Summaries And Critical Commentary

Abstract

The Mill on the Floss, set in the years 1829-39, centres on Maggie and Tom, children of the honest and respectable, but uneducated miller, Mr Tulliver, and his wife. An important peripheral group of characters includes Mrs Tulliver’s three sisters and their husbands: two of these also exemplify the narrow provincialism of the trading town of St Ogg’s while the third uncle, Mr Deane, is an enterprising business man able to offer Tom a job when his father ruins himself financially. This ruin stems from his generosity, unwise expenditure on Tom’s education and, above all, his passion for litigation about his water-rights. After four years’ grinding work and some help from a loyal childhood friend Bob Jakin, Tom raises enough money to pay off his father’s debts. Meanwhile, Maggie, who is a clever, emotional girl, and temperamentally the opposite of prosaic, authoritarian, self-controlled Tom, suffers from the deprivation of any intellectual or aesthetic satisfaction and above all from the absence of the love her nature craves. Only her father admires her and he has become increasingly morose, while Tom to whom she has always been devoted is irritated by what he sees as her emotional instability and waywardness. He dislikes the religious fervour of her adolescence and is further antagonised when he discovers her friendship with the crippled Philip Wakem, whose lawyer father is regarded as having engineered Mr Tulliver’s downfall. Tom immediately ends this relationship by threatening to tell their father, but very soon after, just when Tom has been able to pay off the creditors, Mr Tulliver dies of a stroke after attacking his enemy, Wakem. Two years later Maggie returns from earning her living in a boarding school to visit her cousin Lucy Deane who is virtually engaged to the wealthy Stephen Guest. Maggie meets Philip again, who wants to marry her, but she and Stephen fall violently in love and partly by chance, they become compromised.