Review: "The Lifted Veil" and "Brother Jacob" by George Eliot

Contents originally published: 1859-64
Acquired: September 2012
Read: October 2020

The Lifted Veil, Brother Jacob by George Eliot

This slim volume collects George Eliot's only two standalone pieces of short fiction. The first, "The Lifted Veil," I had known to contain scientific elements, but I did not realize until reading it that it was in fact a proper piece of what we would now call "science fiction." As ably demonstrated by the editor of my edition, Helen Small, Eliot invokes contemporary scientific terminology to justify the strange happenings of her story. It's a neat, dark, dismal story of a man who can piece the veil that separates us from each other and from the future, and is all the worse for it. The set piece that ends the story is dynamic and powerful. I'm sad it took me so long to get around to reading it, but glad to have experienced it. Though I don't think it belongs in my book project, I think it would be really interesting to teach in any number of contexts (an sf class, a Victorian lit class, a science and lit class).

The other story, "Brother Jacob," is a cute example of Eliot's attention to character, and fun enough, but ultimately feels rather slight. It's not very long, but still feels like there's not enough substance to quite justify its length, in terms of either comedy or drama. But even weak Eliot is superior work!

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Tertius Lydgate, Surgeon (Middlemarch, 1871-72)

Trade paperback, 853 pages
Published 2003 (originally 1871-72)
Acquired October 2012
Previously read December 2012
Reread December 2019

Middlemarch by George Eliot

In the British climate there is no incompatibility between scientific insight and furnished lodgings: the incompatibility is chiefly between scientific ambition and a wife who objects to that kind of residence. (679)

Middlemarch is the Victorian scientist novel. If you want a novel about a scientist whose epistemological virtues do not carry over to his personal life, this is it. And if you want a novel about perception, this is it: this novel is about how people perceive other people, how people perceive others’ perceptions, how the novelists perceives people’s perceptions of other’s perceptions. It’s hard to write about, because every idea you have resonates backward and forward through the novel, and soon you’re taking in all 800-plus pages of it in order to make a simple point. The original draft of the Middlemarch section of my book was 9,000 words (25 pages), which honestly isn’t too bad, except it needed to share a chapter with Kingsley’s Two Years Ago, and besides: what can you say about Tertius Lydate that hasn’t already been said? There’s so much, and Anne DeWitt’s Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge UP, 2013) and Ian Duncan’s “George Eliot and the Science of the Human” (A Companion to George Eliot, 2013) largely reflect the way I see him already. My real interest in Middlemarch is in Dorothea Brooke, who I would argue is a descendant of Two Years Ago’s Grace Harvey.

So I reread Middlemarch last fall in order to revise my chapter. I took over 3,500 words of notes on it, which didn’t bode well for cutting, but as it currently stands, I got the discussion of Middlemarch down to 7,500 words (18 pages). I did this by cutting material on Lydgate as well as some extended discussions of related issues that weren’t necessary to make my point about Dorothea. So this post here is a reworked version of my cut material, which mostly focuses on attempts to see “systematically”: to come up with all-encompassing theories that manage to account for everything.

Tertius Lydgate, like Tom Thurnall in Two Years Ago, comes to a rural community with ideas of medical reform and a scientific way of seeing. Unlike Tom, Lydgate has few inclinations toward natural history: Lydgate’s interests lie in human tissues, as he seeks knowledge of the fundamental structure of biology. Lydgate believes that to tackle a problem he must see systematically: “The more he became interested in special questions of disease, such as the nature of fever or fevers, the more keenly he felt the need for that fundamental knowledge of structure” (147). Knowledge of the whole is necessary for the understanding of the parts, because the parts and the whole are interrelated—Lydgate will not be able to carry out reform of medicine as a practice until he has found “the primitive tissue”: “No man, one sees, can understand and estimate the entire structure or its parts – what are its frailties and what its repairs, without knowing the nature of the materials.… Here would be another light, as of oxy-hydrogen, showing the very grain of things, and revising all former explanations” (148). Lydgate’s understanding of his own work is as a form of sight: a light cast into the darkness in order to see what no one else can see. With that vision, he plans to reform the way the medical profession operates, and thus save lives.

In addition to changing the way the science of medicine works, Lydgate will also need to change a social practice: the operation of medical hospitals. He is hopeful that Middlemarch might be the place to make this happen, telling Bulstrode the banker (who funds the hospital), “A fine fever hospital in addition to the old infirmary might be the nucleus of a medical school here, when once we get our medical reforms; and what would do more for medical education than the spread of such schools over the country?” (124). Lydgate sees the village as a space where medical reform can be carried out in microcosm, a model for the potential reform of the nation. If Lydgate can implement his scientific changes to treatment with success at the Middlemarch hospital, he believes—quite ambitiously—that the improvements will spread throughout the nation. Lydgate hopes to systematize medical knowledge as a foundation for national regeneration. Gaining access to the underlying structure of biology will enable this to happen.

Lydgate is a better medical man than the old-fashioned ones who precede him in his town, despite the fact that they are physicians, and he a mere surgeon. (They hold doctorates, whereas he does not, though he is the one hoping to keep science wedded to medical practice.*) He uses a stethoscope to enhance his perceptions—which the narrator assures us “had not become a matter of course in practice at that time” (286)—and he does not overprescribe medicines where they are unnecessary. When he is called in to treat Casaubon, he gives the man a great deal of personal attention, bringing to mind the thoughtfulness of Mr. Gibson in Wives and Daughters. But Lydgate’s perceptions are inconsistently applied; like Mr. Gibson, he often fails to apply them outside the scientific realm, and like Mr. Gibson, this failing is most potently driven home when he enters into an undesirable marriage.

