"The Mill on the Floss" by George Eliot

Should Maggie be allowed to love whom she pleases or should she conform to the expectations of her father and her brother? A Victorian classic.

This is a long and complex novel. On one level it is autobiographical. Mary Anne Evans (‘George Eliot’) must have been very like Maggie Tulliver, a clever, headstrong and impulsive girl. Early in her life she scandalised her family when she turned atheist and something of this is reflected in Maggie’s spiritual struggle between self-fulfilment and renunciation. After her father’s death, like Maggie, Evans/Eliot decided to earn her own living as an independent woman. But when she became the mistress of a married man her favourite brother Isaac, the model we assume for Tom Tulliver, refused to have anything to do with her.

It’s mostly written in the past tense, using the third-person omniscient point of view. The narrative is framed by a present tense narrator who seems to regard her role as guiding her readers around an art gallery; this present tense narration also breaks into the narrative occasionally.

Spoiler alert: The following discussion will provide substantial clues to the development of the story.

The themes of the book
“Oh to be torn ‘twixt love and duty” (as they sing in High Noon)

This is not just a perennial Victorian theme, it is a fundamental question for humankind: as a social animal we have obligations not just for self-fulfilment but also to our clan, our tribe and society at large. On one level it is the theme explored by Romeo and Juliet: the headstrong Maggie is a Juliet and Philip is the son of her father’s mortal enemy; reconciliation only comes with death.

In MotF, Tom more or less represents duty and Maggie more or less represents passion although much of the battle between these forces happens within Maggie herself. At one point she says to herself: “Love is natural; but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too.” But all the characters live their lives on a stage with an audience who is constantly judging them. Disgrace is always just around the corner: for example, the disgrace of 'failure' when Mr Tulliver becomes bankrupt and the threat of disgrace is a girl spends time alone with a boy: “To live respected, and have the proper bearers at your funeral, was an achievement of the ends of existence that would be entirely nullified if, on the reading of your will, you sank in the opinion of your fellow-men ... by turning out to be poorer than they expected”

At the end of the book, GE uses the Christian parable of the Good Samaritan to hint that we should love our neighbours but acknowledges that the religion practised by “the ladies of St Ogg’s” is not really Christianity but “Society”.(Similarly, in Silas Marner, she characterises the religion of the rural villagers as fundamentally pagan with Christian trimmings.) In the end, Maggie sacrifices her own needs so as not to hurt her friends, and this sacrifice is immediately (within a few sentences) followed by her martyrdom.

I suspect that GE, who in her own life chose the path of love and the consequent social disgrace, intends the reader to feel, as I did, that Maggie has made the wrong choice. Certainly Philip argues cogently against her earlier path of self-renunciation:

• “It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive.” (5.1)
• “You are shutting yourself up in a narrow self-delusive fanaticism, which is only a way of escaping pain by starving into dullness all the highest powers of your nature. Joy and peace are not resignation: resignation is the willing endurance of a pain that is not allayed—that you don’t expect to be allayed. Stupefaction is not resignation: and it is stupefaction to remain in ignorance—to shut up all the avenues by which the life of your fellow-men might become known to you. I am not resigned: I am not sure that life is long enough to learn that lesson. You are not resigned: you are only trying to stupefy yourself.” (5.3)
• “You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be an escape from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape possible except by perverting or mutilating one’s nature. What would become of me, if I tried to escape from pain? Scorn and cynicism would be my only opium; unless I could fall into some kind of conceited madness, and fancy myself a favourite of Heaven because I am not a favourite with men.” (6.7)

How the old control the young

Inter-generational conflict is a common theme in novels (I have explored it in my own novel ‘Motherdarling’). The very first chapter after the Prologue opens with Mr Tulliver discussing Tom’s education and how he wants to shape his son. He succeeds in making Tom a spitting image of his father. And the dead hand of the old isn’t just found in the Patriarchy: the aunts, Mrs Glegg in particular, are determined to impose their rules upon Maggie.

The Prodigal Son

This is another Christian parable mentioned in the book. The story is that one of the two sons of a farmer asks to have his inheritance early so he can go and enjoy himself in a nearby town but when the money runs out he returns home with his tail in between his legs. At this point his father, instead of rejecting him, welcomes him and kills the fatted calf to have a feast to celebrate his son’s homecoming. But the good brother, the brother who stayed, is grumpy, feeling that his virtuousness has been taken for granted.

