SOURCE: Horowitz, Lenore Wisney. “George Eliot's Vision of Society in Felix Holt the Radical.” In Texas Studies in Literature and Language 17, no. 1 (spring 1975): 175-91.

[In the following essay, Horowitz discusses the way Eliot uses Felix Holt to articulate her personal vision for reform of English society.]

Not until Felix Holt the Radical does George Eliot bring industrial England from the periphery of her novels into the center. This is a dramatic shift in emphasis and brings to the forefront for the first time the profound concern with the problems of Victorian England characteristic of her mature fiction. Set in the year of the first election under the Reform Bill of 1832, Felix Holt presents a wide range of social problems and political philosophies. There is not only conflict among the social classes but intense rivalry among leaders who seek their support. But while the novel poses the problem of political leadership initially, conventional methods of political change are ultimately rejected in favor of a more far-reaching vision of social change. Instead of endorsing political reform, the novel creates a broad myth of social transition suggesting the selective incorporation of what is valuable in the past into a social order which is really new. This myth of social transition defines meaningful change as the reorientation of society towards the future rather than the past. While George Eliot's respect for the past and its precedents is clear in the novel, Felix Holt presents an urgent plea for the present to break free from the control of the past in the definition and solution of society's problems.

Although it is a dramatic change, the use of industrial England as the setting of Felix Holt grows out of George Eliot's experiments in the earlier novels. Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Silas Marner are set in the stable agricultural England of the past, but industrial England appears on the outskirts of the landscape. The Hayslope of Adam Bede is part of old England, but the impact of manufacturing is felt in Snowfield and in Leeds where Dinah Morris preaches. In The Mill on the Floss, St. Oggs is a nontechnical, provincial society, but Tom Tulliver is sent by his uncle Deane's grain company on “northern business” because of the impact that steam has had on the market. Manufacturing becomes more important in Silas Marner since Silas is a cottage weaver, but the action takes place in Raveloe rather than in Lantern Yard, the manufacturing town, and Raveloe as yet “lay aloof from industrial currents.”

While the problems of industrial England are brought more and more into the settings of these early novels, they play only a minor role. The complex problems of the new England are excluded in the resolution of each novel. Characters with a foot in both Englands end up by leaving the mills for the farm. Dinah Morris gives up Leeds for Hayslope, while Tom Tulliver exchanges a promising future in the thriving grain trade for the old family mill. The pattern of Silas Marner's moral regeneration involves leaving Lantern Yard and its problems behind; his brief return to Lantern Yard severs rather than strengthens his ties to the manufacturing town. Like Dinah Morris, he is saved in a sense by returning to old England and its values.

Such a solution to human and social problems is not possible in Felix Holt because industrial England is at the center of the novel's landscape and social problems play a major role. The novel's “Introduction” presents a striking picture of England in conflict by describing the reaction of a coach passenger journeying through the English midlands.

In these midland districts the traveller passed rapidly from one phase of English life to another: after looking down on a village dingy with coal-dust, noisy with the shaking of looms, he might skirt a parish all of fields, high hedges, and deep-rutted lanes; after the coach had rattled over the pavement of a manufacturing town, the scene of riots and trades-union meetings, it would take him in another ten minutes into a rural region, where the neighbourhood of the town was only felt in the advantages of a near market for corn, cheese, and hay. … The busy scenes of the shuttle and the wheel, of the roaring furnace, of the shaft and the pulley, seemed to make but crowded nests in the midst of the large-spaced, slow-moving life of the homesteads and far-away cottages and oak-sheltered parks.

(Introduction, pp. 5-6)¹

The passenger observes the sharp contrast between old rural England, “the district of protuberant optimists, sure that old England was the best of all possible countries,” and the new England feeling the impact of profound social and economic problems.

The breath of the manufacturing town, which made a cloudy day and a red gloom by night on the horizon, diffused itself over all the surrounding country, filling the air with eager unrest. Here was a population not convinced that old England was as good as possible. …

(Introduction, p. 5)

It becomes clear to the coach passenger that “town and country had no pulse in common.” Rather than the traveler's vacillating movement from one England to the other, a more permanent reconciliation, a synthesis based on a “common pulse,” is sought in the novel.

