SOURCE: Vance, Norman. “Law, Religion and the Unity of Felix Holt.” In George Eliot: Centenary Essays and an Unpublished Fragment, edited by Anne Smith, pp. 103-23. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1980.

[In the following essay, Vance defends the unity and coherence of Felix Holt, concentrating on issues of land ownership and religious dissent, and comparing the period of the novel's setting with the period in which it was written.]

Felix Holt, the Radical has not been fully appreciated. Commentators have complained of the needlessly complicated legal plot, the apparently disappointing issue of the radical promise of hero and title, and a lack of overall imaginative coherence.¹ This essay seeks to review these criticisms against the background of the 1830s and of the 1860s, the historical setting of the novel and the intellectual climate of the decade in which it was written.

The most obvious link between the two periods is the question of parliamentary reform. After the novel was published in 1866 George Eliot was induced to make explicit its implied topicality, the connection between the treatment of the 1832 Reform Bill and the political excitement which was to culminate in the second Reform Bill in 1867. In November 1867 she wrote “Felix Holt's Address to Working Men” which applied to the 1860s the essentially gradualist and ethical approach to political and social change put forward in her novel about the 1830s.² But Felix Holt is much more than a political novel in the narrow sense. It presents a comprehensive view of English society at a critical moment of transition from aristocratic and agrarian values to the new leadership offered by the middle classes in the towns created or transformed by the Industrial Revolution. The law relating to land-ownership and the social and political status of the new urban Dissenters are two important aspects of the transition on which the novel focuses, but George Eliot begins by drawing attention to the general history of the late 1820s and early 1830s.

This historical moment is brilliantly captured in the Introduction to the novel, which was written independently of the early chapters, as the manuscript indicates,³ to provide a general statement of the social theme of the whole book. After some general description the total vision of society crystallizes in the perceptions of the coachman travelling through a now changing countryside, uneasily aware of riot and disturbance and “Reform” in town and country, sensitive to the violent beginnings of a railway age which threatened his own livelihood and provided a comprehensive metaphor of dislocation:

the recent initiation of railways had embittered him: he now, as in a perpetual vision, saw the ruined country strewn with shattered limbs, and regarded Mr. Huskisson's death as a proof of God's anger against Stephenson.⁴

These terrible new railways were an important sign of the times. Huskisson, a former President of the Board of Trade, had been killed on 15th September 1830, at the opening of the Liverpool-Manchester line. Tennyson had been on the first train on this railway and took from it an image of progress for his poem “Locksley Hall”.⁵

But George Eliot's coachman was more interested in the land than in railways. Like the radical William Cobbett on his rural rides in the 1820s, he always knew whose the land was wherever he went. He was familiar with the traditional patterns of prosperity and dissipation, extravagance and game-preserving on the land, but was disturbed and disoriented by the new dimension of Reform in the early 1830s, a phenomenon which had been observed by John Stuart Mill in his articles on “The Spirit of the Age” (1831)⁶. The disputed ownership of Transome Court can be seen as a symptom of this new instability in an era of Reform. With old families fallen on evil days and new fortunes being made the coachman opined darkly that “property didn't always get into the right hands”.⁷ The Transomes were poor, but lawyer Jermyn had grown rich in their service. Durfey the heir had been feeble-minded and dissipated, as if to suggest that the older gentry had had its day, and Harold, the more energetic second son, was in a position to improve the family estates after the depredations of litigation about title only because he could bring a new, commercial fortune to the task. Harold's businesslike energy and efficiency, and his radical politics, are out of keeping with the traditions of the old landed gentry, more in keeping with the entrepreneurial skills of the new men like lawyer Jermyn who set out to make Treby Magna into a commercially successful spa. The plot symbolically demonstrates this by disclosing that Harold is in fact Jermyn's natural son and not a Transome at all. The illegitimacy is compounded in that it turns out that the Transome family have lost their title to the estates Harold was to inherit.

George Eliot was not alone in seeing problems of land-ownership as an important index of social change in the 1820s and 1830s. William Cobbett, mentioned in passing in the novel, deplored the supplanting of the old landed gentry by commercial interests and observed everywhere how estates had passed into the hands of the “new men”. Spicer the Stockbroker now drove a much better carriage then the once-great magnate Lord Onslow, and the Baring brothers, from the banking family, had acquired the lands of the Duke of Bedford and Lord Northington.⁸ The elaborate inheritance-plot of Felix Holt, with its dependence on the law as an institution for furnishing ultimate title or warrant for land-ownership in conditions of social change, is not merely appropriate to the economic conditions of the period: it functions as an extended metaphor for problems of moral and political warrant in a novel concerned with the relationship between personal integrity and social position. The politico-religious theme of the novel relates to this as well. It is not merely that political and religious radicalism have gone together since the seventeenth century and that the 1832 Reform Bill gave political power to Dissenting shopkeepers, as Wellington ruefully acknowledged:⁹ the heroine is (ostensibly) the daughter of a Dissenting preacher with tastes and instincts and, as it turns out, an inheritance above and beyond her humble social station, but in the end she eschews the position among the landed gentry and the socio-religious establishment which could be hers. Morally as well as politically this is less unique, less worthwhile than it might once have been, and in her love for Felix Holt and his moral reformism she finds a better resting place.

