Westminster Abbey Wreath Laying: George Eliot and The Working-Day Business of The World

One of the Shakespeare quotations most frequently used by George Eliot in her writings is an otherwise little-known phrase from As You Like It, Act 1 scene iii, where Rosalind, about to leave the court for the Forest of Arden, says, \u270, how full of briars is this working-day world!\u27 In George Eliot\u27 s work the phrase is illustrative of her theory of realism in fiction, the theory most famously expressed in Adam Bede, where the author praises the truthfulness of Dutch paintings, describing the sympathy which is aroused in her by \u27these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence\u27, as exemplified by \u27old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands\u27 (Book 2, chapter 1). George Eliot\u27s novels show that there is both truth and beauty to be found in everyday scenes among ordinary people. It is not a completely new idea about literature; most famously, Wordsworth had espoused it in the theory and practice of Lyrical Ballads at the beginning of the century. But the novels of the mid-nineteenth century were most often characterised by melodrama, coincidence, and extremes of the social scale, in novels of high life, such as those of Bulwer Lytton, or novels of Newgate, including Oliver Twist. Of course, George Eliot\u27s novels are not without their measure of melodrama - one thinks of the child-murder of Hetty Sorrel and her last minute reprieve from the gallows in Adam Bede, the Liebestod in the flood at the end of The Mill on the Floss, or the Dickensian elements in Felix Holt, such as the secret relationships in the Transome family, and the complicated legal arrangements which are gradually uncovered. But George Eliot also renders people in the home, at work, living ordinary lives (in which, as Wordsworth had also seen, there is plenty of drama mixed up with the monotony). One thinks of Caleb Garth and his family in Middlemarch, or of Adam Bede the carpenter, seen in the very opening chapter (entitled \u27The Work-shop \u27) of this first bestselling novel by the unknown \u27George Eliot\u27, actually at work, making a door. George Eliot is so much one of the great Victorian novelists, and we know that many of those who came after her - Hardy, Meredith, Henry James -owed her a debt of influence, that we may tend to take such elements in her work for granted, even see them as typically Victorian. But she ~ doing something radical, and intentionally so

How George Eliot came to write fiction

We are celebrating one hundred and fifty years since the publication in volume form of George Eliot\u27s first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, three stories printed first in Blackwood\u27s Edinburgh Magazine between January and November 1857, and then in two volumes in January 1858. I will tell the story of how George Eliot came to write fiction by moving backwards from the Scenes themselves, via George Eliot\u27s journal entry of 6 December 1857, \u27How I Came to Write Fiction\u27, to her literary criticism in the Westminster Review in the earlier 1850s, and finally to two letters, of 1849 and 1846, in order to demonstrate, with the benefit of hindsight, how we can observe her writing talent appearing more than a decade before she dared to try her hand at fiction, and what we can conclude about her attitude towards identifying herself as a writer of fiction, particularly with reference to the decision to write under a male pseudonym

Review of George Eliot: A Life

Fifty years after John Cross\u27s hagiographic George Eliot\u27s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals (1885), Gordon Haight planned a more forthright biography but first found that it would be necessary to re-edit those letters and journals expurgated by Cross and search out material unavailable or unmentioned by Cross. The results was first the seven volumes of The George Eliot Letters in 1954-55 and, in 1968, George Eliot: A Biography, the then definitive life. More material has been coming to light since, notably (but not only) the two supplemental volumes of the Letters Haight added in 1978, and there have been a number of new biographies, the most recent, Rosemary Ashton\u27s George Eliot: A Life. Ashton modestly disclaims any ambition to supersede Gordon Haight\u27s biography \u27as a piece of scholarship\u27, though she does have access to a few new letters to John Chapman and to letters of and other material on Lewes, whose biography she published in 1991. She also has much tangential but relevant material that Haight did not (or did not use): letters of Robert and Isaac Evans (George Eliot\u27s father and brother); Henry Crabb Robinson\u27s diary; letters of Bessie Rayner Parkes and Eliza Lynn Linton; letters, the Commonplace Book and engagement diaries of Cara Bray. She has also made use of many GE and GHL Journal entries Haight did not publish, and she has brought to bear significant amounts of relevant published materials: autobiographies, letters, biographies, historical, medical, philosophical studies, and periodicals. Though George Eliot: A Life may not supersede Haight\u27s biography \u27as a piece of scholarship\u27 it has admirably and worthily supplemented it