This is referred to as early as Book 1 Chapter 4 when Luke, the farm hand, asserts that after the prodigal son had returned home, he would “be no great shakes” and Maggie wishes that “the subsequent history of the young man had not been left a blank.” Maggie then runs away from home in Book 1 Chapter 9 and her father welcomes her back. But this is just a dress rehearsal for this theme. When Maggie apparently elopes with Stephen Guest and then returns home, self-righteous Tom, in his role as the good brother, repudiates her. I too was left wishing, with Maggie, that GE had told us what happened next.

Social matters

One of the things that distinguishes GE’s fiction is her concern with ordinary people:

• “We live from hand to mouth, most of us, with a small family of immediate desires; we do little else than snatch a morsel to satisfy the hungry brood, rarely thinking of seed corn or the next year's crop.”
• “The human faces had no sunshine in them, but rather the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want.”
• “The pride and obstinacy of millers and other insignificant people, whom you pass unnoticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy too; but it is of that unwept, hidden sort, that goes on from generation to generation, and leaves no record.”
• "Human life—very much of it—is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception”
• “Good society ... is of very expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving under more or less oppression of carbonic acid.

Feminism

Eliot makes some savagely ironic comments about male attitudes to women:
"An over ‘cute woman’s no better than a long-tailed sheep: she’ll fetch none the bigger price for that.”
“What is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.”
“We don’t ask what a woman does—we ask whom she belongs to.”

Education

• Mr S’s main method of teaching is to assume that if the pupil hasn’t understood the first time they must repeat the lesson until they do “it turned out as uncomfortably for Tom Tulliver as if he had been plied with cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness which prevented him from digesting it.”
• “The schoolmasters who are not clergymen are a very low set of men generally ... men who have failed in other trades, most likely.” (1.3)
• Tom wonders why people ever bother with Latin. “It would have taken a long while to make conceivable to him that there ever existed a people who bought and sold sheep and oxen, and transacted the everyday affairs of life, through the medium of this language, and still longer to make him understand why he should be called upon to learn it, when its connexion with those affairs had become entirely latent.”
• “Education was almost entirely a matter of luck—usually of ill-luck—in those distant days.”
• “All boys with any capacity could learn what it was the only regular thing to teach: if they were slow, the thumb-screw must be tightened.”

“Though he had never really applied his mind to any one of his lessons, the lessons had left a deposit of vague, fragmentary, ineffectual notions.”

Plot and pacing: a ‘timeline’ of the novel
There is a lot of incident. I have picked what seemed to me to stand out and tried to estimate where they come in the text:

• 9%: Tom quarrels with Bob; the pocket knife (B1C6)
• 12%: Maggie cuts her hair, demonstrating her impetuosity (B1C7)
• 13%: Mr T quarrels with Aunt G (B1C7)
• 16%: Mr T goes to his sister demonstrating that brothers must look after their sisters (B1C8)
• 20%: Maggie runs off to the gypsies (B1C11) again demonstrating her impetuosity; a rehearsal of the ‘Prodigal Son’ theme.
• 22%: The legend of St Ogg (B1C12)
• 25%: Tom goes to school (B1C1)
• 34%: Tom hurts himself with the sword (B1C5)
• 35%: Maggie kisses Philip (B1C6)
• 36%: Key turning point: Maggie tells Tom that they have lost their money (B1C7)
• 41%: Tom stands up to the Aunts (B3C3) In a character sense this is the making of Tom: his stubborn determination to restore the family’s good name will never waver from this point
• 47%: Mrs T persuades Waken to keep Mr T at the mill (B3C7)
• 55%: Maggie goes into a self-denying phase because of Thomas a Kempis (B4C3)
• 57%: Philip meets Maggie in the copse (B5C1)
• 59%: Bob starts Tom in business (B5C2)
• 62%: Philip rages against Maggie’s self-denial (B5C3): this is the theme of the book, the great Victorian theme of passion versus duty. It comes immediately after the great comic scene of Bob and Aunt Glegg.
• 66%: Key turning point: Tom finds out about Philip and Maggie; there is a grand scene (B5C5)
• 67%: Tom pays off his father’s debts (B5C6)
• 68%: Mr T thrashes lawyer Wakem (B5C7)
• 68%: Mr T dies (B5C7) Following this disaster we move on a few years and have a sweet drawing room scene with sweet Lucy and her friends. In plot terms this is a bit like Shakespeare's two citizens who meet in a street and narrate what has been happening over the ensuing gap. In style terms we have moved from a moment of high drama, four key incidents crammed into a few pages, into a much more relaxing interlude.
• 72%: Stephen falls in love with Maggie while teaching her to row (B6C2)
• 74%: Tom and Maggie row again about Philip (B6C3)
• 76%: Tom is offered a share in the business but asks for the Mill instead (B6C5)
• 81%: Philip comes clean to his dad and persuades his father to sell Tom the Mill ... so that Philip can marry Maggie (B6C8)
• 89%: TP: Maggie goes for a row with Stephen, they pass their point; her reputation is besmirched (B6C14)
• 99%: The flood (B7C5) Jane Smiley, in Thirteen ways of looking at a novel, says that the climax of a book comes at the 90% mark. This would mean that the climax of this book comes at the climax of a sub-plot only introduced at the start of Book 6. I mean, it is the climax of the theme of Maggie's impetuousity, and the immediate aftermath is an apparently irreconcilable breach between Tom and Maggie, but in terms of climax the death of Mr T would be it for me.
• 99%: The flood (B7C5)

