George Eliot and the production of consumers

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

The review could be taken to mean that Eliot is incomparable. Yet "speak[ing] in the same breath" predicts with uncanny accuracy the juxtapositions that shape Eliot's image in the decade leading up to her death. Eliot's name reappears at the front of the next anthology that Main compiles, a collection of wit and wisdom of Samuel Johnson whose preface is signed by G.H. Lewes and whose epigraph is taken from Eliot's poem The Spanish Gypsy (since Main seems unable to stop excerpting Eliot even when commissioned to excerpt someone else). Where the preface to the first edition of the Sayings had compared Eliot explicitly with Shakespeare, the publication of the second edition within weeks of Main's Conversations of Doctor Johnson-causing the two volumes to be advertised together-gives her an even more respectable analog. The company of a conservative male essayist helps erase Eliot's scandalous past and her association with a frivolous genre. The double Lewes-Eliot signature lends weight to one reviewer's earlier criticism of Main's Sayings of George Eliot as "unendurable Johnsonese" ("Wit" 4344).

But the Conversations of Doctor Johnson is not the only book for which George Eliot provides an epigraph. A quotation from a different Eliot poem appears as a chapter motto in George Jacob Holyoake's History of Co-operation in England (2: 544).10 Eliot's own revival of the chapter motto in her last three novels heightens the effect of these tributes. By 1899, the younger novelist Mary Cholmondley can signal her allegiance to Eliot simply by prefacing with mottoes-several excerpted from Eliot-each chapter of a novel whose heroine writes long periodic sentences interspersed with epigrams and criticized by her brother, "who had the same opinion of George Eliot's works" (263). As Lewes reports to Main, quotations from Eliot also appear in the front of a fourth, more sacred book: "I may also tell you-quite in private of course-what I think will please you almost as much as it did me: Mrs. Cowper Temple told Mrs. Lewes that she had copied passages from 'Romola' into her New Testament" (Letters 5: 276). Lewes has reason to think that the anecdote will please Main, for his anthologies already render Eliot quotations sacred. The gilt-edged pages of the Sayings and the red lettering of the Birthday Book help explain why a Swiss admirer proclaims the Sayings his "breviary" and John Blackwood's wife pronounces it "undeniable Sunday reading" (Letters 5: 230)." Main would have been pleased to know that an imitation of his Sayings-Moments with George Eliot-appears in 1913 in a series of miniature books between the "Sermon on the Mount" and The Imitation of Christ. Anthologies transpose Eliot's words from the most secular of nineteenth-century genres to the most sacred.

Mrs. Cowper Temple's manuscript inscription has more public counterparts. In a different letter to Main, Lewes boasts that "an orthodox West-End preacher" has quoted Middlemarch in a sermon. He responds to Main's initial proposal of an anthology by describing another reader's project of larger-scale inscriptions: "Some years ago a lady suggested that 'texts' should be selected from [Eliot's] works to hang up in schoolrooms and railway waiting rooms in view of the banal and often preposterous bible texts, thus hung up and neglected. Your idea is a far more practical one" (Letters 5: 337, 5:192). Yet the first fantasy has not proved entirely impractical: in the year following the American broadcasting of Middlemarch, one college has plastered the New York subway with advertisements reading (apocryphally?) "'It is never too late to be what you could have been.' George Eliot, Middlemarch."