Relevant History

Abstract

George Eliot’s ultimate subject is humanity and its welfare, ‘the growing good of the world’ which is dependent on ‘unhistoric’ as well as historic acts. Having seen some of the worst effects of industrialization in Britain, she could not but reflect that people deserved the benefits of a religion which affected the whole of life. Most of the historical references in her fiction, from the end of the eighteenth century to the years almost immediately preceding the publication of her last novel, are a reflection of her interest in social developments and related causes. This interest in public morality grew not only from contemporary movements and events but from her father’s recollections. She liked ‘to mark the time, and connect the course of individual lives with the historic stream’ (DD. viii). As a novelist, she thought Gwendolen Harleth a subject of the highest moment; as a philosophical historian, she knew that, in the pride of youth, she was a most ‘insignificant thread in human history’, at a time when ‘the universal kinship was declaring itself fiercely’, as Lancashire cotton operatives demonstrated by supporting the anti-slavery campaign during the American Civil War, even though it led to their own unemployment and starvation (DD.xi). ‘Any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand’, she writes, thinking of the changes in and around Coventry about 1830, when ‘the old stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar guinea became extinct; while squires and baronets, and even lords who had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the faultiness of close acquaintanceship’. She finds ‘much the same sort of movement and mixture’ in this ‘old England’ as in older Herodotus’ (M.xi).