Felix Holt

by George Eliot

  12. Letter to John Sibree, 8 March 1848. In G. S. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters, Vol. 1:1836–1851 (New Haven and London, 1956), p. 254.

  13. ibid.

  14. See Chapter III, note 8.

  15. See Chapter X, note 1. Felix, having ‘made himself a journeyman to Mr Prowd the watchmaker’, as Mrs Holt indignantly tells Rufus Lyon in Chapter IV, instead of following his medical qualifications and making himself a doctor, lacks all claim to the type of property which would be of sufficient value to confer the franchise.

  16. See author’s Introduction, note 21. Harold’s intentions expressed in Chapter I to cut down trees on the estate (‘ “what fine oaks those are opposite. Some of them must come down, though” ’) likewise bring similar reverberations.

  17. See Johnson’s ‘conversion’ of the miners at Sproxton to the Radical cause:

  ‘… We’ve got Reform, gentlemen, but now the thing is to make Reform work. It’s a crisis – I pledge you my word it’s a crisis.’

  Mr Johnson threw himself back as if from the concussion of that great noun. He did not suppose that one of his audience knew what a crisis meant; but he had large experience in the effect of uncomprehended words; and in this case the colliers were thrown into a state of conviction concerning they did not know what, which was a fine preparation for ‘hitting out’, or any other act carrying a due sequence to such a conviction. (Ch. XI, p. 136)

  Dissimulation and speech often act as signifiers beyond the merely linguistic in Eliot’s work, and Jermyn’s carefully constructed discourse (complete with pauses and Latinisms) is similarly significant.

  18. See Chapter XXXVI, note 1.

  19. See Chapter V, notes 13 and 14.

  20. G. Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ (October 1856). In T. Pinney (ed.), Essays of George Eliot (London, 1963), pp. 300–324.

  21. ibid., p. 302.

  22. ‘As to airs of superiority, no woman ever had them in consequence of true culture, but only because her culture was shallow and unreal … mere acquisitions carried about, and not knowledge thoroughly assimilated so as to enter into the growth of character’ (‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’, The Leader, 13 October 1855, in Pinney (1963), p. 203). The implications of this should be remembered for Mrs Transome who, we are told in Chapter I, ‘was used to rule in virtue of acknowledged superiority’, so much so that in meeting Rufus Lyon, she regards him with marked deficiency of sympathy, that cardinal (and truer) virtue in Eliot’s canon: ‘Mrs Transome hardly noticed Mr Lyon, not from studied haughtiness, but from sheer mental inability to consider him – as a person ignorant of natural history is unable to consider a fresh-water polype otherwise than as a sort of animated weed, certainly not fit for table.’

  23. G. Eliot, Adam Bede (London, 1859), Chapter XVII.

  24. See Chapter 1, note 4, and Chapter X, note 3.

  25. Esther’s attitudes to the ‘homage’ which had once figured highly in her own dreams of romance also provide a useful index to her shifting sensibilities on this score, so that in Chapter XI, when Harold pays the ‘homage’ she had once desired, again the wish-fulfiolment is disturbed by other perceptions which have little to do with such superficial attention:

  ‘Ah, how chivalrous you are!’ said Esther, as Harold, kneeling on one knee, held her silken netting-stirrup for her to put her foot through. She had often fancied pleasant scenes in which such homage was rendered to her, and the homage was not disagreeable now it was really come; but, strangely enough, a little darting sensation at that moment was accompanied by the vivid remembrance of some one who had never paid the least attention to her foot.

  26. G. Eliot, ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’, in Pinney (1963), p. 205.

  27. This parallels the argument Eliot sets out in her essay on ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’ in 1855, where she both explores the fact that ‘while men have a horror of such faculty of culture in the other sex as tends to place it on a level with their own, they are really in a state of subjection to ignorant and feeble-minded women’, while also contending, in a format which prepares for Harold’s own orthodoxy on this point, that ‘There is a notion commonly entertained among men that an instructed woman, capable of having opinions, is likely to prove an impracticable yoke-fellow, always pulling one way when her husband wants to go the other … But surely, as far as obstinacy is concerned, your unreasoning animal is the most unmanageable of creatures.’ (In Pinney (1963), p. 203.)

