Abstract
With the proof of Part I of ‘Janet’s Repentance’ in his possession, John Blackwood writes advising George Eliot to ‘soften’ her picture of life as much as she can. ‘Your sketches this time are all written in the harsher Thackerayan view of human nature.’ Thackeray, he adds, is ‘rather disposed to claim you as a disciple of his’.1 Defending what Haight calls ‘the artistic integrity of her realism’,2 Eliot responds: ‘I may have some resemblance to Thackeray, though I am not conscious of being in any way a disciple of his, unless it constitutes discipleship to think him, as I suppose the majority of people with any intellect do, on the whole the most powerful of living novelists’ (Letters, II, 349). This was in 1857, almost a decade after the publication of Vanity Fair, and fifteen years before Middlemarch would be completed. Yet, though separated by nearly a quarter of a century, these novels are united by the bleakly ironic view of social life and human nature shared by their very different authors.
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Notes
The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–78), II, 344–5. Subsequent references are to Letters.
Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 234. Subsequent references are to Haight.
Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), p. 5. Subsequent reference is to VF.
Spectator, 45 (1 June 1872), 685–7. Reprinted in George Eliot: The Literary Heritage, ed. David Carroll (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 298. Subsequent references are to CH.
George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), Ch. 61, p. 449. Subsequent references are to this edition.
Leslie Stephen, George Eliot (London: Macmillan, 1902), p. 174.
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 230. Significantly, Eliot moves more overtly toward allegory as she descends the social scale, i.e. moves towards one of the social extremes. Bulstrode and Raffles are both criminals and therefore belong at the bottom of most social models.
Hiram Ford and Timothy Cooper, both farm-labourers, make a brief but significant appearance in Chapter 56 (404–9). For a concise discussion of the subtleties and complexities of the English class system see Richard Faber’s Proper Stations: Class in Victorian Fiction (London: Faber and Faber, 1971).
Ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), p. 237. Subsequent references are to MF.
‘Leaves From a Note-Book’, reprinted in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 448. The quotation from Charles Lee Lewes appears on p. 437. Subsequent references are to Essays.
In The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, Harvard English Studies, ed. Jerome Buckley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 103.
Basil Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949), p. 238.
Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 32. Subsequent references are to ‘Lukács’.
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© 1982 Gordon S. Haight and Rosemary T. VanArsdel
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Hulcoop, J.F. (1982). ‘This Petty Medium’: In the Middle of Middlemarch. In: Haight, G.S., Van Arsdel, R.T. (eds) George Eliot. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05969-0_13
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