The Face of the Country

Abstract

‘George Eliot’ was the nom de plume of Mary Ann Evans, the daughter of a Warwickshire land agent, who passed her most impressionable years while the country was agitated by the politics of the first Reform Act and had the temper of its life changed by the first railways. Both are reflected in this extract from ‘Felix Holt’, a novel written at the time of the second Reform Act of 1867. The impression given is initially of contrast between pleasant rural and unpleasant urban society, but closer reading reveals that, to Eliot’s eyes, the charm of the villages masked a society which was stupid, credulous and occasionally vicious; and although the new industrialism appeared to promote dirt and sensual indulgence, it could also respond to its problems in a way of which the old order had never been capable. Even a convinced enemy of capitalist industry like Engels was able to write in the 1840s that ‘The English worker today is no longer an Englishman of the old school. He no longer resembles his capitalist neighbour in being a mere machine for making money. His capacity for feeling has developed.’