Transitions

There are some wonderful moments when everything changes.

For example, in Book 2 Chapter 6 Tom is reconciled with Philip and Maggie and Philip kiss. The very next chapter recounts events that happen some years afterwards but in terms of the book we are only talking about a few pages and disaster replaces the earlier harmony. This abrupt transition is compared to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the walled garden of paradise. The childhood innocence embodied in that kiss is lost (the intervening years have turned the children into adults and Maggie now realises that a young lady must not kiss a young man). God cursed Adam thus: “By the sweat of your brow, you will produce food to eat” and Tom must now leave school and work for his living.

At the end of Book 5 we have a roller coaster. In chapter 5, FTom finds out about Maggie and Philip who have had clandestine meetings: furious, Tom insults Philip and demands that Maggie never sees him again without first consulting him. In chapter 6, Tom, triumphant, pays off his father’s debts. And in chapter 7, coming back from the meeting in which he had redeemed himself (both financially and reputationally) Mr Tulliver assaults Mr Waken, has a seizure and dies but not before insisting that Tom “take care of” his sister - which Tom, natch, interprets in patriarchal terms. The wheel of fortune can never have turned so quickly.

But these transitions, sudden as they are, are trumped by that at the end of the book. Maggie finally makes up her mind to sacrifice her own interests to the demands of her friends and family ... and the flood that is to take her life begins within two paragraphs.

The ending

For me, the ending is one of the most disappointing features of the book.

It is heavily foreshadowed from the start. In Book 1, Mrs T twice has a vision of Maggie being "drownded". Book 2 starts with the legend of Saint Ogg, a ferryman, carrying a virgin across the river; this seems like a reference to the Ancient Greek myth of Charon ferrying the souls of the dead across the Styx into the Underworld. Book 4 starts with a flood on the Rhine. There are repeated references throughout to turbulent waters. So it is clear that Eliot always knew where the story would end.

And yet she also knows the difficulty of endings. When discussing the story of the Prodigal Son with Luke, he points out that even after the joyful reunion he believes that the prodigal would be "no great shakes" and Maggie wishes "that the subsequent history of the young man had not been left a blank." (1.5) It is as if GE is saying that the parable should have been continued but couldn't be. And in Book 5 Chapter 1, discussing a book called 'The Pirate' with Philip which Maggie had never finished, she says: "I went on with it in my own head and I made several endings; but they were all unhappy. I could never make a happy ending out of that beginning." This feels as if GE is telling us that there might have been alternative endings to MotF but the one she has selected is the happiest possible. Because the alternative to Maggie and Tom dying in one another's arms, reconciled, is Maggie living out the rest of her life as an unfulfilled and increasingly bitter spinster.

Maggie herself understands this. Almost the final act of her life is to renounce her hope of love with Stephen. But she fears that she might not be able to keep her vow of chastity. "I will bear it, and bear it till death. But how long will it be before death comes! I am so young, so healthy. How shall I have patience and strength? Am I to struggle and fall and repent again?" (7.5)

Fortunately (?) she doesn't have to live much longer. Within a few lines of these words, she feels water under her feet: the flood has started. From now on she will be in the boat with St Ogg, heading towards death.

