SOURCE: Starr, Elizabeth. “‘Influencing the Moral Taste’: Literary Work, Aesthetics, and Social Change in Felix Holt, the Radical.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 56, no. 1 (June 2001): 52-75.

[In the following essay, Starr discusses Eliot's beliefs on the relationship between authorship and commerce in Felix Holt.]

For George Eliot, as for many successful Victorian novelists, moral inquiry into the nature of “the author's vocation” inevitably turned to the relationship between fiction and commerce.¹ In the section headed “Authorship” in her “Leaves from a Note-Book,” Eliot deplores the circumstances that lead writers to behave like industrialists, “producing calicoes [or fictions] as long and as fast as he can find a market for them” (Essays, p. 439). Yet rather than suggesting that authors should (or even could) separate themselves from this marketplace, Eliot explores how the market could disseminate authorial influence:

But man or woman who publishes writings inevitably assumes the office of teacher or influencer of the public mind. Let him protest as he will that he only seeks to amuse, and has no pretension to do more than while away an hour of leisure or weariness … he can no more escape influencing the moral taste, and with it the action of the intelligence, than a setter of fashions in furniture and dress can fill the shops with his designs and leave the garniture of persons and houses unaffected by his industry.

(Essays, p. 440)

In this passage Eliot turns from the fiction-producing industrialist to the “setter of fashions” in order to illustrate the popular reach of literary work. By invoking the fashions, Eliot raises the specter of middle-class mercantilism, the very form of commerce for commerce's sake that runs contrary to her aspirations for authorship. Yet Eliot also envisions another dimension of this marketplace, one in which novels shape the aesthetics of everyday life. By contributing to the formation of a public “moral taste,” authors thus help literary consumers discern between fashions (and between fictions).

Eliot's attempt to integrate the aesthetic, commercial, and ethical aspects of literary work complicates conventional portrayals of her rejection of Victorian commodity culture. Critics readily agree that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, authors could only feign independence from market forces,² and Eliot's interest in the sale of her work is well documented.³ Yet Eliot repeatedly appears in critical and autobiographical accounts as an author deeply ambivalent about the business of writing.⁴ Embracing the idealism of literary vocation while rejecting its mundane professional and entrepreneurial qualities, Eliot thereby evades the fact of her own participation in the literary marketplace. As a complement to these accounts, in this essay I turn to Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), a novel that focuses on the operations of moral influence at the height of George Eliot's commercial success. Eliot's social-problem novel brings her concern with the semantics of vocation and profession to the foreground. Dramatizing what it means to have a vocation, or to be a professional, Eliot demonstrates her willingness to accommodate both ideals and the marketplace.

Critics typically consider Felix Holt—a novel that draws attention to the work of authors, professionals, and setters-of-fashions—to be a singularly conflicted and frustrating work. Framed by the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867, Felix Holt challenges Whig narratives of progress and illustrates, as Catherine Gallagher aptly notes, Eliot's conservative preference for fictional over political representation of the working classes.⁵ It is not surprising, then, that Eliot's social-problem novel is often invoked as a bleak assessment of vocation and social change.⁶ A source of disappointment for critics, like Dierdre David, who find stronger examples of Eliot's sympathy for women and the working classes in all others but her social-problem novel, Felix Holt surfaces as “a nagging difficulty … in Eliot's canon” (David, p. 208).⁷ Despite the novel's absence of reformist sentiment, however, I will argue that Felix Holt enabled Eliot to express the mundane possibilities through which artistry and ethics could permeate readers' experience through commerce.

Nagging difficulties pervade Felix Holt, not the least of which is Felix's concern that the fashionable Esther Lyon will require him to give up his vocation for a profession. By the end of the novel, vocation and fashion are reconciled: Felix will keep a lending library and Esther will keep her curls, as she assures him, “They cost nothing—they are natural.”⁸ Throughout their courtship Esther must defend her curls and the aesthetic sensibilities they represent. Warning her not to become one of “those women who hinder men's lives from having any nobleness in them” (p. 107), Felix associates Esther's fashion sense with commerce and argues that feminine affectation beguiles men into working for capital rather than ideals. As Felix and Esther wrangle over the appropriate placement of aesthetics, ideals, and commerce, they embody and engender cultural hierarchies that were of direct concern for the commercially successful woman writer. This struggle (and compromise), then, deserves our attention, as Felix and Esther vivify the negotiations that enabled Eliot to shape the “moral taste” of her readers. While Eliot's concerns about the damaging influence of market relations inform Felix's intention “to stick to the class [he] belong[s] to—people who don't follow the fashions” (p. 57), we are wrong to follow Franco Moretti in pronouncing Felix the novel's sole “representative of the vocational ethic.”⁹ If any character embodies the complex interplay of artistry, gender roles, and commerce that shaped George Eliot's career, it is Esther Lyon, whose eye for aesthetic detail mirrors the authorial sensibilities that, in Eliot's view, propelled realistic fiction and social progress.¹⁰

In “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856) George Eliot characterizes “bad” fiction in terms that anticipate Esther's role in Felix Holt:

The heroine is usually an heiress. … Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress—that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end.

(Essays, pp. 301-2)

Of course while Esther Lyon, equipped with preternatural aristocratic tastes and bearing, does prove to be an heiress, she is hardly the perfect heroine; instead, Esther's flaws figure prominently in this decidedly unglamorous portrait of inheritance. Felix Holt serves as Eliot's answer to the Silly Novel, as Esther first faces Felix's accusations of “fine-ladyism” (p. 64) and then renounces her fortune in order to enter humble domesticity with her worst critic. Yet while Esther helps redirect a hackneyed romance plot to one of reform and renunciation, she also invokes the relationship between women's work, social change, and literary commerce. For while Esther abdicates the vanity, luxury, and leisure that Eliot associates with the production of Silly Novels, she also counters Felix's limited conception of women's participation in the material world.