The novel focuses the conflict between old rural England and new manufacturing England in Treby Magna. Like Hayslope and Raveloe, Treby Magna is an England of the past. However, while the societies of the earlier novels were stable with elements of change only beginning to show, modern political and economic forces have undermined traditional community relations in Treby Magna and have created social unrest. Coal mines and a tape factory have brought a new population and new problems, and when the passage of the Reform Bill makes the town a polling place, Treby Magna “began at last to know the higher pains of a dim political consciousness” (ch. 3, p. 50). How and by whom the people should be led emerges as an important question. A broad spectrum of political philosophies is presented. Sir Maximus Debarry, the Tory landowner, is one of those “protuberant optimists” who uphold the old ways as best, while Garstin, the Whig manager of the Sproxton mines, seeks moderate change. The miners themselves, however, have quite different opinions and call for annual Parliaments and universal manhood suffrage.

To illustrate the problems involved in leading the people to dramatic social change, the novel focuses on two Radical leaders, Felix Holt and Harold Transome. Both endeavor to change society, but both fail in their efforts to lead the people, or to “head the mob” (ch. 2, p. 34), as Reverend Lingon, Harold's Tory uncle, puts it. The reasons for these failures are important. Harold's efforts to change society are partially undermined by a fallacy in his political philosophy. He believes that society will change for the better through the agency of “active industrious selfishness.” When the Sproxton miners turn their power of self-assertion into mob violence, the danger of such a philosophy becomes clear. In the election day riot, “the multitudinous small wickednesses of small selfish ends, really undirected towards any larger result, had issued in widely-shared mischief that might yet be hideous” (ch. 33, p. 329). Harold's view of social change based on “active industrious selfishness,” like the economic Darwinism prevalent in the period, does not formulate any “larger result” than the satisfaction of self-interest, and George Eliot foresaw dangerous consequences for such limited social vision.

Harold does not look far enough into the future, nor does he see clearly how present problems are rooted in the past. Calling himself a “new man,” Harold seeks to sweep away the corruption of the past. The danger of political leadership which is based on insufficient understanding of the linkage between present and past is reflected in the Oedipal nature of the Harold Transome plot. Harold's discovery of his private past ultimately wrecks his public career. When election posters expose the manner in which his family has gained possession of the Transome estate, Harold learns that he cannot be a “new man” because the past is the “father” of the present. The past cannot be disowned, as he discovers when he sees himself and his father, Matthew Jermyn, reflected in the mirror. The moment when Harold discovers who he is coincides with his final recognition of the ties between the present and the past. Harold's failure as a political leader suggests that it would be as unwise for society to abrogate the past with sweeping changes as it is for Harold to attempt to be a “new man”;² one's “father” always turns up.

Unlike Harold Transome, Felix Holt sees the linkage between present and past clearly. He knows who his father is and judges his parent's accomplishments objectively and even scientifically. It is knowledge rather than prejudice that leads him to repudiate his father's patent medicines. While he acknowledges his father's good intentions, Felix's training as an apothecary's apprentice convinces him that these panaceas complicate rather than cure present ills. Because he understands the relationship between the present and the past, Holt's view of social change is more comprehensive than Harold's. Felix sees social change as the gradual replacement of what is outmoded. The old ways of doing things, which he at one point likens to irrigation canals and pumps, must not be destroyed until they can be replaced. Otherwise society would be left with no means to cultivate its “common crop.” Holt's failure as a political leader is linked not to his ignorance of the past but to his inability to predict with accuracy the future consequences of his actions. This is precisely the lesson of Felix's disastrous attempt to control the direction of the mob during the election day riot. No man can predict the future, but Holt's effort to do so is made particularly difficult by the very sympathy which makes him sensitive to human misery, which makes the “spirit of innovation” a “part of religion” to him (ch. 16, p. 187). While Harold “disliked all enthusiasm” (ch. 16, p. 187), Felix is liable “to be carried out of his own mastery by indignant anger” (ch. 30, p. 292). Felix's decision to lead the mob is an act of impulse “in the midst of a tangled business” (ch. 33, p. 325), and reflects the narrator's observation that “nature never makes men who are at once energetically sympathetic and minutely calculating” (ch. 33, p. 325).

The novel's answer to the question, who shall lead the people, seems to be that social change cannot be brought about safely by political means.³ The lesson that Felix finds when he “sees behind failure” is that he can best improve society by helping those few within his immediate reach, a very limited social role. Attempts to have a wider effect are fraught with danger to both society and the individual himself. The machinery of power is best left in the hands of those who will not seek drastic changes, and it is significant that the Tory Debarry and the Whig Garstin win the novel's election.

