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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Felix Holt, A Radical is today cursorily dismissed by students of George Eliot's works as her one unsuccessful venture in fiction on the position of the laborer in society. Actually, although the novel is somewhat dull in plot, it was by no means unsuccessful in its own time, nor was it George Eliot's only novelistic attempt to discuss industrial issues.
1 Blackwoods paid £5000 for the novel and quickly exhausted the first edition. Within a year after publication, the book had “been read by no end of people” and was popular even in Ireland, where an American visitor found “many friends anxious but unable to get it.” It was also a subject of controversy in the Edinburgh Review and received much notice from other journals. Letter of March 18, 1867. George Eliot's Works, ed. J. W. Cross (New York, 1884), i, 14.
2 For a critical comparison of the novelists who preceded her, cf. Louis Cazamian, Le roman social en Angleterre: 1830–50 (Paris, 1906).
3 In 1832 she saw the riot at Nuneaton, used in Felix Holt. Works, i, 14. Cf. also letters of November 22, 1839; October 27, 1840; September 3, 1841; September 17, 1859; September 15, 1864; April 27, 1866.
4 Letter of April 27, 1866; Journal, June 7, 1865 (ibid., ii, 462); Journal, November 15, 1865 (ibid., ii, 467); letter of September 17, 1859.
5 Letter of February 1, 1853.
6 Letter of early 1848 (ibid., i, 87).
7 The election riot in Felix Holt. The Works of George Eliot (New York, 1900), iv, 316 ff.
8 For these references in the order given, cf. ibid., i, 132, 139, 242; ii, 389, 411, 442, 462, 474, 467, 471.
9 Letter of April 24, 1850.
10 Adam Bede (New York, n. d.), p. 176 and ibid. cit.
11 She wrote of Positivism as “one-sided” but considered Comte “a great thinker, nevertheless,” and in the Spanish Gypsy used the theory throughout.
12 She later wrote in accord with Comte's view, “My books have for their main bearing a conclusion … that the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human (i.e. an exaltation of the human).” Letter of December 10, 1874.
13 Power to endure affliction imposed from without would make man superior to accident.
14 The story of Arthur and Hetty in Adam Bede.
15 Letter of August 8, 1863.
16 Its depiction of the plague shows destitution, but only incidentally.
17 Briefly the plot of Felix Holt is as follows. Felix rejects the false profits open to him from the sale of quack medicine and earns his living by manual labor. He later attempts to dissipate an election riot, the foolish radicalism of which he deplores. Mistaken as a leader of the riot, he is attacked by the police, resists, and is sent to prison. Upon his release, he marries. His wife declines the estate to which she is legally heir, and Felix continues to earn a livelihood as an artisan.
18 Most notable example, of course, is the Christmas story of Scrooge, but Oliver Twist, Hard Cash, and the Old Curiosity Shop all emphasize private philanthropy.
19 Tancred (New York, 1891), 138; Sybil (New York, 1891), 264 and passim. Sybil appeared in 1845, Tancred in 1847.
20 First number of Parson Lot's Letters to the Chartists, May 6, 1848. Kingsley also advocated “association” or cooperative projects by workers, but gave no plan for their development except under a philanthropically endowed and, even then, financially unstable, system. Cf. the association of needle-women, Alton Locke, Chapter 36.
21 Strongly sympathetic with Wordsworth's and Emerson's stress on self reliance, she used charity only as the merest stop-gap in Silas Marner, and then the charity is no more than neighborliness.
22 Speaking of Young Englandism as depicted in Tancred, she wrote “[It] is almost as remote from my sympathies as Jacobitism as far as its force is concerned, though I love and respect it as an effort on behalf of the people.” Letter of early 1848 (op. cit., i, 87).
23 Felix Holt, 295–296. In 1848 she had written that because of the “selfish radicalism and unsatisfied brute sensuality (in the agricultural and mining districts especially) … a revolutionary movement would be simply destructive, not constructive.” She added, “… there is nothing in our Constitution to obstruct the slow progress of reform.” Letter of 1848 (op. cit., i, 92).
24 “Address to Working Men by Felix Holt,” The Works of George Eliot (New York, 1900), x, 198, 202–203, 206. The “Address,” an essay, was published in 1867 and supplemented the ideas in Felix Holt.
25 Cf. the Cass family in Silas Marner, the squire in Adam Bede, and the Transomes in Felix Holt.
26 Adam Bede, 248–249, 487.
27 Cheap Clothes and Nasty and Alton Locke, passim.
28 Both Adam Bede and Felix rely on the wisdom of capitalist employers, and the “Address to Working Men by Felix Holt” reaffirms the need of maintaining a middle and an upper class in control. Op. cit., 198.
29 “How hideous those towns of Holbeck and Wakefield are! It is difficult to keep one's faith in a millennium within sight of this modern civilization which consists in ‘development of industries.‘ Egypt and her big calm gods seem quite as good.” Letter of September 15, 1846.
30 Adam Bede, 262.
31 Felix speaks of “the life of the miserable—the spawning life of vice and hunger,” which charity had not corrected. Felix Holt, 262.
32 The underlying thought in Felix Holt.
33 Felix Holt, 66. Also references to George Eliot's own father, letter of September 30, 1859. Kingsley maintained the same view.
34 Adam Bede, 167, 210, and the “Address to Working Men,” op. cit., 196.
35 Adam Bede, 167.
36 Adam Bede, 169 and Chapter 21. A view stressed by Mrs. Gaskell in Mary Barton, 1848.
37 Adam is qualified in all fields related to carpentry, and George Eliot says of her own father, “… he raised himself [not in rank] from being an artisan to be a man whose extensive knowledge in very varied practical departments made his services valued through several counties.” Letter of September 30, 1859. Felix has likewise some diversity of skills.
38 “Address to Working Men,” op. cit., 198. Also Adam Bede, 490, 492.
39 The usual reforms advocated by George Eliot's predecessors and recommended in Felix Holt, 6, 297, 473, and passim. Also letters of November 22, 1839; October 27, 1840; September 3, 1841; early 1848 (op. cit., 92–93).
40 Letters of November 22, 1839; August 27, 1860; March 16, 1870; April 19, 1880.
