"...the great question was how to give every man a man's share in life. But I think [the trades-union speaker] expects voting to do more towards it than I do. I want the working men to have power... But there are two sorts of power. There's a power to do mischief - to undo what what has been done with great expense and labour, to waste and destroy, to be cruel to the weak, to lie and quarrel, and to talk poisonous nonsense. That's the sort of power that ignorant numbers have... Ignorant power comes in the end to the same thing as wicked power; it makes misery."
George Eliot may have famously aimed at realism in her fiction, but she still seems to have had a weakness for the figure of a handsome young man who tells the Truth. Unless I'm remembering this incorrectly, Will Ladislaw is of a similar type, although not as forceful as Felix Holt. Neither seems quite real, a little too idolised by their creator. Clearly, in the speech which is excerpted above taken from Chapter 30, Felix is voicing something of his creator's views, and his truth telling is surely meant to convince us, his readers, of the rightness of those views. Such an honourable character, so right about so much, could hardly be mistaken here, for all that there are a number of points in the novel where he comes across as an insufferable prig. I've actually taken this quote from the introduction to my Penguin Classics edition of the novel. It's clearly an important moment in the novel's ideological scheme.
I'm being unnecessarily snide. And Middlemarch is actually one of the finest novels I've ever read. Something I don't think I've notice about George Eliot's writing before is just how funny a writer she can be. Perhaps that's inevitable when writing about characters involved in politics, but it also seems a part of her interest in realism and psychological acuity. More likely, her humour is something I can only now fully appreciate. I was a rather over serious young man when I was younger.
What I'm most interested in here is her emphasis on the importance of education. Politically George Eliot might have been no radical, but she was clearly on the side of gradual reform and the general improvement in people's circumstances. She's probably correct to be sceptical about the value of the vote in and of itself. We have a much greater franchise now than was ever conceived of in 1866, yet it's arguable how much power that has actually given people, even if we do manage to win a change in the electoral system in the referendum next week. It's certainly hard to argue that it's made people better, however we might choose to define that.
About education she's much more positive. It's typically mid-Victorian to have such a positivist attitude towards education, and there was recent research which seems to bear out the idea that the more educated you are then the less conservative you are likely to be. It makes a difference. Of course, as the example of someone like Nick Griffith demonstrates, you can have a degree from Cambridge and still believe in the most poisonous nonsense, and there are plenty of other examples one could cite. It could almost be a Liberal parlour game. The Nazis listened to Classical music you know! Just pick one of your most hated political figures and chances are they'll give you a reason to be sceptical about the supposed virtues of education.
On the other hand of course, I also work in academia. Or I'd like to, once the PhD is completed. Obviously I believe that the academic work I do has some value, and that the current attacks on universities by a lot of university educated fools are fundamentally ignorant and destructive. I'm an educated person who has never had to fight for their access to education. It's something I can take for granted and I know there are many people around the world who don't have that luxury. I believe in the importance of literature, art, music. It's all such a part of me, of who I am, of the identity I've constructed for myself. So I think it's incredibly important, and I resent the ideology which would ascribe value to something only once a price tag has been been applied. As Alan Garner says somewhere, accountancy is a fine profession, but we don't want to live in a world run by accountants.
I find that I flip back in my mind between these two positions, that education, the joy of knowing things, is one of the supreme joys of existence. And it is! And simultaneously believing it to be largely worthless and trivial, something which I think George Eliot also knew, as she went on to create Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch with his endless meaningless academic work. I doubt I shall ever manage to resolve these two positions, because it does change you, obviously, although not in any way which feels obvious. I'm not the same person I would have been if I hadn't decided to go into academia and get those extra degrees many of my friends don't have, but I would find it very difficult to say how exactly.
