Abstract
Though the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the publisher John Blackwood had discussed the idea more than two decades before, Middlemarch was the first Victorian serial novel to be published in eight half-volumes, or “books,” priced at 5s., issued bimonthly from November 1871 to December 1872.2 It is possible that George Henry Lewes got the idea from Victor Hugo’s 1862 half-volume sale of Les Misérables; what is certain is that Middlemarch marked one in a series of attempts by the Leweses and Blackwood to escape the power of Mudie’s and other lending libraries, which were by 1871 exacting large discounts on large orders. The potential benefits of half-volume bimonthly publication were numerous: freedom from the pressures of the monthly norm dating from the onset of Pickwick Papers in 1836; the opportunity for end-page advertising; a greater chance of obtaining reviews of each part; and thus an accelerating sale to the appearance of the work in its final, four-volume form (L 5: 146, 179–80).3 The success of the experiment was not immediately obvious, however. At the outset of his year-long series of reviews in the Spectator, for example, R. H. Hutton expressed surprise that George Eliot could prosper writing novels in which painful enlightenment so apparently outweighed any pleasurable kind: “The ground-note of dissatisfaction, of pain, runs through all its melody.
Why should one expect the truth to be consoling?
George Eliot to Edith Simcox1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Simcox recalled the question in July 1880 from a conversation of March 1873. See The Letters of George Eliot, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–78), 9: 315 (hereafter “L”);
Edith Simcox, A Momument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith A. Simcox’s the Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, ed. Constance M. Fulmer and Margaret E. Barfield (New York: Garland, 1998), 129.
See also Carol A. Martin, George Eliot’s Serial Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), 182–6; John Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 193–7.
[R. H. Hutton,] [Review of Middlemarch], Spectator (3 August 1872): 975.
See Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1832–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 6–14;
see also David Carroll, George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 236.
Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 46;
see also Forrest Pyle, The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 158–71;
Alan Mintz, George Eliot and the Novel of Vocation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 167–81.
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 85–7, 45;
Fredric Jameson, “The Vanishing Mediator, or, Max Weber as Storyteller,” in Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 2: 23–5.
For the exemplary discussion of the relation between George Eliot and Arnold in the early 1870s, see U. C. Knoepflmacher, Religious Humanism and the Victorian Novel: George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 60–71;
on Literature and Dogma and its reception, see Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 331–43.
See, for example, Patrick Brantlinger, The Spirit of Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832–67 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 5–9;
John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Charles Dickens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 166–71;
Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 120–5.
On the distinction between commodity-text and commodity-book, see N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 48–9, 55.
Compare J. Hillis Miller, “Narrative and History,” ELH 41 (1974): 455–73,
as discussed in Daniel Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History and Literary Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 112;
David Lodge, “Middlemarch and the Idea of the Classic Realist Text,” in New Casebooks: Middlemarch, ed. John Peck (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 45–64, 60–2.
For an explanation of the Weberian concept of “social action,” emphasizing both subjective intention and inherited disposition, see Raymond Aron, Main Currents of Sociological Thought II: Durkheim, Pareto, Weber, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1970), 220–4.
The phrase first occurs in L 5: 333; see also William Myers, The Teaching of George Eliot (Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1984), 1–4 and passim,
There is no end to this novel’s drive to qualify, as the inscription of Ladis-law’s fate suggests. Though he does become “an ardent public man, working well” (this last adverb much worried over in manuscript), his success is no less about earning his own way in life by “getting at last returned to Parliament by a constituency which paid his expenses” (M 822). Compare Henry Staten, “Is Middlemarch Ahistorical?”, PMLA 115 (2000): 991–1005, 1002–3.
See David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism and English Romantic Thought (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), 73–4.
John Henry Newman, Apologia pro vita sua (Boston: Houghton Mifflin-Riverside, 1956), 39;
Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: the Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 104.
Thomas Chalmers, On Political Economy, in Connection with the Moral State, and Moral Prospects of Society (1832; New York: Kelley, 1968), 445–6.
Michael Mann, The Rise and Fall of Nation-States, 1765–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 101, 534.
Stuart J. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 108–44; Poovey, Making a Social Body, 98–106.
See Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: the Influence of Evangelicalism on Nineteenth-Century Social Thought, 1795–1865, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), passim,
Quoted in Hamish F. G. Swanston, Ideas of Order: Anglicans and the Renewal of Theological Method in the Middle Years of the Nineteenth Century (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1974), 85.
J. Llewelyn Davies, Theology and Morality (New York, [1873]), 27.
Girton College itself was founded through the efforts of Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon, including the £50 subscription the two obtained in 1860 from George Eliot. See Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: a Biography (1968; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 339 n.5 (hereafter “Haight”);
Sheila R. Herstein, A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 177–9.
See Frederick Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1884), 2: 52–3;
Edward R. Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 15–6;
George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical, ed. Fred C. Thompson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 403.
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 1: 160, 18: 243;
see also Life of Maurice, 1: 62, 468, and Bernard Semmel, John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 23.
Ernesto Screpanti and Stefano Zamagni, An Outline of the History of Economic Thought, trans. David Field (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 62–3, 96.
Jacob Viner, “Bentham and J. S. Mill: the Utilitarian Background” (1949), in Essays on the Intellectual History of Economics, ed. Douglas A. Irwin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 175;
Pedro Schwartz, The New Political Economy of J. S. Mill (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), 17.
See also Samuel Hollander, The Economics of J. S. Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 58–60.
See Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 179; for the stories of Sara and Dorcas, see Genesis 16, 17, 18 and Acts 9: 36–43.
See Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 90–1;
on Martineau’s “pathological” attitude towards female sexuality, including her complaints against Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charlotte Brontë, see Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: the Last Victorian (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1999), 154.
On Ambleside and the housing project, see R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: a Radical Victorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 254–62.
See Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals 1830–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 69–72, 100; for a reminder of the persistence of aristocratic rule, see Staten, “Is Middlemarch Ahistorical?”, 992.
See Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 106–7, 110.
H. Buxton Forman, [Rev. of Middlemarch], London Quarterly Review 40 (April 1873): 99–110, 109.
David Carroll, ed., George Eliot: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 358, 353.
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans (1852; New York: Harper, 1957), 271.
On Lydgate’s consciousness, see also Rothfield, Vital Signs, 107, 113; David Carroll, George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 256; Staten, “Is Middlemarch Ahistorical?”, 1001.
See Pierre Bourdieu, “Field of Power, Literary Field and Habitus,” trans. Claud DuVerlie, in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 169–75.
See Andrew Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 197–204.
Henry Jones, Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher (London, 1891), 123.
See also Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction, 171; Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays in Literature and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 95–6;
Jill Matus, Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1995), 217.
See D. A. Miller, Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 178.
James Mill, Elements of Political Economy, 3rd edn (1826), rpr. in fames Mill: Selected Economic Writings, ed. Donald Winch (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1966), 323;
Marx, Capital, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harwordsworth: Penguin — New Left Books, 1976), 718;
Edward R. Norman, The Victorian Christian Socialists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 16–17.
J. Llewelyn Davies, Theology and Morality (New York, [1873]), 275, 277.
Frederic W. H. Myers, “George Eliot,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 23 (November 1881): 57–64, 62.
Max Weber, “Zwischenbetrachtung” [“Intermediate Reflections”] (1915), trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills as “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,”
in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Gerth and Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 341, 352.
See Haight, 439–40; L 5: 185, 192–3, 194, 208, 212, 230; Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans, 244–8; and Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 105–37.
Simcox, Shirtmaker; Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans, 252–5; L 9: 203; K. A. McKenzie, Edith Simcox and George Eliot (London: Oxford University Press, 1961).
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne” (1873),
trans. Daniel Breazeale as “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the early 1870’s, ed. Breazeale (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), 79–97.
Martin, George Eliot’s Serial Fiction, 196–7; on the self-consecration of the artist, see also William Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Mary Moorman, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 2: 150;
Pierre Bourdieu, “Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception” (1968), in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 234.
On the persistence of modernity, see T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 7–8;
Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989), 44–7.
Copyright information
© 2005 David Payne
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Payne, D. (2005). The Production of Belief: the Serial, Middlemarch. In: The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512566_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230512566_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52467-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-51256-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)