The themes of social change and the social status of Dissenters were still current and controversial in the 1860s. Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy began to appear in article form in July 1867, a year after Felix Holt was published. Its concern not so much with aristocratic Barbarians as with the newly powerful middle-class Philistines reflects the same sense of a changing society. Six years previously, in the Introduction to The Popular Education of France, Arnold had raised the same issues, noting that

The time has arrived, however, when it is becoming impossible for the aristocracy of England to conduct and wield the English nation any longer … the masses of the people in this country are preparing to take a much more active part than formerly in controlling its destinies.¹⁰

In retrospect the Reform Bill of 1832 seemed to represent an important phase of this transition, the beginning of the end of the old order which had been much more drastically terminated in France with the Revolution. In the period between the two Reform Bills many advanced thinkers brooded on the political power conferred by the ownership of land and the inappropriateness of this in an increasingly democratised society. In 1851 Herbert Spencer, George Eliot's friend and mentor, published his Social Statics, which was enthusiastically reviewed by Lewes in The Leader. Some of Spencer's most radical ideas, partly repudiated in later life, were introduced in the ninth chapter on “The Right to the Use of the Earth”, which Lewes half-teasingly described as a “terrible chapter”.¹¹ Spencer advocated a kind of joint-stock public ownership of the land on moral grounds, claiming that private ownership led to landowning despotism. He argued, ingeniously, that the legal fiction that all land in England was vested in the crown had a certain literal force:

After all, nobody does implicitly believe in landlordism. We hear of estates being held under the king, that is, the State; or of their being kept in trust for the public benefit; and not that they are the inalienable possessions of their nominal owners.

From this he concluded that claims to private, ancestral ownership of land were ultimately ill-founded, “constantly denied by the enactments of our legislature”.¹² By resting his case on the law, or rather on a fundamental principle of law cutting deeper than the superficial legitimacies of land ownership, Spencer provided George Eliot with a hint of the plot of Felix Holt. Through this the novelist elaborately contrived to undermine the legitimacy of the Transomes' position in the country by permitting underlying legal principle, allied with the moral principle of Esther and Felix Holt, to dispossess them morally if not materially.

Henry Fawcett, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge, was as concerned as Spencer about the manifestly unjust distribution of landed property. In his The Economic Position of the British Labourer, which George Eliot read in November 1865 in preparation for writing Felix Holt,¹³ he stoutly maintained that any law which affected land ownership should immediately be altered if it failed to promote the welfare of the whole community. Fawcett was particularly opposed to the entailing of estates on eldest sons as this prevented land from being brought into the market and caused stagnation by discouraging proper development and efficient cultivation: income and capital often had to be diverted from this to provide for the other children who could not inherit the estate.¹⁴ In Felix Holt the contrast between the eldest son Durfey, an effete wastrel who is only a drain on the estate, and the vigorous Harold Transome who has had to seek an independent fortune, is a sufficient illustration of the unfairness of the principle of primogeniture which Fawcett attacked.

But Fawcett had a more fundamental point to make: like Spencer he was sensitive to a changing social and political climate in England and did not see why there should be anything sacred about the traditional association of political power and ownership of the land, or indeed why land should continue to be regarded as inalienable private property. Some might claim that

the existence of the House of Lords depends upon the maintenance of the large landed estates of our peers. Educated people will rebel against such opinions …¹⁵

Like Spencer, he felt that the traditional rights of private property, the liberty to do what one likes with one's own, simply did not apply to the land, which had always involved social responsibilities. The innovations of the Industrial Revolution made this the more apparent: in cases of necessity the private land owner had to yield to Parliament and give up some of his land, perhaps for a new railway passing through his property, “because public convenience requires it”. Spencer had used the same argument and the same example, adding the further examples of canals and turnpike roads.¹⁶ Harold Transome's attempt to graft a new radical politics onto a traditional power-base of land which is not inalienably his is bound to fail, for there is a truer radicalism indicated by Spencer and Fawcett which locates political legitimacy in responsibility to society in general and in moral principle rather than in land-ownership as such. The empty and unhappy life of Mrs Transome on her neglected estate is a private tragedy which is also a symbol of the bankruptcy and decay of the old order challenged by the 1832 Reform Bill.

The law in Felix Holt threatens to pull down the mighty from their seats and to exalt the humble and meek, but it does not actually do so as in the end Esther waives her inheritance and marries Felix. Law is the book's central mechanism, but more importantly it emerges as one of its central metaphors. It is possible to see the story in terms of an opposition of Byronic and Wordsworthian romanticism: the aristocratic world of Transome Court and the exoticism of Harold's past life and marriage with a slave-girl from the Levant, contrast with the obscure dignity of Felix's educational endeavours in the spirit of Wordsworth's Excursion.¹⁷ Esther rightly chooses Felix and Wordsworth rather than Harold (perhaps hinting at Childe Harold) and Byronism, so her rewards are moral rather than material and the law becomes an image of moral legitimacy rather than a prize-giving instrument.

