[In the following essay, Hockberg explores Eliot's use of names in Felix Holt to encode literary and historical references.]

Felix Holt, one of the least read of George Eliot's works, provides a fascinating example of the ways in which the novelist uses onomastics to encode historical and literary allusions into her text. Jerome Meckier, for instance, suggests that Eliot's novel “rewrite[s] the Book of Esther for Victorian audiences,” with Esther Lyon, like her Scriptural counterpart, functioning as a potential savior of her people.¹ In a similar vein, Donald D. Stone notes the Byronic reference in Harold Transome's first name, as well as the novel's satire of Esther's romantic obsession with Byronic heroes.² Nonetheless, the full implications and relevance of the names of the main male characters in Felix Holt—Felix himself, Harold Transome, and Matthew Jermyn—are far more extensive. Each of these names is used by Eliot to encode deliberate references to historical figures and to literary history in order to create allusional subtexts and ironic undercurrents in the novel, undercurrents which are, on occasion, augmented by the etymological derivations of these very names. Indeed, Eliot's assertion in chapter three of Felix Holt that “there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider, public life” (43) applies not merely to the general historical tenor of her novel and its political backdrop, the Reform Bill of 1832, but to the thematic function of her characters' names, names which incorporate a wider historical and literary resonance.

Both Felix Holt's given name and surname are, in this regard, multi-referential. While “Felix” itself derives from the Latin word meaning “happy” and applies in general fashion to his character, and while Eliot may have intended her lay clerical hero's name to allude to Saint Felix of East Anglia (died 647) and Saint Felix of Valois (1127-1212), both known for proselytizing and works of mercy, there is a more compelling reason for Eliot's choice of nomenclature.³ Significantly, Felix's given name incorporates a literary allusion that underscores his paternalistic and patronizing attitude toward Esther Lyon, the woman to whom he offers moral guidance and whom he ultimately marries. The allusion in question is to Felix Vaughan, the hero of Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House and perhaps the best known fictional “Felix” in nineteenth-century English literature. Patmore's book-length poem was first published in two separate parts as The Betrothal (1854) and The Espousals (1856) and later reissued in 1858, in one volume, thus predating the publication of Eliot's novel in 1866. While no concrete references to Patmore's work appear in any of Eliot's letters, in view of the immense popularity of the poem at the time of its publication, it can be assumed that Eliot had either read it or had at least heard of it. As Kate Flint writes, “The Angel in the House sold better in Victorian England and America than any other work apart from Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1862).”⁴

Patmore's poem depicts the courtship and wedding of Felix Vaughan, a poet and gentleman,⁵ and Honoria Churchill, daughter of a cleric, the Dean of the cathedral at Sarum Close. It is a love story that depicts “scenes of middle-class domesticity,” as J. C. Reid suggests,⁶ and a mystical idealization of married love in the union of the allegorically named characters, “happiness and honor.”⁷ Of significance for the intertextual connection between The Angel in the House and Felix Holt, Patmore's poem suggests that women are naturally inferior to men, that “Man must be pleased, but him to please / Is woman's pleasure …” (Book I, Canto IX, ll. 1-2).⁸ In fact, E. J. Oliver, one of Patmore's biographers, contends that “Patmore was so little in sympathy with equality between men and women that he could only discuss their relations in terms of slavery and captivity. …”⁹

Thus, by encoding an allusion to The Angel in the House into Felix Holt through nomenclature, Eliot adds an important subtext to the depiction of her working class Felix and his relationship to Esther Lyon. Like Honoria Churchill, Esther Lyon is also the daughter of a cleric and is a submissive wife. She is not only turned into what Donald D. Stone terms “an adoring slave-maiden straight out of Byron's poems,” but into a domestic angel in a village house at the end of the novel.¹⁰ The name “Felix” thus has a rich allusional resonance and thematic implications for Eliot's representation of the titular figure of her novel and his relationship to gender politics.