  28. A. Booth, Greatness Engendered. George Eliot and Virginia Woolf (Ithaca, NY, 1992), p. 205.

  29. G. Eliot, ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’, in Pinney (1963), p. 204.

  30. See Chapter XXXVII, note 1.

  31. Letter to Emily Davies, 8 August 1868.

  32. See, for example, Chapter XXXII (‘This breaking-off in speech was something quite new in Felix. For the first time he had lost his self-possession, and turned his eyes away. He was at variance with himself. He had begun what he felt that he ought not to finish’) and the opening of Chapter XXXIII.

  33. G. Eliot, ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’, in Pinney (1963), p. 205.

  34. G. Beer, George Eliot (London, 1986), p. 11.

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The reader will find the Clarendon Edition of Felix Holt, the Radical, edited by F. C. Thomson (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980), of interest in the details it provides of manuscript and textual variations, as well as in the information it supplies about Eliot’s own notes for Felix Holt, for which thanks and acknowledgements to F. C. Thomson are due in the present edition. The previous Penguin edition, edited by Peter Coveney (1972), is still of considerable value in its study of the novel’s historical context.

  The major sources for the biographical background of the writing of Felix Holt are:

  J. W. Cross, George Eliot’s Life, as Related in her Letters and Journals, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1884). Volume II covers the years in which Felix Holt was researched and written.

  G. S. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters, Volume IV: 1862–68 (New Haven and London, 1956).

  G. S. Haight, George Eliot, A Biography (Oxford and New York, 1968).

  D. Carroll (ed.), George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971) provides some useful biographical details, including relevant sections from Eliot’s letters and Journal, as well as giving an excellent guide to the original reception of the novel.

  Eliot’s essays also provide a useful and at times highly illuminating companion to the development of her aesthetic, and these are collected in T. Pinney (ed.), Essays of George Eliot (London, 1963), though a representative selection can also be found in R. Ashton (ed.), George Eliot. Selected Critical Writings (Oxford, 1992).

  There is a wide variety of critical books on Eliot’s work, including Felix Holt, and amongst these may be recommended:

  D. Barrett, Vocation and Desire. George Eliot’s Heroines (London, 1989).

  G. Beer, George Eliot (London, 1986).

  A. W. Bellringer, George Eliot (London, 1993).

  D. Carroll, George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations (Cambridge, 1992).

  S. Dentith, George Eliot (Brighton, 1986).

  B. Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (London, 1959).

  B. Hardy, Particularities: Readings in George Eliot (London, 1982).

  J. Uglow, George Eliot (London, 1987).

  Articles dealing specifically with Felix Holt include:

  L. Bamber, ‘Self-Defeating Politics in George Eliot’s Felix Holt, Victorian Studies, 18 (1975), pp. 419–35.

  J. Butwin, ‘The Pacification of the Crowd: from “Janet’s Repentance” to Felix Holt’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35 (1980–81), pp. 349–71.

  D. Carroll, ‘Felix Holt: Society as Protagonist’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 17 (1962), pp. 237–52.

  C. Gallagher, ‘The Failure of Realism: Felix Holt’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35 (1980), pp. 372–84.

  R. Sheets, ‘Felix
Holt: Language, the Bible, and the Problematic of Meaning’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37 (1982), pp. 146–69.

  A. Thompson, ‘George Eliot, Dante, and Moral Choice in Felix Holt, the Radical’, Modern Language Review, 86 (1991), pp. 553–66.

  F. C. Thomson, ‘Felix Holt as Classic Tragedy’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (1961), pp. 47–58.

  B. Zimmerman, ‘Felix Holt and the True Power of Womanhood’, English Literary History, 46 (1979), pp. 432–51.

  On the history of the period and the passing of the Reform Act:

  A. Briggs, The Age of Improvement (London, 1959).

  M. Brock, The Great Reform Act (London, 1975).

  N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel: A Study in the Technique of Parliamentary Representation, 1830–1850 (London, 1953).

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The first edition of Felix Holt, the Radical was published by William Blackwood and Sons on 15 June 1866 and was followed by a further three editions during George Eliot’s lifetime. Blackwood does not appear to have been Eliot’s first choice of publisher, and George Smith (who had published Romola, her previous novel, in 1862–3) records that he had in fact been offered the manuscript but ‘came to the conclusion that it would not be a profitable venture and … declined it’. It was at this point (20 April 1866) that Lewes approached John Blackwood, the publisher of Eliot’s other novels from Scenes of Clerical Life through to Silas Marner. His response was immediately more positive, though the comment that he was ‘much pleased that she should think in the first instance of her old friend as the publisher’ makes it evident that he was unaware of Felix Holt’s earlier excursion to the house of Smith Elder. After reading through the first two volumes, Blackwood made a formal offer for the novel on 24 April, offering £5,000 for five years’ copyright. ‘It is the greatest publishing triumph her returning to us,’ he wrote to Joseph Munt Langford two days later: ‘it has been a quick transaction but I have thought well about it and I do not see how I can be mistaken about its merits.’

  Progress after that was swift. Though Eliot was still in the midst of writing Volume III (which was not completed until 31 May), she began correcting proofs of the novel alongside the writing of its final stages. As she wrote to Blackwood on 25 April, ‘I am desirous to have the proofs as rapidly as will be practicable. They will require correcting with great care, and there are large spaces in the day, when I am unable to write, in which I could be attending to my proofs.’ Blackwood complied with her request, and by 9 May Eliot had the first volume of Felix Holt in proof. By 30 May, George Simpson could write encouragingly to John Blackwood of the progress of the novel at the press: ‘You will be anxious to know how the printing of Felix Holt is going on. Vol. I is gathering. Vol. II is on the machines up to Sig. K. and the whole of it will be on to-morrow. Vol. III one-half of it will be printed by Saturday afternoon.’

  Unfortunately, the proofs of Felix Holt have not survived, and we have thereby lost a direct record of the changes Eliot sought to make at this stage of the writing of the novel. Certainly a number of alterations were made, some because she was still checking various legal details with Frederick Harrison and his answers occasionally necessitated changes in the text (see, for example, Chapter VI, note 9, and Chapter XLVI, note 4). Others, such as the mottoes which stand at the head of each chapter, were (especially in Volume II) often added at this stage. ‘By the way, how admirable your mottoes are. Many of them I imagine to be your own. I see you have left blanks in many cases. Do you mean to fill them in?’ asked Blackwood on 30 April of the manuscript; ‘Did nothing but write mottoes to my proofs,’ Eliot records on 17 May. Other changes represent a simple tidying-up of various points of composition, presumably by Eliot, though some, notably the imposition of Blackwood’s house style upon Eliot’s own (occasionally random) spelling patterns, represent a normalization of the text by the printers. The latter, for instance, includes the substitution of Blackwood’s -ise spellings for Eliot’s -ize (civilisation/civilization, apologise/apologize), as well as the replacement of Eliot’s preferred spellings of a number of words (gaol, burthened, dispatched) by other variants in common usage (jail, burdened, despatched). Some of the changes Eliot wished to make were, however, subsequently ignored or forgotten by the printers: ‘Will you be so good as to say to Mr Simpson for me that I believe that I have underlined the brief bits of epistolary correspondence in the first and second volumes as if they were to be printed in italics after the fashion of the old novels. But this is undesirable now that people are unaccustomed to it.’ The italics were nevertheless kept.

