British Poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century

A Selection for College Students, including Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge. Includes biographical sketches. doi 10.32873/unl.dc.zea.1096https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/1081/thumbnail.jp

George Eliot in Romantic Biofiction

Dinitia Smith’s The Honeymoon is the first complete biofiction of the woman enduringly known by her masculine pen name, George Eliot. It tells the story of a precocious provincial English girl who challenges the conventions of her middleclass upbringing as she pursues a writing career in Victorian London, moves in with an alreadymarried man, becomes one of the greatest living British novelists, and then marries John Cross, a man twenty years her junior whom she’d long called “nephew.” Whether or not Eliot’s brief marriage to Cross constituted a “happy ending” depends on how you interpret the harrowing incident that took place during their honeymoon in Venice. This is the mystery of the novel, which I will not spoil here. Parts of Eliot’s life have been represented in fiction in several other works, but no novelist before Smith has attempted to recreate Eliot’s whole life. The Honeymoon is thus an important contribution both to the biographical record of George Eliot and to the still-emerging genre of biofiction, in which a novelist draws from traditional biographical sources to create a new version of the life of a historical figure, usually paying particular attention to the subject’s interiority. In a brief prefatory “Note to the Reader,” Smith clearly states that she has written “a novel, a product of my imagination inspired by the life and writings of George Eliot” in order to depict Eliot’s “inner world as she lived out her life.

Victorian Sexual Politics and the Unsettling Case of George Eliot’s Response to Walt Whitman

George Eliot and Walt Whitman, two of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century, are rarely discussed in relation to one another. They did not correspond, nor did either writer ever cross the Atlantic. There may have been several degrees of separation between Eliot and Whitman personally, but even from a distance, the two writers influenced each other’s careers. There has been some misconception that Eliot disdained and discounted Whitman. This essay seeks to refute that assumption by examining the context in which Eliot appeared to reject him. Perhaps more significantly, this essay breaks new critical ground by attributing a second review of Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass to George Eliot. This study examines statements Eliot and Whitman made about one another, and considers the interrelationships of the people they knew in order to demonstrate that Eliot and her domestic partner George Henry Lewes played significant roles in Whitman’s British reception. This new information about their mutual friendships and avenues of promotion supplements several foundational studies of Whitman’s British or European reception undertaken by Clara Barrus, Harold Blodgett, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, M. Wynn Thomas, Joann P. Krieg, Betsy Erkkila, and Michael Robertson. These scholars have traced Whitman’s network of supporters across the Atlantic without noticing that Eliot and Lewes were members of the relatively small circle of influential British intellectuals that embraced and promoted Whitman in Britain early in his career. Finally, this essay posits several reasons why, after initially endorsing Whitman in 1856, Eliot appeared to withdraw her support in 1876. We see in her changing response to Whitman an example of how Eliot responded to the pressures of nineteenth-century sexual politics and her own celebrity status by self-censoring and coding sexuality, particularly same-sex desire, in her fiction, which extends scholarship by Nancy Henry, Kathleen McCormack, Laura Callanan, and Dennis S. Gouws, among others

George Henry Lewes, the Real Man of Science Behind George Eliot’s Fictional Pedants

This paper demonstrates that George Eliot drew on George Henry Lewes’s actual experience as an emerging scientist in her depiction of two fictional scholars, Edward Casaubon of Middlemarch and Proteus Merman, a lesser-known character from the chapter entitled “How We Encourage Research” in her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. After Thomas Huxley published a devastating review of Lewes’s first book of science, Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences, the evidence suggests that Lewes became highly focused on disproving his critics and earning lasting recognition as a scientist, a feat he expected to achieve with his five-volume series, Problems of Life and Mind. The paper concludes with a discussion of what purpose Eliot may have intended when she modeled these characters after George Henry Lewes, her consistently defended partner

George Henry Lewes, the Real Man of Science Behind George Eliot’s Fictional Pedants

