George Eliot and the production of consumers

If [the preface] were true, I should be quite stultified as an artist. Unless my readers are more moved towards the ends I seek by my works as wholes than by an assemblage of extracts, my writings are a mistake. I have always exercised a severe watch against anything that could be called preaching, and if I have ever allowed myself in dissertation or in dialogue [anything] which is not part of the structure of my books, I have there sinned against my own laws....

Unless I am condemned by my own principles, my books are not property separable into 'direct' and 'indirect' teaching. My chief doubt as to the desirability of the 'Sayings' has always turned on the possibility that the volume might encourage such a view of my writings. (Letters 5: 458-59; see Hawes) Eliot's letter begins by accusing Main of misrepresentation, but ends by accusing herself of failure. In stating that her novels should be organic wholes rather than accumulations of didactic parts, Eliot does not claim that they are. On the contrary, the statement that "I have always exercised a severe watch against anything that could be called preaching" presupposes a danger that needs to be guarded against.lS Although the passage begins in the conditional mode-"I should be quite stultified as an artist"-the indicative soon takes over: "my writings are a mistake," "I have sinned," "I am condemned." All three statements suggest that Eliot feels her readers' reactions to be (to paraphrase her characterization of the Tennyson Birthday Book) "the Writer's fault."

The assertions that "I have sinned against my own laws" and "I am condemned by my own principles" outline a gulf between Eliot's aesthetic theory and the impression made upon readers (including Main and his audience) by the novels themselves. In the confession of not practicing what she preaches, Eliot reinscribes the very distinction between "indirect" and "direct" teaching that her letter sets out to deny. Main simply accentuates that distinction, with an almost parodic effect. One of the sentences that the Sayings excerpts from Felix Holt could be usefully applied to what the author of one feels about the editor of the other: "There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling" (Sayings 233).

But Eliot's embarrassment about Main's anthologies cannot be explained by their internal structure alone. An alternative explanation has to do with Main's audience-and with its gender. The Birthday Book is marketed quite deliberately to a vulgar public. When Eliot complains that its binding is too gaudy, William Blackwood answers that "I quite join in your condemnation of the binding but we had to consider a colonial class rather as likely to be its largest buyers and cater to their taste accordingly" (Letters 7: 58). Blackwood's characterization of that "class" rephrases in geographical terms the contempt that Lewes had stated more bluntly: "The cover for the Birthday Book is startling and ornate, but we suppose adapted to the bookseller mind, and the mind of the idiots who buy birthday books!" (Letters 7: 44). Responsibility for the Birthday Book is banished to the colonies, far from the more civilized nation that Eliot invokes when she remarks that "entre nous, I am a little shocked at the tone" and, in another letter, "entre nous, I wish that the Preface [to Main's Sayings] had been touched with a more fastidious finger, a more scrupulous regard to mesure" (Letters 5: 231).