Admittedly, Esther's influence in her community is implicit at best in the author's introduction to Felix Holt. Esther figures prominently in the rumors about the Transome estate that open the narrative, and in this respect, her fortunes (and the stories told about them) will play a significant role in the novel. Yet more important, as these pages bring the act of narration to the foreground, they link Eliot's concerns about professions and authorship with the concerns that will later plague Felix and Esther. While the introduction takes readers on an allegorical coach-ride through the British landscape of Treby Magna “five-and-thirty years ago” (p. 5), Eliot's concern with narration and the representation of the rural working classes in Felix Holt incontrovertibly echoes her earlier critique of artistic, fictional, and historical depictions of the working classes in “The Natural History of German Life” (1856). In this critical essay and in her social-problem novel, Eliot stresses the significant relationship between influential writings and the professionals who produce them. Contrary to the disinterestedness later associated with the professional ideal,¹¹ profession for Eliot in “The Natural History of German Life” and Felix Holt constitutes a threat to the disinterestedness required by moral guidance and literary work. For Eliot this kind of specialization immerses the professional in the concerns of his or her field and career at the expense of broader sympathies and identifications.¹²

In “The Natural History of German Life” professional allegiances, as they distort relationships between observers and subjects, carry a particular threat to authorship. The theories of social reformers—“The tendency created by the splendid conquests of modern generalization, to believe that all social questions are merged in economical science, and that the relations of men to their neighbours may be settled by algebraic equations” (Essays, p. 272)—prove no more accurate or meaningful than the romanticized fictions of merely proficient novelists. Eliot, then an essayist just beginning to compose her own fiction, calls for corrective work by scholars and authors “of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth,” who can give readers more than “observations … vitiated by a foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view” (p. 272).

Yet “The Natural History of German Life” also elucidates Eliot's efforts to defend the possibilities for disinterestedness within professional authorship. Presenting the historian Wilhelm von Riehl as a scholar who has successfully managed this incongruity, Eliot posits a complex combination of authorial skill and a reassuringly pedestrian point of view that will again surface in the introduction to Felix Holt. In part, the value of Riehl's natural history lies in his willingness to suspend professional expertise and mores:

Riehl is not a man who looks at objects through the spectacles either of the doctrinaire or the dreamer; and they will be ready to believe what he tells us in his Preface, namely, that years ago he began his wanderings over the hills and plains of Germany for the sake of obtaining, in immediate intercourse with the people, that completion of his historical, political, and economical studies which he was unable to find in books. He began his investigations with no party prepossessions, and his present views were evolved entirely from his own gradually amassed observations. He was, first of all, a pedestrian, and only in the second place a political author.

(Essays, p. 286)

While Eliot is quick to note the ways in which Riehl is distinguished by his knowledge of “historical, political, and economical studies,” she stresses the value of particularly nonprofessional ties—the scholar as pedestrian. To achieve the status of Goethe, “the man who helps us to rise to a lofty point of observation, so that we may see things in their relative proportions” (p. 297), authors and historians must be able, like Riehl, to retain a colloquial point of view.

In Felix Holt, as the decidedly colloquial Mr. Sampson tells tales from the coach box-seat, the narrator incorporates a pedestrian point of view with her own professional voice. Yet the novel's pedestrian narrator does not get very far on his own. The novel's introduction, like “The Natural History of German Life,” characterizes authorship as an integration of seemingly antagonistic roles; in Felix Holt this integration entails a shift from the temporarily useful pedestrian to the imminently insightful narrator. This narrator initially toys with the characterization of Sampson as a distinctly literary guide; familiar with local roads and communities, “the coachman was an excellent traveling companion and commentator on the landscape: he could tell the names of sites and persons, and explain the meaning of groups, as well as the shade of Virgil in a more memorable journey; he had as many stories about parishes, and the men and women in them, as the Wanderer in the ‘Excursion,’ only his style was different” (p. 9). Yet the figure who makes this comparison—the narrator that readers would identify as George Eliot—quickly outpaces her pedestrian alter ego. While he may temporarily have access to mythical omniscience—“the coachman looked before him with the blank gaze of one who had driven his coach to the outermost edge of the universe, and saw his leaders plunging into the abyss” (p. 9)—he is, after all, only a coachman, and his storytelling suffers as a result: “Some attributed this reticence to a wise incredulity, others to a want of memory, others to simple ignorance” (p. 11).

As the opening chapters continue to model and comment on the author/narrator's ability to see broad connections in intimate details and to move between “public matters” and “the private lot of a few men and women” (p. 45), Felix Holt positions literary work in the midst of the small daily transactions and sorrows of a manufacturing town. In this respect, Eliot's social-problem novel rests securely in her literary canon. As her concern for authorship in early essays like “Silly Novels” and “The Natural History” predict, Eliot's novels famously insist on the material consequences of fiction.¹³Felix Holt aspires to just this standard of authorship. Drawing attention “to the ‘where,’ and the ‘what,’ without which, as the learned know, there can be no event whatever,” the author proposes a narrative that will realign social relationships: “it was through these conditions that a young man named Felix Holt made a considerable difference in the life of Harold Transome, though nature and fortune seemed to have done what they could to keep the lots of the two men quite aloof from each other” (p. 46). In Felix Holt these two men will be brought together through the combined influence of a professional author and a fashionable heiress. Driven by the accomplishments of these worldly women, Felix Holt proceeds to trace the process through which its determinedly disinterested protagonist comes to appreciate and benefit from these skills.