Of further interest regarding nomenclature in Felix Holt, the surname “Holt” has an etymological derivation pertinent to the novel and, moreover, incorporates a literary model. The Old English derivation of “holt” links Felix to the woods, to wooded hills, and to groves,¹¹ establishing him as a natural rather than artificial figure or creature of society, as are Harold and his mother. As an almost pastoral name, evocative of the countryside, “Holt” likewise bears out Eliot's declaration early in the novel that “the lives we are about to look back upon do not belong to those conservatory species; they are rooted in the common earth …” (43).¹²

Eliot, however, incorporates a literary ancestor from Thackeray's Henry Esmond into Felix Holt through onomastics. Moreover, because this reinscription of a literary forbear calls attention to Thackeray's novel, it also suggests a link between several melodramatic plot elements common to both works. Given the popularity of Henry Esmond at the time of its publication in 1852, the educated Victorian reader would very likely have recognized this reference. Indeed, Eliot herself reacted strongly to Thackeray's novel, criticizing, for example, the improbable marriage of Esmond and Rachel. As she wrote in a letter to Charles and Caroline Bray, on 13 November 1852, “‘Esmond’ is the most uncomfortable book you can imagine. … The hero is in love with the daughter all through the book, and marries the mother at the end.”¹³

The literary model derived from Thackeray is Henry Holt, a Jesuit priest who helps care for Esmond as a child and attempts to indoctrinate him in the Catholic faith. Throughout the novel, Father Holt is involved in political intrigues in the struggle over the succession to Queen Anne. As a master dissembler, he has a large wardrobe of disguises and a variety of alternate identities and pseudonyms, appearing on one occasion as “Captain Holton” (96)¹⁴ and, on another, as “Captain von Holtz,” a German officer in the service of the Bavarian Elector, on a secret mission to the Prince of Savoy (310). As Holt says of himself and of Jesuits in general: “You see what deceivers we are, Harry” (81).¹⁵ Despite all efforts, however, his plot to restore the Pretender to the throne of England fails, and he is forced to applaud when George of Hanover is named king.

Several of Thackeray's descriptions of Father Holt not only demean his character, but provide a contrastive, polarizing allusion and context for Eliot's own Holt figure, who, as noted earlier, functions as a lay clerical figure in the novel that bears his name. Henry Holt, we are told, “had a vast power of subjecting those who came near him” (69), a trait reinscribed in Felix's enormous influence on Esther—an influence which, however, has a clearly physical or sexual component.¹⁶ Likewise, as Thackeray writes of the Jesuit priest, “in every point he here professed to know, he was nearly right, but not quite …” (311), and “he never played a game but he lost it; or engaged in a conspiracy but 'twas certain to end in defeat” (511). These characteristics are refigured in Felix, who is almost rigidly opinionated and whose well-intentioned attempts, for instance, to stop the mob from attacking Treby Manor end in his own incarceration. In Henry Esmond, Holt himself is imprisoned for conspiracy, but is later released for lack of evidence and banished from England.¹⁷ The reference to Thackeray's Holt thus has a dual implication: Felix may be, in contrast to Thackeray's clerical intriguer, a good and sincere “apostolic sort of fellow” (350), or Eliot may be providing an ironic context for Felix Holt, who, after all, like his literary model, the other Holt, never accomplishes anything concrete, beyond marrying Esther and retiring to an unspecified village at the end of the novel.¹⁸ For those critics who dislike Felix or who would deconstruct Eliot's novel, the Henry Holt subtext questions and undermines Felix's probity.¹⁹

The reference to Henry Esmond, however, is of further interest, apart from the allusion to Henry Holt and his failed intrigues, for it also provides a possible analogue for the sensational plot elements associated with Esther Lyon's mother, Annette Ledru. Annette's melodramatic fortunes are reminiscent of Gertrude Maes and her secret marriage to Thomas Esmond, and the resemblance between Esther and Henry's respective discoveries of genteel or aristocratic birth and heritage is likewise striking. Moreover, both Esther and Henry, out of love for others, surrender the inheritance or titles that would otherwise be theirs. The nomenclature in Eliot's novel suggests, then, the possibility of an intertextual connection with Henry Esmond as a whole.

Like Felix's name, that of Matthew Jermyn is equally complex in its referentiality to historical figures and their personal and public lives. The name Jermyn itself derives from that of Henry Jermyn, Earl of Saint Albans (1604-1684). His name may have initially caught Eliot's attention because it is mentioned on several occasions in Henry Esmond, particularly in tandem with that of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, a well-known Restoration rake (248). Thus, if Eliot had not already known of Jermyn through her readings of British history, she would certainly have known of him through Thackeray's novel.

