The Altar of Mammon

Abstract

Only a few years before Eliot’s birth Jane Austen began her novel Pride and Prejudice with the ironic sentence: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’.¹ The opening paragraph of her next published work, Mansfield Park, contained the axiom: ‘there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them’.² Austen’s satire focuses on two aspects of life — wealth and marriage — that were not only central throughout the nineteenth century, but became more intensely so during the period of Eliot’s lifetime. The balance of wealth gradually passed from the families of the traditional landed gentry, to the newer interests of manufacturing, trade and commerce. In effect this also meant a shift from rural and agrarian productivity to urban industrialism. The contrast is reflected in a speech from Felix Holt concerning the Transome estate: ‘people who get their money out of land are as long scraping five pounds together as your trading men are in turning five pounds into a hundred’ (p. 185). Although this should not necessarily be taken literally it does illustrate a general trait in economic change.