Situating George Eliot within mid-Victorian debates over central versus local government, this article contests the widespread presupposition that Eliot rejected official politics in favor of cultural mediation. Specifically, I argue that in Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72), Eliot seeks to kindle a desire for local political institutions and to promote, in J. S. Mill's words, “the capacities moral, intellectual, and active required for working” them. Using the representative protocols of the local press, Eliot portrays Middlemarch's public health institutions as both opaque and transparent. While the public health work of Tertius Lydgate is essential to the novel's bildung plots and the town's cholera response, it is only represented obliquely through narrative paralipsis. In contrast, Eliot stages local council debates theatrically in scenes whose typography mimics the local press's treatment of council meetings. Eliot then supplements these protocols with the realist novel's networked form, which compels readers to supply characterological depth to the elided labors of Lydgate and the dramatic representations of council meetings. In thus depicting local representative government, Eliot prompts a desire for local political institutions and trains her readers in the cognitive skills needed to participate within them.

“Sure I am that all the light we can let in upon our own minds, all the acquaintance we can make with our own understandings, will not only be very pleasant, but bring us great advantage in directing our thoughts to the search of other things.” Locke/— Under the authority of so great a man, I proceed to the investigation of myself with no small anxiety— Hitherto I have forgotten myself, I have thought neither of my few perfections or my many failings— I have endeavoured to insinuate myself into the windings of other souls, of other characters— I have endeavoured, I may say, to seek truth with an ardent eye, a sincere heart—of that I can boast—but I have never, even in imagination looked into my own heart— How few indeed know themselves! The investigation of oneself is an anxious employment— The heart may appear corrupted by vanity, exalted by pride, soured by ill temper, & then that brilliant phantom, so dear to every soul, self estimation, fades for ever, & those shining clouds, on which you have soared so often to fame, sink under self-debasement—but shall such weakness prevent us from looking into ourselves? No.— I am not vain, but I have some tincture of pride about me, which I fear not to own, on the contrary which I like to boast of— I am not at all insensible to flattery, when in a proportionate degree, but when outraged, I am conscious of it— I prefer praise most when seasoned with censure, as it then appears in the light of truth— I detest flattery when offered by those whom I feel unworthy, I detest flattery when carried, as I said before, beyond just limits— I confess that I enjoy fame more than any worldly pleasure; I know it is transient, & yet I worship it as such— I am fond of reading & of all literary occupations— I hate needlework & drawing because I never feel occupied whilst I work or draw— I know not why, but I always am fatigued— Dancing I consider mere idleness— I abhor music.— I am told it is the trouble of learning that I dislike— It is not so— I have no desire to learn— I always feel weary, full of ennui at the Piano— I sit down discontented, and I rise disgusted.

IF JOURNAL ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE ERAS reflect their times truly, Victorians and their predecessors did not manage their faces as we do ours. We of the twenty-first century grin or grimace without restraint, but the Victorians checked the impulse to show their teeth. When we engage in an unguarded smile, our show of teeth is intended and taken to mean merely that we are in good spirits or good company. Pictorial evidence indicates that when the Victorians did likewise, the expression held other meaning.

The theatricality of modern politics is an axiom available to every headline writer, every talk show host, and every college professor. National and international politics have become a branch of theater which is a branch of advertising. And most people who bother to note this commonplace complain about it. With the presidency of a movie actor, the headline writers have tended more and more to acknowledge the metaphor that animates their own activity. The press with its words and pictures, the newsreel, and then television have very self-consciously assumed the function of the stage in this century. Politicians step in as its actors while ad agencies produce, and we the people quietly sequestered in our living rooms play an uneasy role as a dispersed and silent audience, the weakest component of a global metaphor that has been with us at least since Shakespeare's time.

Forgery is now considered an offence of the greatest magnitude;… In proportion, therefore, as a nation increases in wealth by buying and selling, it will magnify the criminality of a fraud by which buying and selling may be checked. The change of opinion will show itself in the penal laws, and in the not less deterrent force of social reprobation.