Rufus Lyon, who shares with Felix Holt the responsibility for the novel's moral positives, hints at this additional meaning of “law” in a discussion of the prospects of society with Felix. There is a sense in which the underlying principle of social harmony, imperfectly realised at present, represents the Law behind legalisms, the Law which is more important than lawyer Jermyn. Rufus sees in this the final solution to the political and social unrest of the time:

I apprehend that there is a law in music, disobedience whereunto would bring us in our singing to the level of shrieking maniacs or howling beasts … And even as in music, where all obey and concur in one end, so that each has the joy of contributing to a whole whereby he is ravished and lifted up into the courts of heaven so will it be in that crowning time of the millenial reign, when our daily prayer will be fulfilled, and one law shall be written on all our hearts, and be the very structure of all thought, and be the principle of all action.¹⁸

The writing is brilliantly concise. George Eliot strengthens the reader's sense of the seventeenth-century matrix of Rufus's thought by recalling Milton's L'Allegro with its “hidden soul of Harmony” ecstatically revealed by soft Lydian airs. But Rufus's rhetoric is firmly linked to a non-classical millenarian vision which recalls traditions of radical political thought associated with Milton and seventeenth-century puritanism. For the man of faith the realisation of “one law” is coterminous with the second coming and the realisation of the Kingdom of Christ, but for the nineteenth-century agnostic like George Eliot the words can carry a purely secular meaning. There was a kind of secular millenarianism associated with Comte's positivist “religion of humanity” which formed part of George Eliot's intellectual background, and it is not difficult to substitute for the prospect of “one law … written on all our hearts” Comte's vision of present activity as “but a preparation for the final science of Humanity”.¹⁹ Reasoning from different premises the novelist's friend Herbert Spencer arrived at a similar confidence in an ultimate future when, on condition of “search[ing] out with a genuine humility the rules ordained for us”, men might eventually come to an epoch “when there is perfect sincerity—when each man is true to himself—when every one strives to realize what he thinks the highest rectitude …”.²⁰

George Eliot deliberately leaves the content of Rufus's apocalyptic vision of “one law” rather vague, because at that point positivist and Puritan would begin to part company, but the general idea of underlying Law is put forward, in different contexts, by Felix and Esther as well. Felix's assault on the constable during the Treby election riot was technically in breach of the law but was in fact a calculated action in support of a more fundamental notion of law and order, the only stratagem available to save the mob from itself and from anarchy. At his trial Felix tactlessly defended his action in terms of general principle, distinguishing between the idea and the imperfect reality of law:

I reverence the law, but not where it is a pretext for wrong, which it should be the very object of law to hinder.²¹

He does himself no good by proceeding to argue that his hatred of disorder does not mean he would never fight against authority, for moral principle represents a higher court of appeal than legally constituted authority. The unfavourable verdict despite convincing evidence of Felix's purity of motive in the riot, a verdict influenced by the manifest prejudice of the judge, indicates all the more clearly the distinction between law properly understood, fundamental justice, on which Felix takes his stand, and the legal mechanisms which secure his conviction.

Poor old Tommy Trounsem is only a helpless cipher in the legal plot but his death in the riot (which was promoted by Transome's agent) has the morally satisfying consequence of destroying Transome's title to his estate, and this demonstrates the operations of fundamental moral law in the novel, working through the mechanisms of the law of the land. Tommy's uncomprehending words to Christian, as he loyally sticks up Transome election posters, are rich in irony:

For there's no man can help the law. And the family's the family …²²

In fact, the family is not the family, for Harold is not a Transome at all. But the law is still the law. Its inexorability and pervasiveness are a moral metaphor. If Tommy does not realize this, Esther does, for her growing love for Felix brings with it an irresistible personal intuition of underlying moral principle, the “one law” of which her father had spoken:

[Felix] had seemed to bring at once a law, and the love that gave strength to obey the law.²³

This contrast of superficial mechanisms and underlying Law is at the very heart of the novel, the meaning and perhaps the justification of the complicated legal plot, the fundamental insight which George Eliot maintains will sustain “Reform” and preserve a troubled society through major social change. Mrs Transome's tragedy is that she has never fully confronted this ultimate Law, and public and private themes intersect in the moral compromise which has poisoned her life, encumbered the estate, and involved Harold in the toils of corruption associated with Jermyn his natural father. As George Eliot observes:

She had never seen behind the canvas with which her life was hung. In the dim background there was the burning mount and the tables of the law; in the foreground there was Lady Debarry …²⁴

So Mrs Transome contrives to keep up appearances and cherishes a morally worthless and outmoded aristocratic ideal of social position and display. The sheer complication of the plot, the almost physical effort the reader must make to disentangle the problem of the ownership of the Transome estate, represents the devious paths by which the Transomes and their kind have departed from the original and ultimate sanction of power and position, the enlightened and socially responsible moral integrity preached and practiced by Felix Holt. With an excellent sense of etymology Rufus commends Felix's radicalism as seventeenth-century “root and branch” perception of underlying principles,²⁵ and this perception constitutes the radicalism of the novel. Cautiously gradualistic in outlook, Felix Holt is a radical novel in a precise though not in a popular sense.

