The Learning Curve Kathryn Hughes
[00:00:00] Albert Cheng: Well, hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Learning Curve podcast. I am one of your hosts this week, Albert Cheng. This week co-hosting with me is Helen Baxendale. Hey Helen. How’s it going?
[00:00:33] Helen Baxendale: Great, thanks Albert. Good to be with you again.
[00:00:36] Albert Cheng: Yes, yes, likewise, and I dunno about you, but thanks to all the producers behind this show that pick all the music. I love walking into some baroque music by handle here to kick off the show. I don’t know about how you feel about that, but I always find it’s pretty cool to do that.
[00:00:50] Helen Baxendale: Yes. It’s always a very thoughtful selection on the learning curve. Yeah. High production values.
[00:00:55] Albert Cheng: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, look, George Frederick handle is where we drew that little opening snippet of music, and I guess that’s in honor of our guest who’s gonna talk to us about George Elliot. Helen, I don’t know about you. I mean, I imagine you’ve, you’ve read a bunch of George Elliot, or No,
[00:01:10] Helen Baxendale: Shamefully very, very little, I’m afraid. Albert, this is where I, you know, I’m like the resident dilettante at Great Hearts Academy. So our interview today has inspired me to read more actually. I always enjoy, you know, kind of Victorian novels and I really think I need to get beyond Middlemarch.
[00:01:28] Albert Cheng: Well, you know, you call yourself a Dante. I mean, I don’t know what that makes me, because actually I’ve not read any George Elliot. Albert, you’re a Renaissance man. Well, if that’s me, you gotta give a a larger hat tip to my wife who’s read middle of March twice. So I don’t know what that says about us. But anyway well, let’s, before we get to the interview though, do what we usually do on the show, which is talk about some education news. Helen, what story did you find interesting this week?
[00:01:55] Helen Baxendale: Albert, I, uh, was looking at a story in the Free Press by a fellow called Dan Luhrman, who I, I think was a, one of these sort of super tutors at one point, but has since trained as, I think a cognitive psychologist. Mm. He’s now based outta Teacher’s College Columbia, and he wrote an interesting piece called the War on Knowledge. Which was essentially tracking various developments in school curricular and, and a kind of pervasive trend in a lot of mainstream schools of education that are really advancing this idea of skills rather than mastery of a body of knowledge.
[00:02:30] Mm-hmm. And this is an idea that, you know, it’s kind of the education wheel sort of, you know, turns every few decades and, and old ideas are reheated repeatedly. I think you’ve probably seen this phenomenon, but Mm. Yeah. This was an idea I first encountered when the iPhone became ubiquitous that, oh, you know, we have these search engines in our pockets now we can readily find out any fact we want to, they’re at our fingertips, so why do we need to have children learn, you know, dates and names and places and so on.
[00:02:57] Yeah, and that idea is, I guess, received, you know, renewed force with the advent of ai, which is essentially a kind of supercharged search engine. And so Mr. Luman, or I should say Dr. Leman is making an impassioned defense for knowledge because as a cognitive psychologist, he understands that thinking critically about anything is highly domain specific.
[00:03:20] And so the idea that you can kind of divorce skills like critical thinking. From a mastery of disciplinary knowledge is a fiction. It’s a very funny piece. It’s not necessarily just, you know, it’s a, it’s an important argument he’s making, but he makes it in a lively and engaging way. So I would recommend it to our readers who, you know, interested in such questions of pedagogy and so on, and just, you know.
[00:03:43] It’s an yet another, I think well reasoned case for why facts still matter and why curricula should still be organized around defined disciplines and bodies of knowledge that have been built up over the centuries.
[00:03:57] Albert Cheng: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Great. Well thanks for sharing that. I mean, I, I look forward to reading that. And actually, you know, on last week’s show, I was just talking to Shaka Mitchell about the importance of cultivating discernment. You know, you mentioned our ability to get facts. Discernment, I guess, is a whole nother category of trying to make sense of order and pattern among those facts and to discern, you know, what’s true from what’s false and ugly and beauty.
[00:04:23] Mm-hmm. So I find that line of argument very compelling, but I’m, I’m excited to read through that article. Yes. Thank you. Well, I have a slightly different article. This one is from the 74 and it’s an opinion piece by Kerry McDonald’s entitled Five Trends, reshaping K 12 Education Across the us. And I dunno about you, Helen, but I, I, you know, appreciate these articles, these types of articles where you have folks articulating maybe general patterns that they see shaping over the long run.
[00:04:54] I mean, looks talking about the importance of knowledge and discernment. I mean, I appreciate these articles because I think they try to crystallize just, you know, maybe disparate pieces of, of information and observations that we’re making. And so she’s discussing five trends. One of them is the growth of homeschooling micro schooling.
[00:05:11] The adoption of flexible work arrangement is another expansion of school choice policies, advent of new technologies and ai, and this other one, which I was most intrigued about, which was openness to new institutions. You know, not only a distrust of existing institutions, but an openness to new ones. And so she’s talking about all five of those trends with a particular view of what that means for education. And so I just wanna encourage listeners to look at this. I, I think there’s plenty of food for thought to helping us make sense of what’s going on now, what might that mean for how we think about what education look like, what our educational institutions might look like.
[00:05:48] So anyway, I’m sure your team at Great Hearts would be fascinated to think through some of these larger scale patterns as well. I know your executive team is, is excellent at doing that as well.
