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K. M. Newton
George
Eliot
Twenty
for the
- First
Century LITERATURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
POLITICS
George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century
K. M. Newton
George Eliot for the

Twenty-First Century
Literature, Philosophy, Politics
K. M. Newton
University of Dundee
Dundee, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-91925-6 ISBN 978-3-319-91926-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946149
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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For Jessica, Will, Emily-Rose, Ferne, Jamie
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of Chap. 4 was published in Essays in Criticism: ‘George

Eliot and the Ethical’, 63:3 (2013), 298–316. I am grateful to the editors
and publisher, Oxford University Press, for permission to publish this
revised version here. I am also grateful to Cate Newton for reading the
whole text and suggesting numerous improvements.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George Eliot Past,

Present and Future 1
2 The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot 17
3 Critical Encounters: Hardy, Bonaparte, Miller 51
4 Eliot and the Reinterpretation of the Ethical 77
5 Eliot as Psychological Novelist 97
6 The Mill on the Floss and the Revision of Tragedy 137
7 Daniel Deronda and the Novel of the Future 161
8 Eliot and the Politics of Modernism 205
Index 225
ix
About the Author
K. M. Newton is Professor of English (Emeritus) at the University of

Dundee, Scotland. Among his publications are:
Interpreting the Text. Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1990.

George Eliot: A Critical Reader. (Edited with Introduction, commentary,
notes, bibliography). Longman, 1991.
Theory into Practice: A Reader in Modern Literary Criticism. (Edited with
Introduction, commentary, notes). Macmillan Press, 1992.
Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. (Edited with Introduction,
commentary, notes). Macmillan Press (2nd edition). 1997.
George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism. (Joint
author with Saleel Nurbhai). Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Modern Literature and the Tragic. Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Modernizing George Eliot: The Writer as Artist, Intellectual, Proto-
Modernist, Cultural Critic. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.
xi
List of Abbreviations1
AB Adam Bede (1859), ed. Valentine Cunningham. Oxford: Oxford

World’s Classics, 1996.
DD Daniel Deronda (1876), ed. Graham Handley. Oxford: Oxford
FH Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), ed. Fred C. Thomson. Oxford:
Oxford World’s Classics, 1988.
ITS Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), ed. Nancy Henry.
London: Pickering, 1994.
M Middlemarch (1872), ed. David Carroll. Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 1997.
MF The Mill on the Floss (1860), ed. Gordon S. Haight. Oxford:
Oxford World’s Classics, 1996.
R Romola (1863), ed. Andrew Brown. Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 1998.
SCL Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), ed. Thomas A. Noble. Oxford
SG The Spanish Gypsy; The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and
New. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, n.d.
SM Silas Marner (1861), ed. Terence Cave. Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 1996.
xiii
xiv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
Essays Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney. London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1968.
Letters The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight. 9 vols., New
Haven and London, 1954–1956, 1978.
Note
1. Page references to George Eliot’s writings—fiction and non-fiction—are
included within the text.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George

Eliot Past, Present and Future
I
It is fairly certain, as the bicentenary of Eliot’s birth approaches and pro-
motes reflection on her writing, that her literary reputation in 2019 will be
very different from what it was on the centenary of her birth in 1919. In
that year the decline of interest in and regard for her work that had been
evident towards the end of the Victorian era had not yet been halted, and
little notice was taken of the centenary outside of Nuneaton and Coventry.
It was clearly not regarded as a significant event in the literary world gen-
erally, as press comments show: ‘comparatively few among the present
generation read the works of this great Victorian novelist’; ‘George Eliot
has, I fear, no message for the twentieth century’ (Harris 2007, 42).1
Identified with the high-mindedness, high seriousness and moralism
which were widely seen as characteristic of the Victorian sensibility, the
general view seems to have been that she could be safely relegated to the
nineteenth century along with Lytton Strachey’s set of ‘eminent
Victorians’. Though there has been a major change in Eliot’s reputation
from the low point of a hundred years ago, it is likely that, while her bicen-
tenary will be generally celebrated, doubts about whether her high literary
status is deserved may again be raised in certain circles, such as critics
outside of academia and literary journalists. It may be unlikely that one
could encounter, ‘George Eliot has, I fear, no message for the twenty-first
century’, but in the light of the vicissitudes there have been in critical
judgements of her literary status and reputation she may not be
© The Author(s) 2018 1

K. M. Newton, George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3_1
2 K. M. NEWTON
invulnerable. It may not be difficult to show that past denigration of Eliot

now has little credibility, but this book aims to go much further and show
that few nineteenth-century writers in the next hundred years are likely to
be seen as more essential in terms of both their art and thought than Eliot.
Though Eliot’s reputation may still have been in steep decline a hun-
dred years ago, 1919 did suggest a turning point since Virginia Woolf
published, though anonymously, her now famous essay on Eliot in the
Times Literary Supplement in which Middlemarch was proclaimed as ‘the
magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English
novels written for grown-up people’ (Haight 1965, 187), a judgement
now often printed in paperback editions of the novel. One should remem-
ber, however, that Woolf also wrote in that essay that the ‘movement of
her mind was too slow and cumbersome to lend itself to comedy’; that
readers ‘have good reason’ to ‘fall foul’ of her on account of the fact that
her heroines ‘bring out the worst of her, lead her into difficult places,
make her self-conscious, didactic, and occasionally vulgar’ and that ‘she
had little verbal felicity’ (Haight 1965, 186, 187, 188), most if not all of
which are, at the very least, highly disputable. One had to wait until the
1940s before criticism took a more solidly positive turn, most notably
with F. R. Leavis’s inclusion of her as a central figure in his study of the
English novel, The Great Tradition (1948). The question as to whether
her fiction could be persuasively defended in terms of its form and art
remained a contentious issue, but with the publication of Barbara Hardy’s
The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (1959) and W. J. Harvey’s The
Art of George Eliot (1961), some of the objections made by Henry James
and modern critics influenced by him2 were confronted. From this point
on, Eliot’s reputation as a major novelist was largely restored, and for most
academic critics at least her literary importance was assured and beyond
serious question.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, that assurance
may have appeared fragile. Various critical schools were negative in their
attitudes to her fiction, and it may have seemed likely that her reputation
was again going to be subject to serious questioning. Some critics commit-
ted to a modernist aesthetic saw her fiction as flawed at its root. She was,
for example, identified with the ‘traditional novel’ which ‘assumes that the
world and the world as we are made conscious of it are one’, whereas the
modernist novel of Woolf and Proust ‘emphasiz[es] the will to form that is
characteristic of consciousness’ (Josipovici 1971, 139). Critics influenced
by Marxism such as Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton associated her
INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 3
fiction with a conservative ideology, fundamentally supporting the socio-

economic status quo with its class divisions and inequalities, and exposed
what they saw as the contradictions inherent in her ideological position,
and newer forms of materialist criticism have tended to support that
stance.3 The major challenge, however, came from the most influential
‘isms’ of recent times: structuralism and post- structuralism, feminism,
post-colonialism. Critics influenced by Roland Barthes, such as Colin
MacCabe, have reinforced the modernist critique: ‘The conviction that the
real can be displayed and examined through a perfectly transparent lan-
guage is evident in George Eliot’s Prelude to Middlemarch … [T]his lan-
guage of empiricism runs though the text’ (MacCabe 1978, 18).
Feminist critics of the 1970s found her fiction unsympathetic to femi-
nist political aims and its representation of female characters often unin-
spiring and conservative in viewpoint, one critic notoriously proclaiming
that ‘Middlemarch can no longer be one of the books of my life’ (Edwards
1972, 238). Debate centred on Eliot among feminist critics has continued
since then, but with negative criticism generally more nuanced and
defences of her from a variety of points of view common.4 Post-colonial
critics have been even more severe in their attacks on what they see as her
conservative politics and sympathy with colonialism and imperialism, find-
ing Daniel Deronda and Impressions of Theophrastus Such particularly
problematic: ‘For Disraeli’s Tancred and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the East
is partly a habitat for native peoples (or immigrant European populations),
but also partly incorporated under the sway of empire’ (Said 1993, 63).5
None of these critiques has, however, significantly affected her status as
a major novelist. Criticism that operates outside of the more committed
perspectives outlined above has continued to devote much attention to
her writing. Historically focused criticism that aims to be non-ideological
and highlights the social and psychological themes of her novels has been
a recurrent feature of critical commentary. There have also been many
readings which exploit the breadth of Eliot’s intellectual interests, focus-
ing on her relationship to such literary figures as Goethe, Schiller, Scott,
Austen, Dickens, Woolf, and she has been linked to various thinkers and
philosophical positions, such as Comtean positivism, Mill, Spinoza. Since
the 1970s her work has aroused the interest of critics associated with
deconstructionist or psychoanalytical critical theory, notably J. Hillis
Miller and Neil Hertz whose writings on Eliot call into question the view
that her language is conventionally mimetic by focusing on her intricately
metaphoric language and what Hertz refers to as ‘complicating … strands
of figuration’ (Hertz 2003, 8).6
4 K. M. NEWTON
II
As Eliot will soon move beyond the bicentenary of her birth, are signifi-
cant new perspectives on her and her fiction emerging? Around the
beginning of the twenty-first century, a group of US critics, all with a
strong interest in Eliot, emerged, who wish to break away from the
dominant critical perspectives of the late twentieth century, such as con-
ventional historical and thematic criticism, criticism grounded in iden-
tity politics and post-structuralist theory. Theory however remains
central for these critics but in place of theory driven by ‘ideology cri-
tique’, often just referred to as ‘critique’ or the ‘hermeneutics of suspi-
cion’ and predominantly favoured by various forms of post-structuralism,
there is what has been called by Rita Felski ‘postcritical reading’, strongly
influenced by Habermas, Stanley Cavell, and various Anglo-American
thinkers with strong connections to liberalism.7 A central aim of ‘post-
critical reading’ is to break with ‘critique’ or the ‘hermeneutics of suspi-
cion’ and make literary criticism at the present time have greater cultural
engagement, impact and existential relevance. A possible revival of ‘the-
ory wars’ may make Eliot one of the most significant writers at the pres-
ent time since her writing has been a major interest both to critics
associated with post-structuralism such as J. Hillis Miller and Neil Hertz
and also to critics strongly committed to ‘postcritical reading’ with a
major interest in Eliot, such as Amanda Anderson, Harry E. Shaw and
Andrew H. Miller.8
This search for an alternative to ‘critique’ that favours ‘unsuspicious’
readings is not only an American phenomenon. A very recent study of
Eliot by British critic Philip Davis is perhaps the most impressive dem-
onstration yet of ‘postcritical reading’ in practice. Though his book The
Transferred Life of George Eliot is categorized as a biography, it collapses
generic distinctions by refusing to separate the biographical and the lit-
erary, life and art and creates powerful humanist readings which reveal
both the power of literary language and complexities of meaning even
in texts—such as the three stories which make up Scenes of Clerical
Life—that have tended to be viewed by critics as primarily exercises in
realism and so of limited critical interest: ‘This, then, is an attempted
imaginative recognition of all that George Eliot was in mind and heart,
as though she were indeed a real and achieved person and not just a
pseudonym or an omniscient narrator made out of words and syntax on
a piece of paper’(Davis 2017, 3). Though highly relevant to current and

