"The Mill on the Floss" by George Eliot

This is a classic work by the author of Middlemarch, Romola, Adam Bede, and Silas Marner. It traces the relationship of brother and sister Tom and Maggie Tulliver

Eliot is remarkably good at an unsentimental depiction of children. The pair fight and quarrel, Maggie does daft things because she is impetuous and Tom does daft things because he is inflexible. But they're kids. Of course, you could blame their parents. Mr Tulliver is impetuous and inflexible and as a result is repeatedly going to law to protect his rights as mill-owner. In the end this proves his downfall and he becomes bankrupt, managing the mill for new owner Mr Wakem, the lawyer who defeated him, who becomes the family's bete-noire. But Philip Wakem, hunch-backed son of the lawyer, was friends with Tom at school and has fallen in love with Maggie. As the children grow into adulthood can Maggie and Philip overcome the Capulet and Montague emnity of their families? And then other problems arise as Maggie becomes entangled with Stephen, heir to the rich Guest family and boyfriend of Maggie's favourite cousin Lucy.

It is a classic Victorian novel, around the perennial Victorian theme of "the shifting relation between passion and duty”: the adult 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.” There is the ever present Victorian theme of disgrace: the disgrace of 'failure' when Mr Tulliver becomes bankrupt and the threat of disgrace is a girl spends time alone with a boy. These are difficult to translate in all their awfulness to the modern mind. Also difficult are the passages in which lovers declare their passions in grand language and then are swept away into passionate religious experiences of renunciation. This sometimes tips the novel into melodrama.

Characters

Eliot draws some wonderful characters.

Tom is possibly dyslexic: “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.”
He is also shy: “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.”

But his principal characteristic, at least once he has grown, 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. This trait stays with him through life: “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.”
“Tom was not fond of quarrelling, unless it could soon be put an end to by a fair stand-up fight with an adversary whom he had every chance of thrashing”
“Tom, like every one of us, was imprisoned within the limits of his own nature, and his education had simply glided over him, leaving a slight deposit of polish: if you are inclined to be severe on his severity, remember that the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.”
I think many people look on the adult Tom and see him as an antagonist but I think GE understands his strengths and weaknesses and, with Maggie I suspect, forgives Tom for his later behaviour.

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.’

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.”
One of Philip's roles is to argue that Maggie should be what we would now call 'true to herself'; he does this from the point of view of one who must accept the limitations on his life which his deformity has engenedered but bitterly refuses to allow himself to be so limited: “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.”
Later he tells her: “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.”

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 contains the impetuosity of Maggie 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.
Mr T holds grudges. Some of his actions are done deliberately as a way of spiting his enemy. For example, when he is told that Lawyer Wakem's son is to go to the same tutor as Tom it makes him more determined to send Tom: “if Wakem thinks o’ sending his son to a clergyman, depend on it I shall make no mistake i’ sending Tom to one. Wakem’s as big a scoundrel as Old Harry ever made, but he knows the length of every man’s foot he’s got to deal with. Ay, ay, tell me who’s Wakem’s butcher, and I’ll tell you where to get your meat.”
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).
“‘O, I say nothing,’ said Mrs Glegg, sarcastically. ‘My advice has never been asked, and I don’t give it.’
‘It’ll be the first time, then,’ said Mr Tulliver. ‘It’s the only thing you’re over-ready at giving.’
‘I’ve been over-ready at lending, then, if I haven’t been over-ready at giving,’ said Mrs Glegg. ‘There’s folks I’ve lent money to, as perhaps I shall repent o’ lending money to kin.’”
“Law was a sort of cock-fight, in which it was the business of injured honesty to get a game bird with the best pluck and the strongest spurs.”
Mr Tulliver has, perhaps, one of the saddest character arcs when he is transformed from the fighting cock into the defeated failure:
“To save something towards the repayment of those creditors was the object towards which he was now bending all his thoughts and efforts; and under the influence of this all-compelling demand of his nature, the somewhat profuse man, who hated to be stinted or to stint any one else in his own house, was gradually metamorphosed into the keen-eyed grudger of morsels.”