I submit that, despite the foreshadowing (and perhaps GE felt the need for such heavy-handed foreshadowing precisely because she was aware that the flood would otherwise be a bolt from the blue), the flood is a 'deus ex machina', an unprompted device designed to get to the (happiest possible) ending. It's just a little too convenient. It stops the story just where the prodigal son parable stops. But I agree with Maggie in wishing the story hadn't ended there. Imagine Maggie living into defiant old age, outcast by scandal from society, perhaps marrying Philip and having an affair with Stephen, or maybe staying single until another suitor came along. 

Characters

Eliot draws some wonderful characters. Some of them are Dickens-style caricatures, others are more complex. But none of the characters, except perhaps for Maggie, can be said to have a character arc. Tom is self-righteous and inflexible and determined to do his duty throughout. No-one changes over the course of the novel.

Maggie, the protagonist

Maggie is impulsive. When the aunts praise pretty Lucy and criticise Maggie's untameable hair she goes upstairs and cuts her hair off: “She didn’t want her hair to look pretty—that was out of the question—she only wanted people to think her a clever little girl, and not to find fault with her.” Then, too late, she regrets it: “She could see clearly enough, now the thing was done, that it was very foolish, and that she should have to hear and think more about her hair than ever; for Maggie rushed to her deeds with passionate impulse, and then saw not only their consequences, but what would have happened if they had not been done, with all the detail and exaggerated circumstance of an active imagination.”

Maggie is, perhaps, better than Tom because she knows when she has done wrong but he doesn't:

• “Sometimes when I have done wrong, it has been because I have feelings that you would be the better for, if you had them.”
• “If you had done anything very wrong, I should be sorry for the pain it brought you; I should not want punishment to be heaped on you. But you have always enjoyed punishing me—you have always been hard and cruel to me: even when I was a little girl.”

Tom says about Maggie that he can “never feel certain about anything with you. At one time you take pleasure in a sort of perverse self-denial, and at another you have not resolution to resist a thing that you know to be wrong.”

GE has Maggie think: “It seemed as if he held a glass before her to show her her own folly and weakness—as if he were a prophetic voice predicting her future fallings—and yet, all the while, she judged him in return: she said inwardly that he was narrow and unjust” and then say: “you ought not to treat me with hard contempt on the ground of faults that I have not committed yet.” So much for pre-emptive strikes!

Tom, the antagonist

Tom’s principal characteristic is his determination to hold to whatever course he has fixed. This is already shown in his childhood quarrel with Bob in which, reluctantly, he forfeits the joys of hunting rats because Bob has tried to cheat him. Tom is resolute duty. He is utterly self-righteous, always certain that he is in the right. He never has any regrets. 

• “If Tom had told his strongest feeling at that moment, he would have said, ‘I’d do just the same again.’ That was his usual mode of viewing his past actions; whereas Maggie was always wishing she had done something different.” What's more, he nevewr
• “Tom was ... quite sure that his own motives as well as actions were good, else he would have had nothing to do with them.” (5.5)
• His sister tells him: “You have no pity; you have no sense of your own imperfection and your own sins.” (5.5)

Perhaps Tom’s determination to do the right thing as mandated by his social circle stems from his innate shyness. “He stood looking at nothing in particular, with the blushing, awkward air and semi-smile which are common to shy boys when in company—very much as if they had come into the world by mistake, and found it in a degree of undress that was quite embarrassing.”

Is Tom dyslexic? His dad says: “He isn’t not to say stupid; he's got a notion ‘ things out o’ door, an’ a sort o’ common sense, as he’d lay hold o’ things by the right handle. But he's slow with his tongue, you see, and he reads but poorly, and can’t abide the books, and spells all wrong, they tell me.”

Philip, Maggie’s soul mate

Philip Wakem, hunchbacked son of the Lawyer, is sensitive and intelligent and a perfect mate for Maggie. But he can be angry and his anger is often triggered by references to his deformity, a sadness which haunts his whole life:

• “Philip felt indifference as a child of the south feels the chill air of a northern spring.”
• “Philip had only lived fifteen years, but those years had, most of them, been steeped in the sense of a lot irremediably hard.”
• “Like all persons who have passed through life with little expectation of sympathy, he seldom lost his self-control and shrank with the most sensitive pride from any noticeable betrayal of emotion.”

