The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

Here you may post any background material on the author or book or any other additional material which you think will be relevant and useful to our discussion. Please post spoiler warnings where appropriate.

Found some interesting info on Wikipedia.

George Elliot
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Elliot

Middlemarch
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlemarch

The Great Reform Bill of 1832. While this is very lengthy it will help with a lot of the political information covered in Middlemarch if you are not familiar with British politics of this time.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832

I'm hoping that Madge, our best researcher IMHO, will help fill in the gaps.

http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian...

We don't very often go back to the opening page for the Victorian Web, but there might be a topic or two of interest this time around.

This is from the essay "George Eliot and the Visual Arts" by Hugh Witemeyer:

"...Images and vision are central, in George Eliot's thought, to both the creation of literature and its effect upon its audience. An important corollary of her emphasis upon vision is the high value she placed upon pictorial description. But her pictorialism was qualified by an awareness derived from Lessing of the limitations of such description and the importance of supplementing it with other modes of representation...."

The essay suggests some of the discussion with her consort, G. H. Lewes, and other intellects of the day on the interplay of words, images, and symbols upon the human mind.

http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian...
Table of Contents of the full text of this article with links to its sections.

http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian...

Section of Victorian Web dedicated to George Eliot.

From "Themes", "Fiction superior to the visual arts":

"Lessing's influence upon George Eliot's theory of ut pictura poesis affected the structure of chapters in her fiction. As we have seen, she and Lewes commonly divided the art of the novelist into two branches: description and dramatic presentation. The characteristic George Eliot chapter begins with description, setting a scene in static, visual, often pictorial terms. Then it modulates into drama, activating the tableau with dialogue and movement, or penetrating it with psychological commentary. The picture-frame becomes a proscenium arch, and the viewer is drawn into the scene, moving from a distanced and relatively objective perception toward participation and sympathetic identification. This structure does not involve a transition from 'picture' to 'scene' in the Jamesian sense of the terms. Rather it involves a transition from 'scene' in the graphic sense to 'scene' in the theatrical sense, an ambiguity nicely exploited in the title of George Eliot's first published stories. The moments of transition from one mode to the other are frequently the moments at which the narrator expresses his Lessingite reservations about literary pictorialism." [Bold added.]

http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian...

There is so much on these Victorian Web pages regarding Eliot, Middlemarch, and its characters that I look forward to Madge and others taking us to particular nuggets of gold for this reading.

I will do my best, although it is politically complex as Eliot was writing after the passing of the Great Reform Act about the period before it was passed when there was much agitation for reform and British Politicians/Landowners were very reluctant to change. The French Revolutionary cries of Liberte Egalite Fraternite took a long time to cross the Channel. Eliot, like many intellectuals, was both inspired and frightened by the French Revolution so her prose tends to reflect this ambivalence - an ambivalence we see in Dorothea who frequently curbs her more revolutionary spirit and falls back on the conservatism of her class.

Pictorially, this is still the Warwickshire of Shakespeare's England unspoilt by the Industrial Revolution, except for trains. There are rolling green fields grazed by cattle and sheep but not yet 'enclosed' by post Reform stone walls, broken up by patches of deciduous woodland, where pigs foraged and wood and peat for fires was collected. Whilst the gentry lived in splendid stone mansions paid for by the slave trade, labourers lived in mud brick ('cobb') hovels with vermin infested thatched roofs. People were 'free' but tied through their work to the land and landlords, who hired and fired at will and who owned their meagre homes. It looked like a picture-postcard idyll but it was anything but:(

Women were owned first by their fathers and then by their husbands. Destitution faced an unprovided for single woman until the Property Acts were changed mid-century to allow her to inherit.

I read Middlemarch last year and loved it, however I know I did not understand a lot of the political aspects. I am looking forward to following your discussion and hopefully I will pick up some things I missed.

I also tend not to do any research before beginning a book, but having joined a few of these Goodreads groups I've begun to correct that.

Linda, I read it years ago, and like you didn't understand the political piece very well, the wiki reference regarding the 1832 act was very helpful to me. It's very long, but it describes the before and after and the unrest very well.

Deborah wrote: "Linda, I read it years ago, and like you didn't understand the political piece very well, the wiki reference regarding the 1832 act was very helpful to me. It's very long, but it describes the befo..."

Thanks for posting those links, I'll give them a read when I get a chance.

For some, background information spoils a novel but I feel it enriches it and allows us to enter the mind of the novelist and the times she/he is describing.

Madge I've read books both ways, and have found that for the most part the background really helps me understand the book better. I also always learn from this group, which I love.

Yes there are some good folks here:)

Has anyone read My Life In Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead? Very interesting insight into Eliot's works and life. I highly recommend it.

Alysia wrote: "Has anyone read My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead? Very interesting insight into Eliot's works and life. I highly recommend it."

http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/rebecc...

On George Eliot and Middlemarch. Brought to my attention from another board, serendipitously relates to Alysia's post.