SOURCE: Hobson, Christopher Z. “The Radicalism of Felix Holt: George Eliot and the Pioneers of Labor.” Victorian Literature and Culture 26, no. 1 (1998): 19-39.

[In the following essay, Hobson claims that Eliot was the first major writer to invest a labor activist character with social importance and moral value, and to recognize that class divisions would not disappear with industrialization and modernization.]

With the death of Michael Zametkin last week at the age of 76 another of the thinning ranks of pioneers of the Jewish Socialist and Labor movements passed away. Few, indeed, are left of the gallant band of idealists, mainly immigrants from Russia, who came to the exploited and sweated Jewish workers in the congested Ghettoes of New York and other cities, brought them the inspiration of Socialism and organized them into great trade unions.

(“Michael Zametkin, Socialist Pioneer” [1935])

Mrs. Zametkin came to the United States to continue her humanitarian work among the underprivileged Jewish people of New York City. She devoted her whole life to this work and was a widely known figure on the east side.

(“Mrs. Zametkin Dead” [1931])

George Eliot's Felix Holt The Radical discusses a figure of enormous importance in the social history of Britain and the United States: the labor pioneer, that is, the person who consciously dedicates his or her whole life to long-term activity in the working class. Eliot, I argue, is the first important writer to recognize the significance of this figure and invest it with moral value. In doing so, she upends the tradition bequeathed by earlier “industrial novels” by recognizing, along with the labor pioneer, the permanence of class divisions and the political independence of the working class. Further, in heroizing the figure who struggles for the future of a new social class, Eliot departs from the reliance on “the authority of the past” or the stress on culture in general that have been seen as keys to her work.

That Eliot's accomplishment in Felix Holt has gone unrecognized is an indictment of the limitations of criticism. It is perhaps not surprising that Eliot's “political novel” (as if there were no others!) has been seen as a poor stepchild by interpreters who value, above all, her observation of character and locality. But critics interested in how fiction depicts class and social conflict have also faulted it, all but unanimously, for evasiveness and distortion. This essay will try to dig Felix Holt out from under such strictures, and, in the process, to identify some problems in current social interpretations of fiction.

The dominant view of the “industrial” novels—those novels of the 1840s-1860s concerned with industrial class conflict and, more broadly, the place of the working class in English politics¹—holds that they deny the centrality of class and process threatening working-class elements into less disturbing, middle-class or classless, forms. Typically, P. J. Keating argues that these works, including Felix Holt, advocate “a revolution in class relationships without any alteration in the balance of power”; arouse “sympathy … for the workers' appalling conditions without this being taken to imply that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the social structure”; and attempt to foster “conciliation between the classes on terms put forward by exemplary employers” (227-28, 233). About Felix Holt in particular, several accounts have offered complementary, mutually reinforcing critiques: Felix is merely a puppet for Eliot's fears about mass action (Williams); he represents an initially bold political conception that Eliot could not sustain (Kettle); Felix Holt and other industrial novels substitute a conventional woman-centered domestic plot for the more threatening public sphere of class struggle and political violence (Yeazell).²

Finally, the fullest and most sophisticated recent left-wing critique, Catherine Gallagher's chapter on Felix Holt in The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (1985), sees the novel as forming the endpoint of the industrial novel tradition because it embodies a new, and definitive, way of leaching class out of the social novel. Gallagher places Felix Holt within the Arnoldian “politics of culture,” arguing that the novel, like Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, searches for a realm of disinterested representation independent of class. By superseding “the values of laissez-faire industrial capitalism” and the debate around them (267), Gallagher summarizes,

The politics of culture disarmed a whole tradition of social criticism and brought the Condition of England Debate to an end. … It certainly did not put an end to social criticism, but it drastically altered its terms. Similarly, Felix Holt did not put an end to the social-problem novel, but it did end that specific manifestation of it we call the industrial novel.

(264-65)

By focusing on what they see as Eliot's evasion of class difference, these interpreters also raise the broader issue of her approach to social authority. A generation ago, a critical consensus posited that “the authority of the past” reigns in Eliot's novels. In the 1966 essay from which this phrase is taken, Thomas Pinney generalized that “the chief values of the novels are on the whole conservative, cherishing what is known and familiar, seeking the good in outmoded forms, and remaining skeptical of all hopes for swift and inevitable progress” (40). In a variant of Pinney's argument, discussions of Eliot's search for a substitute for evangelical Christianity have concluded that Eliot relocated the authority of the sacral in “tradition,” later broadened to “culture,” as a “predominantly spiritual force rooted in history” (Knoepflmacher 62, 64).³ Both views retain considerable power, and several accounts I refer to below assume some version of them.

Though they offer much that is valuable, these assessments miss (almost by tone-deafness) what is most striking about Felix Holt: Eliot's awareness of the class spirit and loyalty behind an admittedly moderate working-class radicalism. They also fail to comprehend the ways in which Eliot breaks with the industrial novel tradition and differs with contemporary polemics about class, in particular those of Arnold. Finally, these critics are deaf to the novel's treatment of moral and social authority. While I cannot discuss Eliot's work as a whole, and will refer only briefly to her other later novels, I suggest that in Felix Holt moral authority rests on a quasi-sacral commitment linked to a broad sense of historical development, rather than to tradition or culture as such. The transfer of this conception of consecrated life from evangelical religion to a specific social class whose claims are held central to social development is the heart of this novel's argument.

Felix Holt speaks for the life of labor-centered service in a way marked by the author's progressive-conservative politics. But it does so nonetheless, and is therefore radical in two related ways: it revises the novelistic genre it has inherited, and it records a newly-evolving social pattern of importance in contemporary and future history. Felix Holt marks the end of the industrial novel tradition not because it melts the worker into a general “culture,” but because it recognizes, as social development imperatively demanded, the end of the paternalist conception of social power and the emergence of the workers as an independent force in society.

FELIX HOLT'S RADICALISM: HISTORICAL AND GENERIC PRECEDENTS

Given the moderation Eliot insists on, some readers have felt that Felix is no radical at all; Eliot's Tory-minded publisher John Blackwood famously remarked, “I suspect I am a radical of the Felix Holt breed, and so was my father before me” (qtd. in Haight 385).⁴ Felix's radicalism is circumscribed by the novel's setting—the placid fictional Treby Magna rather than clamorous Manchester, Leeds, or London; its time—autumn 1832-spring 1833, rather than the more agitated periods before passage of the Reform Bill, when rioters took to the streets in Derby and Bristol, and sacked Nottingham Castle, or 1834-35; and the class stratum it portrays—Felix is a watchmaker, a skilled artisan rather than an unskilled laborer. Felix shows no awareness of the tumultuous events referred to here; nor does he refer to strikes or trade unions (except once to the latter, in the “Address”), to radical organizations such as the National Union of the Working Classes, or to publications such as the Poor Man's Guardian or the Poor Man's Advocate, which an educated radical might be expected to have read. Felix does his best to stop the one riot in which he is involved. His perspective, from the start, centers on long-term, relatively local meliorative work.⁵