[00:05:58] Helen Baxendale: Thanks Albert. I need to read that piece. Sounds like a very interesting kind of flyover of trends. I mean, I think we’re all consumed with, you know, what does AI mean both in K 12 and at college, but some of these other phenomena that she mentions that have perhaps received less attention than they deserve. So, eager to read that and dig in. Was there any one in particular, Albert, that struck you as like most intriguing or novel?
[00:06:20] Albert Cheng: Well, you know, the last point about the openness to new institutions. I mean, you know, I guess I’m one of those people that were a little concerned about the reactionary impulse that’s common these days of great distrust over lots of institutions that we have.
[00:06:32] I mean, including post-secondary institutions and for good reason. I, I’m not. I don’t think folks that have, are, are worried about that are distrustful, are unreasonable, but at the same time I’m, you know, I’m kind of here thinking like, well look, we need institutions to order and shape our lives and if we throw the baby out with the bath water, what do we have left?
[00:06:50] And so we do need to rebuild or reimagine reform, I guess, you know, re something. Add in your verb. Mm-hmm. Choice, I guess. But we do need institutions and so I, I guess I’m encouraged to see an openness to new ones. And I guess, you know, that does then raise the question of which ones should we build? And, and I look, I think the education space is really at the forefront of thinking about some of that.
[00:07:14] I mean, micro schooling, homeschooling new ways of doing education. I think there’s a lot of upsides to that. So I think that gives me a little encouragement in the times we live in. Yeah. Here, here. Appreciate chatting news with you, but let’s get on to talking about George Elliot. So that’s coming up on the flip.
[00:07:31] Side of the break with Dr. Kathryn Hughes.
[00:07:47] Dr. Kathryn Hughes is a British academic historian, biographer, and journalist specializing in Victorian England. She is a professor emerita of life writing at the University of East Anglia and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Literature. Dr. Hughes is prize winning books include the Victorian governess, George Elliot, the Last Victorian.
[00:08:12] George Elliot Family History, which is an edited five volume set, the Short life and long times of Mrs. Beaton Victorian’s undone tales of the flesh in the age of decorum, and her latest catland, which explores the cat mania originating in the early 20th century for the past 25 years. Dr. Hughes has been a literary critic at The Guardian and writes regularly for the New York Review of Books and the Times literary supplement.
[00:08:41] She has also presented many documentaries for BBC radio and television, and served as a judge on major literary awards, including the Bailey Gifford, the Woman’s Prize for Fiction, and the Costa Awards. Catherine was educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University, and the University of East Anglia with a PhD in Victorian History.
[00:09:03] Dr. Hughes, it’s a treat to have you on the show. Welcome.
[00:09:07] Kathryn Hughes: I’m delighted to be here.
[00:09:09] Albert Cheng: You’re the award-winning biographer of George Elliot. Or if folks don’t know Mary Ann Evans, the famous 19th century Victorian literary figure whose writing was heavily influenced by country life in Warwickshire England. Could ask you to just start with a brief overview of George Elliot’s career, and why is she such a timelessly important author in British literature?
[00:09:33] Kathryn Hughes: Well, she started from the most unremarkable circumstances, so she starts in Berkshire, as you say, a provincial corner of Britain. She’s the daughter of a tenant farmer.
[00:09:45] So not grands, not posh, not educated, and yet. Extraordinarily. She rises to be for many people at the time, and I, and I would dare say now, the most influential and important, certainly the richest novelist of the 19th century in Britain. So her books, I mean, the most famous of which are, I guess are Middle March and Adam Bead and Silas Mana are red.
[00:10:10] By people in universities still. Certainly anybody who goes to school in Britain, by which I’m in high school, would’ve read her books. It’s absolutely extraordinary. It’s the most extraordinary kind of trajectory, and it’s just so fascinating to know how she could have got from there to here as it were.
[00:10:29] Helen Baxendale: Dr. Hughes, you’re a famous biographer of George Elliott and in your volume, George Elliott, the last Victorian, you use this very interesting device of pairing together the young lives of Maryanne Evans, AKA George Elliott, and Princess Alexandrina Victoria. Two women who were born in the same year. Who both powerfully shaped their era, one in literature and the other as among the most influential queens in British history. Could you briefly discuss young Maryanne and her family background a little bit more and some of her formative religious and intellectual upbringing and how she sort of interfaced with Victorian society?
[00:11:07] Kathryn Hughes: I started off like that because I, again, I was so drawn by the fact that these two baby girls born within months of each other had both come into the world in such unlikely kind of circumstances given their kind of future greatness.
[00:11:21] So Princess Victoria, she once then was. When she was born, she was fifth in line to the throne. There was no suggestion that she was ever going to become Queen, the Queen Victoria that we know. She was just a very obscure harian princess, and so I thought that was very interesting. If you also think about Maryanne Evans, again, born the youngest child of a warwickshire tenant farmer.
[00:11:45] Nothing smart about her background at all. Her father was a, a working man who had risen slightly so that he was now land agent to the local aristocrat, but he was still very much a working man. I mean, he, he farmed his land himself. He was in charge of taking animals to market, selling the hay, doing all those kind of very practical things.
[00:12:09] And so it just seems amazing that the youngest daughter should. Suddenly have this kind of amazing flowering. So she starts off very ordinarily. She is sent away to school quite young because her mother is ill and will actually die when she’s 16. And in a way that is, in finding a way that is the saving of her.
[00:12:27] So she starts off getting quite a good education and she shows herself to be very, very adept and is sent to one of the best schools in the Midlands, run by Quakers. And it starts to kind of imbibe, not the kind of education that a boy would get at one of the great public schools like Ethan O’ Harrow.
