The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Pub. 1860. Ed. Gordon Haight and Juliette Atkinson. Oxford: World Classics, 2015.

General Notes

• Set 1820s -- post napoleonic but pre 1832 reform act
• 10: figurative language is puzzling
• 12, 19, 30, 42, 80 descent/inheritance of traits

   * 37, 44, 82 speciation
   * 53 Gradations in civilization
   * 54 kin vs others
   * 57 Breeding/mixing blood
   * 68 deformity in the person of Philip Wakem
   * Persistent comparison of the children to animals of course because Darwin had broken down that barrier
   * Eliot read Origin while writing this

• 13 foreshadowing
• 15, 328 hotspur Shakespeare

   * 357 Sir Andrew
   * 464 pocket Shakespeare 

• 17-18 reading Defoe
• 24 metafictional/generic
• 27: Maggie's fetish
• 32 unmodifiable characters
• 37 dignified alienation, species
• 51-2 the Dodsons' retrograde gentility in the person of mrs Glegg
• 53 how heavily they expect Tulliver to fail by discussing what would happen to Glwgg's money
• 66 historical difference in religiosity
• 106 the gypsy adventure is through Maggie's psychological geography as well
• 160 metafictive
• 252 again metafictive, obscure vitality, sordid, prosaic --> realism
• Worldliness without side-dishes reminds me of bronte's lentils in Shirley
• 253 there is nothing petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations
• 267 thomas a kempis
• 280 quite wise
• 371 character is destiny - novalis (but later hardy in Mayor too)
• 382 renunciation again
• 442 Maggie reckoning with Stephen

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