The Narrators in 'Macbeth'

The Hilda Hulme Memorial Lectures were established in 1985 following a donation from Mr Mohamed Aslam in memory of his wife, Dr Hilda Hulme. The lectures are on the subject of English literature and relate to one of ‘the three fields in which Dr Hulme specialised, namely Shakespeare, language in Elizabethan drama, and the nineteenth-century novel’

The Woman at the Window

Dear Editors May I write a postscript to Terence R. Wright\u27s review of Perspectives on Self and Community in George Eliot: Dorothea\u27s Window in your last number? He says I \u27come down strongly on lesser critics who make the mistake of locating Dorothea\u27s vision ... in Chapter 80 ... in the boudoir rather than the marital bedroom\u27, but I meant to include myself amongst misinterprets, in writing \u27When I first read the novel I made this mistake\u27

The Two Timothy Coopers

Once or twice when I read and re-read the scene of the railway survey in Middlemarch I felt a sense of niggling lost connection, then one day I belatedly found it. George Eliot had copied the name of Elizabeth Gaskell\u27s Timothy Cooper, in Cousin Phillis, for her character in Middlemarch. Eliot wrote to Gaskell1 that she felt an affinity with \u27the feeling which inspired Cranford and the earlier chapters of Mary Barton\u27 and had read Cranford when writing Scenes of Clerical Life and Mary Barton when writing Adam Bede. When The Moorland Cottage was proposed as source for The Mill on the Floss she said she had not read it. She writes about Ruth, The Life of Charlotte Bronte and Sylvia\u27s Lovers, but as far as I know never mentions Cousin Phillis, serialized in The Cornhill Magazine between November and February, 1863-4, six years before Eliot began to brood over Middlemarch, nine before her novel began its serial appearance. She is unlikely not to have read Gaskell\u27s novella, and also unlikely, I think, to have deliberately used the name of its Timothy Cooper. It seems to be a case of creative forgetting. The two Timothy Coopers are poor farm labourers, on the fringe of the action, each given one big scene. They might be called minor characters but the description is misleading. I once wrote that George Eliot refused to create minor characters, liking to imply that every figure in her fiction has, as she explicitly says, a \u27centre of self\u27. The same is true of Gaskell, exemplified in her late novella Cousin Phillis, a feat of condensation she described as \u27a complete fragment\u27 , an oxymoron effortlessly defining the story and its genre. Timothy Cooper is only one link between the greatest Victorian novella, narrative at its most terse and small-scale, and the greatest Victorian long novel, narrative at its most expansive. Both works combine love-story - twanging what the narrator of Middlemarch calls the old troubadour strings - with wide geographical reference (the Midlands, Italy and America) and historical range. Both dramatize and discuss the coming of railways to England. Cousin Phillis dramatizes more detail about technicalities (shunting, difficulties of laying rail on marshy ground) and personnel (share-holders, managing engineer, clerk, inventors, and navvies) than Middlemarch, and inserts English railways between those in Piedmont and Canada. We may list Gaskell with Robert Evans and Herbert Spencer, both involved with railway survey and works, as a source of Eliot\u27s railway information

A portrait of Lucy Deane

The young woman lifted her hands from the keys, and swivelled on her piano-stool to smile at the large bald-headed man comfortable in a crimson armchair. \u27Well, sir, was that to your liking?\u27 \u27I seem to remember the piece, my dear, but not the composer. Is it something you haven\u27t played for a long time? By one o’ your Germans? You know I never was musical, though I played the flute when I was a young man. Trade opened my eyes and sharpened my wits but I didn\u27t have your expensive schooling.\u27 \u27No, papa, not one of my Germans but an Englishman, who lived in the seventeenth century. Henry Purcell. It is something I haven\u27t played for a long time. I\u27m pleased you remember. And flattered you stayed awake. I\u27ll make a music-listener of you yet.\u27 \u27Lucy, you learned puss, playing your old music has brought back your old laugh and that is the sweetest music to my old ears. You have put off the dismal look with the black dresses. \u27Yes, papa, it was time to shed mourning. Mourning garments.\u27 She left the grand piano to kneel on a footstool by her father. \u27Bless me, child, I remember you sitting on that stool with the purple pansies and trying to open this silver box, when you could scarcely talk. It seems like yesterday. You used to make faces when 1 took my snuff.\u27 \u27I still do. I always detested the smell, and the dirty bits on your red whiskers.\u27* \u27Yes, they were red.\u27 \u27I remember. 1 remember stroking this prickly velvet on your chair - I\u27m still not sure if 1 like or dislike it. But Papa, please to take your second glass of port wine, and tell me why you\u27re fretting instead of having your nap. I know it\u27s not Purcell keeping you awake. 1 can always tell when there\u27s something on your mind, you know.\u27 He put out a hand to touch her glossy light-brown ringlets

Letter To The Editor, 2001

The welcome purchase by the British Library of George Eliot / Jane Senior letters isn\u27t always reported accurately. In a recent Woman\u27s Hour Kathryn Hughes seemed to imply the correspondence was new to scholars. Haight\u27s Yale Edition contains ten letters from George Eliot to Jane Senior, including three of the series in the news. The unpublished letters extend and stimulate existing knowledge. We shall discuss this and other subjects at a two-day symposium to be held at the University of London Institute of English Studies on 17-18 January 2002

Politics and Pastoral in Silas Marner

When eighteen-year-old sumameless Eppie stands by Silas Mamer and against Godfrey Cass she joins a line of subversive children in Victorian fiction. Charlotte Bronte\u27s Jane Eyre speaks out against her aunt; Dickens\u27s Oliver Twist asks for more gruel; his Paul Dombey asks the capitalist father, \u27What is money after all?\u27 One child rebels against adult power; one against institutional power; one against the cash nexus. The children are all economic dependants but there is no emphasis on class. Oliver behaves like a little gentleman; Paul is a little gentleman; Jane tells Brocklehurst she would not like to be poor, and goes to a charitable school for children of gentlefolk. Eppie\u27s father is gentry, her mother a barmaid, but she is the only one of these four rebels who is working-class by upbringing, who chooses the working class, and who rejects the upper class. She is not a child but older than the others, though young enough to share their articulate innocence which makes them metonymic and larger than life. Q. D. Leavis\u27s insistence on the novel\u27s Radicalism has been sidelined: David Carroll in his Penguin English Classics edition (1996), includes her Introduction1 to the Penguin of 1967 in his selected booklist but doesn\u27t say it is reprinted as an appendix in his own edition; Terence Cave in his Worlds Classics edition (1996) mentions her choice of text but not her criticism; Ruth Livesey in her essay \u27Class\u27 for George Eliot in Context 2 asserts that Eppie\u27s preference of Silas is based not on class but on personal relationship and continuity, dismissing Leavis as one of the \u27earlier critics\u27 who saw the rejection as political, but naming her in an endnote as the only example. Leavis said \u27Nancy presses Godfrey\u27s rights on Eppie, who answers the spirit of the insult with a passionate affirmation of class solidarity as well as of loyalty to the only father she has ever known\u27(Carroll, p. 230): I want to recall and extend that judgement

Elizabeth Gaskell in Middlemarch: Timothy Cooper, The Judgement of Solomon, and the Woman at the Window

