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K. M. Newton
George
Eliot
Twenty
for the
- First
Century LITERATURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
POLITICS
George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century
K. M. Newton
George Eliot for the

Twenty-First Century
Literature, Philosophy, Politics
K. M. Newton
University of Dundee
Dundee, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-91925-6 ISBN 978-3-319-91926-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946149
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For Jessica, Will, Emily-Rose, Ferne, Jamie
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of Chap. 4 was published in Essays in Criticism: ‘George

Eliot and the Ethical’, 63:3 (2013), 298–316. I am grateful to the editors
and publisher, Oxford University Press, for permission to publish this
revised version here. I am also grateful to Cate Newton for reading the
whole text and suggesting numerous improvements.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George Eliot Past,

Present and Future 1
2 The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot 17
3 Critical Encounters: Hardy, Bonaparte, Miller 51
4 Eliot and the Reinterpretation of the Ethical 77
5 Eliot as Psychological Novelist 97
6 The Mill on the Floss and the Revision of Tragedy 137
7 Daniel Deronda and the Novel of the Future 161
8 Eliot and the Politics of Modernism 205
Index 225
ix
About the Author
K. M. Newton is Professor of English (Emeritus) at the University of

Dundee, Scotland. Among his publications are:
Interpreting the Text. Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1990.

George Eliot: A Critical Reader. (Edited with Introduction, commentary,
notes, bibliography). Longman, 1991.
Theory into Practice: A Reader in Modern Literary Criticism. (Edited with
Introduction, commentary, notes). Macmillan Press, 1992.
Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. (Edited with Introduction,
commentary, notes). Macmillan Press (2nd edition). 1997.
George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels: Jewish Myth and Mysticism. (Joint
author with Saleel Nurbhai). Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Modern Literature and the Tragic. Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
Modernizing George Eliot: The Writer as Artist, Intellectual, Proto-
Modernist, Cultural Critic. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.
xi
List of Abbreviations1
AB Adam Bede (1859), ed. Valentine Cunningham. Oxford: Oxford

World’s Classics, 1996.
DD Daniel Deronda (1876), ed. Graham Handley. Oxford: Oxford
FH Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), ed. Fred C. Thomson. Oxford:
Oxford World’s Classics, 1988.
ITS Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), ed. Nancy Henry.
London: Pickering, 1994.
M Middlemarch (1872), ed. David Carroll. Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 1997.
MF The Mill on the Floss (1860), ed. Gordon S. Haight. Oxford:
Oxford World’s Classics, 1996.
R Romola (1863), ed. Andrew Brown. Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 1998.
SCL Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), ed. Thomas A. Noble. Oxford
SG The Spanish Gypsy; The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and
New. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, n.d.
SM Silas Marner (1861), ed. Terence Cave. Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 1996.
xiii
xiv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
Essays Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney. London: Routledge

and Kegan Paul, 1968.
Letters The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight. 9 vols., New
Haven and London, 1954–1956, 1978.
Note
1. Page references to George Eliot’s writings—fiction and non-fiction—are
included within the text.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George

Eliot Past, Present and Future
I
It is fairly certain, as the bicentenary of Eliot’s birth approaches and pro-
motes reflection on her writing, that her literary reputation in 2019 will be
very different from what it was on the centenary of her birth in 1919. In
that year the decline of interest in and regard for her work that had been
evident towards the end of the Victorian era had not yet been halted, and
little notice was taken of the centenary outside of Nuneaton and Coventry.
It was clearly not regarded as a significant event in the literary world gen-
erally, as press comments show: ‘comparatively few among the present
generation read the works of this great Victorian novelist’; ‘George Eliot
has, I fear, no message for the twentieth century’ (Harris 2007, 42).1
Identified with the high-mindedness, high seriousness and moralism
which were widely seen as characteristic of the Victorian sensibility, the
general view seems to have been that she could be safely relegated to the
nineteenth century along with Lytton Strachey’s set of ‘eminent
Victorians’. Though there has been a major change in Eliot’s reputation
from the low point of a hundred years ago, it is likely that, while her bicen-
tenary will be generally celebrated, doubts about whether her high literary
status is deserved may again be raised in certain circles, such as critics
outside of academia and literary journalists. It may be unlikely that one
could encounter, ‘George Eliot has, I fear, no message for the twenty-first
century’, but in the light of the vicissitudes there have been in critical
judgements of her literary status and reputation she may not be
© The Author(s) 2018 1

K. M. Newton, George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3_1
2 K. M. NEWTON
invulnerable. It may not be difficult to show that past denigration of Eliot

now has little credibility, but this book aims to go much further and show
that few nineteenth-century writers in the next hundred years are likely to
be seen as more essential in terms of both their art and thought than Eliot.
Though Eliot’s reputation may still have been in steep decline a hun-
dred years ago, 1919 did suggest a turning point since Virginia Woolf
published, though anonymously, her now famous essay on Eliot in the
Times Literary Supplement in which Middlemarch was proclaimed as ‘the
magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English
novels written for grown-up people’ (Haight 1965, 187), a judgement
now often printed in paperback editions of the novel. One should remem-
ber, however, that Woolf also wrote in that essay that the ‘movement of
her mind was too slow and cumbersome to lend itself to comedy’; that
readers ‘have good reason’ to ‘fall foul’ of her on account of the fact that
her heroines ‘bring out the worst of her, lead her into difficult places,
make her self-conscious, didactic, and occasionally vulgar’ and that ‘she
had little verbal felicity’ (Haight 1965, 186, 187, 188), most if not all of
which are, at the very least, highly disputable. One had to wait until the
1940s before criticism took a more solidly positive turn, most notably
with F. R. Leavis’s inclusion of her as a central figure in his study of the
English novel, The Great Tradition (1948). The question as to whether
her fiction could be persuasively defended in terms of its form and art
remained a contentious issue, but with the publication of Barbara Hardy’s
The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (1959) and W. J. Harvey’s The
Art of George Eliot (1961), some of the objections made by Henry James
and modern critics influenced by him2 were confronted. From this point
on, Eliot’s reputation as a major novelist was largely restored, and for most
academic critics at least her literary importance was assured and beyond
serious question.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, that assurance
may have appeared fragile. Various critical schools were negative in their
attitudes to her fiction, and it may have seemed likely that her reputation
was again going to be subject to serious questioning. Some critics commit-
ted to a modernist aesthetic saw her fiction as flawed at its root. She was,
for example, identified with the ‘traditional novel’ which ‘assumes that the
world and the world as we are made conscious of it are one’, whereas the
modernist novel of Woolf and Proust ‘emphasiz[es] the will to form that is
characteristic of consciousness’ (Josipovici 1971, 139). Critics influenced
by Marxism such as Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton associated her
INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF REFLECTION ON GEORGE ELIOT PAST, PRESENT… 3
fiction with a conservative ideology, fundamentally supporting the socio-

economic status quo with its class divisions and inequalities, and exposed
what they saw as the contradictions inherent in her ideological position,
and newer forms of materialist criticism have tended to support that
stance.3 The major challenge, however, came from the most influential
‘isms’ of recent times: structuralism and post- structuralism, feminism,
post-colonialism. Critics influenced by Roland Barthes, such as Colin
MacCabe, have reinforced the modernist critique: ‘The conviction that the
real can be displayed and examined through a perfectly transparent lan-
guage is evident in George Eliot’s Prelude to Middlemarch … [T]his lan-
guage of empiricism runs though the text’ (MacCabe 1978, 18).
Feminist critics of the 1970s found her fiction unsympathetic to femi-
nist political aims and its representation of female characters often unin-
spiring and conservative in viewpoint, one critic notoriously proclaiming
that ‘Middlemarch can no longer be one of the books of my life’ (Edwards
1972, 238). Debate centred on Eliot among feminist critics has continued
since then, but with negative criticism generally more nuanced and
defences of her from a variety of points of view common.4 Post-colonial
critics have been even more severe in their attacks on what they see as her
conservative politics and sympathy with colonialism and imperialism, find-
ing Daniel Deronda and Impressions of Theophrastus Such particularly
problematic: ‘For Disraeli’s Tancred and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the East
is partly a habitat for native peoples (or immigrant European populations),
but also partly incorporated under the sway of empire’ (Said 1993, 63).5
None of these critiques has, however, significantly affected her status as
a major novelist. Criticism that operates outside of the more committed
perspectives outlined above has continued to devote much attention to
her writing. Historically focused criticism that aims to be non-ideological
and highlights the social and psychological themes of her novels has been
a recurrent feature of critical commentary. There have also been many
readings which exploit the breadth of Eliot’s intellectual interests, focus-
ing on her relationship to such literary figures as Goethe, Schiller, Scott,
Austen, Dickens, Woolf, and she has been linked to various thinkers and
philosophical positions, such as Comtean positivism, Mill, Spinoza. Since
the 1970s her work has aroused the interest of critics associated with
deconstructionist or psychoanalytical critical theory, notably J. Hillis
Miller and Neil Hertz whose writings on Eliot call into question the view
that her language is conventionally mimetic by focusing on her intricately
metaphoric language and what Hertz refers to as ‘complicating … strands
of figuration’ (Hertz 2003, 8).6
4 K. M. NEWTON
II
As Eliot will soon move beyond the bicentenary of her birth, are signifi-
cant new perspectives on her and her fiction emerging? Around the
beginning of the twenty-first century, a group of US critics, all with a
strong interest in Eliot, emerged, who wish to break away from the
dominant critical perspectives of the late twentieth century, such as con-
ventional historical and thematic criticism, criticism grounded in iden-
tity politics and post-structuralist theory. Theory however remains
central for these critics but in place of theory driven by ‘ideology cri-
tique’, often just referred to as ‘critique’ or the ‘hermeneutics of suspi-
cion’ and predominantly favoured by various forms of post-structuralism,
there is what has been called by Rita Felski ‘postcritical reading’, strongly
influenced by Habermas, Stanley Cavell, and various Anglo-American
thinkers with strong connections to liberalism.7 A central aim of ‘post-
critical reading’ is to break with ‘critique’ or the ‘hermeneutics of suspi-
cion’ and make literary criticism at the present time have greater cultural
engagement, impact and existential relevance. A possible revival of ‘the-
ory wars’ may make Eliot one of the most significant writers at the pres-
ent time since her writing has been a major interest both to critics
associated with post-structuralism such as J. Hillis Miller and Neil Hertz
and also to critics strongly committed to ‘postcritical reading’ with a
major interest in Eliot, such as Amanda Anderson, Harry E. Shaw and
Andrew H. Miller.8
This search for an alternative to ‘critique’ that favours ‘unsuspicious’
readings is not only an American phenomenon. A very recent study of
Eliot by British critic Philip Davis is perhaps the most impressive dem-
onstration yet of ‘postcritical reading’ in practice. Though his book The
Transferred Life of George Eliot is categorized as a biography, it collapses
generic distinctions by refusing to separate the biographical and the lit-
erary, life and art and creates powerful humanist readings which reveal
both the power of literary language and complexities of meaning even
in texts—such as the three stories which make up Scenes of Clerical
Life—that have tended to be viewed by critics as primarily exercises in
realism and so of limited critical interest: ‘This, then, is an attempted
imaginative recognition of all that George Eliot was in mind and heart,
as though she were indeed a real and achieved person and not just a
pseudonym or an omniscient narrator made out of words and syntax on
a piece of paper’(Davis 2017, 3). Though highly relevant to current and

