Gail Marshall reflects on the European roots of George Eliot’s formulation of realism, the way in which her European experiences in the 1850s coincided with those of a very young Henry James, and how both writers embrace the challenging difference of their experiences of Europe as a prelude to developing their respective practices of realism. ‘George Eliot, Henry James, Realism, and Europe’ examines the novelists’ travels in Europe in the 1850s, the availability of European culture in Britain, Thomas Cook’s first tours to Europe, a nostalgic interest in peasants, and the publication in 1859 of David Masson’s British Novelists and their Styles: Being a Critical Sketch of the History of British Prose Fiction. The chapter argues that the experience of European travel is intrinsic to both Eliot and James’s aesthetic, as well as to the ethical practice of realism.

Chapter 4 focuses on moments of scientific and imaginative engagement with the question of what lay beyond the limits of human audibility. It begins by considering writings by Charles Babbage, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Florence McLandburgh, each of whom explored the possibilities of accessing the continuing sounds of ordinary life beyond the physiological boundaries of human hearing, and the potential artistic, philosophical, and spiritual truths that might be gleaned from so doing. Conversely, the second part of this chapter looks to representations of the limits of individual auditory perception as a newly recognised weakness or vulnerability in the modern subject. The gothic monsters and sensationalised beings of Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Wilkie Collins, were, I argue, born in part of a paranoid white imperialist mindset, for whom superior auditory perception in others might pose a distinct threat to British social and cultural structures.

The introduction provides an outline of the so-called acoustic turn of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when emerging scientific constructions of sound and its movement through the material world rendered that world audible in new and exciting ways. It argues that the new acoustic culture of the nineteenth century raised questions as to what lay beyond the limits of the human ear or scientific instrument and pointed to the existence of an inaccessible, intangible space between sound and silence, whose boundaries could not be measured and were always inherently unstable. That space, beyond the limited powers of human sensitivity, was a rich source of scientific, literary, and broader cultural reflection throughout the period. I delineate the volume’s progression through a series of auditory thresholds, each of which was brought to prominent scientific or medical attention in the period while becoming the subject of literary response and experimentation.

Chapter 3 offers a sustained reading of the nature of auditory perception in George Eliot’s Middlemarchin order to demonstrate the significance of listening and attentiveness not only to the pathological sounds of the body but to those metaphoric heart beats and vibrations that signify psychological struggles within the novel as a whole. In Eliot’s realist project, I argue, both medical and imaginative explorations of the vibrations and pulses beyond the thresholds of usual human ‘stupidity’ and sensory perception are stimulants to the imagination, but they are not a cause for horror or dread like those gothic treatments of the stethoscope discussed in the previous chapter. Rather, they offer an opportunity for cultivating medical knowledge, sympathy, and humility. Here, attentive, stethoscopic listening ultimately provides a means of discrimination, of knowing and orienting oneself, and of relating to others in the modern world.

Chapter 5 considers the ways in which animal responses to music were used as evidence of their intelligence and sensitivities. In the context of the cultural and philosophical search for the origins of music in so-called primitive forms of communication and animal cries, the medium of music provided a means of constructing and imaginatively exploring animal subjectivities, while positing an experience of listening that lay entirely beyond the limits of the human self. Such discussions, though at times making use of scientific data, contained a wealth of anecdotal evidence and casual observations, which I include as a critical component of understandings of animals and music in both the popular and scientific imagination of the period. I also consider the musical animals of fiction by George Eliot and Charles Dickens in order to demonstrate that music offers a familiar point of access into the unfamiliar mind of the other.

A key feature of the novel of ideas is the prominent role of debates between characters that stage political, philosophical, and ideological differences. Often seen as an especially artificial feature of the genre, character-character dialogue is typically contrasted unfavorably with indirect speech and narratorial description of psychological states. This opposition plays into an implicitly modernism-valorizing view and, ultimately, a privileging of the representation and analysis of thought over the representation of speech. As such, it dovetails in an interesting way with a consequential divide within literary history between idea-driven narrative and an allegedly more nuanced psychological and moral realism. Refusing this opposition, this essay considers nineteenth-century novelistic approaches to moral and political ideas around equality and justice through a complex lens involving the interplay between ruminative states and moments of punctual character-character dialogue. Authors discussed include Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot.

