“Eyes That Have Dwelt on the Past”: Reading the Landscape of Memory in The Mill on the Floss

Abstract

In early 1859, the Victorian philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes wrote in his journal, “We took a trip to Newark and Gainsboro, on artistic grounds, Polly wanting to lay the scene of her new novel on the Trent. This little expedition we enjoyed very much, and she found fruitful […].”¹ Several months later, he would offer more details about the project to the publisher John Blackwood: “G. E. is in high spirits,” Lewes reported,

having found a Mill and Millstream to his heart’s content; and we are going to hire a laborer’s cottage for a day or two, and live a poetical primitive life, the results of which will appear in Maggie—who by the way becomes more fascinating than ever, and Tom more intensely boyish.²

Written for himself and to a long-time acquaintance, respectively, these two documents naturally elide some of the contextual information useful to outside readers: “Polly” and “G. E.” referred to none other than the novelist George Eliot, and the “new novel” then taking shape would eventually be published in triple-decker form by William Blackwell in 1860 as The Mill on the Floss, featuring among its characters young Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom. With these facts established, the two accounts seem like relatively straightforward glimpses into Eliot’s writing process, which is more or less a textual analogue to method acting.