Lucretius seizes the opportunity of stating that men think things are done by divine power because they do not understand how they happen’ (p. 212) appears to have been particularly influential. C. Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus: A Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), p. 51. Ibid., p. 325. Aristotle, ‘Physics’, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. with an introduction by Richard Mckeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 245. Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, p. 143. H. T. Buckle, History of Civilization in England in Two Volumes, 2nd edn (London: J. W. Parker, 1858), p. 7. Buckle also notes that ‘the only remedy for superstition is knowledge’, II, p. 142. B. Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, 2nd edn (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951), p. 517. Russell states this in the form of an equation: ‘uncertain knowledge’ = I – p (where p is credibility (in terms of the laws of probability)). L. Monk, Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 4. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 9. G. Levine, ‘George Eliot’s Hypothesis of Reality’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35 (1980), p. 5. J. Liu, ‘Pregnant Movements in the Past: History and Narrative in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda’, Fu-Jen Studies: Literature and Linguistics (Taiwan), 23 (1990), pp. 116–35, offers a differing interpretation of this staggered narrative. She sees it as reinforcing the ‘followability and the cause–effect sequence of the plot’ (p. 124). It is an interpretation that I find wholly unconvincing. J. Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, 5th edn (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 88. The discussion is of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power.



176

67.

68.

69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84.

177

D. Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation, with a foreword by T. Eagleton (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987), p. 176. E. Rosenman, ‘The House and the Home: Money, Women and the Family in the Banker’s Magazine and Daniel Deronda’, Women’s Studies, 17 (1990), pp. 179–92. G. Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), with an introduction by Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 411. B. Swann, ‘George Eliot’s Ecumenical Jew, or, The Novel as Outdoor Temple’, Novel, 8 (1974), p. 39. It is interesting to note Aristotle’s use of the term ‘automaton’, or more accurately aytomaton, which he takes to mean Chance as it happens in nature. The croupier presides, metaphorically at least, over the workings of Chance (the roulette wheel), a sphere in which things happen by accident. This includes Gwendolen’s loss of fortune. The counterpart of this term is the notion of tyche, which refers to the same random quality as it pertains to the workings of the mind. For a wider-ranging discussion of these Aristotelian terms see Monk, Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel. B. Semmel, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (London: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 15. G. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1878), ed. Nancy Henry (London: William Pickering, 1994), p. 155. G. Eliot, ‘A College Breakfast Party’, in Collected Poems, ed. with an introduction by Lucien Jenkins (London: Skoob, 1989), p. 172. Ibid., p. 173. J. Russell Perkin, A Reception-History of George Eliot’s Fiction (London: UMI, 1990), p. 64. D. David, Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels: ‘North and South’, ‘Our Mutual Friend’, ‘Daniel Deronda’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 202. Baker, George Eliot and Judaism, p. 180. This is discussed at greater length in Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: NLB, 1976), p. 119. W. H. Mallock on George Eliot, Unsigned Review, Edinburgh Review October 1879, in George Eliot: the Critical Heritage, ed. David Carroll (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 457. S. Nalbantian, Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Crisis in Values (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 1. Ibid., p. 15. Parker, The English Historical Tradition Since 1850, p. 17. D. D. Stone, Novelists in a Changing World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 11.



Notes

178


1. GE to William Blackwood, 6 May 1859, The George Eliot Letters Vols. 1–9, ed. Gordon S. Haight (London: Yale University Press, 1954–78), III, p. 66. 2. R. B. Du Plessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of TwentiethCentury Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 197. 3. Ibid., p. 5. 4. G. Beer, ‘Beyond Determinism: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf’, in Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 80. 5. N. Paxton, ‘Feminism and Positivism in George Eliot’s Romola’, in Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the English-Speaking World, ed. Rhoda B. Nathan (London: Greenwood, 1986), p. 149. 6. This alternative historiographical tradition has been the subject of a series of critical studies in recent times. Notable in this area are Bonnie G. Smith’s ‘The Contribution of Women to Modern Historiography in Great Britain, France, and the United States, 1750–1940’, American Historical Review, 89 (1984), pp. 709–32. See also Rohan Maitzen’s ‘“This Feminine Preserve”: Historical Biographies by Victorian Women’, Victorian Studies, 38 (1995), pp. 371–93, and Natalie Zemon Davis’s ‘Gender and Genre: Women As Historical Writers, 1400–1820’, in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme (London: New York University Press, 1980). 7. F. Palliser, History of Lace (1864), eds M. Jourdain and Alice Dryden (London: Sampson Low, Marsden, 1910), p. 465. 8. C. A. Senf, ‘The Vampire in Middlemarch and George Eliot’s Quest for Historical Reality’, New Orleans Review, 14 (Spring 1987), p. 94. 9. Smith, ‘The Contribution of Women to Modern Historiography in Great Britain, France, and the United States, 1750–1940’, 89, p. 716. 10. A. Strickland, Lives of the Queens of Scotland and English Princesses Connected with the Regal Succession of Great Britain Vol. I (London: William Blackwood, 1850), p. viii. 11. Ibid., p. vii. 12. A. Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest Vol. I (London: Henry Colburn, 1854), p. xiv. 13. Strickland, Lives of the Queens of Scotland and English Princesses Connected with the Regal Succession of Great Britain Vol. I, p. xiii. 14. See Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England from the Norman Conquest Vol. I. However, it should be noted that this evidential ‘anxiety’ was not confined to female historians; an assertion of the authority of historical sources was common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historiography, an attempt to assert the seriousness and rigour of the work. 15. There has been a great deal written, especially in recent years, concerning the development and status of women’s history. Much is made of the relationship between women’s history and oral evidence, and also of the need to create fresh methods of representation. For example, Berteke Waaldijk notes in ‘Of Stories and Sources: Feminist History’ (in Women’s



