First published 1860. Wordsworth paperback, 1995, pp 459, c.215,000 words.
Very much a Victorian novel, this is full of authorial moralising and has a ridiculously melodramatic ending. The authorial voice slows the narrative pace, something that would be unacceptable to today’s publishers. Victorian society had its strict codes of writing that seeped in from the oppressive moral climate of the times, something that this story very effectively engages with.
The story concerns the life of a girl, Maggie Tulliver, from aged nine to nineteen. She is clearly the brightest member of her family, but as a female is not expected to receive an academic education or to behave in any kind of independent way. The society portrayed here is rather akin to that currently prevailing in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and other fundamentalist Muslim regimes: ‘We don’t ask what a woman does – we ask whom she belongs to’ [p374]. The setting is the English Midlands in the early nineteenth century, the world that Eliot grew up in, with its small-town conformity, continuity, and limited horizons, both geographically and socially.
Maggie is loved by her father, rather as a pet. He owns the titular mill, successful in a modest way, and desires his son, Tom, to rise higher and so determines to give him a gentleman’s education, despite Tom’s lack of interest or aptitude. Maggie’s mother is not very bright but comes from a respectable and long-established family.
Eliot builds the drama well. Maggie loves her brother dearly, but he is indifferent to her, being more interested in rough outdoor pursuits. Mr Tulliver goes to law to fight a neighbour who he believes is taking action that will endanger the mill’s water supply. There is a strong cast of secondary characters, notably Mrs Tulliver’s three sisters and their families, but also a ‘packman’ – a travelling salesman with the gift of the gab and a sharp eye – and the local priest. While Eliot has fun exposing the foibles of her characters they never cease to be plausible humans.
As Maggie grows into womanhood, she attracts the attentions of the young men of the neighbourhood. She is torn to make a choice between two of them; with the only alternative being to leave her beloved neighbourhood to become a governess or teacher. Eliot balances the two principle suiters, adding to the drama, and precipitating the over-the-top ending.
What Eliot is very good at is revealing the complexities and contradictions that lie within us all. ‘There is something strangely winning to most woman in that offer of the firm arm: the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help – the presence of strength that is outside them and yet theirs – meets a continual want of the imagination’ [p358-359]. And: ‘He ought not to have gone. He would master himself in future. He would make himself disagreeable to her – quarrel with her perhaps. Quarrel with her? Was it possible to quarrel with a creature who had such eyes – defying and depreciating, contradicting and clinging, imperious and beseeching – full of delicious opposites? To see such a creature subdued by love for one would be a lot worth having – to another man’ pp359-360]. How well Eliot understand humans in love.
While Eliot is attacking the constraints placed on women by the society of which she writes, she is not a revolutionary wanting to overthrow the whole order. There is sympathetic portrayal of true Christian virtue, notably in the form of Dr Kenn, the local priest. None of the characters are wholly malicious, either by action or omission. None are entirely virtuous either. Some kill by kindness, some by indifference, some by foolishness, some by blindness, but none through deliberate evil.
Eliot just occasionally slips in a bit of humour: ‘she couldn’t cry so much as her sister Pullet did, and often felt her deficiency at funerals’ [p76], and: ‘they didn’t know there was any other religion, except chapel-goers, which appeared to run in families, like asthma’ [p239].
There are some aspects of this novel that were surprising: there is quite a lot of detail about how small business is financed, and how trade is conducted. It is clear that those at the top of society are held aloft on the backs of the many poor. However a crafty, hardworking and independently-minded man can prosper too. Occasionally Eliot slips in a profound remark, for example: ‘ “character is destiny.” But not the whole of our destiny’ [p353], and ‘we are all apt to believe what the world believes about us’ [p63].
Eliot is very good at young love – that wonderful illusion and delusion that wraps all around, colouring sight and sound, touch, feeling and emotion, giddying excitement and confusion. She is also an acute, if sometimes a little exaggerated, observer of how a society coerces its members into conformity. While this is in many ways a heavy-handed Victorian morality tale, it is also a cry from the heart of someone who had a deep understanding of, and ability to convey in writing, unchanging human nature.
There is a short introduction to this edition that is largely a summary of the story (a plot spoiler). It adds little insight into the book, the author or her times.
Wikipedia biography of Eliot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot
Wikipedia summary of the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mill_on_the_Floss
Others’ reviews of the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20564.The_Mill_on_the_Floss?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_18
© William John Graham, July 2024