Yet the conservative elements in Eliot's presentation may coexist with other less obvious radical ones. These emerge when Felix Holt is juxtaposed, first, with the actual working-class memoir that Eliot used as a source, and, second, with the novelistic tradition that she varied and criticized. The comparisons make it evident that Eliot's portrayal is closer to the mark historically and more daring politically than a superficial impression may imply. For instance, many of Felix's attitudes, including conservative ones, are strikingly like those expressed in one prominent version of the working-class radicalism of his time, Passages in the Life of a Radical (1839-41), by Samuel Bamford, a veteran of the 1817-21 reform agitation and Peterloo in 1819, which Eliot consulted extensively while researching the novel (Haight 381).⁶ Written two decades after the events it describes, Bamford's memoir mixes its main narrative with reactions to the reform scene of the 1830s; both threads provide material that Eliot picks up. Though he supports the vote, Bamford's observations on elections are very close to Felix's: “[T]hey are generally conducted in a manner which is disgraceful to civilized society. … Behold the banners; hear the music; mere glare and noise; the speakers—one side yelled dumb, the other drummed deaf—good men bullied by ruffians, and spit upon by poltroons,” etc. (1: 13). Bamford's opposition to riots and “physical force,” his constitutionalism and insistence on legality, his criticisms of demagoguery in the reform movement, and his emphasis on education and improvement, all find echoes in Felix Holt. Bamford's “Address to Workmen and Chartists” provides precedent for Eliot's use of the same device. Even some minor details of the novel, like the quack-medicine plot, have seeds in Bamford.⁷

Bamford, then, though a reformer, shares the “deep constitutionalism” and willingness to compromise that E. P. Thompson cites among reasons for the avoidance of a revolutionary crisis over the Reform Bill (817), and Eliot freely mines these parts of Bamford's self-portrait. But Eliot also departs from Bamford's idiosyncratic, slightly cranky, attitudes when she needs to. Centrally, she rejects Bamford's retrospective stress on change in the heart and home before change in society. Though the differences are subtle—Eliot takes a good deal from Bamford—they are also crucial. Bamford regrets that he and his fellows did not realize “that, before the reform we sought, could be obtained and profited by, there must be another, a deeper reform,—emerging from our hearts, and first blessing our households … and that no barrier could effectually be interposed [to tyranny], save the self-knowledge, and self-control of a reformed people”; elsewhere, that “the industrious and poor man, best serves his country by doing his duty to his family at home. …—Would he govern? let him first obey” (1: 153-54, 112). Though Felix echoes “deeper reform” in speaking of the need to go “a good deal lower down than the franchise” (368; ch. 27), and Bamford's conception of self-control as a bar to tyranny comes close to Felix's idea of how to remedy upper-class manipulation, the direction of Felix's thought is different. In his extended metaphor of political reforms as “engines” run by the “steam” of an enlightened people, sobriety and knowledge are needed “to work the engines” through public opinion (400-01; ch. 30). Felix's attention to self-knowledge and education is centered on how to act effectively in society. Nowhere does he speak of a duty to family before society, one that lies primarily within the home, or one exercised best through obedience; Felix's stated aim is that workers should learn to wield social power. Eliot, then, takes from Bamford's memoirs a mass of attitudes and opinions—and a general high-mindedness that is, indeed, true to the source—but she avoids Bamford's after-the-fact social passivity.

When we turn to the industrial novel tradition, we find several elements that form Eliot's generic inheritance, elements she recasts or overturns. They are, largely, those made familiar (sometimes oversimplified) by Keating's and other critiques: the industrial novels deny a valid, continuing stance of worker radicalism; portray parliamentary politics as injurious or irrelevant to social reform; and hope to reform the attitudes of the ruling class (often simultaneously the working class) so that class cooperation and paternalism can be renewed on a fairer basis.⁸ Most of the novels include one or more of these elements; though some rework them in part, none before Felix Holt does so fully.

The refusal to present a worker who is and remains a conscious radical is seen variously in the class-based but deferential ethic of Dickens's Stephen Blackpool, who prays “that aw th' world may only coom toogether more, an get a better unnerstan'in o'one another” (Hard Times 291; Bk. 3, ch. 6); in characters who live out class conciliation by becoming capitalists, like Disraeli's Dandy Mick and Devilsdust; and in those who undergo deathbed or novel's-end repentances, such as Kingsley's Alton Locke and Gaskell's John Barton.⁹ Gaskell's later North and South, in partial contrast, presents in the unionist Higgins and several subsidiary worker characters a vigorous and idiomatic account of trade unionist viewpoints. Higgins, moreover, never becomes a capitalist, nor does he directly renounce his former views. Nevertheless, in the second half of the novel, when he collaborates with the capitalist Thornton in a welfare scheme, in keeping up production, and prospectively in helping him reopen his business with Margaret's capital (chs. 42, 50, 51), his oppositional voice is effectively stilled.

A second keynote of these novels is the irrelevancy of parliamentary politics to social reform. The critique is made largely on the grounds of effectiveness, not class bias. Criticism of parliament as part of an “oligarchical system,” a creature of the fused landowner-bourgeois upper class, is made most fully in Sybil, from the young Disraeli's antidemocratic, neo-absolutist standpoint (354; Bk. 5, ch. 2). That issue is scarcely broached in Alton Locke, despite the novel's Chartist background and array of upper-class characters; in Hard Times and North and South, written after Chartism's collapse, localized reference and a focus on direct worker-employer interactions suggest that class relations can be improved, if at all, without large-scale political change. In North and South, it is true, the characters carry on a debate about factory governance that raises questions of national political representation obliquely, through allusions to constitutional monarchy, Plato's Republic, and Cromwell (163-71; ch. 16). Yet the overt application of this interrogation is local, and is limited to social-economic, not political, relations.

A third and overriding preoccupation of the novels that informed Felix Holt is class conciliation. This notion has at least two components: class partnership, and the leadership of the existing upper classes. In articulating the first, the novelists voiced an aspiration with many adherents in the working, not only the middle, classes. Toward the end of his memoir, for example, Bamford hopes that with such a conciliation, “we may be a suffering family, but we shall be an united one, and half our evils will be obviated. … If we honestly lay our shoulders to the wheel, and lift all together, with a long pull, and a strong pull, and a sober and noiseless one, we shall get over the slough, upon firmer land, and into better ways” (2: 238, 240). This belief in a partnership that will realize labor's hopes for better conditions and greater rights actuates climactic moments in several of the novels. Alton Locke, for example, ends with the exiled ex-Chartist John Crossthwaite's wish to return to England to “aid in that fraternal union of all classes which I hear is surely, though slowly, spreading in my mother-land” (484; ch. 41). That the changes presuppose social subordination and renewed paternalist order is also clear in several of these novels. In Mary Barton, for example, the employer Carson ultimately acknowledges “the Spirit of Christ as the regulating law between both parties” (458; ch. 37). But though the novel hopes that shared Christian values can mediate class relations, the initiative to accept these values remains the employers'—as the novel's most positive worker-figure, Job Legh, recognizes in asserting that “as much of the burden of the suffering as can be, should be lightened by those whom it is His pleasure to make happy, and content in their own circumstances” (454; ch. 37).

