SOURCE: Wilt, Judith. “Felix Holt, The Killer: A Reconstruction.” Victorian Studies 35, no. 1 (autumn 1991): 51-69.

[In the following essay, Wilt explores the transformation of Felix Holt from doctor to radical and the role of secrets within the narrative in accounting for that transformation.]

What on earth happened in Glasgow in the spring of 1832, to turn Felix Holt the Doctor into Felix Holt the Radical? This mystery remains well after a first reading of George Eliot's 1866 “political” novel has brought to light, more or less satisfactorily, the other secrets which have been guarded for generations by characters, and for many chapters by a narrative engaged, perhaps more than most, in that “blackmail,” “the management and exploitation of secrets,” which Alexander Welsh has identified as fundamental to George Eliot's novels (George Eliot 4).

Three of the secrets in Felix Holt have to do with births, and behind that, of course, with sexual passion; one has to do with religious, and the other with political, conversions. We learn that the eagerly awaited second son of the house of Durfey-Transome, who returns the first of September 1832 to Transome Court to take over the property and stand for a Reformed Parliament as a Radical on the death of the imbecile, vice-ridden, and mother-hated oldest son, is in fact the illegitimate son of Mrs. Transome and the sleek lawyer Matthew Jermyn. In 1798 Matthew Jermyn wooed the dashingly liberated matron of Transome Court, who was well read in Tom Paine, and since then Jermyn has been using his hold on that outwardly “eagle-faced” but inwardly stricken lady to bleed the estate dry (14).

We also learn that young Harold Transome's gypsy-like son Harry, who on arrival fastens his teeth in his grandmother's arm as a harbinger of much worse agenbite of inwit to come, was born of a Greek slave mother bought by the epicurean Harold as the first fruit of a merchant fortune amassed during fifteen years in Smyrna—he expects the Treby seat in Parliament to be the second fruit. And we learn that the lively and fastidious Esther Lyon, who is apparently, if incongruously, the daughter of the “rusty old Puritan” preacher of Treby (61), Rufus Lyon, is actually the child of gentlefolk secretly married during the French wars, and as such, the true heir-at-law of Transome Court.

We learn that the intellectually gifted and articulate minister had in 1810 taken up the impoverished and apparently abandoned widow, Annette Ledru, and the baby she carried, as an act of charity, and then found his ministerial gifts immediately “paralyzed” by a fell rushing together of long-held-off religious doubts and newly awakened sexual passion (71). He resigned his ministry and supported his new, ultimately legitimized family on a craftsman's wages as a printer's reader, returning to his more genteel calling only after Annette had died. This four-year “fall,” as Rufus saw it, was actually a conversion as the narrative sees it, a conversion to that supreme religious value in George Eliot narrative, “life in another” (79).

And we learn, quite parenthetically, since the dark illuminations of private life have increasingly taken over the ostensibly political center of the narrative, that the secret of which Radical will win the seat for Treby in the 1832 Reform Election—Peter Garsten the mining magnate or Harold Transome the returned merchant landowner—is easily answered. Neither one. Philip DeBarry, the intelligent and Catholic-leaning Tory, takes the seat because no Radical worth the name exists, or can exist, to “convert” the society, unless it be the voteless working man, Felix Holt the Radical.

Felix is true heir in narrative to this title, as Esther is in law to that of Transome Court. As readers, we would not be surprised to find, in fact we are impatient to discover, some mysterious and noble origin for Felix too. We expect something to buttress the hints of the narrative that this shaggy head is in fact Coriolanean, this workman's stick actually a gentleman's steel, this “roughly written page” legible (54).¹

There is no mystery about Felix's maternal origin. Mrs. Holt, an insightful if comic dame who believes Felix's radical reversal of her expectations about his “rising” into the genteel middle-class respectability of doctorhood has fundamentally to do with a wish “to abuse his mother,” is solidly of Loamshire earth (51). Felix's paternal origins seem at first more promising. Mr. Holt was a fortuneless stranger from “the north” with a gift for speech and a powerful desire to see his son move beyond his own class origins as a weaver's son. He has been dead for more than seven years: what may not be done in narrative with a dead man?

But no: the novel's first revelations about Holt père are its last. He came from Lancashire with no craft but his tongue, put together out of miscellaneous herbs some quack remedies, Holt's Cathartic Lozenges, Holt's Restorative Elixir, and the Cancer Cure, and made a good enough living by them to set aside money for his son's apprenticeship to a country apothecary and subsequent university medical studies.

We do learn that the twenty-six-year-old Felix Holt returned to Treby in April of 1832 after five years' apprenticeship and an undetermined period of university study in Glasgow to put into brusque and surely obsessive reversal all the plans and works of his father (49). He had discovered during his apprenticeship that Holt's pills, cure, and elixir were fakes, possibly dangerous ones, but allowed his mother to continue the business for several years while he moved along the path toward professional gentility at the Scottish university most hospitable to working- and middle-class ambitions.²

His “conversion” happened there. “I was converted by six weeks' debauchery,” Felix Holt tells his mother's minister, Rufus Lyon; “if I had not seen that I was making a hog of myself very fast, and that pigwash, even if I could have got plenty of it, was a poor sort of thing, I should never have looked life fairly in the face to see what was to be done with it” (55-56). Reminded in the same conversation of the verdict of a Glasgow phrenologist he consulted (why?), he admits: “I am perhaps a little too fond of banging and smashing” (60).

What debauchery? What pigwash? What banging and smashing? That's as much as we know, directly, of the conversion events of that Glasgow spring.³

What do we know indirectly, and how do we know it? I believe George Eliot dramatizes origins here, as she often does, in aftermaths, and by the accumulation of parallel stories in other characters' lives which glancingly reflect upon the origin she keeps hidden (I have pursued this kind of argument in an essay proposing an unnarrated assault relationship between Gwendolyn Harleth and her stepfather; see Wilt, “‘He Would Come Back’”). We see that, “looking life in the face,” Felix returned to Treby full of ruthless virtue. He put an end to Holt père's pills and cures, took up the crafts of watch and clock repairing to replace classics and medicine, and poured steady contempt upon all political, educational, and religious institutions which in any way abetted or accommodated the tendency of the spirit of the age to promote material, social, or aesthetic “rising.” Minister Lyon, no fool despite his engrossment in heavenly matters, recognizes “but a weedy resemblance to Christian unworldliness” in young Holt's violent spate of rejections, warning him, in a metaphor which will become all too appropriate later in the novel, that a mind “too ready at contempt and reprobation is … as a clenched fist that can give blows” (57, 59).