But politics and society require institutions as well as principles. The era of “Reform” represented a phase of institutional adjustment, which was supposed to purify and preserve the principles of the great British Constitution derived from the seventeenth century and the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. The political propaganda of the 1830s claimed that the fourth William would complete the work of the third and that constitutional monarchy would come to rest on a surer foundation than before.²⁶ The 1860s registered the same concern for innovation which would yet preserve eternal values and principles, and Matthew Arnold spoke for his contemporaries when he urged that “Human thought, which made all institutions, inevitably saps them, resting only in that which is absolute and eternal.”²⁷

In Felix Holt the vision of the absolute and eternal, represented by the idea of fundamental Law, is not fully realised in the ephemeral antagonisms of Tory and Radical, Church and Dissent, vested interest and “Reform” whether in quack medicines or in politics. But it is part of Rufus Lyon's dream of heaven and Felix and Esther's agenda for the future. No existing institution, no present system of ideas could fully comprehend it. But Rufus Lyon has the heart of the matter in him, and the reader's small smile at his quaint idiosyncrasy is chastened by the warning that “none of our theories are quite large enough for all the disclosures of time”.²⁸ The plot of the novel, like the march of history from the 1830s to the 1860s and beyond, has plenty of disclosures to make, and Rufus's ideas survive better than most people's in the book. Both Mrs Transome and he have unexpected past histories, but his love has been purer and more unselfish than hers and has ennobled rather than embittered him, and his human instincts are sounder than his Puritan theology as a result of it. He could not consign his beloved Annette, or Esther, or Felix Holt, to the limbo officially prepared for those who have not professed their faith in the Dissenting fashion, and in the court scene his praise for Felix despite his heterodoxy redounds to the credit of both men. George Eliot laconically notes that he is a greater little man than his church can appreciate: after his departure they appoint a successor “whose doctrine was rather higher”, for the “one law” is not yet written in their hearts.²⁹

George Eliot makes a fundamental distinction between underlying Law and the law as it is actually used and abused by lawyer Jermyn, or by the Durfey cousin, also a lawyer, who originally purchased the entail from the Transomes and founded the line of Durfey-Transomes. This distinction is symptomatic of the reforming spirit of the 1860s, which extended to the law. New ideas about the law were abroad, even if there was little actual change. Frederic Harrison, a former pupil of the positivist Richard Congreve and himself a leading positivist and barrister, helped out with the legal complexities of the plot. It was Harrison who furnished George Eliot with the concepts of base fee and remainder man by which the Transome entail could be purchased and yet revert quite unexpectedly to someone outside the family more than a hundred years later.³⁰ Harrison was a radical theorist and reformer by temperament, associated with two of the keenest legal minds of the day, Sir Henry Maine and Westbury the Lord Chancellor.

Harrison had been one of Maine's law-pupils in the 1850s, and had attended the lectures on jurisprudence in the Middle Temple which ultimately became Maine's epoch-making book Ancient Law (1861).³¹ Using the historical method and the techniques of comparative philology, Maine had put forward an evolutionary theory of law tracing continuities of the past and present as well as organic growth and development. In an address delivered in 1865, the very moment George Eliot was writing Felix Holt with the help of his pupil, Maine declared his conviction that

if indeed history be true, it must teach that which every other science teaches, continuous sequence, inflexible order, and eternal law.³²

This extreme positivist assertiveness has been compared with the outlook of Herbert Spencer,³³ and it seems likely that George Eliot's central image of underlying Law owes something to both thinkers. Both were among her luncheon guests.³⁴ Harrison had a unique opportunity to put some of Maine's insights into the essential nature of law into practice when Westbury, a family friend and like Harrison a former Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, appointed him secretary to a Royal Commission for Digesting the Law in 1869.³⁵ This was after the publication of Felix Holt, but the project had been close to Westbury's heart since the 1850s when he had begun his career as a legal reformer in the posts of solicitor-general and attorney-general, and the two men must often have discussed it. Westbury wanted nothing less than the codification of English law, and his Statute Law Revision Act of 1863 advocated the framing of a digest of laws which was finally attempted by the 1869 commission. In the nature of things, codification or a digest of existing laws draws attention to legal principle, the fundamental law on a given subject underlying the accumulated case-law. Land-law was a particularly complicated area of the law, and one of Westbury's special interests was in the simplification of the proof of title and conveyance of land.³⁶ By consulting Westbury's friend Harrison about the land-law of Felix Holt George Eliot put herself in touch with some of the most important legal thought of the time, and her thematic deployment of the idea of fundamental Law can be seen as a metaphorical extension of contemporary ideas about legal principles.