When Felix enters the novel, he positions himself in opposition to professional allegiances, to ties to institutions and markets that, he asserts, consume the opportunities for meaningful work and social responsibility that he associates with vocation. As Felix explains to the Dissenting minister Rufus Lyon, his decision to earn a living as a watchmaker is a deliberate rejection of middle-class respectability. Countering Lyon's assertion of “providential appointment” (p. 57), in which a secular calling reflects good stewardship, Felix asserts a different teleology:

“Let a man once throttle himself with a satin stock, and he'll get new wants and new motives. Metamorphosis will have begun at his neck-joint, and it will go on till it has changed his likings first and then his reasoning, which will follow his likings as the feet of a hungry dog follow his nose.”

(p. 58)

Arguing for the necessary incompatibility of neckties and the kind of altruism he espouses, Felix's description of the chokehold of these “ties,” which overwhelm and determine the “likings” and “reasoning” of anyone in its grasp, assumes that vocation is incompatible with profession. Where Eliot's own allegiances lie, I will argue, is less clear than literary critics have suggested.¹⁴ While sympathetic with Felix's vocational ideals, the novel undermines and revises his rigid distinctions between his macho humanitarianism and the feminine triviality that he associates with Esther, aesthetics, and the marketplace.

Felix's determination “to be a demagogue of a new sort” (p. 224) sounds much like Eliot's claims for her own work, and it is not surprising that Felix appears in literary criticism as a representative for his profession-wary author.¹⁵ Readers who note Felix's oddly static, allegorical persona in a work of realistic fiction, taking their cue from the author's suggestion at the end of the introduction to the novel that “these things are a parable” (p. 11), rightly suggest that Felix must be a representative of something. Felix's arresting presence sets him apart: “doubtless those Duffield men, in the expectation with which they looked up at Felix, were unconsciously influenced by the grandeur of his full yet firm mouth, and the calm clearness of his grey eyes” (pp. 248-49). Along with this engaging persona, his speeches emphasize the product of skillful persuasion: “‘I'll tell you what's the greatest power under heaven,’ said Felix, ‘and that is public opinion—the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful. That's the steam that is to work the engines’” (p. 250). If nothing else, then, Felix is a rhetorician, and he is so dramatically aligned with discursive work and moral influence that it is difficult not to associate him with George Eliot.

Felix's appearance in the “Address to Working Men,” an essay published separately in 1867 at the suggestion of John Blackwood, also clearly links Eliot's protagonist with the novel's concern for rhetoric and moral influence. Ostensibly an attempt to sway an audience of newly enfranchised working-class voters, the essay emphasizes Felix's enthusiasm for sincere and moving discourse. Felix's first impulse is to distinguish himself from less reputable tacticians: “I am not going to take up your time by complimenting you. … In my opinion, there has been too much complimenting of that sort; and whenever a speaker, whether he is one of ourselves or not, wastes our time in boasting or flattery, I say, let us hiss him.”¹⁶ Presenting the dishonest rhetorician as a personification of corrupt commerce, Felix equates the “rich religious scoundrel who lies and cheats on a large scale, and will perhaps come and ask you to send him to Parliament” with the “poor pocket-picking scoundrel, who will steal your loose pence while you are listening round the platform” (pp. 414-15). Noting the absence of common feeling in the “speechifying” (p. 416) he hears around him, Felix encourages listeners to distinguish “the men whose words carry that sort of kernel” from “platform swaggerers, who bring us nothing but the ocean to make our broth with” (p. 421). Yet despite this faith in such oppositions, in Felix Holt Eliot repeatedly frustrates Felix's efforts to maintain his rigorous distinctions between sincere discourse and professional skill.

Rather than establishing a relationship between this orator and his audience, the novel instead establishes the protagonist's uneasy relationship with professional speakers. In the few scenes in which Felix attempts to influence the working classes, his efforts fail miserably. Felix enters the local pub assured of his good intentions and singular skills: “he had great confidence in his powers of appeal, and it was quite true that he never spoke without arresting attention” (p. 114). Once inside, however, he is first taken to be the hired agent of a political candidate and then encounters the genuine article—a professional with considerable rhetorical talents. As Felix squares off with John Johnson, their interchange highlights the extent to which the two speakers share modes of communication and influence. Felix's plan to convince the bar's patrons to spend their time and money more wisely must compete with Johnson's attempt to encourage this audience to agitate for the political candidate Harold Transome—and Johnson's strategy prevails.

This scene draws attention to Felix's unsuccessful efforts to associate himself with his working-class listeners rather than with his professional competition. Felix embraces common-man status, unlike the agent Johnson, who wears “a conspicuous expansive shirt-front and figured satin stock” (p. 116). Yet while “these ‘brave’ men of Sproxton liked Felix as one of themselves,” his audience also recognizes his conspicuous difference, impressing them as “much more knowing” (p. 120). When Felix's objections to his competitor's speech get him ejected from the pub, there is enough similarity between the two men for Johnson to suggest of Felix: “He's most likely a Tory in disguise—a Tory spy. You must be careful, sirs, of men who come to you and say they're Radicals, and yet do nothing for you. They'll stuff you with words—no lack of words—but words are wind” (p. 121). This statement sounds markedly similar to Felix's criticism of “platform swaggerers”; coming from the mouth of an election agent whose own purpose is to ply listeners with deceptive claims and free ale in order to “give a cheer for the right man” (p. 122), Johnson's warning turns the tables on the moral guide. Recasting Felix as the professional, Johnson undermines Felix's claim that the sincerity and disinterestedness of vocation remain distinct from a self-centered professionalism.¹⁷