The political plot, however, fails to deal with the more far-reaching question raised in the novel's “Introduction,” whether a “pulse in common” could be found between old England and the new. It can be argued that the question of social reform in the novel is larger than the question of who shall lead the people, that the political failures of Holt and Transome are only part of the novel's resolution of the problem raised in the “Introduction.” The other aspect of the novel's total vision of society centers around the Transome estate and Esther Lyon's role as heir. The important contrast here is not between Harold Transome and Felix Holt as political leaders but between Felix Holt and Esther Lyon as, respectively, the “outsider” and the “insider” vis-à-vis the novel's society. Each has a different relationship to society and faces different problems. Their opposite and complementary patterns of development explore the relationship between society and absolute moral values central to the novel's resolution.

Felix Holt is an outsider because he does not fit comfortably into the social structure of Treby Magna. “Felix chose to live in a way that world prevent any one from classing him according to his education and mental refinement” (ch. 22, p. 227). Felix does not accept society's values and seeks a higher morality than class prejudice or what he calls “the ordinary Christian motives of making an appearance and getting on in the world.” Instead, Felix is committed to the ideal of human brotherhood and equality, to what he calls “the labour and common burthen of the world” (ch. 27, p. 266), a commitment that is at once his great strength and weakness. However, while he is morally superior to characters who unthinkingly accept conventional values, Felix is ineffective because he does not have a viable role in society. While Felix's sense of social responsibility is close to “vocation” in the religious sense, and religious imagery abounds in the novel to describe it, it is not easy for him to translate this feeling of brotherhood into effective social action. As two Glasgow acquaintances put his problem, Felix's capacity for “large veneration” leads him to “banging and smashing” because he cannot find anything in society “perfect enough to be venerated” (ch. 5, p. 69). He bangs and smashes at conventional values, but he is unable to define the positive part of his social function, that “demagogue of a new sort” (ch. 27, p. 270) he desires to be.

An important reason for this difficulty is his fear of becoming entangled in society. He refuses to wear conventional clothes because he believes that they will “throttle” him and confine him in “straps.” He sees women as a seduction into economic and class compulsions which would force him to compromise his integrity: “Men can't help loving them, and so they make themselves slaves to the petty desires of petty creatures” (ch. 10, p. 129). His desire for independence from the corruption of social relationships extends to children as well. While “a bachelor's children are always young … with a chance of turning out good” (ch. 22, pp. 232-33), specific children would be a disappointment as well as a burden. Felix does not recognize that his refusal to become involved in social relationships hinders his effectiveness and makes him as irrelevant to society as the Byronic corsairs and renegades whose “idle suffering” he despises. As far as members of Treby society are concerned, Felix is as much in the wilderness following the “lawless life of the desert” as a “young Ishmaelite” (ch. 37, p. 363).

Felix's stance is not only ineffective but arrogant as well. No man should try to keep his hands so clean that he must “eat turnips,” as Felix puts it, to subdue his natural desires for intimate social ties. Like Reverend Rufus Lyon, whose history prefigures Holt's development, Felix must enter society even if it means compromising the purity of his ideals. Lyon's love for Annette Bycliffe, “a being who had no glimpse of his thoughts induced a more thorough renunciation than he had ever known” (ch. 6, p. 93) in his solitary life of theological devotion. Similarly, Felix has to learn that self-sacrifice for other persons is as important as self-sacrific for ideals. After learning through his experience in the riot that an aloof purity is not possible in society, he accepts the fact that it is not even desirable. He changes his role as a detached critic of society for the role of husband, father, family provider, and teacher, recognizing that his efforts will “never be known beyond a few garrets and workshops” (ch. 45, p. 443).

While Felix Holt, the outsider, is gradually brought from a position outside society to a definite place and function inside society, Esther Lyon's development begins from the opposite extreme and has an expanding rather than a contracting pattern. Esther is an insider, accepting conventional values and standards of behavior without questioning them. She insists on wax candles instead of tallow, includes Byron's Poems in her workbasket, and wonders how she can counteract the assumption current in good society that Dissenters are necessarily vulgar. It becomes clear that her views are based on a lack of sympathy for others, on a “wilfulness” or self-centeredness “that conceives no needs differing from its own, and looks to no results beyond the bargains of to-day” (ch. 6, p. 81).

