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Beautiful lost causes: quixotic reform and the Victorian Novel

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Beautiful lost causes: quixotic reform and the Victorian Novel

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BEAUTIFUL LOST CAUSES:

QUIXOTIC REFORM AND THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

by

Jennifer D. Conary

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2008

Copyright 2008 Jennifer D. Conary

ii
Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Introduction 1

Chapter One
“Dreaming over an unattainable end”:
Disraeli’s Tancred and the Failure of Reform 18

Chapter Two
“Never meant to go right”: Bleak House and the Limits of Liberalism 48

Chapter Three
“Tragic and yet glorious”:
Dueling Plots and Dueling Causes in Daniel Deronda 77

Chapter Four
“Often noble, but never heroic”: Embattled Idealism
in Gissing’s Demos, Thyrza, and The Nether World 122

Chapter Five
“A tragic Don Quixote”: Jude the Obscure and the Tragedy of Reform 154

Bibliography 186

iii

Abstract

This dissertation expands and complicates the definition of Victorian social fiction by
tracing a particular strand of reform narrative—what I term “quixotic reform”—in
Victorian novels by Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Gissing,
and Thomas Hardy. The protagonists in these novels reject traditional reformatory
efforts, which they view as futile, and instead attach themselves to grandiose, heroic
causes that are doomed to failure because of the very abstract, romantic qualities that
make them so appealing. These novels represent a response to the complex social
conditions of nineteenth-century Britain that is, paradoxically, both despairing and
hopeful, a devotion to beautiful lost causes that haunts not only these fictional narratives,
but also the liberal mind of the century.
1

Introduction

I say boldly that this our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment
against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bottom of our attachment to so
many beaten causes, of our opposition to so many triumphant movements. And
the sentiment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, and has shown its
power even in its defeat. We have not won our political battles, we have not
carried our main points, we have not stopped our adversaries’ advance, we have
not marched victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon
the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our
adversaries’ position when it seems gained, we have kept up our own
communications with the future.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

This passage from the opening chapter of Culture and Anarchy refers to what
Arnold viewed as the heroic failure of the Oxford movement, but it applies just as
fittingly to the agenda of the work in which it appears. Arnold was surely aware of this,
since each of the essays that he eventually collected and published as Culture and
Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1869) is structured as a rebuttal or
an anticipation of counterargument aimed at the great defenders of the political and social
status quo of the day, many of whom accused the well known poet and essayist of
impeding progress by acting as “an elegant Jeremiah”
1
who lived “out of the world and
[knew] nothing of life and men” (Arnold 81). What Arnold calls for in Culture and
Anarchy and what prevents the essay from fitting easily into any recognizable genre (Is
the essay political theory? Literary criticism? Something else entirely?) is, as Arnold
notes throughout, impractical; yet what makes Arnold’s call to action impractical is, at

1
Arnold cites this particular accusation in his “Introduction” to Culture and Anarchy as
having been made back in 1866, the year before he began publishing his culture essays in
serialized form.
2
the same time, what makes it noble, heroic, and, in some strange way, logical. As Arnold
explains regarding the Oxford movement, there is power even in defeat.
In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold offers a scathing critique of the British political
and social mindset of the mid-nineteenth century. The bulk of his condemnation falls on
middle- class Liberals, whom he accuses of “random and ill-regulated action” (82), but
his diagnosis of the sad state of the nation extends to all classes and describes a general
social malaise. Arnold was, of course, not the first to lament the “Condition of England”;
politicians, reformers, and writers of all types had been doing so for decades, and their
critiques had spurred many useful campaigns to improve living and working conditions
across England. Arnold was, however, one of the first social critics to launch such an
extensive attack on the liberal approach to bettering the nation, which he condemned for
contributing to the very problems in need of improvement. He proposed instead that the
English devote themselves to the study of culture: “the best which has been thought and
said in the world” (190). “Through culture,” Arnold argues, “seems to lie our way, not
only to perfection, but even to safety” (180). He continues:
Resolutely refusing to lend a hand to the imperfect operations of our Liberal
friends, disregarding their impatience, taunts, and reproaches, firmly bent on
trying to find in the intelligible laws of things a firmer and sounder basis for
future practice than any which we have at present, and believing this search and
discovery to be, for our generation and circumstances, of yet more vital and
pressing importance than practice itself, we nevertheless may do more, perhaps,
we poor disparaged followers of culture, to make the actual present, and the frame
of society in which we live, solid and seaworthy, than all which our bustling
politicians can do. (180)