The hope for accommodation and revived dependence comes to seem increasingly tenuous as the genre develops, but remains an ideal.¹⁰ It is strong even in the most significant exception, before Eliot, to the embrace of paternalist models. At the end of North and South, Thornton concedes that while “a more hopeful man might imagine that a clear and more genial intercourse between classes might to away with strikes,” his own “utmost expectation” is only that such intercourse “may render strikes not the bitter, venomous sources of hatred they have hitherto been” (526; ch. 51). Thornton learns, too, to accept that he and Higgins “could look upon each other's position and duties in so strangely different a way” (512; ch. 50). So, without explicitly repudiating the identity of interests, the novel grants the inevitability of class conflicts, though not of their bitterness. But narratively, the plot resolution that makes Higgins the champion of Thornton's interests mutes these doctrinal realizations. In particular, the narration slurs over the crucial matter of Higgins's union activism: after his first employer fires him for it, he applies to Thornton on a pledge to consult him first over any grievances, and the union is silently dropped from the plot (chs. 38-39). Thus, despite Thornton's words, what we see is a reconciliation of class interests.

Before Eliot, in sum, a series of industrial novels defined worker radicalism as a stance that could not be maintained throughout a novel; treated the corruption of parliamentary politics in ways that supported either state-paternalist conceptions, or the notion that class relations could be reformed independently of the state; and offered as an ideal—more or less realizable—either a fully-restored or a modified social paternalism. These narrative traditions Eliot smashes to dust.

THE RADICALISM OF FELIX HOLT: ELIOT'S REVISION OF THE INDUSTRIAL NOVEL TRADITION

Felix is, first of all, a worker who intends to remain one, and who affirms the value of patient organizing. “I mean to stick to the class I belong to,” he asserts in one of his first speeches; in one of his last, he avows, “I'd rather have the minimum of effect, if it's of the sort I care for, than the maximum of effect I don't care for,” even if those effects “will never be known beyond a few garrets and workshops” (144; ch. 5;556-57; ch. 45). The plot devices of Felix's weaver-turned-apothecary father and his education, which create the material possibility for him to rise from his class, give moral significance to this decision, which he does in fact stick to.¹¹ Though at the end of the book Felix has a small independent income (£2 a week apparently retained by Esther from the estate settlement), he remains part of general working-class life and an organizer, as the reference to garrets and workshops indicates.

The reflectiveness that informs Felix's choices is itself a generic departure. He is not the first worker-intellectual in the industrial novel tradition; Alton Locke is another, who provides more finely-drawn details about such a worker's education, and Higgins, though uneducated, has a first-rate mind. But Felix may be the first who is a fully conscious, self-reflective protagonist. His ideals are consciously worked out with an awareness of the alternatives and his own motivations and weaknesses, as when he tells Esther that the best man “would be the one who could be glad to have lived because the world was chiefly miserable. … But I'm not up to the level of what I see to be best” (361; ch. 27). Importantly, too, he reverses the pattern by which the worker is enlightened or corrected by a woman from a higher class (Alton Locke and Eleanor; Stephen Blackpool and Louisa Bounderby; Higgins and Margaret). In these aspects of Felix, one feels the force of Ralph Ellison's remark that in writing Invisible Man he wished “to create a narrator who could think as well as act, and I saw a capacity for conscious self-assertion as basic to his blundering quest for freedom” (xxi-xxii).

Perhaps most important, Felix's stance, often seen as an essentially apolitical “decision in favour of moral integrity” (Sandler 143), has a firm basis in class logic.¹² As he asserts to Mr. Lyon, “That's how the working men are left to foolish devices and keep worsening themselves: the best heads among them forsake their born comrades” (145; ch. 5). Though the speech also voices personal dislike of middle-class manners, Felix maintains his collective, class-based approach to his own social expectations consistently, and generalizes it into an overall rejection of individual mobility: “If there's anything our people want convincing of, it is, that there's some dignity and happiness for a man other than by changing his station” (557; ch. 45). Not just an ethical rejection of middle-class life, these statements express a strategic emphasis on keeping the class unified as it rises collectively.

Among several criticisms of Felix's commitments, I want to single out those of Gallagher and Arnold Kettle. Gallagher attempts, boldly enough, to show that Felix's is not a class commitment at all. For Gallagher, Felix's renunciation of his immediate position as the son of a worker who achieved lower-middle class status marks him as Matthew Arnold's “alien” (244), the individual in any class who champions general culture and the “best self” rather than the “ordinary self” and the “class-instinct” (Arnold, Culture 70-71, 73-74; see Gallagher 235, 237). Gallagher bases her analysis partly on Arnold's and Eliot's views of representation, and I shall return to this issue later. But she also simply ignores class loyalty as a factor in Felix's actions:

The ascendancy of the best self over the ordinary self in Felix is proved by his ability to trade in one set of social conditions for another [by rejecting the apothecary trade]. … He represents a pure, disinterested politics and a pure, disinterested culture that ostensibly represent only one another, disregarding alike the worlds of absolute spirituality (the province of religion) and more mundane self-interest (the province of civil society). Felix is, therefore, … cut off not only from social-historical (narrative) intelligibility but also from readily available symbolic intelligibility.

(244-45)

But it is the very reading of Felix as Arnold's “alien” that renders his choices and beliefs unintelligible, suggesting that the reading itself is mistaken. If, on the contrary, we regard Felix's politics as “interested”—motivated by class ideals he has embraced in a wider framework of social turmoil—he is at least symbolically intelligible. Indeed, Gallagher makes the unspoken assumptions that to act in a selfless way is to serve a classless (hence middle-class) ideal and that membership in “civil society” encompasses only individual self-interest, not collective involvements. Eliot, in contrast, is concerned exactly with the bases for selflessness in class loyalty and devotion to social progress.¹³

In a much more cogent political critique, Arnold Kettle argues that the book “begins magnificently,” in part because Felix “takes his Radical stance on the fundamental question of class allegiance”; but Eliot “fails to develop or fully realize the pattern which is the core of her book,” the contrast between Felix and Harold Transome as “working-class” and “ruling-class” radicals. Presented as an ineffective idealist, “Felix is not allowed to be a leader; he is not allowed to grapple in a serious way with the actual problems of popular leadership,” and so his contest with Harold “becomes, artistically, an unfruitful conflict” (99, 102, 104, 110). But Kettle's assumption that Felix must be a leader to be an appropriate foil for Harold overlooks the points that neither Felix nor Harold is an effective leader (Harold loses the election; Felix fails to influence the miners and election crowds), and that the novel, therefore, really centers on contrasted ways of living, not modes of leadership. (I will return to this idea later.) Holding Felix up to a standard of effective leadership misjudges him. Felix is a soldier, not a leader, of the labor movement—one of the millions who, in this period and the subsequent century, toiled their lives through in shops, mines, and schoolrooms to offer, each of them, his or her small contribution to the class. Eliot has discerned the existence of the labor-pioneer type.

As Felix differs from the worker hero of the industrial novels, so does Eliot revise these novels' depiction of electoral politics. Like them, Felix Holt is skeptical about parliament, but its critique focuses on upper-class manipulation of the electoral system; in this it is closest to Disraeli, but at the opposite pole from his royalism. Felix is much more worried about upper-class influence than about the unruliness of the working-class crowd or a supposed preference for internal rather than institutional change.¹⁴

The core of Eliot's portrayal of these class politics is her juxtaposition of Harold, who assures Rev. Lingon that he is “a Radical only in rooting out abuses,” and his agent Johnson, who promises the Sproxton laborers that the “right men” in parliament “will speak up for the collier, and the stone-cutter, and the navvy” (121; ch. 2; 225; ch. 11). Though Harold is “inwardly amused” at the vicar's enthusiasm (121), Harold's relations throughout the novel make it clear which promise the class system will satisfy.

