“Myriad-Headed, Myriad-Handed”: Labor in Middlemarch

While Adam Bede remains the quintessential Victorian novel about work, George Eliot’s preoccupation in Middlemarch with labor and the “unhistoric acts” of laborers has been overlooked. This study examines how George Eliot resolves the social and economic problem of labor into ethical and aesthetic terms. Serving as the medium of this resolution is Caleb Garth—the land manager and soulful autodidact, whose feeling for labor as a “sublime music” and whose disquieting confrontations with laboring men enable George Eliot at once to idealize labor in principle and to relegate its actuality to a past at odds with the modernity she advocates.