post-Romantic narrative mode of virtual autobiography, as in Oliver Twist.
Dickens’s attack on social abuses draws its emotional power not from an accurate
representation of the Yorkshire Board Schools but from the reader’s identification
with the protagonist, a convention borrowed from romance, adventure and fantasy.
After Byron, the Romantic protagonist is often transparently the author as hero and
victim.Jane Eyre shows how hard it is to avoid vicarious self-pity in this mode, where
protagonist, author and reader are all to share the same point of view and to pull
together, a problem better managed in David Copperfield and better still in Great
Expectations. George Eliot’s seven novels develop the strengths of the mode without
entirely overcoming its weakness.Adam Bede
In Adam Bede the pretty, vain Hetty Sorrell prefers the young squire Arthur to the
worthy Adam, a carpenter. She is to marry Adam but finds herself pregnant, and kills
the baby. Hanging is commuted to transportation after Arthur intervenes. In prison,
Hetty is comforted by the Methodist preacher Dinah Morris, loved by Seth Bede.
Seth stands aside to allow his brother Adam to marry her. This tragicomedy of moral
choices is set in a quaintly idyllic rural society. Mrs Poyser, Hetty’s aunt, was thought
a comic creation equal to Sam Weller. Sam’s creator, Dickens, was not taken in by
George Eliot’s manly pseudonym: ‘no man ever before had the art of making himself
mentally so like a woman’.The Mill on the Floss
The narrator ofThe Mill on the Floss is Maggie Tulliver, who has a childhood like that
ofMary Ann Evans: she is a sensitive, intelligent, awkward girl, chafing at the bonds
of rural society, though its domesticities are again described in loving detail. The
narrative in the passage quoted above initially passes from ‘they’ (Tom and Maggie),302 10 · FICTION
Illustration to George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss
(1860), by W. J. Allen. Tom and Maggie Tulliver
foresee their fate.