Felix's responses to electoral canvassing focus on just this issue. While he is indeed anxious about such problems as bribery and drunkenness, his deeper fear is about the class hypocrisy and string-pulling so richly shown in the political scenes with Harold. Felix responds to the news that Jermyn wishes to see Mr. Lyon by guessing, “He's on some committee. An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry” (152; ch. 8). In this scene, he still assumes that Jermyn is canvassing for the Tory interest, but after Harold's Radical candidacy is announced, Felix declares himself “indifferent” to whether he is elected.

This scepticism made the minister uneasy: he had great belief in the old political watchwords. … Felix, being in a perverse mood, contended that universal suffrage would be equally agreeable to the devil; that he would change his politics a little, having a larger traffic, and see himself more fully represented in parliament.

(368; ch. 27)

Felix's fear is that reform may mean only a continued domination of politics by the existing ruling class. (In the evangelical vocabulary that Felix and Mr. Lyon share with the reform tradition, the devil or “Apollyon” refers to political and class privilege.)

In his own speech during the election agitation, Felix links his concerns about character and education to the aim of countering this backstage management. Discussions of this speech have usually dealt with its extractable doctrinal contents.¹⁵ But the speech's dramatic focus comes at a later point, when Felix asks his audience to suppose an electoral majority of “drunken and stupid votes … I'll tell you what sort of men would get the power—what sort of men would end by returning whom they pleased to parliament” (401; ch. 30). Despite what some discussions of Eliot's fear of the masses might lead us to expect, the answer is not the ignorant voting majority, concretized as a hypothetical “Jack” who lives on fifteen shillings a week, has seven children, and cannot read. It is Transome's agent Johnson: Felix answers his own implied question by describing Johnson's clothes, physique, and bearing to the amused crowd (402; ch. 30). Dramatically, then, the speech moves to an assertion of the ability of astute ruling-class politicians to manipulate politically indifferent working-class voters so as to keep a monopoly of real power.

Gallagher has linked Eliot's view of the franchise in this scene to Arnold's and Mill's fears of “descriptive representation” (representation as a mirror of the electorate, thus expressing the “class self” as opposed to the “best self”). Gallagher believes that Felix seeks the representation of Arnoldian culture and the best self in politics, rather than of the working class as it is: “Felix Holt attempts to be a description of the evils of descriptive representation,” and “[t]his desire to have an exclusive representational link between politics and culture is at the heart of Felix Holt” (224, 237). The hypothetical Jack, an advertisement of the evils in question, “has no opinions, no representations of how the world should be; hence, he has no politics to be represented” (250). Though the last remark comes close to Felix's real point, Felix is not upset about descriptive representation, at least in the way critics of the idea usually were. They feared a lowering of the quality of political discourse and a fragmentation of the national interest. Felix shows no regard for these problems. Indeed, in his example, Jack is not descriptively represented at all; his hypothetical enfranchisement masks Johnson's management of the continuing domination of Transome's interest.

Nor does Felix wish to substitute a “best self,” standing for general “culture,” as the object represented. Felix's suspicion that “the devil will change his politics” and his quip about the foxes and poultry are more pointed than an Arnoldian alarm about the “class self.” They focus on one class, not a failing of all classes, and are directed not at “descriptive” representation of the worst in the working class but at manipulation of representation by the upper class. Felix's remark that Jack “perhaps thinks God made the poor laws” (402; ch. 30) has nothing to do with the “best self” in general; its thrust is that Jack should be able effectively to fight the poor laws. And, despite Gallagher's argument, Felix's point is that Jack does have representations of the world, supplied by an inimical class; he needs education to get rid of these. Hence, Felix's stress on the moral and educational elevation of the class refers not to general culture but to the workers' influence within the state: “I hope we, or our children that come after us, will get plenty of political power some time” (399; ch. 30). Felix's aim is the improvement of the class so that it can meaningfully act in politics and social life.

No doubt Eliot's interim solution (influencing public opinion) is naïve. But in the light of subsequent history, her contention that a merely electoral reform will end up not shifting real power to the workers is visionary and prophetic. Finally, her attention to the conditions for the effective influence of an independent working class is an advance both in complexity and in vision on the industrial novel tradition, which imaginatively conceived the solution to the industrial and representation crises as a return to some form of paternalism.

Let us note a final detail in the scene of Felix's speech. During the earlier, more abstract part of the speech, some well-dressed townsmen stop idly, and call out “Hear, hear” as Felix talks about public opinion and what the vote cannot accomplish. Then, when Felix pinpoints Johnson and the crowd bursts out laughing, the auditors leave, sure they have a good joke for dinner; one speculates that Johnson must have offended Felix, “else he wouldn't have turned in that way on a man of their own party” (400, 403). The little incident shows where Felix shares common ground with a Tory emphasis on character and sobriety (as so many interpreters have emphasized), and where he departs from it—in his specification of the political enemy, which interpreters have overlooked and which leaves these onlookers baffled. Hence, this incident also dramatizes the impenetrable incomprehension of upper-class public opinion, which reduces the drama of ideas to a dinner-table gibe and is blind to Felix's point that Johnson is not of the workers' party. So the incident leads to my next topic, the novel's view that the ruling class is incapable of either comprehending or solving the problems of this society, and specifically of reforging a unified social framework under its own leadership. For better or worse, the tableau tells us, the future will be shaped by a divided polity, and, in part, by a politically independent working class.

This acceptance of the separation of classes is Eliot's deepest break with the novelistic traditions she draws on. Plot specifics, the symbol of the estate, and the separate text of Felix's “Address” all insist on the death of paternalist social relations. In terms of plot, Esther's marriage to Felix, his continuation in a working-class level of life, and the Holts' physical move away from Treby Magna emphasize the continuing separation of working class and gentry. The lack of any resolution to the details about management of the Transome estates, or any specification of Harold's future, suggests the gentry's irrelevance to the pattern of social development Eliot wants to reveal. The one contribution the gentry does make to resolving the novel's plot, arranging to commute Felix's sentence, does not effect a larger class reconciliation or turn Felix from his chosen course.

On the level of symbol, the Transome estates are a metonymy for England's estate, the national patrimony whose inheritance and disposition were so important to Eliot.¹⁶ Her handling of the estate symbol shows with considerable exactness a sense of the probable disposition of this patrimony. Felix, as the working class, does not seize the estate (a possibility presented and rejected in the earlier assault on Treby Manor). Nor does he accede to it through Esther; she renounces her interest before knowing whether she will win him. However, as we know, she reserves a small portion of the patrimony for herself, Felix, her father, and his mother. On one side, these occurrences signify a renunciation of revolutionary class struggle: the working class (through Esther) gives up claim to the estate. On another side, again through Esther, the working class does claim that share of the estate which will facilitate its own self-advancement. Most importantly, the renunciation of the estate and the Holts' move from Treby Magna presage a long period of parallel development of the classes; the workers' separate destiny as a class is projected into the future, at least until the time of “our children that come after us” (399; ch. 30) and probably longer.