future critical debate, a danger is that readings of Eliot’s work may tend
to be shaped by the theoretical or critical perspective her critics happen
to favour. In my view Eliot’s mind and therefore her writing is generally
resistant to a logic of either/or. Critical discussion and interpretation in
this book will attempt to take due account of that resistance by trying
not to be overly committed in advance of reading practice to a ‘suspi-
cious’ or ‘unsuspicious’ hermeneutics.
Are there any comparable critical developments and tensions in recent
British criticism? I shall suggest that there may be intimations of those in
an aspect of Eliot that first aroused my interest in her and her work: the
intellectual continuity between her and her partner G. H. Lewes, one
which went beyond his merely influencing her or she him.9 I do not think
that Eliot can be adequately understood unless it is taken into account.
This book will argue that Eliot as artist and intellectual possessed a mind
that was different and exceptional, and far from being the ‘Last Victorian’,
as one biographer styles her,10 she is one of the few writers of the past who
is ‘our contemporary’ in that her mind and work speak to readers in the
twenty-first century more powerfully than any other Victorian writer.
Lewes’s magnum opus, the five volume Problems of Life and Mind
(1974–1979), was left unfinished. Lewes suspected that he might not live
to complete it and light-heartedly suggested to the publisher John
Blackwood that Eliot, Dorothea-like, might have to finish what he called
his ‘Key to all Psychologies’.11 This came to pass when Lewes died with
the last two volumes still incomplete. Eliot duly went into virtual seclusion
to complete them. Lewes’s Problems is vast in ambition, scope and intel-
lectual range, but it has been generally neglected until relatively recently
and completing it was not merely a matter of Eliot writing up Lewes’s
notes. Her letters show that she embarked on some serious study while
working on it and it would not be going too far to see the final two vol-
umes, at least, as in effect a collaboration with Lewes. Her journal records,
for example, that she read or more likely reread Alexander Bain as part of
her work on it as the entry for 25 March 1879 shows: ‘Read Bain on the
Nervous System’ (Harris and Johnston 1998, 167),12 and she was still
reading Bain on 20 April. Bain was one of Lewes’s oldest friends to whom
he was close intellectually, both having been disciples of John Stuart Mill
in the 1840s and eventually moving on to a different form of empiricism.
Eliot would have been generally familiar with Bain’s ideas and well aware
6 K. M. NEWTON
of Lewes’s intellectual affinities with him. Bain (unusually accompanied by

his wife) was a regular attender of Eliot’s and Lewes’s Sunday afternoons
at their London house. That she was capable of completing this work sug-
gests her close familiarity not only with Lewes’s work but also with his
immediate intellectual circle, which included not only Bain but also
Herbert Spencer, whose Principles of Psychology (1855) she and Lewes
especially admired.
Rick Rylance, in his book, Victorian Psychology and British Culture
1850–1880 (2000), breaks new ground in treating Eliot, Lewes, Spencer
and Bain as a distinct group, discussing them both separately and together
with some analyses of passages from Eliot’s fiction. However, he sees them
all essentially as operating within the sphere of positivism, rather than as
radical empiricists, a form of empiricism that owes much to Humean phi-
losophy. Eliot has been identified with empiricism—as in the quotation
from Colin MacCabe referred to earlier—which alludes to empiricism in
the positivist or scientific rationalist sense, not in the Humean sense. As
one critic points out: ‘The roots of positivism lie in the same empiricism
from which Hume’s work derived, but, the practical success of natural sci-
ence in explaining natural phenomena and predicating the laws according
to which these phenomena relate to one another took empiricism beyond
Hume’s radical sense of the word to the point at which it seemed possible
to formulate a rational order uniting all natural phenomena’ (Dale 1989,
10).13 This positivist empiricism is founded on a confidence that external
reality can be viewed as separable from human consciousness and objec-
tively measured. MacCabe and others see this as the source of a transpar-
ency of language in her fiction which has as its aim to reflect external
reality in a mirror-like fashion: ‘Realism offers itself as transparent’ (Belsey
1980, 51). When she is described as a realist and empiricist, that is what is
generally meant. For Hume-influenced empiricists in contrast, objectivity
and materialism cannot be divorced from epistemology since reality is
always mediated through human perception and consciousness and only
accessible via the senses and the ideas and impressions they generate.
Metaphysics is rejected but not replaced by conventional materialism.
If Eliot’s empiricism has continuities with the more radical Humean
form which can be found in the work of Lewes, Spencer and Bain, her
realism takes on quite a different complexion from one based on conven-
tional ideas of empiricist positivism generally identified with scientific
rationalism or traditional materialism. What distinguishes Lewes and Eliot
in particular from such ideas is that mind or psychology cannot be excluded
when considering how human beings engage or interact with external

reality. The claim of positivistic science that it can reveal the true structure
of reality in purely objective terms independent of the senses and ideas is
called into question by Eliot in the epigraph to Chap. 1 of Daniel Deronda:
‘Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe
unit, and must fix a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal
clock shall pretend that time is at Nought’ (DD, 3). It would be a mistake
to read this as rejecting the existence of the atom in its modern scientific
conception, almost certainly the ‘make-believe unit’ that is referred to, but
when that novel was written atoms only existed in the realm of concepts
or ideas. The idea of the atom as the fundamental unit of matter beyond
which one cannot go is, for a thinker such as Lewes, an ‘ideal construc-
tion’ that has instrumental value for the development of science, but the
claim that the atom existed as the fundamental unit of matter was still
unproven. Though the existence of the atom was eventually established in
scientific terms, it is no longer seen as the fundamental unit of matter as it
is divisible into more fundamental particles and new ‘ideal constructions’
such as protons or quarks—a word coined by Joyce in Finnegans Wake—
have emerged, and one may doubt whether this process will ever arrive at
a secure end point. For a radical empiricist such as Lewes, science’s inven-
tion of and need for ‘ideal constructions’ does not undermine its credibil-
ity or lead to the scepticism exemplified in Nietzsche’s famous comment
that truth is only a ‘mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropo-
morphisms’, but Lewes and Eliot insist that human perception and think-
ing—in broad terms psychology—cannot be excluded from any conception
of the nature or structure of reality. In Middlemarch, the narrator asserts
that ‘we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors,
and act fatally on the strength of them’ (M, 83), using a metaphor in
warning of the dangers of such entanglement and thus showing that it is
virtually impossible to avoid metaphor in relating to reality in human
terms. Nietzsche suggests the same in referring to ‘worn out’ metaphors
as ‘coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no
longer as coins’ (Nietzsche 1954, 47).
Eliot uses the phrase ‘ideal constructions’ in an ironic context in rela-
tion to Lydgate in Chap. 27 of Middlemarch: ‘The reveries from which it
was difficult for him to detach himself were ideal constructions of some-
thing else than Rosamond’s virtues, and the primitive tissue was still his
fair unknown’ (M, 270). The phrase probably mystified its first readers
who would have been unaware of its context in Lewes’s radical empiricist
8 K. M. NEWTON
philosophy. But whereas the atom turned out to be a scientifically produc-

tive ‘ideal construction’ whose ‘real’ existence was eventually given scien-
tific legitimacy, Lydgate’s ‘primitive tissue’ in contrast turned out to have
no more substance than Rosamond’s virtues, though in science failed
‘ideal constructions’ can be seen as essential to the scientific enterprise as
a process.14 Significantly a major appeal of the ‘primitive tissue’ for Lydgate
is its association in his mind with the idea of the ‘fair unknown’, a particu-
lar mode of mediaeval romance. I use the word association advisedly.
Associationism is a central element of radical empiricism. It might be
argued that there has been a general prejudice against it, perhaps a reac-
tion to its widespread influence in the Victorian period and its being seen
as a mechanistic process and alien to the modern concept of the ‘organic’,
promoted by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria (1817) and influential
thereafter in literary critical circles. Gillian Beer and Sally Shuttleworth are
two major British critics of Eliot’s intellectual background and influences,
her connections with science in particular, and they are the authors of two
of the most cited studies of Eliot,15 but Beer does not, I think, mention
associationism in Darwin’s Plots, her best known book, and Shuttleworth
directly disconnects Eliot from it by identifying it with ‘the mechanistic
cosmology of the preceding two centuries’. In Eliot’s work, she claims,
there is ‘a distinct theory of character and action which departs from the
earlier mechanistic conceptions of associationist psychology’ (Shuttleworth
1984, 2, 72). Lewes does express his commitment to ‘organicism’—which
Shuttleworth sees as overturning associationism—but to assume that his
concept of ‘organicism’ is irreconcilable with ‘associationism’ is simplistic
and would be to ignore his long intellectual relationship with Bain, the
major proponent of associationism in the latter part of the nineteenth
century. A passage like the following from Middlemarch would seem to go
beyond a merely general use of the word ‘association’:
Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbours’ lot are but the back-
ground of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they
become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a
part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness.
This dream-like association of something alien and ill-understood with the
deepest secrets of her experience seemed to mirror that sense of loneliness
which was due to the very ardour of Dorothea’s nature. (M, 322)
A potential appeal of associationism for radical empiricists such as Eliot

and Lewes is that it can be seen as an important corollary to Darwin’s
c oncept of natural selection. The latter had called into question metaphys-
ics on a number of levels, particularly the most powerful metaphysical argu-
ment for the existence of God, the argument from design. Associationism
undermined an equally powerful metaphysical idea, that of the self or mind
as a kind of ‘ghost in the machine’—to use Gilbert Ryle’s phrase in his
attack on Cartesian dualism—which transcends any empirical account of its
existence. Lewes, however, deviated from Mill, Bain and Spencer in argu-
ing that there needed to be some ordering force that provides structure for
the myriad impressions and sensations that bombard the senses, an empiri-
cist equivalent to Kant’s categories or pure concepts of the understanding.
Such a force, Lewes argued—influenced in part by the work of the German
physiologist Helmholtz—was supplied by biology and physiology since
‘forms of thought’ or ‘forms of consciousness’ have emerged within the
human organism as part of the evolutionary process through natural selec-
tion. Thus association interacts with ‘forms of consciousness’ so that sensa-
tions and impressions are not atomistic but form structures and patterns
which are accessible through memory and continually accumulate so that a
distinctive self or consciousness emerges as a result, but a self that no longer
needs to be conceived of in metaphysical terms.
Two recent studies are very pertinent to any discussion of Eliot’s links
with radical empiricism and associationism: Cairns Craig’s Associationism
and the Literary Imagination (2007) and Peter Garratt’s Victorian
Empiricism (2010). Eliot is discussed relatively briefly in these studies, but
they point to a significant departure from the assumptions of previous
Eliot critics. Garratt writes: ‘… a tradition of associationism can be traced
from Hume … and finally to the theorists contemporaneous with George
Eliot’; ‘… Lewes’s own later psychological theories … would revitalize
associationism by grounding its processes in the knowing body and by
framing its physiological ideas in the context of the new evolutionary the-
ory’ (Garratt 2010, 67, 70). Craig argues that it is a caricature of associa-
tionism, for which Coleridge was primarily responsible, to see it as
mechanistic, atomistic, passive and offering little scope for the imagina-
tion: ‘The priority that association theory gave to the imagination—since
association itself is nothing other than an operation of the imagination—as
well as to the passions made it rapidly appealing in discussions of the origin
and effects of art’ (Craig, 11) and argues strongly in Chap. 2 of his book
that Wordsworth’s associationist theory of poetry in his ‘Preface’ to Lyrical
Ballads (1800) is more powerful and coherent than Coleridge’s organicist
theory, influenced by German idealism, in Biographia Literaria.
10 K. M. NEWTON
Significantly Wordsworth, who was Eliot’s favourite Romantic poet, dis-

agreed with Coleridge and did not abandon associationism. Both Eliot
and Lewes were also great admirers of Spinoza’s Ethics, Eliot having trans-
lated it, and as Garratt discusses, association was a central element of
Spinoza’s monist philosophy (Garratt 2010, 136–8).
Though Rick Rylance sees Eliot, Lewes, Bain and Spencer as a distinct
group, this does not mean that there were not differences and disagree-
ments among all of them, even Lewes and Eliot though not to a serious
degree. What makes Eliot and Lewes stand apart—he the biographer of
Goethe and she the translator of Strauss—was their stronger links with
German thought, particularly with post-Kantian and post-Hegelian
anti-metaphysical thinkers who emerged to some degree out of the more
radical side of German Romanticism, obviously Feuerbach in Eliot’s case
while Lewes’s radical empiricism has some continuities with German post-
Kantianism as exemplified in the work of such figures as Hans Vaihinger,
aspects of Nietzsche, and Ernst Mach. Lewes’s attempt to overcome, at
least partially, the division between the empiricist and the Kantian tradi-
tions was probably one of the reasons why Bain had doubts about Lewes’s
philosophical project in his Problems, perhaps a step too far for him (Ashton
2000, 243). Lewes also believed his most important intellectual contribu-
tion was ‘the discovery of the social factor in Psychology’ (Ashton 2000,
271), and it would not be surprising if Eliot had considerable influence on
this aspect of his thought, which significantly distinguishes them from
Bain and Spencer.
III
Eliot’s relation to radical empiricism is not however the main focus of this
book though it will be implicit in some of its aspects and discussed more
directly in the last section of Chap. 5. Though I have argued the case
for Eliot’s radical empiricism, which most previous critics have either dis-
counted or neglected and which potentially alters critical perspectives on
Eliot, I believe it can be critically counter-productive to identify her work
too directly with specific influences so that her work tends to become defined
in terms of a particular external framework. This is not to deny the usefulness
of studies that have connected her work closely with such thinkers as Comte,
Mill, Feuerbach, Spinoza, among others, but Eliot is not a writer whose
writing can be easily decoded by being identified with one particular thinker
or one school of thought. There are diverse intellectual influences on her
writing, including those referred to above which one should be aware of, but
they should be seen as existing within the distinctive mix that constitutes
Eliot’s own unique mental mapping of reality and life and her fundamental
concern with the art of her fiction. But an important reason for drawing
attention to her affinities with radical empiricism, especially with Lewes’s
philosophical and psychological thinking, is to raise questions about the
common general identification of her with a positivistic conception of
empiricism founded on Enlightenment-influenced rationalism and scientific
materialism. The greater part of this book is focused on a closer reading of
her writing at the textual and linguistic level than her writings normally
receive, together with detailed exploration of human situations and issues
and their wider intellectual significance in terms of philosophy, psychology
and politics, mediated through the art of the novel.
In the second chapter, it will be argued that the otherness of her mind-
set as a person living in the Victorian era as artist and intellectual—espe-
cially given the constraints of her Victorian situation and context—has not
been sufficiently recognized and explored. Discussion in this chapter will
focus on a close reading of some of her non-fiction, especially its concern
with issues that have been controversial in Eliot criticism: her personal and
existential choices in life, her relation to feminism, her politics. The third
chapter engages with the critical perspectives of three of her major critics
and, while respecting them highly, also subjects them to scrutiny. All Eliot
critics need to challenge or be challenged by alternative critical perspec-
tives. The following four chapters concentrate on her fiction, especially in
relation to such major Eliot concerns as the ethical, psychology, tragedy,
temporality. Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda dominate discussion
though Silas Marner is discussed in Chap. 4, Romola briefly in Chap. 3,
and Chap. 6 focuses on The Mill on the Floss and its challenging view of
tragedy. Middlemarch is the prime focus in relation to the ethical and psy-
chology in Chaps. 4 and 5; Daniel Deronda is seen as her most ambitious
novel, one in which she aspires most self-consciously to integrate her roles
as both literary artist and intellectual, while experimenting with literary
form in terms of its narrative. It may be seen as anticipating aspects of
modernist fiction. The final chapter discusses some of the reasons why
Eliot is still conventionally identified with a Victorian ethos despite her
connections with modernism in a wider context and also explores what
relation she has to modernism’s problematic politics. A feature of past
criticism of Eliot—and I do not exclude some of my own previous criti-
cism from this—is that some general thesis or interpretive paradigm has
12 K. M. NEWTON
tended to dictate how she is read so that the particularity of the text has to
submit to the paradigm’s power, and as a consequence subtleties in the
writing or in the situations being depicted have tended often not to be
sufficiently noticed or even ignored. I hope in this book to subject the
force of the general perspective to sufficient degree of constraint so that
the complexities in her art and thought may receive due recognition and
acknowledgement, while at the same time suggesting that she is not only
the greatest ever female writer but on an equal level to that elite group of
writers who are generally regarded as being in the highest echelon of the
literary canon.
Notes
1. Margaret Harris, ‘The George Eliot Centenary of 1919’ (2007), 42.
George Saintsbury in his A Short History of English Literature, first pub-
lished in 1898 and much reprinted, refers to the ‘extravagant heights’ of
her earlier reputation followed by the critical backlash after her death and
comments: ‘This factitious height she can never recover in the estimation
of a competent judgment’ (Saintsbury 1960, 753).
2. The influence of Henry James in terms of theory of the novel perhaps cul-
minates in Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), though Eliot is
only mentioned in passing.
3. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973), and Terry
Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory
(London, 1976). See also Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation
of English Fiction (1985), and Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property:
Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, 1994).
4. Debates among feminist critics continue, with more balanced positions on
Eliot since the 1970s generally adopted. See Gillian Beer, George Eliot
(1986); Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and
the Novel of Development (1993); and most recently June Skye Szirotny,
George Eliot’s Feminism: The Right to Rebellion (2015).
5. See also Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and
Representation (1996).
6. See also J. Hillis Miller, Reading for Our Time: ‘Adam Bede’ and
‘Middlemarch’ Revisited’ (2011), which is discussed in detail in Chap. 3.
7. See Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (2015).
8. See Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of
Theory (2005); Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot
(1999); Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and
Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2008). For the origin
of the phrase the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, see Paul Ricoeur’s essay ‘The
Conflict of Interpretations’, in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in
Interpretation (1970), 20–35.
9. See K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (1981, especially
5–10, 57–64).
10. See Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London, 1999).
11. ‘The shadow of old Casaubon hangs over me and I fear my “Key to all
Psychologies” will have to be left to Dorothea’ (Letters, V, 291). See also
Letters, V, 350.
12. Catherine Gallagher has argued that the influence of the psychophysiology
of Bain in The Emotions and the Will (1865) is evident in Daniel Deronda.
See her chapter on Deronda in The Body Economic: Life, Death, and
Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Gallagher 2006,
esp.134–5, 146–7).
13. Though critics such as Rylance and Dale place Eliot within a positivist
context, this does not mean that they and other critics such as Gillian Beer
and Sally Shuttleworth who do not see her as a radical empiricist have not
made a valuable contribution to Eliot criticism. For example, Shuttleworth
(in George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science) and Dale show that
Eliot’s relationship to positivism is not straightforward, Shuttleworth
revealing links between Lewes’s philosophy of science and that of Claude
Bernard and arguing persuasively that Bernard’s influence is reflected in
Eliot’s writing, and Dale suggestively discusses how the intellectual divi-
sion between Comte and Mill is relevant to Eliot and Lewes, Comte plac-
ing greater stress on the role of hypotheses in science and scientifically
based thinking and working with them provisionally prior to verification
whereas for Mill hypotheses had to be verified before one could make a
positive use of them. Lewes and almost certainly Eliot would have sup-
ported Comte against Mill on this issue, but on the other hand Lewes
supported Mill’s critique of Comte for dismissing psychology and again
Eliot almost certainly would have agreed with him. Dale also convincingly
shows the influence on Lewes of the work of the German physiologist
Helmholtz. Another pertinent study of Eliot and Lewes is George Levine’s
essay, ‘George Eliot, Conrad, and the Invisible World’, Chap. 12 of his
book, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady
Chatterley. Though essentially situating Eliot within scientific rationalism,
Levine recognizes that, in what he sees as her later writing and thinking,
her earlier positivism comes under some stress through ‘honoring the com-
plexities of the new reality and the new epistemologies’ (Levine 1983,
261), so that it is fruitful to connect Eliot and Conrad in terms of their
work and thought.
14 K. M. NEWTON
14. For discussion of the primitive tissue and Lydgate’s connection to Bichat
(M, 146), see W. J. Harvey, ‘The Intellectual Background to the Novel’, in
Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel, ed. Barbara Hardy, 35–6,
and also Avrom Fleishman, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life, 168.
15. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983); Sally Shuttleworth, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Belief of a Beginning
(1984).
Bibliography
Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Rosemary Ashton, G. H. Lewes: An Unconventional Victorian (London: Pimlico,
2000).
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and
Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
———, George Eliot (Brighton; Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1986).
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980).
Cairns Craig, Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal
Chaos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
Peter Allan Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the
Victorian Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
Philip Davis, The Transferred Life of George Eliot: The Biography of a Novelist
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory
(London: New Left Books, 1976).
Lee Edwards, ‘Women, Energy, and Middlemarch’, Massachusetts Review, 13
(1972), 223–8.
Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Avrom Fleishman, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010).
Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of
Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse
and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
———, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the
Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Peter Garratt, Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge, and Reality in Ruskin, Bain,
Lewes, Spencer, and George Eliot (Madison: Fairley Dickinson University Press,
2010).
Gordon S. Haight, ed., A Century of George Eliot Criticism (London: Methuen,

1965).
Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (Athlone Press, 1959).
———, ed., Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel (London: Athlone
Press, 1967).
Margaret Harris, ‘The George Eliot Centenary of 1919’, George Eliot Review, 38
(2007), 32–48.
Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, eds., The Journals of George Eliot (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
W. J. Harvey, The Art of George Eliot (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961).
Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 2003.
Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London: Fourth Estate, 1999).
Gabriel Josipovici, The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction (London:
Macmillan Press, 1971), 139.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1948).
George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to
Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (5 vols.) (London: Trübner, 1874–9).
Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation
(London: Routledge, 1996).
Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London: Cape, 1921).
Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan
Press, 1978).
Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-
Century British Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
J. Hillis Miller, Reading for Our Time: ‘Adam Bede’ and ‘Middlemarch’ Revisited’
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (London: Macmillan Press,
1981).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Viking, 1954).
Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Conflict of Interpretations’, in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay
in Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1970), 20–35.
Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993).
George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (London: Macmillan,
1960).
16 K. M. NEWTON
Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Belief
of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
June Skye Szirotny, George Eliot’s Feminism: The Right to Rebellion (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2015).
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus,
1973).
CHAPTER 2
The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot
I
The critical orthodoxy for many years in regard to George Eliot was that
there was little that is ‘radical’ about her as writer, philosopher or political
thinker.1 As a novelist she may have been one of the major English realists but
according to her critics the content of her fiction was not ‘radical’, in contrast
to writers such as Dickens and Zola, nor did she in her novels attempt to
experiment with form or style in the manner of Flaubert or Henry James or
Joseph Conrad, not to mention modernists such as Virginia Woolf and James
Joyce. As an intellectual she was not considered to be an original thinker but
as a writer primarily influenced by the major thinkers of her age, such as John
Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte. Politically she was regarded
as conservative though she went through a liberal phase when younger but
showed little support for some of the major causes of her time, such as
extending the suffrage, especially for women, or giving greater political
power to the working class if that was likely to lead to a breakdown in social
order. She was seen as a gradual reformist at best. These assumptions had
considerable influence on thinking about Eliot during much of the twentieth
century even after there was a substantial recovery of her literary reputation.
If one considers more recent criticism, some of these critical attitudes have
been seriously called into question.2 This book, however, will argue and try
to show that despite advances in criticism the radical nature of Eliot’s mind
has still not been sufficiently appreciated and the critical assumptions men-
tioned above continue to retain some force. The book will argue that Eliot
© The Author(s) 2018 17