future critical debate, a danger is that readings of Eliot’s work may tend
to be shaped by the theoretical or critical perspective her critics happen
to favour. In my view Eliot’s mind and therefore her writing is generally
resistant to a logic of either/or. Critical discussion and interpretation in
this book will attempt to take due account of that resistance by trying
not to be overly committed in advance of reading practice to a ‘suspi-
cious’ or ‘unsuspicious’ hermeneutics.
Are there any comparable critical developments and tensions in recent
British criticism? I shall suggest that there may be intimations of those in
an aspect of Eliot that first aroused my interest in her and her work: the
intellectual continuity between her and her partner G. H. Lewes, one
which went beyond his merely influencing her or she him.9 I do not think
that Eliot can be adequately understood unless it is taken into account.
This book will argue that Eliot as artist and intellectual possessed a mind
that was different and exceptional, and far from being the ‘Last Victorian’,
as one biographer styles her,10 she is one of the few writers of the past who
is ‘our contemporary’ in that her mind and work speak to readers in the
twenty-first century more powerfully than any other Victorian writer.
Lewes’s magnum opus, the five volume Problems of Life and Mind
(1974–1979), was left unfinished. Lewes suspected that he might not live
to complete it and light-heartedly suggested to the publisher John
Blackwood that Eliot, Dorothea-like, might have to finish what he called
his ‘Key to all Psychologies’.11 This came to pass when Lewes died with
the last two volumes still incomplete. Eliot duly went into virtual seclusion
to complete them. Lewes’s Problems is vast in ambition, scope and intel-
lectual range, but it has been generally neglected until relatively recently
and completing it was not merely a matter of Eliot writing up Lewes’s
notes. Her letters show that she embarked on some serious study while
working on it and it would not be going too far to see the final two vol-
umes, at least, as in effect a collaboration with Lewes. Her journal records,
for example, that she read or more likely reread Alexander Bain as part of
her work on it as the entry for 25 March 1879 shows: ‘Read Bain on the
Nervous System’ (Harris and Johnston 1998, 167),12 and she was still
reading Bain on 20 April. Bain was one of Lewes’s oldest friends to whom
he was close intellectually, both having been disciples of John Stuart Mill
in the 1840s and eventually moving on to a different form of empiricism.
Eliot would have been generally familiar with Bain’s ideas and well aware
6 K. M. NEWTON
of Lewes’s intellectual affinities with him. Bain (unusually accompanied by

his wife) was a regular attender of Eliot’s and Lewes’s Sunday afternoons
at their London house. That she was capable of completing this work sug-
gests her close familiarity not only with Lewes’s work but also with his
immediate intellectual circle, which included not only Bain but also
Herbert Spencer, whose Principles of Psychology (1855) she and Lewes
especially admired.
Rick Rylance, in his book, Victorian Psychology and British Culture
1850–1880 (2000), breaks new ground in treating Eliot, Lewes, Spencer
and Bain as a distinct group, discussing them both separately and together
with some analyses of passages from Eliot’s fiction. However, he sees them
all essentially as operating within the sphere of positivism, rather than as
radical empiricists, a form of empiricism that owes much to Humean phi-
losophy. Eliot has been identified with empiricism—as in the quotation
from Colin MacCabe referred to earlier—which alludes to empiricism in
the positivist or scientific rationalist sense, not in the Humean sense. As
one critic points out: ‘The roots of positivism lie in the same empiricism
from which Hume’s work derived, but, the practical success of natural sci-
ence in explaining natural phenomena and predicating the laws according
to which these phenomena relate to one another took empiricism beyond
Hume’s radical sense of the word to the point at which it seemed possible
to formulate a rational order uniting all natural phenomena’ (Dale 1989,
10).13 This positivist empiricism is founded on a confidence that external
reality can be viewed as separable from human consciousness and objec-
tively measured. MacCabe and others see this as the source of a transpar-
ency of language in her fiction which has as its aim to reflect external
reality in a mirror-like fashion: ‘Realism offers itself as transparent’ (Belsey
1980, 51). When she is described as a realist and empiricist, that is what is
generally meant. For Hume-influenced empiricists in contrast, objectivity
and materialism cannot be divorced from epistemology since reality is
always mediated through human perception and consciousness and only
accessible via the senses and the ideas and impressions they generate.
Metaphysics is rejected but not replaced by conventional materialism.
If Eliot’s empiricism has continuities with the more radical Humean
form which can be found in the work of Lewes, Spencer and Bain, her
realism takes on quite a different complexion from one based on conven-
tional ideas of empiricist positivism generally identified with scientific
rationalism or traditional materialism. What distinguishes Lewes and Eliot
in particular from such ideas is that mind or psychology cannot be excluded
when considering how human beings engage or interact with external

reality. The claim of positivistic science that it can reveal the true structure
of reality in purely objective terms independent of the senses and ideas is
called into question by Eliot in the epigraph to Chap. 1 of Daniel Deronda:
‘Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe
unit, and must fix a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal
clock shall pretend that time is at Nought’ (DD, 3). It would be a mistake
to read this as rejecting the existence of the atom in its modern scientific
conception, almost certainly the ‘make-believe unit’ that is referred to, but
when that novel was written atoms only existed in the realm of concepts
or ideas. The idea of the atom as the fundamental unit of matter beyond
which one cannot go is, for a thinker such as Lewes, an ‘ideal construc-
tion’ that has instrumental value for the development of science, but the
claim that the atom existed as the fundamental unit of matter was still
unproven. Though the existence of the atom was eventually established in
scientific terms, it is no longer seen as the fundamental unit of matter as it
is divisible into more fundamental particles and new ‘ideal constructions’
such as protons or quarks—a word coined by Joyce in Finnegans Wake—
have emerged, and one may doubt whether this process will ever arrive at
a secure end point. For a radical empiricist such as Lewes, science’s inven-
tion of and need for ‘ideal constructions’ does not undermine its credibil-
ity or lead to the scepticism exemplified in Nietzsche’s famous comment
that truth is only a ‘mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropo-
morphisms’, but Lewes and Eliot insist that human perception and think-
ing—in broad terms psychology—cannot be excluded from any conception
of the nature or structure of reality. In Middlemarch, the narrator asserts
that ‘we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors,
and act fatally on the strength of them’ (M, 83), using a metaphor in
warning of the dangers of such entanglement and thus showing that it is
virtually impossible to avoid metaphor in relating to reality in human
terms. Nietzsche suggests the same in referring to ‘worn out’ metaphors
as ‘coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no
longer as coins’ (Nietzsche 1954, 47).
Eliot uses the phrase ‘ideal constructions’ in an ironic context in rela-
tion to Lydgate in Chap. 27 of Middlemarch: ‘The reveries from which it
was difficult for him to detach himself were ideal constructions of some-
thing else than Rosamond’s virtues, and the primitive tissue was still his
fair unknown’ (M, 270). The phrase probably mystified its first readers
who would have been unaware of its context in Lewes’s radical empiricist
8 K. M. NEWTON
philosophy. But whereas the atom turned out to be a scientifically produc-