Impressions of Theophrastus Such

George Eliot\u27s last published work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), has hitherto not been much read or attended to by readers, critics, or even scholars. Now two editions have appeared almost simultaneously, both annotated and furnished with readable introductions. While welcoming the revival of the book in this form, I have to confess to not having had my mind much changed about its merits by the skillful introductions of Nancy Henry and DJ. Enright. The work still seems to me to be chiefly interesting for the extra light it occasionally throws on George Eliot\u27s character representation in the novels, on her views on literature and social and political history, and on her own early life. Compared to the novels, however, and - more tellingly - compared to her wonderful critical essays of the 1850s, Theophrastus Such is tendentious, often laboured, and sometimes downright tedious. One reads it for its moments of wit and for the fair-mindedness that Enright notes while allowing that this sometimes entails a slowing up and loading down of the writing, a lack of \u27immediate edge\u27. Enright suggests that the book\u27s ponderousness is an inevitable concomitant of its comprehensiveness and even-handedness. With a writer other than George Eliot this might have been a sufficient explanation. But since she manages in her novels to be - most of the time - both comprehensive, expansive, tolerant and sharp, witty, progressive, the question which arises is: why not here

The Thirty-nine George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2010- The Mill on the Floss and the Difficulties of Relationships

By late 1859, when she had almost finished writing The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot was still unsure of its final title. The working title was \u27Sister Maggie\u27, which was particularly appropriate to the first two thirds of the novel, where interest is concentrated on the pleasures and pains of the childhood relationship between Tom and Maggie Tulliver. But in the last third of the book, attention had turned to the romantic relationship between Maggie and Stephen Guest, itself intruding into Maggie\u27s near-engagement to Philip Wakem, with Tom kept in the background until the death of brother and sister in the great flood which forms the novel\u27s climax. George Eliot\u27s life partner G. H. Lewes suggested \u27The House of Tulliver, or, Life on the Floss\u27 as a possible title, drawing attention to the tragic aspect of all the family relationships within the novel, not only that between Tom and Maggie, but also the unfortunate family squabbles between their father the hasty miller - who dies overwhelmed by grief at the loss of his mill - and his wife\u27s relations, the redoubtable Dodson sisters. Lewes\u27s suggestion, with its echo of the Greek story of the never-ending curse on succeeding generations in the House of Atreus, is true to the vein of allusion to Greek tragedy that runs through the narration of the novel. It was decided finally in January 1860, only a couple of months before publication, that the more neutral, descriptive title \u27The Mill on the Floss\u27 was the best one; George Eliot\u27s publisher, John Blackwood, suggested it. By choosing this title, George Eliot avoided spelling out which of the many relationships in the novel should be supposed to be the most significant, though it is clear from reading it that the brother-sister one predominates. However, all the relationships are important, and all are difficult; the novel explores in precise detail the whys and wherefores of human interaction among its characters. All George Eliot\u27s novels do this, of course, but The Mill on the Floss stands out from the others both in terms of the ultimate tragedy of the relationships (it is her only professedly tragic novel) and in its closeness to the facts of her own life. This lecture will concentrate on these two aspects of the novel: the tragedy of its chief relationships, and the events in George Eliot\u27s life which inform it

The Thirty-fifth George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2006- Glimpses of Life at 142 Strand