The most striking example of Felix's misguided attempts to sustain these distinctions comes at the novel's climactic mob scene. Physical and persuasive influences converge as Felix is swept along by the mass: “he was himself so surrounded by men who were being thrust hither and thither that retreat would have been impossible; and he went where he was obliged to go” (p. 263). Throughout this encounter Felix remains aware of competing sources of guidance within the crowd, “men of that keener aspect” (p. 263), as he attempts to influence those around him. While initially reassured that “there was no evidence of any distinctly mischievous design” (pp. 263-64), Felix himself becomes “busy with possible devices” (p. 267). These calculations and actions form the bulk of the chapter, as he encourages the crowd to misunderstand his intentions at the same time that he perceives the risk of being too convincing: “Felix was perfectly conscious that he was in the midst of a tangled business” (p. 268). As the tenuous influence that Felix has over the crowd shifts to other “sharp-visaged men. … entertaining another ardent purpose” (p. 270), descriptions of his own calculations do little to distinguish his end from the others'. His attempts to distinguish his motivations and actions from those of the mob leaders fail both in the streets and in the courtroom. At his trial, while Felix may feel “the sublime delight of truthful speech to one who has the great gift of uttering it” (p. 370), Harold Transome notes: “that whole peroration of his. … has done him harm with the jury—they won't understand it, or rather will misunderstand it” (p. 371). The fact that it is the flawed and self-centered Harold Transome who registers Felix's egocentrism is evidence of the distance between Felix and the model of authorial insight that opens the novel.

While Felix behaves as if his vocation functions only through personal skill and resolve, the model of successful moral influence in the novel entails a more complicated relationship with a community of speakers and audiences. At the trial, Felix is certainly not the only—or the most successful—witness in his defense, and the efforts of Rufus Lyon and Harold Transome are followed by another supremely influential speaker. As Esther Lyon takes the stand, her testimony, we are told, has several effects, not the least of which is the impression she makes on her listeners: “The three men in that assembly who knew her best—even her father and Felix Holt—felt a thrill of surprise mingling with their admiration. This bright, delicate, beautiful-shaped thing that seemed most like a toy or ornament—some hand had touched the chords, and there came forth music that brought tears” (p. 376). Part of what makes Esther's performance surprising to Harold, Felix, and her father is the fact that they expect so little from her. To readers, however, who have been privy to the novel's painstaking analysis of her development, this testimony is a logical extension of Esther's growing importance for Felix's (and Eliot's) vocational and social aspirations. While Esther's actions rescue Felix, they also rescue the possibility for moral influence in the novel.

Readers first detect Esther Lyon through the furnishings that denote her presence. While we are told that her father's spare sitting room “was dismally furnished,” the perceptive narrator notes:

any one whose attention was quite awake must have been aware, even on entering, of certain things that were incongruous with the general air of sombreness and privation. There was a delicate scent of dried rose-leaves; the light by which the minister was reading was a wax-candle in a white earthenware candlestick, and the table on the opposite side of the fireplace held a dainty work-basket frilled with blue satin.

(p. 53)

It is not surprising that Felix fails to appreciate these details, and his reaction registers his lack of interest in Esther's aesthetic sensibilities, as he says: “I thank Heaven I am not a mouse to have a nose that takes note of wax or tallow” (p. 54). Felix later confronts Esther in an attempt to distinguish his own “right opinions” from her “good taste”: “I want you to see that the creature who has the sensibilities that you call taste, and not the sensibilities that you call opinions, is simply a lower, pettier sort of being” (p. 107). Asserting that opinions are “men's thoughts about great subjects” and taste is merely “their thoughts about small ones: dress, behaviour, amusements, ornaments” (p. 107), Felix sets his masculine rhetoric against Esther's supposedly trivial feminine materialism. Yet despite Felix's efforts to present taste as a quality antithetical to vocation, Esther demonstrates the power of the kind of “moral taste” that Eliot uses to describe professional literary work. In this way, Felix Holt allows Eliot to shift the alignment of disinterestedness, intellect, and masculinity to a form of female authority in the marketplace.¹⁸

Before the novel establishes a relationship between Felix and Esther, the narrator describes the future heiress in terms that set her apart as an observer worthy of authorship:¹⁹

She had one of those exceptional organizations which are quick and sensitive without being in the least morbid; she was alive to the finest shades of manner, to the nicest distinctions of tone and accent; she had a little code of her own about scents and colours, textures and behaviour, by which she secretly condemned or sanctioned all things and persons.

(p. 68)²⁰

Esther's fashion sense also places her in circulation with currency and commodities. Thought of as “worldly” by her father's congregation because of her experiences living abroad and working in “situations,” Esther uses her income “to indulge in such unbecoming expenditure” as “gloves, shoes, and hosiery” (p. 67). While Felix may accuse Esther only of indirectly supporting a system in which men work to purchase the luxuries that women consume, she actually funds her own purchases, participating directly in the realm of work and commerce. Yet by following the fashions and shaping them, Esther also engages in the circulation of goods and opinions that Eliot, in her notebook entry on “Authorship,” associates with the sale of novels.

Esther's active participation in the marketplace fuels a moral development that will exceed the terms of her mentor relationship with Felix. Certainly, Felix's admonitions initiate this development:

Behind all Esther's thoughts, like an unacknowledged yet constraining presence, there was the sense, that if Felix Holt were to love her, her life would be exalted into something quite new—into a sort of difficult blessedness, such as one may imagine in beings who are conscious of painfully growing into the possession of higher powers.

