George Eliot and the production of consumers

Eliot's reference to the annual "which marked modern progress at that time" emphasizes the ephemerality of gift books-and the datedness of the Keepsake, begun in the year before Middlemarch is set and discontinued in the year when Eliot begins to publish fiction. The phrase clinches Eliot's summary of Rosamond, earlier in the same chapter, as "that combination of correct sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date" (Middlemarch 244; emphasis added).

The references to "that date" and "that time" reinforce Rosamond's association with literary as well as sartorial fashion. Yet while the annual is dead by the 1870s, the young lady's "album for extracted verse" is not. It survives in the blank pages of the Birthday Book, used to collect autographs of celebrities or inscriptions from friends (see, e.g. James, "Private" 111). Rosamond's specifically feminine vulgarity suggests an explanation for the fact that Eliot resists the Birthday Book more strenuously than the Sayings: the second anthology makes clear which sex it addresses.