The whole trajectory of Lydgate’s engagement to Rosamond Vincy is one of mutual misunderstanding, which persists into their marriage. When the two are flirting, Rosamond is angling for a husband, but he takes it as nothing of importance: “there was a delightful interchange of influence in their eyes.… [T]hey flirted; and Lydgate was secure in the belief that they did nothing else. If a man could not love and be wise, surely he could flirt and be wise at the same time?” (268). Despite his observations of Rosamond, Lydgate is fooled by the surface perceptions: because he does not want to be in love again (he had a disastrous love affair in Paris when he was younger, and foreswore romance), he does not perceive that Rosamond desires a romantic relationship. The narrator compares the way the two see each other: Rosamond “had a shaping activity and looked through watchful blue eyes, whereas Lydgate’s lay blind and unconcerned as a jelly-fish which gets melted without knowing it” (271). The only object he perceives here is his pleasure in the flirtation, and like Mr. Gibson, this results in him drifting into a romantic relationship without fully considering it implications.

For example, during his engagement, Lydgate’s interactions with Rosamond “interfere with the diligent use of spare hours which might serve… to make the great, imminent discovery” (349). Lydgate tells his friend Farebrother, the vicar, that he is hopeful that once he’s married, he will have more time to devote to his science, as all the business of being engaged will be over with: once married, the man of science “has everything at home then” (349). This turns out to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of marriage: Lydgate will have more to do at home if he wants to maintain a marriage successfully, not less.

Lydgate’s problem is that he is unable to apply his scientific sight to the social. Late in the novel, Lydgate reflects on the difference between him and Rosamond:

His superior knowledge and mental force, instead of being, as he had imagined, a shrine to consult on all occasions, was simply set aside on every practical question. He had regarded Rosamond’s cleverness as precisely that of the receptive kind which became a woman. He was now beginning to find out what that cleverness was…. No one quicker than Rosamond to see causes and effects which lay within the track of her own tastes and interests… (586)

The difference between Lydgate and Rosamond rests in their abilities to see the minute details of complex structures: there is much that is invisible to Lydgate that Rosamond sees clearly. He thinks he is clever because he can see cellular structure, but society is an order of magnitude more complex than anything he observes, and his scientific skills fail him when he attempts to apply them in the human realm. Lydgate partially becomes aware of this fact near the beginning of Middlemarch; when he is trying to decide who to vote for as hospital chaplain, he realizes that every possible choice has an infinitude of possible reactions that make it impossible to make a perfect one: “For the first time Lydgate was feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity” (180). But this understanding does not stick with him throughout the novel; in his arrogance or naïveté, Lydgate assumes he has the full understanding of both his own marriage and the social situation of Middlemarch when he does not. Lydgate’s difficulties with societal observations allow Eliot to test the concept of systematic sight’s application to human beings: if the man of science cannot observe his community or even his marriage with clarity because the myriad factors that make it up are too much for him to account for, how can he hope to make observations of all society

Lydgate’s difficulties with social observation result in the failure of his attempts at reforms. He never makes his big medical breakthrough, never isolates the primitive tissue. And his inability to observe the complexities of social interaction mean that many in Middlemarch view him with suspicion. Lydgate’s more scientific way of seeing makes him unpopular with the other medical men, who find him arrogant: “They implied he was insolent, pretentious, and given to that reckless innovation for the sake of noise and show which was the essence of the charlatan” (454). Because Lydgate finds it difficult to navigate the complexities of the social system, he is unable to make friends with those who should be his greatest allies, and instead they set themselves against him, opposing his efforts to change the way medicine is done in Middlemarch. Rumors even circulate that he dissects the bodies of the dead for his experiments, because Lydgate is not sufficiently attentive to the feelings of the family of a deceased patient: “For Lydgate having attended Mrs Goby, who died apparently of a heart-disease not very clearly expressed in the symptoms, too daringly asked leave of her relatives to open the body” (455).

Lydgate is not able to turn his scientific vision upon the social realm with  accuracy, and it hurts him in the long run, when the town becomes suspicious that Lydgate may have played a role in the death of Raffles in order to help Bulstrode the banker. It is too easy for Middlemarch to believe Lydgate capable of such a thing because Lydgate has “long been sneered at as making himself subservient to the banker for the sake of working himself into predominance, and discrediting the older members of his profession” (720). Obviously Lydgate is not solely at fault here; the townspeople jump to hasty conclusions based on their preexisting biases. But these mistaken conclusions were aided by Lydgate’s inability to master the complexities of the social situation in Middlemarch, and Lydgate is forced out of the town, his hopes of medical reform dashed. Seeing like a scientist has been for naught; he has not located the primitive tissue he devoted his life’s researches to, his marriage has suffered because he does not know how to communicate with his wife, and his visions of medical reform will never be realized.