—Luke Owen Pike, History of Crime in England (1876)

When, in an episode in the long courtship by mail between Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Elizabeth “confessed” that she was to be numbered, in religion, among “those schismatiques of Amsterdam” Donne talks of, Browning, always the opportunist in the affair, fired back: “Can it be you, my own you past putting away, you are a schismatic and frequenter of Independent Dissenting Chapels? And you confess this to me—whose father and mother went this morning to the very Independent Chapel where they took me, all these years back, to be baptized—and where they heard, this morning, a sermon preached by the very minister who officiated on that other occasion!” The Independent Chapel in question was, of course, the Locks Fields Chapel, or, as it came to be called, the York Street Congregational Church, at Walworth, about a mile from the Brownings' Camberwell home, south of London; and the minister was a George Clayton. Browning's credentials as a schismatic were, however, less obvious than he implies. On his father's side Browning's people, in fact, were members of the Church of England (his grandmother was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman), and in the 1830's he and his sister also attended evening services at Camden Chapel, a separate offshoot from the parish church of St. Giles, in order to hear the more “eloquent and earnest” sermons of Henry Melvill, “Melvill of the Golden Mouth,” whose sermons were also highly approved by John Ruskin. If Clayton's Independent Chapel was nonetheless the family church, there can be no doubt that this was because of the influence of Browning's mother, already a member there before marriage. About 1820, her husband, raised in the Church of England, followed her and officially joined the York Street Congregation.

For Frances Trollope, the nineteenth century was defined by what she perceives to be a pervasive mechanization of emotional life, a phenomenon similar to what Tamara Ketabgian has recently described as the “industrialization of affect” in this period. At the center of this phenomenon, for Trollope, is the disquieting specter of the mother-machine, a figure in whom the processes of mechanical production and maternal reproduction collide. The figure originates, in Trollope's fiction, in the character Juno, an enslaved woman whose alienation from her children under slavery serves as a major plot point in her groundbreaking 1836 antislavery novel The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Scenes on the Mississippi. That figure is then reworked in the violent relationship between children and machines Trollope would go on to depict in her 1839–40 novel, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, one of the first industrial novels published in Victorian England. In these early fictions, Trollope documents what she perceives to be the mechanization of the maternal body under, alternately, slavery and industrialism, and its consequences for both the work and experience of care under nineteenth-century capitalism in its varied forms.

