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A modern odyssey: Realism, the masses, and nationalism in George Eliot's Felix Holt
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1996 by Lesjak, Carolyn
One might read this scene as a straightforward condemnation of men like Johnson who play willy-nilly with the sympathies of the working class. Certainly opportunists are one focus of the narrative's critique. But it is a double-edged critique: the ease with which Johnson can manipulate the miners' sentiments is equally if not more biting about the marked absence of political acuity in the working class. Their sympathies are to be played with so cavalierly because they lack a proper education in political know-how. They hang on the last word of Johnson's speech (crisis), for instance, not because they understand what this word means-they most surely do not, we are told-but precisely because they do not know its meaning and for this reason (or lack of reason) are thoroughly persuaded. His words convince by their very incomprehensibility. This caricature of working-class sensibility is crucial to explaining the effect the absence of industrial work has on the structure of the novel as a whole. By parodying the workers, the narrative provocatively casts suspicion on their political abilities. In the process, the question of their representation moves from the issue of their natural right to self-representation as working members of English society to an evaluation of whether, given their political immaturity, they are in a position to be able to represent themselves." At stake becomes a valuation of political knowledge, a valuation in which the collier and miner come up woefully short. From the issue of knowledge it is then but a small step to the question of culture itself. As Eliot makes explicit in the "Address to Working Men" (a speech appended to the end of the novel and delivered in the fictive voice of Felix Holt), "degrading, barbarous pleasures" such as those of the working class are nothing less than a sign of cultural privation, of the lack of those "precious benefits" which she calls the "common estate of society."12 And this "common estate," which Eliot, via the pub, shows no mere expansion of the franchise can provide, is "that treasure of knowledge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, feeling, and manners, great memories and the interpretation of great records, which is carried on from the minds of one generation to the minds of another" (621). The literary quandary of how to represent modern labor has been translated into an issue of political representation, which in turn rests on who the rightful heirs of such a conveyed tradition of culture can and should be.
Such a shift is integrally connected to the actual debates about reform in England beginning in the 1830s and continuing into the 1860s with the passing of the Second Reform Bill in 1867, just one year after Eliot wrote Felix Holt. The nature of this period of reform has been characterized by critics such as Williams and Patrick Brantlinger as one involving two distinct phases: the first, the middle-class reform of the 1830s through the mid-1850s in which political reformist action was believed to be the mechanism through which to alleviate social problems (grouped under the umbrella term the "Condition of England") and the second, in which the optimism and energy of this earlier period of reform is replaced by the "cult of progress," i.e. the belief in the inevitability of historical
