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George Eliot and the production of consumers
Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Winter 1997 by Leah Price
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).
That disapproving tone reappears a century later, when Rosemary Ashton glosses Eliot's consent to the Sayings as the triumph of personal vanity over aesthetic principle: "though she was aware that such extracting would be damaging to the artistic structure of her works ... her self-distrust and love of approbation ... induced her to permit it" (94). But Eliot's self-distrust could just as easily be used to explain her resistance as her consent, for Main's anthologies heighten her anxiety about the place of maxims within her own fiction. Her protest against Main's proposed preface to the second edition of the Sayings quickly turns against her:
