Following the lead of Eliot’s beloved Walter Scott, this is a historical novel. It is set in the time between the Napoleonic French troops quitting Egypt (about 1800) and the Treaty of Paris (about 1802); it references these events as well as Nelson, Arkwright’s mills and the recent publication of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ (first published in 1798):
- “We must have something beside Gospel i’ this world. Look at the canals an’ th’ aqueducs, an’ th’ coal-pit engines, and Arkwright’s mills there at Cromford: a man must learn summat beside Gospel to make them things, I reckon.” (C 1) Right from the start, the context is given, and quite naturally.
- “I know you are fond of queer wizard-like stories. It’s a volume of poems, ‘Lyrical Ballads’: most of them seem to be twaddling stuff; but the first is in a different style - ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is the title. I can hardly make head or tail of it as a story, but it’s a strange, stroking thing.” (C 5)
- “The news that ‘Bony’ was come back from Egypt was comparatively insipid, and the repulse of the French in Italy was nothing to Mrs Poyser’s repulse of the old Squire.” (C 33)
But there are some glorious characters among the lesser parts. Mrs Poyser the farmer’s wife has a marvellous line in garrulous invective - “Mrs Poyser, once launched into conversation, always sailed along without any check from her preliminary awe of the gentry. The confidence she felt in her own powers of exposition was a motive force that overcame all resistance.” - which leads her to give even the Squire a tongue-lashing, and some brilliant lines:
- “As for farming, it’s putting money into your pocket wi’ your right hand and fetching it out wi’ your left. As far as I can see, it’s raising victual for other folks, and just getting a mouthful for yourself.” (C 6)
- “It’s like as if you’d been cooking a feast and had got the smell of it for your pains.” (C 6)
- “it’s no use filling your pocket full of money if you’ve got a hole in the corner.” (C 9)
- “She might as well dress herself fine to sit back’ards on a donkey.” (C 9)
- “You’re about as near the right language as a pig’s squeaking is like a tune played on a key-bugle.” (C 32)
- “When one end o’ th’ bridge tumbles down, where’s th’ use o’ th’ other stannin’?” (C 10)
- “he could no more ha’ done wi’out me nor one side o’ the scissars can do wi’out th’ other” (C 10)
- “men ne’er know whether the floor’s clean or cat-licked.” (C 12)
- “what’s liking got to do wi’t? It’s choice o’ mislikings is all I’n got i’ this world.” (C 12)
- “he knowsna as I put salt in’s broth, but he’d miss it pretty quick if it warna there.” (C 51)
- “Thee think’st thy mother knows nought, but she war alive afore thee wast born.” (C 51)
It's a big book and the first third is, perhaps, a little slow: Eliot takes her time building up the situation. But once it gets going it is a reasonably quick read. Although the plot is really rather predictable to modern eyes, and the goody-goodies are perhaps a little too perfect, there is bags of verisimiltude and some great comedy.
- “If a man does bits o’ jobs out o’ working hours - builds an over for ‘s wife to save her from going to the bakehouse, or scratch at his bit o’ garden and makes two potatoes grow instead o’ one, he’s doing more good, and he’s just as near to God, as if he was running after some preacher and a-praying and a-groaning.” (C 1): The Victorian virtues of God, but self-help first.
- “Thee’t like they dog Gyp - thee bark’st at me sometimes, but thee allays lick’st my hand after.” (C 1)
- “A little sunny-haired girl between three and four, who, seated on a high chair at the end of the ironing-table, was arduously clutching the handle of a miniature iron with her tiny fat fist, and ironing rags with an assiduity that required her to put her little red tongue out as far as anatomy would allow.” (C 6): I recently wrote to the New Scientist asking why one sticks one's tongue out when trying to concentrate and the answer seems to be that it is because of overload in the same part of the brain which is responsible for both language and fine manual movements (perhaps because language was originally gesture-based) and that it is more prevalent in children before they have been socialised out of sticking their tongue out ... so Eliot seems bang in line with modern science!
- “It isn’t for men to make channels for God’s Spirit, as they make channels for the water-courses, and say, “Flow here, but flow not there.” (C 7)
- “one might as well go and lecture the trees for growing in their own shape.’ (C 7)
- “Young souls, in such pleasant delirium as hers, are as unsympathetic as butterflies sipping nectar; they are isolated from all appeals by a barrier of dreams” (C 9)
- “Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.” (C 11)
- “he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind – impetuous, warm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian.” (C 12) A bit like, in interviews, you are supposed to cast your weaknesses in a positive light.
- “young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest” (C 12)
- “We’ve all had our turn at bein’ young, I reckon, be’t good luck or ill.” (C 14)
- “even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth” (C 17)
- “Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds” (C 29)
- “it seems as if them as aren’t wanted here are th’ only folks as aren’t wanted i’ th’ other world.” (C 32)
- “he was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow. Now that’s an Æsop’s fable3 in a sentence.” (C 33)
- "In young, childish, ignorant souls there is constantly this blind trust in some unshapen chance: it is as hard to a boy or girl to believe that a great wretchedness will actually befall them, as to believe that they will die.” (C 35)
- “you can’t isolate yourself, and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men’s lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease.” (C 46)
- “she’ll no more go on in her new ways without you, than a dog ’ull stand on its hindlegs when there’s nobody looking.” (C 49)
- “It’s allays the way wi’ them meekfaced people; you may’s well pelt a bag o’ feathers as talk to ’em.” (C 49)
- “How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections?” (C 51)
- “I aren’t like a bird-clapper, forced to make a rattle when the wind blows on me. I can keep my own counsel when there’s no good i’ speaking.” (C 52)
- “she makes one feel safer when she’s i’ the house; for she’s like the driven snow: anybody might sin for two as had her at their elbow.’ (C 52)
- “It’s your dead chicks take the longest hatchin’.” (C 53)
A long read, but it repays the investment.
March 2022; 516 pages
Other books by George Eliot include:
- The Mill on the Floss
- Middlemarch
- Silas Marner
Books about George Eliot reviewed in this blog include:
- George Eliot: A Life by Rosemary Ashton
- The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead
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