This same point underlies the “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt.” Eliot wrote this essay at Blackwood's request, in Felix's voice, after the 1867 Reform Bill passed; it appeared in January 1868, a year and a half after the novel. As with the novel, the points usually stressed about the “Address,” such as its presumed suspicion of “active democracy” (Williams, Culture 116), are less salient than its recognition of class independence. This point is best approached through a comparison with Arnold's near-contemporary Culture and Anarchy, published as articles in the Cornhill Magazine in 1867-68 and in book form in 1869.

Besides its support for a politics of the “best self” against class politics, already discussed, two other aspects of Arnold's work are salient here. The first is its position on mass action, specifically the huge reform demonstration of July 1866, when a mainly working-class crowd pushed past police into Hyde Park, tearing down some fences in the process. Arnold's response was immoderate and fully suppressive. Not just “irruptions into the parks,” he insisted, but also “monster processions in the streets,” that is, even orderly marches, must be “unflinchingly forbidden and repressed” (135)—an injunction that would have returned Britain to pre-Peterloo days.¹⁷ In a second, related maneuver that has seldom been fully noted, Arnold's devaluation of trade union politics as mere “ordinary self” philistinism grudgingly allows these politics as no worse than other philistinism, while minimizing the threat of real disruption by banking on the divisions within the class:¹⁸

[T]he part [of the working class] which gives all its energies to organising itself, through trades' unions and other means … must also, according to our definition, go with the Philistines; because it is its class and its class-instinct which it seeks to affirm, its ordinary self not its best self. … But that vast portion, lastly, of the working-class which, raw and half-developed, has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes,—to this vast residuum we may with great propriety give the name of Populace.

(70-71)

Arnold shrewdly sees that the working class is not an undifferentiated whole lacking the “sufficiency of light which comes by culture” (63), but a multiform mass that can be split into groups with competing allegiances. “Go with the Philistines” recognizes, in terms of his metaphor, that the politically active workers will ultimately align themselves with the middle-class political elite. Here, Arnold discerns within the labor movement the possibility of division and weakening that Felix feared could be a consequence of class mobility (Felix Holt 145, qtd. above). This possibility, even more than the strengthening of the state's repressive apparatus that he also advocates (136), is Arnold's long-term guarantee that the workers will never dominate.

Eliot's argument differs from Arnold's in both audience and content. While Arnold implicitly targets middle- and upper-class readers, an “Address to Working Men” accepts bodies of workers as a legitimate public. This acceptance is no mere fiction; Eliot, through Felix, did try to address working-class public opinion.¹⁹ Though it shares Arnold's concern with avoiding disruptive actions, Eliot/Holt's plea is notably more moderate than Arnold's, and, importantly, rather than a call to the state—as in Arnold—this part of the “Address” is a call to the workers themselves to respect legality, on the grounds of benefit to the movement:

If such a spirit spread, and penetrated us all, we should soon become the masters of the country in the best sense and for the best ends. For, the public order being preserved, there can be no government in future that will not be determined by our insistence on our fair and practicable demands.

(619-20)

As these comments indicate, Eliot/Holt also differ with Arnold in not seeking an alternative to class politics. Early in the “Address,” Holt remarks, “We have been sarcastically called in the House of Commons the future masters of the country; and if that sarcasm contains any truth, it seems to me that the first thing we had better think of is, our heavy responsibility” (611). Eliot apparently revised the passage in response to Blackwood's query whether she “allow[ed] too much weight to the assumption that the franchise makes the working man the master? The allegation in the House was made as a sarcasm” (Letters 4:402-403). But in fact Eliot/Holt's whole discussion is built on this assumption; the question it asks repeatedly is how the workers' potential power should be used.

Eliot/Holt answer that the workers should compel the capitalists (and agree themselves) to substitute “Class Functions or duties” for “Class Interests”²⁰—to act in a socially responsible way under pressure of public opinion (617). The workers are further advised to preserve order, tolerate class privileges for some time in order to keep society functioning, preserve and acquire scientific and artistic culture, and educate their children (621-25). These are moderate reform perspectives. Even as such, they violate the earlier paradigm of identity of interests, because they argue that the workers should accommodate other classes for their own reasons. Of most interest, however, is not the measures themselves, but that they are urged directly on the workers' movement. Eliot/Holt accept the existence of a class politics, the claim of the working class to be masters, and the “wants and just demands” that, through the franchise, “must shape the future” (626). Eliot's earlier warning that enfranchisement would be illusory gives way to the assumption that electoral and social power are real, though elusive; the contradiction is resolved on the level of intention, in Eliot's consistent sanction for a strong though moderate workers' social power on the grounds of justice and social development.

Finally, unlike Arnold, Eliot/Holt assume a unified movement that can be won, as a whole, to their position; in this respect they stick to Felix's strategic vision in the novel. “I am addressing a mixed assembly of workmen,” Eliot imagines Holt saying, “and … I have tried to bring together the considerations most likely to be of service to us in preparing ourselves for the use of our new opportunities” (627). One might respond that Eliot is merely introducing middle-class conceptions into the labor movement. But while Arnold cynically, and cannily, proposes an alliance between the middle class and labor aristocracy, leaving the “Populace” to the police, Eliot/Holt accept a unified, independent working class as a legitimate claimant for political and social justice, and try to persuade it to accept moderate goals.

GEORGE ELIOT AND THE PIONEERS OF LABOR

At the beginning of this essay. I remarked that in Felix Holt moral authority comes to reside not in the past but in consecrated service to a new social class. This paradox in George Eliot's conservatism can be approached by juxtaposing two quotations, the evocation of Reform days in chapter 16 and the account of Esther's renunciation in chapter 50:

Such a time is a time of hope. Afterwards, when the corpses of those monsters have been held up to the public wonder and abhorrence, and yet wisdom and happiness do not follow, but rather a more abundant breeding of the foolish and unhappy, comes a time of doubt and despondency. But in the great Reform year hope was mighty.

(271)

… before the day closed Harold knew that this was not to be. That young presence, which had flitted like a white new-winged dove over all the saddening relics and new finery of Transome Court, could not find its home there. Harold heard from Esther's lips that she loved some one else, and that she resigned all claim to the Transome estates.

(599)

The first passage reflects that skepticism toward “hopes for swift and inevitable progress” that Thomas Pinney found central to Eliot's affirmation of “the authority of the past.” Yet its mood and context involve more than an exposure of illusions about reform. Not content to record the failure of the promised changes, Eliot searches for a vehicle for the hope and exaltation the Reform year evoked. This search emerges, as the chapter continues, through the contrast between Mr. Lyon's effort to win Harold over on the ballot issue, and Harold's boredom, a contrast prompting the narrator's closing encomium: “I never smiled at Mr Lyon's trustful energy without falling to penitence and veneration immediately after. For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities—a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces” (276; ch. 16).

Both the “time of hope” passage and the ensuing scene with Mr. Lyon express Eliot's recognition of the exalted service called forth by political ideals she doubted and a religious evangelism she no longer accepted.²¹ Yet neither these episodes nor that of Esther's choice—and the latter is central to the novel's meaning—supports the view that Eliot replaces such commitments with the authority of tradition (Pinney) or of culture, conceived as a “spiritual force rooted in history” (Knoepflmacher 64). As a symbolic entity the novel's embodiment of the past, Transome Court, is a force of stagnation and sterility; its “saddening relics and new finery”—its Tory past and “Radical” liberal present concretized in Harold's remodeling—are equally moribund. Only when “history” is construed to include a leap over the present into the future will the novel's values be found in it.

The point is closely tied to Mr. Lyon's attempted “movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces,” for this movement is what the Transome Court characters lack: “the great story of this world [was] reduced for her [Mrs. Transome] to the little tale of her own existence” (438; ch. 34). The lack of wider vision and a sense of world-historic development means, in Eliot's treatment, that both the social life of property, descent, and inheritance, and the kind of novel that records this life, are exhausted. It is, rather, the plebeian characters who show broader vision. Esther's choice embodies this idea; she functions in the novel as the independent element able to judge between the moral emptiness of the life of property and the need for a life of moral fullness elsewhere.²²

Felix Holt thus establishes a critique of “the authority of the past.” While I cannot examine them in any detail, I would argue that Eliot's final two novels share this negative valuation of tradition as embodied in present social institutions. In Middlemarch, the erosion of Lydgate's idealism by political and marital compromises presents an analogue to the weaknesses Felix perceives in himself but avoids by shunning middle-class life; Daniel Deronda extends Felix Holt's critique of the gentry and its traditions by showing, in Grandcourt, a particularly brutal product of the principle of land inheritance (see Graver 126).²³ In positive terms, Daniel Deronda's handling of the search for an alternative to a morally purposeless society provides, in its distinct way, a parallel to Felix Holt. As in Felix Holt, so in Daniel Deronda the solution lies neither in a return to past values—given Eliot's skeptical, but definite endorsement of modernity and change—nor in an affirmation of “culture” in general. Indeed, Daniel's refusal of a parliamentary career amounts to a repudiation of the “politics of culture” as recommended, in effect, by Sir Hugo Mallinger when he pleads that parliament needs “a little disinterested culture to make head against cotton and capital” (217; ch. 16). In turn, Daniel's Zionism is more than a quest for a meaningful tradition, though it has often been read as such. It weaves together a complex of meanings balanced between past and future. Daniel's self-identification as a Jew fuses his Christian education and his freely affirmed Jewish inheritance; the Jewish nation he envisages is to be a new entity based on cultural fusion—as Mordecai describes it, “a new Judaea, poised between East and West” (597; ch. 42).²⁴ Similarly, though Felix is a worker by birth, his choice to remain one is inseparable from his decision to struggle for the future of his class. Finally, in both novels these choices respond to larger motion in society to which dominant social forms and institutions are oblivious. The double Reform contexts in Felix Holt, and in Daniel Deronda the “world-changing” Austrian-Prussian war (1866) as well as the U.S. civil war, signify this social movement (684; ch. 50; 159-60; ch. 11). And this motion, not a vision of the past, demands the sense of “prophecy” and “inspired vocation” that Sir Hugo finds unsettling in Daniel (433; ch. 33), and that Felix shares.

While present in Mr. Lyon, the possibility of a way of living sensitive to the “sweep of the world's forces” is most fully realized in Felix, and here, Esther's choice between Harold and Felix embodies a complex transfer of value from her father to her lover. This is the meaning of the earlier “moment of supreme complex emotion” when Esther, inspired by the “mental preparation that had come during the last two months from her acquaintance with Felix Holt,” gives her full love to her father. Though sensing in Mr. Lyon the “best life … where one bears and does everything because of some great and strong feeling,” she cannot accept his admonition that the feeling should be devotion to the divine will, because the transcendence she perceives in him is, in fact, most intense in Felix's secular allegiances (355-56; ch. 26). Hence, in the novel's larger movement of ideas, the tribute to Mr. Lyon that closes the “time of hope” chapter is transferred to Felix: “We see human heroism broken into units and say, this unit did little—might as well not have been. … Let us rather raise a monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken, and met death—a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious” (276-77; ch. 16). Felix both embodies this faith and represents its presence in the labor movement.

In this contrast between ways of living lies the core of Eliot's argument. Neither a novel of the labor movement as such, nor one that simply contrasts dedicated and selfish lives, Felix Holt argues that the life of dedication and selflessness must lie in awareness of a larger social-historical development. (Here Eliot shares Marx's historical teleology, which she would otherwise find unattractive.) This sense of the need to transcend individual life through service to a larger, objective historical development ties together the otherwise disparate studies of secular devotion in Felix Holt and Daniel Deronda.

The idea of transcendent service is concretized in Felix and Esther's marriage, precisely the aspect of the novel that has been seen as evasive and depoliticizing. In an argument similar to that made for an earlier period in Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction, Ruth Bernard Yeazell asserts that Eliot's plot substitutes “the narrative of the conventional heroine for one of political violence,” and thus effects a “shift from the public history of class conflict to the private story of an individual courtship” (143). Both Yeazell's and Armstrong's paradigms tell us much about how social tensions are made manageable in nineteenth-century novels; yet there is also much that they do not tell. First, the marriage plot in Felix Holt is not merely conventional; it legitimizes—admittedly, in a relatively unthreatening form—a dedication to class progress. Second, Yeazell is really criticizing Eliot's ideology. In doing so she uses the idea of class conflict in a doubly ontological way: as the real process underlying the relations of classes, and as having its own real essence in political violence. But these identifications are not self-evident and were not all accepted by the historical workers' movement. This movement contained (and contains) different currents of opinion, some of which (most, in reality) believed in peaceful methods and gradual reform.

Both Yeazell's comments and those of Catherine Gallagher, cited earlier, illustrate some larger problems in recent approaches to Eliot's novel. Both interpreters apply particular historical or cultural theoretical constructs, or metanarratives, to Felix Holt and the industrial novels generally. Yeazell applies her metanarrative reading of public class life as a “public history of class conflict,” with its epitome in “political violence,” both to the historical substrate and to the novel's own historical narrative, finding the latter wanting. In this respect, though not necessarily others, Yeazell draws on categories of Marxist criticism, as do several other writers I have mentioned. Gallagher, in complementary fashion, offers a cultural metanarrative characteristic of new historicist criticism, focusing on the organization of culture around conceptions that reproduce social dominance. This metanarrative is evident in Gallagher's view that Felix Holt presents a myth of classless general culture and its representation in place of the reality of cultural discontinuity and struggles over representation.