The narrator makes clear, however, that Esther is capable of developing greater vision through sympathy; “Esther's dread of being ridiculous spread over the surface of her life; but the depth below was sleeping” (ch. 46, p. 458). By telling her that she is “trivial, narrow, and selfish,” Felix shatters Esther's confidence in her values. His criticisms had “shaken her mind to the very roots” (ch. 22, p. 235). Her self-absorbed world breaks apart, and she sees, as he does, the absolute claims that others have on her sympathy. Esther's growth is linked, like his conversion in Glasgow, with religious images. “The first religious experience of her life—the first self-questioning, the first voluntary subjection, the first longing to acquire the strength of greater motives and obey the more strenuous rule—had come to her through Felix Holt” (ch. 27, p. 273). In this “baptism,” sins against man rather than against God are washed away. She is no longer “dead in trespasses—in trespasses on the love of others, in trespasses on their weakness, in trespasses on all those great claims which are the image of our own need” (ch. 13, p. 161). After this process of “painfully growing into the possession of higher powers” (ch. 22, p. 235), of developing what Holt calls the “best self” to a “vision of consequences,” Esther chooses a role in society that can express this higher morality. By refusing to marry Harold and become another Mrs. Transome, Esther puts into practice her idea that “the best life” is not the most comfortable but one in which “one bears and does everything because of some great and strong feeling—so that this and that in one's circumstances don't signify” (ch. 26, pp. 260-61).

As the outsider and the insider approach each other, their different weaknesses are highlighted. While he sees man's fundamental responsibilities as a human being clearly, the outsider finds it difficult to relate these “great claims” to social relationships. In terms of their humanity, all men are equal; in society, however, men have different responsibilities and privileges. The insider, on the other hand, feels at home in social relationships but does not see beyond narrow conventional values. From different directions, Felix Holt and Esther Lyon move towards a norm of behavior in which absolute human responsibilities become workable within social relationships. Their interacting developments are described as a kind of “leavening” process. “So fast does a little leaven spread within us—so incalculable is the effect of one personality on another” (ch. 22, p. 235).

It is at the critical moment in this leavening process that Esther Lyon enters her major role in the novel as the heir to the Transome estate. Educated by Felix Holt to a clear perception of the frequent conflict between social and human values, as the Transome heir she must face squarely the problems of wealth, property, and privilege in society. While the law designates Esther as the legitimate heir and the Transomes as arbitrary possessors of the estate, Esther considers the legal tie the arbitrary one and believes that possession through years of habit and expectation is the human and legitimate claim. She feels that her responsibility to the Transomes as human beings conflicts with the laws of society which distribute property without regard for human feelings. Esther comes to realize that the possession of property and privilege is attended with “circumstances” that only the egotist, like Mrs. Transome, can “sweep away.” She finds it impossible to institute legal proceedings against fellow human beings with whom one should share rather than take.

Disposition of the Transome estate, however, raises even more profound problems than the proper relationship among members of society. The estate is really a symbol for England itself, its complex past, confusing present, and uncertain future. The estate functions in the novel as a myth of social transition which finds the common pulse between the old England and the new. Esther's role as heir of the past is crucial, much like Margaret Schlegel's role in Howards End.

The care with which George Eliot worked out the details of the Transome will is known from her letters,⁴ and the details, though tedious, are important to the novel's structure. John Justus Transome entailed the estate “on his son Thomas and his heirs-male, with remainder to the Bycliffes in fee” (ch. 29, p. 290). Neither Thomas Transome nor any of his male descendants has the power to dispose of the estate as he might see fit because at the end of the male line the estate is to pass to the Bycliffe family. The fee tail perpetuates the testator's view of what is right generation after generation with no possibility for change until the end of the Transome line. There are other complications. By selling the base fee to the Durfey family, Thomas Transome deprived his male heirs of their just share in the estate. The Durfey-Transomes purchased not the estate itself but only the Transome interest in it and may thus possess the estate only as long as the Transome line exists. Tommy Trounsem, the old impoverished bill-sticker, is the “last issue remaining above-ground from that dissolute Thomas who played his Esau part a century before” (ch. 29, p. 291). Mrs. Durfey-Transome and the lawyer Jermyn compound this original injustice by engaging in “law-tricks” to prolong the Transome interest and to prevent the Bycliffe heir from obtaining the estate. As a result of Jermyn's efforts, Maurice Christian Bycliffe, Esther's father, is falsely imprisoned under the name of Henry Scaddon and dies during this confinement.

The discovery of the Bycliffe heir is of great importance to the novel's myth of social transition because only the Bycliffe heir can break the control of the past and dispose of the estate according to the needs of the present situation. Esther's struggle to decide what should be done with the Transome estate thus raises the problem of the proper attitude of the present towards the past, a problem faced, as we have seen, by Felix Holt and Harold Transome as well. Unlike Harold, Felix rejects only part of the past, his father's patent medicines, because he has learned that they reflect “ignorance” of man's real needs. While rejecting these outmoded remedies, however, Felix aligns himself with a different past better suited to his present priorities: “I have my heritage—an order I belong to. I have the blood of a line of handicraftsmen in my veins” (ch. 27, p. 270). Like Felix, Esther acknowledges herself as the heir of the past but takes from the past only what is of value to the new purposes of the present.

