Felix Holt

by George Eliot

  FELIX HOLT

  MARY ANN (MARIAN) EVANS was born in 1819 in Warwickshire. She attended schools in Nuneaton and Coventry, coming under the influence of evangelical teachers and clergymen. In 1836 her mother died and Marian became her father’s housekeeper, educating herself in her spare time. In 1841 she moved to Coventry, and met Charles and Caroline Bray, local progressive intellectuals. Through them she was commissioned to translate Strauss’s Life of Jesus and met the radical publisher John Chapman, who, when he purchased the Westminster Review in 1851, made her his managing editor. Having lost her Christian faith and thereby alienated her family, she moved to London and met Herbert Spencer (whom she nearly married, only he found her too ‘morbidly intellectual’) and the versatile man-of-letters George Henry Lewes. Lewes was separated from his wife, but with no possibility of divorce. In 1854 he and Marian decided to live together, and did so until Lewes’s death in 1878. It was he who encouraged her to turn from philosophy and journalism to fiction, and she subsequently wrote, under the name of George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, as well as numerous essays, articles and reviews. George Eliot died in 1880, only a few months after marrying J.W. Cross, an old friend and admirer, who became her first biographer. She was buried beside Lewes at Highgate. George Eliot combined a formidable intelligence with imaginative sympathy and acute powers of observation, and became one of the greatest and most influential of English novelists. Her choice of material widened the horizons of the novel and her psychological insights radically influenced the novelist’s approach to characterization.

  LYNDA MUGGLESTONE is Senior Fellow and Tutor in English Language and Literature at Pembroke College, Oxford, and News International Lecturer in Language and Communication. She has published widely on nineteenth-century language and literature, and is the author of ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (1995).

  GEORGE ELIOT

  Felix Holt, the Radical

  Edited by LYNDA MUGGLESTONE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 1866

  This edition published in Penguin Classics 1995

  Introduction and Notes copyright © Lynda Mugglestone, 1995

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-92195-2

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Lynda Mugglestone

  Select Bibliography

  A Note on the Text

  Emendations to the Text

  FELIX HOLT

  Appendix A The Legal Background to Felix Holt

  Appendix B Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘The book is a perfect marvel. The time is 1832 just after the passing of the Reform Bill and surely such a picture or rather series of pictures of English Life, manners, and conversation never was drawn. You seem to see and hear the people speaking. Every individual character stands out a distinct figure.’ So wrote the publisher William Blackwood to Joseph Munt Langford in April 1866 after reading the first two volumes of Felix Holt. Begun in March 1865 and finally reaching completion on 31 May 1866, Eliot’s sixth novel had taken fourteen months to write. ‘Finished Felix Holt’ states Eliot’s Journal for this date, and her entries (and her letters) over the intervening time track the progress of her work, as well as the doubts and uncertainties which accompanied its writing.

  ‘I am going doggedly to work at my novel, seeing what determination can do in the face of despair,’ Eliot notes in her Journal in July 1865. References to the anxiety and illness which accompanied almost every stage of Felix Holt prove pervasive. ‘The last fortnight has been almost unproductive from bad health,’ she records in October; ‘headache’ and ‘debility’ hamper work in December; ‘I have no confidence the book will ever be worthily written,’ she comments to Frederick Harrison in January, and ‘sickness’ again holds back Eliot’s desired progress in March. As she wrote to Mme Eugène Bodichon on 10 April, ‘I am finishing a book, which has been growing slowly like a sickly child, because of my own ailments; but now I am in the later acts of it. I can’t move until it is done.’

  Objectively, however, her progress was rapid, especially in 1866. Although only at the end of the first volume in January, she completed the second volume in April, and the third, begun on 16 April, was concluded on 31 May. The three volumes of the novel or 823 pages of manuscript were thus written in little over the space of a year. Alongside her writing, Eliot also read copiously, her habitual zeal, in the stated terms of her aesthetic, leading her to ‘strive after as full a vision of the medium in which a character moves as of the character itself’. She began the four volumes of Daniel Neal’s History of the Puritans (1837) in July 1865 and had finished them by November; Samuel Bamford’s Passages in the Life of a Radical (1840), and the 1835 Reports from Select Committee on Bribery at Elections, as well as The Times and the Annual Register for 1832–3, were all read systematically as Eliot sought to strengthen her grasp of the political and historical background of the First Reform Act. ‘I took a great deal of pains to get a true idea of the period,’ she wrote to Blackwood in April 1866. Certainly this appears no understatement; Henry Fawcett’s The Economic Position of the English Labourer(1865) and J. S. Mill’s On Liberty(1859) and his Principles of Political Economy (1848) were added to her reading in 1865 (as well as the Bible and much classical tragedy, both of which lend their own individual flavour to various sections of the text). Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government (1861) was read early in 1866.

  Eliot’s well-known concern for accuracy was nevertheless perhaps most marked in her correspondence with the barrister Frederick Harrison, whom she contacted for advice on the mass of legal details involved in Felix Holt.1 First consulted in January 1866, he was to prove an enthusiastic and diligent recipient of Eliot’s queries about the niceties of law which figure in both the inheritance plot and the trial scene of the novel. He willingly sent her suggestions and information which might resolve her difficulties, his comments occasionally being incorporated verbatim in the text.2 The first time Eliot had shown a manuscript at this stage to anyone apart from her partner, G. H. Lewes, or the publishers, it was a correspondence which made a marked departure from her usual habits regarding her novels, though given the complexity of Felix Holt on this score, it was necessary. It was also successful, as Eliot recognized: ‘I have been consulting Mr Harrison about the law in my book with satisfactory result,’ states her Journal on 20 January 1866
). Some of his suggestions, notably that which proposed that Esther should be found to be a descendant of the original Transomes, were rejected without hesitation (Eliot countered this on grounds of ‘artificiality of plot’) but all were gratefully received and were able on a number of occasions to allay Eliot’s fears. Harrison’s involvement continued through (and even after) the very last days of writing Felix Holt, and he returned the proofs of the trial scene to Eliot at the end of May with further reassurances: ‘How did you get the trial scene so accurate? It is a perfect labyrinth to find out the course of criminal procedure 34 years ago.’ He adds praise of another kind too: ‘As this drama culminates I feel acutely stirred by it. It is purely tragic. The effect of it is quite overwhelming. I can think of nothing else, and I long for the rest to follow.’

  That more public and critical reception, following publication of Felix Holt on 15 June, was (for the most part) similarly favourable, as many reviewers heaved an almost perceptible sigh of relief that Eliot had, after the Italian excursion of Romola, returned to the English landscapes of her earlier novels. In their praise of the book as being ‘witty’ and ‘truthful’, endowed with ‘intellectual insight’ as well as ‘suppleness’ and ‘vigour’, the reviews which appeared in the immediate wake of publication in many ways amply justify Blackwood’s laudatory comments to Eliot in July: ‘I do not know that I ever saw a Novel received with a more universal acclaim than Felix – the verdict of the Press has amply confirmed all that you and I thought of it.’ Certain positive comments abound. Eliot’s handling of her minor characters and her equally characteristic command of discourse and its gradations are regularly praised (‘in each case the natural style of a distinct character … has been keenly observed and fully conceived’, as John Morley averred),3 while her deployment of the ‘unnumbered tints and shades’ of real life, and her habitual stress on sympathy and its own redemptive powers, realized in Felix Holt as in her previous works, receive similar acclaim: ‘the secret of her power is to be found in the depth and the range of her sympathies, wrote E. S. Dallas in The Times. ‘She gets to the heart of her characters, and makes us feel with them.’4 Issues of gender and ‘the curse which a man can be to a woman’, as one reviewer commented,5 rightly emerge as matters of some significance, as does an awareness of class and social divisiveness, and of that ‘pathos’ which may underlie events to be neglected by ‘incautious readers’ at their cost.6 Alongside the praise and perceptiveness of such responses, however, surface other concerns, largely connected with the plot which had cost Eliot so much effort, and, perhaps still more worryingly, with the person of the hero, Felix Holt himself.

