George Eliot and the production of consumers

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

Although the project of inscribing Eliot's words in railway stations is not realized until much later, Eliot quotations do enter the "schoolroom" (as Lewes puts it) before her death. By 1879 she has given permission for her works to be extracted in four schoolbooks, defending "well-chosen extracts" as "really useful to the works from which they are taken."12 In 1874, Main reports that a schoolmaster has agreed to buy multiple copies of the Sayings: "he means, of course, to use them for school prizes-not a bad way of circulating a book of the kind; for prizes are always shown off, you know."'3 And in the same year, an excerpt from Middlemarch which had already been quoted in the second edition of the Sayings reappears on an examination for military officers, which gives as essay topics a choice between "compar[ing] Cromwell and Napoleon, (1) as generals and (2) as statesmen," or discussing Will Ladislaw's assertion that "to be a poet is to have a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge."14

Eliot knows very well that authors' reputations are colored by the places in which excerpts from their work appear: she expunges a Whitman epigraph from Daniel Deronda "not because the motto itself is objectionable to me-it was one of the finer things which had clung to me from among his writings-but because, since I quote so few poets, my selection of a motto from Walt Whitman might be taken as the sign of a special admiration which I am very far from feeling" (Letters 6: 241). Where Eliot's own chapter mottoes invoke a literary tradition, readers' eagerness to appropriate her work-in the inscriptions in the Bible, the quotation in the sermon, the question on the officers' exam, the examples in the schoolbooks, and the epigraphs to Johnson, Red Pottage and the History of Cooperation in England-makes clear that novels can borrow weight not only from the texts that they quote but from the texts in which they are quoted.

By the 1870s, Eliot is defined by the company she keeps. Her refusal to quote Whitman reflects an awareness that quotation consecrates, but also a fear of guilt by association. The excerpting of her own work brings both possibilities home. Eliot's participation in that project remains deeply ambivalent: she pressures her publisher to bring out Main's Sayings and suggests specific quotations for inclusion in his Birthday Book, but disclaims responsibility for the anthologies whose publication she authorizes and whose contents she supplies (see Letters 6: 423, 5: 195). Her letter authorizing Main's Birthday Book describes birthday books parenthetically as "the vulgarest thing in the book stalls" (Letters 6: 423). When she writes to Main describing as "dolting and feeble" the Tennyson Birthday Book which provides him with a precedent, she adds a pointed qualifier: "This is not the Poet's fault" (Letters 6: 431). The corollary is presumably that the fault lies with the compiler-in this case with Tennyson's editor, but it would be difficult for Main not to apply the accusation to himself. In absolving Tennyson from blame for his Birthday Book, Eliot also disclaims responsibility for hers. Lewes goes farther, asking Main to delete from the Sayings a reference to Eliot's involvement in the selection of excerpts: "it would not do for the public to suppose she had had any share in the book, beyond that of giving permission to its being executed" (Letters 5: 211). Lewes's fear is confirmed when a review of Daniel Deronda-a novel written in the wake of the first edition of Main's Sayings and immediately anthologized in the second-complains "that Mr. Main should, apparently with the author's sanction, collect together 'wise, witty, and tender sayings' from George Eliot's writings may be open to remark" (Dicey 245-46; emphasis added).