Philip is a renaissance man, though he sees himself as no more than a dilettante: “I think of too many things—sow all sorts of seeds, and get no great harvest from any one of them. I’m cursed with susceptibility in every direction, and effective faculty in none. I care for painting and music; I care for classic literature, and mediæval literature, and modern literature: I flutter all ways, and fly in none.”

Mrs Tulliver:

Mrs Tulliver is a meek and mild woman: “Mrs Tulliver never went the length of quarrelling with her, any more than a waterfowl that puts out its leg in a deprecating manner can be said to quarrel with a boy who throws stones.”

She is most affected by her husband's bankruptcy (she spends years ineffectually warning him against going to law but he always ignores her) by the loss of her 'best' household linen and her silver teapot; a very property-based understanding of tragedy.

Mr Tulliver:

Mr Tulliver contains the impetuosity of Maggie (he has a row with Aunt Glegg which leads to him refusing to continue borrowing money from her (which leads to the financial pressures which lead to his downfall) with the determination of Tom. It is his insistence that he will go to law that brings on the family's bankruptcy; it is his feud with Lawyer Wakem that brings on Mr T's apoplectic death. Even on his death-bed, he refuses to forgiven his enemy.

Other characters:

There is a large cast of important supporting characters offering perfect cameo roles for character actors. These are mostly Mrs Tulliver's sisters and their husbands. These 'aunts' are comically conceived but they are also a Greek chorus who represent the forces of public opinion in all its shades:

• “When one of the family was in trouble or sickness, all the rest went to visit the unfortunate member, usually at the same time, and did not shrink from uttering the most disagreeable truths that correct family feeling dictated: if the illness or trouble was the sufferer’s own fault, it was not in the practice of the Dodson family to shrink from saying so.”
• “There was a general family sense that a judgment had fallen on Mr Tulliver, which it would be an impiety to counteract by too much kindness.”

Mrs Glegg is the childless aunt and is therefore most expected to be a source of a legacy for Tom and Maggie some day but she is also the one who stands most on the dignity of the Dodsons (Mrs T’s maiden name) and sees kin as a wall dividing those who matter from those who don’t. She always accuses her husband Mr G if keeping her in the dark and doing whatever it is she still needs persuading to do. Both of them are very cautious with their money, of which they have quite a lot; Mrs G cloaks her refusal to give anyone any charity in a cloak of the morality of people should stand on their own two feet; this will become particularly poignant when Mr T becomes bankrupt and the Aunts refuse to help.

• “She despised the advantages of costume, for though, as she often observed, no woman had better clothes, it was not her way to wear her new things out before her old ones."
• "To look out on the weekday world from under a crisp and glossy front, would be to introduce a most dreamlike and unpleasant confusion between the sacred and the secular.”
• “Mrs Glegg held her large gold watch in her hand with the many-doubled chain round her fingers, and observed to Mrs Tulliver, who had just returned from a visit to the kitchen, that whatever it might be by other people’s clocks and watches, it was gone half-past twelve by hers.”
• "It’s right as somebody should talk to ’em, and let ’em know their condition i’ life, and what they’re come down to, and make ’em feel as they’ve got to suffer for their father’s faults.’

Mr Glegg is wonderfully hen-pecked but he has some character of his own:

• “Mr Glegg, having retired from active business as a wool-stapler, for the purpose of enjoying himself through the rest of his life, had found this last occupation so much more severe than his business, that he had been driven into amateur hard labour as a dissipation, and habitually relaxed by doing the work of two ordinary gardeners.”
• “There was no humbug or hypocrisy about Mr Glegg: his eyes would have watered with true feeling over the sale of a widow’s furniture, which a five-pound note from his side-pocket would have prevented; but a donation of five pounds to a person ‘in a small way of life’ would have seemed to him a mad kind of lavishness rather than ‘charity,’”

Mrs Deane has a lovely daughter Lucy who always looks so beautiful (in comparison with Maggie whose beauty lies in her wildness rather than her ability to look good in beautiful clothes).