[00:12:46] Not that, but really, really sound for a girl. So she is learning Latin, she’s certainly learning French, little bit of Italian and a lot of literature. And it makes it quite remarkable really for, for her background. At the same time, I have to say, she’s also like so many, I mean I’m probably talking about myself here, but clever little school girls, slightly prish, so she’s brought up in the Church of England, the Anglican church, but she’s quite prish.
[00:13:15] She’s, she goes through a very religious phase and. At school, one of her favorite things to do was suddenly suggest to her school fellows, why don’t we just have a spontaneous prayer meeting now? Which did tend to kind of put everybody off ’cause they were more interested in talking about their hats or, you know, likely boyfriends.
[00:13:34] So there was that sort of very pish quality to her, which she didn’t lose until much later. But she comes back to the farm at the age of 16 when her mother dies and she embarks on this extraordinary thing. So she continues her education. She carries on reading. Her father allows her to have a visiting master to teach her Italian.
[00:13:55] She takes piano lessons and she goes on being actually sort of ponderously religious. So she is she sort of poor visiting, for instance, which is very popular. So you go around the cottages, you help people, I mean. Something that Dorothea does in middle March. In other words, you go round, you visit the sick and you visit the poor, and then when she is about 19, she and her father move to Coventry, which is the nearby city, and she has this absolute revelation that the Bible that has been so important to her as an evangelical Christian.
[00:14:30] She does quite a lot of reading in what’s called the higher criticism, which is coming outta Germany, and she realizes that the Bible is probably not the literal word of God. It is probably a manmade artifact. Incredibly important, very meaningful for all that. Not actually, you know, the mediated word of God.
[00:14:50] And so she has this huge quarrel with her family because she refuses to go to church and it’s shocking. Her family sort of disowns her. She’s literally sent to Coventry. Nobody will speak to her. And that is really the point at which you start to see the beginning of, in a way, the Marianne Evans, who becomes George Elliot.
[00:15:11] So you’ve got this. Very, very kind of clever school girl who goes through a very religious phase and then comes out of it, but hangs onto a lot of the things that are very important to her. She goes on believing that Christianity is hugely important, but more as a social mechanism rather than a, you know, received divine word.
[00:15:32] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s continue with the arc of her life here, Dr. Hughes. So from 1854 to 1878, she lives with a married man, a philosopher, and critic, George Henry Lewis, which for the times is pretty scandalous and even calls him her husband. So, you know, you say in your book quote, there would’ve been no George Elliot without Lewis.
[00:15:53] So tell us about George Henry Lewis, their relationship together, the impact that he had on her ideas and writing. You are absolutely right.
[00:16:02] Kathryn Hughes: It is scandalous and it is slightly extraordinary that this girl who has started off being such a censorious kind of small town evangelical becomes this woman who becomes infamous for living.
[00:16:16] With a married man in London. So by now she has moved to London. She’s working as a journalist on the Westminster Review, which is the sort of leading periodical of the day, and she meets George Henry Lewis and he is unhappily married and has recently separated and they form an attachment and she takes the incredibly radical decision to live with him as.
[00:16:42] She would say it as his wife. Everybody else would say it as his mistress, of course, because divorce being very expensive at this time and really quite impossible to obtain. So it’s almost impossible even now to imagine just how incredibly radical that step was. It meant that. Her family never spoke to her again in the Midlands in Warwickshire.
[00:17:03] She was completely cut off from them. But it also meant that even in literary London, a very rackety place, you would’ve thought even amongst the leading lights of the day, she couldn’t receive and polite society. She, she could never go round to somebody else’s house for dinner, for instance. All that is just cut off from her.
[00:17:21] She has to stay in a sort of very anonymous house in the suburbs while. The old double standard Lewis is allowed to carry on his life un molested. He is allowed to go out and about the military channels. She may not, but why? I think it’s the making of her. Well, number one, he midwives are her birth as a novelist.
[00:17:42] She’s always wanted to write fiction. She’s in her late thirties by now, but never felt she could. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t think she could do plot. She thought she could do descriptions. She couldn’t do plot, and he just, he just showers her with encouragement and says, yes you can. You absolutely can.
[00:18:01] And because of that encouragement, she dipped her tone in the water and she writes three short stories, scenes of clerical life, ironic clerical meaning about the church. Very ironic that for her first written of fiction, she’s, she writes about the church, the thing that he left and he introduces her to his publish.
[00:18:20] John Blackwood and the It’s Caesar car. Life is a big success and Lewis carried on doing that for the rest of her career. He is always encouraging. He actually always fulfills any sort of criticism, so one of his favorite things to do is read the reviews. Of her novels in advance, if there’s anything critical.
[00:18:39] And of course there always were. ’cause that’s the nature of literal criticism. He would just cut those out in newspaper before she could see them. So, which is what, which is what every writer wants. I have to say. I think a nice partner who cuts them out and then just says, oh no, I, I lost them. I dunno where they went.
[00:18:57] The other thing is he was a very good man of business, so he, he got her huge advances. She was the most highly paid writer in Britain. She broke all sorts of records. He was wonderful. He was the perfect partner for a writer. That’s all I could say, really endlessly encouraging a good man of business. The one problem was, of course, he was married, which meant that for the next 20 years at least, she had this very, very secluded life.
[00:19:24] Helen Baxendale: So a charming little vignette about him cutting out the negative reviews. You just mentioned also Dr. Hughes, John Blackwood, her publisher, who when first presented with George Elliott’s first full length novel, Adam Bead, said quote, the story is altogether very novel and I cannot recollect anything like it, and it became an instant bestseller and established her as a major literary figure.