Chapter 7 Unwritten Landscapes: Imagining the National Future

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

179

Studies and Culture: A Feminist Introduction, edited by Rosemarie Buikema and Anneke Smelik (London: Zed, 1993)), that women’s historiography ‘increasingly questions – both implicitly and explicitly – the ways in which historical knowledge is produced’ (p. 23). Further to this, Selma Leydesdorff, in her ‘Politics, Identification and the Writing of Women’s History’ (in Current Issues in Women’s History, eds Arina Angerman, Geerte Binnema, Annemieke Keunen, Vefie Poels and Jacqueline Zirkzee (London: Routledge, 1989)) sees women’s historiography as part of the ongoing quest to identify a past with which women can identify. It is effectively an attempt to delineate a narrative of the oppressed, she claims. A. Jameson, Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical and Historical, 2 vols (London: Saunders & Otley, 1836), I, p. 18. For a more wide-ranging discussion of Jameson see Judith Johnston’s Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997). GE Journal, 2–3 February 1858, in The George Eliot Letters, II, p. 430. Both volumes appear in A Writer’s Notebook (1854–1879) and Uncollected Writings, ed. J. Wiesenfarth (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1981), entry 41. G. Eliot, Middlemarch (1872), with an introduction by W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 112. G. Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), with an introduction by David Lodge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 316. Ibid., p. 336. Smith, ‘The Contribution of Women to Modern Historiography in Great Britain, France, and the United States, 1750–1940’, p. 720. Ibid., p. 730. Some critics argue that historical narratives are ubiquitous in nineteenthcentury historiography, effectively that however ‘objective’ a historian may have believed themselves, it was impossible to avoid (even if only by implication) a narrative configuration of historical events. An example is Gianna Pomata, in ‘Versions of Narrative: Overt and Covert Narrators in Nineteenth-Century Historiography’, History Workshop, Issue 27 (Spring 1989), pp. 1–17. L. Mulvey, ‘Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience’, History Workshop, Issue 23 (Spring 1987), pp. 3–19. J. King, Tragedy in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 77. L. M. Robbins, ‘Mill and Middlemarch: The Progress of Public Opinion’, Victorian Newsletter, 31 (1967), p. 38. Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 896. E. J. Sabiston, The Prison of Womanhood (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 111. J. Uglow, George Eliot (London: Virago, 1987), p. 216. M. S. Greene, ‘Another Look at Dorothea’s Marriages’, Literature and Psychology, 33: 1 (1987), p. 31. B. Hill, ‘The First Feminism’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity Vol. 2: Minorities and Outsiders, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 130.



Notes


32.

This is indicted in Woolf’s Orlando (1928). As Gillian Beer points out in ‘Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past’, in The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, eds Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (London: Macmillan, 1989), ‘Woolf is particularly concerned and angrily amused by their [women] absence from the historical record’. Thus ‘she is responding to the assumption of then new social historians, most notably G. M. Trevelyan’s History of England (1926), that women can be subsumed under men’s concerns’ (p. 79). Hill, ‘The First Feminism’, p. 123. J. Mackay and P. Thane, ‘The Englishwoman’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, eds Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 191. Hill, ‘The First Feminism’, p. 123. Ibid. Ibid. P. Hoch, White Hero, Black Beast: Racism, Sexism and the Mask of Masculinity (London: Pluto, 1979), p. 116. P. J. Walker, ‘”I live but not yet I for Christ liveth in me”: Men and Masculinity in the Salvation Army 1865–90’, in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, eds M. Roper and J. Tosh (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 92. G. Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 181. N. Yuval-Davis, ‘National Reproduction and “the Demographic Race” in Israel’, in Woman–Nation–State, eds N. Yuval-Davis and F. Anthias (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 106. R. Lewis, Gendering Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 208. T. Brennan, ‘The national longing for form’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 47. Yuval-Davis and Anthias, in Woman–Nation–State, p. 7, discuss these five major influences on ethnic and national culture at greater length. G. Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987) p. 125. C. Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘the Woman Question’ (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 1. K. B. Linehan, ‘Mixed Politics: The Critique of Imperialism in Daniel Deronda’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 34 (1992), p. 325. S. L. Meyer, Gender and Empire: Figurative Structures in the Fiction of Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, DPhil Dissertation, Yale University, 1989, p. 181. See D. Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation, with a foreword by Terry Eagleton (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987), p. xxi. G. Eliot, ‘Armgart’, in Collected Poems, with an introduction by Lucien Jenkins (London: Skoob, 1989), p. 132. D. Heller, ‘George Eliot’s Jewish Feminist’, Atlantis (Canada), 8: 2 (1983), p. 38. Crosby, The Ends of History, p. 1. Ibid., p. 42.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53.



