English Fiction of the Victorian Period by Wheeler Michael

Author:Wheeler, Michael.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Incarnate history and unhistoric acts: George Eliot

Writing on George Eliot in 1876, when her last novel, Daniel Deronda, was appearing in parts, Trollope concurred with many contemporary critics in describing her as ‘the first of English novelists’ at the ‘present moment’ (Autobiography, 13). He is particularly interested in characterization, again like other Victorian critics of the ‘fiction as a mirror of life’ school:28 ‘Seth Bede, Adam Bede, Maggie and Tom Tulliver, old Silas Marner, and, much above all, Tito, in Romola, are characters which, when once known, can never be forgotten. I cannot say quite so much for any of those in her later works, because in them the philosopher so greatly overtops the portrait-painter, that, in the dissection of the mind, the outward signs seem to have been forgotten.’ The word ‘dissection’ echoes Trollope’s broader criticism that ‘her imagination is no doubt strong, but it acts in analysing rather than in creating’. The reference to her later works is developed in further comments on their difficulty. Perhaps Trollope’s most interesting point, however, is that the philosopher overtops the portrait-painter, for recent academic criticism of George Eliot has furthered our own century’s rescue work on her later novels from Victorian claims of affected difficulty and an imaginative falling off by acclaiming rather than apologizing for the subtleties of her mature intellect and a complexity of mythic structure which anticipates Joyce.29 I suggested in the last section that Trollope did not write novels of ideas. His characters, unlike those in novels of religious polemic, for example, do not tend to discuss the major intellectual issues of his own times. This last point also applies to George Eliot’s characters in fact, for only Daniel Deronda has a contemporary setting and the discussions of politics in Felix Holt (1866) and Middlemarch (1871–72) and of scientific and historical research in the latter novel are carefully placed in the period of the first Reform Act (1832). Even in the early phase of her novel-writing career, however, the period of Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861), the notoriously intrusive authorial narrator is a thinker: meditative, moral and philosophical.

When one compares George Eliot’s own intellect with that of Thackeray (for Trollope an even greater novelist) one is struck not only by its remarkable depth and breadth but also by the fact that almost all her interests, like Thackeray’s, had a historical dimension, in a century obsessed by history. Capable of reading Greek, Latin, French, Italian and German in her mid-twenties, she had access to ancient historical sources and, particularly through German, which Mr Casaubon in Middlemarch lacked (21), to the most advanced modern writings on religious, historical and philosophical subjects. Although she lost her faith in early womanhood, her respect for and interest in Christianity as the highest expression to date of man’s spiritual quest was expressed in and through her fiction. Influenced by Comtean Positivism, aspects of which she embraced, and by the works of Strauss and Feuerbach which

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