  Of the first edition of Felix Holt 5,252 copies were printed, and though the reaction of the critics was, on the whole, enthusiastic (see editor’s Introduction, p. ix), sales were not at the levels Blackwood had expected. ‘There has been a small sale of Felix going on but nothing much to speak of,’ he wrote to Eliot in September: ‘I think we have about 400 on hand. I wish we could get quit of these but from the slow way the book has been dropping off during the last fortnight I fear we must consider the sale in three volumes as about over.’ As the second edition of the novel came out in December, there were still ‘a few hundred left’ and it is clear that, for Blackwood, Felix Holt did not recoup the initial outlay; before the Cabinet edition of 1878, only 7,352 copies had been printed, and these were slow to disperse. Proposals for the 12/- two-volume second edition nevertheless went ahead as planned and, using the printed text of the first edition, Eliot made a number of changes to the novel; ‘I shall look through Felix to see if there are any other corrections to be made besides one or two which I have already in my mind,’ she wrote to Blackwood on 11 September 1866. Some of these involve the correction of errors which had arisen in the printing process itself ‘Dr Althaus has sent me word of a misprint which I am glad to know of – or rather a word slipped out in the 3d volume, “She saw streaks of light etc. and sounds”,’ as Eliot wrote to Blackwood on 6 September; others emend Biblical citations, ‘Plough up the fallow-ground of your heart’ of the manuscript and first edition being emended to ‘Break up your fallow-ground’, for example. Sales of the second edition were particularly depressed; out of the 2,100 copies printed, 1,274 still remained ‘on hand’ ten years later. ‘The 12/- Felix has, I am sorry to say done very little,’ Blackwood commented to Eliot in March 1867; in May of that year the loss on Felix amounted to £1,168.

  The third or ‘Cheap’ edition appeared in 1869, though the details were arranged late in 1866: ‘After many consultations and much dubiety the opinion we have formed here is that the best plan will be to try the cheap illustrated editions of your Novels in sixpenny numbers of which Adam, The Mill, Scenes, Silas, and Felix would make thirty, ultimately to form four volumes selling at 3/6 each.’ A number of corrections were made in this edition, some major, some minor: these include changes of paragraphing as well as the introduction of some errors, presumably by compositors, such as gulled for galled (p. 339) and the ‘correcting’ of Eliot’s depiction of Mrs Holt’s regionally marked speech, as in the appearance in the third and fourth editions of orphan for Eliot’s original orphin in Chapter XXV. Sales of this edition, although ‘modest’ by Blackwood’s reckoning, were also ‘good and steady’, around 5,800 copies being sold by 1873. A fourth and final edition, the Cabinet edition, appeared in two volumes in 1878. This does contain some changes (five in total) but, contrary to a number of previous assumptions, there is no direct evidence that Eliot read the proofs for this edition and as Fred Thomson notes in the Clarendon edition of Felix Holt, ‘the variants seem to be more the result of Blackwood’s house styling or of printers’ carelessness than of authorial intent’. Among the former may be enumerated differences such as ‘Transome’s carriage’ for ‘Transomes’ carriage’ in Chapter XLII. Some changes, however, may well be deliberate corrections on Eliot’s part, such as the emendation of ‘Humphrey’ to ‘Humphry’ in Chapter I, p. 7.

  Choice of copy-text among these various editions has varied in the past, wit
h either the first or the fourth edition usually being selected. The present text is based on the former, on the grounds that it is the only one for which Eliot (together with G. H. Lewes) did read and correct the proofs. A number of the significant changes made over the textual history of the novel are given in the explanatory notes to the text, together with indications of the various changes and revisions made by Eliot in the manuscript itself where these are of interest. The manuscript is in three bound volumes in the British Library (Add. MS 32100–2), the first volume of which bears Eliot’s dedication to G. H. Lewes on 4 August 1866: ‘From George Eliot (otherwise Polly) to her dear Husband, this thirteenth year of their married life in which the deepening sense of her own imperfection has the consolation of their deepening love’. Written (apart from the Introduction) on one side of the page only on blue lined paper (and with a margin of just over an inch from Chapter XVIII onwards), the manuscript is striking in its relatively low level of deletions and corrections, especially given the complexity of the novel. Though some chapters do bear witness to considerable care in revision (amongst these could be enumerated Chapter II with its account of the first meeting of Jermyn, Mrs Transome and Harold), much of Eliot’s text is apparently written with remarkable fluency, notably in Volume III of the novel where the hand is larger and more fluid, and few changes indeed mar Eliot’s progress towards the resolution of her tale.

  EMENDATIONS TO THE TEXT

  A number of emendations have been made to the text, some restoring superior manuscript readings; others emend the text of the first edition in the direction of changes introduced in the second, third or fourth editions. Names which were inconsistently (or incorrectly) given in the first edition have been corrected throughout. In the following list, the emended reading appears in the first column (together with its source); the second column gives the reading which appears in the first or subsequent editions.