While no reading of history or culture is possible without metanarratives, these particular metanarratives, which play prominent roles in Marxist and new historicist theory, obscure both the complexity of literature's relation to ideology and the complexity of working-class history. Gallagher's, for instance, oversimplifies both Eliot's specific relation to Arnold and, more broadly, a writer's relationship to different currents in her culture. Careful reading finds in Felix Holt—and other of Eliot's late novels—a visible dissatisfaction with the ideas and life of the dominant upper class and a search for alternative life patterns, which provide Eliot with usable novelistic milieux and narratives. These are drawn not only from older social groups and discourses, but also from emergent classes and discourses, i.e., in Felix Holt the growing, largely reformist, labor movement. Thus Gallagher's Arnoldian novel turns out to be one in which a manual worker—glamorized and cleaned up, to be sure—affirms the progress of his class as his central goal. Arguably, Gallagher's failure to recognize this point flows from her guiding assumption that cultural practice reproduces ideological structures of dominance. This observation in turn suggests that theories of cultural practice need to reincorporate some conception of a subjectivity which, if not fully autonomous (whatever that would mean), is at least able to select from and vary competing discourses so as to affirm cultural patterns besides the dominant ones.²⁵

This brings us to the second point, the complexity of real working-class history. My concern is not so much with several critics' misassessments of Felix Holt, as with how their operating assumptions have led to these assessments. So far as these critics fault Eliot for evading the reality of class struggle, they assume both that class conflict and violence represent a real essence of history and, as well, that this essence is a knowable underlying pattern that allows alternative ideas to be identified as distortions, ideology in the Marxist sense of false consciousness.²⁶ (Complicating the picture, their metanarrative also insists that the broadening of the franchise was a crucial stage in the struggle it scripts, and faults Eliot for minimizing its significance.) While I cannot enter here into the reasons for rejecting these assumptions, particularly the second, one effect of them seems clear: they result in overlooking a pattern of social conduct at least as significant as the one they wish to focus on.

The pattern unfolds through a long history containing both sharp crises and long-term organizing, bound up in daily life and in activities such as education, as well as direct struggle. Though Eliot is a gradualist, this pattern is not specifically reformist; some who lived this history held ultimately revolutionary perspectives, some sought social transformation through reforms, some more piecemeal change. But Eliot's gradualism has led her to perceive the pattern, while her critics' insistence on their own metanarrative has led them to dismiss her focus as evasion. Eliot is thus more far-seeing than her critics: speaking to the actual British working class, she urged its members to adopt the strategy that, for better or worse, the majority of them did follow for the next century. From their standpoint the novel's domestic plot, emblematizing reform work as a lifelong partnership in a ground-level working-class community, might stand as a powerful symbol of their commitments. Eliot's ideology remains open to the question of whether reforms can change the real balance of social power—but it needs to be addressed politically in these terms, not treated as an avoidance of evident truths.

At the center of this pattern stand the pioneers of labor. Felix speaks for a historical stratum that, from varied perspectives, manifested the same sustained devotion as his, “proof against that word failure” (556; ch. 45). Many of Felix's ideals presciently evoke theirs. When he remarks, “If there's anything our people want convincing of, it is, that there's some dignity and happiness for a man other than changing his station,” and “I'd rather have the minimum of effect, if it's of the sort I care for, than the maximum of effect I don't care for,” we can hear Debs's “I want to rise with my class, not from it” and “It is better to vote for what you want, and not get it, than to vote for what you don't want, and get it.”

Felix's life trajectory evokes theirs, as well. Like Felix, some of the revolutionaries of my political generation, that of the 1960s, chose labor activism as their life vocation. Many years later they remain active, knowing their work will bear little short-term fruit. In the political generation of the 1930s, the trajectory is that of a John Anderson, Frank Marquart, Genora Johnson Dollinger, or Stan Weir, socialists and rank-and-file activists from youth to old age, little known to the world at large. Neither these people, nor those who opposed them ideologically from reformist and Stalinist directions, lacked brains or talent to “rise” had they wished; belief and loyalty kept them where they were.²⁷

Finally, in the generations before theirs, there were tens of thousands like my grandparents, Michael and Adella Kean Zametkin, reform socialists born in the Ukraine in the fifties and sixties of the last century. Emigrating separately to the United States, she to avoid the pogrom and he after escaping from a prison sentence for printing leaflets against conscription, they met in New York, where they were active in the Jewish labor movement. First a shirtmaker and later a night-school teacher, Michael was a founder of the Jewish Daily Forward, a staff writer after being forced off the editorial board, and “one of the ablest and most fiery of the Socialist speakers of that period” (“Michael Zametkin, Socialist Pioneer”). Adella wrote for immigrant women on health, nutrition, and childrearing, “was a forceful speaker and cultivated a large following within the party,” and in her last year, running unsuccessfully for state assembly as a party duty, “polled more votes than had any previous Socialist candidate in the district” (“Mrs. Zametkin Dead”).²⁸ Their obituaries, quoted here and at the start of this essay, indicate the closeness of their lifework, and that of many thousands like them, to Felix Holt's life of consecration to labor. George Eliot has captured much of the splendor of that movement.

Notes

1. For characterizations of the genre of “industrial novels” in relation to the “condition of England” debate, see Williams, Culture 94-118 and Gallagher xi-xii. Keating distinguishes these novels from other genres of working-class fiction, e.g., the London lowlife novel (5-24); his more specific discussion of individual works (223-35) concludes with a brief but valuable comment on Chartist novels.

2. Williams, Culture 110-18; other references below. Note Williams's later partial retraction, which finds in the novel a “creative disturbance” that reflects “where the life is, in that disturbed and unprecedented time” (Novel 85). For references in Williams's other work, see Graver 20.

3. See, in general, Knoepflmacher 44-71. Knoepflmacher treats Felix Holt, with its “working-man ‘Saviour,’” as transitional to this later focus (61). Like Gallagher, though from a distinct focus, he argues the congruence of Eliot's and Arnold's ideas on culture.

4. The remark is repeated and endorsed in Karl's 1995 biography: Blackwood understood that “underneath all of Felix's bluster, he was as safe as any conservative Tory” (400). See Karl 389-409 and Haight 381-95 for accounts of the novel's genesis, and Letters 4: 189-302 passim.

5. For the historical background referred to here, see Thompson 814-32 passim.

6. Four eds. appeared before 1866, and a fifth (abridged) in 1893. The third (1844) contains added chapters in vol. 2 but drops some end-material to vol. 1 found in the 1841 ed. (reincorporated in the 1967 photographic reproduction, used here). A later work, Early Years, records Bamford's youth. The 1967 ed. styles this as “Volume One” and Passages as “Volume Two” of Bamford's autobiography, while retaining the works' separate titles. My citations refer to the two-volume pagination of Passages, reproduced in this edition.

7. For riots and “physical force,” see 1: 11 and elsewhere; for legality, 31-32, 112; for demagoguery, passim but especially segments dealing with Henry “Orator” Hunt; for education and improvement, 111-12, 153-54, 279-80, 2: 235; for quack medicine, 1: 52, 108; for the address, 1: 276, reverted to elsewhere. The immediate suggestion for Felix's “Address” came from Blackwood, after hearing Disraeli's speech on reform to Edinburgh workers, Oct. 29, 1867 (Letters 4: 394-95).

8. A fourth element might be selected, disapproval of mass violence. I omit a major discussion of this element partly because it has been very fully discussed in relation to all the industrial novels, and partly because Felix's disapproval of rioting lies within one strand of working-class radicalism.

9. Sybil 495; Bk. 6, ch. 13; Alton Locke 480-82; ch. 41; Mary Barton 431; ch. 35.

10. Coles argues that the ideal of capital-labor union is negated in Hard Times by the unresolved opposition between major character groups, the absence of a character to effect class reconciliation, and the overall bleakness of the ending (162; see also 168). In my view, Coles mistakes pessimism about achieving the ideal with its renunciation; Dickens offers no alternative vision, and the closing image of Rachael “ever working, but content to do it, and preferring to do it as her natural lot” (313, Bk. 3, ch. 9) reaffirms the paternalist ideal as a hope.