HARDLY A CHAPTER goes by in novels like Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1860) or Our Mutual Friend (1864) or Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) or The Way We Live Now (1875) without money being invoked. Generations of critics have noted that almost every relationship between characters comes with a pound sign attached. Thus The Last Chronicle of Barset belies its most esteemed and truthful character, Mr. Harding, when he says, “Money is worth thinking of, but it is not worth very much thought” (447; ch. 49). He is correct to the extent that money alone fails to do justice to the complexity of most of the relationships in the novel. In the first place, money is only a component of a broader and more pervasive set of connections that can be described as exchanges of capital. Indeed, as this essay shows in the case of The Last Chronicle of Barset, if one stands back from more than a few novels of the mid-Victorian decades, one can see that the intersections and progressions of fictional lives that they portray are couched within a larger pattern of interaction and exchange of which capital is the protagonist.Such a reading is implicit, if not explicit, in recent studies that analyze representations of circulation, whether of money, gossip, blood, or language itself. I am thinking particularly of Beer, Shell, Smart, and Trotter. If this formulation seems extreme, it is only one step beyond the arguments of recent studies that money is “perhaps the most common theme in nineteenth-century fiction” (Vernon 14) or that “the universal, leveling power of money is a theme intrinsic to, perhaps even definitive of, the novel form itself” (Brantlinger 23). The intensity of the nineteenth-century novelistic fascination with money in particular and capital in general can be explained in part by demonstrating, as Mary Poovey and James Thompson respectively have, that novelistic discourses emerged in eighteenth-century Britain in conjunction with the emergence of the discourses of political economy. Similarly, the fact that the mid-Victorian decades in particular produced such a large number of works organized around exchanges of capital is understandable in relationship to historical developments within capitalism. I have in mind especially the finalization in the 1830s of the long transition from gold to paper – from wealth as treasure to the exchange of capital – and the complete formalization in the first half of the nineteenth century of the central institutions of finance capitalism, namely the joint-stock company and the stock market.I mark this finalization with the standardizing of currency on the Bank of England note in 1833; only in 1844 were other British banks banned from issuing their own notes (Vernon 32). The London Stock Exchange was established in its modern institutional form in 1802 (Baskin 207). Also indicative of the period is that “[t]here were eight million pounds more paper money in circulation in 1825 than in 1823, with no corresponding increase in trade and industry to justify it”; at the same time, “there had developed a vast extension of private credit – the ‘new currency of the age’ – and the market was flooded with bills of exchange, promissory notes, and similar paper” (Russell 45). I of course am not claiming that paper money or stock trading did not exist prior to the nineteenth century. Rather, I am claiming that finance capitalism reached society-wide dissemination in the first half of the nineteenth century and only then took on the institutional forms that still are in place in the twenty-first century. As Ermarth remarks in this regard: “Market-places may be old; but the market-system, which ‘is a mechanism for sustaining and maintaining an entire society’ is a fairly recent invention, as new as the humanist conception of the species ‘man’, as new as ‘the profit motive’, and as new as the idea of gain conceived in terms of capital” (121). These contextual factors set the stage on which mid-Victorian novels in particular struggled to interpret and re-express the meaning of human relationship for a society increasingly organized by and obsessed with exchanges of capital. The first goal of this essay is to describe, more thoroughly and precisely than has been done to date, exactly how capital circulates through mid-Victorian novels, taking The Last Chronicle of Barset as a representative case. The second goal is to demonstrate how exchanges of capital are not only thematically significant but actually constitute the plot structure of this novel. Finally, the third purpose is to challenge certain recent critical arguments that continue to posit – even while critiquing – a separation in the nineteenth century of the domains of the novel and of political economy, a separation that reproduces the Victorian notion of “separate spheres” and underestimates the cultural work of mid-Victorian novels.

THE POPULAR LEGEND used to be that at supper in 1895, Bram Stoker had “a too generous helping of dressed crab,” and that the crab begot the subsequent nightmare which in turn begot Dracula (Ludlam 99). This theory was nullified, however, by the discovery in the 1970s of Stoker’s working notes in the Rosenbach Foundation library of Philadelphia.1 Stoker, it seems, made his initial memorandum for the novel on March 8, 1890 while on holiday in Whitby, where Dracula was eventually to disembark in canine semblance. By February 1892, he had sketched out a plot, complementing a nod to the new technology — Kodak cameras, portable typewriters and recording phonographs — by situating events in the next calendar year, that of 1893. The retrospect over an interval of seven years in Jonathan Harker’s “Note” comprising the final pages of the novel would thus imply a date of composition of 1900; they were actually written, however, by Stoker, in July 1896, and one may wonder whether his official chronology was at this point to the forefront of Stoker’s consciousness. Arguably, July 1889 would have been precisely among the candidates to have been a portentous date, epitomizing an epoch when “we all went through the flames,” so far as the inspiration of Dracula is concerned (378; ch. 27).2

In 1895, the Critic published an anecdote about two young ladies discussing the popularity of George Du Maurier's novel Trilby (1894):