It’s not just Lydgate, though. Middlemarch is full of people trying to scientifically observe and/or systematize human experience, and often failing. Part of the problem is egoism, of sifting out the observer’s own thoughts and position from an observation. The narrator renders this problem of perspective with another visual thought-experiment:

Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel… will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against a lighted candle as a centre of illuminations, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion…. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent. (264)

The metaphor employed here compares observing human events to an experiment involving light and glass, and the danger of assuming that one’s position in a system of events is the primary one because one is incapable of removing oneself from the scene. This is a recurrent threat throughout Middlemarch; the accuracy of characters’ observations is often endangered by what they desire to see. Middlemarch suggests that despite any commitments to objectivity an observer might have, it is easy to run afoul of believing one’s self to be objective when we are not. No one is at the center of the universe, but it is easy to believe it.

I always kind of struggle with liking Will Ladislaw, but Eliot positions him as a positive alternative to the problems that Lydgate and Casaubon struggle with, and this comes down to his artistic inclinations. Ladislaw can see things in Casaubon and Dorothea that they cannot see in each other. He knows that “Casaubon hated him – he knew that very well; on his first entrance he could discern a bitterness in the mouth and a venom in the glance,” and he also sees Dorothea’s sadness: “he painted to himself what were Dorothea’s inward sorrows” (360). The importance of art for creating sympathy is why in her essay “The Natural History of German Life” (Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, Penguin, 1990), Eliot declares that “the unreality of their [peasants’] representations is a grave evil” (110). If we depend on art to be sympathetic, then art must do its best to be accurate. What Eliot ends up suggesting is an alliance between the novel and science. The distance of science can be combined with the closeness of the novel to make truly useful observations, for a true understanding of character will “check our theories, and direct us in their application” (“Natural History” 111). The novelist is the only one who has the knowledge of the particularity of human character necessary for ensuring that the application of systematic theories to human society is accurate and thus moral.

There is hope for the characters within the novel, too, which Eliot shows through Dorothea’s actions at the climax of the story. Here, she goes back and re-observes an earlier encounter with Rosamond and Ladislaw with her “vivid sympathetic experience,” which “asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance” (788). She quite literally cannot see the way that she used to. She does not know everything, but she can discern that there are “hidden as well as evident troubles” in the Lydgate marriage (788). At this moment, Dorothea looks outside and sees “involuntary, palpitating life”: a woman with a baby, a shepherd with a dog, the field beyond the entrance gate. Dorothea experiences sympathy in the way that “The Natural History of German Life” calls for all would-be sociologists to do so, and armed in this way, she is able to help Rosamond and Ladislaw.

What she tells Rosamond is based on a misinterpretation of events—but it helps Rosamond anyway and, in fact, it is exactly what Rosamond needed to hear. Through this scene, Eliot suggests that when scientists anchor their observations with sympathy, they can do good, and even if they have misunderstood the situation, their actions can be beneficial to others regardless. Dorothea’s actions here are just the beginning of her finally fulfilling her desire to help change the world, now through her marriage to Ladislaw, which makes sense given what we were told earlier of his strong sympathy. James Scott’s “George Eliot, Positivism, and the Social Vision of Middlemarch” (Victorian Studies, vol. 16, Sept. 1972) points out that “her marriage to Ladislaw… is a substantial force for change, promising to break down eventually the restrictive class barriers of the Middlemarch gentry” (173-4). Ladislaw even becomes a reform politician. Dorothea is finally beginning to have an impact in the world, even if it’s not quite the one she always wanted. Systematic reform, Middlemarch argues, is beyond the capacities of our science to realize. Dorothea’s housing scheme might have been thwarted by her marriage to Ladislaw, but it was probably never going to work anyway. She is, however, able to make a couple other significant architectural interventions, as I discuss in my book, drawing on Heather Miner’s “Reforming Space: The Architectural Imaginary of Middlemarch” (Victorian Review, vol. 38, no. 1, Spring 2012) and Barbara Leckie’s Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain (U of Pennsylvania P, 2018).

The moment where Dorothea helps Rosamond despite her misunderstanding was foreshadowed all the way back at the beginning of Middlemarch, where the narrator points out the tendency of young women to interpret facts incorrectly, but then claims that the result is not necessarily bad: “They are not always too grossly deceived; for Sinbad himself may have fallen by good luck on a true description, and wrong reasoning sometimes land poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zig-zags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be” (25). Everyone is but a poor mortal trying to do their best in solving the world’s problems, but if they look around keenly and let the novelist guide their sympathies, they might give some moral benefit to the world, even if it’s not the good they intended, whether they have scientific detachment on their side or not.

On my dissertation, one of my committee members wrote after my discussion of Middlemarch, “Why moral benefit? On the side of science, one could argue that moral benefits are not a primary but rather a secondary goal of scientific inquiry. Is there something wrongheaded, when viewed from a history of science perspective, about novelists’ torquing the goals and justification of scientific observation into an account of its social benefits? In other words, shouldn’t literature have its own domain, and science its own methods?” I think this might possibly be true in general, but Middlemarch is a novel about sociology and medicine, two sciences that are supposedly entirely focused on benefiting human beings. Knowledge for its own sake is not what these sciences promise, and those promises are (among many many other things) what Middlemarch puts to the test.

* Probably I'm just stupid, but British medical titles are often a muddle at best. Irvine Loudon’s “Why Are (Male) Surgeons Still Addressed as Mr?” (British Medical Journal, vol. 231, Dec. 2000) indicates that “[p]hysicians were gentlemen with a university education who dealt with internal diseases, arrived at a diagnosis on the basis of the history and external appearance of the patient, and prescribed in Latin. In theory, but seldom in practice, their supposedly superior knowledge gave them a monopoly over the practice of physic and the authority to supervise the work of surgeons” (1589). Lydgate is a “general practitioner,” also known as a “surgeon-apothecary,” but unlike other surgeon-apothecaries, he does not dispense medicine, viewing it as a conflict of interest. Loudon’s article lays out the distinctions, such as they exist, in full.