As a means of saving England from social, intellectual, and moral decay, Arnold
proposed altering the way English society as a whole thought.
3
The fame of Arnold’s discussion of “sweetness and light,” the space he devotes to
defining the proper balance of Hebraism and Hellenism, and his general focus on inaction
make it easy to forget that the essays in Culture and Anarchy were written as political and
social criticism, not as a treatise on art, literature, or any of the other more common
associations of “culture.” Arnold explains at the beginning of “Sweetness and Light”:
There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards
action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing
human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave
the world better and happier than we found it,—motives eminently such as are
called social,—come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-
eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in
curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of
perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion
for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. (59)

Abstract as his definition is, Arnold contends that culture offered England the only true
means of alleviating human misery. Thus, he called for an intellectual revolution in order
to achieve the tangible improvements that more practical reformers were failing to
realize.
Arnold’s critics dismissed the visionary nature of the argument made in
“Sweetness and Light” as rather silly, and accused Arnold, as he writes at the beginning
of the second of the Culture and Anarchy essays, of “proposing parmaceti, or some
scented salve or other, as a cure for human miseries; a religion breathing a spirit of
cultivated inaction, making its believer refuse to lend a hand at uprooting the definite
evils on all sides of us, and filling him with antipathy against the reforms and reformers
which try to extirpate them” (81). Arnold’s idea that the only way to change the world
was to change the way people thought and were came across as the ravings of an
4
extremely articulate madman, and although Culture and Anarchy has certainly withstood
the test of time and can now be seen as an influential exposition on the notion of
“culture” and its social relevance, the non-political, non-violent revolution Arnold desired
never came to be. As a manifesto calling for real political and social change, Culture and
Anarchy, much like the Oxford movement, failed to achieve the ends its author desired.
Although Culture and Anarchy failed to bring about the changes in English
society it outlines, it nevertheless succeeded as an intriguing and enduring work of social
philosophy. It is easy to see why many of Arnold’s contemporaries objected to the
abandonment of practical reform efforts in favor of more intellectual or at least more
indirectly active social pursuits—indeed, modern reformers, or activists as they are more
commonly known in the twenty-first century, would most likely respond to the same
argument today much as their Victorian predecessors did: with disdain for an
unwillingness to deal with actual material conditions. Yet Arnold’s argument, despite
being couched in irony that is easily mistaken for snobbery,
2
is both logical and
sympathetic to the deplorable conditions he seems to disregard. Culture and Anarchy is
not an aesthetic treatise; Arnold does not propose pursuing the beautiful instead of
working to improve social conditions. Rather, he proposes pursuing the beautiful as a
means of improving social conditions. According to Arnold, the English first needed to
learn how to understand “the best which ha[d] been thought and said in the world” before
they could learn how to use their right reason to solve social problems in a logical, useful

