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George Eliot and the production of consumers
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Winter 1997 by Leah Price
In 1866, George Henry Lewes wrote that "it is a pity that [Felix Holt] isn't quite ready for publication just in the thick of the great reform discussion so many good quotable 'bits' would be furnished to M.P.s" (Eliot, Letters 8: 374). The absence of George Eliot quotations from that debate has been more than compensated for by their ubiquity in other venues. Before her death, excerpts from Eliot appear in an anthology, on a calendar, in four schoolbooks, on an army officers' examination, in a sermon, in one reader's copy of the New Testament, and as epigraphs to a socialist treatise and an abridgment of Boswell's Life of Johnson. In the years immediately following, her works are excerpted in a Zionist tract, provide chapter mottoes for at least one novel, and appear in anthologies ranging from booklets for the pocket to albums for the sofa-table (see Zionism).
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Readers' fondness for quoting Eliot can ultimately be traced to the structure of her own narratives, punctuated with epigraphs and self-contained digressions. But it originates more directly in the publishing venture of one of her fans. In the year in which Middlemarch appears, the publisher Blackwood also brings out a daintier volume-the Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Works of George Eliot-edited by a sycophantic young Scotsman named Alexander Main. Three more editions follow over the next eight years, updated each time a new book by Eliot herself appears. Meanwhile, at the end of 1878, in time for Christmas presents, Main assembles a new series of quotations for the George Eliot Birthday Book, a diary decorated with a "thought" from George Eliot for every day of the year.' The fact that every new book by Eliot prompts a new edition by Main means that Daniel Deronda and the Impressions of Theophrastus Such are both written in the expectation of being excerpted. And because buyers of the Sayings and Birthday Book constitute only a fraction of the readers who know of their existence, Main's anthologies shape the way Eliot's work is perceived even by those who refuse to read her at less than full length.
This article examines the effect of that awareness on George Eliot-and on her readers, reviewers, and critics. Anthologies redefine the genre of Eliot's oeuvre and the gender of its author in contradictory ways: they sanctify the novel by classifying Eliot as a poet, and bracket her with male predecessors while marketing her to women. In training their readers to sift Eliot's reusable wisdom from her ephemeral plots, anthologies replace the novel's difference from other genres by a gendered difference within its own public. Nineteenth-century reviews and twentieth-century criticism characterize Eliot's work more explicitly as peculiarly quotable, even as-like Eliot herself-they question the ethics of appropriating others' words. Their ambivalence about Eliot's lapidary generalizations marks a shift away from traditional assumptions about the relation between plot and pleasure which replaces the figure of the self-indulgent female reader about whom eighteenth-century critics had worried with a new figure of the selfimportant female sage. Reviewers' anxiety about the dependence on representative quotation that they share with anthologists raises questions about the rules of textual evidence that twentieth-century criticism has yet to resolve.
Few novels are quarried for anthology-pieces before George Eliot's.2 Victorian anthologies are dominated by more serious genres: lyric, the essay, and drama (or rather, Shakespeare). In that context, the very act of excerpting Eliot implies that the novels, or the best parts of the novels, are not narrative at all. Alexander Main's assertion that Middlemarch "is really a prose-poem much more than a novel in the ordinary sense of the word" tells us less about the form of that text than about the anthology-piece as a form.3 The preface to the Sayings defines Eliot's achievement in terms of genre: What Shakespeare did for the Drama, George Eliot has been, and still is, doing for the Novel. By those who know her works really well, this branch of literature can never again be regarded as mere story-telling and the reading of it as only a pastime. George Eliot has magnified her office and made it honourable; she has for ever sanctified the Novel by making it the vehicle of the grandest and most uncompromising moral truth. (Sayings ix; emphasis added) By defining "story-telling" as "only a pastime," Main reduces narrative to the dispensable "vehicle" by which "truth" is conveyed.
And he does dispense with it. Main's comparison of Eliot with Shakespeare invokes a dramatic model that the second edition of the Sayings borrows more obliquely, adding several dialogues from Middlemarch and eliminating the narrator's voice by the double expedient of deleting speech tags and transposing the narrative into stage directions. Thus, "Mr. Bulstrode, alone with his brother-inlaw, poured himself out a glass of water, and opened a sandwich-box" (Middlemarch 155) becomes: Mr. Bulstrode (pouring himself out a glass of water, and opening a sandwich box). -I cannot persuade you to adopt my regimen, Vincy?