1. John Chapman and the Strand in 1847 24 July 1847 the following advertisement appeared in the weekly periodical, the Athenaeum: MR CHAPMAN, Bookseller and Publisher, begs to announce that he has REMOVED his Business from 121 Newgate Street, to more spacious premises on the South side of the STRAND, No 142, a few doors West of Somerset House; and requests, therefore, that all communications may be forwarded to the latter address. For the next seven years John Chapman\u27s \u27spacious premises\u27 - consisting of the bookselling business and publishing house, his family home, and rooms for literary lodgers - was the chief place of resort for writers with a book to publish which was in any way radical or unorthodox. The move to the Strand was significant, signalling Chapman\u27s arrival in the heart of London to take up residence in a handsome house on the city\u27s most famous street. Just after Chapman moved in, John Tallis, a bookseller and publisher, issued a second edition of his London Street Views, a set of cheap, handy booklets, each containing detailed drawings of the buildings in a particular area of London. He had first issued eighty-eight of these booklets in 1838-1840; they measured approximately nine inches by five, had a pale green paper cover, and showed the engraved elevation, beautifully line-drawn, of London\u27s buildings. The Street Views cost 1 ½d each.\u27 Tallis\u27s revised and enlarged edition of 1847 included five separate plans covering the Strand, the longest street in London and the city\u27s main east-west thoroughfare. The recently completed Trafalgar Square marked the beginning of the Strand at its western end, while Temple Bar formed the eastern boundary with Fleet Street. 142 Strand features in the section which includes Somerset House, nine houses east of number 142 on the south side near Temple Bar

Review of George Eliot: Selected Critical Writings

Walter Houghton made duality, and especially opposites, the keystone of his analysis of the Victorian frame of mind. Eliot\u27s mind fits happily into that dualistic frame. Was she George or Marian (or any variation of the latter)? Was she the contriver of the novels or was it her husband? Was she hypochondriac or valetudinarian, diffident or arrogant, prominent or retiring, imposing or horse-faced? The identity remains fascinatingly protean. If deciding whether Eliot was novelist or poet is less difficult than a similar decision with regard to Hardy, the common reader (and more particularly the paperback purchaser) has been at a considerable disadvantage in assessing how to appraise Eliot not just as novelist but as what she most assuredly and more completely was, an all round person of letters. Rosemary Ashton\u27s new edition for World\u27s Classics helpfully joins A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren\u27s Penguin anthology in at last giving wider access to Eliot\u27s criticism

George Eliot Birthday Lucheon, 21 November 2004 The Toast to the Immortal Memory

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a special year because it is ISO years since George Eliot and G. H. Lewes began to live together openly. 22 November 1854 was her thirty-fifth birthday. Where were she and Lewes? What were they doing? They were in Berlin, having moved on from Weimar on 3 November. They had left England on 19 July, the day Marian Evans sent her famous telegram to her Coventry friends Charles and Cara Bray and Sara Hennell: Dear Friends - all three I have only time to say good bye and God bless you. Poste Restante, Weimar for the next six weeks, and afterwards Berlin. Ever your loving and grateful Marian. The journey to Germany was undertaken to bring Lewes\u27s research for his biography of Goethe to a successful conclusion; the more negative reason was the desire to get away from English curiosity and the scandal that would erupt at the news of their living openly together. In Weimar there was no problem about them cohabiting; the Kapellmeister was Franz Liszt, who was living with the Princess Caroline von Sayn-Wittgenstein without raising eyebrows. Once in Berlin, they were again able to socialise with the local literati without embarrassment. Varuhagen von Ense, the literary saloniste and former acqaintance of Goethe, whom Lewes had met on a previous trip to Berlin, was happy to invite them to his house. He bumped into them on Unter den Linden and commented with equanimity in his diary that Lewes, whom he knew to be married, was \u27with an Englishwoman, a Miss Evans, editor of the Westminster Review and translator of Strauss\u27s Life of Jesus and Feuerbach\u27s Essence of Christianity\u27. Lewes worked away at the Life of Go et he; Marian translated extracts for him, as well as getting on with her own translation of Spinoza. Lewes reported back to their friend Caroline von Sayn Wittgenstein on 16 December 1854, making their relationship sound like that of a cosy old married couple: Our mode of life is somewhat this. We rise at eight; after breakfast read & work till between one & two; walk in the Thiergarten [zoo] or pay visits till dinner, which is at 3; come home to coffee, and, when not at the theatre or in society Miss Evans reads Goethe aloud to me & I read Shakspeare aloud to her. There you have a programme of our lives