Conclusion

Summary

George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) opens with a coachman and a traveller passing through districts of the English Midlands by stagecoach. Seated on the box next to the coachman, the ‘happy outside passenger’ revels in the driver's stories of ‘English labours in town and country’ and in his detailed knowledge of the landscape. The narrator notes that as the traveller's journey unfolds, he passes from ‘one phase of English life to another’: from ‘a village dingy with coal-dust, noisy with the shaking of looms’, quickly followed by ‘a parish all of fields, high hedges, and deep rutted lanes’, to a ‘manufacturing town, the scenes of riots and trades-union meetings’, and within ‘ten minutes’ to a ‘neighbourhood of the town’ whose inhabitants care nothing for politics (1871: 10). It would be ‘easy’, the narrator avers, for the ‘traveller to conceive that town and country had no pulse in common’ (1871: 10). But should Eliot's readers?

Reflecting on this scene, Raymond Williams once remarked that the introduction to Felix Holt engages in a mystification. In comparison to the ‘busy scenes of the shuttle and the wheel, of the roaring furnace, of the shaft and the pulley’, to say nothing of the violence of rioters in the manufacturing regions, the peacefulness of the countryside – with its ‘low gray sky’ that seems to effect ‘an unchanging stillness as if Time itself were pausing’ – would be experienced by the traveller as a welcome relief (Eliot 1871: 10). Because the journey takes place thirty-five years before the novel was written, Williams suggests that Eliot – who directs the reader to view the Midlands through the eyes of the traveller (Williams 1973: 178) – engenders in readers a nostalgia for the past.

Yet throughout the novel, Eliot, in fact, shows that both town and country are fundamentally interconnected and share the same ‘pulse’. In Our Village, Mitford's narrator insists that her village had ‘a trick of standing still, of remaining stationary, unchanged and unimproved in this most changeable and improving world’ (Mitford 1826a: 1). The narrative itself, however, reveals not only changes but significant changes. Similarly, in Gaskell's Cranford, Mary Smith's statement that nothing has happened between her visits to the village from the industrial town of Drumble may conjure in one's mind a timeless world. But her narrative, too, documents all sorts of change.