11. For a view of Felix and Esther's choices as “regressive,” see Fisher 153; see also Wilt's lampoon of the novel's final line as foreshadowing “young Felix Holt the doctor” (67), and L. R. Leavis's view that Eliot's effort to “delineate a side of Esther's character that tends to self-renunciation and towards ‘truth’ … is unacceptable on a moment's consideration” (318).

12. Sandler's often brilliant defense of the novel takes on the charge by F. R. Leavis and others that it splits into a brilliant rendering of the Transomes and a second-rate political plot. (Sandler refers to comments in Leavis's The Great Tradition [1948], 50-61.) Sandler argues that it is unified by Esther, “whose story gives the book a beginning, a middle and an end” (138). From a left-wing standpoint, Spittles reaches a view of Felix similar to Sandler's, recognizing his “affirmation of radicalism” but seeing it as “individualistic in nature” (155, 153).

13. Felix's decision may remain narratively unexplained so far as his “conversion” in Glasgow is not detailed. For an argument that it stemmed from remorse over some act of violence there, see Wilt.

14. A substantial interpretive tradition stresses these factors to the exclusion of those I consider. See, inter alia, Williams (Culture 113-16), Gallagher (237-52 passim), Coveney (63-64), Keating (230), Semmel (63-64), and Patterson, who phrases the point particularly clearly: “Felix Holt proceeds to express George Eliot's own doctrine that personal change, through education, should replace the demand for institutional or constitutional change” (150, and 149-53 passim; Patterson's discussion occurs as part of her consideration of nineteenth-century uses of Coriolanus).

15. See, e.g., Coveney's identification of these statements as “the ground upon which the moral and political weight of the novel rests” (667).

16. For discussions of this point, see Semmel 65-67 (an especially well-historicized commentary), Pinney, Knoepflmacher 60-71, and Gallagher 252-63.

17. In a notorious passage in the articles that became Culture and Anarchy and in the 1869 ed, Arnold quotes his father, the master of Rugby, on how to handle riots: “the old Roman way … is always the right one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian Rock!” (135; Cornhill: Aug. 1868, 250; 258 in 1869 ed.). Arnold cut the passage from later eds.; it has been selectively included in modern texts, including the 1994 Yale ed. used here, based on that of 1869. Eliot's “Address” was already written before most of Arnold's series appeared, including the bloody-minded conclusion. In this context it is striking how much more repressive his ideas are than hers.

18. None of the essays accompanying the 1994 Yale reissue—not even the most critical, by Gerald Graff—notes this aspect of Arnold's work.

19. I treat this text more “fictively” than usual; I regard it not simply as a projection of Eliot's views onto Felix, but as part of Eliot's continuing effort to imagine a genuine working-class voice that she could endorse. Nonetheless, the “Address” is less fictionalized than the novel (Eliot makes almost no effort at characterization, for example by recognizing that Felix would now be about sixty years old). So it is best treated as a hybrid, quasi-authorial and quasi-fictive. In my discussion, “Eliot/Holt” refers to the controlling intelligence of the “Address,” “Holt” to the speaker, and “Eliot,” of course, to the author.

20. As Semmel notes, this conception had important antecedents in Coleridge, Carlyle, and Disraeli (65).

21. Eliot's concern with the non-religious bases of right action was long-standing. In her 1857 essay on the poet Edward Young, she ridicules his belief that such action is meaningless without belief in an afterlife, and phrases an unbeliever's reply:

    [Y]ou are not to force upon me what would result from your own utter want of moral emotion. I am just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world, but because, having felt the pain of injustice and dishonesty towards myself, I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who would suffer the same pain if I were unjust or dishonest towards them. … I am able so to live in imagination with the generations to come, that their good is not alien to me, and is a stimulus to me to labor for ends which may not benefit myself, but will benefit them.

    (36)

    The passage is a tonal anticipation of Felix.

22. A comparison with Mansfield Park may help make my point. In the scenes in which Fanny returns briefly to her family and realizes that she can no longer make her home among them (chs. 38-39), she realizes that loyalty to her class of origin is now mere sentiment, that her adopted class has provided intellect and culture. The power of Austen's conception lies in her critique of Romantic primitivism and the sentimental wish that Fanny be “true to her origins,” and in the stubborn, conservative insistence that the upper class does possess the cultural prerequisites for a meaningful life. The reversal that Eliot works depends on the idea that the society of Transome Court lacks these qualities, that Felix and his mission display the intellection and higher purpose that Fanny found in the gentry.

23. Graver's fine George Eliot and Community analyzes Eliot's conception of community in general in terms of Ferdinand Tönnies's Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft polarity (traditional community and modern society, or simply “community” and “society” or “association”). Graver is particularly acute in noting the mixture of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft qualities, with the emphasis on the latter, in Eliot's portraits of positive engagement, including Felix (112-26, esp. 116, 118, 124).

24. For a contrasting account see McKee 208-69 passim, esp. 240-41 and 269. Knoepflmacher notes that Arnold became more critical of the sufficiency of culture and reasserted the importance of “Hebraism” in his Literature and Dogma (1873); Knoepflmacher treats Arnold's views and Eliot's in Daniel Deronda as congruent, endorsements of “a moral tradition which could embody an authoritative ‘power not ourselves’” (64; see 63-68 passim, and 116-48 for discussion of Daniel Deronda).

25. A response might be that Eliot's registry of a moderate labor voice is part of the ruling culture's maneuver to limit the labor movement even while recognizing it. This, however, is not what Gallagher argues, and in any case is too simple. The limitation of the labor movement is a product both of what the ruling class is willing to concede, and of what positions, revolutionary or reformist, the active workers support. Eliot, as I note, takes part in this debate, but does not foreclose its outcome. Alternatively, it might simply be argued that dissenting voices can be recorded without seriously undermining hegemony. Gallagher defends new historicism along these lines in a 1989 article responding mainly to cultural-materialist criticisms. In place of the idea that culture “creat[es] false resolutions for social contradictions,” which she links to Frankfurt school Marxism, Gallagher testifies that new historicists' “effort was, and still is, to show that under certain historical circumstances, the display of ideological contradictions is completely consonant with the maintenance of oppressive social relations” (“Marxism and the New Historicism” 39, 44). However, Gallagher's practice in The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction is much closer to the first approach; in addition, the second conception is hardly unique to new historicism.

26. See Jameson's exposition of the “philosophical and methodological priority” of the Marxist “master narrative” as a means for evaluating other ideologies in Political Unconscious 19-21 and 33.

27. See Anderson, The History of the UAW Local 15, 1936-1958; Marquart, An Auto Worker's Journal; Saxon, “Genora Dollinger.” Weir, a former merchant seaman and dockworker who spent two decades battling the bureaucracy of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, now runs a labor-socialist small press and archive, Single Jack Books.

28. See also “Michael Zametkin, Veteran of Labor and Socialist Movements”; “Mrs. Zametkin, Veteran N. Y. Socialist, Dies”; memoir by my mother, Laura Z. Hobson, Laura Z; fictionalization in Hobson, First Papers (1964); major treatment in Cassedy, received while this article was in press; brief references in Howe (291, 292, 315, 524) and Levin (93, 154-57, 179, 207).

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