5 - A Wider Horizon: Portable Interiority and Provincial Life

Summary

George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) is not generally considered to be a political novel. That appellation is instead bestowed most often on Felix Holt, the Radical, with Romola usually not far behind. Published in fourteen monthly parts between July 1862 and August 1863 in Cornhill Magazine, Romola explores fifteenth-century Florentine republican politics through the anti- Papist reform championed by Girolamo Savonarola and the competing vision of Niccolò Machiavelli. The novel was, in George Henry Lewes's characterisation, ‘flatly received by the general public though it has excited a deep enthusiasm in almost all the élite’ (Haight 1968: 4, 102). This was certainly an overstatement. Stung by the criticism of Romola, Eliot returned to the English Midlands with Felix Holt. John Morley likely spoke for many in literary and intellectual circles when he insisted in a review of this later novel that, although the public holds no right to lambaste a writer for changing characters or locales, ‘we may still rejoice that she has again come back to those studies of English life, so humorous, so picturesque, and so philosophical, which at once raised her into the very first rank among English novelists’ (1866a: 723). Accustomed to Eliot's depictions of English rural life in Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, reviewers and readers had simply baulked at her experiment.

Yet Romola and Felix Holt share an underlying concern. In Romola, Eliot attempts to think through the democratic reforms undertaken in her own time by displacing them onto a different country and an earlier era. In Felix Holt, which was written against the backdrop of parliamentary debates surrounding a further extension of the franchise, she explores the consequences of the Great Reform Act of 1832 on the fictional market town of Treby Magna. Harold Transome, the Tory landowner who cynically runs on a platform of reform, and his electioneering agent Matthew Jermyn are positively Machiavellian in manipulating the ‘faith in the efficacy of political change’ unleashed by the first Reform Act (Eliot 1871: 203).