Mr Deane has worked his way up into a partnership with one of the bigger firms in the locality. “Mr Deane’s box had been given him by the superior partners in the firm to which he belonged, at the same time that they gave him a share in the business, in acknowledgment of his valuable services as manager. No man was thought more highly of in St Ogg’s than Mr Deane.”

Mrs Pullet is always convinced that she is about to die and is always reminded of her mortality by an excessive interest in the illnesses of others. Mr Pullet is rich and they have their own carriage: 

• “Mrs Pullet had married a gentleman farmer, and had leisure and money to carry her crying and everything else to the highest pitch of respectability.”
• “Mr Pullet was a small man, with a high nose, small twinkling eyes, and thin lips ... He bore about the same relation to his tall, good-looking wife, with her balloon sleeves, abundant mantle, and a large befeathered and beribboned bonnet, as a small fishing-smack bears to a brig with all its sails spread.” (1.7)

One of the most important other characters is Bob, the lower class boy Tom befriends as a child, who grows up to become a trickster with a heart of gold.

• “If I wasn’t to take a fool in now and then, he’d niver get any wiser.”
• “He doesn’t mind a bit o’ cheating, when it’s them skinflint women, as haggle an’ haggle, an’ ’ud like to get their flannel for nothing, an’ ’ud niver ask theirselves how I got my dinner out on’t. I niver cheat anybody as doesn’t want to cheat me”

Writing techniques:

Foreshadowing

There is one heck of a lot of foreshadowing. Most of it involves water:

• “Where's the use o my telling you to keep away from the water? You’ll tumble in and be drownded someday, and then you'll be sorry you didn't do as your mother told you.”
• “The idea of Maggie sitting alone by the pond, roused an habitual fear in Mrs Tulliver’s mind, and she mounted the horse-block to satisfy herself by a sight of that fatal child ... ‘They’re such children for the water, mine are,’ she said aloud, without reflecting that there was no one to hear her; ‘they’ll be brought in dead and drownded some day. I wish that river was far enough.’”
• At the start of book two we are told the legend of St Ogg who was a ferryman (aka Charon?). The local legend has him ferrying a woman across the who blessed him suggesting that those who went in his boat would always be safe: “from henceforth whoso steps into thy boat shall be in no peril from the storm; and whenever it puts forth to the rescue, it shall save the lives both of men and beasts.” Then, the story continues, “when the floods came, many were saved by reason of that blessing on the boat. But when Ogg the son of Beorl died, behold, in the parting of his soul, the boat loosed itself from its moorings, and was floated with the ebbing tide in great swiftness to the ocean, and was seen no more. Yet it was witnessed in the floods of aftertime, that at the coming on of eventide, Ogg the son of Beorl was always seen with his boat upon the wide-spreading waters, and the Blessed Virgin sat in the prow" 
• “There’s a story as when the mill changes hands, the river’s angry”
• “Journeying down the Rhone on a summer’s day, you have perhaps felt the sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks in certain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose, like an angry, destroying god, sweeping down the feeble generations whose breath is in their nostrils,* and making their dwellings a desolation.”
• “He fancied Maggie was slipping down a glistening, green, slimy channel of a waterfall, and he was looking on helpless, till he was awakened by what seemed a sudden, awful crash.”
• “She was in a boat on the wide water with Stephen, and in the gathering darkness something like a star appeared, that grew and grew till they saw it was the Virgin seated in St Ogg’s boat, and it came nearer and nearer, till they saw the Virgin was Lucy and the boatman was Philip—no, not Philip, but her brother, who rowed past without looking at her; and she rose to stretch out her arms and call to him, and their own boat turned over with the movement,”
• "she will be selling her soul to that ghostly boatman who haunts the Floss—only for the sake of being drifted in a boat for ever.’”

Getting into a boat is a disaster for Maggie, twice! It could be argued that the first disaster foreshadows what will happen in the second.

Other moments of foreshadowing include when Mr T, wanting to recover a £300 loan to his sister who has married a poor farmer and has a large family, realises he can't get his money with ruining his sister. He decides that brothers must always look after sisters which will resonate with the Maggie Tom relationship: “They mustn’t look to hanging on their brothers.’ ... ‘No; but I hope their brothers ’ull love the poor things, and remember they came o’ one father and mother’”

“‘I hope and pray he won’t go to law,’ said Mrs Moss, ‘for there’s never any knowing where that’ll end. And the right doesn’t allays win. This Mr Pivart’s a rich man, by what I can make out, and the rich mostly get things their own way.’”