There is an obvious conceptual difficulty with any unitary notion of underlying Law which attempts to be comprehensive, and the different uses of the term “law” in Felix Holt are perhaps a verbal device to hint at a greater unity than the novel actually achieves. Rufus Lyon's politically alert religion, Esther's sympathetic emotion, Felix's political and educational ideas all converge on the same word “law”, enshrining the eternal principle of moral order which alone can harmonise the discords of the Reform era. But this almost mystical veneration for a slightly nebulous comprehensive category described as “Law” can be traced back to the constitutional excitements of the seventeenth century.

It is no accident that Rufus Lyon constantly harks back to the religious controversies of this epoch, for these were political controversies as well: the inferior social and political status of Dissent, increasingly resented in the 1820s and 1830s, stemmed directly from seventeenth-century reactions to the successful assault on the Church and King of the Civil War period. George Eliot's positivist friends Harrison and Congreve were both interested in Cromwell and the “English Revolution” of the seventeenth century,³⁷ and her favourite novelist Sir Walter Scott stimulated her imagination with his romantic vision of the politics of religion in Old Mortality and Woodstock. Almost her first juvenile exercise in fiction was a tale of the Civil War in England, partly derived from Scott, and in a sense it is Scott's sympathetically treated Puritans like Peter Poundtext and Ephraim McBriar in Old Mortality, or the worthy Holdenough in Woodstock, that provide the imaginative matrix of George Eliot's “rusty old Puritan” Rufus Lyon.³⁸ At one point in Felix Holt the Debarry daughters vaguely describe Dissent as Holdenough and what happens in Woodstock.³⁹ But Scott's seventeenth-century Puritans represented religion at its best for George Eliot: in a review of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred the highest praise she could bestow on its religious fervour was to claim it was reminiscent of the best bits of Old Mortality.⁴⁰ Like George Eliot, Scott had been brought up in the shadow of an austere religious commitment he no longer fully shared, but like her he retained a generous sympathy and respect for the humanity, dignity and moral seriousness of old-fashioned religious notions he resisted intellectually. For George Eliot the “old-fashioned Puritan” Rufus Lyon was essentially no more ridiculous than his great predecessor “Mr. John Milton”.⁴¹

This fascination with Milton's century is entirely appropriate in a novel about the comparable political and religious excitements of a later century, and the parallel was often drawn in the 1830s. But seventeenth-century constitutional turmoil also stimulated interest in the law. Sir Edward Coke, James I's chief justice of the common pleas, challenged the royal prerogative on the grounds that it encroached upon the immemorial continuities of the English common law. Sir Matthew Hale, half a century later, compiled an epoch-making History of the Common Law of England critical of and yet in some sense stemming from Coke's pioneer work. Hale wrote after the Restoration, but he had collaborated with the Cromwellian regime “to steady the ship of the law through a tempest” as one commentator puts it, and this helped to give him a profound sense of the English common law as a vital principle of continuity in a changing world. Both he and Coke maintained that because of this “formal” continuity of the law from remote times even the disruptions of the Norman conquest need not be regarded as a constitutional break.⁴² There was an historical precedent for George Eliot's invocation of Law as a source of continuity and moral legitimacy in rapid social and political change, and Rufus Lyon provides the reader with a route back to it, but the imaginative metaphorical extension of the term “law” is idiosyncratic, a function of George Eliot's attempt to give unity to her novel.

At least one critic has complained that George Eliot loaded Rufus Lyon with too much significance, anachronistically making him both a seventeenth-century puritan and a political dissenter of the 1860s without due respect for the nature and concerns of Dissent in the late 1820s and early 1830s.⁴³ But this is both to mis-state the nature of Dissent at the period of the novel and to misunderstand the role and function of Rufus Lyon. It is known that Rev. Francis Franklin, minister at Cow Lane Baptist Chapel in Coventry 1798-1852, provided a model for many aspects of Rufus Lyon and was very much an “old-fashioned Puritan” in the same mould. His lack of interest in the political questions which exercise Rufus Lyon might seem to suggest that George Eliot went beyond her historical evidence at this point, in the interests of strengthening the links between the political and Dissenting themes of her novel.⁴⁴ This would be important in the 1860s as political Dissent and protest against the Established Church were particularly strong, spearheaded by Edward Miall's paper The Nonconformist which took its stand on “The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion”. The 1832 Reform Bill had given Dissenters a voice in parliament, which was one reason why in 1867 Arnold took exception to their manifest lack of sweetness and light in relation to parliamentary business such as a Bill to legitimize marriage to a deceased wife's sister. Miall of The Nonconformist is one of the villains of Culture and Anarchy. Lyon's political concerns do have this topicality for the 1860s, but they are closer to the concerns of the 1830s than has been realised, for in a sense political Dissent of the Miall variety grew out of the late 1820s and early 1830s when Dissenters worked for Catholic Emancipation.

