Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The “Evangelical”: starting out in a Christian culture
- 2 The Apostate: moving beyond the Christian mythos
- 3 The Journalist: editing, reviewing, shaping a worldview
- 4 The Germanist: balancing the counterweight of German thinkers
- 5 The Novelist: mixing realism, naturalism and mythmaking
- 6 The Historian: tracking ideals – utopian and national – in Romola and The Spanish Gypsy
- 7 The “Radical”: taking an anti-political stance in Felix Holt
- 8 The Encyclopedist: transcending the past in Middlemarch
- 9 The Visionary: transmitting ideals in Daniel Deronda
- 10 The Intellectual: cultural critique in Impressions of Theophrastus Such
- Notes
- Works cited
- Name index
7 - The “Radical”: taking an anti-political stance in Felix Holt
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The “Evangelical”: starting out in a Christian culture
- 2 The Apostate: moving beyond the Christian mythos
- 3 The Journalist: editing, reviewing, shaping a worldview
- 4 The Germanist: balancing the counterweight of German thinkers
- 5 The Novelist: mixing realism, naturalism and mythmaking
- 6 The Historian: tracking ideals – utopian and national – in Romola and The Spanish Gypsy
- 7 The “Radical”: taking an anti-political stance in Felix Holt
- 8 The Encyclopedist: transcending the past in Middlemarch
- 9 The Visionary: transmitting ideals in Daniel Deronda
- 10 The Intellectual: cultural critique in Impressions of Theophrastus Such
- Notes
- Works cited
- Name index
Summary
George Eliot's next major work, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), emerges within several biographical contexts – her personal history, her intellectual milieu and her historical surroundings. I shall rehearse them in that order, without privileging any one of them, for their importance will be found to be illuminating but not determinative. Since Eliot was at times a political novelist – at large in Romola and Felix Holt and in part in her later works – the question arises, what were her politics? A review of her political opinions yields the following data. In 1848, at the time of continental nationalist and left-wing revolutions, she wrote:
I should have no hope of good from any imitative movement at home. Our working classes are eminently inferior to the mass of the French people. In France, the mind of the people is highly electrified – they are full of ideas on social subjects … Here there is so much larger a proportion of selfish radicalism and unsatisfied, brute sensuality (in the agricultural and mining districts especially) than of perception or desire of justice, that a revolutionary movement would be simply destructive – not constructive. Besides, it would be put down. Our military have no notion of “fraternizing.” … the aristocracy have got firm hold of them. Our little humbug of a queen is more endurable than the rest of her race because she calls forth a chivalrous feeling, and there is nothing in our constitution to obstruct the slow progress of political reform … But we English are slow crawlers.
(Letters I, 254)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- George Eliot's Intellectual Life , pp. 140 - 160Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010