Esther's decision as heir is crucial since the estate represents the line of succession from the past to the present. The alternatives to her choice show that, while the novel's myth of transition preserves the ties to the past, it involves a revolutionary change in the direction of society. Were Esther not revealed as the Bycliffe heir or had she decided to renounce her claim to the estate, the Durfey-Transomes would retain possession of the estate and could claim legal title after twenty years. This would merely legalize their position as false or spurious heirs of the past. Were Esther to marry Harold, the Durfey-Transomes would possess the estate under the original terms of the will through Esther's legal title. In this way, the succession of the estate through sale and injustice would be affirmed and continued. In both alternatives, the present is essentially a continuation of the past, and this principle is repudiated in the novel's myth of social transition.⁵ Esther reclaims the “pawned inheritance,” and, as the only heir with the discretion of disposal, she divides the estate according to her newly developed vision of priorities. She conveys the major portion of the property to Harold and his mother and arranges for annuities for her stepfather and Holt's mother. Wealth is not necessary to her new life of moral purpose with Felix, only a small income of “two pounds a week” to buy books for a lending library. The bulk of the inheritance from the past is used to provide for members of the past generation while the present looks forward to a very different kind of future.

By ending the fee tail, Esther breaks the control of the past and aligns the present with the future. Her marriage with Felix Holt becomes a symbol for possibilities in society not dictated entirely by tradition. It is a union between two characters who are symbolically fatherless and thus not strictly tied to the class or to the past in which they have been brought up. Their social identities are flexible rather than fixed. Although he is of lower-class birth, Felix's education and intelligence raise him above it. Esther was brought up in the lower class but is of the aristocracy and half-French by birth. Their marriage cuts across class boundaries to embrace all segments of society in a way that tradition would make impossible. This union is connected not with conventional values of class and position but with more important human responsibilities. Felix gradually emerges as belonging to what the novel defines as an aristocracy not of birth but of behavior. Esther remarks that Felix's behavior to his mother is “the highest gentlemanliness, only it seems in him to be something deeper” (ch. 22, p. 234). This gentlemanliness is a deference to the human dignity of others rather than merely respect for social rank. According to the narrator, Felix's “look of habitual meditative abstraction from objects of mere personal vanity or desire” is “the peculiar stamp of culture,” the culture of the “human face divine” (ch. 30, p. 300). This marriage between an outsider and an insider whose different strengths are combined and whose different weaknesses are corrected suggests a society in which absolute human values would govern social behavior.⁶

This marriage reaches back to the past through inheritance and forward to the future through imagery of family connections that extend to all the social classes. Felix sees himself as belonging to the family of society: “It is held reasonable enough to toil for the fortunes of a family, though it may turn to imbecility in the third generation. I choose a family with more chances in it” (ch. 27, p. 270). The creative energy of this marriage is highlighted by contrast with the “fortunes” of the Transome family. Imbecility in the third generation is precisely their fate in the case of the half-mad Tommy Trounsem as well as the “imbecile” Durfey, Harold's older brother. By turning his efforts to the aid of all his brothers, Felix, a “man of this generation,” works for a future that will not repeat the errors of the past. The offspring of this marriage between outsider and insider, between absolute human values and social relationships, is a hopeful future for society, a young Felix with “a great deal more science than his father, but not much more money” (Epilogue, p. 487).

Taken together, the political plot and what I have called the novel's myth of social transition provide a complex answer to the question whether a “pulse in common” can be found between old England and the new. The failures of Felix Holt and Harold Transome as leaders of the people make clear that there are no reliable political solutions to society's problems. As Holt, sounding very much like Matthew Arnold,⁷ says to the Duffield workmen: “Now, all the schemes about voting, and districts, and annual Parliaments, and the rest, are engines, and the water or steam—the force that is to work them—must come out of human nature—out of men's passions, feelings, desires. Whether the engines will do good work or bad depends on these feelings” (ch. 30, p. 302). Moreover, to set up a political “engine” to endure for generations would condemn society to mechanical repetition with little opportunity for fresh evaluations of its problems, much like the Transome fee tail.

