A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

Preoepts ~ People.
Our investigation of George Eliotts conception of morality has led
into very divergent field~.
We have examined eighteenth oentury moralists,
Shaftesbury,Hutcheson and Hume; Balguy and Prioe; nineteenth century
sociologists, biologists and moral philosophers such as Spencer, Bain,
Darwin and Lewes; and lastly a German demythologiser of the Bible,
Ludwig Feuerbach. These various writers ir~luenced George Eliot, or'more
accurately, reinforced the tendency of her thought to move in a part- /
icular direction. Her concern for moral growth, for fellowship and
human sympathy, provides a particular mental coloration which permeates
her whole vlOrk. We find the same emphasis whether we are examining
her belief in "universal causality" 1 or observing the eff'ect on her
methods of characterisation of her acceptance of the laws of association
psychology or those of' evolutionary psychology. We have been inspecting
a "web where each mesh Ldraw~ all the rest. It 2
Up to this point I have been concentrating on isolating and identifying
George Eliot's clusters of ideas. But an analysis or description
of her psyohologioal and moral assumptions provides no indication of how
she has incorporated these assumptions into her.novels. It may indicate
t
the parameters of' a character s growth or decline but convey no critical
assessment o!' the novelist t s success or f'ailure. A know13dge of the relationship
between her thought and that of her contemporaries may illmainate
the novels in one area but cannot Df itself offer an evaluat~ve
commentary. To briu.ge this gap between description and evaluation, it
is necessary to examine more specifically the implications of her ideas
for the aesthetic completeness of' the novels. Thus it is not enough
merely to identify George Eliot's moral absolutism or her hierarohical