Meanwhile another young man comes home ready to reverse the doings of his genteel putative father, and, as he does not yet know, those of his “rising” real father too. Harold Transome is no clenched fist; his manner of mastery is subtle and genial. Yet his mother is from the novel's opening frozen in “dim terror about the future,” a terror she spells out only toward the end: “It seemed as if murder might come between you” (34, 338).

Murder between sons and fathers, between men and their patrimony, stalks the novel from beginning to end, in all its parallel, mutually commenting stories of public and private life. Only once is murder actually accomplished, and even here the act itself, like much else about Felix Holt, is unrepresented and unrepresentable.⁴ In a carefully wrought, dimly lit scene of public violence structured around the first Reform Election at Treby in November 1832, a clenched fist strikes down an officer of the law, killing him, and in his place rises “a man with a sabre in his hand”—a symbolic figure, a “flag” of radical mobilization (269, 268).

In this act the real Felix, we are told, is only pretending, like Hamlet, to be mad, to be revolutionary. In his proper mind he is the glass of that Victorian fashion, the mold of that Victorian form, “Culture.” But the pat emergence of an Anarchic alter-ego might, if closely examined, take us imaginatively back to Glasgow in the spring of 1832, to the originating scenes that made Felix Holt the Doctor into Felix Holt the Radical. As Laure the actress was to say to another doctor in Middlemarch, the role of killer is neither consciously chosen nor utterly accidental; rather, “it came to me in the play” (114). The script of “the killer radical” was abroad in culture before Felix Holt, or Felix Holt. But Felix Holt, and George Eliot, chose the part.

Indeed, Eliot handled the script memorably, if briefly, in her first outing as a novelist, where her working-class hero strikes down the figure of erring law and order in just such a complex matrix of politico-Oedipal rage and repressed sexual fury as I shall argue operates here. Adam Bede, “robbed” of pretty Hetty Sorel by the military, the aristocratic, the magistrate's nephew, Arthur Donnithorne, calls him to account in words bitterly aflame with sexual politics, political sexuality: “Won't you fight me like a man? … No, you don't want to fight me. You think I'm a common man, as you can injure without answering for it.”⁵ A moment later the two are fighting in the woods like “panthers,” until the much stronger working man's blow breaks the aristocrat “as a steel rod is broken by an iron bar” (290-91).

The chapter ends with Adam, his sexual and political arousal shrinking, “sickened … at the thought of his own strength” bent over the prone body “like an image of despair gazing at an image of death” (291). This is the alpha and omega nightmare of Eliot's strong protagonists, of Gwendolen Harleth as of Adam Bede. This, I shall argue, must surely have been Felix Holt's Glasgow moment of conversion. It may be that in Glasgow, as in the Loamshire woods, the “image” rose up, alive, in the next chapter: in Treby Magna, the “image” takes flesh in two figures killed by the protagonist's sickening strength.

I. FIRST VISION: THE BAD DOCTOR

In chapter seventeen of Elizabeth Gaskell's 1855 novel of working-class misery and mob violence, North and South, the dying Methodist factory lass, Bessie Higgins, meditates about the pure and compassionate, the honest and cultured protagonist, Margaret Hale: “I wonder how she'll sin. All on us must sin” (188). The equivalent memory/prophecy in Felix Holt is offered by the protagonist himself. “I am a man warned by visions,” he tells Esther Lyon, in a sincere but unconsciously duplicitous effort to shift the focus from the memory of his own Glasgow trauma to the imminent fall of the “fine lady” female protagonist; “some charm or other will be flung about you … and nothing but a good strong terrible vision will save you” (224).

Felix clearly had his terrible vision in Glasgow in the early spring of 1832; its elements, and the likely quantum of real action in the experience, “sin,” are the subject of this essay. Mrs. Gaskell's narrative accomplishes the fall of the virtuous female protagonist in two linked actions which resonate for the male protagonist of Felix Holt as well. In both novels the virtuous and cultured figure tries to stop mob violence and instead precipitates it: s/he renounces sexual passion and yet, through a complicated series of displacements, expresses sexual passion in/as a related crime. The “sins” seem gendered too. Margaret Hale lies. Felix Holt kills.

We know that, despite his evasive association of his debauchery with “pigwash,” political rage and sublimated sexual passion will be, we surmise it has been, part of the debauchery from which Felix Holt was “converted” early in the novel. Or it would be more correct to say that the act of debauched drinking, swallowing pigwash, metonymically pulls into itself all the vices that haunt the narrative of Felix Holt and drive its plots. Drinking becomes medicine, potions and pills; bad medicine becomes Reform politics, “notions” and Bills: the cure is really a kill, violence to the individual body and the body politic. For Eliot, as for Carlyle, greedy and heedless swallowing is the prescription of a corrupt medical and political profession for a credulous age in a hurry. And a surprising number of the evildoers in this novel, in a metaphoric slide by which the narrative stands behind Felix's repudiation of his/his father's profession, are at some level “doctors.”⁶

Even the profession of religion is afflicted in this way. Rufus Lyon berates himself for an intellectual tendency to “examine and sift the medicine of the soul rather than to apply it.” This calls forth from Felix, the bitter ex-doctor, his habitual contempt for the profession: “When a man sees his livelihood in a pill or a proposition … he likes to have orders for the dose and not curious inquiries” (61).

On the other side of the novel, the Lady of Transome Court, rigid with fear and self-loathing after thirty-four years of knuckling under to the lawyer who holds her honor, and increasingly her estate, in pawn, after thirty-four years of eager waiting for his own vices to kill her “dissolute” elder (and only legitimate) son Durfey before her hatred of him erupts in a murderous deed—that Lady keeps a cabinet of neatly arranged “drugs” next to the embroidery basket and account books with which she fills her empty days. Mrs. Transome is a doctor too: the potions she clearly wishes she dared use with finality upon her vicious son she uses instead on those who must bend to her will. She “found the opiate for her discontent in the exertion of her will about smaller things,” says the narrator (28); she “insisted on medicines for infirm cottagers,” and “she liked to change a labourer's medicine fetched from the doctor, and substitute a prescription of her own” (23, 28-29).