180

54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

78. 79. 80.

181

Cottom, Social Figures, p. xxi. K. Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Virago, 1987), p. 139. W. H. Epstein, ‘Biographical Criticism and the “Great” Woman of Letters: The Example of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf’, in Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991), p. 87. E. A. Daniels, ‘A Meredithian Glance at Gwendolen Harleth’, in George Eliot: A Centenary Tribute, eds G. S. Haight and R. T. Van Arsdel (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 31. Ibid., p. 36. B. Hochman, The Test of Character (London: Associated University Press, 1983), p. 131. Zimmerman, ‘George Eliot and Feminism’, in Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the English-Speaking World, ed. Rhoda B. Nathan (London: Greenwood, 1986), p. 235. G. Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876), with an introduction by Barbara Hardy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 78. The fact that no one went to the North Pole until 1909 defines the quest as a dim future prospect in 1865. B. Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 1. Ibid., p. 333. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 278. Ibid., p. 337. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 875. Ibid., p. 876. E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 226. G. Beer, ‘Beyond Determinism: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf’, in Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus. G. Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin, 1962), p. 36. R. Stevenson, Modernist Fiction – An Introduction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), p. 152. G. Levine, ‘Romola as Fable’, in Critical Essays on George Eliot (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 93. This point is also made by Levine in ‘Romola as Fable’, p. 93. This is especially the case in the ‘Drifting Away’ section, in which Romola sails away to a plague-ridden, vaguely identified island and tends the people back to health before ultimately being proclaimed as their new Madonna. Even this, as Deirdre David points out, is qualified. ‘Patriarchal authority’ is maintained, she claims, in the way that Romola teaches her young son about Petrarch while not doing so for her 13–year-old daughter. See Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet N. Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 195. Ibid., p. 142. Uglow, George Eliot, p. 238. Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy, in Collected Poems, p. 309.



Notes


81. 82.

Ibid., p. 443. T. Lovell, ‘Gender and Englishness in Villette’, in Political Gender: Texts and Contexts, eds Sally Ledger, Josephine McDonagh and Jane Spencer (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), p. 41. It is noted that this is a partial representation of feminist debates on the relationship between feminism, nationalism and imperialism; the intention is not to suggest otherwise, but more to illustrate the way in which George Eliot’s fictions tend to reinforce this view. The other main sphere of criticism vis-à-vis women and national/racial identity includes the work of critics such as Gayatri Spivak. For example, in ‘Imperialism and Sexual Difference’, Oxford Literary Review, 8 (1986), pp. 225–40, she rejects the ‘truth of global sisterhood’ (p. 226) and laments the fact that much feminist criticism reinforces the racial hegemony implicit in masculinist ideology. In ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), pp. 243–61, she remarks how ‘it seems particularly unfortunate when the emergent perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism’ (p. 243). G. Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860), with an introduction by A. S. Byatt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 494. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 71. Ibid., p. 95. W. B. Warner, Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ (London: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 19. Ibid., p. 20. Epstein, ‘Biographical Criticism and the “Great Woman” of Letters: The Example of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf’, p. 87. A. Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 5.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

Conclusion: Beyond Victorian Historiography 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

Though falling outside the parameters of this study, Hegel is obviously fundamental to a wider appreciation of the notion of History as a totality. In The Philosophy of History, for example, he defines the term History as that which marks decisive actions and world-stirring events. This places a stress on the political and often military dimension of existence, unsurprising bearing in mind Hegel’s fascination with Napoleon. See Hegel, The Philosophy of History in Three Volumes, trans. E. S. Haldane (London: Lincoln, 1995). F. Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 49. Ibid., p. 169. G. Lukács, ‘Art and Objective Truth’, in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin, 1970), p. 38. M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 239. J. Reilly, Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and



