George Eliot and the production of consumers

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Winter 1997 by Leah Price

In other words, although Main claims that Eliot has made the novel a serious genre, his anthology de-novelizes Eliot as strenuously as earlier abridgments like Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales (1807) had novelized Shakespeare. The Lambs use the model of the novel to reduce Shakespeare to a smaller, domestic, feminine scale; conversely, the preface to the Sayings invokes Shakespearean drama to "magnify" Eliot's "mere storytelling" into something more "grand." Where the Lambs redefine Shakespeare as a children's writer, Main helps to position Middlemarch as what Virginia Woolf would later call "one of the few English novels for grown-up people" ("Eliot" 168). While the Lambs modernize Shakespeare by transposing his plots into a genre that postdates them, Main attempts to grant a living novelist the status usually reserved for dead poets.

Ultimately, however, Main's anthologies do not so much substitute one genre for another as scramble generic signals to a point where "lyric" ceases to designate anything more specific than "anthology-piece." Main's unsuccessful plan to yoke Eliot with Shakespeare under the rubric of "British Poetry" makes clear that the novel is not the only genre that anthologies rename. The proposed "selection of English lyrics, from Shakespeare and Spenser to Browning & George Eliot"9which Main later revises to read simply A Selection of British Lyrics from Shakespeare to George Eliot-begins the history of "lyric" with a dramatist and ends it with a novelist.

The title makes no sense unless we remember that Shakespeare had already been redefined by earlier anthologies as a writer of lyrics. Thomas Percy's decision to excerpt only the songs from Shakespeare's plays in his Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765) is repeated by later collections like Robert Bell's Songs from the Dramatists (1854) and A.H. Bullen's Lyrics from the Dramatists of the Elizabethan Age (1889), and by the overrepresentation of songs in Palgrave's Golden Treasury (1861). Victorian editors deny the dramatic status of the plays more obliquely than the Lambs, by isolating Shakespearean anthology-pieces from other dramatic texts. Put differently, Shakespeare provides Main with a precedent for excerpting works in a genre that anthologies otherwise exclude. Vicessimus Knox's influential Elegant Extracts (1784) includes 112 pages of Shakespeare and only 23 from other dramatists. An excerpt from the excerpts, Knox's abridged Poetical Epitome (1792), reduces the latter (10 pages) more sharply than the former (85 pages). Even more than a century later, in 1910, Henry Frowde's Moments series of pocket anthologies, which includes no novelist but Eliot and Dickens, also excludes all dramatists except Shakespeare.

In this context, Main's invocation of Shakespeare sets off a chain of generic transformations in which narrative gets displaced by drama which has already been redefined as lyric. In the preface to the Sayings, Shakespeare's name stands not only for Eliot's power to transcend genre, but for the power of anthologies to transform it. The Sayings claims for a single novelist the generic extraterritoriality that earlier anthologies had conferred upon a single playwright. The generic rule proves the authorial exception: genius overrules genre. Just as the Elegant Extracts do not grant respectability to drama but simply make Shakespeare less of a dramatist, Main's anthologies do not ennoble the novel so much as de-novelize Eliot. In Eliot's case as in Shakespeare's, authorial identity overrules the generic criteria that normally govern admittance to anthologies-and to the canon. Main's Sayings and the anthologies that follow make Eliot's relation to other novelists as tenuous as her relation to other women. Like another admirer who describes Eliot as "the female Shakespeare, so to speak," they define her as an exception (Letters 5: 465). Main's defensive claim in the preface that by ranking Eliot with Shakespeare "I would not be supposed to undervalue the writings of other novelists" (Sayings x) confirms the accusation that it attempts to avoid: as his publisher, John Blackwood, complained, "in his preface he allows too little for all the good in Novels that have gone before" (Letters 5: 212). Main's claims for Eliot's uniqueness depend on the same dismissal of the novel that his preface claims to challenge. The Sayings contributes to the substitution of individual genius for generic categories that makes one review in the Telegraph a few months later pronounce it "almost profane to speak of ordinary novels in the same breath with George Eliot's" (qtd. in Letters 277-78).