  Like modern critics of Felix Holt, these nineteenth-century reviewers often seem to have felt some unease at the complex legalities of inheritance and justice which inform much of the construction (and associated mechanisms) of the novel. The plot is ‘vulgar’, ‘essentially made up, and its development is forced’, censured Henry James. ‘It is a pity that the plot of the story, which runs upon the gradual disclosure of a claim to some property, happens to flow from utterly remote and far-off incidents, instead of flowing from the mental movement of the principal actors … the plot and the movement of character rather jar and clang together,’ stressed John Morley. Though countered by other critics as essentially insignificant within the larger schemes of the work (‘We could easily show that, according to the approved methods of handling a plot, George Eliot has made several mistakes … But it is to be hoped that true criticism will one day get beyond such cavilling, which reminds one rather vividly of the old paltry squabbles about the unities’),7 the legacies of such attitudes remain, often iterated in twentieth-century criticism. ‘The unpopularity of Felix Holt, the Radical has usually, and with some justice, been attributed to the intricate legal plot,’ as Fred Thomson, for one, has explained.8 Other perceived flaws also prove difficult to dismiss, and the person of Felix Holt rears large in adverse comment; ‘a grand stump of a character in an impressive but fixed attitude. His radicalism … has the baldness connected with the word “radicalism” hanging round it still,’ wrote R. S. Hutton. ‘Felix is a fragment,’ commented Henry James, and modern criticism has again tended to maintain a certain continuity in this respect, as Felix is isolated as a figure who serves rather as a figurehead, a symbol without substance: ‘a lifeless figure, except in local flashes’, as Barbara Hardy, for example, contends.9 ‘Felix, as a political figure in the novel, does not begin to exist,’ R. T. Jones likewise asserts.10 In this context, Felix Holt, in spite of Blackwood’s pleasure as he accepted the novel for publication, has thus often been counted among Eliot’s relative failures rather than her genuine successes. Just as Romola tends to be categorized as Eliot’s ‘Italian’ novel, Felix Holt has often been labelled her ‘political’ one, with a certain marginalization among critical comment as a result.

  2

  Though it deals with the events immediately following the Reform Act of 1832, and was in fact written during the debates for the Second Reform Act of 1867, to categorize Felix Holt as Eliot’s ‘political’ novel is, however, hardly adequate. Nor, moreover, can its eponymous hero be described with justice simply as a ‘political’ hero. Indeed, as Simon Dentith has commented, Felix Holt might better be seen as Eliot’s ‘most insistently anti-political novel’,11 a view which certainly challenges a number of the clichés of criticism which surround this novel. It is a position supported both in early reviews and in Eliot’s own attitudes to politics. As E. S. Dallas pertinently stressed in 1866, ‘Felix Holt, the Radical is not, as its title would lead one to suppose, a political novel, though it necessarily touches on politics … the purpose of the author is not, as is usual in a political novel, to advocate and render palatable any constitutional doctrines – it is rather to exhibit the characters of men as they conduct themselves in a political struggle, here panting after some high ideal of what ought to be, there floundering contented in things as they are, some seeking honestly for the general good, others selfishly grasping at power and pelf.’ Dallas’s criticism cuts to the heart of Eliot’s concerns and her treatment of politics in the novel, the election in Treby Magna serving not as a vehicle for the exploration of political as much as moral concerns, and the radicalism of Felix Holt and Harold Transome offering versions of belief and of behaviour which have resonances far beyond the espousal or otherwise of political tenets. The issues of reform which concern Eliot are social rather than political, and individual as well as communal; in Eliot’s text the personal can be political in ways which transcend the narrow definitions of party and its associated patterns of allegiance.