182

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

183

George Eliot (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 10. M. Y. Mason, ‘Middlemarch and History’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25 (1971), pp. 417–31. In The Order of Things Foucault identifies the nineteenth century as the ‘age of history’, when ‘a profound historicity penetrates into the heart of things, isolates and defines them in their own coherence, imposes upon them the forms of order implied by the continuity of time’ (p. xxiii). T. Lovell, Picture of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics and Pleasure (London: BFI, 1980), p. 85. Ibid., p. 84. Bakhtin defines this plurality of narrative/authorial voices in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) and also The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin (London: University of Texas, 1981). H. James, ‘Preface to The American’ (1877), in Novelists on the Novel, ed. M. Allott (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 56. L. Stephen, George Eliot (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 51. The origin of the modern controversy regarding ‘the end of history’ was Francis Fukayama’s essay of the same name, which appeared in The National Interest (Summer 1989), pp. 3–18. In it Fukayama claims that ‘mankind’s ideological evolution’ has ended, resulting in the ‘universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ (p. 4). In the conclusion to his Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) Terry Eagleton envisages the study not of individual academic subject areas, but of ‘signifying practices’ (p. 205) more generally, a discipline in which the literary text and the historiographical text would be awarded the same significance/status. Simon During, in the introduction to The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993), suggests something similar, which he identifies as the emergent discipline of ‘Cultural Studies’. Notable in this area has been the work of Hayden White, for example Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) and Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Also relevant are Andrew P. Norman’s ‘Telling It Like It Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own Terms’, History and Theory, 30: 2 (1991), pp. 119–35, and B. C. Hurst’s ‘The Myth of Historical Evidence’, History and Theory, 20: 3 (1981), pp. 278–90. Norman argues for the inevitability of narrative discourse in historiography, and Hurst goes further with this and argues that there is no such thing as objective historical evidence: all evidence comes ‘narrative-laden’ (p. 278) and as such discourse-specific. D. Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists (London: Constable, 1934), p. 3. Cecil identifies Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope as the other literary ‘monarchs’. G. Bullett, George Eliot: Her Life and Books (London: Collins, 1947), p. 13. Perhaps the most obvious exception to this was Virginia Woolf in her essay ‘George Eliot’ (1921), in Collected Essays Vol. I (London: Hogarth,



Notes

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography 1966). Though she recognized the way in which Eliot had ‘become one of the butts for youth to laugh at’ (p. 196), she praised her as a fellow feminist. ‘For her, too, the burden and the complexity of womanhood were not enough; she must reach beyond the sanctuary and pluck for herself the strange bright fruits of art and knowledge’ (p. 204). Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-15

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Book-length studies Adam, Ian (ed.), Essays on ‘Middlemarch’: This Particular Web (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1975). Alley, Henry, The Quest for Anonymity: The Novels of George Eliot (Newark: Delaware University Press, 1997). Allott, Miriam (ed.), Novelists on the Novel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959). Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Angerman, Arina, Binnema, Geerte, Keunen, Annemieke, Poels, Vefie & Zirkzee, Jacqueline (eds), Current Issues in Women’s History (London: Routledge, 1989). Appleman, Philip, Madden, William A. and Wolff, Michael (eds), 1859: Entering an Age of Crisis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959). Arac, Jonathan, Commissioned Spirits: The Shaping of Social Motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville, and Hawthorne (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979).



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Aron, Raymond, Main Currents in Sociological Thought Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Ashton, Rosemary, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800–1860 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Ashton, Rosemary, George Eliot: A Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996). Bailey, Cyril, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus: A Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928). Baker, E. A., The History of the English Novel Vol. IX: The Day Before Yesterday (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1950). Baker, William, George Eliot and Judaism (Salzburg: Salzburg University Press, 1975). Baker, William, The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue of Their Books at Dr. Williams’s Library, London (London: Garland, 1977). Baker-Smith, Dominic and Barfoott, C. C. (eds), Between Dream and Nature: Essays on Utopia and Dystopia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1978). Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (London: University of Texas, 1981). Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Bald, Marjory A., Women-Writers of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963). Bann, Stephen, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Barker, Francis, Hulme, Peter, Iversen, Margaret and Loxley, Diana (eds), Europe and Its Others: Vol. 1 (Colchester: Essex University Press, 1985). Barthes, Roland, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology (London: Cape, 1967). Beaty, Jerome, ‘Middlemarch’ from Notebook to Novel: A Study of George Eliot’s Creative Method (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1960). Beer, Gillian, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Ark, 1985). Beer, Gillian, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1986). Belsey, Catherine and Moore, Jane (eds), The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1989). Bhabha, Homi K. (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). Blaas, P. B. M., Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (London: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978). Bonaparte, Felicia, The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot’s Poetic Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 1979). Born, Daniel, The Birth of Liberal Guilt in the English Novel: Charles Dickens to H. G. Wells (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Brantlinger, Patrick, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (London: Cornell University Press, 1988). Brooks Chris, Signs for the Times: Symbolic Realism in the Mid-Victorian World (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984). Brundage, Anthony, The People’s Historian: John Richard Green and the Writing of



