Customer Reviews

George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science. The Make-Believe of a Beginning

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I am glad this title is back in print. For years Amazon was showing prices in the hundreds for it because it was out of print and copies were scarce. This book confines its scientific focus to the theme of organicity -- an idea that became popular in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The idea of an organism being more than the sum of its parts was taken by many writers, including Eliot, Lewes and Spencer to be a good metaphor for society and social interaction as well, and the metaphor took on a life of its own for several decades, including the span of Eliot's career as novelist. Many discourses sprang up being influenced by organicity as a social theory. George Eliot's fiction, as well as her sometimes heavy-handed narrative intrusions, were heavily influenced by organic theory and the metaphors it generated in Victorian culture (and which she indeed helped to generate). It is critical to understand what social organicity is in order to fully comprehend novels such as "The Mill on the Floss", "Middlemarch", and "Daniel Deronda".

Shuttleworth's book goes through each of Eliot's novels and discusses each with a focus on one particular aspect of organicity. The Middlemarch essay is the best, I think. There is also a good essay on Adam Bede and the difference between constructing plot and character according to a 'mechanistic' natural history versus a more modern 'organic' biology that would infuse the later novels.

This book is a classic and stands alongside Gillian Beer's "Darwin's Plots" and George Levine's "Darwin and the Novelists". It is essential reading for any academic studying the relationship between Victorian literature and science. If your library does not have a copy, request that they buy it, now that it has been reprinted and can be had at a reasonable price.