[00:19:47] Could you briefly sketch for us the context of Adam Be’s developments, the major themes, and why was it such a breakout success?
[00:19:55] Kathryn Hughes: Well, I also have to tell you something else. So John, that’s what John Blackwood said to Elliot because he wanted to encourage her actually privately, he wasn’t really sure that it would work because again, it’s about, it’s a wonderful book.
[00:20:11] It’s full of power, but it is actually about a village girl who gets pregnant and kills her baby. Very sadly. So it’s, again, it’s slightly scandalous. And Blackwood, who was running a, you know, a very family oriented publisher, was absolutely kind of not sure this was the book he wanted. Anyway, it’s set in the Midlands again, that bit of England that she knows so well.
[00:20:34] It’s right Adam Bead based very much on her father, who is a carpenter and a woodsman. He’s engaged to Hetty Sore, who is a very pretty, but. Flirtatious Village Girl Heti. While quite liking Adam really has eyes for the young Squire Arthur Don Thorn and Don Thorn Seduces her. And the result, as I say, is a pregnancy, which ends very unhappily because the baby’s born and Hetty goes on the run and kills the baby.
[00:21:05] So again, as you, you know, you can see it’s actually quite a scandalous book. And Blackwood, who I think by this time had guessed that George Elliot was actually Mary Ann Lewis Lewis’s common wife, was just quite worried that the whole thing was gonna blow up into a big sort of scandal. He didn’t have worried.
[00:21:23] It was a huge success, as you say, and I think he does some very interesting things. I mean, there’s a very famous chapter, chapter 17, in which Elliot, as the narrator suddenly goes, it’s called in which the story pauses a little. What Elliot does is. Talk to the reader and say, I know what you think you are.
[00:21:42] You are reading this book. You think it’s a charming story about peasants in Old England. You think it’s great. It’s all gonna work out fine. It’s not going to, and actually peasants don’t live the sort of life that you think they do. You know, life in the country is actually not very glamorous. You know, it’s not very kind, it’s not very charming.
[00:22:02] Bad things happen and that is the nature of life. So right from the start, she is writing realism, but she’s writing it in a very confrontational way, and she’s saying to her. Readers whom she imagines as town dwellers. Look, I’m telling you stories and they’re not the stories that you think you’re going to hear.
[00:22:22] And I think that’s very interesting. ’cause she’s doing something almost bian. I mean, she’s stepping outta the story, addressing the reader. That’s quite a sort of confrontational thing to do, and the readers loved it. So as you say, the book was a massive success. I mean, it was a runaway success and it sort of changed novel writing because from then on you couldn’t really just do a kind of formulaic tale in which, you know, the good are always rewarded and the bad people are always punished.
[00:22:50] It’s a far more kind of muted, nuanced kind of story in which nobody gets exactly what they want. But they mostly get a bit of what they need.
[00:23:01] Albert Cheng: That’s fascinating. A bit more realist if you, if you will. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk about George Elliott’s third novel, Silas Marner, the Weaver of Ravelo.
[00:23:11] It’s known for its realistic treatment, a variety of topics like love, religion, industrialization, and community. And so you write in your book, quote, the idea. Of Silas Marner forcing itself on Marian suggests something of its immediacy and power. So tell us about this novel and what you meant by that quote from your book.
[00:23:33] Well, what’s
[00:23:34] Kathryn Hughes: happening at this point in her life is that Marian has been living anonymously in a suburb of London, and up until now nobody’s been quite sure that she’s George Elliot. I mean, insiders have probably known Blackwood knows, but it hasn’t quite been clear. Suddenly it does start to become very clear.
[00:23:53] You know, the reading public now knows that George ett is none other than Marian Lewis. Shameful Scarlet woman who is living as a mistress of a married man. So it’s a deeply unhappy time for her. She feels very, very paranoid, stuck in the suburbs. She actually even thinks that the sort of the walls are closing out on her, that the houses opposite her have eyes.
[00:24:15] So it’s just psychologically a very, very constricting time. And it’s at this point that Sila Marner just sort of comes to her in a single moment, and I think it’s no surprise it’s set back in the Midlands. It’s quite compressed. It’s shorter than the other novels, and it’s got a sort of fabulous quality to it.
[00:24:36] A sort of folktale quality, which is kind of quite charming. Sans Mana is a weaver. He’s also a miser who lives detached. From the village. So again, we’ve got certain psychological rhyming and echoing there, quite detached from everybody else. He, he’s removed himself. He’s become obsessed with money, with making gold, so that’s all he cares about.
[00:25:01] He weaves away all night like a sort of auto automaton. His machine is in his cottage. He’s a handling weaver. And then one night he goes out, leaving the door unlocked and somebody breaks into his cottage and steals his marvelous golden treasure. And he’s absolutely distraught him and he’s undone. But shortly afterwards, a small toddler, a 2-year-old girl stumbled into his cottage.
[00:25:29] Appears to be an orphan. The mother has died in the snow and he decides to raise this child as his own, and that’s what the setup. Thereafter, we learn about how he becomes humanized through this experience of being a father. He’s reintroduced to the community. He makes peace with his neighbors, who help him, who gather around, so it becomes a kind of a village, raising a child.
[00:25:55] It’s a story really about the redeeming power of love and community. I think we can say that. Of course, there is also the plot. Who stole those Golden sovereigns turns out to be, it was the Squire’s near Dowell son and the gold is eventually recovered. But again, it is a story. It’s less realistic than Adam Bead.
