Andrew Mangham analyses the importance of narrative for the German embryologist Karl Ernst von Baer, and its influence on George Eliot’s early fiction. This chapter evidences the way in which knowledge from Europe was acquired, debated, and adopted in London soirées. Van Baer’s work was welcomed by the circle of radicals, including Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Marian Evans, who congregated around John Chapman’s Westminster Review. Newly available in a partial translation by Huxley and the botanist Arthur Henfrey, von Baer’s Uber Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere (1828) specifies a theory of growth based on early differentiation of individuals, which seemed to chime with the period’s investment in industry, but also insisted on the importance of narrative. The early work of George Eliot, specifically Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and Adam Bede (1859), bears the imprint of von Baer’s models of individuation in the secularism that we find in her work.

This chapter investigates the relation of style to the emergent poetics of the novel in the Victorian era. It considers the proximity of 'style' to 'craft' and the way that representations of making in three Victorian novels address the principles and the practices of craft – though rarely are the principles and practices in perfect unison given the 'makeshift creativity' discussed here. What is at stake in these representations is a question about representation itself: namely, whether style is mimetic or whether it may be more excessive, improvisatory or haphazard than that.

Chapter 5 focuses on the “paranaturalist realism” of George Eliot’s early career, including her journal sketches “Recollections of Ilfracombe” and “Recollections of Scilly Isle & Jersey” as forerunners of her early fiction: Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) and Adam Bede (1859). Situating Eliot’s emerging turn to realism and fiction amidst two summers of seashore naturalizing with George Henry Lewes, who was writing Sea-Side Studies, the chapter argues that the most resonant connections between Eliot’s fiction and a persistent theology of nature from natural history is her choice to a) write about commonplace everyday human subjects and ordinary particulars, and b) employ descriptive amplitude to appropriate reverence to those subjects. Eliot realizes the aesthetic potential of paranaturalism, borrowing the capacious descriptive practice of reverent natural history in the service of a realist delineation of a human community and natural world. The period 1856-1859 constitutes what I term Eliot’s “naturalist phase”; the chapter deeply explores the biography by way of illuminating the formal elements of Eliot’s emergent realism.