This paper demonstrates that George Eliot drew on George Henry Lewes’s actual experience as an emerging scientist in her depiction of two fictional scholars, Edward Casaubon of Middlemarch and Proteus Merman, a lesser-known character from the chapter entitled “How We Encourage Research” in her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. After Thomas Huxley published a devastating review of Lewes’s first book of science, Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences, the evidence suggests that Lewes became highly focused on disproving his critics and earning lasting recognition as a scientist, a feat he expected to achieve with his five-volume series, Problems of Life and Mind. The paper concludes with a discussion of what purpose Eliot may have intended when she modeled these characters after George Henry Lewes, her consistently defended partner

George Henry Lewes, the Real Man of Science Behind George Eliot’s Fictional Pedants

This paper demonstrates that George Eliot drew on George Henry Lewes’s actual experience as an emerging scientist in her depiction of two fictional scholars, Edward Casaubon of Middlemarch and Proteus Merman, a lesser-known character from the chapter entitled “How We Encourage Research” in her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such. After Thomas Huxley published a devastating review of Lewes’s first book of science, Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences, the evidence suggests that Lewes became highly focused on disproving his critics and earning lasting recognition as a scientist, a feat he expected to achieve with his five-volume series, Problems of Life and Mind. The paper concludes with a discussion of what purpose Eliot may have intended when she modeled these characters after George Henry Lewes, her consistently defended partner

Victorian Sexual Politics and the Unsettling Case of George Eliot\u27s Response to Walt Whitman

George Eliot and Walt Whitman, two of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century, are rarely discussed in relation to one another. They did not correspond, nor did either writer ever cross the Atlantic. There may have been several degrees of separation between Eliot and Whitman personally, but even from a distance, the two writers influenced each other’s careers. There has been some misconception that Eliot disdained and discounted Whitman. This essay seeks to refute that assumption by examining the context in which Eliot appeared to reject him. Perhaps more significantly, this essay breaks new critical ground by attributing a second review of Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass to George Eliot. This study examines statements Eliot and Whitman made about one another, and considers the interrelationships of the people they knew in order to demonstrate that Eliot and her domestic partner George Henry Lewes played significant roles in Whitman’s British reception. This new information about their mutual friendships and avenues of promotion supplements several foundational studies of Whitman’s British or European reception undertaken by Clara Barrus, Harold Blodgett, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, M. Wynn Thomas, Joann P. Krieg, Betsy Erkkila, and Michael Robertson. These scholars have traced Whitman’s network of supporters across the Atlantic without noticing that Eliot and Lewes were members of the relatively small circle of influential British intellectuals that embraced and promoted Whitman in Britain early in his career. Finally, this essay posits several reasons why, after initially endorsing Whitman in 1856, Eliot appeared to withdraw her support in 1876. We see in her changing response to Whitman an example of how Eliot responded to the pressures of nineteenth-century sexual politics and her own celebrity status by self-censoring and coding sexuality, particularly same-sex desire, in her fiction, which extends scholarship by Nancy Henry, Kathleen McCormack, Laura Callanan, and Dennis S. Gouws, among others

The George Eliot Archive: Current Reception & Comparison of DH Projects 2020

• Current legal gray area for digital collections: An exception for public libraries and archives as educational tools exists for copyright infringement, but digital archives are not currently protected by this exception unless they can prove that the content is transformative. • Benefits of archiving scholarship together: Grouping like scholarship together regardless of genre or authorship allows for unique cross-purpose or interdisciplinary connections to be drawn from the collection. • Humanists of today must devote time and resources to the educational tools and platforms of tomorrow: Without the successful building and completion of means to ensure digital archives can be maintained throughout the future, all work will be done in vain

British Poetry of the Long Nineteenth Century: A Selection for College Students

A Selection for College Students. Includes introduction, brief biographical sketch, and a selection of the most frequently studied poems of Charlotte Smith, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge. 436 pages plus index of first lines

The George Eliot Archive: Current Reception & Comparison of DH Projects 2020

• Current legal gray area for digital collections: An exception for public libraries and archives as educational tools exists for copyright infringement, but digital archives are not currently protected by this exception unless they can prove that the content is transformative. • Benefits of archiving scholarship together: Grouping like scholarship together regardless of genre or authorship allows for unique cross-purpose or interdisciplinary connections to be drawn from the collection. • Humanists of today must devote time and resources to the educational tools and platforms of tomorrow: Without the successful building and completion of means to ensure digital archives can be maintained throughout the future, all work will be done in vain