Middlemarch Backgrounds

Summary

                I read number of short to medium length letters, journal entries, and essays to, from, and about George Eliot (Eliot and Hornback, 532-69). While they do not meld into one neat and tidy whole, they create a pattern that reveal Eliot as driven, artistic, and highly intelligent. For example, Eliot records in a 1 January 1869 journal entry her explicit goal to write Middlemarch; she completed and published it as planned by the 1 January 1873 entry. The excerpts from Quarry for “Middlemarch” further reveal her commitment to research and organize her art. It is also impressively highlights her intelligence. Eliot cared deeply about her art and her message, as shown when she tells Mr. Blackwood that she avoids reading her critics, hinting that she preferred to avoid discouragement. She goes on to mention that she likes the emotional effect the novel’s installment publication plan had on her readers, a notion that contrasts rather amusingly with her husband’s reason for liking the plan—it made for better sales.

Readers saw the artistry in Eliot’s realistic characters right away. Blackwood praises her at length on their sophistication, while in another letter Eliot had to correct Harriet Beecher Stowe, American author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who apparently thought Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon so realistic that she believed, incorrectly, that it was drawn from Eliot’s personal experience. In the “Story-Telling” section from Leaves from a Notebook, Eliot explains that the best storytelling comes from keeping the reader’s interest, and the best way to keep that interest is to introduce a character as a “stranger in some unusual or pathetic or humorous situation,”—pathetic here meaning to cause or evoke pity—” or manifesting some remarkable characteristics” (537).

Eliot has well-articulated, intelligently constructed ideas about the world. As she tells Stowe, she believes that our common humanity supersedes any one religious denomination. Emily Davies relates that Eliot believes honesty as the greatest thing to be taught, whereas dishonesty in speech and action ought to be avoided at all costs, and both impact people and society in general. Davies went on to tell Eliot that the girls at her school did not give up on achieving anything because they could not achieve great things, but rather they did not care to do anything in the first place. Eliot pronounced this as stupid, explaining that stupidity is not only intellectual, but can be of the character as well. She said it is entirely possible to be good and smart at the same time.

Analysis

George Eliot wrote in Leaves from a Notebook that “In endeavouring to estimate a remarkable writer who aimed at more than a temporary influence, we have first to consider what was his individual contribution to the spiritual wealth of mankind” (537). It is this statement that convinces me that Eliot wanted to create great art to stand through time. She wasSense is perhaps too loose a word, but the statements and clues I gathered from just a few pages of letters and other writings show a person deeply interested in the artistic merit of her novel. She wants to throw great lights on the human condition; she wants to render life as accurately as she may, and she expects no less from other authors. She was speaking generically—the title of the essay was “Judgments on Authors”—, yet I sense this is the very ethic she poured into her work.

Works Cited

Eliot, George, and Bert G. Hornback. Middlemarch: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2000. Print

Critical Reviews of Mary Barton

Summary

                Three critical reviews from the Norton edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton caught my eye, two by John Lucas and the third by Josephine M. Guy. In “Carson’s Murder and the Inadequacy of Hope in Mary Barton” (501-4), Lucas claims that by inserting Carson’s murder as a plot device, Gaskell avoids challenging her own conclusions (“false hope” as Lucas calls it) on how to help the poor. She reduces John Barton, whom she had given complex, real-world grievances, to the caricature of murderer, now easily handled by her good-hearted hopes. This allowed her to solve the problems she masterfully raised in a tidy way that does not conflict with her preconceived beliefs. But Lucas feels this is a cheat. In his mind, the problem of poverty amongst the Manchester working class defied such simplistic solutions (i.e. Christian solutions).

Interestingly, Lucas argues passionately in favor the novel in “Why We Need Mary Barton” (504-9). His argument here does not contradict, but supports, his prior argument, where he applauded Gaskell’s accurate portrayal of the working poor. It is that very accuracy that leads him to state in the second accuracy the need for Mary Barton. Lucas takes issue when Friedrich Engels, the famous Marxist thinker, claimed after visiting Victorian Manchester to fully understand the conditions and anger of the working class. But Lucas notes that the rich young German missed the complexities found within that world. Gaskell did not. She lays out with an expert eye the subtle, but real, differences between impoverished families like the Bartons, Wilsons, Leghs, and Davenports. Engels attributed a single, unremitting anger to the working class, which Lucas says served revolutionary’s purposes well. In fact, Lucas believes what Engels described was “magnificent”, but insufficient. (It almost as if Engels, second only to Karl Marx as a father of Socialism, was not socialist enough for Lucas.) It is Gaskell who got it fully right.