Review: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings by George Eliot

Trade paperback, 505 pages
Published 1990 (contents: 1846-79)
Acquired August 2015
Read May 2017

Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings by George Eliot
edited by A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren

Wit, acumen, imagination, feeling as distinguished from sensation, reason as a subjective faculty, – all these so-called powers of the soul, are powers of humanity, not of man as an individual; they are products of culture, products of human society. [...] To ask a question and to answer, are the first acts of thought. Thought originally demands two. It is not until man has reached an advanced stage of culture that he can double himself, so as to play the part of another within himself. (462)

This volume collects a variety of writing by George Eliot, from across four decades: her journals, reviews of a diverse range of books, letters, poems, and translations. The editors, A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren, seem to have a particular interest in areas where Eliot expresses her opinions on the importance/function of art, and on the role of women. Eliot was a smart, witty woman, and so of course, her essays make for smart, witty reading. Some of what's collected here, the most famous stuff, I'd already read in Nathan Sheppard's The Essays of "George Eliot", so I skipped over that material, but that still left a lot of good stuff.

Parts of particular interest include her 1866-70 correspondence with Frederic Harrison, which may have inspired Middlemarch (1871-72); he asked her to write about a utopian village run by scientist to demonstrate the power of Positivism, and she replied that "æsthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely æsthetic – if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram – it becomes the most offensive of all teaching" (248). If Middlemarch is anything, it is anti-utopian, but it definitely deals with "life in its highest complexity," as indeed do all of her works-- yet they still all engage in "æsthetic teaching" too.

Review-wise, I particularly got something out of those of R. W. Mackay's The Progress of Intellect (1851),* where she sifts out some of what there is to like about Positivism; of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1855), where she argues under what circumstances a book depicting immorality can still promote morality, concluding that in overtly moral novels, "The emotion of satisfaction which a reader feels when the villain of the book dies of some hideous disease, or is crushed by a railway train, is no more essentially moral than the satisfaction which used to be felt in whipping culprits at the cart-tail" (308); of Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855), where she decries how Kinglsey lets his fiction be taken over by his shoddy moralizing; and of John Ruskin's Modern Painters (1856), where you can see some of her own theory of art emerge, being developed (one presumes) on its way to its fullest statement in Adam Bede (1859).

The translations (I've quoted from her 1854 translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity above) are also worthy inclusions; they come from early in her career, and you can see how they would influence both her theories of art and knowledge and her fiction, especially (as always) Middlemarch.

* All dates given are those of her review, not the reviewed book's publication.

"Our Thoughts Entangled in Metaphors": Animated Tax-Pennies and the Double Metaphor of Middlemarch

What follows is an incredible investigation into George Eliot and the vagaries of nineteenth-century British income tax law, and a demonstration of how far I will go in order to work out something that might not be worth knowing.

I. The Saga Begins

Let me set the scene by explicating a part of Middlemarch. Middlemarch is, of course, George Eliot's nineteenth-century realist triumph. It concerns many things, but among them are Tertius Lydgate, a physician, amateur microbiologist, and would-be medical reformer; Dorothea Brooke, a would-be social reformer derided for her lack of systematic observations; and Edward Casaubon, a scholar attempting to systematize all mythology and produce The Key to All Mythologies. Given my interests in scientists and scientific observation in the Victorian novel, you can imagine that there's a lot for me to work with in Middlemarch.

"Active voracity, my foot."

Key to my arguments about Middlemarch is Eliot's use of scientific metaphors, since she uses them (I argue) to suggest the futility of creating accurate observations of individual human beings. In one scene, the narrator ponders on this difficulty in the context of the actions of one Mrs. Cadwallader, the town gossip. He says: (I apologize for the length of the quotation, but this is what you get with Eliot, though I've bolded the most relevant part)

Was there any ingenious plot [in Mrs. Cadwallader's actions], any hide-and-seek course of action, which might be detected by a careful telescopic watch? Not at all: a telescope might have swept the parishes of Tipton and Freshitt, the whole area visited by Mrs Cadwallader in her phaeton, without witnessing any interview that could excite suspicion, or any scene from which she did not return with the same unperturbed keenness of eye and the same high natural color. In fact, if that convenient vehicle had existed in the days of the Seven Sages, one of them would doubtless have remarked, that you can know little of women by following them about in their pony-phaetons. Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader's match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed. Her life was rurally simple, quite free from secrets either foul, dangerous, or otherwise important, and not consciously affected by the great affairs of the world. (59-60)

So my argument about this is essentially that this metaphor suggests that observing the actions of human beings is incredibly difficult: we draw the wrong conclusions about the source of their movements, just as a scientist would if they looked at a creature ostensibly exhibiting an active voracity without a powerful enough lens. But the observational power necessary to create an accurate observation of Mrs. Cadwallader is immense-- it takes the novelist three full pages to explicate why she does what she does, and of course the novelist has much more access to Mrs. Cadwallader's interiority than any of us can ever hope for!