[00:26:19] It’s got more fabulous folk tale elements, but it does have a sort of extraordinary kind of compressed power, and it is about, again, the healing possibility that I think of community of living with other people, of not being separate from the rest of humankind. It also has a wonderful scene set in the Rainbow Pub where there’s a sort of Greek chorus of local people, men of course drinking and smoking.
[00:26:45] Who is it where provide a sort of coic commentary on what’s going on. So it’s very layered, but it is also very charming. And as I say, because it’s quite short, it is the book that all British children have to read in school because it’s considered kind of just easier for them to manage than something like the very long.
[00:27:04] Or Daniel,
[00:27:07] Helen Baxendale: let’s turn to middle March, which despite its length I think is fair to say, is George Elliot’s most famous work of fiction. And you wrote in your biography, George Elliot, the last Victorian, that more than any of Marianne’s previous books, middle March, was concerned with national and political life.
[00:27:25] Could you briefly sketch the plot and the key characters and put it in its wider historical context?
[00:27:32] Kathryn Hughes: The reason I’m laughing is that you, as you will let, no, no small undertaking.
[00:27:37] That’s exactly, but how long have you got The most succinct way that I can think to Middle March is so named because it concerns the middle of England.
[00:27:46] Again, we’re back to Warwickshire. The place where Georgia, it comes from it, it concerns two communities who start off fairly, fairly ACH from each other. We have the county, the gentry, the. Country people, smart country people. So we have Dorothy Brook, who is the heroine, seems to lead a slightly charmed life, very beautiful, but also very moral, slightly kind of over earnest.
[00:28:11] She lives with her uncle, who is a man, a squire, who talks a lot about improving things, but actually does very little at all. And Dorothy, because she’s so idealistic, falls ridiculously in love with a much older man called Kaon, another clergyman who. Who she thinks will, as it were, show her the mysteries of the world.
[00:28:31] He’s making an extraordinary book called The Key to or Mythologies, and she thinks that she can become his secretary and some of his greatness will rub off on her. The other community is the town, the nearby town community, and we have as where sort of parallel world these people are middle class, they are manufacturers.
[00:28:49] We have the VIN family, we have Rosa and Vincent about the same age as Dorothea. She is in a way, the inverse. She’s been away. To a, a sort of fancy boarding school, but she’s rather silly. She’s very beautiful and her one ambition in life is to escape from her family who, who slightly embarrass her because they’ve got sick warwickshire accents and she wants to marry well, and she falls in love with the doctor who has just come into the c.
[00:29:16] Ter Litigate, who is a gentleman as well as a scholar and is doing great work for Middlemarch. He wants to set up a fever hospital so you know he is worthy of any girl’s attention. And there again, another unfortunate marriage. Rosamond and ligate get married and it is an equally horrible marriage. And really the book is about the unraveling of these.
[00:29:39] Two central relationships, these I unfortunate marriages, and it’s really about the sort of self-deception of young people and the fantasies that marriage will somehow bring completeness, when in fact what it brings is immense unhappiness. And all the characters have to go through a sort of learning process in order to discover, first of all who they are and then the kind of relationships that they need now.
[00:30:07] I think with the March is concerned with national politics is that it’s set in 1830, just on the eve of the Great Reform Act. And Brooke, Mr. Brooke, the Squire tries to get elected for Parliament and he thinks he’s going to be a reforming candidate. And in fact, he’s shouted down, people throw ex at him.
[00:30:27] He is hopelessly suited to the job of a public man. A public servant, because he’s really only concerned with his own vanity. And I think. It’s very interesting and it’s no mistake that. It sets her novel then, because she’s writing it just at the time of the second Reform Act 1867, and she too is very worried about the coming of modernity, what will happen if we open up voting rights to a new sway of working people.
[00:30:54] So in a way, she expresses her anxiety about her present time in the late sixties through anxieties that are swirling around at the time in 1830. What will happen if the franchisees opened up to middle class people? And the book also deals with the coming of modernity, with the railways that are coming and they’re cutting through the country.
[00:31:17] They’re remaking the country, they’re scarring it, they’re kind of changing it, and social relationships will change as a result. So I think those are the main themes. At one hand, it’s a very personal book. It’s about love and marriage, but it is also about the coming of modernity and what that means.
[00:31:35] Albert Cheng: I have to commend you, Dr.
[00:31:36] Hughes, for packing all that in, in, in the time that you did. But let me give you, uh, some more opportunity to talk about Middle March. You know, given the themes, I guess Virginia Wolf is famously called that novel quote, one of the few English novels written for grownup people. I’d like to give you the opportunity to unpack some of those themes a little bit more.
[00:31:55] I mean, you’ve already mentioned marriage, political reform, idealism. The onset of modernity. I mean, there are other ones too, right? So the roles and status of women education. I’d like to give you the floor to talk about these issues a little bit more.
[00:32:10] Kathryn Hughes: I think probably what Virginia Wolf meant in that very famous.
[00:32:14] Applaud it was that it’s a book for grownups because again, we get this sense of a, of a realism that is real. So we’re talking about Adam Bead and the fact that, you know, life in the country is not a master of skipping around a maple and country dances and feasting. Likewise. In middle March, everybody gets a slightly muted ending.
[00:32:37] As I say, you know, Dorothea does not get to marry somebody rather splendid, and she does not go on to have a fantastic afterlife because what happens is she marries her distant cousin, Latice Law, who is Mr. Brook’s secretary and, and tells us quite specifically the end of the book. She doesn’t have a very glorious life.