Mrs. Transome strikes her neighbor, Lady DeBarry, as a woman driven to the edge of her strength by sudden turns of fortune, someone in need of a doctor's prescription of digitalis for her heart, could she only overcome her pride long enough to consult any doctor but herself (81). But this proud, self-medicining woman is already under a fell doctor's “care.” The man who is slick Lawyer Jermyn to the rest of the world comes into the breakfast parlor at Transome Court displaying “very much the air of a lady's physician” (33); it is some hateful feline certainty in the movements of his hands that strikes this simile out of Harold Transome.

As a dashing young matron in the heady 1790s, Arabella Lingon Transome had read “the dangerous French writers” while projecting an aristocratic imperiousness “which would have marked her as an object of hatred and reviling by a revolutionary mob” (27). She had tried to live on both sides of the political fence, marrying the landed Transome and making dangerous, liberated love to the rising young lawyer. But the lawyer was too calculating to deliver on his passion even after he had fathered her child, and the woman was too proud to dismiss him, face the scandal and the emotional truth, that her lawyer had become her lover in order to “pick her pocket” (337). After that Jermyn could make her swallow anything. Her only victory is that that “lady's physician” cannot deceive her about the taste of her daily draught: “I am too old to learn to call bitter sweet and sweet bitter” (103).

Curiously enough the fall of Jermyn and the linking of the novel's many plots begin with the swallowing of another poisonous medicine, opium. Strangely ubiquitous in George Eliot's narratives, opium seems the bottom of some slippery slope of swallowing pigwash, an obligatory moment of “debauchery” in the lives of independent young gentlemen: Will Ladislaw tries it, and Tertius Lydgate, and Daniel Deronda's friend Hans Meyrick. And, likely as not, Felix Holt. Felix's alter ego, Harold Transome, brings the addiction back in oriental form: on the morning of his return he is making plans for the proper setting up of his “hookah” before he even sits down in his drawing room. The plebeian wife of Godfrey Cass, in her embittered abandonment, moves from vice to vice, sexual license to alcoholism to opium drinking, and dies of an overdose before the cottage of Silas Marner.

Another alter ego to the hero in Felix Holt is an opium addict too, an enigmatic man who goes in Treby by the name of Maurice Christian. “The amazing Christian,” “the questionable Christian” (92), now serving Sir Philip DeBarry as “factotum,” is actually a middle-class rogue named Henry Scaddon who knew Esther Lyon's real father, Maurice Christian Bycliff, and changed names and destinies with him while both were held prisoner during the French wars. He takes opium both for bodily suffering and because of the “nervous pains” that result from a lifetime of not-quite-successful attempts, first by over-spending and forgery, then in the “Christian” masquerade, to leave the “pence-counting, parcel tying” environs of trading fathers for the ego gratifications of gentility (59).

Felix never comes to know Scaddon/Christian, but that class-crossing “harlequin” (92) certainly represents to the reader one of the futures which lay ahead of the young man at Glasgow who was trying to become an aristocratic debauchee in a Scotch garret on a shilling or two (56). Scaddon/Christian is a warning figure in that “terrible vision”: in him we see how the young man ambitious to rise gains a precarious outward success but radically destabilizes his own identity.

Concealing his real identity, his illness and his opium addiction/cure, Christian carries his dose with him at all times, ready to commit suicide if his life becomes intolerable. On a certain Sunday evening he comes accidentally closer than he intended to that end. Carrying money and papers for Sir Philip DeBarry, as well as items from (the real) Maurice Christian Bycliff's personal history, he sits down to relieve himself of pain for a moment with a dose of opium, overdrinks, and wakes up several hours later minus the papers and items. While he was drowsing on opium, an enemy cut off this cock's coattail for a joke: the DeBarry papers and the Bycliff letters and locket fall into the grass, where Felix Holt, passing by later, picks them up. Knowing they belong to the Manor, “too proud a man” to return them himself (129), Felix hands them on for return to Rufus Lyon who, recognizing the Bycliff items, tremulously begins the work of uncovering the past of Esther's father, and, eventually, of her claim to the Transome estate.

The Felix Holt who stumbled across the Bycliff articles while crossing the DeBarry Manor Park was in a towering rage that Sunday. He had just come from a confrontation in which the man who becomes his real nemesis had worsted him in political debate before his “congregation” of miners in the Sugar Loaf pub (65), and he had twice been moved nearly to physical violence against him. Where Scaddon/Christian represents the self-destructive aspect of the “terrible vision” at Glasgow, the fey, rootless, shrunken De Quinceylike possibility in “pigswill,” John Johnson represents the destroyer, the soulless, purely sensual, violent, and revolutionary potential of it, the self as a “clenched fist.”

The strong confident Johnson is election agent under Matthew Jermyn for the Radical candidacy of Harold Transome. He handles, among other things, what we would now call the “dirty tricks” branch of the campaign, which in 1832 means he offers free liquor to voteless workers in exchange for their drunk-and-disorderly presence on the Transome side during the public nomination and voting processes in Treby.

Like Christian, like Harold, like Felix Holt's father, Johnson is a man on the rise, “not a high-flyer but a mere climbing-bird” (304), one of those servants who intends ultimately to be master. As with the elder Holt, John Johnson's fortune is in his insinuating tongue; it is the false promises he makes of an instant Radical parliamentary “cure” to the poverty of the working classes that makes the angry Felix “feel the sharp lower edge of his tin pint-measure, and to think it a tempting missile” during their debate in the pub (119). Rather than come to blows with the older, stouter “charlatan” (119) who is pouring beer down the throats of the miners as if it were Holt's elixir, Felix leaves the pub. But he walks slowly along the main road to Treby in conscious hope that Johnson will overtake him, so that he might “have the pleasure of quarrelling with him … and perhaps end by thrashing him” (128). This is the first indication we have not only that Felix is prone to, has very likely engaged in, violence, but that he knows this about himself, and has made efforts to “convert” himself from it. For he turns out of the main road along the “blind path” (129) which eventually carries him through the Manor park specifically to avoid this “temptation” as soon as he becomes fully conscious of it, reminding himself that his tendency to rage “is drunkenness without wine” (128).

These confusedly political Oedipal rages are not the only source of Felix's kind of “drunkenness,” however. Christian/Johnson, the “climbing bird,” is not his only nemesis/rival/model. The other is the poet “whose books embodied the faith and ritual of many young ladies and gentlemen,” especially brooding young would-be gentlemen at universities, the very blueprint for the “misanthropic debauchee” that Felix surely was in Glasgow: Byron (62). It is Esther Lyon's defense of Byron that arouses his most violently “denunciatory and pedagogic intention” at their first meeting, an intention which issues in the ambiguously sado-erotic desire to “come and scold her every day, and make her cry and cut her fine hair off” (62, 65).

One brief flash of Glasgow memory sheds some light on the curious way in which sexuality and fury, women and social misery, are knotted in Felix Holt's mind. Walking alone for the first time with Esther, contemptuously arguing once again about the Byronic hero's tendency to evade the call of finite social duties by projecting a soul sensitive only to “the infinite” (221), Felix contrasts the rather robustly English and quite masculine misery he is trying to alleviate in the mining hamlet of Sproxton with the much more terrible and futile poverty he saw in the wynds of Glasgow, “where there was little more than a chink of daylight to show the hatred in women's faces” (220).

Whether we imagine these damaged and hating women as impoverished prostitutes competing for the last shillings of the young Englishman practicing dissipation, or impoverished mothers dying in the garret across the hall from him, it is clear that they played a significant part in the conversion of Felix Holt the Doctor to Felix Holt the Radical. The damaged and hating women of the Glasgow wynds are one of the two “pictures” that have lodged in Felix's mind “like a splinter” (222), a dyptich that makes up the terrible vision which converted him from debauchery. One picture is of masculine, ultimately Oedipal, violence, associated with sociopathic climbing birds like Christian and Johnson, “the picture of what I should hate to be” (222). The other picture, “the life of the miserable—the spawning life of vice and hunger,” seems most deeply to have been female (222).

Paradoxically and brutally enough, it is out of this experienced material of male aggression and female misery that Felix projects the fantasy figure of the “fine lady” whose aggressive desire to climb into the middle class makes for male misery, for the blunted purpose and corrupted ideals of such as Felix Holt might have been. He has been “grinding his teeth” at this figure since Glasgow, well before he meets Esther Lyon (66). He has two exactly opposite desires with respect to her, as he has to that “world” which she represents. On the one hand, he rejects her/it: “I'll never marry, though I should have to live on raw turnips to subdue my flesh” (66). On the other hand, he desires to remake her/it: “I want you to see. … I want you to see. … I want you to change,” Felix “thunders” at Esther on very short acquaintance (107, 108).

The rage to change the (masculine) world with a clenched fist is self-blocked by the terrible vision of potential (or wasn't it, in Glasgow, actual?) physical violence, manslaughter. Felix will channel that rage instead upon the world of women and children. He becomes the “angry pedagogue” (224) whose words affect to hurt only to heal, supplying/projecting onto Esther the terrible vision of the woman who could do moral manslaughter, as a prelude to transforming her (the world) into an object of perfection, so that his desire for her “may rush in one current with all the great aims of his life” (223).

Felix's spiritual aim, poignant and impossible, is to make all his humanly contradictory desires—to be greatly good, to be powerfully wise, to be wedded to a fleshless ideal while living on turnips—rush in one current. It was clearly in Scotland, in university life, in urban life, that he was forced to look these contradictions in the face, and to accommodate the fury that comes from the failure to unite them. He had swallowed “pigswill” and found himself still a “hungry, discontented fellow,” “a very ambitious fellow with very hungry passions” (221, 222). And the Byronic model, to act forever in proud and amoral defiance of (and imitation of) a universe in which man's desires always contradicted each other, and to carry a female alter ego into that whirlwind, had surely tempted him.

We are not made narratively present at this crisis, or the conversion that followed it, the “turning back” at the edge of the moral abyss of Byronic and empty freedom that Rosemarie Bodenheimer has identified as the key action in Eliot's plots. But in recompense, in mimesis, as one of those “present causes of past events” which Cynthia Chase has proposed was part of Eliot's elliptic narrativity (217), Felix Holt builds toward a climactic scene of political and sexual mob violence in which the hidden Felix Holt, misanthropic debauchee of the Glasgow streets, Byronic gentleman adventurer, is seen once (again?) trying by force of egoistic will to make all his desires rush in one current, and failing.

II. SECOND VISION: THE KILLER

English novels of the mid-nineteenth century often worked toward a climactic scene of mob violence. This scene typically both clarified and exacerbated the sexual tensions in the romance plot while it affected to clarify and purge the class tensions in the political plot, pulling back from the ambiguous zone of conflict to the safe parameter of debate and liberal compromise. In defiance of the historical facts (constables were occasionally injured, but more often it was working-class demonstrators who were cut down by constables), middle-class novelists most often created scenes where the hand of working-class violence fell on those in, or allied with, authority. But the violence falls by accident, as if, in their mixed political and human sympathies, or even in their brief conscious recognition of their own complicity in narratives of violence, the novelists wished to deliberately blur the issue of responsibility.

But the crowd violence scenes of Mary Barton or Shirley or North and South or Sybil are not the only ones in George Eliot's mind as she designs chapters thirty-one and thirty-two of Felix Holt. That she has international history in mind is signified by the already mentioned reference to Mrs. Transome as having the sort of arrogant bearing which infuriated the Jacquerie of the French Revolution. The sacred history of Paradise Lost, with its drama of Satanic/Byronic revolution reversed by the self-sacrifice of the Son of God, is never far from Victorian minds either. The Biblical hope for “right” communal action is signified by the Old Testament text Rufus Lyon is contemplating when the novel opens: “And all the people said, Amen.” And by the politicized Miltonic sermon he drafts about it:

“My brethren, do you think that great shout was raised in Israel by each man's waiting to say ‘Amen’ till his neighbor had said ‘Amen’? Do you think there will ever be a great shout for the right—the shout of a nation as of one man, rounded and whole … if every Christian of you peeps round to see what his neighbors in good coats are doing, or else puts his hat before his face that he may shout and never be heard?”