The political plot leads simultaneously, however, to the discovery of Esther Lyon as the true heir of the past, the Transome estate. The sequence of events that results in the failures of Transome and Holt to lead the people also leads up to the uncovering of Esther's claim to the estate. At Harold Transome's nomination speech, Maurice Christian recognizes Esther and resolves to profit by revealing her claim to the estate. During the election campaign, posters and handbills advertise the history of the Transome family and cast doubt on their claim to the estate. During the election day riot, Tommy Trounsem, the last male Transome, dies and Esther's claim to the estate becomes valid. The narrator's observations make clear that the timing of these events is important. Even though several characters learn about Esther's legal claim, information alone is not sufficient because, as the narrator says, “Esther's claim had not yet accrued” and “hurry was useless” (ch. 30, p. 306). In terms of the novel's structure, the appropriate moment for Esther's claim to become valid is the point at which her interaction with Holt has produced in her a sufficiently broad perspective on society's problems. Rather than Felix Holt or Harold Transome, it is Esther Lyon who makes the significant move for social change by disposing of the Transome estate according to her vision of present needs.⁸

In Felix Holt, the final emphasis is on hope for society. Esther Lyon's role in the novel's myth of social transition provides a broad perspective on society and its problems within which the political failures of Holt and Transome can be understood. The problem with England as presented in the novel is that society is dominated by ideas and attitudes that are over a century old, the fee tail of the Transome estate. The present lives in the form of the past. New conditions have arisen, but the mechanical succession from the past to the present prevents any single generation from reevaluating its future goals and its inheritance from the past. Reevaluation is necessary, but the only heir with the power of possessing the past in “fee simple” has been lost and must be found.

It is important that the heir has been lost for another reason. Because he has been temporarily disinherited, the heir is given the opportunity to break free from inherited values. The interaction between the outsider and the insider explores a wide spectrum of values from which the heir may choose. A strong connection is established in the novel between interruption in the direct line of succession from the past and the discovery of important human values. The Duffield Watchman, for example, praises Harold Transome for his “self-liberation from the trammels of prejudice … united with a generous sensibility to the claims of man as man, which had burst asunder, and cast off, by a spontaneous exertion of energy, the cramping outworn shell of hereditary bias and class interest” (ch. 8, p. 114). While inappropriate for Harold, the terms of this praise fit Esther Lyon well. She has the capacity for feeling that “breaks through formulas too rigorously urged on men by daily practical needs” (ch. 46, p. 456) and can judge the past in terms of a “generous sensibility to the claims of man as man.” According to the novel's vision of society, then, social development would parallel the pattern of individual development.⁹ The “spiritual convulsion” in Esther's personal life is matched, on the level of social development, by the temporary loss and discovery of the true heir of the past.

The confusion and dislocation between old England and the new described in the novel's “Introduction” is resolved in a vision of society as involved in a broad transitional process from the past to the future. The solution to present confusion is to find the true heir of the past, the only heir who can “cast off, by a spontaneous exertion of energy, the cramping outworn shell of hereditary bias and class interest” and rediscover the human values with which a better society can be built.¹⁰ As the true heir of the past, Esther Lyon restores the proper line of succession by reclaiming the “pawned inheritance” but disposes of it in such a way as to orient the present towards a better future for men, towards the “transition of an improved heritage” as Reverend Lyon puts it. Political solutions to social problems are rejected because society should be truly “re-formed” with the new energy of love and sympathy, and not simply build another mechanical engine to entail on future generations.

I have suggested that Felix Holt's setting makes it a transitional novel in terms of George Eliot's development, but it is a transitional novel in terms of her use of plot and character as well. Felix Holt is not the first outsider in George Eliot's novels. Earlier characters were also at odds with society because of their extraordinary beliefs and behavior. Dinah Morris is criticized by Mrs. Poyser for having ascetic ideas and for preaching, an unconventional occupation for a woman. Maggie Tulliver frequently says and does things that embarrass her Dodson relatives, staunch exponents of conventional virtues. Silas Marner is called “queer Master Marner” because of his antisocial behavior. Nor is Felix Holt the last outsider. In Middlemarch, the outsider will be called a “later-born Theresa” trying to fuse “spiritual grandeur” with “domestic reality.” Daniel Deronda is perhaps the most explicitly defined outsider, a character “stirred with a vague social passion but without fixed local habitation to render fellowship real.”

Although there are important variations, the outsider's marginal relation to society is generally represented in his fatherless and sometimes homeless condition, his commitment to wider values than narrow social conventions, and his consequent difficulty in defining a social role. His development generally takes the shape of a gradual entry into society by means of assuming specific social responsibilities. Not until Felix Holt, however, is the outsider's gradual movement into society integrally involved with an insider's opposite and complementary development. Felix Holt's movement into a fixed social position is at once result and cause of Esther Lyon's movement towards recognizing absolute responsibilities outside conventional distinctions of rank and privilege.

