Keywords

Definition

George Eliot’s Felix Holt (1866) is known for its exemplary commitment to historical accuracy in its depiction of Reform Act England. That reputation that so often precedes it, however, can lead to under-appreciation of the equally meticulous “private” worlds of the novel. The “radical” concerns of public life in Felix Holt – of the dangers of universal franchise before educational reform; of political vanity parading as concern for the public good – pale beside the often more truly “radical” gestures, choices, revolutions of feeling and knowledge that Eliot represents in the most private, mental, and physiological experiences of her characters.

Introduction

“There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life” (50); so writes George Eliot in the third chapter of Felix Holt, The Radical, her fifth novel, published on June 15th, 1866. The novel is an important continuation of the large-scale historical and political concerns that had opened up to Eliot in her research and writing of Romola (1863) – a novel often seen as a diversion from the confirmedly popular nineteenth-century midlands settings of her other works. Felix Holt was written in the midst of debates over the 1867 Reform Bill, making the choice of an 1832 “Great Reform” setting not so much a return to comfortable territory but an ideally dialogic way to engage her readership. “Public life” looms large from opening pages of the novel in the sweeping stagecoach journey through time and into the meticulously researched historical setting. The first post-Reform Bill parliamentary election of “Treby Magna” – an event rife with all the electioneering politics, scandals, strategy, and tragedy Eliot could muster – touches the lives of every character, across all divisions of class and gender, just as the personal realities of those characters are shown to be the product of “public” histories beyond their ken. Eliot’s consultation of barrister Frederick Harrison in the creation of her complex legal plot is often taken as exemplary evidence of her commitment to historical accuracy in her fiction and indeed it has proven to be the machinery of law and politics – all of that “wider public life” of Reform Act England – for which Felix Holt is most notorious. This reputation, however, can lead to underappreciation of the equally meticulous “private” worlds of the novel – not only the vivid domestic realities of Malthouse Yard, Treby Manor, and Transome Court but the private character psychologies which demonstrate some of Eliot’s highest achievements in psychological realism.

Between Arabella Transome, the “eager-minded” woman of “small, rigid habits” (24) and her lately returned son, Harold, Eliot delves deep into the complexities of mental otherness, and with metaphors among the most striking and visceral of her career. Mrs. Transome’s frustrations are “as painful as a sudden concussion from something hard and immovable when we have struck out with our fist, intending to hit something warm, soft, and breathing like ourselves” (348); and the agony of her secrets compare to “the finest threads, such as no eye sees … bound cunningly about the sensitive flesh, so that the movement to break them would bring torture”(111). The novel’s action begins with the mother’s shock of disappointment in the reality of her long-awaited son and, indeed, the jarring encounters between expectation and actuality remains central to the novel’s dramatic feeling. “Fancy what a game at chess would be,” suggests the narrator, “if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning” (278). The artistic power of Felix Holt lies in the veracity of passion and intellect with which even the smallest of its chessmen are animated; the philosophical power of it, anticipating the doctrine of “moral stupidity” in Middlemarch, lies in the limits of calculation that even its most intelligent characters face. In Felix’s attempt to steer the election-day mob from disaster, Eliot scales large in her representation of unpredictability; while in Esther’s sudden testimony on Felix’s behalf she becomes “the added impulse that shatters the stiffening crust of cautious experience” (447). The “radical” concerns of public life in Felix Holt – of the dangers of universal franchise before educational reform; of political vanity parading as concern for the public good – pale beside the often more truly “radical” gestures, choices, revolutions of feeling and knowledge that Eliot represents in the most private, mental, and physiological experiences of her characters.

Following the passage of the Second Reform Act, Eliot wrote and published for Blackwood’s Magazine a commissioned piece entitled “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt” (January, 1868). The commitment to “national” before “class” interest urged by the re-enacted Felix, as well as the lauding of England’s best institutions as those of slow-growth, confirmed not only for contemporary but future readers the judgment of Felix Holt – and Eliot – as essentially conservative. Eminent Eliot critics such as Rosemarie Bodenheimer and Sally Shuttleworth (among many others) have found the “Address” to confirm the unity of Eliot’s voice with that of her hero and his “crude” politics of diffuse self-improvement before the systemic change of political reform (Shuttleworth, 117). Without denying the basis of these judgments, more recent critical works have introduced greater nuance to our understanding of the novel’s politics, particularly John Kucich who sees Eliot’s “organicism” as merging appeals to change at the individual and collective levels. Equally helpful in attending to the finer aspects of nineteenth-century politics, Evan Horowitz has also ventured a powerful reassessment – neither explaining nor excusing Eliot’s conservatism, but taking up the novel’s beef with “radicalism” as central.

Summary

“The central concern of Felix Holt,” writes Horowitz, “… is to demonstrate that any reform broad enough to be effective is also potent enough to be catastrophic. Every effort, no matter how carefully planned or well intentioned, is as likely to inflame as to resolve. What remains in Felix Holt, as for Eliot more generally, is a radicalism in which the stakes are so high and the risks so acute that it can only act like conservatism” (9). Such reassessments of the novel mark a reengagement with its intellectual challenges equal to its aesthetic innovation. The intertwining of art and idea, of the physical and the spiritual, and indeed of “public” and “private,” are as designedly knotted in Felix Holt as in the two great novels it presaged, and the ideological challenges it poses will likely continue to be one of the main, if agonistic, entries into appreciating its power.

Cross-References