It is perhaps a mistake to pay too much attention to specific models for Rufus Lyon. Francis Franklin obviously supplied some details, but Franklin was a Baptist, and George Eliot makes it clear that Rufus was an Independent, in a chapel built by the Presbyterians. Independents and Presbyterians were characteristically among the best educated and most enlightened of the Dissenters. Joseph Priestley, Presbyterian minister, pioneer scientist and Jacobinical radical had been a case in point thirty years before. Baptists like Franklin might well have been politically inert in 1832, but not so the Independents, for this was the year in which many of them decided to join together to form the Congregational Union as a better way of opposing the tyrannical monopoly of the Anglican State Church in which they had to marry and to which they had to pay Church rates. The campaign had begun about 1827, and had involved political action from the outset. Catholic Emancipation was in the air, and in this liberal climate of opinion Whigs and Dissenters formed a political alliance. In return for their support for Catholic Emancipation the Dissenters gained improved civil rights with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828.⁴⁵

Catholic Emancipation in 1829 was the first major indication that things would never be quite the same again, that to be English was no longer to be either Anglican or some kind of second class citizen, which had been the case since the seventeenth century. In Scotland one Andrew Marshall, a Presbyterian minister, bitterly attacked church establishment as a “yoke of bondage” which the recently enfranchised Catholics could not be expected to tolerate or to support financially as the law required,⁴⁶ and the controversy this sparked off had repercussions among the Dissenting clergy in England as well. Rufus Lyon's frustrated debate with the nervous Sherlock (the name ironically recalls a great Anglican divine of the seventeenth century⁴⁷) was brilliantly topical for the 1830s as well as the 1860s and also self-consciously modelled on a seventeenth-century episode recounted in Daniel Neal's History of the Puritans.⁴⁸ George Eliot hinted that the debate raised questions of universal principle and could even be seen as “part of the history of Protestantism”. Rufus wanted to inquire into the “constitution of the true church”, hinting fairly broadly that this was not the Church of England. In George Eliot's day Miall was robustly proclaiming “The Establishment a Counterfeit Church—An image carved with marvellous cunning”, but in 1832, with a quiet dignity and solemnity more like Lyon than like Miall, Rev. Thomas Binney affirmed that

It is with me, I confess, a matter of deep, serious religious conviction, that the Established church is a great national evil; that it is an obstacle to the progress of truth and godliness in the land …

Binney takes the highest ground, and so does Lyon, convinced that nothing less than the “welfare of England” is at stake.⁴⁹ It has been argued that the political temper of Congregationalism in the 1830s was “conservative”, so that Lyon's support for Transome's radical politics and Felix Holt's would be unusual.⁵⁰ But deep-seated hostility to Church Establishment is hardly conservative, and in any case the point is surely that George Eliot intends Rufus to be an unusual man, penetrating, original, learned and with human sympathies and instincts beyond the ordinary and well beyond his congregation. For them the debate with Sherlock is a social occasion and an opportunity for sectarian knockabout, but for Rufus it is an occasion of the utmost solemnity. Despite his disappointment when Sherlock fails to appear he offers to address some improving words to his flock, but his high seriousness is not for them. His politics take the same high ground, for the legitimacy of the State Church is but one aspect of the problem of the legitimacy of a political and religious Establishment closely connected with aristocracy and the land which had ruled the country since the Civil War. The highest Tory in the novel, Sir Maximus Debarry, who presides over an old-fashioned and inefficient household, is symbolically the brother of the beneficed clergyman with whom Lyon had sought to debate, and the failure of nerve of both Rev. Augustus Debarry and the tremulous Sherlock indicates that in religion as well as in society the old order has lost the initiative in the Reform era. It can no longer defend itself against the attack of Puritan and Dissenter which Rufus is aware has continued in an unbroken tradition of high principle and moral indignation almost since the Reformation. It is significant that Sherlock tries to nerve himself for the fray by aspiring to the polemical fame of a Philpotts,⁵¹ for Henry Philpotts, Bishop of Exeter, was one of the most notoriously conservative bishops on the bench. In October 1831 the Archbishop of Canterbury had claimed in the Lords that the Reform Bill, which could give many Dissenters the vote, was “mischievous in its tendency and dangerous to the fabric of the constitution”. The Bill was defeated partly by the hostility of the bishops, and when the Lord Chancellor criticised them it was Philpotts who complained that they were “vilified and insulted”.⁵²

Rufus Lyon's function in the novel is to ask unanswerable fundamental questions about the legitimacy of the Church and the Establishment which included Philpotts and the Debarrys and to suggest that there might be a higher warrant than custom and tradition for the institutions of the age. His vision of one law transcending and harmonising present turmoil and division is founded in a cleverly presented religious politics imaginatively enriched by Sir Walter Scott, deriving from the seventeenth century yet closely relevant to the situation in the 1830s and of topical interest in the 1860s. Intellectually and imaginatively, this is a tour de force. This continuity of principle converges upon the idea of Law illustrated in the land-law which takes away the Transomes' title to their estate after a century. In religion as well as in society, among the disruptions and dislocations of the Reform Era, the way forward is located in an imperfectly realised underlying Law or moral order.