tive ‘ideal construction’ whose ‘real’ existence was eventually given scien-
tific legitimacy, Lydgate’s ‘primitive tissue’ in contrast turned out to have
no more substance than Rosamond’s virtues, though in science failed
‘ideal constructions’ can be seen as essential to the scientific enterprise as
a process.14 Significantly a major appeal of the ‘primitive tissue’ for Lydgate
is its association in his mind with the idea of the ‘fair unknown’, a particu-
lar mode of mediaeval romance. I use the word association advisedly.
Associationism is a central element of radical empiricism. It might be
argued that there has been a general prejudice against it, perhaps a reac-
tion to its widespread influence in the Victorian period and its being seen
as a mechanistic process and alien to the modern concept of the ‘organic’,
promoted by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria (1817) and influential
thereafter in literary critical circles. Gillian Beer and Sally Shuttleworth are
two major British critics of Eliot’s intellectual background and influences,
her connections with science in particular, and they are the authors of two
of the most cited studies of Eliot,15 but Beer does not, I think, mention
associationism in Darwin’s Plots, her best known book, and Shuttleworth
directly disconnects Eliot from it by identifying it with ‘the mechanistic
cosmology of the preceding two centuries’. In Eliot’s work, she claims,
there is ‘a distinct theory of character and action which departs from the
earlier mechanistic conceptions of associationist psychology’ (Shuttleworth
1984, 2, 72). Lewes does express his commitment to ‘organicism’—which
Shuttleworth sees as overturning associationism—but to assume that his
concept of ‘organicism’ is irreconcilable with ‘associationism’ is simplistic
and would be to ignore his long intellectual relationship with Bain, the
major proponent of associationism in the latter part of the nineteenth
century. A passage like the following from Middlemarch would seem to go
beyond a merely general use of the word ‘association’:
Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbours’ lot are but the back-
ground of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they
become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a
part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness.
This dream-like association of something alien and ill-understood with the
deepest secrets of her experience seemed to mirror that sense of loneliness
which was due to the very ardour of Dorothea’s nature. (M, 322)
A potential appeal of associationism for radical empiricists such as Eliot

and Lewes is that it can be seen as an important corollary to Darwin’s
c oncept of natural selection. The latter had called into question metaphys-
ics on a number of levels, particularly the most powerful metaphysical argu-
ment for the existence of God, the argument from design. Associationism
undermined an equally powerful metaphysical idea, that of the self or mind
as a kind of ‘ghost in the machine’—to use Gilbert Ryle’s phrase in his
attack on Cartesian dualism—which transcends any empirical account of its
existence. Lewes, however, deviated from Mill, Bain and Spencer in argu-
ing that there needed to be some ordering force that provides structure for
the myriad impressions and sensations that bombard the senses, an empiri-
cist equivalent to Kant’s categories or pure concepts of the understanding.
Such a force, Lewes argued—influenced in part by the work of the German
physiologist Helmholtz—was supplied by biology and physiology since
‘forms of thought’ or ‘forms of consciousness’ have emerged within the
human organism as part of the evolutionary process through natural selec-
tion. Thus association interacts with ‘forms of consciousness’ so that sensa-
tions and impressions are not atomistic but form structures and patterns
which are accessible through memory and continually accumulate so that a
distinctive self or consciousness emerges as a result, but a self that no longer
needs to be conceived of in metaphysical terms.
Two recent studies are very pertinent to any discussion of Eliot’s links
with radical empiricism and associationism: Cairns Craig’s Associationism
and the Literary Imagination (2007) and Peter Garratt’s Victorian
Empiricism (2010). Eliot is discussed relatively briefly in these studies, but
they point to a significant departure from the assumptions of previous
Eliot critics. Garratt writes: ‘… a tradition of associationism can be traced
from Hume … and finally to the theorists contemporaneous with George
Eliot’; ‘… Lewes’s own later psychological theories … would revitalize
associationism by grounding its processes in the knowing body and by
framing its physiological ideas in the context of the new evolutionary the-
ory’ (Garratt 2010, 67, 70). Craig argues that it is a caricature of associa-
tionism, for which Coleridge was primarily responsible, to see it as
mechanistic, atomistic, passive and offering little scope for the imagina-
tion: ‘The priority that association theory gave to the imagination—since
association itself is nothing other than an operation of the imagination—as
well as to the passions made it rapidly appealing in discussions of the origin
and effects of art’ (Craig, 11) and argues strongly in Chap. 2 of his book
that Wordsworth’s associationist theory of poetry in his ‘Preface’ to Lyrical
Ballads (1800) is more powerful and coherent than Coleridge’s organicist
theory, influenced by German idealism, in Biographia Literaria.
10 K. M. NEWTON
Significantly Wordsworth, who was Eliot’s favourite Romantic poet, dis-