[00:33:00] She’s anonymous. You won’t have heard of her. She doesn’t, her name is not in the history books, but life was better for lots of people around her because she had lived. So, in other words, Dorothea’s legacy is in acts of small kindness and small acts of mercy and readers at the time. And I would say having taught this book to undergraduates, readers now have often found that very, very difficult because.
[00:33:28] We want our heroines to have lovely, lovely endings, and Dorothy is so magnificent. We wanted to have a proper. That is appropriate for her. And I think part of what Elliot is doing is trying to educate us out of those kind of ridiculous fantasies about how life will be that actually magnificent things do not happen.
[00:33:54] But that doesn’t mean that life is hopeless. We can all, as it were. Try to be Dorothys and do small acts of goodness. Ally to that, I think is very much her interest in education. As you said, one of the themes running through Elliot’s life and also through Middlemarch is a real anxiety about what education does for young people.
[00:34:17] She herself was very, I mean, and again, this is, this does not play very well now, certainly doesn’t play very well with undergraduates today, and it was not very keen on a lot of education for women. So for instance, when her friend Emily Davis starts the first women’s college at Cambridge, Elliot’s, very reluctant to give any money.
[00:34:36] I think she gives five pounds. She is very unclear that educating people outta their home, outta their natural kind of place in the world can lead to lots of problems. And she illustrates this in Middlemarch by Roswell. Vincent has been sent away to a fancy boarding school and has picked up a lot of fancy tricks, a little bit of foreign languages, some very pretty ways, but it hasn’t stuck.
[00:35:03] It’s not a real moral education. It makes her me nutritious and unsatisfied. Likewise, her brother Fred has been sent to Oxford where he hasn’t done very well, and he has come back to Middlemarch and has Fantasised about becoming a clergyman because. That’s what you do. If you’ve been to Oxford and you’ve been educated a gentleman, you become a Lerman.
[00:35:27] And his girlfriend, his intended Mary Garth is horrified by this because again, the education has inculcated Fred with all sorts of ideas and ambitious that aren’t really suitable or appro. They’re not deeply felt, and she feels that he would be much better off working as a land agent with her father doing something limited and local.
[00:35:50] And again, you can sit with Ter Ligate, a very clever man and a doctor who’s been educated in Edinburgh and France, but hasn’t quite softed off the desire to be special and remarkable. Elliot refers to his spots of commonness, which is very cutting, but he has a slight ca seat about his place in the world, and as a result.
[00:36:13] She tells us in the afterward he leaves him astray and he’s no longer a clever young doctor, doing good in middle March. He becomes a slightly jaded doctor, physician, just looking after rich and pampered people in spar towns. So again, his education is not of the right kind, and I think this is a very difficult.
[00:36:33] Thing for us to comprehend because we tend to think of education as being really, really good. But Elliot, it wasn’t an Aloy good. She thought that a moral education was more important. Likewise, and again, this is very difficult for us to understand. She didn’t think political reform was necessarily always an obvious good.
[00:36:53] She didn’t think that women necessarily needed the vote, which is something that reads very, very strangely to us today. But her anxieties were about sudden convulsive moves, sudden change legally imposed from the top. She was much more interested in slow, incremental change, and again, I don’t think there’s any way around it.
[00:37:16] It doesn’t always play very well to us today, but it does make her a very interesting and subtle novelist. I.
[00:37:23] Helen Baxendale: Hug. I’d like to explore this kind of notion of sort of rootedness and groundedness in George Elliot’s work, other war, and in her final novel, Daniel Durda. She says, A human life I think should be well rooted in some spot of a native land where it may get the love of tender kinship.
[00:37:41] For the face of the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. She goes on to say, you know, the best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s homestead.
[00:38:02] You alluded a little bit earlier in your contemplation of her. Interesting views on education and its role in sating people from place, I suppose. What do you think she has to tell a, a modern reader about the importance of human happiness being grounded in a sense of place?
[00:38:20] Kathryn Hughes: I think she is, we should remember that the great 19th century novels in English literature are all about place, usually about provincial place.
[00:38:29] So we have, you know, the Brontes, we have, so Walter Scott, we have Thomas Hardy and we have Elliot. And they are all writing about very particular patches of locality and that is very, very. Important to them. I don’t think we should think, especially with Elliots, we’re not talking about parochialism. We’re not talking about a sort of narrow.
[00:38:53] Inward looking this after all Daniel LaRhonda is lots of it is about the possibility that Daniel LaRhonda will go to the Near East and work for a homeland for the Jews. So she’s very kind of open to possibility. She’s not just a kind of inward thinker. She’s got a vast kind of knowledge. But I think for her, what’s really important is that.
[00:39:18] Any kind of cognition and the early years in which we lay down those very, very important connections of, you know, growing up in a family, growing up in a community, that kind of very important emotional work has to be done in a very specific kind of place. And the knowledge has to be almost a kind of bodily knowledge.
[00:39:40] It has to. Specialized inside us. She talks often about nerves and nerve endings. We really have to kind of inhabit it, and only then once we’ve, as it were. Got that very solid sense of self, can we start to look around ourselves and peak that knowledge into different places? I also think that we shouldn’t underestimate the fact that she personally is writing as somebody who’s been entirely, she never goes back to Warwickshire.
[00:40:12] She leaves at 28, she lives to 60. She never goes back to orchestra because her family has rejected her and it’s too painful. So I think we have to allow for a certain amount of personal nostalgia and. Longing. She was never terribly happy in London. And interestingly, if you look at her diaries, she didn’t leave that many diaries, but the diaries that she did keep, she constantly mentions the weather.
