After the anthropology of the first three novels, George Eliot turns to historical reconstruction in Romola, a work of extraordinary scope and ambition. We have seen how the novelist sketched a variety of alternative world-views in the theodicies of Hayslope, and then in The Mill on the Floss focused on the process by which a family of world-views was formed and destroyed. These can now be read as adumbrations of the far more ambitious work which follows: Romola extends and recasts this range of world-views into a comprehensive history of European civilisation. As such, it dramatises the formidable task of hermeneutics to re-possess the past in those belated Victorian times, beset by a keen awareness of the discrepancy between inherited forms and the contemporary spirit, a state of mind embodied most vividly in Dorothea Brooke's anguish as she confronts in bewilderment the ‘stupendous fragmentariness’ of a Rome which should have been ‘the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world’. How can one recover the past as a living presence? Or, in the words of Middlemarch again, how does one acquire ‘the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts’? This is the task to which Romola explicitly and urgently addresses itself.

There were many hermeneutic metaphors or models available to describe the interpretation and recovery of the Victorian past. In his opening remarks to The Ring and the Book (1868), Browning, for instance, runs through several possible analogies for his re-creation of a seventeenth-century Roman murder trial – painting a landscape, conducting an electrical experiment, reconstructing a column from a fragment of stone.