Jermyn began his colorful political career as a member of parliament for Bodmin in 1625 and for Liverpool in 1628. He was later appointed vice-chamberlain to Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, and accompanied her when she escaped to France in 1644. In fact, his intimacy with the Queen was so marked that members of the court assumed and gossiped that they were lovers. In 1645 Jermyn was named Lord Chamberlain, and in April of 1660 was created Earl of St. Albans by Charles II. Jermyn was involved in numerous political intrigues, and his reputation as a glutton and a gambler was such that he was even satirized by Andrew Marvell in “The Last Instructions to a Painter” (ll. 29-48) as being “full of soup and gold.”²⁰

The surname Jermyn, which not only refers to the “glib-tongued” lawyer (30) who embezzles money from the Transome estate, is, however, also the true surname of Harold Transome. Thus it functions further, as subtext and historical model, to link the two men and to conflate the political aspirations of Harold as a Radical candidate for Parliament with the more sinister aspects of Matthew Jermyn's machinations as Harold's election agent. Moreover, the gluttony of the original, historical Jermyn is incorporated into the fat hands of both Harold Transome and Matthew Jermyn, his father, providing a textual clue to Harold's paternity which incorporates, at the same time, a link with adultery and illegitimate birth.²¹ Like the historical Jermyn, both men indulge themselves sexually. Matthew Jermyn has conducted an adulterous liaison with Arabella Transome, and Harold, who is “fond of sensual pleasures” (93), has “brought with him from the East” a “slow-witted large-eyed woman, silent and affectionate, with a load of black hair weighing much more heavily than her brains” (290). Thus, by selecting the surname Jermyn for the unscrupulous lawyer in Felix Holt, Eliot is able to encode associations with both political and sexual intrigue.

That Henry Jermyn was Earl of Saint Albans is significant as well. St. Albans, now a cathedral city, was famous, historically, for several reasons. It was there that the first draft of the Magna Carta was read to a group of clergymen and nobles, and it was there that a famous prison stood. During the 18th century St. Albans became notorious for irregularities, bribery, and illegal practices during parliamentary elections, and sustained this reputation as late as 1851, prompting Charles Dickens, for example, to allude to electoral corruption in St. Albans in Bleak House.²² Thus, the historical background of St. Albans, encoded into the novel through the allusion to the first Earl of St. Albans, creates a subtle thematic undercurrent in a novel which depicts both the political pretensions of Harold Transome, the ethical issues that arise during his electoral campaign, and Felix Holt's own quest for civil rights and freedom for the working class.

In addition to the deliberate thematic implications of his surname, Matthew Jermyn's given name is likewise appropriate in its reference to the apostle Matthew, who had been a tax collector before his conversion and whose gospel stresses the public appeal of Jesus' ministry.²³ Thus it echoes, thematically and ironically, the implied lay ministry of Felix and contrasts with the corruption of Matthew Jermyn, who not only pockets rents and tenant fees from the Transome estate, but who is responsible, ultimately, for the death of Maurice Christian Bycliffe, Esther Lyon's biological father. Clearly, Eliot is reinscribing the New Testament association of tax collectors and sinners (Matthew, 9:10-11) into her novel through Matthew Jermyn's given name.²⁴

One more onomastic connection remains to be examined regarding the themes of moral corruption and intrigue in Eliot's novel, and that is the ironic implication of the surname Transome, the family name Harold bears, since both he and others are unaware, initially, that Matthew Jermyn is his real father. A “transom,” in its lexical meaning, not only denotes a crossbar or crossbeam, but specifically refers to the horizontal beam of a gallows.²⁵ Thus the surname by which Harold is known undercuts both the veneer of genteel respectability that his mother tries so desperately to preserve and his aspirations to political power. The moral ambiguity inherent in the reference to the historical Henry Jermyn thus finds an echo in the etymological derivation of the surname by which Harold is known.

In Felix Holt, then, a character by any other name would lack the multi-referential complexity that Eliot gives the male figures examined above. The cumulative effect of nomenclature in the novel thus gives rise to an even greater unsavoriness in the portrayal of Matthew Jermyn and Harold Transome and to a possibly negative treatment of Felix Holt himself. Given the unquestioned extent of Eliot's general scholarship and her broad knowledge of history and literature, these parallels and analogues can hardly be coincidental. An examination of the nomenclature in Felix Holt thus not only points to Eliot's learnedness, but adumbrates the richness of her intertextual engagement with other Victorian writers, such as Patmore and Thackeray. Through the subtextual intricacies encoded by onomastics, Eliot is able to create an allusive narrative texture that is, at once, surprisingly accessible, yet erudite and profound.