agreed with Coleridge and did not abandon associationism. Both Eliot
and Lewes were also great admirers of Spinoza’s Ethics, Eliot having trans-
lated it, and as Garratt discusses, association was a central element of
Spinoza’s monist philosophy (Garratt 2010, 136–8).
Though Rick Rylance sees Eliot, Lewes, Bain and Spencer as a distinct
group, this does not mean that there were not differences and disagree-
ments among all of them, even Lewes and Eliot though not to a serious
degree. What makes Eliot and Lewes stand apart—he the biographer of
Goethe and she the translator of Strauss—was their stronger links with
German thought, particularly with post-Kantian and post-Hegelian
anti-metaphysical thinkers who emerged to some degree out of the more
radical side of German Romanticism, obviously Feuerbach in Eliot’s case
while Lewes’s radical empiricism has some continuities with German post-
Kantianism as exemplified in the work of such figures as Hans Vaihinger,
aspects of Nietzsche, and Ernst Mach. Lewes’s attempt to overcome, at
least partially, the division between the empiricist and the Kantian tradi-
tions was probably one of the reasons why Bain had doubts about Lewes’s
philosophical project in his Problems, perhaps a step too far for him (Ashton
2000, 243). Lewes also believed his most important intellectual contribu-
tion was ‘the discovery of the social factor in Psychology’ (Ashton 2000,
271), and it would not be surprising if Eliot had considerable influence on
this aspect of his thought, which significantly distinguishes them from
Bain and Spencer.
III
Eliot’s relation to radical empiricism is not however the main focus of this
book though it will be implicit in some of its aspects and discussed more
directly in the last section of Chap. 5. Though I have argued the case
for Eliot’s radical empiricism, which most previous critics have either dis-
counted or neglected and which potentially alters critical perspectives on
Eliot, I believe it can be critically counter-productive to identify her work
too directly with specific influences so that her work tends to become defined
in terms of a particular external framework. This is not to deny the usefulness
of studies that have connected her work closely with such thinkers as Comte,
Mill, Feuerbach, Spinoza, among others, but Eliot is not a writer whose
writing can be easily decoded by being identified with one particular thinker
or one school of thought. There are diverse intellectual influences on her
writing, including those referred to above which one should be aware of, but
they should be seen as existing within the distinctive mix that constitutes
Eliot’s own unique mental mapping of reality and life and her fundamental
concern with the art of her fiction. But an important reason for drawing
attention to her affinities with radical empiricism, especially with Lewes’s
philosophical and psychological thinking, is to raise questions about the
common general identification of her with a positivistic conception of
empiricism founded on Enlightenment-influenced rationalism and scientific
materialism. The greater part of this book is focused on a closer reading of
her writing at the textual and linguistic level than her writings normally
receive, together with detailed exploration of human situations and issues
and their wider intellectual significance in terms of philosophy, psychology
and politics, mediated through the art of the novel.
In the second chapter, it will be argued that the otherness of her mind-
set as a person living in the Victorian era as artist and intellectual—espe-
cially given the constraints of her Victorian situation and context—has not
been sufficiently recognized and explored. Discussion in this chapter will
focus on a close reading of some of her non-fiction, especially its concern
with issues that have been controversial in Eliot criticism: her personal and
existential choices in life, her relation to feminism, her politics. The third
chapter engages with the critical perspectives of three of her major critics
and, while respecting them highly, also subjects them to scrutiny. All Eliot
critics need to challenge or be challenged by alternative critical perspec-
tives. The following four chapters concentrate on her fiction, especially in
relation to such major Eliot concerns as the ethical, psychology, tragedy,
temporality. Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda dominate discussion
though Silas Marner is discussed in Chap. 4, Romola briefly in Chap. 3,
and Chap. 6 focuses on The Mill on the Floss and its challenging view of
tragedy. Middlemarch is the prime focus in relation to the ethical and psy-
chology in Chaps. 4 and 5; Daniel Deronda is seen as her most ambitious
novel, one in which she aspires most self-consciously to integrate her roles
as both literary artist and intellectual, while experimenting with literary
form in terms of its narrative. It may be seen as anticipating aspects of
modernist fiction. The final chapter discusses some of the reasons why
Eliot is still conventionally identified with a Victorian ethos despite her
connections with modernism in a wider context and also explores what
relation she has to modernism’s problematic politics. A feature of past
criticism of Eliot—and I do not exclude some of my own previous criti-
cism from this—is that some general thesis or interpretive paradigm has
12 K. M. NEWTON
tended to dictate how she is read so that the particularity of the text has to
submit to the paradigm’s power, and as a consequence subtleties in the
writing or in the situations being depicted have tended often not to be
sufficiently noticed or even ignored. I hope in this book to subject the
force of the general perspective to sufficient degree of constraint so that
the complexities in her art and thought may receive due recognition and
acknowledgement, while at the same time suggesting that she is not only
the greatest ever female writer but on an equal level to that elite group of
writers who are generally regarded as being in the highest echelon of the
literary canon.
Notes
1. Margaret Harris, ‘The George Eliot Centenary of 1919’ (2007), 42.
George Saintsbury in his A Short History of English Literature, first pub-
lished in 1898 and much reprinted, refers to the ‘extravagant heights’ of
her earlier reputation followed by the critical backlash after her death and
comments: ‘This factitious height she can never recover in the estimation
of a competent judgment’ (Saintsbury 1960, 753).
2. The influence of Henry James in terms of theory of the novel perhaps cul-
minates in Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), though Eliot is
only mentioned in passing.
3. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973), and Terry
Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory
(London, 1976). See also Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation
of English Fiction (1985), and Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property:
Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, 1994).
4. Debates among feminist critics continue, with more balanced positions on
Eliot since the 1970s generally adopted. See Gillian Beer, George Eliot
(1986); Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and
the Novel of Development (1993); and most recently June Skye Szirotny,
George Eliot’s Feminism: The Right to Rebellion (2015).
5. See also Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and
Representation (1996).
6. See also J. Hillis Miller, Reading for Our Time: ‘Adam Bede’ and
‘Middlemarch’ Revisited’ (2011), which is discussed in detail in Chap. 3.
7. See Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (2015).
8. See Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of
Theory (2005); Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot
(1999); Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and
Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2008). For the origin
of the phrase the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, see Paul Ricoeur’s essay ‘The
Conflict of Interpretations’, in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in
Interpretation (1970), 20–35.
9. See K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (1981, especially
5–10, 57–64).
10. See Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London, 1999).
11. ‘The shadow of old Casaubon hangs over me and I fear my “Key to all
Psychologies” will have to be left to Dorothea’ (Letters, V, 291). See also
Letters, V, 350.
12. Catherine Gallagher has argued that the influence of the psychophysiology
of Bain in The Emotions and the Will (1865) is evident in Daniel Deronda.
See her chapter on Deronda in The Body Economic: Life, Death, and
Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Gallagher 2006,
esp.134–5, 146–7).
13. Though critics such as Rylance and Dale place Eliot within a positivist
context, this does not mean that they and other critics such as Gillian Beer
and Sally Shuttleworth who do not see her as a radical empiricist have not
made a valuable contribution to Eliot criticism. For example, Shuttleworth
(in George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science) and Dale show that
Eliot’s relationship to positivism is not straightforward, Shuttleworth
revealing links between Lewes’s philosophy of science and that of Claude
Bernard and arguing persuasively that Bernard’s influence is reflected in
Eliot’s writing, and Dale suggestively discusses how the intellectual divi-
sion between Comte and Mill is relevant to Eliot and Lewes, Comte plac-
ing greater stress on the role of hypotheses in science and scientifically
based thinking and working with them provisionally prior to verification
whereas for Mill hypotheses had to be verified before one could make a
positive use of them. Lewes and almost certainly Eliot would have sup-
ported Comte against Mill on this issue, but on the other hand Lewes
supported Mill’s critique of Comte for dismissing psychology and again
Eliot almost certainly would have agreed with him. Dale also convincingly
shows the influence on Lewes of the work of the German physiologist
Helmholtz. Another pertinent study of Eliot and Lewes is George Levine’s
essay, ‘George Eliot, Conrad, and the Invisible World’, Chap. 12 of his
book, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady
Chatterley. Though essentially situating Eliot within scientific rationalism,
Levine recognizes that, in what he sees as her later writing and thinking,
her earlier positivism comes under some stress through ‘honoring the com-
plexities of the new reality and the new epistemologies’ (Levine 1983,
261), so that it is fruitful to connect Eliot and Conrad in terms of their
work and thought.
14 K. M. NEWTON
14. For discussion of the primitive tissue and Lydgate’s connection to Bichat
(M, 146), see W. J. Harvey, ‘The Intellectual Background to the Novel’, in
Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel, ed. Barbara Hardy, 35–6,
and also Avrom Fleishman, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life, 168.
15. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983); Sally Shuttleworth, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Belief of a Beginning
(1984).
Bibliography
Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Rosemary Ashton, G. H. Lewes: An Unconventional Victorian (London: Pimlico,
2000).
Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and
Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
———, George Eliot (Brighton; Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1986).
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980).
Cairns Craig, Associationism and the Literary Imagination: From the Phantasmal
Chaos (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
Peter Allan Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the
Victorian Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
Philip Davis, The Transferred Life of George Eliot: The Biography of a Novelist
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory
(London: New Left Books, 1976).
Lee Edwards, ‘Women, Energy, and Middlemarch’, Massachusetts Review, 13
(1972), 223–8.
Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Avrom Fleishman, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010).
Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of
Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse
and Narrative Form, 1832–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
———, The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the
Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Peter Garratt, Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge, and Reality in Ruskin, Bain,
Lewes, Spencer, and George Eliot (Madison: Fairley Dickinson University Press,
2010).
Gordon S. Haight, ed., A Century of George Eliot Criticism (London: Methuen,

1965).
Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (Athlone Press, 1959).
———, ed., Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel (London: Athlone
Press, 1967).
Margaret Harris, ‘The George Eliot Centenary of 1919’, George Eliot Review, 38
(2007), 32–48.
Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston, eds., The Journals of George Eliot (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
W. J. Harvey, The Art of George Eliot (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961).
Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 2003.
Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London: Fourth Estate, 1999).
Gabriel Josipovici, The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction (London:
Macmillan Press, 1971), 139.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1948).
George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to
Lady Chatterley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
G. H. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind (5 vols.) (London: Trübner, 1874–9).
Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation
(London: Routledge, 1996).
Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London: Cape, 1921).
Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (London: Macmillan
Press, 1978).
Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-
Century British Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
J. Hillis Miller, Reading for Our Time: ‘Adam Bede’ and ‘Middlemarch’ Revisited’
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).
K. M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (London: Macmillan Press,
1981).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Viking, 1954).
Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Conflict of Interpretations’, in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay
in Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1970), 20–35.
Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993).
George Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature (London: Macmillan,
1960).
16 K. M. NEWTON
Harry E. Shaw, Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Belief
of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
June Skye Szirotny, George Eliot’s Feminism: The Right to Rebellion (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2015).
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus,
1973).
CHAPTER 2
The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot
I
The critical orthodoxy for many years in regard to George Eliot was that
there was little that is ‘radical’ about her as writer, philosopher or political
thinker.1 As a novelist she may have been one of the major English realists but
according to her critics the content of her fiction was not ‘radical’, in contrast
to writers such as Dickens and Zola, nor did she in her novels attempt to
experiment with form or style in the manner of Flaubert or Henry James or
Joseph Conrad, not to mention modernists such as Virginia Woolf and James
Joyce. As an intellectual she was not considered to be an original thinker but
as a writer primarily influenced by the major thinkers of her age, such as John
Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte. Politically she was regarded
as conservative though she went through a liberal phase when younger but
showed little support for some of the major causes of her time, such as
extending the suffrage, especially for women, or giving greater political
power to the working class if that was likely to lead to a breakdown in social
order. She was seen as a gradual reformist at best. These assumptions had
considerable influence on thinking about Eliot during much of the twentieth
century even after there was a substantial recovery of her literary reputation.
If one considers more recent criticism, some of these critical attitudes have
been seriously called into question.2 This book, however, will argue and try
to show that despite advances in criticism the radical nature of Eliot’s mind
has still not been sufficiently appreciated and the critical assumptions men-
tioned above continue to retain some force. The book will argue that Eliot
© The Author(s) 2018 17

K. M. Newton, George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91926-3_2
18 K. M. NEWTON
possessed a ‘radical’ mindset that makes her stand apart from virtually all of
her Victorian contemporaries (and also from many notable writers who have
followed her in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) as literary artist,
intellectual and socio-political thinker.
II
It is useful to start at a personal level by focusing on some of the significant
choices Eliot made in her life as much negative criticism has been directed
at these choices on the grounds of their being inconsistent, incoherent or
morally or socially questionable, and these judgements have often been
carried over to the interpretation of her mental outlook and by extension
to her writing. A common perception has been that there is a lack of con-
tinuity between her early political radicalism in the 1840s and her later
thinking and the choices and actions it generated. I shall suggest that her
critics tend to operate with a conventionally defined or ideologically influ-
enced concept of consistency that Eliot calls into question. Political critics
of liberal or left-wing leanings, for example, generally admire her rebellion
against Victorian conventions by choosing to live with a married man
knowing that it would cause a scandal. Even friends who held feminist
views, such as Bessie Rayner Parkes, were shocked at her decision to live
openly in a non-marital relationship as G. H. Lewes was widely perceived
as having a disreputable past, one which Eliot would have been well aware
of. But for many of her post-Victorian feminist and liberal critics she did
not carry this social rebellion through, so that her apparent rejection of
Victorian values and assumptions in regard to what is perceived as proper
and respectable conduct, especially as applied to women, is seriously com-
promised. She insisted, for example, on being called ‘Mrs Lewes’ and
referred to G. H. Lewes as her ‘husband’ as if she were a conventional
married woman. Even worse was to follow after the death of Lewes when
she married the friend of both herself and Lewes, John Walter Cross, also
her financial advisor, in a church wedding and adopted the name ‘Cross’.
Many of her biographers find her actions difficult to come to terms
with.3 Marrying Cross, though from one point of view a conventional act,
from another was as unconventional and transgressive as choosing to live
‘in sin’ with Lewes, Cross being some twenty years younger than she was.
Whether acting ‘unconventionally’ or ‘conventionally’, Eliot shocked and
unsettled both her contemporaries and also later commentators in regard
to the choices she made in her life, it being not quite clear whether her
THE ‘RADICAL’ MINDSET OF GEORGE ELIOT 19
relationship with Lewes and her marriage to Cross were conforming to