In \u27Silly Novels by Lady Novelists Gaskell and Harriet Martineau were the only living novelists George Eliot praised, and very briefly. George Eliot and Gaskell never met but corresponded, admired each other\u27s work, and in several books George Eliot unconsciously drew on details and characters from Gaskell novels.3 There are three important details in Middlemarch - which Gaskell never read because she died before its publication - deriving from Cousin Phillis, Wives and Daughters, and North and South. Chapter 56 of Middlemarch is a meeting-point for history and the personal life. Caleb Garth\u27s social confidence rings loud as he speaks to the rustic rebels roused to violence by a local agent provocateur hoping to hamper the railway survey: \u27Somebody told you the railway was a bad thing. That was a lie. It may do a bit of harm here and there, and so does the sun in heaven. But the railway\u27s a good thing\u27. He is answered by a voice we have not heard before and will not hear again, that of a farm labourer, Timothy Cooper, whose response is eloquent in personal particulars and political generalization: ‘Aw! good for the big folks to make money out on,\u27 said old Timothy Cooper, who had stayed behind turning his hay while the others had been gone on their spree; - Tn seen lots 0\u27 things turn up sin\u27 I war a young \u27un-the war an\u27 the pe-ace an\u27 the canells [ ... J an\u27 it\u27s been all aloike to the poor mono What\u27s the canells been t\u27 him? They\u27n brought him neyther me-at nor ba-acon, nor wage to lay by, if he didn\u27t save it wi\u27 clemmin\u27 his own inside. Times ha\u27 got wusser for him sin\u27 I war a young un. [ ... J This is the big folks\u27s world, this is. But yo\u27re for the big folks, Muster Garth, yo are.\u27 (Middlemarch, ch. 56

Review of Dorothea\u27s Daughter and Other Nineteenth-Century Postscripts

This book is the fruit of many years of thought about nine great novels. Barbara Hardy does not present us with a series of sequels, though we do learn of things that happened after the action of the novels ended. Rather, she offers a set of conversations in which two (or, in some cases, three) characters from each novel reflect on the past. This formula allows her to focus on aspects of the stories that intrigue her, or that frustrate her wish to have a full understanding of fictional people who, it is clear, move and interest her as much as real human beings. Some of the conversations crackle with tension. Emma calls on Jane Fairfax (or, rather, Mrs Knightley calls on Mrs Churchill). Jane\u27s aunt Miss Bates has died, and Emma\u27s shame about the Box Hill insult resurfaces. She is anxious to offer Jane hospitality, and to end the chill between them (\u27do not call me Mrs Knightley, let us be Emma and Jane\u27). But Jane remains unthawed. Without trying to ape Austen\u27s style, Hardy makes us feel that these are the characters we have known, only older and wiser. Another dramatic encounter is between Mr Dombey and his second wife, Edith. He is asking to be forgiven, and when she forgives, and calls him \u27Paul\u27, it is extraordinarily moving. At the same time, the repentant Dombey is such a latecomer in the novel, and so unlike the Dombey who has amused and appalled us for most of the book, that it is hard to believe we are listening, here, to a Dickensian character. Hardy was inspired to write it by the (often forgotten) scene in the novel where Edith speaks to Dombey about her dead son and offers him the possibility of reconciliation - a scene, she feels, more like Henry James than Dickens. The most tempestuous exchange is between Mr. Rochester, now minus one hand and only gradually regaining sight in his remaining eye, and Jane, now his wife, and mother of their baby son James. The cause of the friction is Adele Varens, daughter of Rochester\u27s \u27opera mistress\u27. She has been sent away to school, but Rochester cannot bear having her in the house, even for a brief holiday. It torments him when she plays with baby James. He hates the thought that he may be her father. Jane remains firm and sensible throughout his tirades, insisting that the two children must be brought up together. It is an ominous, uncomfortable episode, and endorses the feeling, conveyed by the novel, that neither we nor Jane really understands Rochester