In moving to align narrative envisioning with the likes of CGI (computer-generated images) or laser holograms, this chapter sets out to rethink the essential text/image relation in literary reading under the generative rubric of IMAGEdTEXT: the visualization made operational, just as it sounds in that compound, by the alphabetic (and thus phonetic) momentum of written speech. This is the forward motion, at times momentarily recursive, by which mental images are produced, vistas made available, narrative scenes set and peopled, events brought to mind. It is in this sense that Western literature, rooted in what linguists call the “graphophomemic” structure of sound–symbol relations, summons sights and sounds from the spinning gears of what is at base an audiovisual engine of its own – one that, in just such a phrase, may set ringing ears spinning, dizzy with unseen wording as well as new mental pictures. Authors from George Eliot through Henry James, Proust to Richard Powers, are read into evidence on the score of such textual “audioptics.”

This chapter explores the range of essayistic writing in nineteenth-century newspapers: leaders (political and topical in focus and the principal genre of the Victorian daily and weekly press), middles (a shorter version of the leader and characteristic of some weeklies), correspondence columns from journalists at home and abroad, and reviews of both books and theatre. It charts the expansion of the press at mid-century following the abolition of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ and an influx of literary talent that raised the quality of newspapers, and it notes the transformation of newspapers at the end of the century with the creation of literary pages, supplements, and special features (following the demise of many quarterly reviews and monthly magazines). The second half of the chapter examines the newspaper writing of John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and argues that each made a unique contribution to the newspapers of their day.

Before Chaucer became ‘the Father of English Poetry’, the French poet Eustace Deschamps had called him ’Grant translateur’. In fact, Chaucer was the fons et origo of the English poetic tradition precisely because he was the Great Translator, because the history of English literature is also the history of European translation. Beginning with the medieval practice of translatio, whereby source and commentary fused into the new work, this chapter charts the contested views of translation from primary mode of making, to secondary exercise, back to primary production as literary translation reaffirms its centrality to the literary polysystem. It also traces the rise of the professional translator, the evolution of the literary translator, and translation studies as a discipline predicated on the development of translation theory. While Dryden in the seventeenth century could draw crucial distinctions between modes of translation, the development of translation as a formal and theorized practice (exemplified by Schleiermacher in early nineteenth-century Germany) could not be disassociated from the efflorescence of national literatures, pace Goethe, the Romantics, and George Eliot.

In her final work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), George Eliot includes an essay, “Shadows of the Coming Race,” in which the fictionalized narrator speaks of his concerns regarding the growing power of machines. This chapter explores Eliot’s responses to actual machines of her time, and the impact they had on her conceptions of human consciousness and the animal/human/machine divide. It argues that the machine she had in mind for drawing the right conclusion was William Jevons’s “Logical Piano.” The chapter examines this connection, but also, more broadly, the various machines Eliot viewed when visiting laboratories. This was the great age for the development of experimental physiology and of the creation of “self-recording” machines that could measure every aspect of human physiological life and also, it was believed, the flows of thought and emotion. Starting with Lewes’s own work on “Animal Automatism,” the chapter explores how these new conceptions of mind, body, and machine enter into Eliot’s thinking.

This chapter examines the conscious automata theory as advanced by Thomas Huxley in his controversial essay “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History” (1874), which posits that human consciousness is a mere byproduct of neural processes, not, as is widely thought, the initiator or controller of voluntary behavior. This chapter asks why a theory that denied the efficacy of consciousness strongly captured the Victorian cultural imagination, and considers the implications of the view for aesthetic production. It explores late nineteenth-century responses to conscious automatism in philosophy, psychology, literature, and popular culture, before looking more closely at the treatment of the ideas in Samuel Butler’s “Book of the Machines” and George Eliot’s “Shadows of the Coming Race,” alongside George Henry Lewes’s Physical Basis of Mind. The chapter argues that rather than diminishing consciousness, Huxley’s theory removes consciousness from science and hands it over to aesthetics and, especially, literary texts.

The first of Wagner’s visits to London, in 1839, failed to secure the hoped-for performance of his Rule Britannia overture. He was also unable to meet Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, on whose Rienzi novel he had designs.

The second visit, in 1855, was made to conduct eight concerts for the Philharmonic Society, but Wagner fell foul of the conservative nature of the society’s programming, of old-fashioned performing practices in the country, and of the more reactionary members of the London press.

The third visit, in 1877, was intended to defray the deficit of the inaugural Bayreuth Festival with a series of concerts in the Royal Albert Hall. Economically the project misfired, but it sparked interest in his work among leading musicians, artists and intellectuals. It also helped pave the way for the surge of Wagnerism that would grip the arts in England at the close of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

Abundant moments of indecision and delay shape George Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda (1876), which treats uncertainty as a recursive movement between interior and exterior, potentiality and activity. This chapter shows how Eliot explores action’s convoluted antecedents, drawing on intellectual trends in mid-century comparative method and physiological psychology, especially the latter’s portrait of embodied willing and pathologies of volition. These contexts frame a reading of the novel’s twin stances of practical experience and intellectual reflection: hesitation, the bewildering experience of having a “will which is and yet is not yet,” and its rational cousin, comparison, “our precious guide.” Formal fluctuations and portrayals of mental caprice would seem at cross-purposes with Eliot’s narrative control and moral coherence. Yet in discovering a “kinship” between certainty and doubt, she reinvigorates her novelistic ethics and recasts sympathy as guaranteed by “closer comparison between the knowledge which we call rational & the experience which we call emotional.” Her characters set store by irresolute stances of hesitation and comparison, and predictive affects like trust and hope.