notions of respectability or transgressing them. She thus subverts standard
assumptions as to what is radical or what is conservative. Thomas Carlyle
is I think well justified in calling her a ‘strong minded woman’ in contrast
with the influential view promoted by her major biographer Gordon
Haight that she always needed someone to lean upon. Regarding her
elopement with Lewes, she claimed to be ‘entirely indifferent’ as to how it
was judged, asserted that ‘I have done nothing with which any person has
a right to interfere’ and found the phrase ‘“run away” as applied to me …
simply amusing—I wonder what I had to run away from … I have done
nothing with which any person has a right to interfere’ (Letters, VIII,
123–4).
She can be seen as both rebel and pragmatist at the same time. She
rebelled against Victorian marriage in choosing to live with Lewes outside
wedlock but made sure she showed respect for marriage as a concept and
social institution—a respect one should stress which was sincere—by tak-
ing the ‘married’ name of ‘Mrs Lewes’. Almost certainly she would have
married Lewes if he had been free. Marriage had human value despite the
existence of bad marriages—a significant presence in her fiction—but non-
legal ‘marriages’ could have equal value. There is no sign that she had a
fixed position in regard to marriage or sexual relationships, rejecting both
that sexual relationships were only justifiable within marriage and that
marriages should be maintained even if they had irretrievably broken
down. Her comment on Jane Eyre in regard to Rochester’s marital situa-
tion is significant: ‘All self-sacrifice is good—but one would like it to be in
a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man
soul and body to a putrifying carcase’ (Letters, I, 268). But she had no
animus towards those who held conventionally respectable views about
marriage and evinces few indications of resentment at being ostracized by
society for being a ‘fallen woman’.
Many of her critics and biographers have expressed some shock or con-
sternation at her positive response to her brother Isaac’s letter of con-
gratulation following her marriage to John Cross, after Isaac had been
estranged from her for choosing to live with Lewes for more than a quar-
ter of a century. But Isaac Evans was a respectable Victorian who held
standard Christian beliefs, and his severing of connections was therefore to
be expected. She had chosen a different path from her brother and rejec-
tion by him was one of its inevitable consequences and no blame could
therefore be attached to him. She was prepared to pay such a price in order
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battlement of rocks. Here a grassy sward smooth and level as a
billiard table was used as a croquet ground, this being at that time a
universal outdoor game in England. He had a democratic park. It had
no wall, and wire fences were as yet unknown, so he could not keep
deer. But on his fields we saw many cattle grazing. He told us he
was raising blooded stock, and expected the next year to commence
annual sales. We observed the very pleasant house beautifully
located in the valley, but he told us he was planning to remove it and
build a baronial hall in its place. I learned afterwards from Mr. Hoyle
that he had for some time kept two London architects employed on
designs for this hall, which designs he then employed another
draftsman to combine into a plan to suit himself, but had not as yet
determined on anything. As he was an old man, and had no one in
the world to leave this estate to, I could account for his devotion to it
only by his restless temperament, that must always find some new
outlet for his energy.
I, however, did not want him to expend any of this energy in
getting a steam-engine to suit him, and so the passing months
brought us no nearer to an agreement. My experience with
Ducommen et Cie. confirmed me in my decision not to let the
mechanical control of the engine in England pass out of my hands,
and Mr. Hoyle told me that he could not advise me to do so. Mr.
Whitworth was at that time in the death agonies of his artillery
system, and I did not meet him, but I learned through Mr. Hoyle that
he was highly indignant at me for presuming to take the position I
had done, and was immovably fixed in his own.
CHAPTER XIV
Study of the Action of Reciprocating Parts. Important Help from Mr. Frederick J.
Slade. Paper before Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Appreciation of Zerah
Colburn. The Steam Fire Engine in England.
fter the close of the Paris Exposition I devoted myself

