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Electricity in the novels of George Eliot

16 October 2015
The Victorian novelist was surprisingly fond of the adjective "electric."

Mitsuharu Matsuoka is a professor at Nagoya University's department of multicultural studies. Perhaps to promote the study of his scholarly field—English-language literature—Matsuoka has created what he calls the Hyper-Concordance. Using his online database, anyone can search through the works of 200 American, British, and Irish writers to find the occurrences of single words.

Out of curiosity, I decided to look for physics terms in the novels of George Eliot. Why her? Besides being one of my favorite novelists, Eliot was born in 1819. Her works of fiction—from Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) through Daniel Deronda (1876)—encompassed a period of remarkable activity in physics.

Samuel Laurence (1812–84) drew this portrait of George Eliot in or around 1860. CREDIT: British Museum

Samuel Laurence (1812–84) drew this portrait of George Eliot in or around 1860. CREDIT: British Museum

In 1858 Herman von Helmholtz published one of the foundational works of fluid dynamics, On integrals of the hydrodynamical equations which express vortex motion. James Clerk Maxwell's A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field was published in 1865. That same year, Rudolf Clausius chose the term "entropy" for the thermodynamic concept that he had recently developed.

I couldn't tell whether Eliot was aware of those and other advances. She did, however, belong to a community of thinkers and writers who accepted Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and who doubted the literal truth of the Bible.

My search of Eliot's oeuvre revealed a surprising fondness for the terms "electricity" and "electric." She uses the noun in her first full-length novel, Adam Bede (1859), whose title character is a virtuous village carpenter. In chapter 33, Bede learns that his employer, Jonathan Burge, wants to make him his business partner. Enthused by his expanded prospects, Bede does not forget his (unrequited) love for the beautiful Hetty Sorrel. Rather, her image remains hovering in his mind—because, as Eliot puts it,

our love is inwrought in our enthusiasm as electricity is inwrought in the air, exalting its power by a subtle presence.

"Electricity" appears in only one other of Eliot's novels, her magnum opus Middlemarch (1871–72). Eliot uses the word twice, both times to convey the notion of a palpable shock that is either mysterious or unexpected.

The first usage in Middlemarchis the most original. Cajolingly and with trepidation, Celia Brooke raises the question of their deceased mother's jewels with her older and more idealistic sister, Dorothea:

Celia's face had the shadow of a pouting expression in it, the full presence of the pout being kept back by an habitual awe of Dorothea and principle; two associated facts which might show a mysterious electricity if you touched them incautiously.

In a similar vein, Eliot uses the word "electric" at total of 19 times to qualify a shock, thrill, or sense of awe: three times in Scenes of Clerical Life, twice in The Mill on the Floss (1860), three times in Romola (1862), twice in Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), five times in Middlemarch, and four times in Daniel Deronda (1876).

The covers of the editions that I read in high school. Both are details from paintings—by Thomas Creswick (Middlemarch) and by James Tissot (Daniel Deronda).

The covers of the editions that I read in high school. Both are details from paintings—by Thomas Creswick (Middlemarch) and by James Tissot (Daniel Deronda).

More interesting, perhaps, are the cases when "electric" describes more than a short, sharp sensation. In the first story in Scenes of Clerical Life, a poor country curate, Amos Barton, and his wife, Milly, are burdened by the sojourn in their house of Countess Caroline Czerlaski, who had quit her brother's house in moral indignation when he married her maid. In the following passage, Eliot seems to reveal her knowledge of the electric telegraph, which had made its commercial debut in 1838 along one of the Great Western Railway's lines:

When time glided on, and the Countess's visit did not end, Milly was not blind to any phase of their position. She knew of the slander; she was aware of the keeping aloof of old friends; but these she felt almost entirely on her husband's account. A loving woman's world lies within the four walls of her own home; and it is only through her husband that she is in any electric communication with the world beyond.

Chapter 40 of Milddlemarch begins with the omniscient narrator observing the scene at breakfast in the home of businessman Caleb Garth. Perhaps to emphasize the narrator's impartiality, Eliot evokes the notion of a scientific experiment:

In watching effects, if only of an electric battery, it is often necessary to change our place and examine a particular mixture or group at some distance from the point where the movement we are interested in was set up.

What, if anything, is the significance of Eliot's evident fondness for electricity? For one thing, it is not shared by her near contemporary Charles Dickens, who wrote about twice as many novels as she did. Dickens does use "electric," but only in four novels and almost always literally, to describe storms and wires.

As a writer, Eliot might have chosen "frisson" to convey the idea of a sudden shock. My hunch is that she favored "electric" because it connotes not just intensity but also mystery. Despite the contributions of Maxwell, Michael Faraday, and others, electricity remained an enigmatic phenomena in her day.

If only Eliot had not died in 1880 at the age of 61 and had lived seven more years, she might have learned of J. J. Thomson's discovery of the electron.

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