serialist vanishes: Producing belief in George Eliot, The

Such circumstances as these allow us to extend D.A. Miller's suggestion that "while the narrator's discourse is merely in the novel, the novelist's discourse quite simply is the novel" (152-53n20). Written text, marketed book, and performed author entwine the contradictions of disenchantment and sympathy, sociological perspective and intellectual charisma, into a cultural form of unprecedented authority and durability. A traditional means of marking the emergence of this form is to indicate Middlemarch's status on the cusp of literary history, as Henry James did-though we might also think of this "limit" to the "old-fashioned English novel" as its own "cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values which exist in their own right," providing an imaginary "salvation from the routines of everyday life, and especially from the increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism" (Carroll, Heritage 359; Weber 342). Even if it was George Eliot's only bimonthly serial, even if its quadruple-decker format would soon die out, the sum of texts and circumstances we call Middlemarch has not yet exhausted its mediating power because neither the educated class it soothes, nor the modernity to which that class must perpetually reconcile itself, shows any sign of passing from the scene.9

1 Simcox recalled the question from a conversation of March 1873 in July 1880 (Letters 9: 315; Simcox, Shirtmaker 129).

2 The only exception to the bimonthly rule was the final Book Eight, written sufficiently early to appear in December 1872, in time for the Christmas gift season, and only one month after November's Book Seven (Letters 5: 290, 293, 297).

3 At Dickens's death, the earnings from his public readings made up nearly half his estate (Collins xxix).

4 For the novelist herself, as Beer has emphasized, "[i]ncarnation summarizes all that is most difficult for her and rewarding to her" (154).

5 Girton College itself was founded through the efforts of Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon, including the F-50 subscription the two obtained in 1860 from George Eliot (Haight 339n5; Herstein 177-79).

6 By the publication of On Liberty in 1859, the philosophical incarnationalism of Goethe and his disciple Maurice had taken its place as Mill's third stage of modern cultural development, after his nation's Reformation and his father's Enlightenment (Works 18: 243; Life of Maurice 1: 62, 468; Semmel 23).

See also Letters 5: 164, where Haight identifies Barbara Blackwood's lunch companion as John Tulloch, Principal and Professor of Theology at St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, and notes that Tulloch had called on the Leweses twice in 1870.

8 Although Daniel Deronda also appeared in eight serial parts, Blackwood suggested monthly publication, over his staff's objections, on the ground that two months would give "the Librarians a better opportunity of starving their supplies"; George Eliot's head start allowed her to agree to the monthly schedule (Letters 6: 186; Martin 213-16).