II. A Twist in the Tale

actual magnetized coins
courtesy Mr Reid

And there my insights would have forever remained if it wasn't for a comment from one of my advisory committee on my dissertation. She highlighted "animated tax-pennies" and wrote: "What do you make of the analogy with taxation? It seems to suggest that the micro and macro levels of phenomena—biological science and political economy--and thus of observation and analysis, could function analogously."

Well! Wasn't "animated tax-penny" just a fancy word for a magnetized coin? I'll show you, committee member. So I attempted to figure out from where I knew this. In my Penguin Classics edition of Middlemarch, edited by Rosemary Ashton, "tax-pennies" is marked with an end note, which reads, in full, "magnetized coins" (841n38). So I imagined this as coins dancing around under the influence of a magnet-- a nice metaphor for seemingly unmotivated movement actually having a scientific cause. But some cursory Internet searching and then some in-depth Internet searching revealed no indications that an animated tax-penny was a magnetized coin.

Indeed, the only place I can find in the universe of the web or print that refers to animated tax-pennies as magnetized coins is a doctoral dissertation by Catherine Jane Massie, which discusses the same metaphor: "Seen with one lens power a microscopic specimen seems to vacuum in its prey as if these smaller protozoa were magnetized coins ('animated tax-pennies'), but a stronger lens power will 'reveal' the existence of the specimen’s tiny moving hairs, or cilia, that perform the work for the passive larger 'creature'" (156). But she cites no source and uses the same term as the Penguin Classics edition, leading me to believe that she's pulling from it as well.

At the suggestion of a colleague, I reached out to the editor of the Penguin Classics edition, Rosemary Ashton, herself. Professor Ashton indicated that she took the definition from the previous Penguin edition of Middlemarch, and could not provide any elucidation beyond that. Nothing in the OED or other sources provided a definition of the "animated tax-penny." I should note that nineteenth-century pennies were made of copper-- which is not magnetic.

III. The Plot Thickens

Who put him in charge
of metaphors, though?

The metaphor is cited in a book by J. Hillis Miller about Middlemarch (and Adam Bede). Miller singles it out as unusual:

When the little creatures seen under the microscope are compared to "so many animated tax-pennies," a monetary metaphor adds itself to the first one in a metaphor of a metaphor no longer directly grounded in the first level of reality of the novel. The effect of this is odd. It cannot be easily evened out in a total accounting of the interplay of literal and figurative language in the novel. As Wallace Stevens says, "There is no such thing as a metaphor of a metaphor." (97)

But as Miller goes on to show, this is a metaphor of a metaphor. (He provides a very nice close reading of it, in fact.)

But what is a tax-penny, then? As opposed to non-tax-pennies, specifically, I mean. Miller goes on to say that the word penny was used to "indicate 'the sum exacted by a specific tax or customary payment.' The word existed in such compounds as 'earnest penny,' 'ale-penny,' or 'fish-penny,' as well as in 'tax-penny'" (102). Well, there you go then, but I want to suggest some modifications to Miller's explanation.

IV. The Truth Revealed

Searching Google Books' nineteenth-century corpus for "tax-pennies" turns up very few references that aren't people just quoting Eliot's use of the term in Middlemarch. In fact, it turns up three, two of which actually use the term "income-tax pennies." If you search Google Books for "income-tax penny" in the singular, suddenly more pop up. Not a ton more (there are seven hits, but one's a duplicate), but enough to get a feel for what's going on, as they use terms like "Mr. Gladstone's own income-tax penny" or "the additional income-tax penny." With these clues, I dug up the following information.

"I'll tax you, and you'll like it."

William Gladstone, later to become prime minister (1868-74, 1880-85, 1886, 1892-94), became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1852. Whether or not the nation's income tax should be renewed at the time was a big point of contention. Gladstone argued that the income tax should be renewed but gradually phased out (Seligman 154-5). As you might imagine if you know anything about "temporary" taxes, though, the phasing out did not take place. The Crimean War (1854-56) necessitated the raising of taxes, in fact. Edwin Seligman records the following 1862 exchange in Parliament:

"Necessity," said Gladstone, "drove us to it in 1842, and necessity has attached us to the use of it." And when he was interrupted by cries of "no! no!" he added: "When I use the word 'attached' I mean not as a bridegroom is attached to his bride, but as a captive is attached to the car of his conqueror." (157)

Far from phasing out the income tax, Gladstone had been captured by it. One of the specific increases that Gladstone created was in 1860, from 9 pence to 10 (or from 9d. to 10d., as the British say) (Seligman 156). This, then, is Gladstone's income-tax penny. I think Eliot is probably picking up this term when she uses the phrase "tax-pennies" in Middlemarch, though somewhat adapting it, as it's usually used in the sense of an institution, not as referring to individual pennies paid in tax.

V. Happily Ever After

Pictured: Mrs. Cadwallader

What can we conclude about Eliot's metaphor from all this research? Well, I think-- that as my committee member's comment indicated-- she's analogizing Mrs. Cadwallader's observations to two different kinds of scientific observation: on the microscopic scale (as in microbiology) and on the macroscopic scale (as in political economy). In both of them, the tracing of causes is difficult and complex. You might assume the microscopic organism has an active voracity when in reality it's using tiny hairlets to draw in its victim, and you might assume the tax-pennies are animated when in reality it's British tax system that causes them to be deposited with a collector.

