George Eliot and the production of consumers

The omnipresence of quotations in Victorian reviews means that the bare fact that reviewers excerpt Eliot has no significance in itself. While anthologies quote Eliot more than any previous novelist, reviews do not. What is unusual is that both hostile and favorable reviews describe Eliot as peculiarly quotable while explicitly questioning the adequacy of excerpts to represent her work-and, by extension, the ethics of quotation itself. Positive reviews begin to describe Eliot's work as raw material for hypothetical anthologies long before Main's Sayings appears. In a review of Felix Holt, E.S. Dallas concludes an unbroken series of four chapter mottoes and two long quotations-a kind of miniature anthology that prefigures Main's overrepresentation of epigraphs-with the observation that "we might cull too from the talk of the characters to whom we are introduced a whole book of proverbs" (3; emphasis added). Richard Simpson praises Eliot for interspersing her "drama" with "a copious supply of maxims, ethical, psychological, and physiological, enough to furnish forth a 'just volume' of ana" (534; emphasis added).25 The "whole book" and the "just volume" form mirror-images of the equally hypothetical "Beauties" from which Marian Evans excludes Cumming. Like Evans, Simpson and Dallas take the number of potential anthology-pieces as a proof of literary value.

Other reviewers raise this possibility before ostentatiously rejecting it. The Westminster's review of The Mill on the Floss announces its determination not to become an anthology: Neither have we thought it desirable to give a collection of the quaint humorisms that abound in the first two volumes, or to make a catena of the profound and farreaching remarks which abound throughout the book; this would neither be fair to the author nor agreeable to our readers. These beauties are for the most part so organic, that to withdraw them from their context would be to dislocate them from that vital nexus which gives them their highest charm. (Chapman 32-33) The refusal to make a "collection of quaint humorisms" rejects the genre of Main's Witty Sayings at the same time as it turns against the conventions of the review itself. Yet the review's attitude toward quotation is less simple than its moralistic language of "fairness" would suggest. The article terms witty passages "beauties," even though it refuses "to withdraw them from their context"; and it calls them "organic" even though it refers earlier to "the separate beauties" of The Mill on The Floss (32-33; 29).

In terming the beauties "organic" and the novel a "vital nexus," the review anticipates the language of Eliot's own assertion that "forms of art can be called higher or lower only on the same principle as that on which we apply the words to organisms; viz., in proportion to the complexity of the parts bound up into one indissoluble whole" ("Notes" 234). So does Edward Dowden's essay on Eliot in 1872. Like the reviewer of The Mill on the Floss, Dowden calls attention to the selfrestraint with which he resists the temptation to quote: "Many good things in particular passages of her writings are detachable; admirable sayings can be cleared from their surroundings, and presented by themselves.... But if we separate the moral soul of any complete work of hers from its artistic medium, if we murder to dissect, we lose far more than we gain" (Carroll, Critical 321-22). Dowden's discussion of whether to quote signals a departure from the conventions of the review. But the wording of his statement that "admirable sayings can be cleared from their surroundings" can also be read more literally as a comment on the Sayings published by Main several months before. Just as Eliot's letter against Main's preface juxtaposes the assertion that "my books are not properly separable into 'direct' and 'indirect' teaching" with the acknowledgment that readers are dangerously skillful at separating the two, Dowden combines the claim that Eliot's sayings "can be" detached with the argument that they should not be. The ambivalence expressed by Dowden's weighing of "loss" against "gain" is rendered all the more acute by his recourse to a Wordsworthian tag: it takes a decontextualized quotation to defend the organic unity of the text.