(p. 197)

While Esther learns to practice the “difficult blessedness” of renouncing immense wealth for love, she also finds new applications of her good taste: she casts herself in a role that surpasses Felix's highest aspirations. Rather than becoming a feminine appendage to male vocation, “the woman whose beauty makes a great task easier to men instead of turning them away from it” (p. 224), Esther performs all of the great tasks of the novel. As she modifies and enacts Felix's idealism, she illuminates the continuum on which “great subjects” and “small ones” operate.

While the narrator and Felix alike note the petty tendencies of Esther's aesthetics, her worldly sensibilities ultimately work in the service of humanist reform. Esther admires Felix's disdain of “the scramble for money and position” (p. 221) and becomes acutely aware of her own selfishness. Yet as Esther benefits from his critiques, she also acts as a foil to this austere idealism, as she tells Felix: “I wish I felt more as you do. … I can't help caring very much what happens to me” (p. 222). Esther's willingness to consider her connection to the Transome family (and fortune) advances the marriage of her aesthetic and moral sense. When she is officially informed that she is an heiress, her appreciation for what is right and what is pleasing immediately correspond: “Even in her times of most untroubled egoism Esther shrank from anything ungenerous; and the fact that she had a very lively image of Harold Transome and his gypsy-eyed boy in her mind, gave additional distinctness to the thought that if she entered they must depart” (p. 305). As the Transomes initiate familial and economic relationships with her, Esther learns to negotiate the conflicts and correspondences between “good” and “moral” taste. Her initial reaction to Mrs. Transome is steeped in the older woman's appeal to her senses: “over and above her really generous feeling, she enjoyed Mrs Transome's accent, the high-bred quietness of her speech, the delicate odour of her drapery” (p. 310). Esther's inheritance then plunges her into a plot right out of a Silly Novel: “It seemed that almost everything in her day-dreams—cavaliers apart—must be found at Transome Court” (p. 305). Yet once there, her eye for detail registers—as Eliot's fiction does—the fine points of the Transomes's existence. Esther quickly notes evidence of the vacuity of Mrs. Transome's marriage and daily life, accoutrements that “had never been part of the furniture she had imagined for the delightful aristocratic dwelling in her Utopia” (p. 319).

This heroine's efforts to choose between Felix and Harold, the two “cavaliers” that become part of her inheritance plot, entails more than a selection of a good match; for Esther the comparison is an exercise of taste. She has a “native capability for discerning that the sense of ranks and degrees has its repulsions corresponding to the repulsions dependent on difference of race and colour” (p. 340), and this quality registers the strict class codes that should govern her decision. Harold, she knows, would instinctively consider inappropriate her relationship with Felix, “who to him was of course no more than any other intelligent member of the working class” (p. 340). Esther recoils from this conventional affront to her judgment: “her vanity winced at the idea that Harold should discern what, from his point of view, would seem like a degradation of her taste and refinement” (p. 341). Yet her good taste, while enabling her to understand existing prejudices, also allows her to see past—and consequently to reshape—them. Esther notes that “whatever Harold might think, there was a light in which he was vulgar compared with Felix” (p. 340). Recognizing about Harold that “the love of this not unfascinating young man who hovered about her gave an air of moral mediocrity to all her prospects” (p. 341), Esther makes her decision as a result of the interplay between her aesthetic and moral standards, rather than a rejection of one for the other.

Her choice of Felix over Harold supports the traditional (and quite accurate) reading that Esther learns to value virtue over wealth—a choice that accords with Eliot's own efforts to distinguish between writing as a vocation and writing as a source of income.²¹ Yet Esther's decision—as she informs Felix, she “made a deliberate choice” (p. 396)—is far more complex. The narrator describes Esther's dilemma:

All life seemed cheapened; as it might seem to a young student who, having believed that to gain a certain degree he must write a thesis in which he would bring his powers to bear with memorable effect, suddenly ascertained that no thesis was expected, but the sum (in English money) of twenty-seven pounds ten shillings and sixpence.

(pp. 341-42)

This passage stresses Esther's sense of the “cheapened” quality of achievements based on fees rather than merit. Yet while Felix refuses to entertain her initial, tentative suggestions that they could combine her new-found wealth with his vocational aspirations, she continues to search for a compromise. As Felix blithely assumes that Esther will accommodate herself to a life of shallow pleasures—“All your tastes are gratified now,” he tells her (p. 365)—readers witness a very different application of her aesthetic sense. Esther comes to realize that she cannot reconcile herself to “a compromise with things repugnant to the moral taste” (p. 357). Instead, she finds a better solution, one that allows her to employ her “exceptional organization” for detail while maintaining her independent participation in a public, commercial sphere.

Esther's actions during and after her exposure to Transome Court are replete with references to the careful, compassionate observation that Eliot associated with literary work in its purest form. While “Esther found it impossible to read in these days,” she does not merely substitute Felix's persuasive text for Byron. Esther reads significant details, paints broader pictures drawn from these observations, and puts these things together in an authorial fashion: “her life was a book which she seemed herself to be constructing—trying to make character clear before her, and looking into the ways of destiny” (p. 322). Using this application of her aesthetic sensibility both to identify sympathetically with the Transomes and to make Felix's heroic status legible to other characters, Esther adroitly wields moral influence. As she witnesses the construction of a case against Felix in the Treby Magna courtroom, it is not surprising that she feels moved to intervene.

