of James’s own art, following French examples, make George Eliot’s openness look
solidly provincial. James’s handling of narrative propriety and of point-of-view is
more discriminated. Yet he fully shared Eliot’s root concern with the future of inno-
cence in a civilization growing ever more complex. He thought the old-fashioned
English novels ‘loose and baggy monsters’. Yet there is always an appeal from art to
life and human import. James’s refinement (see p. 310) set a different limit to the
development of the novel.Daniel Deronda
Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s last novel, has had a mixed reception. In order to save her
family and herself from poverty, Gwendolen Harleth marries the rich Grandcourt,
who has had children by a mistress known to Gwendolen. Grandcourt’s selfishness
and his mistress’s reproaches isolate Gwendolen, who relies increasingly on the soul-
ful Daniel Deronda – an idealist of a type dear to Eliot, who in the Preface to
Middlemarch had dwelt on the modern problem of the martyr without a cause.
Deronda turns out to be the son of a Jewish singer, who sacrificed him to her own
career. When Grandcourt is drowned, Deronda marries Mirah, a young singer, and
devotes himself, with Mirah’s brother Mordecai, to founding a Jewish national home
in Israel. Many readers find that the Jewish theme is presented uncritically.
Daniel Deronda does not show English virtue and foreign duplicity, rather the
reverse. Its international perspectives on the fate of idealists in a sophisticating world
are those of Henry James and Conrad. After George Eliot’s death in 1880, the Novel’s
achievements and audiences became more specialized, as common culture further
diversified.Nonsense prose and ver se
Lewis Carroll
The rest of the 19th century is treated separately, but before leaving the Victorian
uplands, mention must be made of a rare flower which grew there:Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’ s Adventures in Wonderland.The author, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a
deacon at Christ Church, Oxford, a mathematics don and a pioneer of portrait
photography. Alice Liddell was the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, joint
editor of the standard Greek dictionary.Alice was originally made up by Dodgson
for her and her sisters while he was rowing them up the Thames in 1862, when she
was 10.Alice’s adventures occur when in a dream she falls down a rabbit-hole. In a
series of odd and threatening situations, creatures engage her in ‘curiouser and curi-
ouser’ conversations and sing nonsensical songs. Alice’s unintimidated common
sense saves her.
Children still like Alice’s fantasy, surprise, and logical and verbal jokes, as in ‘The
Mad Hatter’s Tea Party’. The action often shows the absurd arrangements whereby
large animals eat small ones (weeping in pity as they do so), and big people boss little
people about without compunction. Adults enjoy the stream of riddles and logical
games, such as ‘How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?’, and the Cheshire
Cat’s grin, ‘which remained some time after the rest of it had gone’.
There are also verse parodies. Alice tries to repeat Isaac Watts’s ‘Against Idleness
and Mischief ’: ‘How doth the little busy bee / Improve each shining hour’. It comes
out as ‘How doth the little crocodile / Improve its shining tail’, with a second verse:306 10 · FICTION