George Eliot and the Politics of National Inheritance

Abstract In this stimulating intellectual history of the ideas behind George Eliot’s novels, Bernard Semmel argues that the popularity of Eliot’s fiction can be attributed to a nostalgia for a lost heritage. Writing at a time when society was transforming itself from a traditional to a modern one, Eliot, however, viewed herself as intellectually ‘disinherited’, largely because of her estrangement from her father and brother. Through detailed analyses of Eliot’s novels, and a study of the intellectual currents of the time, Semmel demonstrates that the theme of inheritance provided the central ideas in Eliot’s novels. Semmel argues that Eliot wrote of inheritance both in the common meaning of the term, as in the transfer of goods and property from parents to children, and in the more metaphoric sense of the inheritance of both the benefits and the burdens of the historical past, particularly those of the nation’s culture and traditions (Eliot viewed nationality as an especially important moral force). Semmel also sees Eliot’s use of the politics of inheritance as a debt to the philosophical view called Positivism, which was a major force in nineteenth-century culture. Eliot’s difficult personal associations with leading Positivists, however, led her to a political compromise that pervades her later work. Semmel dissects the Politics of Middlemarch and convincingly demonstrates Eliot’s variations on the theme of inheritance and her acceptance of the gradualist reform processes in (as opposed to a radiacl criticism of) Britain’s political life.