George Eliot and the Novelist Historian

Many of the great social novelists of the 19th century wrote into their novels great theories of historiography. By historiography I mean not only the study of the methods used by historians, but as was particularly the case in the later 18th and the whole of the 19th century, the "shape" or overall meaning of historical phenomena and processes. Great 19th century novels like War and Peace, Les Miserables, and Vanity Fair have these theories. Eventually I will get to writing about them, but for now I'm about 150 pages into Middlemarch and I had some thoughts.

As I was reading George Eliot's Middlemarch, I cam across something I wasn't particularly expecting:

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house. I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. (Beginning text of chapter 15)

 Eliot seems to be eschewing working a grand scheme for the meaning or shape of history into Middlemarch. She seems to be arguing that the world has changed since the time of Henry Fielding and his The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. The reference to the ticking clock is a clear reference to historical process. That historical processes have sped up along with the increase in "our needs." Moreover, "our needs" are linked to "money," which is a clear reference to the advancement of capitalist processes.

George Eliot

The advancement of capitalism and the change in human experience it brought change in the way that historical processes could be properly understood and written about, even in fictions. So for Eliot, using broad strokes to paint historiography into Middlemarch would have been a misstep because it would have missed the intricacies of human experience in her contemporary time, which much be thought and written about on a smaller scale because of the advancement of historical time and capitalism. Instead, she moves on to in depth description of her characters.

It will be interesting to see how Eliot's thoughts on historiography play out through the course of the novel, and how they under gird its structure.

-Karate Bear out!