“Mr Tulliver did not want spiritual consolation—he wanted to shake off the degradation of debt, and to have his revenge.”

The Aunts
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 also 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.”

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”
• There is a wonderful scene in which Bob chats and charms Aunt Glegg into buying some cloth and investing in a scheme for Tom; it is a mini comic masterpiece of the servant conning the master.

Social matters

For a book about the middle class, Eliot is also very understanding of the poor:

• “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.”
• Some of the poor seek to escape but the others seek ways to bear their yoke: “Some have an emphatic belief in alcohol ... but the rest require ... something that will give patience and feed human love when the limbs ache with weariness, and human looks are hard upon us—something, clearly, that lies outside personal desires, that includes resignation for ourselves and active love for what is not ourselves.” Is this the opiate of the people?

Eliot also 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.”
• 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.”

• Public opinion (which is often represented by the Aunts):
• “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, either by turning out to be poorer than they expected”
• “The ladies of St Ogg’s were not beguiled by any wide speculative conceptions; but they had their favourite abstraction, called Society, which served to make their consciences perfectly easy in doing what satisfied their own egoism—thinking and speaking the worst of Maggie Tulliver, and turning their backs upon her.” 

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.”
• And here are the dreams of two of the characters:
• “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.

But there is also a lovely bit of foreshadowing 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.’”

But, brilliantly, GE can avoid foreshadowing at critical moments. In the death-bed scene GE avoids the cliche that the father extorts from the daughter the promise to give up Wakem ... instead putting the burden on Tom to look after Maggie: “You must take care of her, Tom …. don’t you fret, my wench …. there’ll come somebody as’ll love you and take your part …. and you must be good to her, my lad. I was good to my sister.”

Pathetic fallacy:
It is also attended by 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.”

Turning points

• The moment when Maggie tells Tom that there father is bankrupt and has had a stroke.
• “Tom, he will lose the mill and the land, and everything; he will have nothing left.”
• The moment when Tom discovers that Maggie and Philip have been meeting in secret. Tom, self-righteous in his sense of his dignity threatened, is insulting and horrid to Philip, particularly because of Philip’s deformity. Philip fights back: “You have dragged your sister here, I suppose, that she may stand by while you threaten and insult me. These naturally seemed to you the right means to influence me. But you are mistaken. Let your sister speak. If she says she is bound to give me up, I shall abide by her wishes to the slightest word.” After the confrontation, Maggie is furious with Tom: “Don’t suppose that I think you are right, Tom, or that I bow to your will. I despise the feelings you have shown in speaking to Philip: I detest your insulting unmanly allusions to his deformity. You have been reproaching other people all your life—you have been always sure you yourself are right: it is because you have not a mind large enough to see that there is anything better than your own conduct and your own petty aims.

Key Incidents and Turning points: 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) which again, I suppose, demonstrates her impetuosity but seemed a bit far-fetched and unnecessary
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%: TP: 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%: TP: Tom finds out about Philip and Maggie; there is a grand scene (B5C5)
67%: TP: Tom pays off his father’s debts (B5C6)
68%: Mr T thrashes lawyer Wakem (B5C7)
68%: Mr T dies (B5C6)
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)

It is interesting how the turning points are grouped together:
35%: Maggie kisses Philip (B1C6)
36%: Maggie tells Tom that they have lost their money (B1C7)
In terms of chronology these two incidents are spearated by a couple of years, in terms of pages they are almost adjacent. GE is moving from a delightful love moment into instant disaster.

66%: 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 (B5C6)
Thus, in a few pages, GE roller coasters from Tom's anger to Tom's triumph to Mr T's death. It is as if GE is saying that the personality of Mr T warps the triumph of repayment into an instant disaster. I understand this but might not the excitement have been spread out a bit to emphasise that very point?