Like I said, Miller quotes Wallace Stevens to say a metaphor oughtn't have its own metaphor, and Miller's argument about this passage is that Eliot is highlighting the trickiness of using metaphor as a descriptive tool; he says it models "the unanswerable question of whether the making and movement of signs is active or passive, controlled by human beings or controlling them. It is both and neither" (102-3). Eliot does address this theme previously in Middlemarch in the passage where the title of this blog post comes from: "for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them" (85).

This is a generous reading. A contemporary reviewer of Part I of Middlemarch in The Athenæum was less kind; they quoted this same passage and then commented:

Metaphors such as these, far-fetched, somewhat strained, and drawn by force from the most recondite arcana of chemistry and zoology, are apt, if indulged in, to degenerate into mannerism. We do not remember such in 'Romola'; but 'Middlemarch' is full of them. They choke the mechanism of the English, and they interrupt the thought. George Eliot ought to be far too self-possessed to fall away into any such tricks of style. (714)

Ouch.

Works Cited

Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871-2. Ed. Rosemary Ashton. London: Penguin, 2003. Print

Massie, Catherine Jane. Romantic Frames of Mind: Vision and Sympathy in British Novels of the Nineteenth Century. Diss. U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013. Web. <https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/indexablecontent/uuid:b9b46436-ceb1-4e4b-92cf-8489c919460d>.

Miller, J. Hillis. Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch Revisited. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012.

Rev. of Middlemarch: a Study of Provincial Life, Book I—Miss Brooke. Athenæum 230 (2 Dec. 1871): 713-14.

Seligman, Edwin R.A. The Income Tax: A Study of the History, Theory, and Practice of Income Taxation at Home and Abroad. New York: Macmillan, 1911.

Student Review: Adam Bede by George Eliot

Trade paperback, 655 pages
Published 2008 (originally 1859)
Previously read May and November 2009

Acquired December 2013

Reread April 2014

Adam Bede
by George Eliot

If I learned anything this semester, it's don't assign 600-page Victorian novels in the last four weeks of the semester:

• "Liked all books but Adam Bede"
• "[...] it's difficult to pay attention to something so long near the end of the semester." 
• "replace Bede"
• "I think you should teach Adam Bede, Arthur & George and Frankenstein (which I had already read in high school but didn't get that much out of at the time) again definitely"
• "Adam bede was a great read!"
• "I had a little trouble understanding how Adam Bede fit into the themes of the course so maybe that could be dropped [...]"
• "Adam Bede should definitely be taught again because I think it was a good example of realism."
• "In my very biased opinion 'Between The Acts' was somewhat painful due to its lack of plot, as was 'Adam Bede' due to its very slow advancement + painful dialect in some parts."
• "I personally disliked Adam Bede, though I definitely see its importance within the course."

Review: Middlemarch by George Eliot

Trade paperback, 853 pages
Published 2003 (originally 1871-72)
Acquired October 2012
Read December 2012

Middlemarch
by George Eliot

I said in my review of George Henry Lewes's Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences (1853) that I thought Middlemarch was a utopian novel, because it “examines the ways in which the ideals of positivism do and do not work.” Positivism, as envisioned by Comte and Lewes, rests its premises on detailed historical, social, and psychological observations of human beings, which can then be used to recreate society on scientific grounds. What's more utopian than that? Middlemarch is a utopian novel because it shows the beginning of that utopian project.

The difficulty of obtaining accurate scientific observations of people is shown consistently throughout Middlemarch. Most famously, this is done via the poor social choices of Tertius Lydgate, the physician and naturalist, but I would like to look at other elements of the novel’s engagement with scientific observation: the narrator’s use of scientific metaphors and the character of Dorothea. Dorothea, though not a scientist, is heavily invested in the idea of doing good in general and reform in particular, and she often advocates for an approach to reform with a scientific edge. In the first few chapters of Middlemarch, she is involved in a scheme to build new cottages for the villagers of Middlemarch, but she constantly reflects how she wishes her efforts had a stronger basis in knowledge: “The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on” (29). This seems to be a perfect example of the positivist desire: Dorothea cannot create a new society (even if on her scale a “society” is merely a set of new cottages) if she does not first understand the way the current one works.

Where Dorothea initially runs into difficulty is in her inability to find the best (or even a good) way to accomplish her goal of finding the completest knowledge. She ends up deciding that marrying Causabon, who is attempting to develop The Key to All Mythologies, is best, because she can help him in his great works: “It would be like marrying Pascal. I should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by” (29). Here, as in so many other cases, her increased knowledge is figured as more penetrative sight; a new light will come upon her sight and enable her to see old objects in a new way. Dorothea’s desire is at its most explicitly Comtist when she first hears Causabon describe his project: “To reconstruct a past world, doubtless with a view to the highest purposes of truth – what a work to be in any way present at... though only as a lamp-holder!” (18).

Her desire to reconstruct history recalls Lewes’s grandiose claim that in giving his theory of development, Comte had “explained all the great historical phases… whence results the conception of a homogenous and continuous connection in the whole series of anterior ages, from the first manifestation of sociality, to the most advanced condition of mankind” (327). Dorothea too believes that all she needs to envision the future accurately is a complete conception of the past, and this leads her into her marriage with Causabon. Of course, Causabon’s work is not exactly the noble endeavor she imagines it to be, and the marriage quickly becomes unhappy for both of them. Ironically, but perhaps typically, for someone who wants to know all humanity, Dorothea struggles with just knowing the desires of herself and her husband.