194

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History in Victorian England (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994). Buckley, Jerome H., The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence (London: Harvard University Press, 1967). Buckley, Jerome H. (ed.), The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, 3rd edn (London: Harvard University Press, 1977). Buikema, Rosemarie and Smelik, Anneke (eds), Women’s Studies and Culture: A Feminist Introduction (London: Zed, 1993). Bullett, Gerald, George Eliot: Her Life and Books (London: Collins, 1947). Burrow, J. W., A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Butterfield, Herbert, The Englishman and his History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944). Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965). Carr, E. H., What is History? (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1987). Cecil, David, Early Victorian Novelists (London: Constable, 1934). Cheyette, Bryan, Constructions of ‘the Jew’ in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations 1875–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Cohen, Derek and Heller, Deborah (eds), Jewish Presences in English Literature (London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990). Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996). Colls, Robert and Dodd, Philip (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986). Cottom, Daniel, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation, with a foreword by T. Eagleton (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1987). Crosby, Christina, The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘the Woman Question’ (London: Routledge, 1991). Culler, A. Dwight, The Victorian Mirror of History (London: Yale University Press, 1985). Culler, Jonathan, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, 5th edn (London: Routledge, 1993). Dale, Peter Allan, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold, Pater (London: Harvard University Press, 1977). David, Deirdre, Fictions of Resolution in Three Victorian Novels: ‘North and South’, ‘Our Mutual Friend’, ‘Daniel Deronda’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). David, Deirdre, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (London: Macmillan, 1987). Dentith, Simon, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester, 1986). Dentith, Simon, A Rhetoric of the Real: Studies in Post-Enlightenment Writing from 1790 to the Present (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1990). Dollimore, Jonathan and Sinfield, Alan (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (London: Manchester University Press, 1994). Dunn, W. H., James Anthony Froude: A Biography Vol. I – 1818–1856 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). Du Plessis, Rachel Blau, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985).



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Hollis, Burney J. (ed.), Amid Visions and Revisions: Poetry and Criticism on Literature and the Arts (Baltimore, MD: Morgan State University Press, 1985). Hughes, Kathryn, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London: Fourth Estate, 1998). Jacobus, Mary (ed.), Women Writing and Writing About Women (London: Croom Helm, 1979). Jameson, Frederic, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, 2nd edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974). Jameson, Frederic, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Jameson, Frederic, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1993). Jann, Rosemary, The Art and Science of Victorian History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985). Jasper, David (ed.), Images of Belief in Literature (London: Macmillan, 1984). Johnston, Judith, Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997). Kamenka, Eugene (ed.), Nationalism: the Nature and Evolution of an Idea (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973). Karl, Frederick, George Eliot: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1995). Kaufmann, David, George Eliot and Judaism: An Attempt to Appreciate ‘Daniel Deronda’, trans. J. W. Ferrier (London: Blackwood, 1877). Kenyon, J. P., The History Men: The Historical Profession in England Since the Renaissance (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983). Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). King, Jeanette, Tragedy in the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Knoepflmacher, U. C., Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1965). Knoepflmacher, U. C., George Eliot’s Early Novels – the Limits of Realism (Berkeley: California University Press, 1968). Kobler, Franz, The Vision Was There: A History of the British Movement for the Restoration of the Jews to Palestine (London: Lincolns-Prager, 1956). Kosicki, Henry (ed.), Developments in Modern Historiography, with an introduction by Sidney Monas (London: Macmillan, 1993). Kosicki, Henry (ed.), Western and Russian Historiography: Recent Views, with an introduction by Sidney Monas (London: Macmillan, 1993). Labalme, Patricia H (ed.), Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past (London: New York University Press, 1980). Leavis, F. R., The Great Tradition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962). Ledger, Sally, McDonagh, Josephine and Spencer, Jane (eds), Political Gender: Texts and Contexts (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994). Levine, George, The Realistic Imagination (London: Chicago University Press, 1981). Levine, George, Darwin and the Novelists (London: Chicago University Press, 1991). Lewis, Reina, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996). Light, Alison, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991).