A Response- 2014

Against Marianne Burton\u27s carefully argued case for the consummation of the Casaubon marriage are images and hints which I mentioned in The Appropriate Form: an Essay on the Novel\u27 and Particularities: Readings in George Eliot,\u27 especially: the Cadwallader and Chettam opinions: \u27A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in, and \u27no good red blood\u27; the onanistic echo of \u27the seeds of joy are forever wasted\u27, (Middlemarch, Ch. 42); Casaubon\u27s lack of bliss; post-marital absence of expectations of issue; \u27the way\u27 in which \u27years to come\u27 ... might be filled with joyful devotedness\u27 became less clear for Dorothea after marriage (M, Ch. 20); her idea of changing the will which left \u27the bulk of his property to her, with proviso in case of her having children\u27; (M, Ch. 37); the narrator\u27s dry observation that unlike early sonneteers, no one required Casaubon to leave a copy of himself (M, Ch. 29); and Dorothea\u27s longing \u27for objects who could be dear to her, and to whom she could be dear\u27 (M, Ch. 48): all of which should be read in context. I find two aspects of Burton’s pro-consummation case unconvincing and redundant: \u27If Eliot\u27s intention were that Dorothea married Ladislaw as a virgin, one might expect some more substantial hint to be given. It would be significant. Casaubon would not then have been Dorothea\u27s true husband; her mistake, and tragedy, would be less.\u27 and, \u27crucially, when Dorothea faces Rosamond with her moving speech about marriage, Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings (Ch. 81), she would be speaking from a position of ignorance about that nearness\u27

Review of Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel

This book is a reprint of the 1967 edition published by the Athlone Press, one of \u2756 classic works of literary criticism\u27 that Bloomsbury is reprinting from Athlone Press. This opportunity to revisit and reassess works that were highly regarded in their day should be welcomed and one hopes that the archives of other academic publishers may also be subject to similar treatment. It is not good for the health of literary criticism if significant studies of the past are not easily accessible to readers and critics in the present. I remember reading this book fairly close to when it was first published. The 1960s was an interesting time for George Eliot studies. Criticism of Eliot seemed to have stabilized. The decline of her reputation evident in the first decades of the twentieth century and, sometime later, criticism drawing on Jamesian ideas about the nature of fiction, which influenced the New Criticism in its generally negative attitude to the Victorian novel, had kept Eliot\u27s literary status fairly low even if critics were not as dismissive of her work as Edwardian critics such as Edmund Gosse and George Saintsbury had been. Notable post-Second World War studies by F. R. Leavis and later by Barbara Hardy and W. J. Harvey, however, significantly turned the tide in her favour so that Eliot could no longer be tenably described as moralistic and artless. Hardy in The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in form (1959) and Harvey in The Art of George Eliot (1961) in particular defended Eliot persuasively from the strictures of Jamesian influenced formalist objections to various aspects of her fiction. During the 1960s one had a sense that it was no longer necessary to defend Eliot from the negative assessments of critics in the first half of the twentieth century. Critics could now focus on her writing in itself in the assurance that she was a significant literary figure whose work was worthy of study and interpretation. This 1967 collection of essays is the product of that sense of assurance. A whole book is devoted unapologetically to Middlemarch by a variety of critics who accept virtually unreservedly its greatness and who subject it to critical scrutiny from different points of view. The essays that make up the book are more various than I had remembered. There is coverage of textual matters, intellectual background, the novel\u27s contemporary reception, and its artistic achievement. W. J. Harvey\u27s essay on its contemporary reception was particularly interesting for though some reviews now seem to be wrong-headed, one can\u27t help but be impressed by the many serious and detailed discussions devoted to the novel. The contrast with reviewing of serious fiction at the present time is striking. British critics are in the majority in this collection but an American New Critical perspective is included. Mark Schorer, one of the few New Critics who had a serious interest in Victorian fiction, in an earlier essay of 1949 had been fairly critical of the form of Middlemarch, arguing that the book had the wrong kind of unity despite the intricacy of its construction, but though he still has some worries in this later essay, his view of the novel is much more positive: \u27it produces a nearly coherent vision, as well as a unified one\u27 (p. 20). This suggests a shift towards a more positive view of Eliot even on the part of American critics influenced by New Critical concepts