in earnest to the study of the action of the
reciprocating parts of the engine, and will here give a
sketch of its development. In the high-speed steam-
engine the reciprocating parts were found to be a most
essential feature. Besides transmitting the pressure of
the steam to the crank they perform quite another office. It is their
inertia, relieving the crank from shocks on the dead centers, and
equalizing the distribution of the pressure on it through the stroke,
that makes the high-speed engine possible. I employed this inertia
before I knew anything about it. I had been occupied with the subject
of balancing. I had demonstrated practically that the centrifugal force
of a weight equal to that of the reciprocating parts, opposite the
crank and at the same distance from the center as the crank-pin,
perfectly balanced a horizontal engine, and had shown this fact
conclusively at this exposition.
The problem before me was, “What is it that makes my engine run
so smoothly?” I am not a mathematician, and so could not use his
methods. I got along by graphic methods and study of the motion of
the piston controlled by the crank. My recollection of the several
steps of my progress is quite indistinct. One thing I do remember
distinctly, and that is the help that I got from my friend Frederick J.
Slade, who was younger than I, but who died several years ago. Mr.
Slade was a mathematical genius. The firm of Cooper, Hewitt & Co.
were at a later date the pioneer makers in the United States of
wrought-iron beams and other structural shapes; and all their
designs and computations were the work of Mr. Slade. I had formed
his acquaintance in London in ’63. I met him again in Paris in ’67. He
was then in France in the employ of Abram S. Hewitt, investigating
the Siemens-Martin process of steel manufacture. He took much
interest in the engine. One day he brought to me a diagram
representing the two now famous triangles, and a demonstration of
them which he had made, showing that the ordinates, representing
the acceleration or retardation of the piston motion at every point, if
erected on the center line of the engine, terminate in a diagonal line,
which, with a connecting-rod of infinite length, would cross this
center line at its middle point.
This exhibited at once the equalizing action of the reciprocating
parts in a cut-off engine, absorbing the excessive force of the steam
at the commencement and imparting it to the crank at the end of the
stroke. I feel myself more indebted to Mr. Slade than to any one else,
and would here record the tribute of my grateful acknowledgment.
On January 30, 1868, I had the honor of reading a paper on the
Allen engine before the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. The
discussion of the paper was postponed until the next meeting, April
30, and the paper was ordered meantime to be printed and sent to
the members. The result was that on the latter date we had a very
interesting discussion. I may mention two things which occurred at
the first meeting, but do not appear in the report of the transactions.
When the secretary reached the statement that the acceleration of
the piston was greatest at the commencement of the stroke, the
president of the meeting, Sampson Lloyd, Esq., one of the vice-
presidents of the Institution, stopped the reading and said to me,
“You do not mean, Mr. Porter, that this is on the commencement of
the stroke, but at a point near its commencement.” I was obliged to
answer him that I intended to say that precisely on the dead center,
at the point where motion in one direction had ceased and that in the
opposite direction had not yet commenced, at that precise point the
stress on the crank was at its maximum, the crank having brought
the reciprocating parts to rest, and then by a continuance of the
same effort putting them in motion in the reverse direction.
Frederick J. Slade
After the reading was concluded, Mr. E. A. Cowper took the floor,
and stated that I was entirely mistaken in my explanation of this
action, that this had been investigated by a gentleman whose name
he gave but which I have forgotten, and who had demonstrated that
this retarding and accelerating action was represented by a curve,
which approximately he drew on the blackboard, but which he
excused himself from demonstrating there, as it would require the
use of the calculus and would take considerable time. For this
reason the discussion was postponed. At the next meeting Mr.
Cowper did not present this demonstration, and long afterwards he
wrote a letter to the editors of Engineering, stating that on full
investigation he had found the retardation and acceleration of the
piston to be represented by triangles and not by a curve. At the
discussion of the paper my view was supported by all the speakers
who addressed themselves to this point, except Mr. Cowper. An
especially careful and valuable exposition of the action of the
reciprocating parts was given Mr. Edwin Reynolds, then of the Don
Steel Works, Sheffield.
Zerah Colburn, the editor of Engineering, had always taken a
warm interest in my engine, and in the winter following the Paris
Exposition he invited me to furnish him the drawings and material for
its description in his paper. This I did, and from these he prepared a
series of articles written in his usual clear and trenchant style. These
will be found in Volume V of Engineering, the cuts following page 92,
and the articles on pages 119, 143, 158, 184, and 200.
Mr. Colburn’s articles in Engineering are so interesting in
themselves that I think I need make no apology for quoting from
them his remarks on this subject of the inertia of the reciprocating
parts, and those in which is depicted the revolutionary nature of the
high-speed engine, as viewed at that time.
After a prelude, with most of which the reader is already
acquainted, Mr. Colburn says:
“When a steam-engine is brought from abroad to the very spot
where the steam-engine originated, and where it has received, so far
at least as numbers are concerned, its greatest development, and is
claimed to be superior to those produced here, and to be able to run
advantageously at a speed hitherto deemed impracticable, its
promoters must not expect to have much attention paid to its claims
until such attention has been actually compelled, and then they must
be prepared for an ordeal of severest criticism....
“In employing a high grade of expansion, especially with the
considerable pressure of steam now usually carried in stationary
boilers, two serious practical difficulties are met with. The first arises
from the injurious effect of the sudden application of so great a force
on the centers, which the beam-engine, indeed, cannot be made to
endure, and the second is found in the extreme difference between
the pressures at the opposite ends of the stroke, which is such that
the crank, instead of being acted upon by a tolerably uniform force,
is rotated by a succession of violent punches, and these applied
when it is in its most unfavorable position....
“In the Allen engine the action of high speed causes all the
practical difficulties which lie in the way of the successful
employment of high grades of expansion combined with high
pressure of steam completely to disappear. The crank receives as
little pressure on the centers as we please; none at all if we like; the
force is applied to it as it advances, in a manner more gradual than
the advocates of graduated openings and late admission ever
dreamed of, and a fair approximation is made to a uniform rotative
force through the stroke. So that, in a properly constructed engine,
the higher the speed the smoother and more uniform and more silent
the running will be.”
After a page or more devoted to a demonstration of this action, Mr.
Colburn sums up the advantage of high speed in the following
illustration:
“Let us suppose that, in an engine making 75 revolutions per
minute, the reciprocating parts are of such a weight that the force
required at the commencement of the stroke to put them in motion is
equal to a pressure of 20 pounds on the square inch of piston. This
will not modify the diagram of pressure sufficiently to produce much
practical effect. But let the number of revolutions be increased to 150
per minute, the centrifugal force of these parts as the crank passes
the centers is now equal to 80 pounds on the square inch of piston,
and any pressure of steam below this amount acts only as a
relieving force, taking the strain of these parts partly off from the
crank. It makes no matter how suddenly it is admitted to the cylinder,
not an ounce can reach the crank; but as the latter advances, and
the acceleration of the reciprocating parts becomes less, the excess
of force not required to produce this becomes, in the most gradual
manner, effective on the crank.
“It will be observed how completely the designer has this action of
the reciprocating parts under control. He can proportion their speed
and weight to the pressure of steam in such a manner as to relieve
the crank from the blow on the center to whatever extent he may
wish. The notion that the reciprocating parts of high-speed engines
should be very light is therefore entirely wrong. They should be as
heavy as they can be made, and the heavier the better.
“The advantages of more rapid rotation are largely felt in the
transmission of power. Engineers understand very well that,
theoretically, the prime mover should overrun the resistance. Motion
should be not multiplied but reduced in transmission. This can
seldom be attained in practice, but high speed gives the great
advantage of an approximation to this theoretical excellence. On the
other hand, slow-speed engines work against every disadvantage.
Coupled engines and enormous fly-wheels have to be employed to
give a tolerably uniform motion; often great irregularities are
endured, or the abominable expedient is resorted to of placing the
fly-wheel on the second-motion shaft. Then comes the task of getting
up the speed, with the ponderous gearing and the enormous strains.
Slow motion also prevents the use of the belt, immeasurably the
preferable means of communicating power from a prime mover.
“But how about the wear and tear? The question comes from
friends and foes alike. The only difference is in the expression of
countenance, sympathetic or triumphant. The thought of high speed
brings before every eye visions of hot and torn bearings, cylinders
and pistons cut up, thumps and breakdowns, and engines shaking
themselves to pieces. It is really difficult to understand how so much
ignorance and prejudice on this subject can exist in this day of
general intelligence. The fact is, high speed is the great searcher
and revealer of everything that is bad in design and construction.
The injurious effect of all unbalanced action, of all overhanging
strains, of all weakness of parts, of all untruth in form or construction,
of all insufficiency of surface, increases as the square of the speed.
Put an engine to speed and its faults bristle all over. The shaking
drum cries, ‘Balance me, balance me!’ the writhing shaft and
quivering frame cry, ‘See how weak we are!’ the blazing bearing
screams, ‘Make me round!’ and the maker says, ‘Ah, sir, you see
high speed will never do!’
“Now, nothing is more certain than that we can make engines, and
that with all ease, in which there shall be no unbalanced action, no
overhanging strains, no weakness of parts, no untruth of form or
construction, no insufficiency of surface; in which, in short, there
shall be no defect to increase as the square of the speed, and then
we may employ whatever speed we like. ‘But that,’ interposes a
friend, ‘requires perfection, which you know is unattainable.’ No, we
reply, nothing unattainable, nothing even difficult, is required, but
only freedom from palpable defects, which, if we only confess their
existence, and are disposed to get rid of, may be easily avoided. It is
necessary to throw all conceit about our own work to the dogs, to lay
down the axiom that whatever goes wrong, it is not high speed, but
ourselves who are to blame, and to go to high speed as to our
schoolmaster.
“Among the many objections to high speed, we are often told that
the beam-engine will not bear it, and the beam-engine, sir, was
designed by Watt. In reverence for that great name, we yield to no
one. The beam-engine, in its adaptation to the conditions under
which it was designed to work—namely, a piston speed of 220 feet
per minute and a pressure of one or two atmospheres—was as
nearly perfect as any work of human skill ever was or will be; but we
wonder why the outraged ghost does not haunt the men who cling to
the material form they have inherited, when the conditions which it
was designed to meet have been all outgrown, who have used up
his factor of safety, and now stand among their trembling and
breaking structures, deprecating everything which these will not
endure.
“A journal and its bearings ought not only never to become warm,
but never even to wear, and, if properly made, never will do so with
ordinary care to any appreciable extent, no matter how great speed
is employed. It is well known that there exists a very wide difference
in bearings in this respect, some outlasting dozens of others. Now,
there need be no mystery about this: the conditions of perfect action
are so few and simple that it seems almost idle to state them. The
first is rigidity of a shaft or spindle between its bearings; but
everybody knows that if this is flexible, just in the degree in which it
springs, the journals must be cast in their bearings, though in actual
practice this perfect rigidity is not once in a thousand times even
approximated to. The point of excellence in the celebrated Sellers
bearing for shafting is that it turns universally to accommodate itself
to this flexure of the shaft, and the result is a durability almost
perfect.
“The second requirement, when we have a shaft capable of
maintaining perfect rigidity under all the strains it may be subjected
to, is abundant extent of bearing surface both in length and
circumference, a requirement, it will be seen, entirely consistent with
the first. It is a mistake to use journals of small diameter with the idea
that their enlargement will occasion loss of power on account of the
increased surface velocity, as, in fact, the coefficient of friction will
diminish in a greater ratio than that in which the velocity is increased.
In the Allen engine it is intended to make all shafts and journals too
large.
“But all is of little use unless the journal is round. High speed
under heavy pressure has a peculiar way of making it known when a
journal is not round, which, we suppose, is one of its faults. Now the
difference between a true cylindrical form and such an approximation
to it as a good lathe will produce in turning ordinarily homogeneous
metal is simply amazing; but when we compare with this the forms of
journals as commonly finished, the wonder is how many of them run
at all at any speed. When ground with a traversing wheel in dead
centers, which have themselves been ground to true cones, the only
known method by which a parallel cylindrical form can be produced,
their inequalities stand disclosed, and these are usually found to be
greater, often many times greater, than the thickness of the film of oil
that can be maintained in running. Then under pressure this film is
readily broken, the metal surfaces come into contact and abrasion
begins. But a true cylindrical journal swims in an oil-bath, separated
from its bearing at every point by a film of oil of uniform thickness,
and sustaining a uniform pressure, which cannot be anywhere
broken, and which has very little inclination to work out; and if it
revolves without deflection and the pressure per square inch of
surface is not sufficient to press out the lubricant, the speed is
absolutely immaterial and wear is impossible, except that due to the
attrition of the oil itself, which on hardened surfaces has no
appreciable effect.”
From the illustrations contained in these articles, I copy only the
following pair of diagrams with the accompanying note.
Pair of Diagrams from 18×30 Allen Engine at South Tyne Paper Mill, 108
Revolutions, Vacuum 28 Inches. Only Half Intended Load on Engine.
The winter of 1867-8 was devoted by me partly to watching the