(48)

The closer literary ancestor Eliot has in mind, here as so often elsewhere, is Walter Scott. English youths are often depicted in nineteenth-century novels as getting what superficial knowledge they have of dissenters like Rufus Lyon from the novels of Walter Scott, as is the case in Felix Holt, where the DeBarry daughters learned about “people of that sort” from Woodstock (136). A still deeper and more ubiquitous plot scheme inherited from Scott is the journey of the privately virtuous and brave but communally alienated and thwarted young man who is swept up only half unwillingly in the public movements of his time, and creates himself anew not only as a fighter but as a leader.

This happens to young Waverley in Scott's first novel, and in Rob Roy and, preeminently, in Old Mortality, all novels of Oedipal tension where the possible inheritance of brutality or dishonesty from a dead father paralyzes the hero until a clear call to righteous violence validates his manhood. Curiously enough, as Alexander Welsh pointed out, while the finally liberated hero wields weapons and leads other men into death and the meting out of death, he himself is never actually seen to kill another man, a narratological diffidence we will note in Felix Holt as well (Hero 223; I have discussed the Oedipal tension and licensed killing in Scott's novels in Secret Leaves).

All of these transformed Scott protagonists deliver violence as military men, with and upon armies. But in one novel, the most beloved of all in Victorian times, the violence is that of a Scottish urban mob. The man killed in The Heart of Midlothian is an officer of the law, as in Felix Holt. In the aftermath of the emphatically male violence in both novels, as a kind of answer to it, a woman's “influence” penetrates the law's justice and wins a pardon for a guilty person.

In looking closely at the election-day riot scene in Felix Holt I want to spotlight three things: 1) the role of Johnson, the man Felix Holt wished not to become, in the general violence and especially in the particular death of the man whose demise opens the way to Esther Lyon's claim on the Transome estate; 2) the role of Esther and the conversion of sexual tension into political rage; and 3) the many paradoxes involved in the half-willing, Scott-like transformation of Felix Holt from working man with a stick to gentleman with a sword, “knight,” “man with a sabre.”

“A capable agent makes himself omnipresent” is the maxim that brings John Johnson to Treby on election day (254), but he is present everywhere else in the narrative too. As Jermyn's longtime agent he did all the research which uncovered the whereabouts of Maurice Christian Bycliff years before; it was he who had Bycliff thrown into prison for the misdeeds of the man, Henry Scaddon, who now bears Christian's name. He had discovered old Tommy Trounsem, “the last representative of a pawned inheritance” (241), and he understands that Tommy's death will open the way for a Bycliff heir, should there be one, to claim the Transome estate. “Johnson” is also the name under which Jermyn holds moneys he stole from the Transome estate, and the big man dealing out Transome sixpences for drink to the Sproxton miners, who bested Felix in debate and roused his murderous rage, is Johnson.

On the eve of the election the plot brings together Johnson, who knows the Bycliff story, and Christian, who knows there is a Bycliff heiress. And, neatly enough, the agents of their coming to know each other, and each other's facts, are Tommy Trounsem, whose life is surely forfeit according to the principles of Victorian melodrama as soon as these facts come to light, and Felix Holt, who is unconsciously seeking a target for his suppressed fury at Johnson.

Seeing Jermyn's star about to fall, the ubiquitous Johnson has become a double agent for the Whig Garsten, writing a damaging handbill linking Harold Transome with some of the less savory rumors about Jermyn's embezzlement. At the same time the equally ubiquitous Christian, also in the political dirty tricks business for a lark, finds the drunken billsticker Tommy Trounsem employed by Johnson to paste up handbills for “the family.” He substitutes, on behalf of a Tory printer friend, the anti-Jermyn/Transome bills.

Reading these bills gives Christian his first clear idea that his knowledge of Esther's background might be coined into money, if he can find the knowledgeable Johnson Tommy Trounsem tells him of. He finds him by the unwitting agency of Felix Holt, who has at last seized an opportunity to do some public speaking on a street corner, excoriating Johnson as a master of “dirty work” beneath his “innocent pink and white skin” (251). The listening Christian has the listening Johnson pointed out to him, and makes a cautious approach: Johnson learns that a Bycliff heir exists, and the stage is set for the clearly necessary death of Tommy Trounsem. Inevitable scapegoat and repressed killer pass without recognition in narrative daylight, but narrative darkness is arranging another, deadlier meeting.

Just how dirty were Johnson's “dirty tricks” in this respect? Tommy Trounsem's death during the riots is in fact less accidental than would appear. His trampled body is discovered “doubtless where he fell drunkenly, near the entrance of the Seven Stars” (272), the Garsten pub where the most dangerous part of the election-day riot began. It was Johnson who originally paid the Sproxton miners to raise drunken hell with Garsten and DeBarry supporters the day of the election. But he did more than that. Tommy Trounsem received an “astonishing” amount of silver from Johnson on election day to put to his favorite use. If this is the first time in a George Eliot plot that a man got rid of an inconvenient life by giving a drunkard enough money to drink himself to death, it isn't the last, as Middlemarch's John Raffles was to discover. And in the crowd that stormed the Seven Stars, trampling Tommy Trounsem to death, was Felix Holt, the Radical.

By all the many strands of his desire “Felix had at last been willingly urged on to this spot” (266). He has walked away from violence all through the novel, ever since he left the Sugar Loaf pub in Sproxton to stop himself from flinging his tankard at the infuriating Johnson. Now at last his desires “flow” in the same current: as George Eliot designs the riot scene Felix's walk toward violence begins with sexual desire, with a walk toward Esther Lyon.

Weeks before, when they had “walked out together”—a quasi-formal social commitment, as Esther is aware—the two had made a virtual declaration of love, Esther replying “yes I can” to Felix's sudden eager question whether she could “imagine choosing hardship as the better lot” (225). Yet that was also the conversation in which Felix revealed the “good strong terrible vision” which had “converted” him, the vision of man's probable destruction by the “fine lady,” and of woman's vice/misery as somehow linked with man's “debauchery.” This conversation made it clear that his lack of “faith” in Esther's capacity to make a heroic moral choice is a projection of his fear of his own failure, surely the memory of his own failures (before his conversion) in Glasgow and before.