Notes

1. See Hidden Rivalries in the Victorian Novel. Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987) 18. Meckier also suggests that Felix Holt rewrites Bleak House, with its criticism of lawyers and the legal process which ultimately drains the Jarndyce estate. Esther Summerson, however, never becomes a potential savior of her people, as does Eliot's Esther. See 3-4 and 13-26.

2. See Donald D. Stone, The Romantic Impulse in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1980) 229, regarding the Byronic ambience that colors Harold's entry into the narrative. All page references to Eliot's novel are from Felix Holt, ed. and introd. Fred C. Thomson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

3. For the lexical meaning of “Felix,” see The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) 1321.

   Given Eliot's extensive historical knowledge and her interest in hagiology, evidenced by her use of prototypes based on saints' lives elsewhere in her fiction—most notably in Middlemarch—it is entirely possible that Eliot wished to encode a subtext to Felix's role as lay cleric and social activist through an onomastic allusion to these canonized historical models. For a summary of these saints' lives see The Encyclopaedia Britannica (1966) Vol. 9: 158.

   Eliot's repeated creation of lay clerical figures is by now a critical commonplace. In Felix Holt itself, see, for example, the following: Harold Transome terms Felix “an apostolic sort of fellow” (350); Esther tells Felix, “You should really found a sect. Preaching is your vocation” (165); Eliot writes of Esther that “The first religious experience of her life … had come to her through Felix Holt” (255); Felix mentions his “conversion from debauchery” (53), almost as if he is being called to sainthood or apostolic vocation; and Felix speaks of vocation united to the love of a “woman whose beauty makes a great task easier to men instead of turning them away from it” (222). The conflict between Rufus Lyon's “ministerial vocation” (143) and his love for Annette Ledru forms a suitable contrast.

4. Kate Flint, Dickens (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1986) 114-15.

5. Frederick Page writes that Vaughan's poetic vocation parallels that of Patmore himself or possibly Tennyson. See Patmore. A Study in Poetry (New York: Archon Books, 1970) 48. I suggest that the name Vaughan is probably another onomastic code, an allusion to the seventeenth-century devotional poet Henry Vaughan (1621-95), since Felix speaks of love in sacramental fashion in The Angel in the House.

6. J. C. Reid, The Mind and Art of Coventry Patmore (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957) 255.

7. See Wendell Stacy Johnson, Sex and Marriage in Victorian Poetry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975) 75.

8. For the text of Patmore's poem see The Angel in the House together with the Victories of Love, ed. Alice Meynell (London: George Routledge and Sons, and New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., n.d.). John Wilson Bowyer and John Lee Brooks quote Patmore as having said that “No right-minded woman would care a straw for her lover's adoration if she did not know that he knew that after all he was the true divinity.” See The Victorian Age. Prose, Poetry, and Drama, ed. John Wilson Bowyer and John Lee Brooks, Second Edition (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1954) 608.

9. Coventry Patmore (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956) 186.

10. Stone 226. Stone also suggests that Felix “enunciates the Comtist position on woman as an ennobling influence—a Madonna in the house—who makes ‘man's passion for her rush in one current with all the great aims of his life’ (II, 39)” (227). Given, however, the significance of nomenclature in the novel, I suggest that Patmore's angel is yet another influence or subtext, and does not, in any event, exclude Stone's contention.

11. Webster's 670 and The Compact OED 1321.

12. It should not be surprising that Eliot deliberately encoded etymologies into her works, since, clearly, she is punning on the Latin derivation of “Radical,” from the word “radix” or “root,” in the title of her novel. See Webster's 1171, and The Compact OED, Vol. 2, 2574. Felix is “rooted in the common soil” (43), and in response to Rufus Lyon's query as to whether he is a “Radical, or Root-and-branch man,” Felix replies that he wants “to go to some roots a good deal lower down than the franchise” (224). Harold, the other Radical in the novel, says, “I am a Radical only in rooting out abuses” (38), and “I belong by my birth to the classes that have their roots in tradition and all the old loyalties” (152).

    Jerome Meckier writes that Eliot redefines Radicalism “to mean change continuing organically via careful evolution from the root, center or fundamental source of life, an energy perceived as positive and good” (21).

13. See The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 2, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954) 67. Other references to Henry Esmond in Eliot's letters include: Vol. 2:80, 157; and Vol. 4 (1955) 79, 90-91.

14. The History of Henry Esmond, ed. John Sutherland and Michael Greenfield, introd. John Sutherland (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972). All page references are to this edition.