The difficulty of knowing others is consistently reinforced throughout Middlemarch, from Dorothea’s bad choice in marriage to Lydgate’s inability to judge how the Middlemarch community will react to him (not to mention the Middlemarch community’s inability to understand him!). But certainly misunderstanding and bad judgments are part of the plots of most novels. What makes the ones in Middlemarch interesting and relevant to a project on scientific vision is that the inability is most often communicated with scientific metaphors. When Mrs Cadwallader tells Sir James that he did not and cannot win the hand of Dorothea, the narrator wonders why she has done this, commenting that “a telescope might have swept the parishes… without witnessing any interview that could excite suspicion… Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse” (59). The narrator goes on to explain that only with the strongest of lenses can we see why the simple life-forms in a water-drop act as they do—but the implication is that science could not achieve this level of insight into a human being, with either a telescope or a microscope. In fact, it takes the insight of the novelist three full pages to explain why Mrs Cadwallader acts the way that she does—and no one else has that level of access to interiority.

Another scientific metaphor points to a different difficulty when it comes to observation, sifting out the observer’s own thoughts and position from an observation. If a surface of polished steel is “minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against a lighted candle as a centre of illuminations, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion… These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent” (264). The metaphor employed here compares observing human events to an experiment involving light and glass, and the danger of assuming that one’s first inclination is the true one. The threat here is the human ego, which puts itself in a primary position far too easily. This is a recurrent threat throughout Middlemarch; characters’ observations are often endangered by what they want to see. This metaphor carries an implicit critique of scientific work like Comte’s: when Lewes says that the “foremost portion of mankind is now approaching the positive state… and now only await their general co-ordination to constitute a new social system” (328), he is both assuming that his portion of mankind is the foremost one, and that his age is the one on the verge of the new social system. What is this but egoism? What would it be like if Lewes and Comte had moved that flame and seen scratches emanating from the fourth-century Middle East?

The way Middlemarch warns against such dangers of observation makes it a fictional counterpart to Eliot’s own essay “The Natural History of German Life,” published in 1856, just three years after Lewes published Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences. I've already covered that essay as well, but suffice it to say that Eliot ends up suggesting is an alliance between the novel and science. The distance of science can be combined with the closeness of the novel to make truly useful observations, for a true understanding of character will “check our theories, and direct us in their application.” It is not just that the novelist is the only one who knows why Mrs Caldwell acts the way she does; the novelist’s knowledge of character is necessary to all society.

But even this is not enough to save Comte’s grand theories, to let us believe that everything about civilization can be summarized in an equation or theory. If observation is flawed, and if no theory can ever be universal, what are we left to work with in creating Comte’s future society? Within Middlemarch, Eliot shows her solution in action with Dorothea’s actions at the climax of the story. Here, she goes back and re-observes an earlier encounter with Rosamond and Ladislaw with her “vivid sympathetic experience,” which “asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance” (788). She quite literally cannot see the way that she used to.

She does not know everything, but she can discern that there are “hidden as well as evident troubles” in the Lydgate marriage (788). At this moment, Dorothea looks outside and sees “involuntary, palpitating life”: a woman with a baby, a shepherd with a dog, the field beyond the entrance gate. Dorothea experiences sympathy in the way that “The Natural History of German Life” calls for all would-be sociologists to do so, and armed in this way, she is able to help Rosamond and Ladislaw. What she tells Rosamond is based on a misinterpretation of events—but it helps Rosamond anyway, and in fact, it is exactly what Rosamond needed to hear. Eliot suggests that when we ally sympathy with observation, we can do good, and even if we have misunderstood the situation, our good can be good enough anyway. Dorothea’s actions here are just the beginning of her finally fulfilling her desire to help change the world, as she marries Ladislaw and he becomes a reform politician.

The moment where Dorothea helps Rosamond despite her misunderstanding was foreshadowed all the way back at the beginning of the novel, where the narrator points out the tendency of young women to interpret facts incorrectly, but then claims that is not that bad of an outcome: “They are not always too grossly received; for Sinbad himself may have fallen by good luck on a true description, and wrong reasoning sometimes land poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zig-zags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be” (25).

We are all but poor mortals trying to do our best in solving the world’s problems, but if we look around keenly and let the novelist guide our sympathies, we might do some good in the world, even if it’s not the good we intended, whether we have scientific theories on our side or not.

Review: The Essays of “George Eliot”: Complete: Collected and Arranged, with an Introduction on Her “Analysis of Motives” by Nathan Sheppard

Kindle eBook, 288 pages
Published 2009 (contents: 1852-68)
Read May 2013

The Essays of “George Eliot”: Complete: Collected and Arranged, with an Introduction on Her “Analysis of Motives” by Nathan Sheppard

Nathan Sheppard's anthology collects ten essays by George Eliot, which mostly seem to come from early in her career, pulled out of the literary magazines. The best of these is probably "The Natural History of German Life," which can be seen as a manifesto for the way Eliot approached social ills; traces of it have been noted by many critics in Middlemarch, amongst other novels. She argues that observation is of utmost importance, but also that is a difficult, fraught process, especially when it comes to human beings: Eliot says that if we could see what image of the working classes was meant "by many who theorize on those bodies… we should find that they indicate almost as small an amount of concrete knowledge-- that they are as far from representing the complex facts summed up in the collective term" as someone whose rides a train sometimes is able to represent the complexities of railroads. The danger of sociology when it comes to reforming society is that it is not able to see people with the complexity that they possess.