This chapter highlights the newly significant role of embodiment in the discourses of realist aesthetics and theory of mind across the 1860s. Developing conterminously (though not in lockstep), the discourses of aesthetic realism and psychology at this time endowed material reality – including the mind – with new relevance, insisting on the interdependence of body and mind and on the fundamental sameness of scientific and psychological inquiry, whose shared pursuit was advancing the “science of human nature.” More particularly, this chapter moves beyond a familiar emphasis on the role of visual aesthetics to feature other emergent or developing discourses important to realism, including theories of sound, psychology and perception, and motion, and even ital atomic theory and what E.S. Dallas, in The Gay Science (1866), described as “the science of the laws of pleasure.”

John Ruskin and Karl Marx – two heterodox economic thinkers writing in England in the 1860s – both considered production, circulation, and exchange in relation to the natural environment. After first discussing the imbrication of the economic and the ecological in their work, this chapter turns to George Eliot’s Felix Holt [GK19](1866) and Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm [GK20](1861–62) to explore points of intersection between heterodox economic thought and literary realism. Focusing on soil fertility, an issue that evokes the uses of water, soil, and manure in service of capitalism, the chapter shows that Eliot and Trollope trace the ways in which ownership, labor, or trade transforms humans’ relations to animals, plants, and landscapes. Heterodox economic thought and literary realism in the 1860s took into account historical dimensions of the natural world, especially its economic involvement.

As he developed his own faith, working it out as he lived and wrote, Tolstoy responded to varieties of religious experience and expression, including English ones. From early on, Tolstoy found in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and the novels of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, and others, information about English religious life and examples of how to novelize religious experience. In turn, when Tolstoy emerged, later in life, as a religious seeker and moral authority, English readers responded to Tolstoy both as a novelist and as a thinker.

Well, if things could talk then I’m sure you’d hear A lot of things to make you cry, my dear. Ain’t you glad, Oh, ain’t you glad, Ain’t you glad, Glad that things don’t talk?

The development of a scientific economic discourse and the expansion of the financial system and markets across the nineteenth century and through the British Empire proved to be rich sources of inspiration to novelists and poets. Fictional writers not only explored the themes of stock market crashes, imperial investments, industrial expansion, gambling and risk taking, fraudulent currencies, and bank failures, but also the failure of political economy to account properly for the inadequacies of the economic system and the people who fell victim to those failures. Examining the interplay, interaction, and coconstitution of literary and economic discourses in the nineteenth century, this chapter demonstrates the celebratory and critical ways economic writers, essayists, novelists, and poets represented and responded to political economy’s evolution. Reading the history of economic thought alongside the literary texts of the nineteenth century – this chapter argues – reveals their shared investments in value, representation, and human desires.

The founding fathers of English literature, Chaucer and Shakespeare, bequeathed a range of possible attitudes to Jews and Judaism. These can be found in the ambivalent figure of “the Jew” – malign and benign, medieval and modern – in much 19th- and 20th-century English literature, from the romantic poets to imperial writers, and from realist novelists to modernist writers of all kinds. The essay contextualizes these changing attitudes and ends with Graham Greene, George Orwell, and Margaret Drabble.

This chapter addresses five authors who respond to Romantic hopes in indefinite futures: John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche. In Mill’s late writing on religion, hope in eternal life constitutes a link to Romantic poetry, a motive for taking life seriously, and a wan empirical possibility. In Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil, blind hope, or our uncertainty about other people and any future we might share with them, may be necessary for love and engagement in this life – or it may be a grievous, fatal error. Along with Dickinson, Eliot supplies a bridge to the Modernists’ largely ironic representation of hope, more or less stripped of its possible virtue. The art of Dostoevsky is also oriented toward emerging Modernism, even as he exposes the ills of modernity, ultimately affirming something akin to Christian hope. Nietzsche sketches a new hope that might rise on the grave of Christianity. Despite his well-known adage on Pandora’s jar – the hope it contains is “the worst of evils” – Nietzsche more often prophesies, in his later writings, the “highest hope” of becoming who one is.