Sorry, I’m two days late with this post. I think I have to recognize that, when reading George Eliot or writing about her, I should always leave myself more time than I believe I need.

I had intended to write about The Mill on the Floss (1860) at the end of August last year but didn’t manage to get the post written. My experience with reading George Eliot hasn’t been all that happy. Apart from Silas Marner, which I studied for the Irish Inter Cert in the early 1970s, I hadn’t finished any work of fiction by her till about a year ago. Middlemarch was the only text on my English degree course that I didn’t read all the way through. I hadn’t allowed enough time to read it all before the seminar and then I never went back to it — till last year.

Having heard the stormy climax of a radio dramatization of The Mill on the Floss during my teens, I thought I’d like to read the novel but never (until early 2025) got further into it than the first few chapters. I reread it for the August post that never happened, and I’ve just completed a second rereading, a necessary preliminary to the present post. As with Middlemarch, I found that each reading took longer than I had allowed for. So I seem to have a particular problem reading Eliot. I don’t think it’s just me.

As far as I can see, in both this book and Middlemarch, Eliot brings together an unusually balanced mix of individual psychology and socioeconomic history. For the reader, it’s hard to keep both elements equally in view at any point in the story, so we tend to perceive the balance as being less stable than it really is. In one chapter, we’re sympathizing with Maggie’s frustration and sense of not belonging; in another, we attempt to figure out the social dynamics of the market town in which members of her family have significant economic roles.

The novel features several contrasting pairs of characters. First, of course, we have Maggie and her elder brother Tom. She is dark — both her hair and her eyes are described as “black”. As a child she’s messy and perhaps accident-prone. She forgets to feed her brother’s rabbits while he’s away at school. Her mother despairs of her straight hair, which she can’t get to curl like a normal girl’s. Her father says that she physically resembles his sister Gritty (Mrs Moss). Maggie reads for hours on end and understands much more of what she reads than would normally be expected of a nine-year-old girl.

Her brother Tom is just the opposite: fair-haired, neat and disciplined, not at all a reader or a scholar and happiest at outdoor activities, such as fishing. His mother thinks he much more closely resembles her side of the family, the Dodsons.

The Tulliver parents are another contrasting pair: Mr Tulliver, is the owner of Dorlcote mill on the river Floss. He congratulates himself on having chosen a pretty wife who is not his intellectual equal, but though he has strong opinions on some matters he is not as far her intellectual superior as he imagines.

Mr Tulliver was, on the whole, a man of safe, traditional opinions; but on one or two points he had trusted to his unassisted intellect and had arrived at several questionable conclusions: among the rest, that rats, weevils, and lawyers were created by Old Harry. Unhappily he had no one to tell him that this was rampant Manichaeism, else he might have seen his error. (p. 11)

Mrs Tulliver has a talent for taking action which tends to undermine her own objectives and intentions. She sends one of her sisters, Mrs Pullet, to try to dissuade another, Mrs Glegg, from calling in a loan she made long before to Mr Tulliver (who had in turn lent money to Mr Moss, the husband of his sister). In fact, Mrs Glegg had already decided to leave her money where it was, as Mr Tulliver was regularly paying her interest at a good rate. But the idea of vicariously pleading with his sister-in-law strengthened Tulliver’s resolve to pay off the loan with money borrowed from outside the family. Again, Mrs Tulliver visited the lawyer Wakem to petition him not to bid for the mill when it was put up for sale — and thereby put an idea in his head that he hadn’t already considered.

Mr Tulliver stands somewhat apart from the other husbands of the Dodson sisters. He is the one who produces a commodity, who makes a useful physical product for sale. That’s not to say that he is using advanced industrial technology, although the story is set at a time when the industrial revolution was transforming manufacturing. But water-driven mills like Dorlcote were nothing new: they had been in use for centuries. For all its lack of innovation, though, the mill seemed to be a sound business. When Mr Tulliver was ruined financially, it wasn’t because either the supply or grain or the demand for flour failed, nor because the level of the Floss fell so far it could no longer power the mill, but because he lost a lawsuit that he should never have pursued.

