Industrial History, Preindustrial Literature: George Eliot's Middlemarch

An especially gruesome historical event impresses itself on the minds of several characters in Eliot's Middlemarch. The first allusion to that event occurs when Mr. Hackbutt, explaining his reservations about the 1832 Reform Bill, remarks, "I myself should never favour immoderate views--in fact I take my stand with Huskisson." ¹ William Huskisson, who opposed reform until it was all but inevitable, is remembered equally well for his horrific death. In 1830, after he had resigned as Secretary of State, he was riding in one of the show trains that marked the beginning of the railway system. When the train stopped, Huskisson stepped down onto the tracks to admire the new machine. The accident is related in one particularly vivid account:

Those inside [the train] stretched their legs discreetly and consulted their watches, wondering how long it would be before the other engine reached them. "I think you had better get in," called the Duke of Wellington to the loiterers outside. Only then did they see the Rocket bearing down on them fast on the other rails. There was not enough room, they suddenly realised, for them to stand safely on the opposite side of the line, and no space either between the two sets of rails . . . The former Secretary of State had already tried to escape the oncoming train by crossing the track. He now ran back in panic and was clutching at one of the doors when the engine caught him and flung him on the rails. Even inside the carriage, Lady Wilton could distinctly hear the crushing of bones, followed by Mrs. Huskisson's piercing shriek. ²

This accident, compulsively repeated in Eliot's text, is referred to a few chapters later, when Mr. Raffles takes "the new-made railway, observing to his fellow-passengers that he considered it pretty well seasoned now it had done for Huskisson" (379). As Linda Colley notes, the death of Huskisson became a historical set-piece, in part, because of its obvious and facile symbolism: after resisting reform, he was both literally and figuratively flung in front of the fast moving and inevitable engine of change, which symbolized not only the advent of middle-class emancipation, but also the revolution of industrialization, signalled by the new railway system.

The head-on collision between literary and historical character in Middlemarch is important, for Eliot criticism has long been divided by divergent interpretive tracks, one which runs along the lines of a kind of Lukácsian march of history, and the other which follows the perhaps slower lines of figurative reading. In Eliot criticism, the political / literary tension manifests itself through the historical / literary distinction, where "history" is frequently substituted for "politics." ³ The polarized critical climate surrounding Eliot's work results, in part, from the fundamental misconception of tropological discourse as wholly incompatible with historical and political discourse. In Eliot's Middlemarch, however, historical and political discourse is inescapably tropological. Tropes, in particular, the trope of personification, allow Eliot to create a world in which the terms associated with the literary are turned into the terms aligned with the historical and political. Like politics, the term history, in both Victorian texts and in current critical theory, is aligned with action and practice. ⁴ Because the related tropes of personification and prosopopeia enable a turn from inanimate to animate, from object to subject, and from description to action, those tropes are central to Eliot's historical turn.

In the polarized climate of Eliot criticism, figurative reading tends to emerge as a kind of preindustrial form opposed to the industrial realm of history. Terry Eagleton, for example, argues that Eliot's novel reduces the historical to the literary because "[t]he Reform Bill, the railways, cholera, machine-breaking: these 'real' historical forces do no more than impinge on the novel's margins." ⁵ The forces of industrial revolution, that is, are "real" history, and those forces are contained and reduced by the text. Distinguishing "between the text...