The Thirty-Third George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2004 \u27School-Time\u27: George Eliot and Education

In George Eliot\u27s first piece of published fiction, the hero - if that\u27s the right word for the hapless Reverend Amos Barton - is no advertisement for the conventional schooling of a middle-class Englishman. Though he has managed to struggle through the university degree he needs to qualify him for a clerical life, his years as a student have not made an intellectual of Amos: \u27Mr. Barton had not the gift of perfect accuracy in English orthography and syntax, which was unfortunate, as he was known not to be a Hebrew scholar, and not in the least suspected of being an accomplished Grecian. These lapses, in a man who had gone through the Eleusinian mysteries of a university education, surprised the young ladies of his parish extremely; especially the Miss Farquhars, whom he had once addressed in a letter as Dear Mads., apparently an abbreviation for Madams. The person’s least surprised at the Rev. Amos\u27s deficiencies were his clerical brethren, who had gone through the mysteries themselves.\u27 1 Such deficiencies are not uncommon in George Eliot\u27s work. Badly schooled people, men or women, are the rule rather than the exception, in her novels, and she repeatedly returns to the subject of the muddled thinking and false values that lead to these failures. Though George Eliot famously made herself one of the most learned women of her time, she had sharply divided feelings about what formal teaching could achieve. This is a matter worth attending to, for it takes us to the heart of what engaged her most deeply as a novelist. Some of what Eliot has to say about education is a question of social observation and satire, to do with her pungent sense of what had been denied her, and also of the limitations of what had been denied. She is consistently sceptical about the benefits of the kind of masculine classical and theological education in Oxford and Cambridge that had produced such poor results with Amos. Both class and gender had excluded her from that kind of schooling - as of course most English men and all women of her generation were excluded. One of her objectives is to reveal the narrowness and injustice of the system, and also to remind her readers that the benefits offered by such education might not after all be so very worthwhile, as the Misses Farquhar discovered. This is part of her work as a politically sophisticated and progressive writer, a woman whose objective it is to analyse and sometimes to condemn the patterns of power that governed cultural life in mid-Victorian England. Her consistent advocation of rigorous and broadly based courses of study for both boys and girls, with a strong practical element, and including serious attention to modem languages and science, and to the traditions of European thought, is one of the most telling ways in which she intervened in the cultural debates of her period. But George Eliot\u27s engagement with processes of education is not simply a matter of political criticism, or even of satire. Thinking about what pedagogy meant was a matter of understanding the autonomy of the self, and the necessary limits of that autonomy. It involved questioning the nature of what could be taught, or learned, through fiction, or more specifically through the development of the realist narrative forms of the novel that were her central concern. The transition from the small Mary Anne Evans as a disoriented schoolgirl to the dignified George Eliot, most eminent of British women writers, was a journey in which changing concepts of pedagogy played a central part. They involved processes of desire and subjugation, in tension and sometimes in contradiction with the will to self-assertion. They also involved George Eliot\u27s understanding of the cultural identity of women, caught between opposing social and individual obligations, or oppressions. Her ideas about education are closely bound up with her expanding sense of authenticity and subjectivity, within the development of a post-Christian framework of thought

The Thirty-Third George Eliot Memorial Lecture, 2004 \u27School-Time\u27: George Eliot and Education