K. M. Newton, George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3_2
18 K. M. NEWTON
possessed a ‘radical’ mindset that makes her stand apart from virtually all of
her Victorian contemporaries (and also from many notable writers who have
followed her in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) as literary artist,
intellectual and socio-political thinker.
II
It is useful to start at a personal level by focusing on some of the significant
choices Eliot made in her life as much negative criticism has been directed
at these choices on the grounds of their being inconsistent, incoherent or
morally or socially questionable, and these judgements have often been
carried over to the interpretation of her mental outlook and by extension
to her writing. A common perception has been that there is a lack of con-
tinuity between her early political radicalism in the 1840s and her later
thinking and the choices and actions it generated. I shall suggest that her
critics tend to operate with a conventionally defined or ideologically influ-
enced concept of consistency that Eliot calls into question. Political critics
of liberal or left-wing leanings, for example, generally admire her rebellion
against Victorian conventions by choosing to live with a married man
knowing that it would cause a scandal. Even friends who held feminist
views, such as Bessie Rayner Parkes, were shocked at her decision to live
openly in a non-marital relationship as G. H. Lewes was widely perceived
as having a disreputable past, one which Eliot would have been well aware
of. But for many of her post-Victorian feminist and liberal critics she did
not carry this social rebellion through, so that her apparent rejection of
Victorian values and assumptions in regard to what is perceived as proper
and respectable conduct, especially as applied to women, is seriously com-
promised. She insisted, for example, on being called ‘Mrs Lewes’ and
referred to G. H. Lewes as her ‘husband’ as if she were a conventional
married woman. Even worse was to follow after the death of Lewes when
she married the friend of both herself and Lewes, John Walter Cross, also
her financial advisor, in a church wedding and adopted the name ‘Cross’.
Many of her biographers find her actions difficult to come to terms
with.3 Marrying Cross, though from one point of view a conventional act,
from another was as unconventional and transgressive as choosing to live
‘in sin’ with Lewes, Cross being some twenty years younger than she was.
Whether acting ‘unconventionally’ or ‘conventionally’, Eliot shocked and
unsettled both her contemporaries and also later commentators in regard
to the choices she made in her life, it being not quite clear whether her
THE ‘RADICAL’ MINDSET OF GEORGE ELIOT 19
relationship with Lewes and her marriage to Cross were conforming to

notions of respectability or transgressing them. She thus subverts standard
assumptions as to what is radical or what is conservative. Thomas Carlyle
is I think well justified in calling her a ‘strong minded woman’ in contrast
with the influential view promoted by her major biographer Gordon
Haight that she always needed someone to lean upon. Regarding her
elopement with Lewes, she claimed to be ‘entirely indifferent’ as to how it
was judged, asserted that ‘I have done nothing with which any person has
a right to interfere’ and found the phrase ‘“run away” as applied to me …
simply amusing—I wonder what I had to run away from … I have done
nothing with which any person has a right to interfere’ (Letters, VIII,
123–4).
She can be seen as both rebel and pragmatist at the same time. She
rebelled against Victorian marriage in choosing to live with Lewes outside
wedlock but made sure she showed respect for marriage as a concept and
social institution—a respect one should stress which was sincere—by tak-
ing the ‘married’ name of ‘Mrs Lewes’. Almost certainly she would have
married Lewes if he had been free. Marriage had human value despite the
existence of bad marriages—a significant presence in her fiction—but non-
legal ‘marriages’ could have equal value. There is no sign that she had a
fixed position in regard to marriage or sexual relationships, rejecting both
that sexual relationships were only justifiable within marriage and that
marriages should be maintained even if they had irretrievably broken
down. Her comment on Jane Eyre in regard to Rochester’s marital situa-
tion is significant: ‘All self-sacrifice is good—but one would like it to be in
a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man
soul and body to a putrifying carcase’ (Letters, I, 268). But she had no
animus towards those who held conventionally respectable views about
marriage and evinces few indications of resentment at being ostracized by
society for being a ‘fallen woman’.
Many of her critics and biographers have expressed some shock or con-
sternation at her positive response to her brother Isaac’s letter of con-
gratulation following her marriage to John Cross, after Isaac had been
estranged from her for choosing to live with Lewes for more than a quar-
ter of a century. But Isaac Evans was a respectable Victorian who held
standard Christian beliefs, and his severing of connections was therefore to
be expected. She had chosen a different path from her brother and rejec-
tion by him was one of its inevitable consequences and no blame could
therefore be attached to him. She was prepared to pay such a price in order
20 K. M. NEWTON
to have a loving relationship with Lewes. But she seems not to have even
thought of spurning Isaac’s congratulation. Negative responses to her
brother have clearly influenced the many unsympathetic critical judge-
ments of Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, distorting interpretation of
the novel in my view.
Her pragmatism can be seen as a means of defusing social disapproval of
her transgressive acts. Calling herself ‘Mrs Lewes’ was a rational way of
controlling scandal as far as possible as retaining her own name would have
only prolonged it. The name ‘Mrs Lewes’ implied that she did not reject the
idea of marriage as such, which may have placated to some degree conven-
tional opinion. Why did Lewes not divorce his wife and marry her? In a
biography of Eliot that questions many of the assumptions of previous
biographers, Nancy Henry has argued that Lewes would have been able to
seek a divorce even though he had condoned his wife’s adultery,4 in contrast
to what Gordon Haight claimed in his biography. According to Henry,
Lewes would have chosen not to do so as a legal divorce would have caused
a greater scandal than his and Eliot’s living together outside of marriage as
details of their own adulterous relationship would have been disclosed,
exposing her publically as a ‘fallen woman’. Her self-declared marriage
allowed her to live with the man she loved yet not place herself completely
beyond the pale of respectable society because she did not display contempt
for marriage in the manner of certain bohemian artists. If she had flaunted
her status as a ‘fallen’ woman, it is doubtful whether she would have suc-
ceeded in Britain as a novelist.
Marrying Cross was controversial in her own time among her friends
and remains so among modern critics and biographers. Though she and
Cross were free to marry, the fact that she chose to do so in church despite
her agnosticism or atheism could be, and has been, seen as a distasteful
reaching out for acceptance by conventional society. Yet the mature Eliot
had long valued religious ceremonies and rituals even if she did not accept
their metaphysical bases. What this ‘conventional marriage’ shows is that
transgression is always determined by context. Both her self-proclaimed
‘marriage’ and her ultra-conventional real marriage were transgressive in
their particular contexts. There was also unstated but implied transgres-
sion as she gave no sign of rejecting the views of social rebels who applied
concepts of freedom or liberty to marriage or social conventions or reli-
gious doctrines, such as those who had adopted something of a bohemian
lifestyle, like John Chapman, who shared a home with both his wife and
his mistress. Eliot lodged with him briefly and may have had a sexual liai-
son with him before wife and mistress forced her out. She was also happy
to be part of Liszt’s bohemian circle when she met him and his mistress in
Germany.
It would be wrong to conclude from the above that Eliot was indiffer-
ent to principle or consistency; rather her personal life and choices ques-
tion conventional concepts of what it means to be ‘radical’. Marriage to
Cross was both pragmatic and rational even if outwardly conforming to
conventional social behaviour. She knew it would shock her friends and
admirers, ‘I quail a little in facing what has to be gone through—the hurt-
ing of many whom I care for’ (Letters, VII, 259).5 But of course she could
not know that she would only live another year or so and therefore behaved
with intelligence and firmness in overruling the feelings of her friends as
she may have lived for ten or more years. Why risk a lonely old age and
forgo the possibility of personal happiness to avoid hurting people mostly
motivated by their own conventional assumptions. Taking account of oth-
ers’ feelings was for her a key principle but it must also engage with ratio-
nality and reality viewed empirically. Another example of her strong
mindedness together with an ability to resist or distance herself from natu-
ral egoism can be seen in her sustaining a long friendship with Herbert
Spencer—with whom she had been seriously in love before meeting
Lewes—even after he had informed her that he could not return her love
and marry her, and, according to Haight’s biography, letting it be known
that her lack of beauty was the main reason.
Some Eliot critics have attached considerable significance to the fact
that she wrote under a pseudonym,6 but it should be borne in mind that
adopting a pseudonym was largely a product of chance and circumstance.
Because of the perceived ‘scandal’ of her personal life, being published in
Britain under her own name would have been problematic. There was no
alternative to publishing under a pseudonym if she was to be published by
a respectable publisher and hope her writing would reach a wide audience.
Her first two pseudonymous works, Scenes of Clerical Life and especially
Adam Bede, were a success, but when she was forced to reveal her identity
after one Joseph Liggins claimed to be their author she retained the pseud-
onym even when it no longer concealed her identity. I would suggest this
is another aspect of her pragmatism. To use her real name or the name
‘Marian Lewes’, which she insisted in being called after choosing to live
with Lewes, would have been likely to give new impetus to the scandal and
thus could have been a barrier to continued literary success. The pseud-
onym was useful to create some distance between her as author and the
reality of her life as a ‘fallen woman’, whereas using her real name would
22 K. M. NEWTON
have continued to keep that fact in the public consciousness. Other writers
have of course chosen to adopt pseudonyms for what can be seen as posi-
tive reasons, but in her case she was initially forced to do so by the pressure
of her circumstances. Given that the pseudonym was created as an expedi-
ent necessary to cope with her situation as an aspiring writer and remained
useful even later to divert attention away from her still unconventional life,
and not a choice she would have been likely to have made otherwise,
should it be retained now? I see no strong reason for doing so, apart of
course from being convenient to publishers and librarians, and would
favour returning to the name that appeared in the only book of hers—her
translation of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity—that was published
before the emergence of ‘George Eliot’: that is ‘Marian Evans’.
III
Many of Eliot’s critics have found it difficult to come to terms with some
of her stated views and opinions as found in her essays and articles. Though
she is commonly identified with the ‘Doctrine of Sympathy’7 in her non-
fiction, she often appears to lack sympathy, especially in her attitude to
groups within society who to modern eyes are seen as victims of prejudice,
oppression or discrimination. Her essay ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’
may appear heartless in its treatment of woman authors and may especially
trouble feminist critics who may be inclined to read it as symptomatic of
what has often been claimed is her reluctance to identify with feminist
social and political aims. But Eliot is seldom a comfortable writer. It is for
her one thing to have sympathy with women writers who are disadvan-
taged by lack of cultural opportunities and male prejudice, but it is another
to set aside critical judgement in assessing their work. She shows no desire
to compromise as regards critical standards though well aware that women
are greatly inhibited by social and cultural factors from reaching these
standards, most obviously by having little access to higher education and
subject to numerous social conventions which constrain their potential. It
is hardly surprising that many women produced novels—Eliot claims—
not through applying themselves to the art of writing but by exploiting
the fact that ‘in novel writing there are no barriers for incapacity to stum-
ble against, no external criteria to prevent a writer from mistaking foolish
facility for mastery’ (Essays, 324).
Since there are social and cultural reasons why women in the nine-
teenth century tended to write what Eliot saw as inferior fiction, does it
not show a lack of sympathy to be so scathing and brutal about their

efforts? But a recurrent theme in Eliot’s writing, though too little empha-
sized, is that for her sympathy cannot be boundless and should not be
dissociated from the intellectual or the rational even though this may be a
difficult relation to negotiate, creating dilemmas, as she often shows in her
fiction. Nevertheless she attacks the conventional assumption that wom-
en’s writing is intrinsically inferior to men’s. In regard to the novel, women
can ‘fully equal men’ (Essays, 324). But women’s writing will only improve
in quality if there are greater cultural opportunities for women, particu-
larly in the educational sphere, and there should be no compromise with
critical standards as that will only encourage women writers to settle for
second best and not aspire beyond mediocrity.
Eliot did admire women whose work met the highest critical standards,
notably Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë, but even
those writers have to survive her critical scrutiny and are subject to critique
if they fail to do so. Though she praises the style of Gaskell’s Ruth for
being ‘a great refreshment to me from its finish and fulness’, nevertheless
‘with all its merits, [it] will not be an enduring or classical fiction … Mrs
Gaskell seems to me to be constantly misled by a love of sharp contrasts—
of “dramatic” effects. She is not contented with the subdued colouring—
the half tints of real life’ (Letters, II, 86). But she considers Charlotte
Brontë’s Villette to be a major novel by any standards, ‘almost preternatu-
ral in its power’ (Letters, II, 87).
Critics of the ‘Images of Women’8 school complained that Eliot created
no female characters comparable to herself in artistic or intellectual
achievement. This view is open to qualification as Armgart in the poem of
the same name and the Princess Halm-Eberstein in Daniel Deronda, the
former prima donna Alcharisi, were great artists in the sphere of opera.
But creating exceptional female (or male) characters as role models was at
odds with Eliot’s realist aesthetic. To create women characters with wholly
exceptional qualities would in effect be complicit with maintaining and
justifying the limitations or constraints placed on women as they appear to
be capable of mastering their world without significant social change being
necessary. One should also keep in mind that though Eliot may have been
relatively distant from female activism in a public sense—in part at least
because she feared that such support from a ‘fallen women’ could have
been an embarrassment—she expressed her agreement with J. S. Mill’s
political efforts on behalf of female suffrage, being ‘inclined to hope for
much good from the serious presentation of women’s claims before
24 K. M. NEWTON
Parliament’ and called a speech by an opponent of Mill ‘an abomination’