The relationship between Felix Holt and Esther Lyon is a formal achievement of great importance because it focuses the question of the relationship between society and absolute values which George Eliot sought to explore and resolve in all her fiction. This formal pattern has its origin in the earlier novels and in the even earlier short story “Janet's Repentance.” But while outsiders and insiders had been previously combined, their developments were not interdependent. The stimulus for Adam Bede's growth as an insider is Hetty's tragedy, and Dinah Morris, the outsider, is also affected primarily by the suffering Hetty causes. Moreover, she never really becomes a major character. In The Mill, Maggie's growth is not connected with the growth of an insider of comparable stature. After Book Four, Tom Tulliver moves into the background and remains unmoved in his commitment to conventional values until the flood brings about his sudden awakening. Silas Marner is the first novel in which a double plot structure presents the complementary developments of an outsider and an insider, but Silas and Godfrey Cass develop independently until Eppie brings them together near the novel's end. In Romola, Savonarola's character is altered by the events in the shifting political life in Florence rather than changed through his relationship with the insider, Romola. While the development of the novel's other outsider, Tito Melema, is more fully presented than Savonarola's, it involves his relationship with Baldassarre more than Romola. It is not until Felix Holt that the developments of outsider and insider become directly linked, a significant achievement in using the conventions of the novel to illuminate the conflict between absolute and conventional values and the possibilities for their reconciliation.¹¹ This combination of characters is at the core of both Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, although there is in both these novels an almost astonishing increase in scope and complexity especially since the outsiders continue to be involved with political ideals rather than with religion as in the earlier works.

The marriage between Felix Holt and Esther Lyon which reconciles absolute and conventional values also looks back to the earlier novels and ahead to her major achievements. Marriages conclude all but two of George Eliot's novels and bring together either an outsider and an insider (Dinah Morris and Adam Bede, Eppie and Aaron Winthrop, Felix Holt and Esther Lyon) or two outsiders whose entry into the social bond of marriage is equivalent to an entry into society itself (Dorothea and Will Ladislaw, Deronda and Mirah). These marriages, except in her first novel, are connected with important and well-developed patterns of inheritance. The heirs are symbolically fatherless, able to judge the past critically. Temporarily disinherited and “orphaned,”¹² Eppie, Romola, Esther Lyon, Dorothea, Ladislaw, and Deronda select from the past only what is important to present priorities.

Society for George Eliot is more than simply a condition of life to which the individual must adjust, however painfully. Its problems and possibilities for its reform are explored with increasing insight and comprehensiveness as stable societies like Hayslope and Raveloe are replaced with traditional societies beginning to change, like Treby Magna and Middlemarch, under the impact of modern political and economic forces, and finally, in Daniel Deronda, by contemporary society itself. The widening scope and complexity of George Eliot's investigation of society is made possible by her gradual development of significant formal techniques such as the interdependent developments of outsider and insider, marriage, and inheritance. Felix Holt is the key novel in understanding the way in which George Eliot gradually learned to shape formal conventions into a structure flexible enough to explore the upheaval of mid-nineteenth-century England and to interpret it finally as a transition to something better for men.

Notes

1. All quotations are from Felix Holt the Radical, ed. George Levine (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970).

2. In her review of Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl's The Natural History of German Life for the Westminster Review of July, 1856, George Eliot agrees with his recognition of the organic bonds between society's present and past. Language is used as a metaphor, as Carlyle uses clothes, for man's changing social institutions. “Language must be left to grow in precision, completeness, and unity, as minds grow in clearness, comprehensiveness, and sympathy. And there is an analogous relation between the moral tendencies of men and the social conditions they have inherited. The nature of European men has its roots intertwined with the past, and can only be developed by allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the process of development is going on, until that perfect ripeness of the seed which carries with it a life independent of the root. This vital connexion with the past is much more vividly felt on the Continent than in England, where we have to recall it by an effort of memory and reflection; for though our English life is in its core intensely traditional, Protestantism and commerce have modernized the face of the land and the aspects of society in a far greater degree than in any continental country” (The Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1967], p. 288).

3. For a fuller discussion of George Eliot's conservative attitude towards political solutions for social problems, see Thomas Pinney. “The Authority of the Past in George Eliot's Novels,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 21 (September, 1966), 131-47.

