Class Affect and the Victorian Novelist: George Eliot's Gentility and the Origins of Sympathy in Felix Holt

Abstract

Class Affect and the Victorian Novelist:George Eliot's Gentility and the Origins of Sympathy in Felix Holt Susan Zlotnick (bio) george eliot's husband, John Cross, singles out Esther Lyon, the heroine of Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), in the beginning of his biography, George Eliot's Life (1885), for her resemblance to his late wife. That observation might surprise Eliot's readers, who have been inclined to see the rebellious Maggie Tulliver and the ardent Dorothea Brooke as avatars of their creator, but not Esther Lyon. An aspirer to gentility who acquired "too many airs and graces" (Felix Holt 75) at boarding school to settle back into her father's small-town Dissenting congregation, Esther is a recurring figure in Eliot's fiction, an early version of that more ruthless aspirant to gentility, Middlemarch's Rosamond Vincy. Despite the glaring contrast between the vulgar young women who inhabit her novels and the mature Eliot's sage-like stature, there are sound reasons for adding provincial strivers to Eliot's roster of semi-autobiographical characters. In his "Introductory Sketch" of Eliot's childhood, Cross highlights the narrowness of Eliot's farmhouse upbringing before noting that Eliot glimpsed a wider life while visiting neighbourhood grandees, and that these glimpses "affected the imagination and accentuated the social differences—differences which had a profound significance for such a sensitive and such an intellectually commanding character, and which left their mark on it" (36). Cross follows this observation about Eliot's sensitivity to social distinctions with a description of Esther from Felix Holt that he believes captures his late wife's characteristic class feelings: No one who has not a strong natural prompting and susceptibility towards such things [the luxuries wealth can provide], and has, at the same time, suffered from the presence of opposite conditions, can understand how powerfully those minor accidents of rank which please the fastidious senses, can preoccupy the imagination. (qtd. in Cross 35–36) By aligning Eliot with Esther, Cross suggests that Eliot too suffered on account of her family's modest social position. Moreover, the link he draws between [End Page 115] Esther and Eliot raises the question: if "minor accidents of rank" preoccupied Esther's imagination, to what degree did they also occupy Eliot's? Embedded in this question about Eliot's rank is a larger one about class affect. Can what sociologist Diane Reay identifies as the "psychic landscape of social class," composed of an "affective lexicon" that includes such emotions as "envy, deference, contempt, arrogance, pride, rage, satisfaction, embarrassment and pity" (912–13), be discerned in a writer's work? This essay attempts to answer that question by turning to Esther Lyon, who shares Eliot's humble origins as well as her boarding-school education in gentility, and the novel in which she appears. Class has long been of vital concern to critics of Felix Holt because of its engagement with the politics of workingclass suffrage.1 Most often read as a contribution to the debates surrounding the Reform Bill of 1867, Felix Holt simultaneously looks back to 1832 and the emergence of the middle class as a rising political force in British society and forward to the passage of the Second Reform Bill. Nevertheless, its stereoscopic focus on both the middle and working classes has been overlooked, and the bulk of critical attention has been paid to the working class, even though the novel links the two reform bills through Felix Holt, who is less a radical than a reformer bent on reshaping the identities of both the middle and working classes. To be fair, Felix Holt remains a difficult text for critics to make sense of: its titular working-class radical turns out to be a conservative who opposes the extension of suffrage, and the backstory that explains how Esther Lyon comes to be the long-lost heir to the Transome estate is so complex that it impedes the story's flow. Moreover, the novel's main narrative threads, Felix's political plot and Esther's inheritance plot, do not seem to align easily, which has led Alison Booth to conclude that "it is impossible to make a fully coherent novel out...