(Letters, IV, 366). She was sceptical, however, about whether extending
the suffrage to women would be, as implied earlier, any kind of panacea.
In a letter to John Morley, editor of the Fortnightly Review, she declared
she ‘would certainly not oppose any plan which held out reasonable prom-
ise of tending to establish as far as possible an equivalence of advantages
for the two sexes, as to education and the possibilities of free develop-
ment’, and dismissed ‘the “intention of Nature” argument’—which
claimed that women’s lower status was a fact of nature—as ‘a pitiable fal-
lacy’, though admitting that ‘woman seems to me to have the worse share
of existence’ (Letters, VIII, 402).
In modern Eliot criticism, it is clear that many critics find it difficult to
come to terms with the logic of her position that while social victimhood
or disadvantage should be acknowledged and addressed there were dan-
gers if sympathy could lead to critical or rational judgement being
compromised. Not only does this way of thinking determine her harsh
judgement of much women’s fiction and her lack of enthusiasm for suf-
frage reform even if not opposed to it in principle, but for her the question
of education for both women and the working classes was much more
important.
What has been perceived as her negative view of the urban working
class is another aspect of her thought that has troubled her critics. A more
positive treatment of the rural working class is evident in Adam Bede and
she herself was only one generation removed from that class. But her atti-
tude to the urban working class has been seen as an unattractive elitism or
at worst sheer snobbery. It has been said that she refers ‘scornfully’ to the
idea ‘that the working-classes are in a condition to enter at once into a
millennial state of altruism, wherein everyone is caring for everyone else,
and no one for himself”’ (Rignall 2011, 32). But her scorn is not for
working-class people but for the absurdity of elevating them to heights of
virtue that are beyond human capability, as is evident in a phrase like ‘enter
at once into a millennial state of altruism’. She is especially critical of the
idealization of the working class in fiction, referring in her essay ‘The
Natural History of German Life’ to ‘Eugène Sue’s idealized proletaires’
(Essays, 272). Such representation she finds ‘noxious’ because for her it
prevents readers seeing or understanding the often shameful material real-
ity of working-class life. One can argue, however, that her realist aesthetic
led to a lack of appreciation of the artistic advantages of idealization in
forms of literature, notably Dickens’s, that combine realism with elements
drawn from a literary mode such as romance. When Eliot wrote her own
fiction she had to qualify her critique of idealization and admitted with
regret that she could not avoid some idealization in regard to her depic-
tion of the eponymous heroine of her ‘historical romance’, Romola.9
But while Eliot may criticize the idealization of the working class, she
rejects the converse of that: the middle- and upper-class assumption that
both the vices of the working classes and their identification with menial
tasks are indicative of an intrinsic inferiority. This position is also pertinent
to the woman question, where the influence on Eliot’s thinking of Mary
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) is clear. In
her short 1855 essay on Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller, Eliot writes:
‘On the one side we hear that woman’s position can never be improved
until women themselves are better; and, on the other, that women can
never become better until their position is improved—until the laws are
made more just, and wider field opened to feminine activity … we want
freedom and culture for woman, because subjection and ignorance have
debased her, and with her, Man’ (Essays, 205).10 Eliot had a long-standing
interest in Wollstonecraft—Mirah’s suicide attempt in Deronda obviously
alludes to Wollstonecraft’s—and though one can admit that Eliot’s discus-
sion of the Vindication does not deal with its more revolutionary aspects
it would be a simplistic response to criticize it for that. The fact that Eliot
discusses it at all and recommends it to readers is a denial that it is a ‘rep-
rehensible book’. She calls it ‘eminently serious, severely moral’ (Essays,
201) when it had been generally seen as a dangerously revolutionary text
and thus virtually excluded from serious consideration in the nineteenth
century until Eliot’s 1855 essay. Eliot’s positive view of Wollstonecraft’s
book is in itself a radical act.
Eliot agreed with Wollstonecraft that education for women—being
‘educated in an orderly manner’ so as to be able to take up forms of
employment in the professions or business that would free them from the
need to ‘marry for a support’ (Essays, 204)—was essential for female prog-
ress. Like Wollstonecraft she condemned woman being seen as ‘fit for
nothing but to sit in her drawing-room like a doll-Madonna in her shrine’
(Essays, 205), as Eliot puts it, though she also agreed with Wollstonecraft
that most women are likely at present to choose conventional roles such as
being wives and mothers and should have the right to do so. She stresses,
however, like Wollstonecraft, the need for ‘thorough education of women
which will make them rational beings in the highest sense of the word’
(Essays, 203) if women are to have an alternative to domestic roles but
26 K. M. NEWTON
agrees with both Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller that supporters of

female advancement should resist succumbing to the temptation of ‘senti-
mental exaggeration’ in order that ‘Their ardent hopes of what women
may become do not prevent them from seeing and painting women as
they are’ (Essays, 205).
Eliot’s critique of idealization in regard to how women and a socially
disadvantaged working class tend to be represented seriously challenges
her critics, and this is seen most clearly in response to her short and light
in tone essay entitled ‘Servants’ Logic’, which critics have found offensive.
Even a critic generally well disposed to Eliot’s ideas, such as Avrom
Fleishman, sees it as the culmination of Eliot’s essential lack of sympathy
with the working class, as it communicates her ‘sense of futility in con-
fronting the deficiencies of working-class people’ (Fleishman 2010, 160).
Dorothea Barrett goes much further and calls the essay ‘perhaps the most
unpleasant and embarrassing she ever wrote … Riddled with sneering class
prejudice, “Servants’ Logic” shows clearly the kind of condescension,
aversion, and, at bottom, fear that would soon produce Felix Holt and his
political platitudes’ (Barrett 1989, 103). But the reasons for the servants’
faulty ‘logic’ does not derive from working-class women being mentally
inferior in any essentialized sense but from their having ‘untrained minds’
(Essays, 391). In the essay on Fuller and Wollstonecraft, Eliot remarks that
‘a woman quite innocent of an opinion in philosophy, is as likely as not to
have an indomitable opinion about the kitchen’ (Essays, 203). Though it
is not the servants’ fault that they have untrained minds, for Eliot this does
not alter the fact that they have little grasp of ‘logic’ as a consequence. As
in the case of bad writing by inadequately educated women in ‘Silly
Novels’, she believes ‘logic’ and empirical fact cannot be allowed to be
compromised by treating the servants’ faulty ‘logic’ with respect even if
this may undermine their self-esteem. Her servants resent any criticism of
their ‘logic’, which is in fact a rejection of logic, in regard to their justifica-
tions of their cooking practices, and resist it. In the context of making
soup, the consequences may be relatively trivial: possible dyspepsia for
those who consume it. The servants refuse to listen to a rational argument
against a cooking method that could lead to dyspepsia or at worst food
poisoning (there is a personal aspect to this essay as Lewes was ‘eminently
dyspeptic’) (Letters, III, 23).
Of course mocking in a light humorous way, servants, who had to do
all the menial work in a middle-class Victorian home, can be regarded as
somewhat distasteful. Without the labour of the working classes s upporting
upper- and middle-class lifestyles, one may doubt whether Middlemarch

would have been written. This is no doubt a factor in negative critical reac-
tions to this essay. But those who may criticize or feel superior to Eliot for
what may appear to be lack of sympathy for her servants should perhaps
bear in mind, at the risk of stating the obvious, that although few mem-
bers of the middle class today in the West may employ live-in servants,
they are no less dependent on working-class labour. Unlike Victorians
such as Eliot, however, they are largely insulated from direct contact with
working-class people and the kind of difficulties that master-servant rela-
tionships almost inevitably create. Eliot’s attitude to her servants is only
superficially a sign of a lack of sympathy for the working class. Though she
is well aware of the social conditions that are responsible for the servants’
‘untrained minds’, the interests of human beings, society and its institu-
tions, including of course the interests of the working classes, are not
served by the setting aside of logic. Sympathy should not operate sepa-
rately from rationality and empirical fact if it is to be a productive force
ethically and socially.
IV
One can discern a political subtext to ‘Servant’s Logic’ and I shall now
focus on Eliot’s politics: ‘Reason about things with your servants, consult
them, give them the suffrage, and you produce no other effect in them
than a sense of anarchy in the house’ (Essays, 396). Doubt about democ-
racy, at least if it is defined only in terms of extending the suffrage, is
implied: ‘I who am no believer in Salvation by Ballot, am rather tickled
that the first experiment with it has turned against its adherents’ (Letters,
VI, 21–2), Gladstone’s Liberal Party having been defeated in a general
election. Universal suffrage for all people over twenty-one was finally
introduced in Britain in 1928, and one can argue that Eliot was right to
believe that it would hardly prove to be a panacea for women or the work-
ing class. Eliot is not so much concerned that the extension of voting
rights to the uneducated working classes might lead to anarchy or major
social disorder, a conventional conservative view which has not been borne
out, but by the likelihood that without major educational reform serious
inequalities would be unaddressed and the power of the traditional ruling
classes would remain largely intact. Her essay, ‘Address to Working Men,
by Felix Holt’ suggests that identifying democracy simply with extending
the suffrage in the conditions that prevailed in Victorian Britain would not
28 K. M. NEWTON
create a form of democracy she could respect. An electorate made up pre-

dominantly of an inadequately educated and culturally deprived populace
would be unlikely to produce the social and economic changes that Eliot
regarded as necessary for a Victorian society which she saw as largely cor-
rupt. As regards the suffrage question in relation to women, she is uncon-
vinced that it would do much to further social progress in a prevailing
cultural and social context that placed limits on them in virtually every
sphere, especially in the sphere of education. She unequivocally advocated
education at university level for women and financially supported it.
Though Eliot sees women as being in a similar situation politically to
the working class as regards the issue of education, her position is most
directly radical in relation to education for the ‘labouring classes’, which
would of course include working women, where she rejects conservative
ideology on the issue. Why educate a class whose role was to do the physi-
cal labour and the menial tasks required by society, as a Tory MP asked:
However specious in theory the project might be of giving education to the

labouring classes of the poor, it would, in effect, be found to be prejudicial
to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life,
instead of making them good servants in agriculture and other laborious
employments to which their rank in society had destined them; instead of
teaching them the virtue of subordination, it would render them factious
and refractory, as is evident in the manufacturing counties; it would enable
them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books and publications against
Christianity; it would render them insolent to their superiors …11
Eliot was familiar with this argument as is clear in Scenes of Clerical Life in
Chap. 1 of ‘Janet’s Repentance’ when Mr Tomlinson, ‘the rich miller’,
remarks to Mr Dempster: ‘There’s work enough with the servant-maids as
it is—such as I never heard the like of in my mother’s time, and it’s all
along o’ your schooling and newfangled plans. Give me a servant as can
nayther read nor write, I say, and doesn’t know the year o’ the Lord as she
was born in’ (SCL, 169). Also, Eliot’s support of education for the work-
ing classes is not merely to serve utilitarian ends as is clear in ‘Address to
Working Men’: they should have a right to access ‘that treasure of knowl-
edge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, feeling, and manners, great
memories and the interpretation of great records, which is carried on from
the minds of one generation to the minds of another’, from which they
have ‘for the most part [been] shut out from sharing’ (Essays, 425). She
does not fear that working-class education will undermine the existing
social structure but in contrast views it positively as having the potential to
change a society which the essay sees as rotten in virtually every respect.
Her spokesman Felix Holt spells out ‘the bad practices, the commercial
lying and swindling, the poisonous adulteration of goods, the retail
cheating, and the political bribery which are carried on boldly in the midst
of us’, going on to refer to ‘the abomination of men calling themselves
religious while living in splendour on ill-gotten gains … to have as low a
standard of right or wrong, to have so much belief in falsehood, or to have
so degrading, barbarous a notion of what pleasure is’ that it deserves to be
called ‘vicious’ (Essays, 416–7).
Few of Eliot’s critics, however, have generally acknowledged the essay’s
political radicalism; it is generally seen as exemplifying her political conser-
vatism, and her use of the word ‘Radical’ in the title of Felix Holt the novel
and the later essay is generally mocked by critics. The editor of her essays,
Thomas Pinney, mentions a critic who has ‘accurately observed, “Felix
Holt the Radical is rather Felix Holt the Conservative”’ (Essays, 415), a
view that has been widely shared. One of the main reasons for this identi-
fication of the essay with conservatism is that radicalism has now become
virtually identified with the left and modern liberal opinion whereas some
of the social and political thinkers Eliot has affinities with, such as Ruskin
and Carlyle, tend now to be associated with a right-wing political ideol-
ogy, though clearly radicals in a nineteenth-century context. She distanced
herself, however, from the later Carlyle, pointing to ‘the exaggerations of
Latter-Day Pamphlets’ (Essays, 214), and her position on the Governor
Eyre affair and the ‘Indian Mutiny’ was quite different from his.12 In a let-
ter she contrasts Carlyle with the ‘theoretical democrat’, Varnhagen von
Ense, who admired Carlyle but who had been dismayed on meeting him
that ‘Carlyle talked the fiercest despotism’ (Letters, II, 185).
Eliot cannot be straightforwardly aligned with ‘right-wing’ or ‘left-
wing’ radicalism as conventionally understood. She problematizes such
terms. Also, critics who contend she is conservative politically do not take
sufficient account of her continuing connections with Comtean political
radicalism, which may be seen as predominantly ‘left wing’ in orientation,
even though she could not accept Comte’s positivist system as a whole.
She maintained, however, strong links with English positivists, especially
Frederic Harrison, a close friend who advised her on legal issues related to
her fiction, who may be described as a ‘left-wing’ radical who had links
with Christian socialism, was an opponent of colonialism and supported
30 K. M. NEWTON
numerous radical causes, such as furthering the interests of the working