This lack of faith makes him see Esther's proferred fulfillment of his desire as a temptation, a “lying promise” exactly equivalent on the erotic level to the lying promise of the vote, as he sees it, on the political level. So Felix had ruthlessly checked his desire, proud of his capacity to bear the pain of renunciation, and oblivious, in that scene, to the pain he caused Esther, the renunciation he forced on her.

In this state of suppressed desire, Felix Holt sits repairing a tiny watch on election day, “vibrating” to the growing noise of popular violence outside. Political passion, like erotic passion, has been wrought up, then checked, the better to overflow barriers in the end. Chapter thirty-one's depiction of the election-morning mob action quelled by a strong but weaponless show of force by the authorities matches Felix's rejection of “temptation” in chapter twenty-seven. In chapter thirty-two Felix rushes out to the noisy marketplace in an ambiguously excited fashion, consciously to try to reduce or divert that violence, subconsciously to be a part of it. The magistrates have turned the crowd back, but at some level Felix cannot accept that, believe it, be turned back himself. He returns to his mother and his home only very briefly; his desire to be “in the midst of the danger” (261) makes him walk to the one remaining scene of potential passion.

His knock on Esther's door “had shaken the small dwelling” (260). He believes he has come only to reassure her that the crowd violence outside has abated, but his insistent “I wish I could be sure that you see things just as I do” (261) precipitates declarations of love from both. A rising passion is “converted” immediately to renunciatory fervor, but that fervor itself will fuel the political passion that in fact is still beating outside Esther's door.

In his conscious mind, the renounced Esther, the loving temptation, is dead, she is “dear as the beloved dead are dear” (263). In his conscious mind the spectres of futility, failure, compromise, and “debauchery” remaining from the Glasgow experience have been wiped out by the explosion of love and renunciation in him, and a new Felix Holt has been born: “This thing can never come to me twice over. It is my knighthood. That was always a business of great cost” (262).

Yet matter is not so patly shaped by metaphor, body by mind, collective destiny by individual will. The new Felix who rushes away from Esther out to the re-gathering election-day mob will experience again, twice over, the debauchery of his own violence. This time (and the imagination is irresistibly carried back to the blank space of Glasgow—perhaps last time too) there will be a non-metaphorical death in it.

Felix is abroad on election day at eleven in the morning against his conscious judgement because he could not forbear going to Esther. He is still in the streets at three in the afternoon because he could neither stay with her nor return home. Roaming the streets with his new knighthood, he is at first pushed by the mob from the marketplace toward the Seven Stars pub—“he went where he was obliged to go” (263). Then, “at last willingly urged on to this spot” (266), he becomes the very image of Scott's heroes, kidnapped by circumstances and made to be what he secretly desires to be. His knightly new (debauched old) role only dimly comes to his mind as the mob breaks into the pub: “he went in with a miscellaneous set … he might save someone” (266). It is after “being guided by the screams of women” to a scene of attempted rape on the upper floors that his political and erotic frustrations, sanctioned by his “knighthood,” make him Felix Holt the Radical Mob Leader: “Assuming the tone of a mob-leader, he cried out, ‘Here, boys, here's better fun this way’” (266).⁷

Emboldened by the success of this masquerade, Felix tries a still bolder rescue: he pushes to the front of the more politically aroused part of the mob who are manhandling the hated colliery foreman Spratt, with a view to taking him in charge, pretending to the crowd he has a specific plan for Spratt's disposal. But, dreamlike, the mask he (thinks he) wears becomes progressively less able to be dislodged. In his drifting progress Felix has abandoned his workingman's stick for a rioter's bludgeon (267). Now, as he approaches a constable who has a sword in his hands, the last man between himself and his object of rescue (Spratt), Felix makes a deadly choice, irrational but at some level irresistible. He believes that he alone, not the constables, has the power to lead the mob away from the more dangerous paths of its rage. Still more irrationally, though he is by far the biggest and strongest man on the scene, the most “massive” physical presence in the novel, and though earlier he had avoided the nomination scenes because “he had a terrible arm: he knew he was dangerous” when aroused (243), he believes he can use violence on a determined officer of the law and do no damage. What he knows now, sanctioned by metaphorical knighthood, is only that there is a deed of rescue to be done, a sword to be won. So he strikes down constable Tucker, and “started up with the bare sabre in his hand” (267).

So the good strong terrible vision is fulfilled. Tucker is dead, but Felix “did not imagine” that possibility because “he had chiefly before his imagination the horrors that might come if the mass of wild chaotic desires and impulses around him were not diverted” (268). Around him, and, one might surely say, in him.

At least once before, in Glasgow, Felix had started down the road to “debauchery,” his mind, like the mob, a mass of wild chaotic desires and impulses, political and erotic ideals shadowed by Oedipal anger and poverty into Byronic misanthropy. He had “diverted” these impulses then, opting for the hidden life of a kind of monk, wedded to poverty, mortifying the flesh by eating turnips, mortifying the ambition of his “climbing bird” side by eschewing all corrupting forms of leadership. Now the flesh and the ambition seem to strike back, his arm, undiverted, doing manslaughter without his conscious knowledge, and, more important, in narrative darkness. The narrative leaves the constable prone on the ground for five pages, until the “mistaken” soldiers have shot the “innocent” Radical, before uncovering the constable's death and Felix's guilt.

This interval provides time and narrative space for the crowd, abandoning Spratt according to Felix's saving plan, to turn unerringly toward that other focus of Felix's ire, the Manor of the DeBarrys, home of “fine ladies,” which the angry workman was unable to approach when he discovered the Bycliff mementos lost by Christian. Up to the last possible minute Felix declines to leave the mob, unconsciously drawn to its licensing of his rage, consciously hoping, by pretence of mob leadership, to divert the worst—the worst is specifically connected with possible violence to the women of the Manor, the “fine ladies.” So he is still present, brandishing a gentleman's steel, a revolutionary leader's sabre, when the rescuing soldiers arrive and fire a bullet through the unidentified “shoulder of the arm that held the naked weapon which shone in the light from the window” (271).