Eliot does not suggest, however, that all observation is impossible, or even that observation's imperfection ultimately makes it unusable. She believes that statistics can be useful in solving social problems, but appeals made on their basis "require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity," which art-- such as the novel-- alone can provide; this is why "the unreality of their representations is a grave evil." What Eliot ends up suggesting here is an alliance between the novel and science. The distance of science can be combined with the closeness of the novel to make truly useful observations, for a true understanding of character will "check our theories, and direct us in their application." The novelist’s knowledge of character is necessary to all society.

But people are so complex that the more we investigate, "the more thoroughly we shall be convinced that a universal social policy has no validity except on paper, and can never be carried into successful practice." People are not particles; their movements cannot be reproduced by a set of physical laws that apply universally.

If observation is flawed, and if no theory can ever be universal, what are we left to work with in creating a better society? Eliot suggests that wise social policy will be based "on the natural history of social bodies," but if one cannot even know one’s neighbors or even one’s self (as many of her novels suggest) then how can such social policy be put into practice? In her essay, Eliot suggests that W. H. Riehl responds appropriately: he is "able and willing to do justice to the elements of fact and reason in every shade of opinion and every form of effort" even when the larger picture is not immediately apparent. Eliot suggests that when we ally sympathy with observation, we can do good, and even if we have misunderstood the situation, our good can be good enough anyway.

All of this feels like a rebuttal to Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences by George Henry Lewes, her husband, which posits that we can know people well enough to create a social theory that will generate a utopia. Eliot, I would argue, is skeptical of all this.

Of the other essays here, I particularly enjoyed "Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming," where Eliot skewers a particularly bad example of a particular sort of preacher, and "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," where she skewers several particularly bad examples of a particular sort of novel. Apparently, I like my Eliot being mean (and she does do a great putdown), but I like her even more thoughtful, and this book showcases her at her thoughtful best.

There's an overly lengthy essay by Sheppard about Eliot's characterization, and of course I agree with his statement that "if the analysis of human motives be her forte and her art, she stands first, and it is very doubtful whether any artist in fiction is entitled to stand second." But I'll save my full thoughts in that direction for my reviews of her novels.

Victorian Controversies, 1876: Zionism

Daniel Deronda

by George Eliot

Trade paperback, 727 pages. Published 2009 (originally 1876). Acquired July 2011. Read November 2011.

George Eliot wrote one of my favorite-ever novels, Adam Bede, so it was with some anticipation that I opened up Daniel Deronda. The opening pages didn't disappoint; the first chapter, where we see Gwendolen Harleth at the gambling tables, is absolutely exquisite, an utterly captivating use of point-of-view as we come closer and closer to the odd and unsettling sight of a woman gambling, and meet our two main characters, Gwendolen and Daniel.

From there, their backstories unfold before us in parallel, and then their forwardstories. It's a common truism that despite who the novel is named after, the Gwendolen sections are more interesting. It's true that they are very good-- still no one can do interiority to the extent that George Eliot can, and the bit on the boat is utterly riveting especially-- but I loved the sections where Deronda began to associate with Mordecai and his associates. Everyone knows that Deronda is the "Jewish novel," but that's part of the problem, too. The point isn't the Zionist discussion themselves, but the real sense that Deronda is beginning to experience something bigger than himself, coming into contact with a larger world full of big, important ideas. Also, knowing that this is the Jewish novel preempts certain revelations from having their full effect.

The novel does get kinda weird, though. The narrative seems to condemn Gwendolen for being unable to dedicate her own life to something bigger than herself, whereas it praises Deronda for dedicating himself to Zionism. This is weird for two reasons. First, dedicating herself to a cause isn't really the solution to Gwendolen's marital woes. Second, Daniel lucks into a cause-- had he not had a secret Jewish ancestry, he would have been just as aimless as Gwendolen, if not moreso. It feels massively unfair for Daniel and the narrator to condemn Gwendolen for her inability to see the big picture, when she's never been permitted access to the art museum. (Okay, that metaphor is stretched too much.) The narrator comments:

That was the sort of crisis which was at this moment beginning in Gwendolen's small life: she was for the first time feeling the pressure of a vast mysterious movement, for the first time being dislodged from her supremacy in her own world, and getting a sense that her horizon was but a dipping onward of an existence with which her own was revolving.

Gwendolen must be made small (humiliated, even) to discover something bigger than herself... but Deronda didn't have to be. Why is that?

There are similar moments of incongruence throughout the novel, such as when Daniel condemns his own mother, seemingly unfairly to me, but not the narrator, or when a musician declares that musicians are so good at things that they could advise politicians, which strikes me as far-fetched but no one quibbles with him.

The thing I wonder about Eliot is if we take her at face value too much, just because she's a Victorian. We assume that the writer and the novel are aligned in perspective with the protagonist and the narrator. We wouldn't do this if she was a 20th-century writer; it would be almost expected that the narrator must not represent the author. So why do we do that here? As with the ending of Adam Bede, where Adam seems to think it's okay for his wife to give up her vocation, I don't think we should. I think we are supposed to disagree with Adam, with Daniel, with the musician, with the narrator even.

But that's hard to prove, especially since I suspect it might be rooted in the fact that I love Eliot's writing so much-- and so I want her to be like me, and I want her politics and philosophy to be like mine. Because surely she can't believe that it's right to humiliate Gwendolen that way. I don't.