dissolving view of my engineering prospects in England. It grew
more and more evident that through my difference with Mr.
Whitworth all my efforts and successes there would come to naught,
as they did.
But my friend, Mr. Lee, had even worse luck than I had. It will be
some relief from the monotony of my reverses if I go back a little and
tell of a reverse that befell another man. Curiously enough, Mr. Lee’s
reverse came from the overwhelming character of his success. The
English engineers had their breath quite taken away and lost their
heads, with the result that Mr. Lee lost his position. He was
ambitious to show his steam fire-engine doing its utmost. If he had
been wiser and had realized the limit of what his judges could stand,
he would have shown about one half its capacity and all parties
would have been happy.
To understand how naturally this most unexpected dénouement
came about, we must recall what the English people had been
accustomed to. In London fires were rare and trifling. Buildings were
low, built of brick with tile roofs. Open grates afforded the means of
cooking and of warming sufficiently for their climate. Every tenant of
a building who called in the fire department was fined five pounds,
which encouraged careful habits. The apparatus itself was
something quite ridiculous. It consisted of little hand-engines, worked
by about a dozen men. On the side of a corner building occasionally
one saw painted a distance in feet and inches. This meant that by
measuring this distance from this corner out into the street and
digging a little into the macadam pavement, a connection would be
found with the water-main. From this the water was permitted to flow
gently into an india-rubber saucer some 6 feet in diameter spread on
the ground. Out of this saucer the engine drew its water for a feeble
little stream.
Mr. Lee’s engine, with Worthington duplex pump, was, on its
completion, exhibited before a large company of invited guests,
principally officials of the fire department and prominent engineers.
The engine maintained a vertical column of water, delivered from a
much larger nozzle than had ever before been used in England, and
considerably over 100 feet high. There was also a corresponding
column of sparks from the chimney of the steam-pump. The
exhibition was made late in the afternoon of a short winter day, and
before it was over the coming darkness showed the column of
incandescent cinders to the best advantage. The few Americans
there enjoyed this miniature Vesuvius hugely. The Englishmen were
frightened out of their wits. Their unanimous verdict was that the
engine would evidently put out a fire, half a dozen of them for that
matter, but it would kindle twenty. And this where the engine had
been pushed to its utmost, and had not kindled one fire. Easton,
Amos & Sons instantly decided that they could never sell a steam
fire-engine under Mr. Lee’s management, and they discharged him
the next morning.
During the following season we had quite a steam-fire-engine
excitement. Some one, I have forgotten who, but think it was the
Duke of Sutherland, made a public offer of a thousand pounds
sterling for the best steam fire-engine, competition to be open to all
the world, the engines to be tested for six days in the park of the
Crystal Palace at Sydenham, in the month of July following. There
were a number of amusing incidents connected with that exhibition.
One was the following: The common council of New York City
determined that the city must have that prize, so they sent over
engine No. 7, a favorite engine, one of Mr. Lee’s make, and which
had been three or four years in service. A junket committee of the
city fathers accompanied it. The London Fire Department received
this delegation with great enthusiasm, and devoted itself to making
them happy. They took entire charge of their machine and exhibited
it in London to admiring crowds. A few days before the time fixed for
the opening of the trial they took the engine to Sydenham, where on
the way to its station it accidentally rolled down a hillside and was
pretty well broken up. Mr. Lee being in London was hurriedly sent for
to see if it could be repaired in time for the trial. He found that the
injuries were of so serious a nature that the repairs could not be
completed in less than three weeks. So that competitor was out of
the way. Their sympathizing friends were full of condolence, and
assumed all the cost of the repairs. They also proposed that when
the engine was put in proper order they should have an excursion
down the Thames to Greenwich and have there an exhibition of its
powers. So a steamboat was chartered and a large party
accompanied the machine to Greenwich. On arrival there it was
found that the two nozzles, a large one and a smaller one for long-
distance streams, which had been taken especial charge of by the
members of a fire company, had been accidentally dropped into the
Thames. The New York delegation were glad to get their engine
back to New York without further accident.
Easton, Amos & Sons also concluded that they would like that
prize. After they had taken the engine into their own hands, they
found a number of features which seemed to them to need
amendment, so they made some quite important changes. On the
second day of the trial this engine broke down and had to be
withdrawn.
I have forgotten how many competitors remained in the field, but
the prize was awarded to a London firm, builders of hand fire-
engines, who had only lately taken up this new branch of
manufacture. This successful firm applied to the government for an
order to supply steam fire-engines for the protection of the public
buildings. This application was referred to Easton, Amos & Sons, the
consulting engineers of the government. This firm concluded if
possible to have this order given to themselves, and applied to Mr.
Lee to recommend the changes in his engine necessary to put it in
proper working order. Mr. Lee replied that it was only necessary to
put the engine back in the precise condition in which he left it. They
finally agreed to do this, and employed Mr. Lee to direct the work.
When completed the engine was tried in the gardens of Buckingham
Palace, in competition with the prize winner, before a large body of
government officials. The Easton, Amos & Sons engine proved its
superiority on every point so completely that the government
immediately purchased it.
Some time before this, however, Mr. Lee had associated himself
with a capitalist for the manufacture of steam fire-engines in
England, and was then engaged on plans for them. His financial
associate was Judge Winter, by which title only he was known to us.
He was an American, and before the war was the proprietor of the
Winter Iron Works in Georgia (the precise location I have forgotten),
the most prominent engineering establishment in the Southern
States, in which business he had become wealthy. He will be
remembered by some gray heads as having been an exhibitor in the
New York Crystal Palace in 1853. He sent to it a steam-engine
bearing the name of “The Southern Belle.” This stood in the
machinery department, close to a Corliss engine, the two being the
only engines of any size which were exhibited there. This engine
was beautifully finished, polished pretty much all over, but its working
features were of the most ordinary character. Mechanically it was
valueless.
Judge Winter was a determined opponent of secession, and on
the adoption of that ordinance by the State of Georgia, was
compelled to fly from the country. He then took up his residence in
London, to which he had transferred such portion of his wealth as he
was able to convert into money.
He took a deep interest in the new steam fire-engine, and spent
part of nearly every day in the office where Mr. Lee and Mr. Taylor,
an American engineer whom Mr. Lee had associated with himself,
were engaged on their plans.
The point of interest to myself in this story lies here. The old judge
had no sound mechanical education, but was very fertile minded. He
came almost every morning with a new idea that he wanted
embodied. It was always absurd. He generally protested vigorously
against being overruled. When he was furnishing all the money he
could not see why he should not be allowed to have something to
say about it. I happened to be present in their office one morning
when he got particularly excited over their opposition. He was a stout
party, and on this occasion I had the fun of joining in the shout of
laughter that greeted him, when, after pacing the floor in silence for a
few minutes, he exclaimed, with his hand on the fabled seat of his
sympathies, “I thank my God that if there is one thing I am free from,
it is pride of opinion.”
My recollection of the above action of Easton, Amos & Sons and
of Judge Winter contributed materially to form my imagination of the
predicament in which I would certainly find myself, should I yield to
Mr. Whitworth the power to make whatever changes might occur to
him in my engine.
CHAPTER XV
Preparations for Returning to America. Bright Prospects.
aving but little practical work to occupy me that

winter, I devoted myself to getting out for Elliott Bros. a
second edition of my instruction book to accompany
the Richards indicator, and my paper for the Institution
of Mechanical Engineers and the illustrations and
material for Mr. Colburn’s articles on the Allen engine
published in Engineering.
I found in the library of the Manchester Philosophical Society a
copy of the twentieth volume of the “Memoirs of the French Academy
of Sciences,” containing the report of the experiments of M. Regnault
to determine the properties of steam, with the leaves uncut, of which
I was then able to make some use. I was anxious to obtain a copy of
this volume for myself, and also of Volume 21, containing other
memoirs by M. Regnault. This object I succeeded in accomplishing
when in Paris that winter through the kind interest of M. Tresca, the
well-known Sous-Directeur of the Ecole des Arts et Métiers. This
was a matter of so much difficulty, that a letter from M. Tresca to the
publisher was found not to be sufficient. It was necessary that M.
Tresca should personally identify me as the “savant” to whom he had
given the letter. I was then able to obtain both the volumes, which I
brought home with me on my return to America.
Now was the winter of my discontent made glorious summer, and
all the clouds that lowered about my enterprise in the deep bosom of
the ocean buried, by the receipt of a letter from Mr. Hope, telling me
that Mr. Allen’s report after his visit of inspection was of so entirely
satisfactory a character that, after full consideration, it had been
concluded to write me to leave everything in England in whatever
condition I might be obliged to, and return home and join with Mr.
Allen in the manufacture of the engines, for which ample capital
would be furnished. So in my ecstasy I went about quoting to myself
Shakespeare’s lines and applying them to my reviving fortunes. Mr.
Hoyle congratulated me warmly on this favorable turn in my affairs,
seeing clearly that I would never do anything with Mr. Whitworth,
unless on his own inadmissible terms.
After I had sobered down from my excitement, I began to consider
the matter carefully, and to determine upon the preparations that
ought to be made as a foundation for what, by judicious
management, should grow to be a great and profitable business. I
fully realized the responsibility that was devolved upon me, and
determined that both in foresight and prudence I would prove myself
equal to its requirements.
I wrote a glad acceptance of the proposition and expatiated on the
advantage we should enjoy from what I had learned in England. I
told them that the selection of a suitable location was of the first
importance, and suggested that a plot of twenty or thirty acres
should be purchased in the environs of a large manufacturing town,
affording a good labor market and having good railway facilities, and
where the land could be got at farm prices. I would plan shops on a
scale large enough for a great business and of a form adapted for
enlargement from time to time, and build at first a small part, which
as the business grew could be added to without alteration. I asked
them to look about for the best place, but do nothing further until I
got home, when I would have carefully studied plans, embodying the
most recent improvements in building and tools to lay before them.
I then entered with enthusiasm into the preparation of my plans.
The model shop, now in common use, had then lately been designed
by the firm of Smith & Coventry, tool makers of Salford, which is a
suburb of Manchester, separated from it only by a narrow stream,
the river Irwell, and their plan had been at once followed by the firm
of Craven Brothers of Manchester, also tool makers. It was, of
course, still unknown in the United States.
The general idea of this shop was taken from the nave and side
aisles of Gothic cathedrals. The central and wider portion, which we
may call the nave, was one story in height and was commanded by
the travelers, and its floor was occupied by the largest tools only, and
for erection. The side aisles were two stories in height. The smallest
work, of course, was on the upper story, and tools and work of
medium size on the floors below, the latter being transported by
carriages suspended from the floor above. No rails were laid or
gangways kept open on any floor. All transportation of heavy objects
was through the air. The great value of this improvement, made by
this firm in shop design, and which has brought this design into
general use, lay in its natural classification of the work. Travelers
were already quite common in England, but under them large and
small tools, often very small ones, were found mingled quite
promiscuously. Their shop had an entire glass roof, made on the
ridge and furrow plan, first used in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park
for the International Exhibition of 1851. That roof would not answer,
however, in this climate, on account of our snow in winter, so I had to
plan a different one. But in every other respect their plan was
perfect. The columns, of course, at that time were of cast iron. These
were cast in pairs connected by a web, the longer columns in each
pair supporting the roof, the short ones the rails for the travelers.
In Smith & Coventry’s shop the traveler was operated from the
floor by means of a loop hanging from a wheel on the crab. The
arrangement was exceedingly convenient in every respect.
I obtained full detail drawings of Smith & Coventry’s shop. The
accompanying outline presents a cross-section of this shop, and is
figured to the dimensions I proposed to adopt. I proposed to build a
length of only 75 feet, which by successive additions could be
extended to 500 feet if required. Moreover, at first the office,
drawing-office, pattern shop, and storeroom, besides the machine
shop, in short everything, except only the engine and boiler, smith
shop and foundry, were to be accommodated in this one building. I
was greatly pleased with my plan, and felt sure that it would
commend itself to my associates, as no shop possessing these
conveniences then existed in the United States. I, however,
introduced one modification of the English shops, or rather one
addition. I had observed that reliance on the traveler for local work
involved a serious loss of time. I had seen in various shops men
standing idle, sometimes from fifteen to thirty minutes, waiting for the
traveler to be at liberty to come and give them a lift. It appeared
evident to me that the province of the traveler was to fetch and carry;
not to perform local work, unless of the heaviest class. So for the
latter purpose I provided swing cranes, which could be operated by
the workman himself without assistance. This also enabled one
traveler to cover a much longer extent of floor.
Cross-section of Machine Shop Proposed by Mr. Porter in 1868, after the Design
of Smith & Coventry.
Smith & Coventry had made numerous improvements on Mr.