Esther's testimony brings about Felix's release through odd, circumspect means, illustrating the complex relationship between artistry and moral influence. Critics who identify Felix as “the real locus of value”²² rarely grant much authority to Esther's part in his trial. Constance Harsh, for example, sees Esther's speech as mere acquiescence: “By taking the stand, she demonstrates that she has abandoned her independence and embraced the patriarchal role of Felix's submissive instrument” (p. 164). Yet Esther, who earlier noted how women's choices are limited—“A woman can hardly ever choose in that way; she is dependent on what happens to her” (Felix Holt, p. 225)—ultimately chooses against the grain of patriarchy. The fact that she is familiar with the grim alternative dignifies her decision to refuse the Transome fortune: “Her past experience saved her from illusions. She knew the dim life of the back street, the contact with sordid vulgarity, the lack of refinement for the senses, the summons to a daily task” (pp. 389-90). Esther knows the meaning of work, and she knows the work that her words can accomplish. In her decision to take the stand, she has a distinct plan and purpose: “There had been no witness to tell what had been his behaviour and state of mind just before the riot. She must do it. It was possible” (p. 375).

The fact that Esther's testimony does not succeed in the way she means it to does not lessen her role in salvaging Felix's vocation. Rather than establishing Felix's disinterestedness, Esther instead lends him the strength of her aesthetic prowess. As a result of her lifelong attention to details, when the time comes for her to make a public plea, she has prepared her audience to listen. They respond not merely to her appeal but to her self-presentation as well:

Before the trial commenced, Sir Maximus had naturally been one of those who had observed Esther with curiosity, owing to the report of her inheritance, and her probable marriage to his once welcome but now exasperating neighbour, Harold Transome; and he had made the emphatic comment—“A fine girl! something thoroughbred in the look of her.”

(p. 378)

Esther's fashion sense translates into influence, and when Sir Maximus resolves to act on Felix's behalf, it is this cultivated persona that captures his attention, as he relates: “That girl made me cry. … she's been fond of Holt—in her poverty, you know. She's a modest, brave, beautiful woman. … Hang it! the fellow's a good fellow if she thinks so” (p. 379). Esther both successfully presents herself as a point of sympathetic identification and excites the proliferation of other, appealing narratives: she is alternately the poor girl who captures the heart of Harold Transome, despite their class differences, and the girl who once loved the man on trial, and she is now moved to speak for him.

Initially ridiculed for valuing taste over ideas, Esther ultimately teaches Felix a lesson about demagoguery. In the novel's epilogue some characters' lives are less than model narratives, as in the case of Mr. Johnson: “Some persons, who did not think highly of him, held that his prosperity was a fact to be kept in the background, as being dangerous to the morals of the young” (p. 399). Yet Esther's story awakens the community's imagination. In the spectacle of her wedding to him—“no wedding, even the gayest, ever raised so much interest and debate in Treby Magna” (p. 398)—Felix figures only as a minor character. If the residents of Treby Magna are interested in this wedding, then it is because of their interest in Esther's narrative, in “this bride, who had renounced wealth, and chosen to be the wife of a man who said he would always be poor” (p. 398). Though, as the narrator explains, some of this interest is a result of skeptical reading by members of the community (“there was ‘more behind’”), Esther's is ultimately the most uplifting and influential narrative in the novel:

the majority of honest Trebians were affected somewhat in the same way as happy-looking Mr Wace was, who observed to his wife, as they walked from under the churchyard chestnuts, “It's wonderful how things go through you—you don't know how. I feel somehow as if I believed more in everything that's good.”

(p. 398)²³

As the story of an astute reader whose renunciation of wealth itself enacts a moving narrative, Esther's life illustrates the transformation of a “setter of fashions” into an influential moral guide. As Esther manages the roles of (albeit incongruent) Dissenting minister's daughter, heir to the Transome estate, and Felix's partner ministering to the working classes, she successfully achieves the goal that culture (usually associated in the novel with Felix and with Matthew Arnold's Alien) can transcend class-based identity and make her sympathetic presence felt in all of these realms. Yet Esther also maintains her connection to the commercial realm. As Nancy L. Paxton notes, Esther's economic proposal to Felix perhaps suggests that she has determined not to relinquish all of the Transome estate.²⁴ Esther tells him:

“I think even of two pounds a-week … there would be money to spare, and you could do wonders, and be obliged to work too, only not if sickness came. And then I think of a little income for your mother, enough for her to live as she has been used to live; and a little income for my father, to save him from being dependent when he is no longer able to preach.”

(p. 397)

Whether Esther will secure these modest funds from her inheritance or her labor—as she notifies Felix, “You think you are to do everything. You don't know how clever I am” (p. 397)—matters less than the significant fact that she intends to maintain her own income and connections to the public sphere. Through the mobilization of Esther's aesthetic sensibilities, Felix Holt thus allows Eliot to present a model of authorship that can “override the rule of the market” not by evading this marketplace but by insisting on the varied dimensions of participation in it.

Readings that emphasize Eliot's discomfort with rhetorical and commercial marketplaces suggest that the end of Felix Holt entails an authorial retreat from this too-troubling text.²⁵ Ending a novel that began with meditations on the shape of narrative, the epilogue closes with what does in fact read like a disclaimer of sorts:

As to all that wide parish of Treby Magna, it has since prospered as the rest of England has prospered. Doubtless there is more enlightenment now. Whether the farmers are all public-spirited, the shopkeepers nobly independent, the Sproxton men entirely sober and judicious, the Dissenters quite without narrowness or asperity in religion and politics, and the publicans all fit, like Gaius, to be the friends of an apostle—these things I have not heard, not having correspondence in those parts. Whether any presumption may be drawn from the fact that North Loamshire does not yet return a Radical candidate, I leave to the all-wise—I mean the newspapers.

(p. 399)

In these four sentences the author both suggests that Felix and Esther have failed to enact any real change in the community of Treby Magna, and seems to abdicate any authorial responsibility for her narrative. Yet this passage ultimately, I would argue, reinforces its author's connections to the moral and commercial circulation of fiction.

