serialist vanishes: Producing belief in George Eliot, The

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1999 by Payne, David

Why should one expect the truth to be consoling?

--George Eliot to Edith Simcox1

Though the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the publisher John Blackwood had discussed the idea more than two decades before, Middlemarch was the first Victorian serial novel to be published in eight half-volumes or "books," priced at 5s., and issued bimonthly from November 1871 to December 1872.2 It is possible that George Henry Lewes got the idea from Victor Hugo's 1862 half-volume sale of Les Miserables; what is clear is that Middlemarch marked another in a series of attempts by the Leweses and Blackwood to escape the power of Mudie's and other lending libraries, which by 1871 were exacting large discounts on large orders. The potential benefits of half-volume bimonthly publication were numerous: freedom from the pressures of the monthly norm dating from the onset of Pickwick Papers in 1836; the opportunity for end-page advertising; a greater chance of obtaining reviews of each part; and thus an accelerating sale leading up to the appearance of the work in its final, four-volume form (Letters 5:146,179-80; Martin 182-86; Sutherland 193-97). The critical success of the experiment was not immediately obvious, however. At the outset of his year-long series of reviews in the Spectator, for example, R.H. Hutton expressed surprise that George Eliot could prosper writing novels in which painful enlightenment so apparently outweighed any pleasurable kind: "The ground-note of dissatisfaction, of pain, runs through all its melody. On your wedding day, toothache is the governing thought.... No doubt life is like that, but how one sighs sometimes that the great novelists and dramatic poets of our day would give us a little more of the ideal" (Hutton 975-76).

It has long been clear that a substantial part of this novel's ideological work is the instruction of its readers as to what Mary Poovey has called the "disaggregation" of Victorian culture from other persistent or emergent discourses, such as theology, law, economics, and social theory: those who fail to accept the consequences of an ongoing division of intellectual labor will only produce their own keys to all mythologies (Poovey 6-14; Carroll). But even as readers absorb the history of Lydgate's intellectual development in chapters 15 and 16, for example, the suggestion is made that insight itself, rather than the objects glimpsed by means of it, should now be the object of our desire-"the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space" (16: 161-62). So refined a definition suggests that any vocation as a messenger of disaggregation seems also to require some compensatory sacralization of a highly rationalized but still imaginative intellect as "ideally illuminated space," some consecration of this version of mind as, in Gauri Viswanathan's phrase, "the instrument by which the moral mission of culture is propagated" (46; Pyle 158-71; Mintz).

The infusion of moral authority into nineteenth-century literary culture was one leading means of obtaining assent to the very modernity responsible for desacralization. Fredric Jameson has argued for Weberian Protestantism as a "vanishing mediator" between a sacralized and desacralized culture; likewise, Hans Blumenberg has characterized Marxian utopianism as a leading example of the "reoccupation" of scientific or progressivist thought in the cultural position of religious practice long "consecrated for consciousness," but now vacated by the irregular but inexorable processes of rationalization. Historically specific ideologies such as Protestantism or Marxism thus accomplish "not the secularization of eschatology but rather secularization by eschatology": by means of each, modernization is paradoxically effected "not by making life less religious, but by making it more so," after which time the particular ideology "disappears from the historical scene" (Blumenberg 85-87, 45; Jameson 23-25). We might take the Dickensian public readings of the 1860s as one of many high Victorian cultural practices attempting this kind of work. The young Dickens had constructed his emergent serial novel around characters like Mr. Pickwick and Nancy, embodiments of the perennial Christian values of incarnate benevolence and atoning sacrifice (Payne; Heyns). Fashionable audiences at the readings of 1869 were still being brought down from the horrors of Nancy's murder via the Pickwickian party at Bob Sawyer's or the conversion of Scrooge to benevolence-as profitable a mix of gore and sentiment in those latter days as it had been in 1837.3

Similar traces of ideological effort, I argue, are visible in George Eliot's career in the years just following Dickens's death. It has been clear for some time that even within the conventions of the Victorian multiplot novel, and in particular its symbolic manipulations of capital, Middlemarch refuses to enact any alternative to the economic status quo (Garrett; Brantlinger 5-9; Kucich 166-71; Nunokawa 12025). The pages of what N.N. Feltes would call its commodity-text make up a symbolic sector substantially innocent of interclass capital transfer (48-49). The Leweses' correspondence with John Blackwood, however, features two capitalist enterprises dealing at a friendly arms' length, weighing risk frankly and prudently, and finally acting to produce an innovative commodity-book-the bimonthly serial novel-in pursuit of profit (Feltes 55). Here, I investigate the compensations proffered in and beyond the text for this refusal and polarization. The first part of the argument examines how the gap between text and book has much in common with the humanist social theory of the period, still struggling to divest itself of an inherited evangelical economics. I then explain how evangelical and humanist readers, whatever their other differences, were unanimous in their praise of those moments in the text which work hardest at reoccupation or mediation-a unanimity which, as Daniel Cottom has suggested, recent discussions of the novel all too often reproduce (112). George Eliot's project of refusal is also visible in her evolving relationship with her readers. The early 1870s saw an unprecedented idealization of the novelist as Great Teacher, the ideologeme of intellectual accomplishment whose textual intensification, as in the above narratorial comment on Lydgate's imagination, was supplemented by a series of innovative personal relationships between George Eliot and her fans, and in particular the feminist, labor activist, and writer Edith Simcox (Letters 5: 333; W. Myers 1-4). One principal symbolic solution to the contradiction between the text's static treatment of capital and the book's innovative commodity form, I conclude, is the consecration of the novelist of sympathy, arisen from the tomb of Christian belief, as an object worthy of unconditional assent.