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Lodge, David, Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature (London: Routledge, 1991). Lovell, Terry, Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics and Pleasure (London: BFI, 1980). Löwith, Karl, Nature, History, and Existentialism and Other Essays in the Philosophy of History, ed. with an introduction by Arnold Levison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966). Lukács, Georg, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin, 1962). Lukács, Georg, Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin, 1970). Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, trans. from the German by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Pelican, 1981). Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, with a Preface by Fredric Jameson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). MacCabe, Colin, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan, 1979). McCobb, Anthony, George Eliot’s Knowledge of German Life and Letters (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1982). Mangan, J. A., and Walvin, J. (eds), Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). Martin, Carol A., George Eliot’s Serial Fiction (Colombus: Ohio State University Press, 1994). Melman, Billie, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (London: Macmillan, 1992). Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics (London: Virago, 1987). Monk, Leland, Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). Morse, David, High Victorian Culture (London: Macmillan, 1993). Nalbantian, Suzanne, Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Crisis in Values (London: Macmillan, 1983). Nash, Christopher (ed.), Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytellers in the Sciences, Philosophy and Literature (London: Routledge, 1994). Nathan, Rhoda B. (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Women Writers of the EnglishSpeaking World (London: Greenwood, 1986). Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Laurence (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988). Newman, Gerald, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987). Newton, K. M., George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (London: Macmillan, 1981). Oddie, William, Dickens and Carlyle: the Question of Influence (London: Centenary Press, 1972). Paris, Bernard J., Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1965). Parker, Andrew, Russo, Mary, Sommer, Doris and Yaeger, Patricia (eds), Nationalisms and Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1992). Parker, Christopher, The English Historical Tradition Since 1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990).



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Patrides, C. A. and Wittreich, Joseph (eds), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents and Repercussions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Perkin, J. Russell, A Reception-History of George Eliot’s Fiction (London: UMI, 1990). Pollard, William G., Chance and Providence: God’s Action in a World Governed by Scientific Law (London: Faber & Faber, 1958). Reilly, Jim, Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot (London: Routledge, 1993). Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, Vol. III, eds Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988). Roberts, Neil, George Eliot: Her Beliefs and Her Art (London: Elek, 1975). Roper, M., and Tosh, J. (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991). Rosenberg, John D., Carlyle and the Burden of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). Sabiston, E. J., The Prison of Womanhood (London: Macmillan, 1987). Said, Edward, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). Said, Edward, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber & Faber, 1984). Said, Edward, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Said, Edward, The Question of Palestine, 4th edn (London: Vintage, 1992). Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994). Samuel, Raphael (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity Vol. 1: History and Politics (London: Routledge, 1989). Samuel, Raphael (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity Vol. 2: Minorities and Outsiders (London: Routledge, 1989). Samuel, Raphael (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity Vol. 3: National Fictions (London: Routledge, 1989). Samuel, Raphael and Thompson, Paul (eds), The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 1990). Sanders, Andrew, The Victorian Historical Novel 1840–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1978). Semmel, Bernard, The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire: Theories of Imperialism from Adam Smith to Lenin (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Semmel, Bernard, George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance (London: Oxford University Press, 1994). Seton-Watson, Hugh, Nations and State: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (London: Methuen, 1977). Shaffer, E. S., ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The Fall of Jerusalem’: Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature 1770–1880 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Shaw, Harry E., The Forms of Historical Fiction (London: Cornell University Press, 1983). Shine, Hill, Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians: The Concept of Historical Periodicity (New York: Octagon, 1971). Shuttleworth, Sally, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984).



Bibliography


Sprinkler, Michael (ed.), Edward Said: A Critical Reader, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). Stephen, Leslie, George Eliot (London: Macmillan, 1904). Stevenson, Randall, Modernist Fiction – An Introduction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992). Stone, Donald David, Novelists in a Changing World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). Sussman, Herbert, Fact into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood (Colombus: Ohio State University Press, 1979). Sussman, Herbert, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Taylor, A. J. P., Essays in English History, 4th reprint (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). Todorov, Tzvetan (ed.), French Literary Theory Today: A Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Uglow, Jennifer, George Eliot (London: Virago, 1987). Vargish, Thomas, The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction (Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1985). Warner, William Beatty, Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ (London: Cornell University Press, 1986). White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). White, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973). Wood, David (ed.), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation (London: Routledge, 1991). Woolf, Virginia, Collected Essays Vol. 1 (London: Hogarth, 1966). Wright, T. R., The Religion of Humanity: the Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Young, Robert, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1995). Yuval-Davis, Nira and Anthias, Floya (eds), Woman–Nation–State (London: Macmillan, 1989).