ON THE FAR SIDE OF MATTHEW ARNOLD'S familiar call for objectivism lies a world of phantoms. His phrase, “to see the object as in itself it really is,” responds to a vision of the social body as particularly in need of objectivity. And because it lacks this quality, Arnold's Victorian society is one that sees the object as in itself it really is not. This mode of perception is the other side of Arnold's writing: a world of prevailing hallucinations, where fictions are taken for fact and facts for fiction. Seeing the object as it is not takes a characteristic form in Arnold's writing. Illustrative is the stanza in “Empedocles on Etna,” when the philosopher describes what happens when a child is injured, and then compares it to the normal condition of social life: Scratch'd by a fall, with moansAs children of weak ageLend life to the dumb stonesWhereon to vent their rage,And bend their little fists, and rate the senseless ground. (1.2.272–76) Attributing “life” to a stone, or to the ground, is a particular way of seeing the object as it is not. It involves an imaginative attribution of power to the object, and this active investing then goes unrecognized by the child, who believes that the object's power exists independently, in the external world. The passage continues by resolving the simile of the injured child into a prototypical act of magically explaining the unknown: So, loath to suffer mute,We, peopling the void air,Make Gods to whom to imputeThe ills we ought to bear;With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily. (1.2.277–81) Both the reference and figure describe the process of fetishism, in its earliest form. Initially associated with “primitive” cultures, fetishism described a society in which supernatural powers are routinely attributed to inanimate objects. Empedocles is describing his own society as fetishistic, one that not only sees the object as it is not, but worships the object that is not, making a deity out of the void.

Matthew Arnold cuts a familiar figure in narratives of Victorian secularization, although commentators often cast him in contradictory roles. In some accounts we meet him as an elegiac liberal who laments the loss of a no-longer-tenable faith but feels powerless to produce an alternative – “Wandering,” in a famous couplet, “between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born” (Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse” 85–86; see Miller 212–69). Meanwhile other studies portray Arnold as a cautionary example of aggressive counter-secularization, a humanist whose vaunted ideal of “Culture” becomes as absolutist as the religion it is designed to replace (Williams, Culture and Society 125–26). What both accounts share, however, is an understanding of secularization as the process whereby a definite thing called religion lost its hold upon European public life, leaving worried intellectuals to search for substitutes. Since the Second World War this view of secularization has come under increased scrutiny from sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and lately some literary critics; yet it remains difficult to imagine nineteenth-century literary history without it, largely because it is a narrative that was first developed by major Victorian writers like Arnold himself. Perhaps the best way, then, to engage Victorian crisis-of-faith writers is to follow the lead of recent commentators like Talal Asad and Michael Kaufmann and reframe the problem in discursive terms. Rather than retrace the rise and fall of two definite things called religion and secularity, Kaufmann argues, we should instead assume from the outset that “[t]here is no idea, person, experience, text, institution, or historical project that could be categorized as essentially . . . secular or religious” and mark how the significance of this opposition gets reordered in “varying discursive contexts” (Kaufmann 608; see Asad 25–26). We can see such thinking at work in recent scholarship that effectively replaces “secularization” with the conceptual emergence of religion as such – that is, the modern redescription of religion as a specific and limited sphere of human life, marked by certain energies (the irrational, the affective), whose role within the public is considered problematic. Anthropologist Timothy Fitzgerald, for instance, suggests that the Enlightenment turn toward regarding religion as the arena of strong personal belief was instrumental in establishing the space of the secular in the first place, insofar as it helped to define by contrast the new public sphere of “this-worldly . . . freedoms, laws, and markets” (Fitzgerald 5). Similarly, historian Callum Brown argues that late eighteenth-century Evangelicalism produced, as a sort of necessary pair, both the sociological idea of religion as an empirically discrete thing and our popular notion of religion as under threat or in decline (C. Brown 1–34).

Founded in medieval monasticism, the University of Oxford has always been nervous about women on its premises. For six hundred years, the other sex was comprehensively shut out. It was not until 1879 (some time after Cambridge) that a token few female students were admitted at the collegiate enclave of Somerville (Mallet 432). Oxford dons were bound to formal celibacy until the 1870s. And even after the erosion of this rule, women continued to be seen as fatal presences at the university: a fear burlesqued in Max Beerbohm's novel Zuleika Dobson (1911), where the arrival of one sexually desirable girl drives the whole of Oxford's undergraduate population to lemming-like suicide in the Isis.