After Tulliver’s death, when his son Tom and brother-in-law Deane are discussing what is to happen to the mill, they mention the possiblity of converting it to run on steam. In the meantime it is owned by the lawyer Wakem, who has bought it on a (rather cruel) whim and treats it as a hobby, showing no interest in developing the property.

Deane himself appears to be the most materially successful and is certainly the most ambitious of the husbands. He’s a partner in Guest & Co, a business which combines production (“oil-mill”, p. 247) and trading elements, including international trade. When Tom is on the point of expressing a desire to go back and run the mill that had belonged to his father, Deane tells him:

“… Somebody has said it’s a fine thing to make two ears of corn grow where only one grew before; but, sir, it’s a fine thing too to further the exchange of commodities and bring the grains of corn to the mouths that are hungry. And that’s our line of business, and I consider it as honourable a position as a man can hold to be connected with it.” (p. 405)

There’s not much point in increasing food production, unless it’s also possible to get the additional food to the people who want to consume it.

Of the other husbands, Glegg is a lender of money on “excellent mortgages” (p. 247), and Pullet is a gentleman farmer. So, Pullet lives (very well) off the rent paid by the active farmers who are tenants of his land. Glegg has effectively retired to his garden, but the interest on his loans continues to flow in, supporting him comfortably. Mrs Glegg, unusually for the time, manages her own assets — partly, it would seem, to save her husband the trouble. During one of their frequent quarrels, her husband reminds her that she is “… allowed to keep her own money the same as if it was settled on her” (p. 125). Like him, she lends her money out at interest and does well out of it.

These are among the most comfortable people in the community, which (as we see) is hardly a hive of enterprise.

When Mr Tulliver is ruined, Maggie and Tom each, in a different way, submits to a form of renunciation or self-denial. Tom persuades his uncle Deane to give him a low level job in the company, and studies bookkeeping at night. He saves all he can from his wages to contribute to the eventual discharge of his father’s debts. He dedicates himself to his work and makes himself valuable to his employers, to the point where, less than seven years after he is offered a share in the company. He has developed a deep furrow in his brow (which, however, suits his looks) and appears much older than he is (which, his uncle Deane tells him, is an advantage in business, at least while he’s young). After his father’s death, Tom lives in a room which he rents from his old friend Bob Jakin and his wife.

When Maggie pays a rare visit to Tom’s lodgings, she learns from Bob that Tom is leading a lonely life, with little to occupy him except work. He seems to be in love with their cousin, Lucy Deane, to whom he gave a spaniel pup as a present. But while Lucy is fond of the pup, she has a tacit understanding (falling just a little bit short of an engagement) with Stephen Guest, son of the founder of Guest & Co.

Tom would say that the straitened path he has followed was necessary, a requirement of his duty to provide for his mother and extricate his father from debt. He does not see an equivalent necessity for Maggie’s self-denial. Nor does her friend, and Tom’s former fellow student, Philip Wakem. When she is 15, Maggie is given a bundle of books by Bob Jakin, among which she finds a copy of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Years earlier, her father had been shocked to find that the nine-year-old had read (and absorbed much of) Defoe’s History of the Devil. It’s arguable that the devotional work of à Kempis had the potential to do her more harm.

In that old book she reads:

“Know that the love of thyself doth hurt thee more than anything in the world … If thou seekest this or that, and wouldst be here or there to enjoy thy own will and pleasure, thou shalt never be quiet nor free from care: for in everything somewhat will be wanting, and in every place there will be some that will cross thee […] everywhere of necessity thou must have patience, if thou wilt have inward peace and enjoy an everlasting crown … If thou desire[st] to mount unto this height, thou must set out courageously, and lay the axe to the root, that thou mayest pluck up and destroy that hidden inordinate inclination to thyself, and unto all private and earthly good …” (pp. 293–4)

This seems to the fifteen-year-old Maggie to be the solution she has been looking for. It has an appeal similar way to those of Stoicism and Buddhism: one should extinguish desires which (whether in their fulfillment or their frustration) are liable to give rise to psychic agitation, and so achieve serenity. Maggie is delighted to find that she is capable of such renunciation, but she hasn’t yet discovered that there are some desires that are much more difficult to suppress than others. She won’t learn that till she meets Stephen Guest, her cousin Lucy’s almost-fiancé.