class and helping French refugees following the defeat of the Paris com-
mune, which he had sympathy with.13
Where Eliot had significant intellectual affinities with Carlyle was in
relation to his scathing critique of laissez-faire capitalism and what he
famously called the ‘cash nexus’. In particular she sees free-market capital-
ism as a major driving force in the nineteenth century of an imperialist and
colonialist foreign policy that exploited countries such as India and China.
The most obvious indication of this is the mention in Impressions of
Theophrastus Such, in the chapter ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, of the
opium wars between Britain and China in the mid-nineteenth century
where her narrator Theophrastus writes: ‘I am bound not to demoralise
him [the Chinaman] with opium, not to compel him to my will by destroy-
ing or plundering the fruits of his labour on the alleged ground that he is
not cosmopolitan enough’ (ITS, 147), alluding to British economic policy
which compelled China to import opium in order to correct a trade imbal-
ance between British India and China. When China resisted, Britain
started a war in which she prevailed. The opium policy was put into effect
and, as Eliot suggests, China was forced by an imperialist power to accept
capitalist economics in its drive to dominate the world by gaining control
over its resources and exploiting its cheap labour.
Yet critics have continued to associate Eliot with a conservative political
philosophy, primarily because she does not express a political alternative to
the existing socio-economic system, which is seen as tantamount to accept-
ing the status quo. Though opposed to the Victorian social structure with
its class divisions and inequalities and what she saw as its moral bank-
ruptcy, she differed both from Carlyle and from critics of capitalism from
the left, such as socialists or communists, in not believing their socio-
political alternatives had credibility, at least in the prevailing cultural and
political context of Victorian Britain. She recognizes the reason for the
attraction of capitalism since she was well aware that selfishness as a near
intrinsic human drive can easily be aligned with capitalism’s capacity to
appeal to self-interest and greed and almost certainly she would have been
aware of the rational force of Adam Smith’s argument in The Wealth of
Nations (1776) that selfishness was fundamental to the workings of com-
merce and business. This does not mean that she became reconciled with
the Victorian political and economic status quo but in a context where she
believed that there was no possibility of seriously threatening that status
quo a more pragmatic attitude was necessary. Liberal-leaning and left-wing
critics have suggested, however, that her extensive investment portfolio is

in effect a collaboration with the capitalist system.14 It would be simplistic
to suggest that donating the wealth that came to her from her writing to
charity, for example, would have been a practicable option as she had
extensive financial responsibilities, especially the need to support Lewes’s
wife and children, and also money gave her the power to have some impact
on the world. She took an interest in her investments though Lewes and
Cross played the main role, and though it would be anachronistic to see
her as ‘an ethical investor’ one could argue that the fact that she was a
heavy investor in Indian railway stocks was not only because of the gener-
ous returns it offered to investors but also because the creation of a rail
network could have major benefits for the Indian economy. One hardly
needs to point out that after independence, the Indian railway system,
though built to serve British colonial interests, was fundamental to India’s
eventual emergence as a major modern economy.
A significant reason for the ‘Address to Working Men’ being misread as
supporting a conservative agenda is that it is largely assumed that Eliot’s
political radicalism was a thing of the past after the 1840s. It needs to be
stressed that in 1848 she was an unequivocal supporter of political revolu-
tion, both the French and 1848 revolutions, as is evident in her 1848 let-
ters to John Sibree. Her support for feminist ideas is also clear at that time
though her way of talking about them is unorthodox from the start: she
has no time for ‘bluestockings’, calling them ‘monsters’, because she sees
them as the product of ‘a miserably false state of society, in which a woman
with but a smattering of learning and philosophy is classed along with
singing mice and card playing pigs’ (Letters, I, 245). She also tells Sibree
she can have no sympathy for the fall of the Bourbons ‘when the earth has
its millions of unfed souls and bodies’. But is there evidence that such
views are merely a passing phase? On the face of it, there is such evidence
but I shall suggest that it has been misinterpreted.
Letters that she wrote in 1859 and 1860 to François D’Albert-Durade
may seem to claim that she had renounced her radical opinions of 1848.
Recalling her state of mind of some ten years before when she stayed with
the D’Albert-Durade family in Geneva, she attributes her mental state at
that time to her being ‘very unhappy, and in a state of discord and rebel-
lion towards my own lot’: ‘Many things that I should have argued against
ten years ago, I now feel too ignorant and too limited in moral sensibility
to speak of with confident disapprobation’. She goes on to say that she
now disapproves of the ‘attitude of antagonism’ she then had towards
32 K. M. NEWTON
‘dogmatic Christianity’ and though she has not returned to Christian

belief she now ‘see[s] in it the highest expression of the religious sentiment
that has yet found its place in the history of mankind’ (Letters, III, 230–1).
Later in 1860 she wrote to him: ‘Tell Maman I now enter into her conser-
vative feelings, which I used inwardly to disapprove in my revolutionary
mood—the mood I was in when you knew me’ (Letters, VIII, 264).
However, to identify that last sentence with a rejection of political
radicalism on Eliot’s part misreads the context. Her disapproval in 1860
of her ‘revolutionary mood’ of 1848 almost certainly refers to the reli-
gious rebellion of her earlier self which had led both to her refusal to
attend church and to an antagonistic attitude to Christian theology, cre-
ating severe family conflict. The later Eliot regretted that her hostility to
Christian belief in 1848 may have disturbed the faith of Mme D’Albert-
Durade, her more mature self having no desire to undermine the faith
of religious believers. But one should not conclude that she abandoned
her 1848 political radicalism, at least philosophically. In a letter written
to Mrs Richard Congreve from Italy days before the 1860 D’Albert-
Durade letter, she expresses support for a Neapolitan who has joined
the Sardinian army in order ‘to turn out the Neapolitan Bourbons. I feel
some stirrings of the insurrectionary spirit myself when I see the red
pantaloons at every turn in the streets of Rome’. She goes on to com-
ment ironically on Mrs Browning’s praise for ‘the modern saviour Louis
Napoleon’ and her belief that ‘for the French to impose a hateful gov-
ernment on the Romans is the only proper sequence to the story of the
French Revolution’ (Letters, III, 288), a claim that Eliot regards as ludi-
crous as this French action is completely opposed to the spirit of the
French Revolution.
After the 1840s Eliot continues to have radical views similar to those
expressed in the letters to Sibree. A passage in The Mill on the Floss, pub-
lished in 1862, deserves to be quoted more often as it shows that Eliot’s
political radicalism was undiminished with the narrator emphasizing class
division, the dire conditions in which the poor live and the indifference of
the rich despite their dependence on the labour of the poor:
… good society has its claret and its velvet-carpets, its dinner-engagements
six weeks deep, its opera and its faëry ball-rooms; rides off its ennui on thor-
oughbred horses; lounges at the club … But good society, floated on gos-
samer wings of light irony, is of very expensive production; requiring
nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant
deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding,
hammering, weaving under more or less oppression of carbonic acid—or
else, spread over sheepwalks, and scattered in lonely houses and huts on the
clayey or chalky corn-lands, where the rainy days look dreary. This wide
national life is based entirely on emphasis—emphasis of want, which urges it
into all the activities necessary for the maintenance of good society and light
irony … (MF, 291–2)
Similarities with ‘Address to Working Men’ are also clear, but though
the ruling class is seen as corrupt, where Eliot disturbs her critics is her
lack of confidence that the British working class if it gained political
power would be any better and will act or behave little differently from
‘a selfish aristocracy and a selfish commercial class … the opponents of
change’ (Essays, 424).
It is easy to see why Eliot’s attitude to the working class has been iden-
tified with a conservative ideology and distrust of democracy. But if one
compares her political thought in the 1840s with her later political think-
ing, there are significant continuities. Disappointment with the British
working class is a feature in both periods. In 1848 she compares the British
working class adversely with the French: ‘Our working classes are emi-
nently inferior to the mass of the French people’. Whereas with the French,
‘the mind of the people is highly electrified—they are full of ideas on social
subjects—they really desire social reform’, among the British working
class, she claims, ‘there is so much larger a proportion of selfish radicalism
and unsatisfied, brute sensuality (in the agricultural and mining districts
especially) than of perception or desire of justice, that a revolutionary
movement would be simply destructive—not constructive. Besides, it
would be put down … the aristocracy hav[ing] got firm hold of [the mili-
tary]’ (Letters, I, 254 [emphases in original]). This is essentially similar to
the argument in ‘Address to Working Men’, thus the stress on the need for
the political leaders of the working class to make working-class education
a priority, otherwise even if the existing ruling class is overthrown the
working classes will succumb to similar vices. Though working-class rage
against poverty and social oppression is understandable for Eliot, without
the idealism of the French working class motivated not only by material
considerations but by justice and reform as ideals in themselves, working-
class rebellion will not be fundamentally different in ethical terms from the
ruling classes’ determination to retain its political and economic power.
34 K. M. NEWTON
The difference between the Eliot of 1848 and the later Eliot is less
between the content of their political views than their mental outlooks on
life in each period. In 1848 Eliot was optimistic and driven by ‘revolution-
ary ardour’ (Letters, I, 253). The later Eliot in contrast tended to be pes-
simistic about whether the world could be changed for the better in her
time and her mental orientation was also significantly sceptical. It might
seem that this is another sign of contradiction and incoherence in Eliot for
how can a commitment to radical political views be reconciled with pessi-
mism and scepticism? But Eliot has not the kind of mind that functions in
terms of either/or but rather in terms of both/and.15 Though rationally
she may hold out little prospect for the emergence of a better world, she
does not reject utopian hope. For her one should never rule out the unex-
pected and the possibility that a new world order may come into being and
change what seemed unchangeable. While in her letters to Sibree her sup-
port and enthusiasm for the French Revolution and the 1848 revolutions
is clear, after the failure of the 1848 revolutions her ‘revolutionary ardour’
is no longer proclaimed. Even the best intended political ideals can fail,
revolutions are very likely to be defeated, and even if they are successful in
overcoming oppressive governments, they may only replace them with
something just as bad or worse. For Eliot’s political critics, it is easy to
brand this kind of thinking as reactionary in political terms. It is clearly a
consequence of experiencing the failure of the 1848 revolutions and the
end of an era of political hope.
In his book The Burdens of Perfection (2008), Andrew H. Miller argues
that ‘moral perfectionism’ is a fundamental element in the work of a wide
range of nineteenth-century writers, including Eliot, and sees its force as
emerging from and responding to a cultural ethos in which scepticism in a
variety of forms was a major preoccupation, consciously or unconsciously,
for all of these writers, again including Eliot. Miller is right to connect
Eliot with both moral perfection and scepticism but what makes Eliot dif-
ferent is that something more powerful than scepticism is at work in her
thinking, namely, pessimism. The major source of her thoroughgoing pes-
simism is almost certainly political: the failure of the 1848 revolutions.
Eliot was wholly committed to the revolutionary ideals of 1848, and the
political pessimism that followed their failure for her was not characteristic
of the other writers Miller discusses. Yet pessimism does not lead her to
abandon moral perfectionism as a concept, but what power will it have if
there is no supporting socio-cultural and political context for it? There is
little sign that after 1848 Eliot believes that such a context will ever come
into being, but that did not lead to a Schopenhauerian indifference to