200

Acton, Lord, 33, 34, 60 Adam Bede, 1, 4, 16, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 38, 39, 42, 43, 45, 48–50, 72, 75, 78, 83, 89, 114, 121, 131, 134–5, 139 Aikin, Lucy, 122 Anderson, Benedict, 1, 12 Anglo-Saxonism 35, 38, 40, 41, 46, 66, 127 Annual Register, 22 Arnold, Matthew, 53, 105 Arnold, Thomas 41, 101 Authenticity, 17–22, 65, 93, 124, 143 Blackwood, John, 62 Bodichon, Mme Eugène, 4, 51, 174 Bray, Charles, 6 Browning, Robert, 53 Buckle, H. T., 6, 7, 45, 101, 113 Bulwer Lytton, Edward, 107 Butterfield, Herbert, 33 Byron, Lord, 53 Carlyle, Thomas, 2, 3, 13, 31, 33, 52, 66–84, 85, 88, 90, 95–9, 100, 109, 110, 123, 128, 139, 144 Catholicism (Roman), 35, 46, 47, 48 Chance, 87–90, 100, 105–6, 112–15, 135 ‘Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!’, 21 ‘College Breakfast-Party, A’, 118 Comte, Auguste, 3, 5, 6, 43, 101, 122 Congreve, Dr Richard, 5, 49 Cornhill Magazine, 22 Cowper, William, 53 Daniel Dernoda, 10, 12, 18, 22, 24, 37, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 92–3, 95, 96, 97, 100, 103–19, 121, 126–38, 139, 141, 144 Darwin, Charles, 5, 6 Dickens, Charles, 68, 69, 77, 78

Eliot, George, see under individual works Englishness, see National Identity Empiricism, 3, 8, 18, 20, 25 Ethnicity, 6, 36, 37, 39, 49, 53, 129, 144 ‘Evangelical Teaching: Dr Cumming’, 47 Felix Holt, 10, 22, 27, 31, 75–6, 78, 79, 90, 93, 135 Femininity see also Masculinity,12, 15, 39, 88, 89, 116–18, 121–38, 140, 143 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 83, 84 Fichte, J. G., 69 Foucault, Michel, 81, 141, 142 Freeman, E. A., 33, 34, 35, 41, 54–5, 57, 58, 59, 102 Froude, J. A., 33, 52, 67, 78 Gentlemen’s Magazine, 21, 22 Goethe, J. W., 17, 69 Green, J. R., 33, 34, 51, 56–7, 59, 61, 101 Harrison, Frederic, 5, 101, 102 Hegel, G. W. F., 140 Hennell, Sara Sophia, 5, 7, 34, 72 Historical fiction, 8–10, 24, 44, 138, 139 Historiography British, 14, 67–8, 101, 122, 139, 140, 141, 146 as discourse, 1, 2, 8, 11, 13, 23, 25, 28, 29, 37, 142, 143 as fiction, 10, 11, 26, 30, 138, 139, 143, 145 German, see also under individual historians, 14, 41, 69, 98 Liberal Anglican, 7, 8 research, 22, 28 scientific, 3–7, 95, 101, 113 201



Index

Index

Whig, see also under individual historians, 12, 32–7, 40, 41, 42, 46, 50–6, 57–64, 66, 71, 75, 78–9, 85, 95, 113, 120, 121, 123, 139, 143, 144 History, see also Historiography and Metahistory and idealogy, 1, 10, 11, 12, 18, 28, 29, 31, 32, 53, 89, 90, 94, 96, 97, 119, 114 and capitalism, 2, 134 as process 71, 85, 92, 101, 146 and religion, 12, 35, 42, 85–6 Huxley, T. H., 41 Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 37, 51, 54–63, 66, 77, 80, 105, 117, 143, 144 Industrialization, 75–6, 78, 86, 90 Ireland/the Irish, 46, 48, 49, 50 James, Henry, 9, 12, 144 Jameson, Anna, 122, 123 Judaism/Jewry, see also Zionism, 52–5, 57–8, 60–5, 97, 100, 103–6, 111, 112, 113, 128, 129, 130, 131, 143 Kavanagh, Julia, 122 Kingsley, Charles, 41 Lawrance, Hannah, 122 ‘Leaves from a Notebook’, 16, 18 Lessing, G. E., 105 Lewes, G. H., 5, 10, 14, 34, 62, 71 ‘Looking Backward’, see Impressions of Theophrastus Such Macaulay, T. B., 33–8, 41, 42, 46, 59–64, 78, 79, 101 Maitland, F. W., 101, 102 Marsh, Anna, 122 Martineau, Harriet, 122, 124 Masculinity see also Femininity, 39, 63, 96, 97, 107–9, 116, 122, 124, 126–8 Metahistory, 2 Metanarrativity, see also History, Historiography and Totality, 1,

