Notes Introduction: ‘Those Far-Reaching Visions of the Past’ 1. G. Eliot, Adam Bede (1859), with an introduction by Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 49. 2. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), p. 7. The quote is also used, but to an entirely different effect, by William Baker, in ‘Memory: Eliot and Lewes “The Past is a Foreign Country: They Do Things Differently There”’, George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies, 24–5 (September 1993), pp. 118–31. 3. E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. xiii. 4. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 6. 5. Ibid. 6. Throughout this study a discrimination will be made between ‘History’ as signifier, i.e. the representation of past events (e.g. historiography), and ‘history’ as signified, i.e. the past events themselves. This implies a distinc- tion between representation and historical event that is unfortunate (and probably, outside the context of this study, unsustainable). However, it is a vocabulary intended to reflect a separation in the minds of the philoso- phers and writers alluded to, not to reflect an inevitability. This distinction is also delineated, with great clarity and perspicacity, in Jim Reilly’s Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot (London: Routledge, 1993). 7. Though this term has become definitely associated with one particular critic, Hayden White, the term metahistory does have a more general reso- nance, as highlighted in Adrian Kuzminski’s ‘Defending Historical Realism’, History and Theory, 18:1 (1979), pp. 326–49. Kuzminski sees metahistory as that strand of criticism whose subject matter is historiog- raphy: that which deals often, though not exclusively, with the rhetorical or structural premises on which historiography is founded. 8. A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (London: Yale University Press, 1985), p. viii. Unlike Georg Lukács, Culler implicates Walter Scott as being ‘primarily responsible for historicizing the imagination of the 147 148 George Eliot and Victorian Historiography English people’. Quite what influenced Scott himself in his interest in history, Culler is less forthcoming about. 9. P. A. Dale, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History: Carlyle, Arnold, Pater (London: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 2. 10. G. Lukács, The Historical Novel, translated from the German by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Pelican, 1981), p. 20. Lukács explains the development of this mass experience in terms of the French Revolution and its aftermath. 11. Ibid., p. 22. 12. T. Carlyle, ‘On History’, in A Carlyle Reader, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 56. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History, p. vii. 16. A. Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel 1840–1880 (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 1. 17. J. S. Mill, ‘Of the Inverse Deductive, or Historical Method’, in John Stuart Mill: On Politics and Society, ed. Geraint L. Williams (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1976), p. 75. 18. See J. S. Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (London: Longmans, 1865). 19. J. Buckley, The Triumph of Time: A Study of the Victorian Concepts of Time, History, Progress, and Decadence (London: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 6. 20. R. Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 63. 21. See W. Baker (ed.), The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalogue of Their Books at Dr. Williams’s Library, London (London: Garland, 1977), p. xx (Table I). According to Baker 40 per cent of the books in the library were on broadly scientific themes. 22. G. Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Ark, 1985), p. 154. 23. S. Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make- Believe of a Beginning (London: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. xii. 24. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. 218. 25. G. Eliot, Middlemarch (1872), with an introduction by W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 25. 26. GE to Mme Bodichon, 5 December 1859, The George Eliot Letters: Vols 1–9, ed. Gordon S. Haight (London: Yale University Press, 1954–78), III, p. 227. 27. GE to Sara Sophia Hennell, 6 November 1858, The George Eliot Letters, II, p. 496. 28. GE to Mrs Richard Congreve, 16 January 1867, The George Eliot Letters, IV, p. 333. 29. GHL and GE to Sara Sophia Hennell, 9–10 July 1860, The George Eliot Letters, III, p. 320. 30. See Frederic Harrison to GE, 12 June 1877, The George Eliot Letters, IX, p. 194. 31. T. R. Wright, ‘George Eliot and Positivism’, Modern Language Review, 76 (1981), pp. 257–72. 32. T. R. Wright, ‘From Bumps to Morals: the Phrenological Background to Notes 149 George Eliot’s Moral Framework’, Review of English Studies, 33 (1982), pp. 35–46. 33. GE to Frederic Harrison, 15 August 1866, The George Eliot Letters, IV, p. 300. 34. A. Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte in Two Volumes, trans. Harriet Martineau (London: J. Chapman, 1853), I, p. 3. 