Debt and the Moral Imagination in Middlemarch

Having again moved to the forefront of public attention as a result of the most recent financial crisis, issues of debt have gained renewed urgency in politics and the media. But how do we actually think about debt? As David Graeber, the anthropologist and social activist, observes: "Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it" (Graeber 4-5). In this essay, I want to examine some of the notions that shape our thinking about debt and, at the same time, show how they relate to debt narratives in Victorian novels, which reveal a veritable obsession with issues of debt.

The literary treatment of debt in Victorian fiction differs considerably from contemporary discussions in politics and the media. However, similar to nineteenth-century literature, our understanding of debt today tends to carry a moral undertone. In her timely non-fiction book Payback, written shortly after the onset of the financial crisis, the novelist Margaret Atwood notes that "[w]e seem to be entering a period in which debt has passed through its most recent harmless and fashionable period, and is reverting to being sinful" (Atwood 41). For many years, people were encouraged to take out mortgages and live on their credit cards. However, since the beginning of the financial crisis, debt appears to have become disreputable (again).¹

Indeed, our everyday understanding of debt appears to be closely linked to moral judgments. But how exactly does economic debt intersect with moral discourse? And how do our notions relate to the literary treatment of debt in George Eliot's novel Middlemarch? Because moral discourses are coming back and because they go back to nineteenth-century culture, it is important to look at the ways in which debt figures in the moral imagination and literary narratives of the Victorian period. So far Middlemarch has not prominently featured in the critical discussion of literature, money, and debt.² However, debt plays a pivotal role in Eliot's novel. As I will argue in my reading, the literary text uses debt as a narrative trope in order to address moral issues. Or put differently, debt becomes a vehicle for Eliot's moral imagination. At the same time, Eliot's complex literary treatment of debt in its various forms works against the conflation of the moral and the financial that often underpins everyday notions of debt.

Middlemarch, published in 1874, is generally regarded as one of the key texts defining Victorian literature, and Eliot is often described as the moral novelist of the period par excellence. In Eliot's novel, the question is raised time and again what one needs to do in order to be a good person. What does it mean to lead a good life? And what does money have to do with morality? Eliot's heroine Dorothea Brooke, for instance, is anxious to make herself and her life worthy and responsible by helping others and thus repeatedly asks herself what she can do. Dorothea is not in debt. On the contrary, thanks to her upper-class background, she is socially and financially privileged. However, it is precisely her privilege that makes her feel indebted to society. As a result, she constantly wonders what she can do about her moral indebtedness and how she can use her wealth to help others.

By engaging with these and related questions, Eliot places a lot of emphasis on the choices and decisions of her characters. What choices do they make, and how do they reach their decisions? But also, do they gain any moral insight? Do they actually recognize the consequences of their actions and decisions? In the Victorian novel, the economic domain serves as an important area in which moral questions such as these can be explored. As Mary Poovey points out, financial themes become more prominent in British novels published from the late 1840s onwards precisely because issues of money lend themselves so well to reflections on questions of individual choice: "unlike the inheritance plots that dominated eighteenth-century novels, financial...