[00:40:42] She, she knows. When the harvest is being done, she knows what time of year it is, what will be happening in the countryside, whether there’s too much rain or not enough rain. So she hasn’t vibe that kind of locality, which she sees as the kind of root of all morality. But as I say in Daniel Rhonda, half of the book is about, is a very empathetic exploration of Anglo Jewish identity and longing for making a home on the other Sydor the continent.
[00:41:12] So. It’s subtle and it’s big. It’s not a sort of inward looking parochialism.
[00:41:19] Albert Cheng: Well, let me begin this next question with, let me just read the first few lines of, oh, may I join the choir? Invisible. So let’s talk about her poetry. Oh, may I join the choir? Invisible of those immortal debt who live again in minds made better by their presence.
[00:41:35] So it’s the beginning of that, and I guess folks are probably generally less familiar with George Elliot’s poetry, but this one probably has, this is maybe a bit more well known. So. Share with us your thoughts on this poem in particular, and perhaps what we should remember about her poetry in general.
[00:41:52] Kathryn Hughes: I have to say, I don’t think her poetry does always land, and I think she was writing it in that middle part of her career, which I alluded to where in a way she slightly lost her bearings, I think artistically.
[00:42:06] So she has this kind of mid-career slump. She produces some books that don’t go very well, Romala, she writes. Poetry, which doesn’t work particularly well. I don’t think it’s where her skills lie. But this poem, well, it’s very well known, particularly amongst, I think, Unitarians in this country, which is not quite the semi unitarianism in America use it.
[00:42:31] It’s also very popular with. In humanist funeral services over here. So in other words, when people are having a funeral service, but they are emphatically not religious, so they’re not they, they’re not Christian. And it can often be quite hard to find appropriate texts that say what we want them to say without alluding to God.
[00:42:51] And this does the trick, and it’s a beautiful poem because it’s. It’s about those very things that seem quite commonplace to us, but it beautifully put, which is again, going back to her feelings about Dorothea, the idea that a good life, an important life is one where. Somebody just lives quite anonymously, but does small acts of goodness and actually makes the world a slightly better place for the people around them.
[00:43:24] So it’s not a kind of heroic goodness. It doesn’t involve great big deeds. One line says, you know. That she hopes that to in Kindle generous ER feed, pure love beget the smiles that have no cruelty, be the sweet presence of a good diffused and in diffusion even more intense. So shall I join the choir? I visible.
[00:43:45] I think it’s very confident. There’s this sense in which the small acts of everyday kindness mean that you will be remembered. You will. Be remembered because people will have had a better life because of you, and you will join the choir invisible, so you are no longer with us, but in a way, you are always there.
[00:44:06] It’s a beautiful poem and I can see why it is so popular at Humanist Funeral Services.
[00:44:13] Helen Baxendale: Professor Hughes, I, uh, I’d like to close the way we commonly do when we talk to a biographer, a famous literary figure, and the question we often ask is for you to just sum up broadly why readers in the 21st century.
[00:44:28] Should continue to read and take interest in their work and what you think their legacy is in general terms. And having done that, I wondered if you’d be kind enough to share with us a short passage from your own biography of George Elliot to close this out.
[00:44:44] Kathryn Hughes: I think that Elliot has been undergoing a bit of a renaissance, certainly in Britain.
[00:44:49] So for the first part of the 20th century, she was really outta favor. I think it’s important to say that. So the time is a high modernism, and you know, if we’re thinking of, you know, the world of James Joyce or TS Elliot. She really wasn’t popular. She seemed to very much belong to the a late Victorian period of slightly plotty, ponderous kind of moral fiction that didn’t really do anything for anybody.
[00:45:16] So she was very, very unpopular. She didn’t really become very popular even in the 1970s where we have second wave feminism and scholars like Elaine Showalter is writing so marvelously about the brunches, you know, mad Woman in the attic. Finding wonderful things to say about these sort of subversive female writers, and it didn’t quite fit because after all, she had never really been marginalized.
[00:45:38] You know, she was wealthy, she was successful, and yet she still wrote under a man’s pseudonym, and that didn’t quite work in the seventies. What I think became really important is she became important in the nineties where I think there was a move away from postmodernism where you know, a sort of literature that had Trix generators and cut up narratives and all sorts of francs no longer seemed to quite hit the spot and there was a renewed interest, I think.
[00:46:07] In social realist narratives. Not naive, not naively so, but ones in which you could explore interiority and which characters were securely placed in a landscape. And certainly over here we have a whole generation of novelists Who, who I couldn’t name who. I mean, John Lanchester, Andrew Hague, and Sarah Moss who write in that way.
[00:46:30] So. I think she, she has a real kind of renaissance at the moment. I think we’re very interested in how, in this very fractured and difficult world, you find a way of writing that encompasses everything that doesn’t just as it were, take the. Kind of e way out and just talk about small corners of the world that still has that ambition to take in the whole world.
[00:46:54] But it has a sort of generosity to allow for people having different viewpoints. I mean, Elliot is all about nuance. She’s all about ity of views. It’s not didactic. It’s very capacious, her narrative voice. So I think that works very well for now, and I think it will go on working. In fact, I think she’s bequeathed us, that she has shown us that novels can both be extremely important in showing us about ourselves and about society, but they can also be exceptionally readable reading.
[00:47:29] And it is not a chore. It’s not something you have to do to fulfill a sort of test paper at school. It is actually, it is full of characters whom you. Would honestly swear, kind of could almost live outside the book. And I think that is what makes her so extraordinary. She shows that it can be done and I think she, at the same time makes us realize how hard it is to do properly.