human suffering or undermine her support for what she saw as positive
social changes, such as Italian unification or a recreated Jewish nation,
though there seemed no prospect for the latter. I shall return to the ques-
tion of Eliot’s scepticism and pessimism without, however, any abandon-
ment of idealism, in the final chapter.
Aware that her political position is open to misunderstanding, she tries
to clarify it in a letter of 1865 explaining how her support for revolution-
ary activism does not lead to suppression on her part of the sceptical or
rational intellect. Urged to subscribe to a fund in tribute to Mazzini, one
of the most persistent of nineteenth-century revolutionaries, despite her
admiration for him and general support for Italian unification, she will not
subscribe because she has doubts about the motives and intentions of the
committee behind this fund since it has not been made clear what the fund
will be used for and she suspects that ‘unknown to the subscribers’ the aim
‘may ultimately be the promotion of conspiracy’. She goes on to say:
‘Now, though I believe there are cases in which conspiracy may be a sacred,
necessary struggle against organized wrong, there are also cases in which
it may be hopeless, and can produce nothing but misery; or needless,
because it is not the best means attainable of reaching the desired end; or
unjustifiable, because it resorts to acts which are more unsocial in their
character than the very wrong they are directed to extinguish’ (Letters, IV,
199–200). Critics of Eliot’s politics have been reluctant to hear this mes-
sage though both past and recent history would seem to bear out what
one might call its dismal wisdom. Though the Eliot of 1848 was a hopeful
and enthusiastic advocate of revolution, the Eliot of the 1860s and 1870s
while not denying the need for revolutionary change is certainly less hope-
ful, all too aware of its risks, unattracted by futile political gestures.
What might appear to be another problematic contradiction in Eliot’s
politics is that though her critique of the existing social system for its
inequality, oppression and moral corruption links her with political radi-
calism, there was initially a lack of an economic dimension to her politics.
This is apparent in a letter of 1858 to Sara Hennell when she comments
that Ruskin’s socialistic Political Economy of Art had ‘some magnificent
passages, mixed up with stupendous specimens of arrogant absurdity on
some economic points’, and lets Hennell know that she had discussed
economics with Herbert Spencer, an extreme libertarian who asserted that
the state had no right to exercise control over the individual, and sup-
ported unconstrained laissez-faire economics. Spencer had ridiculed those
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Tibetan Woman using a Sling for throwing Stones
They possess a long barrel, not always perfectly straight nor cylindrical; they are
smooth-bore, the explosion being caused by a primitive fuse attachment which,
when lighted by means of a flint and steel, applies the fire to a small cup of
gunpowder at the side of the barrel. They have a peep-hole [159]sight, but this is
absolutely devoid of mathematical accuracy, and the bullets and gunpowder
used by the Tibetans are home-made and of inferior quality. Pebbles, or small
pieces of iron, are frequently used for ammunition. A movable prop is necessary
in order to enable the long weapon to be held in a horizontal position, and this
should in a way facilitate accurate shooting. Apart from the various faults of the
matchlocks themselves, an additional difficulty arises in Tibet even when firing
with more perfected weapons. Shooting at great altitudes, it may be pointed out,
involves special sighting of one’s rifle; the variation in the trajectory of a
projectile being considerable, at 15,000 or 16,000 feet above sea-level, owing
chiefly to the rarefied air. The clearness of the atmosphere also prevents the
correct estimate of range. For instance, with my ·256 Mannlicher rifle, with the
usual sight at 100 yards, it was necessary at that altitude to aim about a foot
lower than the target in order to make a bull’s eye.
When people get to high elevations for the first time, and until they have the
cause explained to them, or learn it for themselves, this is a constant puzzle,
and frequently leads to the condemnation of a good weapon. [160]
It must be said for the Tibetan that his eye is generally fairly accurate and his
hand steady, and with bows and arrows I have seen some archers make quite
creditable performances. These are, however, now looked upon as obsolete
weapons by the natives. The soldiers as well as civilians are armed with
matchlocks.
Men and women in Tibet are extremely skilful in the use of a rope sling, which
they always carry about their person, and with which they can fling stones long
distances with great precision. It is not uncommon, as I have said, to see them
strike in this manner a picked recalcitrant sheep in a large flock, or a distant yak
which they want to drive to camp. Even children, through constant practice, are
adepts at stone-throwing.
Tibetan Games. Stone-Throwing
All over Asia, as we have seen, is found the ancient custom of “stone-fighting,”
either as a sport or to settle disputes between factions; and although in Tibet
these combats do not assume such gigantic proportions as in Corea, for
instance, where thousands of combatants are engaged in fierce fights, still in the
Forbidden Land, too, there is plenty of scope for broken skulls and bruises. The
battles are generally fought between the male members of two or more rival
families, [161]and seldom between large factions or guilds, except in big towns
such as Lhassa or Shigatz, where these stone fights occasionally assume
alarming proportions. They are undoubtedly a speedy and practical method of
settling controversies among rival families, besides affording some considerable
amusement and excitement to the gathered crowd of spectators watching the
progress of the combat well out of range of the missiles.
Stone-throwing in a different form, as a sport, is indulged in on festive occasions

by young men. Some large rocks, more or less spherical, and some 30 to 50 lbs.
in weight, being collected, and the participants in the game having divested
themselves of their heavy coats, which are left hanging from their waistbands,
the rocks are lifted and swung over the head and flung some considerable
distance, often ten or twelve yards, either into an appropriate hole or near a
mark-stone. This exercise generally takes place near a mani wall, such as is
represented in the illustration in this book. Another form of the same game
consists in kicking to or near a particular spot a small stone with the instep of
one’s foot, swinging one’s stiffened leg as if it were a golf-club.
Wrestling is one of the few other sports noticeable [162]in Tibet. It is, however, not
commonly indulged in, and is done according to no rules. It is, in fact, in the
“catch as catch can” style, with additional biting and vicious kicking until the
victor can firmly hold the helpless vanquished flat under him.
The amusement which always causes much mirth among Tibetans is

tobogganing. They do not always indulge in it as a sport; but when opportunity
offers, for instance, to save themselves the trouble of long and steep descents
on snowy mountain slopes, they greatly enjoy the fun. I have seen Tibetans slide
on their backs at a terrific pace for a hundred or two hundred yards down
precipitous inclines, laughing and yelling, with their heavy sheepskin coats
collected in front, and their legs up in the air except when required for steering
purposes.
Tobogganing made easy
With the exception of the above, I do not recollect seeing any other national
sport; nor, as a matter of fact, do Tibetans indulge much in sports of any kind—
partly owing to the great altitudes which they inhabit, where violent exercise
leads to considerable personal discomfort and suffering; partly because of a
somewhat depressed nature. Although not always devoid of considerable
humour, [163]the Tibetan can seldom be roused from his normal sulkiness and
made to put forth superfluous exertion either for his own delectation or that of
others.
Also, the nomadic existence which he leads from one end of the year to the
other, is full of ever present wild excitements and surprises. He often travels over
snowy passes several thousand feet higher than the highest mountains of
Europe, where precipices and avalanches and land-slides or falling rocks are of
daily occurrence, and any devised sport becomes in comparison rather tame
and uninteresting.
Naturally, there is no such thing in Tibet as training to be an athlete, nor are the
few sports and games specially taught to the children. They are merely picked
up from one generation to the other by imitation. The Tibetan is extremely hardy
and wiry.
Amusements which are the result of prosperity and happiness are not plentiful in
Tibet. Playing cards and dice and a primitive sort of chess, and one or two more
elaborate games imported from China and Nepal, are occasionally to be seen;
but perhaps the most interesting to us is their dancing, notably their war-dances,
curious in people so little martial. With a sword in one [164]hand and a kata in the
other, and with the knees bent, the dancers keep time to the beating of a double
drum and the clapping of hands from the spectators. They attempt some more or
less clumsy revolutions on their heels, but the movements of their arms are quite
graceful. Alternately each bent arm is raised in front of the head, while the other
is held far back, and they manage to give a pretty semi-rotary twist to both
forearms and hands when they have reached the highest and lowest points
respectively.
As the dancers and musicians get excited the movements of the arms and legs
are greatly accelerated, and some of the best dancers can move their limbs so
quickly that on looking at them one’s eyes get confused to such an extent that
only a shapeless moving mass is distinguishable. Owing to the rarefied air, they
cannot, however, keep this up very long, and, panting, their lungs in convulsion
and eyes bulging out of their sockets, they abruptly end the dance with a
suggestive and humorous—often too humorous—posture, or else with a leap in
the air, doubling up the body and resting the head upon the knees before the
feet touch the ground again.
Tibetan Dance with Sword and Kata (Veil of Friendship)
The most appreciated dancing, from a Tibetan [165]point of view, is when the
performer can continue his evolutions, bringing his legs forward alternately with
knees bent low and almost touching the ground. In a way, this dance is not
unlike Russian peasant dancing. The best dancers give solo performances,
while the rest join in a circle round and round them until they get tired out and
dizzy.
The women’s dancing has precisely the same characteristics, except that it is
done with no sword. Only a kata is held in the right hand, and the contortions are
less exaggerated, and, therefore, more graceful. The abrupt end also is done
away with, together with odd posturing. The women, whenever I saw them
dance, usually danced singly to the accompaniment of softer and more
sentimental music than was the case with the men. They added sad, melodious
chanting to their movements, weird and wild to a degree, yet full of expression
and quite pleasing to the ear. [166]
[Contents]
CHAPTER XV
The Tibetan in his normal life is occasionally an amusing being, full of coarse
humour, and with a bounce which carries him through his existence. When
alone, he is quiet in his manner, and will spend his leisure hours spinning wool
or in some other such feminine occupation, while his women-folk do all the hard
work about the tent. As will be seen by the illustrations in this book, both Tibetan
men and women look clumsy and heavy. Anatomically, they are well-built, small
but wiry, and rather thickly set, but very seldom with any great abundance of
flesh and fat, except the Lamas, who lead a lascivious and lazy life.
A Typical Tibetan
Tibetan clothing is mostly responsible for the funny appearance they present,
men wearing sometimes three or four coats, skin or woollen, one on the top of
the other. The sash or belt, which is intended to be at the waist, is usually
considerably [167]lower down owing to the weight of the variety of articles the
wearer constantly carries stored away round the waist in his outer coat,—
wooden bowls, balls of butter, bags of tsamba, a bundle of wool for spinning with
the distaff, the prayer-wheel, and a quantity of rags,—which bulge out at the
waist all round his body and drag down his coat. This often gives them the
appearance of being quite short-legged, though, of course, they are not really.
Men and women wear picturesque, most comfortable and practical long boots,
the legging being usually red or white, the thick soles of rope well protecting the
foot all round. These boots are largely manufactured in Lhassa and Shigatz, but
people also manufacture them themselves. Officials wear leather boots of the
Chinese type, with thick wooden or leather soles with a few huge iron nails
underneath and a curled-up toe.
Among the coloured illustrations will be found paintings of Tibetan women—from