4. On 9 January 1866, George Eliot wrote to Frederic Harrison for advice on the Transome will. Significantly, her major concern was the extent of time that the will would influence. She wrote, “I should be glad of as large a slice of a century as you could give me, but I should be resigned if I could get forty years.” In three lengthy letters written on January 11, 27, and 29, Harrison suggested what amount to the broad outlines of the Transome will. See The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon Haight (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954-56), IV, 216-32 and 237-40.

5. George Eliot rejected Frederic Harrison's suggestion that Esther turn out to be a Transome as well as a Bycliffe. As a Transome-Bycliffe, Esther would have been more closely allied with the past. See Letters, IV, 230-31.

6. Social distinctions do not disappear. George Eliot did not foresee any benefits from the abolition of the class structure, and was sympathetic to von Riehl's belief that “in modern society the divisions of rank indicate division of labour, according to that distribution of functions in the social organism which the historical constitution of society has determined” (Essays, p. 296). In the “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt,” published in the Blackwood's Magazine of January, 1868, Felix Holt advises the working classes that, while their claims are just, these claims must find expression in changes that would not give a “fatal shock” to the “living body” of society as a whole. Particular changes “can be good only in proportion … as they put knowledge in the place of ignorance, and fellow-feeling in the place of selfishness. In the course of that substitution class distinctions must inevitably change their character; and represent the varying Duties of men, not their varying Interests” (Essays, p. 422). In this way, social distinctions will gradually be unified with absolute moral values so that what von Riehl called “the principle of differentiation and the principle of unity” become “identical” (Essays, p. 296).

7. Matthew Arnold uses the metaphor of machinery in Culture and Anarchy. “Faith in machinery is, I said, our besetting danger; often in machinery most absurdly disproportioned to the end which machinery, if it is to do any good at all, is to serve; but always in machinery as if it had a value in and for itself” (Culture and Anarchy, ed. R. H. Super [Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1965], p. 96). Arnold identifies “machinery” with a wide range of things—railroads, coal, wealth, industrialism in general, religious organizations, and radical political movements like Jacobinism. Culture, which is concerned with man's spiritual development, must evaluate and direct society's economic and political machinery. “The idea which culture sets before us of perfection,—an increased spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy,—is an idea which the new democracy needs far more than the idea of the blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of its own industrial performances” (p. 109).

8. It is tempting to go so far as to suggest that it is Esther who is “nominated” on the day of Transome's nomination speech and who is “elected” on election day when her claim to the estate becomes valid.

9. David R. Carroll is one of the few critics to recognize that the fate of society itself is a central issue in Felix Holt. In his article, “Felix Holt: Society as Protagonist,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 17 (December, 1962), 237-52, he suggests that society's growth parallels Esther's development but does not link her role as heir to the Transome estate with George Eliot's vision of society.

10. In the “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt,” the opposition between a wisdom seen as “outside” society and the social structure is explained by Felix Holt. “Wisdom stands outside of man and urges itself upon him … before it finds a home within him, directs his actions. … But while still outside of us, wisdom often looks terrible, and wears strange forms, wrapped in the changing conditions of a struggling world. It wears now the form of wants and just demands in a great multitude of British men: wants and demands urged into existence by the forces of a maturing world. And it is in virtue of this—in virtue of this presence of wisdom on our side as a mighty fact, physical, and moral, which must enter into and shape the thoughts and actions of mankind—that we working men have obtained the suffrage. … But now, for our own part, we have to seriously consider this outside wisdom which lies in the supreme unalterable nature of things, and watch to give it a home within us and obey it. If the claims of the unendowed multitude of working men hold within them principles which must shape the future, it is not less true that the endowed classes, in their inheritance from the past, hold the precious material without which no worthy, noble future can be moulded. … Here again we have to submit ourselves to the great law of inheritance” (Essays, p. 429). In this passage Felix Holt expresses rhetorically what the novel presents formally through the marriage of the insider-heir and the outsider.

11. The interrelated developments of the outsider and insider can be seen as George Eliot's effort to explore and try to resolve what she calls the conflict between Antigone and Creon in her article for the Leader, “The Antigone and its Moral” (29 March 1856). “Whenever the strength of a man's intellect, or moral sense, or affection brings him into opposition with the rules which society has sanctioned, there is renewed the conflict between Antigone and Creon” (Essays, p. 265). Her belief that this conflict is an “antagonism between valid claims” is reflected in the complex “leavening process” in which the different weaknesses of the outsider and the insider are corrected and their different strengths combined.

12. Ian Adam has discussed the significance of “lost children” in terms of the problems in individual character development in “Character and Destiny in George Eliot's Fiction,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 20 (September, 1965). 127-43.