Perhaps the main thing that Maggie wants to renounce is her friendship with Philip Wakem. Philip does his best to persuade Maggie that the serenity she hopes to achieve by her practice of self-denial is illusory. He tells her:

“… you are shutting yourself up in a narrow, self-delusive fanaticism, which is only a way of escaping pain by starving into dullness all the highest powers of your nature. Joy and peace are not resignation; resignation is the willing endurance of a pain that is not allayed, and you don’t expect to be allayed. Stupefaction is not resignation; and it is stupefaction to remain in ignorance, to shut up all the avenues by which the life of your fellow men might become known to you. I am not resigned; I am not sure that life is long enough to learn that lesson. You are not resigned; you are only trying to stupefy yourself.” (pp. 334–5)

This attempt at persuasion is self-serving on Philip’s part: he is in love with Maggie and is trying to talk her out of her determination to stop seeing him. In this he is partly successful — and the fact that his statement is self-serving doesn’t mean that it’s utterly wrong. A year later, they are still meeting secretly, though Maggie feels that it is wrong of them to do so.

“… You know we couldn’t even be friends if our friendship were discovered. I have never felt that I was right in giving way about seeing you, though it has been so precious to me in some ways; and now the fear comes upon me stronly again that it will lead to evil.” (p. 342)

Maggie has told Philip that she loves him too but it becomes clear (to her and to the reader) that the love she feels for him is not the equivalent counterpart of his for her. Her feeling for him is effectively a kind of fraternal love: an extension of, and in part a substitution for, the love she feels for Tom:

“What a dear, good brother you would have been, Philip,” said Maggie, smiling through the haze of tears. “I think you would have made as much fuss about me and been as pleased for me to love me as would have satisfied even me. You would have loved me well enough to bear with me and forgive me everything. That was what I always longed that Tom should do. I was never satisfied with a little of anything. That is why it is better for me to do without earthly happiness altogether […]” (p. 335)

When Tom tells her that if she marries Philip that will mean an irrevocable breach between the siblings, she relinquishes her friend-lover. She feels pain for Philip and believes that Tom is punishing their secrecy too harshly.

And yet, how was it that she was now and then conscious of a certain dim background of relief in the forced separation from Philip? Surely it was only because the sense of a deliverance from concealment was welcome at any cost. (p. 356)

Is Tom Tulliver a hero or a villain? To me it seems obvious that he is neither, though his character includes elements of both. Rather, he is a young man, still in his early 20s at the end of the tale, who has found himself in his mid teens obliged (as he sees it) to support his parents and sibling, a role in which his unsuitable education will be no help at all. As to how he discharges this responsibility, he doesn’t have a choice: it has to be done in the stifling and largely stagnant milieu that I’ve described above.

Tom, like everyone of us, was imprisoned within the limits of his own nature, and his education had simply glided over him, leaving a slight deposit of polish; if you are inclined to be severe on his severity, remember that the responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision. (p. 512)

It’s true that Tom treats his sister monstrously. If Maggie had survived, though, it might have turned out that he had been doing her a kindness, if an implacably cruel one. By pushing her away, he might have been making it possible for her to separate herself from her mother and the aunts and uncles as well as from himself, allowing her to develop an independent, self-sufficient personality. Her death, of course, precluded that possibility.

There’s more I could say about The Mill on the Floss but I’m conscious that this post is already very late. I wanted to take a brief look at Eliot’s handling of Bob’s “patter” as he sells various materials to a professedly reluctant Mrs Glegg. The other aspect I’d particularly like to have dealt with is the advice given by Dr Kenn to Maggie after her reputation has been ruined in the restricted world of St Ogg’s.

I’ll be reading Middlemarch for the second time and writing about it at some point, maybe not all that soon. When that happens, I’ll probably have more to say about The Mill on the Floss, as I think the two novels have something in common in their combination of inndividual psychology and the study of a society.

Edition: Penguin Popular Classics, 1994; emphasis original, ellipses original (to Eliot’s text) except where indicated by square brackets.