WHAT DO WE EXPECT to learn when we scrutinize the boundaries of, or within, Victorian literary studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Because many nineteenth-century scholars had always worked within an interdisciplinary paradigm, the theoretical shifts of the last thirty years or so, which broke down divisions between generically distinct discourses, could be said to have brought continuity, rather than change, to this particular community. Yet it is probably true that a pre-existing predilection for historicist investigation has gained added strength in Victorianist circles in recent times. Certain kinds of journeys have become especially common: intrepid explorers travel beyond the bounds of a literary text to hitherto unimagined contexts, and then return to said text laden with the spoils of their expeditions. The exotic voyage to discover the strangeness of the Victorians, then, has become a familiar event; we have witnessed an expansion of the empire of possible connections. Rarer than these heroic ventures, however, has been the practice of quiet contemplation: we have perhaps been less adept at standing still, and looking carefully at the ground we already hold, the ground we assume we share with our nineteenth-century predecessors. What happens when we eschew the temptation to strike out across new territory, and turn our eyes merely to the earth below? Might we discover boundaries between the Victorians and ourselves in the most mundane, the most fundamental of places?

THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT, WITH the publication of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë established a landmark in the history of the novel, but there is little agreement as to exactly what she accomplished or how she pulled it off. Brontë's detractors, as well as her defenders, have often stopped short of treating her as a mature artist or social theorist, explaining her power as “personal” or “autobiographical.” They adjourn further analysis of such qualities by expressing their distaste for, or at best, faintly embarrassed appreciation of, her intensely personal, perilously autobiographical, violently passionate style. There is a family resemblance between Matthew Arnold's disgust at Brontë's “hunger, rebellion and rage” (Letters 132), Virginia Woolf's wariness of her “self-centered and self-limited” but “overpowering personality” (Common Reader 222–23), and Terry Eagleton's ambivalent acknowledgment that Brontë's novels, though politically compromising, nonetheless contain a radical “sexual demand – an angry, wounded, implacable desire for full personal acceptance and recognition” (xix). Each of these critics, to varying degrees, distrusts the personal and emotional as factors that pull Brontë (and her readers) too close to herself and too far away from either her social conscience or her art. Of course, in The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar valorize rather than regret Brontëan rage, but they still emphasize the violent emotion, on the verge of spinning out of control, pervading her “confessional art” (440).Gilbert and Gubar consider Brontë's oeuvre, especially Villette, “a literature of consciousness,” claiming that Brontë is “in some ways, a phenomenologist – attacking the discrepancy between reason and imagination, insisting on the subjectivity of the objective work of art, choosing as the subject of her fiction the victims of objectification, inviting her readers to experience with her the interiority of the Other” (440).

“The book was nothing like the film,” complained one of my students about a week or so after the premiere of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010). Barely able to contain his disgust, he added: “I expected it to be as exciting as the film, but it turned out to be dull – and it appeared to be written for children!” Stunned with the virulence of his reaction, I thought how much his response to the book mirrored – as if through a looking glass – that most common of complaints voiced by many reviewers and overheard in book lovers’ discussions of film adaptations: “not as good as the book.” Both views reflect the hierarchical approach to adaptations traditionally employed by film studies and literature studies respectively. While adaptations of Victorian literature have been used – with more or less enthusiasm – as teaching aides as long as user-friendly video formats were made widely available, it is only recently that film adaptation started to be considered as an object of academic study in its own right and on an equal footing with works of literature (or, for that matter, films based on original screenplays). Adaptation studies came into its own in early twenty-first century on the heels of valuable work done by scholars such as Brian McFarlane (1996), Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (1999), James Naremore (2000), Robert Stam (2000), Sarah Cardwell (2002), and Kamilla Elliott (2003) which paved the way for a consideration of film adaptations beyond the fidelity debate. The field was solidified with the establishment in 2006 of the UK-based Association of Literature on Screen Association (called Association of Adaptation Studies from 2008) and the inception of its journal Adaptation, published by Oxford University Press, in 2008. Interdisciplinary in nature, the field primarily brought together literature and film scholars who insisted that adaptations were more than lamentably unfaithful or vulgar versions of literature mired in popular culture and market issues on the one hand, or merely derivative, impure cinema on the other. The foundational tenets of adaptation studies therefore included a non-judgemental and non-hierarchical approach to the relationship between the text and its adaptation, and a keen awareness of film production contexts. These vividly illustrate the field's move away from discussing fidelity to the “original” which, thanks to the work of Linda Hutcheon (2006), started to be increasingly referred to simply as “adapted text.” Hutcheon's book came out at the same time as another foundational monograph on the subject, Julie Sanders's Adaptation and Appropriation (2005) which contributed to the debate through its focus on intertextual links and the palimpsestuous nature of adaptations, in which debate on fidelity was substituted with the analysis of the distance between the text and its adaptation(s).