2, 3, 6, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22–8, 30, 31, 33, 36, 44, 50, 55–7, 59, 60, 62, 65, 66, 68, 73, 76, 80–4, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91–5, 98, 100–4, 106, 108–9, 111, 112, 115, 117, 120, 121, 125, 128–9, 137, 139, 145 Middlemarch, 4, 13, 22, 27, 31, 36, 37, 46–7, 76–81, 87, 90–2, 94, 96, 110, 119, 123–6, 131, 132, 134, 135, 139 Mill, John Stuart, 3, 41 Mill on the Floss, The, 22, 26, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 52, 77–8, 86, 88, 89, 92–3, 131, 134–6 Milton, John, 53 ‘Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!, The’, see Impressions of Theophrastus Such Mommsen, Theodor, see also Historiography, German, 69–70 Morality of Wilhelm Meister, The, 17 Morley, John, 41 National identity, see also Nationalism, 1, 2, 4, 6, 12, 35–41, 44, 46, 49, 50, 52, 55–62, 64, 65–7, 74, 84, 100, 101, 103, 105, 106, 108, 115, 116, 117, 119–20, 121, 127, 129, 131–2, 139, 143, 163 Nationalism, 1, 6, 8, 33, 39, 40, 41, 46, 49, 50, 52, 55–7, 97, 116, 127, 128, 143, 144 ‘Natural History of German Life, The’, 18, 19, 20, 48 Niebuhr, B. G., see also Historiography, German, 69 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 87, 90, 102, 103, 114, 140 Novalis, 69 O’Connell, Daniel, 49 Orientalism, 63, 101, 143, 144 Otherness, 1, 46, 127 Palliser, Fanny, 122, 123 Pope, Alexander, 53 Positivism, see also Buckle, Comte, and Historiography, scientific, 5, 6, 7



202

Progress, see also History, metanarrative, 3, 4, 7, 19, 20, 27, 35, 36, 37, 41–6, 53, 58–9, 63, 66, 68, 75–7, 90, 97, 101, 105, 111, 117–18, 120, 125, 126, 128, 140, 143 ‘Prospectus of the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review’, 19 Protestantism, see also Historiography, Whig, 35, 38, 46, 47, 38, 50, 64, 143, 144 Ranke, Leopold von, 12, 69, 102 Realism, 8, 16, 17, 20–3, 27, 28, 31, 32, 90, 94, 139, 140, 142, 144–5 Richter, J. P., 69 Romola, 8–10, 13, 20, 21, 24, 32, 36, 47, 54, 87, 92, 100, 122, 131, 134, 135, 139 Round, J. H., 101, 102 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 70, 72 ‘Ruskin’s Lectures’, 19 Russell, Bertrand, 113 ‘R. W. Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect’, 19 Saint-Simonians, 69 Savonarola, 36 Scenes of Clerical Life, 16, 24, 42, 43, 44, 45, 75, 83, 92, 124, 127 Schelling, F. W. J., 69 Schiller, J. C. F., 69 Schlegel, F., 69 ‘Shadows of the Coming Race’ see Impressions of Theophrastus Such Sibree, John, 73, 104

203

Sidgwick, H., 101 Silas Marner, 7, 38, 86, 90 ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, 9, 19, 21 Spanish Gypsy, The, 5, 135 Spencer, Herbert, 5 Stanhope, Lady Hester, 133 Stanley, A. P., 101 Stone, Elizabeth, 122 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 107 Strickland, Agnes and Elizabeth, 122–3 Stubbs, William, 12, 33, 34, 35, 58, 102 ‘Timoleon’, 91 Totality/Totalization, 4, 6, 7, 13, 16, 17, 28, 29, 31, 32, 37, 44, 54–6, 59, 60, 61, 63, 77, 82, 85–6, 90, 92–4, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 110, 111, 112, 118–19, 121, 130, 131, 132, 139, 142, 143, 145 Tout, T. F., 101, 102 Typology, 82–4 Westminster Review, 19 ‘Westward Ho! And Constance Herbert’, 18 ‘Worldiness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young’, 18, 19 Woolf, Virginia, 126, 136, 146 Wordsworth, William, 7, 17, 53 Zionism, see also Judaism/Jewry, 96, 103, 105–6, 127, 128, 132, 134



Index

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography: Imagining the National Past

George Eliot and Victorian Historiograph

George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture

George Eliot

Memory and history in George Eliot: transfiguring the past

George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance

Eliot, George - Middlemarch

George Eliot and the British Empire

George Eliot: The Novels (Analysing Texts)

The Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot

Historical Theory: Ways of Imagining the Past

George Eliot, Judaism And The Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism

Framing the past: the historiography of German cinema and television

George Eliot (Bloom's Classic Critical Views)

Narrating the Past: Historiography, Memory and the Contemporary Novel

George Eliot (Routledge Guides to Literature)

Imagining Objects and Imagining Experiences

The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad

Germaine De Stael, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist

Imagining and the Image

Haunting and Spectrality in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Possessing the Past

A Liberal Descent: Victorian historians and the English past

A Liberal Descent: Victorian historians and the English past

Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance

The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film

Imagining Jesus, imagining Jews

Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography

T.S. Eliot

The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot

George Eliot and Victorian Historiography: Imagining the National Past