A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

3.
the time, and certainly no novelist, more fully epitomizes the cent~;
her development is a paradigm, her intellectual biography a graph, of its
most decided trend. It 3 One possible approach, therefore, 1to. J
George Eliot t s
work is to use her articles, letters, and novels as quarries for research
into nineteenth cent~ ideologies. A related pursuit is the search for
influences, and the detection of similarities between her thought and
that of her contemporaries, not in order to suggest a common preoccupation
with certain topics but in order to establish causal links. Historians of
ideas can delve into her novels and come up with items labelled ItComteJ'
or "Feuerbach)' or ''Darwin. tt But conclusions of this ldnd are very difficult
to prove and therefore always remain tentative. And when vIe are dealing with
~a mind of the quality of George Eliot's, it is highly probable that
on certain occasions she herself was the originator of the "influenoe."
Lewes, for example, acknowledges that he owes to her his recognition of the
Utopian nature of Comte's work. 4 Later, in ~ Study ~ Psycholoeax (1878),
he mentions that "one very near and dear" 5 has brought to his 'notice an
important pasSage from Aristotle's Ethics. Herbert Spencer similarly
admits a debt to her. 6 In his AutobiOgraphY, he also states clearly
that "there is not the slightest foundation" for the belief that he had
much to do with her education: their "friendship did not commence uutil
1851--a date several years later than the publication of her translation
of Strauss, and when she was alrea~ distinguished by that breadth of
culture and universality of pOYiTer which have since made her known to all
the world." 7 And a further indication of the pervasiveness of her influence
occurs in the notes D~vin's
son added to the posthumpus edition
of ~ Expression ~ ~ Emotions ?::!l ~ ~ Animals. 8 For there he suggests
that readers who are seeldng confirmation of his father's thesis should
turn to Ge0rge Eliot's novels. Clearly George Eliot exerted direct influence
on various seminal writers of the nineteenth century, and we can thus