[00:47:54] So I’m gonna read a passage. It’s a reminder, it’s from the beginning of the book that Georgette wasn’t always George Elliott, this sort of magisterial, omniscient, wonderful moral teacher. She was actually a slightly confused young woman who was rather keen on men and tend to chase them in a, not a very kind of profitable way.
[00:48:17] And I just think it’s very important to remember that there is nothing. Absolutely. There was nothing fully formed about her, just like the rest of us, just like her characters. She had to go through an awful lot of unpleasant, rocky, difficult situations before her kind of maturity was, was hard won in the end.
[00:48:38] So this is when she’s about. 28, she goes to live in London with, in the house of a man called John Chapman, who is a publisher, and he’s also a philander. And he’s got about three women on the go, including Marian. And what is so extraordinary is that he writes it all down in his diary. And it makes for kind of extraordinary reading.
[00:49:02] ’cause you, you start to see Elliot in a completely different way. So on 30th July, 1851, Chapman records a typical incident. In his diary, he says, Susanna, that’s his wife. And I had serious altercation about going out on Sundays. She said how much she would like to spend the whole of the Sundays out. I said, yes, so should I, but you prevented it, meaning that she would not recognize my right to take her, or Elizabeth, that’s his mistress, as I might think best, like alternatively, her marks one tissue, exaggeration, misrepresentation, preferation of passion.
[00:49:36] I bore it calmly with one or two exceptions, which I could not help stopping her by saying she was a liar, which afterwards I apologized. And then we go on to talk about why Maryanne was, she was also, she was brought into this, as it were, Mina Artis for Maryanne. She was then Marianne becoming George Chapman’s right hand woman represented the kind of vocation, which it seemed so outta reach when she wrote her last despair letter to the brave from Geneva.
[00:50:05] Now, within weeks of returning to Darling Different Coventry, he was a handsome man asking her to join with him in a glorious project to change the world. What is more he had promised to help her break into free arts journalism, and as earnest of its good faith had placed her first piece in the Westminster review.
[00:50:23] The fact that Chapman was not only married, but had a mistress, would not have deterred her, just as it made no difference with Dr. Bravin, Mr. Dolbert and Charles Bray. It was not that she was cruel exactly, or indifferent to other women’s situations, but her own deep needs for intellectual and emotional intensity was still incapable of being schooled.
[00:50:44] Or almost, but chaplain’s observation that she was formal and studied at Houston Square suggests at this time Maryanne was determined at least to try to avoid the turmoil, which would’ve followed her wherever she went as a signal that this was to be a new phase in her life, which Evans announced and Strand Wellers From now on, she would like to be known as Marian.
[00:51:05] She played with the idea ever since she was a school girl, learning French, drawing out Marianne in her exercise book. But now the time felt right for a radical change. Marianne’s were to a penny, a rural warwickshire. Marianne had tried to be much more suitable for a woman who attended to take London by storm.
[00:51:24] Albert Cheng: Take the world by storm. She seemed to do that, but maybe not a raging storm. But Dr. Hughes, thank you so much for giving your time to discuss George Elliot with us. It was such a pleasure.
[00:51:37] Kathryn Hughes: I’ve so much enjoyed myself. Thank you so much.
[00:51:53] Albert Cheng: Do you feel like a little bit of renewed inspiration perhaps to get beyond middle March and I guess it’s in my case, to get into middle March
[00:52:01] Helen Baxendale: or something else? Well, I, I hasten to add, it was a long time ago, and so I could probably do with revisiting Middlemarch myself, but no, a very edifying conversation.
[00:52:09] And I wanna read Dr. Hughes’s biography
[00:52:12] Albert Cheng: now too. Ah, yeah, yeah, that’s right. So anyway, well, I, I hope you’re listening. You caught a little bit of a bug to pick up some George Elliot. In your spare time for some good old fashioned leisure. Anyway, I wanna close the show here first. I’ll leave you with all with the tweet of the week.
[00:52:28] This one comes from Education. Next quote. Likewise, teachers receive bonuses for each student who scores a four or five on the AP exam, a merit pay system in which. If all teachers excel all receive bonuses, and that’s a, a line taken from an article written by a colleague of mine, Dr. Robert Marto and some others.
[00:52:48] The article at Education X entitled y Academically Intensive Charter Schools deserve our attention. And so I know we began the show, Helen, talking about the importance of developing general knowledge and getting kids familiar with. Facts and, and the knowledge base that’s out there. I think there’s a, a fine way to close to kind of close the loop on that really, and to close the show an article about charter schools that are doing that.
[00:53:11] And I think listeners are well aware. Great hearts definitely in the liberal arts tradition is trying to do that.
[00:53:18] Helen Baxendale: Yes. Yes indeed. And I’ll even give a shout out to our Arizona Stablemate basis. Mm. Who I, that’s right. I think now the primary subject of that very interesting piece by your colleague Robert Marto and Ed next, and encourage those who are interested in the charter phenomenon to take a look at that piece.
[00:53:35] Yeah.
[00:53:35] Albert Cheng: Alright, well Helen, thanks for, uh, co-hosting the show. Pleasure as always. Likewise, Albert. Always fun to spend time with you and with our guests.
So hope you join us next time. And until then, be well. Hey, it’s Albert Cheng here, and I just wanna thank you for listening to the Learning Curve podcast. If you’d like to support the podcast further, we’d invite you to donate to the Pioneerinstitute at pioneerinstitute.org/donations.