  ‘[T]here is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life,’ writes Eliot in Chapter III of Felix Holt, and this intersection of private and public can rarely be forgotten, whether in Eliot’s careful documentation of the ‘new conditions’ of Treby Magna as it shifted from its old status as a sleepy country town into ‘the more complex life brought by men and manufactures’, or in her detailed evocation of the dynamics which come to surround the first election after the Reform Bill in Treby Magna in December 1832. Refracted through Eliot’s own distrust of purely political measures to effect beneficial social change, the circumstances which came to attend political activity in Treby emerge as an exploration of a moral dialectic that extends outside the simple outcome of elections. As her attitudes to the revolution in France reveal, moral imperatives (or their absence) cannot be avoided in considerations of wider shifts of this order. Eliot’s comparisons of the French and the English divide precisely on this point. Whereas, for the French, ‘the mind of the people is highly electrified; they are full of ideas on social subjects; they really desire social reform – not merely an acting out of Sancho Panza’s favourite proverb, “Yesterday for you, to-day for me” ’, the converse remains true in England where Sancho Panza’s ethos rules supreme: ‘Here there is so much larger a proportion of selfish radicalism and unsatisfied brute sensuality (in the agricultural and
mining districts especially) than of perception and desire of justice, that a revolutionary movement would be simply destructive.’12 The legacy of such ideas clearly informs representation of the mob in Felix Holt and its unreasoning impulses during the riot but, more importantly, it also informs the wider explorations of egoism and selflessness which surround the advent of ‘reform’ in all its senses. Eliot’s reservations on matters purely political should, however, be kept in mind. As she stressed in 1848, ‘There is nothing in our Constitution to obstruct the slow progress of political reform. That is all we are fit for at present.’13 These same reservations about political as opposed to a wider social (and moral) reform are equally apparent in the radicalism of Felix Holt himself.

  The two returning sons, Harold Transome and Felix Holt, in their different social spheres, form the two radicals of the novel, but whereas the former returns to his heritage of Transome Court, standing as a candidate in the forthcoming election, the latter returns to a legacy of quack medicine (which, with characteristic integrity, he rejects)14 and, being without the necessary property qualifications to grant him the franchise,15 is unable even to vote. The versions of radicalism which they offer, however, turn upon far more than disparities of social status. They act as concise indices of the tensions which may hold between private and public morality. Harold Transome, presented in the propaganda of his electioneering agent as ‘the working man’s friend, the collier’s friend, the friend of the honest navvy’, manifests in reality somewhat different attitudes in his relations with others. ‘Never forget places and people – how they look and what can be done with them’ is his motto, and the images he selects to describe the butler, Hickes, form a truer guide to his sensibilities in this respect: ‘He was a neat little machine of a butler; his words used to come like the clicks of an engine. He must be an old machine now, though.’ Harold’s espousal of radical principles is entirely pragmatic; he is, he asserts, a ‘practical’ man, making a ‘virtue of necessity’, though the nature of his practicality is itself radically different from that of Felix. Whereas the latter strives ‘to make life less bitter for a few within my reach’, Harold’s involves a far less active compromise: ‘A practical man must seek a good end by the only possible means; that is to say, if he is to get into Parliament he must not be too particular.’ Eliot’s prose carefully underlines the surface quality of his beliefs. He is ‘called a Radical’, and ‘declares himself a Radical’ (just as later, for Esther Lyon, he will ‘take on the aspect of a lover’), but the images of radicalism he deploys are unfortunate, and their resonances more disturbing than he knows; ‘a Radical only in rooting out abuses’, and in replacing ‘rotten timbers’ by ‘fresh oak’, Harold’s words provide echoes of other forests where, as in Eliot’s introduction, roots may bleed and cut trees cry out.16