35. B. Paris, Experiments in Life: George Eliot’s Quest for Values (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1965), p. 15. 36. J. F. Stephen, ‘Buckle’s History of Civilization in England’, Edinburgh Review, 107 (1858), p. 466. 37. J. P. Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England Since the Renaissance (London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), p. 108. Kenyon explains that although Macaulay, Carlyle and Acton scoffed at his work, Spencer, Huxley and Mill craved his company. He was elected to the Athenaeum and gave a lecture at the Royal Institution (p. 133). 38. J. W. Cross, George Eliot’s Life: As Related in her Letters and Journals (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1885), p. 232. 39. Ibid., p. 235. 40. Ibid., pp. 253–4. 41. Ibid., p. 338. 42. See Baker, The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Library, p. 196 (entry 2107). The essay, deeply critical of Buckle, appeared in Fraser’s Magazine, 87 (April 1873) pp. 482–99. 43. In The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1952), Duncan Forbes discriminates between the Liberal Anglican ‘science of history’ (process) and the ‘philosophy of history’ (progress) (p. 60). Natural development is governed by laws whereas moral develop- ment was by free will (‘under God’s Providence’ (p. 145)). 44. Ibid., p. 149. 45. Ibid., p. 4. 46. T. Arnold, ‘Essay on the Social Progress of States’ (1830), in The Miscellaneous Works of Thomas Arnold: Collected and Republished, ed. A. P. Stanley (London: B. Fellowes, 1845), p. 81. 47. Arnold, ‘Essay on the Social Progress of States’, p. 111. 48. Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel, p. 176. 49. H. Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 38. 50. H. Witemeyer, in ‘George Eliot’s Romola and Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi’ (Studies in the Novel, 15 (1983), pp. 62–73) has explained this demand for historiographical accuracy in relation to the dominance of empiricism within historical circles during this period. 51. Sanders, The Victorian Historical Novel, p. 3. 52. H. E. Shaw, The Forms of Historical Fiction (London: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 30. 53. H. James, ‘The Life of George Eliot’, in Essays on Literature: American Writers, English Writers, ed. Library of America (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 1005. 54. L. Stephen, George Eliot (London: Macmillan, 1904), p. 137. 55. K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 14. 150 George Eliot and Victorian Historiography 56. G. Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, in George Eliot: Selected Critical Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 316. 57. J. Bayley, ‘The Pastoral of Intellect’, in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 200. 58. U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels – the Limits of Realism (Berkeley: California University Press, 1968), p. 22. 59. D. Morse, High Victorian Culture (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 337. 60. Ibid. 61. J. Goode, ‘Adam Bede’, in Critical Essays on George Eliot, p. 37. 62. A. Kettle, ‘Felix Holt the Radical’, Critical Essays on George Eliot, p. 99. 63. B. Semmel, The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire: Theories of Imperialism from Adam Smith to Lenin (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 4. 64. GHL to John Blackwood, 28 May 1861, The George Eliot Letters, III, p. 420. 65. J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (London: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 6. 66. Ibid., p. 10. Dollimore identifies these three as relating to, respectively, the ‘means whereby a dominant order seeks to perpetuate itself’, the ‘subversion of that order’ and the ‘containment of ostensibly subversive pressures’. 67. Ibid., p. 7. 68. P. Coveney, ‘Introduction’ to Felix Holt (1866) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 8. 69. U. C. Knoepflmacher, ‘Fusing Fact and Myth: the New Reality of Middlemarch’, in Essays on ‘Middlemarch’: This Particular Web, ed. Ian Adam (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1975), p. 68. 70. H. James, ‘Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life’, in Essays on Literature: American Writers, English Writers, p. 965. 71. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 19. 72. Fraser, The Victorians and Renaissance Italy, p. 2. 73. Ibid., p. 34. 74. Reilly, Shadowtime, p. 114. 75. Ibid., p. 39. 76. R. Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 80. 77. Ibid., p. 22. 78. C. Parker, The English Historical Tradition Since 1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1990), p. 4. 79. Semmel, The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire, p. 11. 80. As Parker illustrates, in The English Historical Tradition, six ‘types’ of philosophy of History (chance, Divine Providence, decadence, progress, cycles and antithesis) are represented within British historiography; however, they are not exclusive to it (see p.