The fact that this statement implies Felix's failure, of course, necessarily implies the narrator's omniscience. At the same time that she simultaneously disclaims and mocks omnipotence, first by leaving it “to the all-wise” and then by toying with expectations of who this “all-wise” would be, the narrator claims just this kind of knowledge and control.²⁶ Withholding Felix and Esther's whereabouts, resisting the reader's “insufferable motive of curiosity” (p. 399), and blocking the reader's ability to intervene in the lives and narratives of the protagonists, the narrator both reminds readers of her superior knowledge and retains the prerogative to be the only one in possession of it. The narrator will then “only say” that she has fairly intimate knowledge of these characters; she is able to convey that Esther “has never repented,” Felix “grumbles,” and “young Felix … has a great deal more science than his father, but not much more money” (p. 399). By raising the questions that suggest that there is no change (that all the farmers are not public spirited, or that there has not been a successful Radical candidate), Eliot directs her audience toward a conclusion that anticipates her validation of “unhistoric acts” in the final pages of Middlemarch (1871-72), her more well-known (and even more commercially successful) fiction of vocation.²⁷

While Felix Holt demonstrates Eliot's skepticism about the efficacy of social progress through politics, then, it also expresses her faith in slow change—the same kind of change that she argued could be instigated by the subtle yet powerful influence of literary commodities. In her note on “Authorship” the issue for Eliot is not whether authors should engage in commercial exchange; commerce, she asserts, has become constitutive of literary work. Instead, Eliot concerns herself with how an author should regulate himself or herself in this marketplace:

It is in the highest sense lawful for him to get as good a price as he honourably can for the best work he is capable of; but not for him to force or hurry his production, or even do over again what has already been done, either by himself or others, so as to render his work no real contribution, for the sake of bringing up his income to the fancy pitch.

(Essays, p. 440)

While authors appropriately sacrifice wealth for vocation (as Esther does), they also appropriately maintain ties to the marketplace. While we must acknowledge her significant reservations about the connection between fiction and economics, then, without her efforts to bridge the gap between her moral aspirations for literature with the marketplace that allowed her to sell novels, the commercial and canonical success of George Eliot makes little sense.

Notes

1. See George Eliot, “Leaves from a Note-Book” (first published 1884), in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), p. 438. Further references to Eliot's essays are to this edition and are included in the text.

2. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958); Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988); and Daniel Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987).

3. See N. N. Feltes, “One Round of a Long Ladder: Gender, Profession, and the Production of Middlemarch,” English Studies in Canada, 12 (1986), 210-28; and Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994). Career-long discomfort with personal ambition, Bodenheimer argues, increased with Eliot's celebrity: “Beginning in the late 1860s and continuing through the writing of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, the letters express a new phase of anxiety about her own writing and a renewed intensity of criticism concerning the production and circulation of bad literature. … increasingly, she found rhetorical ways to disengage herself from the literary marketplace she had conquered” (p. 174).

4. One notable exception is Catherine Gallagher, who argues that in Daniel Deronda Eliot embraces her professional status as a means of countering “any specifically patriarchal authority that her literal and her literary forefathers might try to impose, replacing the mystifications of genealogy with the realities of economics” (“George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question,” in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1983-84, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986], p. 46). Gallagher's reading, however, ultimately leads back to a conventional assessment of Eliot's unease with “the interchangeability … between prostitution and authorship” (p. 59) and her disenchantment with the moral economy that should accompany this model of professional work.

5. See The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form, 1832-1867 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 224.

6. Robin Sheets and Catherine Gallagher make compelling cases for the novel's vexing cynicism about literary work, noting the many failures of characters' efforts to speak skillfully and persuasively (see Sheets, “Felix Holt: Language, the Bible, and the Problematic of Meaning,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37 [1982], 146-69; and Gallagher, Industrial Reformation). See also Constance D. Harsh, Subversive Heroines: Feminist Resolutions of Social Crisis in the Condition-of-England Novel (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994); Dorothea Barrett, Vocation and Desire: George Eliot's Heroines (London: Routledge, 1989); and Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987).

7. Expressing disappointment with “Eliot's most explicitly political and most politically conservative novel” (p. 197), David argues that Felix Holt's “subversive sexual politics” help restore the novel as “a nagging difficulty rather than a large problem in Eliot's canon” (p. 208).

8. George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical, ed. Fred C. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 397. All further references are to this edition and appear in the text.

9. See Moretti, The Way of the World: The “Bildungsroman” in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), p. 224. By bringing Esther to the foreground, I join Bruce Robbins in critiquing Moretti's as “one of many narratives which present professionalization as a withdrawal from the public, from meaning and value” (Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture [London: Verso, 1993], p. 122).

10. For other work on Esther's significance, see Rita Bode, “Power and Submission in Felix Holt, the Radical,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, 35 (1995), 769-88; and Sheets. Most readings of the novel assert Esther's submission to Felix's patriarchal authority (see Harsh; and Gallagher, Industrial Reformation) or read the novel's treatment of the (lack of) possibilities for female vocation through the tragedy of Mrs. Transome (see Barrett; and David). In Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel, Monica Cohen presents Esther's acquisition of moral taste as a result of Felix's influential (if flawed) advocation of renunciation. Cohen reads Esther's development as the enactment of (rather than a corrective to) Felix's vocational ideal: “Esther legitimizes Felix's vocation not only literally by defending him at his trial but, more importantly, in the language of her own psychological character development” (Monica Cohen, Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel: Women, Work and Home [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998], p. 142).

11. See Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989). Perkin traces the division between a once-dominant entrepreneurial class and a newly ascendant professional class during the Victorian period (see pp. 83-84). Cohen, citing Perkin, identifies this professional ideal at work in Daniel Deronda, arguing that Eliot's novel ultimately shifts from a disinterested professional ideal to “an intellectual romance with nationalism” (Monica Cohen, “From Home to Homeland: The Bohemian in Daniel Deronda,” Studies in the Novel, 30 [1998], 342).

