George Eliot ‘despaired’ over trivial literature of her day

A DUMBING down in reading tastes is a criticism that is often raised these days, but the great Victorian novelist George Eliot had similar concerns almost 150 years ago, according to a previously unpublished letter.

The author of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, among other masterpieces, may have been disturbed by the popularity of lesser novels of the day when she wrote to a friend in 1879: “I get into despair sometimes and fancy that nobody reads a serious book except its author or editor, all the other so-called readers only dipping into it here & there in order to form a few mistaken conclusions concerning its general tenor.”

The recipient was Sir Henry Maine, professor of jurisprudence at Oxford and author of Ancient Law, on which she had made notes in her Middlemarch notebooks.

Prof William Baker, a leading Eliot expert, said that this is “a revealing and important document”, with criticisms that are pertinent today.

Another scholar, Prof Patrick Scott of the University of South Carolina, said that her criticism “strikes a nerve”: “Middlemarch had been a great critical success, but she may have been worrying about future response to her own books, when younger novelists like [Mary Elizabeth] Braddon and Rhoda Broughton were catching popular taste and drawing huge [sales].”

The letter has emerged from Maine’s descendents and will be sold by Dominic Winter Auctions, near Cirencester, on Nov 24, for an estimated £600-£800.