Abstract
HE TRADITION of chapter tags established by Scott in the Waverley Novels was ignored by Dickens and Thackeray, and it was followed by George Eliot only in her last three novels, Felix Holt, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, although she had used mottoes for the earlier novels as a whole.1 Her curious adoption of an earlier fashion received specific praise from John Blackwood when he commented on the manuscript of Volumes I and II of Felix Holt in his letter of April 30, 1866, By the way, how admirable your mottoes are. Many of them I imagine to be your own. I see you have left in many cases. Do you mean to fill them up? 2 In the manuscript, now in the British Museum,3 there are still blanks for Chapters xix-xxv, xxviii and xxix, and the mottoes of the printed novel must have been added at the printer's proof stage, as is borne out by George Eliot's own statement: in the same letter Blackwood had warned her that will begin to pour in upon you in a few days;' 4it is presumably these proofs she corrected in the evening of May 16, and of which she wrote on May 17, Did nothing but write mottoes to my proofs, 5 in a confession of artistic weariness. The manuscript of Volume III
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