Unfortunately, this does not quite take care of the problem of the unity of the novel. The “message” that human beings must be enlightened moral beings before they can legitimately exercise political power is somehow a meagre response to the vividly presented confusions of 1832. Felix's educational programme is a perfectly legitimate response to the challenge of his times. Though it is essentially a positivist specific⁵³, it has a radical pedigree in that it is strongly recommended by Samuel Bamford in Some Passages in the Life of a Radical, which George Eliot read in preparation for her novel.⁵⁴ Bamford's essential gradualism and conservative caution as he reviews his early and less prudent career is reflected in the novel in Felix's respect for law and order. In fact, Felix's family background among Lancashire weavers (such as Bamford), his harking back to the ideas of Sir Francis Burdett whom Bamford met, and even his sense that peddling quack medicines is a poor advertisement for morally indignant radicalism all derive from Bamford.⁵⁵

But this is not the real centre of interest in the novel. Felix himself is a pillar of uninteresting righteousness, with few crucial choices to make and almost nothing important to learn from experience. This makes him useless as a sympathetic unifying focus of the book's personal and social concerns. The radical politics, the election riot, the electoral malpractice and the legal plot are all conscientiously worked up from books, the files of The Times and childhood memory of a Reform Bill election in Nuneaton, but the histories of Esther, Rufus Lyon and Mrs Transome are the emotional and imaginative core of the book. It might much more appropriately be called Esther's Choice, for public and private themes coincide in her choice between the glittering but effete and compromised old world of Transome Court and marriage with Harold, and the prosaic self-denying high-thinking reformist world of her father and Felix Holt. The old and the new are most graphically presented not in terms of Debarrys and radicals but in the dignified desolation of Mrs Transome's tragedy and in Esther's moral education in sympathetic insight and social responsibility which liberates her from inane class-consciousness.

Sympathy and moral duty emerge as the real positives of the novel, domestic qualities applicable to but separable from the condition of society at large. The reader is more interested in Felix's affection for little Job Tudge, shared by his otherwise thoroughly tiresome mother, than in what Felix plans to teach him, and it is the affectionate rather than the severely didactic Felix that wins Esther's love. Philip Debarry, sophisticated scion of an old Tory family, contributes to the theme of massive social disruption by evincing a modern dissatisfaction which is to lead him out of the established church and into the Church of Rome,⁵⁶ but he engages our momentary interest and respect chiefly because he tries hard to keep his word to Rufus Lyon, where his less scrupulous father and uncle would have arrogantly disregarded a Dissenter.

Felix Holt the Radical presents a comprehensive and authoritative picture of society in the throes of political and social change. With brilliant conceptual originality it deploys the intricate legal plot as an extended metaphor for the underlying Law of human sympathy and moral order which is the only possible source of social stability. The themes of moral and political warrant and legitimacy which convey the novelist's radical insight stem from this central image of Law and link the public and private worlds of the novel. But private emotion has an independent life which may leave the rest of the world to its own devices, and this is what tends to happen in Felix Holt. Sympathy and duty are the abiding moral imperatives in George Eliot's fiction, and it is only when these, rather than the condition of England, are her starting-point that full imaginative as well as conceptual unity is possible. Middlemarch, set in the same period, is a greater book because it is less self-consciously a history of the times. Both novels triumphantly vindicate George Eliot's quiet confidence in one of her letters seeking information from Frederic Harrison:

On a few moral points, which have been made clear to me by my experience, I feel sufficiently confident,—without such confidence I could not write at all.⁵⁷

Notes

1. See, e.g., Leslie Stephen, George Eliot, 1902, pp. 150, 155; Peter Coveney, ed., Felix Holt (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 629; G. J. Holyoake, Bygones worth Remembering, 2 vols., 1905, I, 92; David Craig, “Fiction and the Rising Industrial Classes”, Essays in Criticism XVII (1967), 64-74; F. C. Thomson, “The Genesis of Felix Holt”, P.M.L.A. LXXIV (Dec. 1959), 577.

2. Blackwood's Magazine CII (January, 1868), 554-60; see Coveney op. cit., p. 607.

3. Unlike the rest of the MS this is on unlined paper, and the leaves are separately numbered. See British Library Add. MS 34030, ff. 1-10.

4. Felix Holt, “Introduction”.

5. H. Martineau, History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace: 1816-1846, 2 vols., 1860, II, 6; “Locksley Hall” 1.182: see C. Ricks, ed., The Poems of Tennyson (1969), p. 699n.

6. Examiner, 6 January-29 May 1831; extracts are reprinted in G. L. Williams, ed., John Stuart Mill on Politics and Society (1976), pp. 170-78.

7. Ch. 3.

8. W. Cobbet, Rural Rides (1830) (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 33f, 44.

9. Letter to J. W. Croker, 1833, quoted in David M. Thompson, ed., Nonconformity in the Nineteenth Century (1972), p. 83f.

10. R. H. Super, ed., Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. II (Michigan, 1962), pp. 6, 15.

11. G. H. Lewes, “Spencer's Social Statics”, The Leader, II (8 March 1851), 248-50.

12. H. Spencer, Social Statics (1851), p. 122.

13. J. W. Cross, ed., George Eliot's Life as Related in her Letters and Journals, 3 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1885), II, 413.