The riot scene began at the end of chapter thirty when Felix unwittingly identifies Johnson, his alter ego and nemesis, to Christian as the man who knew the facts about Esther's claim to Transome Court. With nice symmetry the riot scene ends in chapter thirty-three with Johnson's malicious identification of “the man with the sabre” as Felix Holt, “a dangerous character—quite revolutionary” (271). And with the revelation, saved for the last sentence, that the man with the sabre and the mob he led have done Johnson's business for him. Tommy Trounsome is dead, and the way is open for Johnson to bring down Jermyn, for Christian to pass the now saleable information of Esther's claim on to Harold Transome, and Esther to become in earnest the “fine lady” of Felix's most dividedly erotic and misogynistic terrible vision.

Shot down, imprisoned, tried, convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison, Felix Holt the Killer Revolutionary was a spectre, pure “figure” (the arm that held the naked weapon) in the “ground” of political turmoil the novel explores. He emerged from Felix Holt the Good (ex) Doctor, did a job in the public and the private plot, and disappeared again—like the angry Adam Bede who would have killed Arthur Donnithorne and half-consciously wished that “thorn in his side” dead, as he shortly was; like the Gwendolen Harleth who did kill Grandcourt in her mind as the last in a series of assaulting males whose first was her stepfather; like Dr. Jekyll's Mr. Hyde, whose prime murder was also that of a powerful patriarch.⁸ That figure of male aggression/punishment takes its place for the rest of the novel in the mind of Esther Lyon, one-half of the good strong terrible vision, “the vision of consequences” which is George Eliot's fundamental condition of right moral choice (306). The other half of the vision, the female half, is supplied almost twenty chapters later by Mrs. Transome, when Esther goes to Transome Court to try out the reality of her early dream of fine ladyhood.

As the weeks go by Mrs. Transome displays before Esther the beauty, the power—even, now that she has come to love Esther, the virtue—that can surely exist in the high places as well as in the low. The weeks at Transome Court, “rising” toward the material, social, and emotional security which are not undeservedly Esther's, are the equivalent of the time of Felix's studies in Glasgow: this is her patrimony, but it is also, at some level, “debauchery.” Like Felix in Glasgow, when the anticipation becomes the reality, she finds herself “arrested and painfully grasped by the means through which the ladyhood was to be obtained” (305), morally repelled by the fact, thrust before all George Eliot's protagonists from Adam Bede through Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda, that our gain is always another's loss. Though she is not herself guilty of the means, any more than Felix had invented the “pigswill” from which he had profited, yet the means are guilty. The conditions of gentility, power, eminence are corrupt at origin, obtained by greed, fraud, even manslaughter, maintained by pride.

Esther does not know of the moment of near Oedipal murder when Harold Transome learned Jermyn was his father, or of the “slow distinctness” with which Mrs. Transome, “an Eve gone grey with bitter memories” (385), has pronounced her fate to her maid, the only creature she trusts: “I am not at rest!” (317). But a “rapid flash” of divination of all these conditions of ladyhood comes to Esther as she sees Mrs. Transome pacing the corridors of Transome Court in tragic, even Gothic, anguish, “like an uneasy spirit without a goal” (393).⁹ And this terrible vision of consequences drives Esther from her “debauchery” to a renunciatory conversion: she rejects her inheritance to make a defiantly working-class life with Felix Holt.

The Scott novels which did so much to form the political imagination of the Victorians also tend to depict birthrights as fouled, all authority as usurped by violence somewhere along the line. The spectral Felix Holt who seized authority's sabre and made it the radical's leadership beacon, ingenuously surprised that the death of “the father” is the consequence, is in fact in the main tradition of British politics: today's radical is tomorrow's constable.

To renounce brutal “power” for subtle “influence” is, however, to opt for means not much less corrupt. In Felix Holt as in Scott's The Heart of Midlothian the final third of the narrative moves beyond the stalemated actions of power and justice to effect the release of a guilty but beloved protagonist through the actions of influence and mercy. But in both novels others even less guilty, but not under the narrative protection of a female protagonist's “influence,” suffer. Jeannie Deans saves her sister Effie but cannot save Madge Wildfire; Esther saves Felix but not Tommy Trounsem or Constable Tucker.

Eliot's unease over this accommodation, over her (storyteller's) patrimony, reflects Scott's unease, always in view as a melancholic edge to the inevitable success of the mild-mannered and tolerant descendents of the original violent usurpers. This may be one of the reasons why her narrator hides the “present” whereabouts of the happily married, fertile, relentlessly thriving, inevitably rising Mr. and Mrs. Felix Holt in the novel's last paragraphs.

At the end of perhaps his most important and influential novel, Old Mortality (1816), Scott pictures the reunited and victorious lovers gazing not at each other but at two dead rivals, a disturbed ending evocative of Adam Bede's “image of despair gazing at the image of death,” of the deadly and despairing final confrontations between Harold Transome and Jermyn, between Esther and Mrs. Transome, which seem somehow generated by Felix Holt's (and Felix Holt's) murderous blow to the “patriarchs,” Constable Tucker and Tommy Trounsem. Striving, like all the Victorian novelists, to emerge from the nightmare of their stories, to break from that “image of despair gazing at the image of death” which seems the inevitable posture of an ending, Eliot turns to the smallest possible happy ending compatible with this desire: two renunciations of money and position equal one working-class marriage.

But the fruit of all these renunciations, it turns out, is not only happiness but, ironically, success. The town of Treby Magna has stood still, is returning Tory, not Radical members to parliament, but no such stasis attaches to the unnamed town where Felix Holt the Radical has, by his own admission, all but turned into a “sleek dog” (399). More significantly still, Felix Holt the almost doctor had considerably more “science” than his quack father, and Felix and Esther's son, we are told, “has a great deal more science than his father,” and more money too, if “not much more” (399). Were we to visit the older Holts in their unnamed town I bet we would find a young Felix Holt the doctor. To quote Esther's last words in the novel, to somewhat different effect: “I call that retribution” (398).

Notes

1. Eliot uses two headnotes from Coriolanus to suggest this analogue (see chapters twenty-seven and thirty). Sally Shuttleworth argues, correctly I think, that Eliot has consciously only the “noble” Coriolanus's resistance to “the mob” in mind in her choice, whereas Charlotte Brontë in a chapter of Shirley comparing her own man-against-the-mob figure, Robert Moore, to Coriolanus, has also in mind the ignoble, violent, and dangerous traits that make Shakespeare's tragic hero so ambiguously compelling (132-33).