15. Thackeray also writes: “The moral of the Jesuits' story I think as wholesome a one as ever was writ: the artfullest, the wisest, the most toilsome, and dextrous plot-builders in the world …” (232).

16. See, for example, the continual references to Felix's gaze, his “large clear grey eyes” (58), which seem to overmaster Esther, and the massive “barbaric” grandeur of his form (371). Felix's own sensuality is made clear in the mention of his “six weeks of debauchery” (53) and in his declaration that “I'll never marry, though I should have to live on raw turnips to subdue my flesh” (63). Stone notes that “the most interesting aspect of Eliot's treatment of Felix Holt is the linking of his mesmeric hold over others with his sexual magnetism” (226).

17. Other instances of imprisonment in Thackeray's novel include that of Esmond himself and Isabella, Viscountess of Castlewood (202 ff. and 98 ff., respectively).

18. Henry Holt ends his career in America, buried in an unnamed location somewhere in Maryland (511).

19. Fred C. Thomson, for example, asserts, in a different context, that “the dearth of camaraderie in Felix, his belligerent pedantry, his aloofness from the community life in Treby, to say nothing of the shadowiness of his background and motivation, weaken his effectiveness as a spokesman for George Eliot” (“Introduction,” xii). Similarly, Stone terms Felix “the most insufferable of Eliot's Rousseauesque heroes” (225-26).

20. See David Williamson, Debrett's Kings and Queens of Britain (Exeter, Devon: Will and Bower, 1986) 141; The Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 10, ed. Sir Leslie Stephens and Sir Sidney Lee (London: Humphrey Milford and Oxford University Press, 1917) 779-81; and Charles Carlton, Charles I. The Personal Monarch (London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983) 253, regarding the possibility of Jermyn's adultery with Henrietta Maria. In his other book on the period of Charles I, Archbishop William Laud (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), Carlton describes Jermyn as “the queen's pet” (182). For the full text of “The Last Instructions to a Painter” see The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, Vol. 1, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) 141-165, ll. 29-48. Marvell's satire emphasizes Jermyn's greed, gluttony, massive corporeality, and his taste for gambling:

    “Paint then St. Albans full of soup and gold,
    The new Courts pattern, Stallion of the old.
    Him neither Wit nor Courage did exalt,
    But Fortune chose him for her pleasure salt.
    Paint him with Drayman's Shoulders, butchers Mien,
    Member'd like Mules, with Elephantine chine.
    Well he the Title of St. Albans bore,
    For new Bacon study'd Nature more.
    But Age, allaying now that youthful heat
    Fits him in France to play at Cards and treat.”

    (ll. 29-38)

21. The textual clues to Harold's paternity are numerous, but the fat hands of both men constitute one of Eliot's more subtle touches, especially in light of Mrs. Transome's fear, regarding Harold's appearance, that “though the likeness to herself was no longer striking, the years had overlaid it with another likeness which would have arrested her” (17). This likeness includes Harold's “plump hand” and his having grown stout in Greece (17). Jermyn, too, is “fat,” and his hands are described as “white, fat, but beautifully shaped” (30). The hints at a physical resemblance between father and son culminate at the end of the novel, when Harold looks in the mirror at his own reflection and that of Jermyn and sees “the hated fatherhood reasserted” (381). Felicia Bonaparte points out the general plumpness of both men as a textual clue to Harold's biological father in Will and Destiny. Morality and Tragedy in George Eliot's Novels (New York: New York University Press, 1975) 73. Also see Dorothea Barrett, Vocation and Desire. George Eliot's Heroines (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Barrett writes that “Harold also has fat hands, which he habitually rubs together in the mercantile manner of his natural father …” (109).

22. Britannica (1966) Vol. 19: 888-89. Electoral corruption in St. Albans was a topical subject even at the time Dickens wrote Bleak House in 1853. As Susan Shatto writes in The Companion to Bleak House (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), “The town had featured prominently in the press and in Punch since the spring of 1851, when a parliamentary election disclosed the existence of widespread and long-standing bribery and corruption in the borough” (65). Dickens refers to St. Albans in Chapter 6 of his novel. See Bleak House, ed. Norman Page, introd. J. Hillis Miller (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985) 111.

23. Matthew 9:9-11, Luke 5:27, and Mark 2:14.

24. A. E. Harvey, in Companion to the New Testament (Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1970), writes that the profession of tax collecting “invariably involved extortion and dishonesty …” (275).

25. Webster's 1511, and The Compact OED, Vol. 2: 3383.