In George Eliot\u27s first piece of published fiction, the hero - if that\u27s the right word for the hapless Reverend Amos Barton - is no advertisement for the conventional schooling of a middle-class Englishman. Though he has managed to struggle through the university degree he needs to qualify him for a clerical life, his years as a student have not made an intellectual of Amos: \u27Mr. Barton had not the gift of perfect accuracy in English orthography and syntax, which was unfortunate, as he was known not to be a Hebrew scholar, and not in the least suspected of being an accomplished Grecian. These lapses, in a man who had gone through the Eleusinian mysteries of a university education, surprised the young ladies of his parish extremely; especially the Miss Farquhars, whom he had once addressed in a letter as Dear Mads., apparently an abbreviation for Madams. The person’s least surprised at the Rev. Amos\u27s deficiencies were his clerical brethren, who had gone through the mysteries themselves.\u27 1 Such deficiencies are not uncommon in George Eliot\u27s work. Badly schooled people, men or women, are the rule rather than the exception, in her novels, and she repeatedly returns to the subject of the muddled thinking and false values that lead to these failures. Though George Eliot famously made herself one of the most learned women of her time, she had sharply divided feelings about what formal teaching could achieve. This is a matter worth attending to, for it takes us to the heart of what engaged her most deeply as a novelist. Some of what Eliot has to say about education is a question of social observation and satire, to do with her pungent sense of what had been denied her, and also of the limitations of what had been denied. She is consistently sceptical about the benefits of the kind of masculine classical and theological education in Oxford and Cambridge that had produced such poor results with Amos. Both class and gender had excluded her from that kind of schooling - as of course most English men and all women of her generation were excluded. One of her objectives is to reveal the narrowness and injustice of the system, and also to remind her readers that the benefits offered by such education might not after all be so very worthwhile, as the Misses Farquhar discovered. This is part of her work as a politically sophisticated and progressive writer, a woman whose objective it is to analyse and sometimes to condemn the patterns of power that governed cultural life in mid-Victorian England. Her consistent advocation of rigorous and broadly based courses of study for both boys and girls, with a strong practical element, and including serious attention to modem languages and science, and to the traditions of European thought, is one of the most telling ways in which she intervened in the cultural debates of her period. But George Eliot\u27s engagement with processes of education is not simply a matter of political criticism, or even of satire. Thinking about what pedagogy meant was a matter of understanding the autonomy of the self, and the necessary limits of that autonomy. It involved questioning the nature of what could be taught, or learned, through fiction, or more specifically through the development of the realist narrative forms of the novel that were her central concern. The transition from the small Mary Anne Evans as a disoriented schoolgirl to the dignified George Eliot, most eminent of British women writers, was a journey in which changing concepts of pedagogy played a central part. They involved processes of desire and subjugation, in tension and sometimes in contradiction with the will to self-assertion. They also involved George Eliot\u27s understanding of the cultural identity of women, caught between opposing social and individual obligations, or oppressions. Her ideas about education are closely bound up with her expanding sense of authenticity and subjectivity, within the development of a post-Christian framework of thought

Victorian Beauty: Ruskin’s Changing Ideals

Ruskin, and to some extent his followers, is often seen as the great Victorian prophet of beauty. In his early writing he invests beauty with the force of religious truth. In a passage intended for the second volume of Modern Painters (1846), he writes of the power of an Alpine avalanche teaching him ‘what till then I had not known — the real meaning of the word Beautiful. With all that I had ever seen before — there had come mingled the associations of humanity — the exertion of human power — the action of human mind. The image of self had not been effaced in that of God […] . It was then that I understood that all which is the type of God’s attributes […] can turn the human soul from gazing upon itself […] and fix the spirit […] on the types of that which is to be its food for eternity; — this and this only is in the pure and right sense of the word beautiful’ (Works, IV, 364–65). But he was never entirely content with this definition, and only two years later writes of the landscape of the Jura in very different terms: ‘Those ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue; and the crests of the sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron walls of Joux and the four-square keep of Granson’ (VIII, 223–24). In his later work he retreats from his youthful belief that the value of beauty is distinct from human character, claiming instead that ‘endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty’ (XVI, 372). The perspective of his work shifts to the social and political, and he turns from the analysis of beauty to a critique of the circumstances that excluded men and women from its creation, or its presence. As he became more interested in justice, he grew less interested in beauty. To see the celebration of beauty as the primary motive of his work is to mistake the nature of its persistent challenge.</jats:p

Review of A. N. Wilson's 'Victoria' (2014)

Review of A. N. Wilson's biography of Queen Victori

Common People: the History of an English Family, by Alison Light

Revie