The Individual versus the Community

Abstract

The starting point for explaining Eliot’s views on civil society is often taken to be her 1856 essay in the Westminster Review on the German social scientist, Wilhelm von Riehl.¹ The date, less than two years after the publication of North and South, is significant, for it locates the development of Eliot’s understanding of the social within broadly the same period as that of the other social-problem novels — a circumstance which partly reduces the chronological gulf which might otherwise appear to separate Felix Holt from the other works in the sub-genre.