Pathetic fallacy:

There is a beautiful bit of pathetic fallacy in which a baby has its rattle taken and squawks even when the rattle is returned: “was not to be appeased even by the restoration of the rattle, feeling apparently that the original wrong of having it taken from her remained in all its force.”

Selected quotes:

• “He had the marital habit of not listening very closely” (1.2)
• “It’s foolish work,” said Maggie, with a toss of her mane,—“tearing things to pieces to sew ’em together again.” (1.2)
• “I have often wondered whether those early Madonnas of Raphael, with the blond faces and somewhat stupid expression, kept their placidity undisturbed when their strong-limbed, strong-willed boys got a little too old to do without clothing. I think they must have been given to feeble remonstrance, getting more and more peevish as it became more and more ineffectual.” (1.2)
• “A fat and floury spider, accustomed to take his fly well dusted with meal, must suffer a little at a cousin’s table where the fly was au naturel” (1.4)
• “She thought it was in the order of nature that people who were poorly off should be snubbed.” (1.8)
• “The present time was like the level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and earthquakes, thinking to-morrow will be as yesterday, and the giant forces that used to shake the earth are forever laid to sleep” (1.12)
• “She loved Tom very dearly, but she often wished that he cared more about her loving him.” (2.5)
• “If boys and men are to be welded together in the glow of transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.” (2.6)
• “The pride and obstinacy of millers and other insignificant people, whom you pass unnoticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy too” (3.1)
• “Human life—very much of it—is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate” (4.1)
• “It is a sordid life, you say, this of the Tullivers and Dodsons, irradiated by no sublime principles, no romantic visions, no active, self-renouncing faith; moved by none of those wild, uncontrollable passions which create the dark shadows of misery and crime; without that primitive, rough simplicity of wants, that hard, submissive, ill-paid toil, that childlike spelling-out of what nature has written, which gives its poetry to peasant life. Here one has conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction and without polish, surely the most prosaic form of human life; proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without side-dishes.” (4.1)
• “The vicar of their pleasant rural parish was not a controversialist, but a good hand at whist, and one who had a joke always ready for a blooming female parishioner.” (4.1)
• “Even at school she had often wished for books with more in them.” (4.3) Know what she means!
• “Ugly and deformed people have great need of unusual virtues, because they are likely to be extremely uncomfortable without them; but the theory that unusual virtues spring by a direct consequence out of personal disadvantages, as animals get thicker wool in severe climates, is perhaps a little overstrained.” (5.3) The theory that, because they can’t see, a blind person must have extraordinary hearing is false.
• “I often hate myself, because I get angry sometimes at the sight of happy people. I think I get worse as I get older, more selfish.” (6.2)
• “The world goes on at a smarter pace now than it did when I was a young fellow.” (6.5) Plus ca change!
• “Each was oppressively conscious of the other’s presence, even to the finger-ends.” (6.6) A stunning description of the uncomfortable feeling that often accompanies sexual attraction.
• “Maggie ... left her ... mother to the compromise between knitting and nodding, which, when there was no company, she always carried on in the dining-room till tea-time.” (6.6)
• “But to minds strongly marked by the positive and negative qualities that create severity,—strength of will, conscious rectitude of purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great power of self-control, and a disposition to exert control over others,—prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth.” (6.12)
• “Moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.” (7.2)

Hugely readable and highly entertaining, this is a masterpiece of Victorian literature.

August 2019; August 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

George Eliot also wrote:

• Scenes from Clerical Life
• Adam Bede
• Silas Marner
• Middlemarch
• Romola
• Daniel Deronda

An interesting lecture entitled ‘George Eliot and Relationships’ given by Professor Rosemary Ashton on 25th November 2019 at Gresham College can be found here.

'The Pirate', the book that Maggie never finishes, was a three volume novel by Sir Walter Scott which was published in 1821; GE might have read it when young. Minna, the heroine, falls in love with a shipwrecked seaman called Captain Cleveland, not realising that he is a pirate. 

Biographies of George Eliot which have been reviewed in this blog:

• George Eliot by Jenny Uglow
• George Eliot: A Life by Rosemary Ashton