babyhood, in an ample and striking robe of white and blue checks; at the age of
twelve, with shaggy hair hanging down the back and shoulders and a sufficient
collection of ornaments round the neck; an older dame, of middle class and age,
in her everyday costume, with [168]a sash enveloping nearly one-third of her
body; then a lady of rank and beauty, fully decorated with amber necklace, gold
and malachite brooch, elaborate earrings, and a much-adorned aureole upon
the head. She sits modestly on bags of borax, and displays feet of some
considerable size. Well, that is the fault of the ample and padded boots which
she wears, and not a fault of the foot inside—not small, mind you, but generally
well-formed—nor of the painter who depicted the scene.
Next we have a religious lady praying before a tent shrine, turning her back to us
and displaying in its full glory her Tchukti—that is to say, three broad bands of
three sections each alternately blue and red. These bands of heavy cloth reach
from the shoulder to the feet, and they are ornamented with coral or malachite
beads, silver coins and bells, and at the lower end a row of little brass or silver
bells is generally attached. Nearly all the money earned by the woman (and
frequently that of the husband) is sewn on to the Tchukti, so that the family
fortune—when this fortune exists—hangs down women’s backs to a number of
neat little tresses of the woman’s hair to which it is attached. When the Tchukti is
worn the hair is parted in the middle and plastered down with melted butter. [169]
Last, but not least, you will find the portrait of a Tibetan old lady, who somewhat
resented being sketched and had not her sweetest smile upon her face. Rather
bony and toothless, with a wrinkled skin which would put to shame a crocodile,
one leg stretched out because she had a rheumatic pain and could not bend it,
she used quite bad language when I quickly portrayed her. She predicted and
wished misfortunes of all kinds which should descend upon me.
Perhaps you will notice, in most of the illustrations representing Tibetans, that
the people depicted in them have their eyes half-closed. This is one of the most
characteristic points about a Tibetan face, especially when out of doors and
conversing. First of all, as you know, the Mongolian eye is elongated between
heavy lids, and does not afford an extensive view of the iris at any time; then,
owing to the intensely brilliant light, the severe and constant winds, and plentiful
snow, the natives get into the habit of accentuating the squeezing of the eye-
aperture for protection. This causes crow’s-feet to appear on men and women at
an early age, and a much corrugated forehead and brow.
I had occasion on this journey to pay a visit to [170]a quaint tribe of Tibetans
calling themselves the Kam-par, or people from Kam (Tibet). They possessed
extraordinary features—from intermarriage with some tribe of Nepal, I should
think—intensely cruel faces in many instances; others quite refined, especially
those of the better class. The young man whose portrait I give, very girlish-
looking, with an elaborate hat ornamented with gold embroidery, was the son of
the chief, and quite a nice-looking boy, with suave manners and a humble voice.
He had long hair in waves upon his shoulders, and a short pigtail behind. But
some of the older men, such as the one I portrayed, had brutal faces, and their
manner was somewhat coarse, sulky, and blunt. They possessed highly
developed cheek-bones, slits of eyes, and prominent drooping lips. The nose,
however, was more developed than on other Tibetans.
Woman and Child praying before a Shrine inside a Tent
These people, like most other Tibetans, practise a form of cannibalism which is
not at all uncommon in Tibet, especially in their funeral ceremonies. The Lamas,
as is well known, often drink human blood out of bowls made of human skulls.
This tribe, a nomad one, was, among other employments, given to a certain
amount of brigandage; [171]and, in fact, among them I found a well-known
brigand—a long-lost friend of mine—whose portrait I also give in these pages.
He possessed quite a striking-looking head, with a good deal of determination
upon his features, a fierce moustache, and masses of curly hair trimmed straight
at the height of the shoulders. He always shouted at the top of his voice
whenever he spoke; always heartily laughed at everything you said; and, to
show his approval, struck you upon your shoulder with his ponderous hand after
each sentence. He was one of the most powerfully built men I have ever met, his
strength being quite extraordinary; and, for a brigand, quite an agreeable
companion out of business hours.
Polyandry, when the wife is shared among brothers, as is the case all over Tibet,
is practised by this tribe also; and when I met them they were employed in
conveying salt and borax, from Gyanema over the Darma Pass into India. These
Kam-par occasionally travel as far down as Tanakpore, the borax and salt being
carried entirely on sheep-back.
When one got over the peculiar expression of their faces, the Kam-par were
amiable enough.
Their women were highly decorated with [172]numerous brass ornaments with
pendants, and silver bracelets inlaid with malachite. Teeth of musk-deer were
freely used as ornaments, as well as being used for such useful purposes as
picking one’s teeth, cleaning the nails, and so on.
The chief wore his hair parted in the centre, and plaited into small tresses which
joined into a single pigtail behind. The skin was of a sallow yellowish colour. The
upper portion of the eye, as is often the case in people who are constantly
exposed to a brilliant light, was much discoloured, and a peculiar whitish tinge
veiled the entire iris of the eye. In the way of clothing they showed a marked
preference for bright red and yellow textiles, and on their visits into Kumaon they
had invested their savings in buying old regimental brass buttons, with which the
women were freely ornamented. Bracelets of glass beads, and also necklaces of
coral and amber, were displayed with pride.
Tibetan Boy in his Gold-embroidered Hat
These people had beautiful tents, the inside being most comfortable, with
Chinese carpets spread on the floor, cushions to rest the head and back upon,
and cured skins spread everywhere where they might come in useful. Elaborate
altars, some double-tiered, with as many as seven images of Buddha, were to
be seen, and upon them [173]burning lights galore, incense-sticks alight filling the
tent with saintly fumes. Bags of butter and chura and sweet paste hung from
every tent-pole. All round the tent, inside and also outside, were high walls of
double sacks of borax. Outside, on high posts, with an ingenious contrivance to
prevent animals going up, a lot of meat was prepared, with salt, in thin slices,
and exposed to the sun to dry.
As is always the case, with this tribe too travelled a number of Lamas, who
practically controlled everything. One of these Lamas had as repulsive and
murderous a face as it is given to any human being to possess. True enough,
his first boast was that he had killed three people (the natives said a good many
more). His manner towards the people was most brutal. He was a tall man of
marvellous muscular development, and between his most repulsive lips, which
never seemed to close, he displayed a set of most powerful long pointed teeth,
such as those one would see in a wild animal. His head-gear consisted of a
vizor made of long, bristly hair—not unlike the half of a chimney-sweeper’s
brush—which he fastened round the forehead and back of the head with a
string.
This gentleman was inclined to be overbearing, [174]even intrusive; and, to show

his courage as well as muscular power (possibly to frighten me), he thumped
and knocked about his people in a merciless manner, always taking care to
select the helpless and weaker ones. His brutality irritated me considerably. I
was standing near his tent, and he came in with a long knife—he had been
making himself a stick to beat the people with. He was still foaming with rage.
There was a woman, his servant, sitting near the fire, and he asked her whether
the tea was ready in the raksang. She replied it was not, upon which he
administered a terrific kick in her stomach which would have killed any woman
but a Tibetan. I could stand no more. I seized my rifle by the muzzle and applied
the butt upon his face in a fashion which somewhat flattened his nose more than
it originally was and loosened some teeth. All bullies are cowards in any country,
and he made no reply whatever.
No doubt I shall be blamed—as I have been before—for administering my own

justice in other people’s countries, but I cannot help feeling that the weak should
ever and at any cost be protected against unwarranted attacks of the brutally
strong.
A Brigand
Another similar, but more comical, incident—[175]one of many—occurred another

day, when a shapeless figure, almost bent over in two and walking unsteadily
upon his feet, approached my camp. We were in a barren, desolate spot, cold
and dreary, and my men had put up chokdens of stones all round the camp.
The queer stranger had a most comical appearance, his waist down to his
knees, so full was his coat with stores of all kinds. He bowed profusely, his
shaggy hair flying—as much as it could fly, for it was so dirty and entangled—in
the breeze.
“Who are you and what do you want?” we asked him.
“I am a poor, poor man, with no food and no friends.”
I well knew this to be a lie, as I had had similar visitors before. He was a mere
Tibetan spy—a soldier in the disguise of a beggar, to come and find out all about
us.
“What do you want?”
“I am hungry and have pains in my inside for lack of food.”
I ordered my cook to give him plentiful meat and rice and some sweet paste. A
little of it he ate; the rest he stored away in his coat, wrapped up in dirty rags.
[176]
“Is there anything else you want?”
“Yes, I would like some tchah (tea).”
A jug of tea was handed him.
“Anything else you wish from us now?” we inquired of the Tibetan, who, while
pretending to sip the tea, was counting the number of my men, was trying to see
how many rifles we had, and was taking in everything all round with his ferreting
eyes. But although he was a splendid actor, his infirmities, I had detected at
once, were all put on for the occasion.
“Can I be allowed to prowl around your camp and see what I can pick up—
anything you have thrown away?”
“Yes, certainly; but mind you do not pick more than you expect.”
A Tibetan Spy in the Disguise of a Beggar approaching the Author’s Camp
The man crawled about camp—I ordered my men to pretend not to notice him—
while I observed him closely, all the time pretending to be busy writing. By
means of a small looking-glass I could watch his movements even when he was
behind me. The fellow was examining all my baggage carefully, and especially
our rifles which lay about. Having persuaded himself that none of us were
looking at him, he raised the flap of my tent and had a good look inside. When
he [177]had finished his inspection he came to bid me good-bye.
“Have you had all you want, do you think?” I asked him.
“Yes, indeed. He was grateful. He now wanted to go.”
“Before you go, I want to give you a remembrance to teach you that when you
accept people’s hospitality you should not practise treachery.”
Snatching out of his hand a long stick he carried, I applied to him a good beating
—not that it hurt him much, because he was so padded with articles he had
stored in his coat. In fact, in trying to struggle away, his sash got undone and he
dropped a number of little bags containing tsamba and butter, provisions which
were evidently intended to last him several days on his spying expedition. Also
two daggers.
My men, who entered fully into the spirit of the joke, chased him out of camp
with a well-directed shower of stones. Needless to say, “the starving Tibetan
cripple” outran them all. From a high point of vantage I watched him with my
telescope. When some distance off he went among some rocks, picked up his
matchlock which he had hidden there—and continued his flight. [178]

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George Eliot for the Twenty-First

Century 1st ed. Edition K. M. Newton

Televising Restoration Spain: History and Fiction in

Commonwealth History in the Twenty-First Century 1st

The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and

History after Hobsbawm: Writing the Past for the

The Palgrave Handbook of Magical Realism in the Twenty-

Governing California in the Twenty-First Century

Re-Imagining Creative Cities in Twenty-First Century

Definitions of Biomaterials for the Twenty-First

George Eliot for the

ISBN 978-3-319-91925-6 ISBN 978-3-319-91926-3 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946149

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: Classic Image / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

An earlier version of Chap. 4 was published in Essays in Criticism: ‘George

1 Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George Eliot Past,

2 The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot 17

3 Critical Encounters: Hardy, Bonaparte, Miller 51

4 Eliot and the Reinterpretation of the Ethical 77

5 Eliot as Psychological Novelist 97

6 The Mill on the Floss and the Revision of Tragedy 137

7 Daniel Deronda and the Novel of the Future 161

8 Eliot and the Politics of Modernism 205

K. M. Newton is Professor of English (Emeritus) at the University of

Interpreting the Text. Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1990.

AB Adam Bede (1859), ed. Valentine Cunningham. Oxford: Oxford

Essays Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney. London: Routledge

Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George

© The Author(s) 2018 1

i­nvulnerable. It may not be difficult to show that past denigration of Eliot

fiction with a conservative ideology, fundamentally supporting the socio-

a piece of paper’(Davis 2017, 3). Though highly relevant to current and

of Lewes’s intellectual affinities with him. Bain (unusually accompanied by

when considering how human beings engage or interact with external

philosophy. But whereas the atom turned out to be a scientifically produc-

A potential appeal of associationism for radical empiricists such as Eliot

Significantly Wordsworth, who was Eliot’s favourite Romantic poet, dis-

Gordon S. Haight, ed., A Century of George Eliot Criticism (London: Methuen,

The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot

© The Author(s) 2018 17

relationship with Lewes and her marriage to Cross were conforming to

not show a lack of sympathy to be so scathing and brutal about their

Parliament’ and called a speech by an opponent of Mill ‘an abomination’

agrees with both Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller that supporters of

upper- and middle-class lifestyles, one may doubt whether Middlemarch

create a form of democracy she could respect. An electorate made up pre-

However specious in theory the project might be of giving education to the

numerous radical causes, such as furthering the interests of the working

critics have suggested, however, that her extensive investment portfolio is

‘dogmatic Christianity’ and though she has not returned to Christian

into being, but that did not lead to a Schopenhauerian indifference to

Stone-throwing in a different form, as a sport, is indulged in on festive occasions

The amusement which always causes much mirth among Tibetans is

Tibetan Dance with Sword and Kata (Veil of Friendship)

Among the coloured illustrations will be found paintings of Tibetan women—from

This gentleman was inclined to be overbearing, [174]even intrusive; and, to show

No doubt I shall be blamed—as I have been before—for administering my own

Another similar, but more comical, incident—[175]one of many—occurred another

“Who are you and what do you want?” we asked him.

“I am a poor, poor man, with no food and no friends.”

“What do you want?”

1 Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George Eliot Past,

2 The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot 17

3 Critical Encounters: Hardy, Bonaparte, Miller 51

4 Eliot and the Reinterpretation of the Ethical 77

5 Eliot as Psychological Novelist 97

6 The Mill on the Floss and the Revision of Tragedy 137

7 Daniel Deronda and the Novel of the Future 161

8 Eliot and the Politics of Modernism 205

AB Adam Bede (1859), ed. Valentine Cunningham. Oxford: Oxford

invulnerable. It may not be difficult to show that past denigration of Eliot