Reading George Eliot with Victorian College Students

In the 1880s, students at Mason Science College (a newly established, coeducational civic college which later became the University of Birmingham) ranked George Eliot as their favorite author. Through careful attention to archival records of extracurricular student engagement at Mason College, this essay explores the institutional impacts of Eliot's resonance with students in a late-nineteenth-century context of scientific education. Eliotian sympathy, the essay argues, contributed meaningfully to the cultivation of college spirit, helping to connect Mason students across increasingly specialized academic disciplines, even while ironically reinforcing curricular divisions. By reading Eliot with past generations of students, who turned to her novels at a time of profound academic transformation, this essay prompts reflection on the stakes of reading Eliot with students in our own moment of institutional change.