VICTORIAN COSMOPOLITANISM, INTERRUPTED

Readers ofMiddlemarch(1871–1872) willremember the moment when Brooke's bid to win a seat in Parliament abruptly ends, in the middle of the Reform Bill campaign and in the middle of a speech. He tells the crowd how happy he is to be there. He tells the crowd he is a “close neighbor” of theirs. Then he says the following:“I've always gone a good deal into public questions – machinery, now, and machine-breaking – you're many of you concerned with machinery, and I've been going into that lately. It won't do, you know, breaking machines: everything must go on – trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples – that kind of thing – since Adam Smith that must go on. We must look all over the globe: – ‘Observation with extensive view,’ must look everywhere, ‘from China to Peru,’ as somebody says – Johnson, I think, ‘The Rambler,’ you know. That's what I have done up to a certain point – not as far as Peru; but I've not always stayed at home – I saw it wouldn't do. I've been in the Levant, where some of your Middlemarch goods go – and then, again, in the Baltic. The Baltic, now.” (Eliot,Middlemarch349; Book 5, ch. 51)It's when he passes from the Levant to the Baltic that Brooke is interrupted by a laugh-creating echo from the crowd, an echo which, “by the time it said, ‘The Baltic, now'” (350; Book 5, ch. 51), has become fatal.