89%: Maggie goes for a row with Stephen, they pass their landing point; her reputation is besmirched (B6C14)

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)

Other great lines:

• “It's foolish work ... tearing things to pieces to sew ‘em together again.”
• “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.”
• “He'd be expectin’ to take to the mill an’ the land, an’ a-hinting at me as it was time for me to lay by an’ think o’ my latter end. Nay, nay; I've seen enough o’ that wi’ sons. I’ll niver pull my coat off before I go to bed.”
•  “That's what brings folk to the gallows - knowin’ everything but what they’n got to get their bread by. An’ they’re mostly lies, I think, what’s printed i’ the books.”
• “What is life without a pocket-knife to him who has once tasted a higher existence?”
• “For getting a strong impression that a skein is tangled, there is nothing like snatching hastily at a single thread.”
• “There’s folks as things ’ull allays go awk’ard with: empty sacks ’ull never stand upright.”
• “The one point of interest to him in his toilette—he had transferred all the contents of his everyday pockets to those actually in wear.”
• “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 for ever laid to sleep.”
• “A time when cheap periodicals were not, and when country surgeons never thought of asking their female patients if they were fond of reading, but simply took it for granted that they preferred gossip; a time when ladies in rich silk gowns wore large pockets, in which they carried a mutton-bone to secure them against cramp.”
• “People who seem to enjoy their ill-temper have a way of keeping it in fine condition by inflicting privations on themselves.”
• “‘You’re like a tipsy man as thinks everybody’s had too much but himself.’”
• “Mr Tulliver did not willingly write a letter, and found the relation between spoken and written language, briefly known as spelling, one of the most puzzling”
• “Having been married little more than two years, his leisure time had been much occupied with attentions to Mrs Stelling.”
• “Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations softer than the limbs of infancy”
• “The plum-pudding was of the same handsome roundness as ever, and came in with the symbolic blue flames around it, as if it had been heroically snatched from the nether fires into which it had been thrown by dyspeptic Puritans”
• “Water’s a very particular thing—you can’t pick it up with a pitchfork.”
• “For a river’s a river.”
• ”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.”
• “Void as promises made in Eden before the seasons were divided,”
• “To haggard men among the icebergs the mere presence of an ordinary comrade stirs the deep fountains of affection.”
• “What with illness and bad luck, I’ve been nothing but cumber all my life.”
• “With poor Tulliver death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.”
• “Why should people give away their money plentifully to those who had not taken care of their own money?”
• “It would be well to put a tax upon Latin, as a luxury much run upon by the higher classes”
• “The world isn’t made of pen, ink, and paper, and if you’re to get on in the world, young man, you must know what the world’s made of.”
• “There is no hopelessness so sad as that of early youth, when the soul is made up of wants, and has no long memories”
• “Hev a dog, Miss!—they’re better friends nor any Christian,”’
• “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."
• “I’m determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness. I should begin to have a prejudice against them. If you could give me some story, now, where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore the balance.”
• “I’ve never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.”
• “She didn’t see why women were to be told with a simper that they were beautiful, any more than old men were to be told that they were venerable”
• “There isn’t many sorts o’ goods as I can’t over-praise when I set my tongue to’t.”
• “Everything was on a lower scale, sir—in point of expenditure, I mean. It’s this steam, you see, that has made a difference: it drives on every wheel double pace”
• “If the population is to get thicker upon the ground, as it’s doing, the world must use its wits at inventions of one sort or other.”
• “A state of hideous doubt mingled with wretched certainty.”
• “The persons who are the most incapable of a conscientious struggle such as yours, are precisely those who will be likely to shrink from you; because they will not believe in your struggle.”
• “The mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.”
• “Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course”
• “Nature repairs her ravages—but not all.”

This is a masterpiece of Victorian literature.

August 2019; 

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