Whitworth’s tools. I have already mentioned their arrangement which
made it possible to take up the wear of the lathe spindle bearings. In
the radial drill, an invention of Mr. Whitworth’s, as made by him, in
order to bring the drill to the right position longitudinally, the workman
was obliged to go to the end of the arm and turn the screw. From this
point he could not see his work, and had to guess at the proper
adjustment. I have seen him in the Whitworth works go back and
forth for this purpose three or four times, and have always doubted if
he got it exactly right after all. Smith & Coventry introduced an
elegant device by which the workman was able to make this
adjustment without moving from his place. They also first made the
arm of the radial drill adjustable vertically by power. By simply
reversing the curve of the brackets under Mr. Whitworth’s shaper
tables, they made these unyielding under the pressure of the cut.
This firm also first employed small cutting tools set in an arm which
was secured in the tool-post, and put an end to tool-dressing by the
blacksmith, which had caused a fearful waste of time, and also
encouraged idle habits among the workmen. This improvement has
since come into common use. Their system of grinding these small
tools interested me very much. The workman never left his machine.
He was provided with a number of tools, set in compartments in a
box. When a tool became dull he took it out, set it in the box upside
down, and substituted another. A boy went regularly through the
shop, took up all the upside-down tools, ground them, and brought
them back. The grindstones were provided with tool-holders and a
compound screw feed, by which the tools were always presented to
the stone at the same desired angle, and were prevented from
wearing out the stone by running into grooves or following soft spots.
The whole surface of the stone was used uniformly and kept in
perfect condition.
I picked up in that shop the solid wrench made with the elegant
improvement of inclining the handle at the angle of 15 degrees from
the line of the jaws; enabling it, by turning the wrench over, to be
worked within a radial angle of 30 degrees. This adapted it for use in
tight places. I brought the idea home with me and always supplied
my engines with wrenches made in that way. I offered the plan to
Billings & Spencer for nothing, but they did not think it worth making
the dies for. Mr. Williams was more appreciative. I believe it is now in
quite common use.
At that time toolmaking in this country, which has since become so
magnificently developed, was in many important respects in a
primitive condition, and I proposed to introduce into my shop every
best tool and method, adapted to my requirements, that I could find
in England. For this purpose I visited and carefully studied all the tool
works of good standing, and my final conclusion was that the best
tools for design, strength, solidity, facility of operation and truth of
work were those made by Smith & Coventry. This may be guessed
from the few examples I have given of their fertile mindedness and
advanced ideas. So I prepared a careful list of tools that I proposed
to order from them in time to be ready for use as soon as my shop
should be completed. I found also the remarkable fact that I could
obtain these tools, duty and freight paid, decidedly cheaper than
corresponding inferior tools could then be got from American
makers.
Before bidding good-by to England, I must tell the luck I had in
endeavoring to introduce Mr. Allen’s double-opening slide valve,
shown in the general view of my London exhibit, now in common use
the world over. No locomotive engineer would even look at it. Finally
I got an order from Mr. Thomas Aveling for one of these valves with
single eccentric valve-gear, to be tried on one of his road
locomotives or traction engines. Mr. Aveling is known to fame as the
inventor of the road locomotive and steam road roller. He once told
me how he came to make this invention. He was a maker of portable
engines in Rochester, which was the center of a wheat-growing
district. These engines were employed universally to drive threshing
machines. Horses were used to draw both the machine and the
engine from farm to farm. The idea occurred to him that this was
almost as foolish as was the practice of the Spanish muleteers, in
putting the goods they transported on one side of the animal and
employing a bag of stones on the other side to balance them. Why
not make the engine capable of moving itself and drawing the
threshing machine, and dispense with the horses altogether? So he
applied himself to the job and did it. Then it was found that the self-
propelling threshing-machine engines could draw a great many other
things besides threshing machines, and the business grew to large
proportions.
Mr. Aveling made an engine with valve and valve-gear from my
drawings, and I took a ride with him on it from Rochester to London,
the engine drawing two trucks loaded with the two halves of a fly-
wheel. The performance was entirely satisfactory. He said the engine
was handled more easily than any other he ever made, and it
maintained its speed in going up hill in a manner to astonish him,
which was accounted for by the double valve opening. The little
engine ran very rapidly, about 300 revolutions per minute, being
geared down to a slow motion of the machine, about 4 miles travel
per hour. With a single opening for admission it had admitted only a
partial pressure of the steam, but the double opening valve admitted
very nearly the whole pressure and made a sharp cut-off, all which I

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George Eliot for the Twenty-First

Century 1st ed. Edition K. M. Newton

George Eliot for the

ISBN 978-3-319-91925-6 ISBN 978-3-319-91926-3 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018946149

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: Classic Image / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

An earlier version of Chap. 4 was published in Essays in Criticism: ‘George

1 Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George Eliot Past,

2 The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot 17

3 Critical Encounters: Hardy, Bonaparte, Miller 51

4 Eliot and the Reinterpretation of the Ethical 77

5 Eliot as Psychological Novelist 97

6 The Mill on the Floss and the Revision of Tragedy 137

7 Daniel Deronda and the Novel of the Future 161

8 Eliot and the Politics of Modernism 205

K. M. Newton is Professor of English (Emeritus) at the University of

Interpreting the Text. Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1990.

AB Adam Bede (1859), ed. Valentine Cunningham. Oxford: Oxford

Essays Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney. London: Routledge

Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George

© The Author(s) 2018 1

i­nvulnerable. It may not be difficult to show that past denigration of Eliot

fiction with a conservative ideology, fundamentally supporting the socio-

a piece of paper’(Davis 2017, 3). Though highly relevant to current and

of Lewes’s intellectual affinities with him. Bain (unusually accompanied by

when considering how human beings engage or interact with external

philosophy. But whereas the atom turned out to be a scientifically produc-

A potential appeal of associationism for radical empiricists such as Eliot

Significantly Wordsworth, who was Eliot’s favourite Romantic poet, dis-

Gordon S. Haight, ed., A Century of George Eliot Criticism (London: Methuen,

The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot

© The Author(s) 2018 17

relationship with Lewes and her marriage to Cross were conforming to

fter the close of the Paris Exposition I devoted myself

The winter of 1867-8 was devoted by me partly to watching the

Preparations for Returning to America. Bright Prospects.

aving but little practical work to occupy me that

Smith & Coventry had made numerous improvements on Mr.

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1 Introduction: A Brief Reflection on George Eliot Past,

2 The ‘Radical’ Mindset of George Eliot 17

3 Critical Encounters: Hardy, Bonaparte, Miller 51

4 Eliot and the Reinterpretation of the Ethical 77

5 Eliot as Psychological Novelist 97

6 The Mill on the Floss and the Revision of Tragedy 137

7 Daniel Deronda and the Novel of the Future 161

8 Eliot and the Politics of Modernism 205

AB Adam Bede (1859), ed. Valentine Cunningham. Oxford: Oxford

invulnerable. It may not be difficult to show that past denigration of Eliot