12. Julia Swindells deftly notes Eliot's reservations about professionals: “In George Eliot's fiction, professional work. … is not simply celebrated as ideal, nor the professional man celebrated as a good man. Professional work can carry elements of idealism, but at a price, and anyway, idealism as part of professional work begins to constitute the problem itself: image and reproduction of man's failure to secure satisfactory social relations. Not least important in these social relations are the gender relations constructed and disturbed by professional work” (Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985], p. 58). Swindells finds Eliot herself constrained and excluded by a construction of the masculine professional gentleman. Yet in Felix Holt, Esther's reconfiguration of domesticity, aesthetic skill, and the marketplace challenges these gender distinctions.

13. In Adam Bede (1859), for example, Eliot's narrator argues that the fictional representation of “these common, coarse people” shapes readers' response to the ordinary world, at worst encouraging them “to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields—on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice” (George Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. Stephen Gill [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985], pp. 224, 222). While the “able novelist” may successfully entertain readers with “the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay,” the better novelist, the narrator argues, situates him/herself locally to inspire “a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat” (p. 225). Repeatedly, Eliot's fiction suggests that commercial exchanges (like the weighing out of sugar) can also be the site of empathetic relationships.

14. See Cohen, who notes the disjunction between vocation and specialization within an ideology of professionalism (p. 138). Alliances in Felix Holt are particularly complex matters. While Gallagher, in Industrial Reformation, also notes the discord between Felix and the implied author (“the protagonist's outspoken opposition to the novelist's usual methods of representation” [p. 237]), she argues that it is Felix who threatens the work of the author, rather than, as I do, that it is the implied author who scrutinizes Felix. According to Gallagher, “the narrator now seems undermined by Felix's own cultured mode of beholding reality, a mode that unsettles the assumptions of descriptive representation” (p. 237).

15. See Ian Milner, The Structure of Values in George Eliot (Praha: Universita Karlova, 1968), pp. 50-53, for an example of assessments that read Felix as “the voice of George Eliot the essayist.”

16. George Eliot, “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt,” Appendix C, in Felix Holt, p. 412.

17. Robin Sheets makes a comparison between Johnson and another speaker in the text: “Outside this symmetrical structure [the main speakers in the novel] stand two more speakers who seem to be morally and aesthetically opposed to one another, but who may in the end share some disturbing qualities: the narrator and that little-noticed professional liar, John Johnson” (p. 149). Sheets makes this provocative comparison—“Johnson senses that a good agent is rather like a novelist: ‘omnipresent,’ invisible, and always plotting” (p. 150)—as part of her argument that the novel ultimately collapses under the weight of its own skepticism.

18. This reading of Felix Holt complicates broad assessments like Julia Swindells's, in which dominant gender ideologies determine representations of gender and profession in Eliot's fiction (see Swindells, p. 63).

19. Matthew Arnold includes taste (or the lack of it) as a component of his characterization of the Philistine in his “Introduction to On the Study of Celtic Literature” (1867): “On the side of beauty and taste, vulgarity; on the side of morals and feeling, coarseness; on the side of mind and spirit, unintelligence,—this is Philistinism” (“Introduction to On the Study of Celtic Literature,” in Lectures and Essays in Criticism, ed. R. H. Super, vol. 3 of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold [Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1962], p. 390). Despite Felix's critiques of Esther's fastidiousness, she is poised to counter middle-class mercantilism (and bad taste) on the basis of her prescient ability to observe and discern. Here, Esther uses her aesthetic sense to locate Philistinism in Matthew Jermyn's daughter: “She considers herself a judge of what is ladylike, and she is vulgarity personified—with large feet, and the most odious scent on her handkerchief, and a bonnet that looks like ‘The Fashion’ printed in capital letters” (pp. 63-64). For more on the relationship between the aesthete and the professional, see Cohen, Professional Domesticity, pp. 148-49; and Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), p. xix.

20. While Sheets argues for a similar reassessment of Esther's narrative abilities—“Through Esther, the novel aligns eloquence and interpretive skill with the fullness and spontaneity of women's emotions rather than with the bookish and aggressive world of male intellectuality” (p. 164)—she neglects, I think, the degree to which Esther's own interpretive skill is aggressive (and commercial) rather than emotional. This more complicated gendered behavior exhibited in the novel is significant not only for Esther's characterization, but also for the degree to which it parallels Marian Lewes's use of a male authorial persona in a literary marketplace. See also David, pp. 167-69.

21. Eliot illustrates this concern as she presses her publisher to settle the terms of the contract for her second novel: “You know how important this money question is to me. I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money” (George Eliot, letter to John Blackwood, 13 September 1859, in The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954-78], III, 151-52).

22. See Gallagher, Industrial Reformation, p. 263.

23. This representation of the public influence of Felix and Esther's union differs from the private/silenced ending that Sheets suggests: “Although Felix and Esther have gained intuitive understanding of one another, their ability to communicate does not extend into the public sphere” (pp. 165-66).

24. See George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), p. 170.

25. According to Deirdre David, “the ending is suffused with a weary irony behind which the narrator retreats into an indifferent, studied ignorance of events” (p. 204). See also Barrett, p. 122.

26. By leaving political speculations to the newspapers, Eliot certainly did not dismiss or disassociate herself from this very common form of circulation. In a 27 April 1866 letter to John Blackwood she writes: “I went through the Times … at the British Museum, to be sure of as many details as I could” (Letters, IV, 248). See also Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1984), p. 289.

27. See George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 825.