Black Sugar

At the end of ‘Brother Jacob’, Eliot bids farewell to her duplicitous anti-hero by consigning him to prospects whose exact nature is unclear. Shortly after the unmasking of the imposture at the heart of the text, the narrator notes how ‘the shop in the market-place was again to let, and Mr David Faux, alias Mr Edward Freely, had gone – nobody at Grimworth knew whither’. The obscurity of the future into which the discredited Faux is cast accords Eliot's tale a neat symmetry by balancing out the vagueness of the past from which he emerges into Grimworth in the first place: ‘he had absconded with his mother's guineas’, the narrator continues, adding, ‘who knew what else he had done, in Jamaica or elsewhere, before he came to [the parish]’. Yet Faux's mysterious disappearance has an import which resonates well beyond the parochial limits of Eliot's novella, prefiguring the literary fortunes of the very commodity from which he hopes to profit: while sugar is central to ‘Brother Jacob’ itself, it is not, for some considerable time to come, a subject with which subsequent texts in Eliot's literary tradition are inclined to engage to any great degree.