Let's face it:Impressionsof Theophrastus Such can be a pretty dreary book. It's all too easy to put it down, especially if you happen to be in the middle of a particularly heavy-handed passage in “The Watch-Dog of Knowledge” or “Debasing the Moral Currency.” Some early readers felt that the real George Eliot had abandoned them in her final publication by ceasing to write fiction, while recent critics have gone to some lengths to show that the narrator, allegedly a minimally published bachelor named Theophrastus Such, is a self-reflexive fictional character whose failings and contradictions are the real subject of the book.1 Who is Theophrastus Such? What is his ethical, political, or scientific orientation? How does his character emerge during the course of the volume? These are questions that have occupied recent critical dialogue. In response, I find myself harboring some sympathy for George Saintsbury, who reviewed Impressions in the Academy of 28 June 1879:

The “deeply felt” quality of Walter Pater's essay on Winckelmann indicates the depth of affinity between these two men. Young Pater shared Winckelmann's religious scepticism, his intense commitment to rationality, and his absorption in the study of art. As well, both shared an erotic temperament and wrote especially for young men. Winckelmann had shown that an explicit homoeroticism might play a key role in cultural interpretation. His writing helped Pater in his effort to counter the Matthew Arnold of “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment.” Already in March 1864, when Arnold delivered this lecture at Oxford, he was reacting against the second-generation Pre-Raphaelites. At least such a reaction explains his harsh treatment of Heine as a latter-day pagan. Although only a year earlier Arnold had delivered a sympathetic and well-informed lecture on Heine, he now put him in the position of aesthete and ignored important elements of his thought. Walter Pater may well have been one of Arnold's auditors at this time (DeLaura, p. 203). If so, the occasion was prophetic because Heine's position as characterized by Arnold resembles that which Pater would take in 1867 in his second published essay, “Winckelmann” (DeLaura, p. 201). Pater realized as much, hence took steps to subvert the position that Arnold took in his lecture. He supplemented Arnold's view of Greek culture in the time of Sophocles with Winckelmann's playful and sensuous ideal of androgynous beauty in the succeeding age of Praxiteles. Pater reinterpreted Arnold's ideal of the imaginative reason in an erotic light. Arnold's negative treatment of Heine extended to the “peace” between “body and soul” that Heine had prophesied (p. 227). Pater corrected this bias in Arnold and argued instead the importance of the body as a crux of value in a contemporary ideal of culture.

An actor is one who repeats a portion of a story invented by another.

— George Moore, “Mummer-Worship” (1891)

THE COMPLEXITIES OF GEORGE MOORE’S CHARACTER, his reactions to Victorian life, and his experimentation with literary styles and genres make him a persistently marginal, albeit intriguing, character in literary studies. “[H]is best work,” Lloyd Fernando has observed, “rests to this day in an artistic as well as social limbo which resists complete definition” (10). A Mummer’s Wife (1885), his second novel, has been studied for Moore’s debt to French novelists, in particular Flaubert, or for the author’s reaction to the British circulating libraries’ power.1 In response to controversy over A Mummer’s Wife’s perceived crudeness, Moore claimed “I have a great part to play — I am fighting that Englishman [sic] may exercise a right which they formerly enjoyed, that of writing freely and sanely” (qtd. in Hone 114), even appointing himself “un ricochet de Zola en Angleterre.”2 Without exception then, author and scholars regard A Mummer’s Wife as a transitional work, the book that brought naturalism into the British tradition. The novel, however, suspended in that artistic and social limbo, has not come under scrutiny for additional and alternative readings.3