14. H. Fawcett, The Economic Position of the British Labourer (Cambridge and London, 1865), pp. 17-23.

15. Op. cit., p. 14f.

16. Op. cit., p. 17; Spencer, op. cit., p. 122.

17. Specifically mentioned in the text, “Introduction”.

18. Ch. 13.

19. A. Comte, A General View of Positivism (1848 etc.), tr. J. H. Bridges, 1865, p. 47.

20. Spencer, op. cit., p. 476.

21. Ch. 46.

22. Ch. 28.

23. Ch. 27.

24. Ch. 40.

25. Ch. 27.

26. See, e.g., “The Reformers of England” (ballad), Times, 11 March 1831, p. 3 col. c; 11 April 1831, p. 1 col. e (election report).

27. The Popular Education of France, Super, op. cit., II, 29.

28. Ch. 6.

29. “Epilogue”.

30. G. S. Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 7 vols. (New Haven and London, 1954-55), IV, 215-40; see also F. Harrison, “Reminiscences of George Eliot”, Memories and Thoughts (1906), pp. 146-48. I am deeply indebted to Raymond Cock for his help with legal-historical matters in what follows.

31. F. Harrison, Autobiographic Memoirs, 2 vols. (1911), I,152. Harrison enthusiastically reviewed both the 1861 and the 1906 (revised) editions of Maine's Ancient Law: see Memories and Thoughts, pp. 118-22.

32. H. Maine, “Address to the University of Calcutta”, reprinted in Village Communities in the East and West (1871), p. 205f. Compare Ancient Law, 1906 ed., ch. 5, p. 119f. See G. Feaver, From Status to Contract. A Biography of Sir Henry Maine, 1822 - 1888 (1969), ch. 5.

33. See J. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge, 1966), Ch. 5, esp. p. 165.

34. Both men also attended her funeral. See G. S. Haight, George Eliot: a Biography (Oxford, 1968), pp. 463, 550.

35. Who's Who, 1910 ed., s.c. “Harrison”. Oddly, there is no Harrison D.N.B. entry.

36. W. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 16 vols., XVI (1966 ed.), 74-86; D.N.B.

37. Harrison wrote a popular biography of Cromwell (1888) and three articles reprinted in Memories and Thoughts. Congreve lectured on the seventeenth century and planned a book (never completed) to be called Cromwell, Milton and the English Revolution: [A] Positive or Positivist History of the English Revolution (c.1890). Bodleian Library MS Eng. Misc. d. 484, f.77^v; MS Eng. Misc. d. 485, f.l.

38. G. S. Haight, George Eliot, Appendix I, pp. 554-60. See also the rather sketchy pamphlet by A. J. Craig, Notes on the Influence of Sir Walter Scott on George Eliot (Edinburgh, 1923).

39. Ch. 14.

40. Westminster Review LXVI (October, 1865), 572f.

41. Ch. 6.

42. See C. M. Gray, in his introduction to Matthew Hale, The History of the Common Law of England (posthumously published 1713 etc.), (Chicago and London, 1971), esp. pp.xxxi, xxvi-xxix.

43. V. D. Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent and the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 1975), pp. 182-89.

44. Discussed in Cunningham, loc. cit.

45. See H. S. Skeats, C. S. Miall, History of the Free Churches of England 1688-1891 (1891), ch. 10.

46. In his 1829 “Voluntary Sermon” reprinted in J. D. Marshall, ed., Memoir of Andrew Marshall, D.D., LL.D. (Glasgow, 1889), pp. 125ff.

47. William Sherlock, 1641?-1707, nonjuring Dean of St Paul's who opposed prayerbook alterations that might win back Dissenters. His son Thomas (1678-1761, Bishop of London) and Richard Sherlock (1612-1689, Royalist divine) were also prominent Anglican controversialists. D.N.B.

48. Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans … an Account of their Principles (1732-38), 3 vols. (1837), I, 420-2, referred to implicitly in ch. 15; discussed by Coveney, op. cit., p. 661; Felix Holt, ch. 23.

49. Miall quoted in Clyde Binfield, So Down to Prayers. Studies in English Noncomformity 1780-1920 (1977), p. 111; Binney quoted in Skeats and Miall, op. cit., p. 479; Felix Holt ch. 15.

50. Cunningham, op. cit., p. 176.

51. Ch. 23.

52. See Rev. W. N. Molesworth, The History of the Reform Bill of 1832 (London and Manchester, 1865), pp. 257-65.

53. A. Comte, A General View of Positivism, pp. 180-94.

54. Cross, op. cit., II, 404; S. Bamford, Some Passages in the Life of a Radical, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (1843), I,12,29.

55. Bamford, op. cit., I, ch. 1; I, ch. 5; I, pp. 47, 52; compare Felix Holt, ch. 5; ch. 30; ch. 3.

56. Ch. 14.

57. Cross, op. cit., II, 421.