A Natural History of English Life

Abstract

Early in The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’, the concluding essay of George Eliot’s Impressions ofTheophrastus Such (1878) (and as such the finale of Eliot’s literary career), the narrator makes an implicit allusion to J. R. Green. This is disguised in the apparently innocuous mention of ‘one of our living historians’.1 At first glance it may not appear to be a particularly significant allusion, as Green was a popular historian of the mid-later nineteenth century. His A Short History of the English People (1874) achieved significant commercial success. Indeed, George Eliot’s own personal familiarity with Green’s work at this particular point in her career is clear. A Short History featured in her notebooks2 and, in a letter to her friend Eugène Bodichon, she noted how she was ‘deep among the gravities now. I have been reading aloud Green’s first vol. of his new larger History of the English People.’3 As such, an allusion to Green does not stand out as especially unusual.