In “Morality and Economics in Mary Barton” Josephine M. Guy (575-83) observed that the exchange of money and moral acts always went together throughout the novel. She says that for Gaskell, money was necessary for morality. A person who gave money, or lowered the price of goods or services for the needy customer, was moral; those who withheld money or assigned fixed prices were less so. Those that had no money at all were in danger of losing their moral moorings. For example, the poor who had some money, like John Barton did early on, used it to help those needier than themselves. Their family and community lives, while modest, were close knit. But those bonds began to break down in the absence of money. They could not afford to social gatherings or to help the neediest. The most moral characters—Jem, Margaret, Job—were (relatively) financially secure.

Analysis

Lucas says that “Mrs. Gaskell doesn’t think that hatred and vengeance make the sum total of working-class consciousness. Engels does. It is only there that the working class is anti-atomistic…” (508, emphasis original). I find this admission extraordinary. This all but admits that Engels refused to see the working-class in any light that would contradict his desire for socialist revolution. He wanted revolution; he wanted the working class to have hatred and vengeance in their hearts and nothing else; and so that is what he saw. Yet, this is the very type of crime Lucas criticizes Gaskell in “Carson’s Murder and the Inadequacy of Hope in Mary Barton”. Only the belief systems are different: Gaskell held preconceived hopes in a Christian solution; Engels held preconceived hopes in a Socialist one. Lucas notes this, and after some criticism, forgives it. Gaskell received from him no such forbearance. It is clear Lucas favors one hope over the other. That is fine, but one must treat all views, even unfavored ones, with the same intellectual honesty demanded of Gaskell.

Works Cited

Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, and Thomas Recchio. "Contemporary Reviews." Mary Barton: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2008. 365-90. Print.

Contemporary Reviews of Mary Barton

Summary

Any popular novel wins its share of approval and disapproval from critics. Even so, Mary Barton seemed to incite the greatest of passions amongst its contemporary reviewers.  Appreciative reviewers praised the novel’s masterful blending of fiction and social commentary into a work of art. To them, Mary Barton wrenches at the heart (mostly) without sentimentality as it tells of the plight of the poor and desperate. They laud its vivid picture of this desperation, even to the point of imploring readers to embrace the novel’s message. So powerful are the descriptions of working class speech and ordinary life that they declare the author’s powers of observation keen, and suspect she has firsthand experience in that world. Reviews also praised Mary Barton’s even-handedness in describing the weakness of the poor as well as the rich. For example, the novel describes not only the masters’ unconcern toward the worker, but also the worker’s tendency toward improvidence—wasteful spending and the failure to save money against hard times. But here, even positive reviewers admit that the novel understates worker’s weaknesses, and so the point is easily passed over.

Mary Barton’s detractors chiefly object to what they saw as one-sidedness, and an unfair portrayal of the factory employers. They further object to inaccuracies of the portrayal of the then-current state of English manufacturing in general, working conditions, economics of the time, and worker morale. From my research into reactions and reform to the Industrial Revolution (for my class presentation), anger amongst the working class had indeed calmed somewhat, which lends some strength to this argument. The reviewers write that most masters or factory owners are decent men, and go on to cite statistics that factory conditions are not as dangerous as rumor imagined, and that many workers were undeniably improvident with their wages.

Analysis

“Mary Barton…is a work of no ordinary talent in reference to the humbler characteristics of a novel, whilst its truthful pictures of the humbler classes of society…is an evidence of much higher capacity of the author" (Gaskell et al., 366, emphasis added).

"A [grave] charge has been brought against the book…that it is one-sided and unfair, and places the relation of the whole class of masters to their work people in a false and invidious [i.e. hateful] light” (Gaskell et al., 379, emphasis added).

The two quotes taken from contemporary reviews of Mary Barton illustrate the positive and negative points made in the summary above. But I find they share, perhaps unwittingly, a common value or expectation—that this work of literature ought to represent the truth. “Truthful” is the word the first review calls Gaskell’s portrayal of the working class; where the second, while excerpted from a positive review, notes that many believed the author paints a “false” image. The reviews always examined the novel’s accuracy, as if it were of the utmost importance. It appears Victorian readers expected a work of fiction to hold true to the society and conditions of its setting. No reviewer said, in essence, that the story was wonderful independent of real world accuracy. Rather, they applauded it as truth, or complained that it was not.

Works Cited

• Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, and Thomas Recchio. "Contemporary Reviews." Mary Barton: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2008. 365-90. Print.