2. In the first chapter of Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland, R. D. Anderson describes “the Scottish tradition” of universities “open to anyone who could scrape together a little Latin and mathematics, and this included men who decided to change course in adult life.” Both Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities had important medical faculties, but “it was at Glasgow if anywhere, with its high proportion of working-class students, that one would expect the appearance of those ‘organic’ intellectuals described by Gramsci, who remain in sympathetic communion with their class of origin” (330). Anderson is here talking about university life in Glasgow several generations later than the time of Eliot's novel, yet the tradition was already alive in Felix Holt's time.

3. Alexander Welsh, puzzling like all of us over the blank narrative space of the “six weeks' debauchery,” suggests that Felix's quick opening and shutting of the door upon his Glasgow “secret” constitutes “a perpetual blackmail of the self. … By threatening [himself] to tell about it, he forces himself to behave perhaps” (George Eliot 25). Philip Fisher, speaking for the many who find Felix a “straw hero,” complains that both hero and narrator “give no moral analysis” of either the Glasgow debauchery or the killing which ends the novel (153), a silence that I will argue suggests connection. For Sally Shuttleworth as for many other readers Felix is “an unproblematic Christ figure” because he is “without struggle” (116). This essay aspires to take more seriously the ultimately murderous, if barely visible, struggles of this problematic Christ figure.

4. In the most significant and influential recent reading of Felix Holt, Catherine Gallagher traces both the narrative detail and the philosophical imperative by which George Eliot evades the realistic “representation” of her hero (see especially 222-45). Eliot does this, Gallagher argues, in order to deny the utilitarian political proposition that mere mirror-like “representation” of all competing classes and points of view in a Reformed Parliament would produce a body genuinely representative of that “best self” which lies, invisible to all but the eye of “culture,” in “the people.” For this reason “there is not, nor can there be, any social explanation for his development,” for “he represents a realm that is not at all given but is, rather, in the process of being created by books like Felix Holt” (244, 245). An extension of this argument is Daniel Cottom's meditation on the trope of violence. For Cottom both “culture” and “violence” are pure “figure” without possibility of realistic detail in a politico-Romantic middle-class discourse of transcendence (“culture” diverts “violence” into “feeling”) (see 38-42).

5. Following up connections between the two novels, one might also note the presence of Oedipal rage in the hardworking Adam toward his feckless and drunkard father, a rage whose proximity to the accidental death of that father causes Adam dread (ch. 4), and the political cast to the admiration the novel's quasi-narrating “traveller” of chapter two feels about the young man he sees: “We want such fellows as he to lick the French” (18).

6. The link between rural landlords—keepers of pigs and growers of profitably distillable grains—and the brewing and pub interests, and Tory political interests, is explored by Brian Harrison, as is the link between doctors, drinking, and drugs (see 57, 286ff, and 334ff). In the 1830s teetotaling doctors “were the dissenters of the medical world, threatening its established Church, the College of Physicians,” who preferred to prescribe both pills and alcohol or opium-laced drinks partly because of outmoded medical theories and partly because, as Felix will say, they were paid for prescribing things (161-62). The argument that political reform was simply another expensive placebo prescribed by self-seeking politicians was a familiar one on both the Radical and the Tory hustings during the late 1820s and early 1830s, and achieved memorable form in Carlyle's contempt for the “Morrison's Pill” philosophy of reform in Past and Present (1843).

7. The interweaving of sexual and political violence on the part of the “have nots” that George Eliot hints at here was (and is) a commonplace of riot behavior, both in art and life. J. E. King describes an assault upon a “master's” house in the 1878 cotton strikes in North Lancashire as harboring the same elements as the election-day riot scene in Felix Holt—a mob leader with a sword, property destruction, triumphant drinking and attempted rape amidst an almost “carnival atmosphere.”

8. Stevenson's novel, published in 1886, is of course not a source for Felix Holt but an echo of a common Victorian trope. A key scene in the novel finds the freed Hyde popping up out of nowhere and beating to death an innocent and “beautiful” old man, Sir Danvers Carew, who is not only aristocratic but also a figure of the law's authority. William Veeder has offered an extended reading of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a Victorian fantasy of “father killing” in his “Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy.”

9. Fred C. Thompson has elaborated the evidence for believing that Eliot's thought about this novel began with the Mrs. Transome story, and that her readings in Aeschylus and Aristotle at this time, as well as the on-and-off writing of her drama “The Spanish Gypsy,” suggest that Mrs. Transome was to be a tragic heroine in the Greek mold. Gillian Beer thinks the classical analogue might be Medea, who killed her children (144). I think there is also a hint of Clytemnaestra, who killed her betraying husband and was in turn done to death through the revenge plan of her daughter Elektra, in the vision Mrs. Transome has of Esther as “a daughter who had no impulse to punish and to strike her whom fate had stricken” (Felix Holt 596). Chapter forty-two of Felix Holt has a headnote from Elektra. Beer, like many readers, feels that the Transome (the Medea) tragedy “makes the Oedipus story comparatively unimportant” (144). This essay has tried to establish the importance of the Oedipus story by seeing it as Felix's as well as Harold's.

Works Cited

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Beer, Gillian. George Eliot. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.

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Cottom, Daniel. Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History and Literary Representation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. New York: Dutton, 1960.

———. Felix Holt, The Radical. Ed. Fred C. Carpenter. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.

———. Middlemarch. 1871-72. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1956.

Fisher, Philip. Making Up Society: The Novels of George Eliot. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1981.

Gallagher, Catherine. The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. North and South. 1855. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

Harrison, Brian. Drink and the Victorians. London: Faber, 1971.

King, J. E. “‘We Could Eat the Police’: Popular Violence in the North Lancashire Cotton Strike of 1878.” Victorian Studies 28 (1985): 439-71.

Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Science: The Make Believe of a Beginning. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Thompson, Fred C. “Felix Holt and Classical Tragedy.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 16 (1961): 47-58.

Veeder, William. “Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy.” Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde after One Hundred Years. Ed. Veeder and Gordon Hirsch. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. 107-60.

Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985.

———. The Hero of the Waverley Novels. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1963.

Wilt, Judith. “‘He Would Come Back’: The Fathers of Daughters in Daniel Deronda.” Nineteenth Century Literature 42 (1987): 313-38.

———. Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.