2
Many of Arnold’s views can, of course, be viewed as elitist. However, my purpose here
is not to judge the particulars of Arnold’s ideas, but to analyze the implications of his
project as a whole in Culture and Anarchy.
5
manner. Instead of worrying about the physical before considering the intellectual,
moral, or spiritual (in the secular sense), Arnold contends that one must first fix the
intellectual, moral, and spiritual; if the English could learn how to think and feel
correctly, they would then be able to resolve material problems much more effectively.
Of course, what Arnold calls for—a revolution in thought and feeling—is far
more difficult to achieve than any legislative victory, for changing a law is much easier
than changing a national social outlook. The plan is, indeed, quixotic—Arnold’s goal in
Culture and Anarchy is noble and is proposed with the best of intentions, yet it is always
unattainable. Beautiful though it may be, the intellectual revolution Arnold desired was a
lost cause.
Arnold was not the only Victorian writer to pursue a beautiful lost cause,
however. Many of the Victorian social critics (Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin come
first to mind, but there are certainly others) also approached the “Condition of England”
in a similar fashion by attaching themselves to heroic social agendas that were doomed to
failure, yet admirable and inspiring nonetheless. The attachment to beautiful lost causes
is also represented in a number of novels from the period. Indeed, this peculiar approach
to social problems was, I will argue, a distinct cultural phenomenon in the period between
1840 and 1900. The goal of this dissertation is, then, to identify and trace the attachment
to beautiful lost causes in the works of five Victorian novelists and to explain the
significance of this narrative pattern. By illuminating this pattern, I hope to provide a
new framework through which Victorian approaches to social improvement can be
understood. Although the scope of this particular project is, by necessity, narrow, the
6
questions raised will, I hope, provide the basis for a reconsideration of how the Victorians
thought through social problems and solutions to those problems.
I term this approach to social problems “quixotic reform,” and define it as a
dismissal of traditional approaches to reform—parliamentary and legal reforms,
organized charity, etc.—in favor of more heroic, indirect efforts that are noble, yet
doomed to failure. Quixotic reformers turn away from traditional efforts toward social
justice because they view such efforts as futile; although small-scale reforms may make
correspondingly small social improvements, the quixotic reformers see these efforts as
unable to remedy the highly complex, deeply-rooted sources of social problems, and,
thus, view such efforts as ultimately trivial. Instead, these reformers recognize the
enormity of the social problems they face and attempt, unsuccessfully, to attack the roots
of those problems. Their quests end in failure, yet their efforts are represented as heroic;
thus, pursuing the beautiful lost cause endows the quixotic hero with an aura of nobility
drawn from the heroism of his cause.
The protagonists of these novels take up doomed causes, not because they are
doomed, but because they are noble and, to the quixotic heroes, logical. These quixotic
reformers do not conscientiously devote themselves to efforts they know will fail; instead,
they devote themselves to causes that are beautiful and noble but, because beautiful and
noble, hopeless. Pursuing a less beautiful and noble cause would have been far more
practical, but far less heroic and, thus, unappealing to anyone desirous of accomplishing
something truly great; and, as Arnold explains in Culture and Anarchy, pursuing practical
reform by altering only the superficial effects of social problems rather than the
7
foundational roots from which those effects stem, is, to the quixotic reformer, really to
devote oneself to a truly lost cause.
* * *
As is probably already evident, I use two different definitions of “quixotic” to
convey the complexity of ideas associated with the reform efforts I describe. The first
definition is the more common and familiar, and refers to the impractical, futile, and
often romantic nature of a particular enterprise. This definition relates most closely to the
“lost” part of the beautiful lost cause.
The second definition is derived from the nineteenth-century understanding of the
word’s literary source: Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, the first volume of
which initially appeared in 1605. From the time of its first translation into English in
1612 (three years before the second volume of the novel was even published in Spain),
Don Quixote enjoyed great popularity in England, primarily because of the work’s
comedic elements. The tale of the aged lover of romances, whose unhealthy reading
habits lead him to believe himself the champion of a social order that was largely of
literary creation, was initially read in England as the story of a madman. This reading of
the now-beloved knight continued to be the most prevalent throughout the eighteenth
century, and it was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the
sympathetic reading emerged of Don Quixote as a noble knight who sought the ideal in
spite of his constant conflict with the real. According to Eric Ziolkowski,
3
this reading of

3
For the history of how Don Quixote was read in England, see Ziolkowski’s The
Sanctification of Don Quixote: From Hidalgo to Priest and Ronald Paulson’s Don
Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter.
8
Cervantes’s text, one that is still prevalent today, was first posited by the German
Romantics and quickly spread to England and the rest of Europe with the rise of
Romanticism. The second definition of “quixotic” I will be using derives, then, from this
Romantic interpretation of Cervantes’s text that presented Don Quixote as a noble figure.
Just as the once comical fighter of windmills became for the Romantics a symbol of
admirable idealism, Victorian quixotic reformers and their pursuit of lost causes are
represented as tragic, not silly. Thus, “quixotic” can also refer to the nobility of one’s
efforts to combat the ugliness of reality in an attempt to realize a glorious end; the quest
may be doomed, but the journey itself is nonetheless heroic, even though that heroism is
inextricably bound with a sense of tragedy.
The shift in the reading of Don Quixote from the Enlightenment to the Romantic
period is largely responsible for the distinction apparent between the quixotic characters
of eighteenth-century British novels and those of their nineteenth-century fictional
successors. As Wendy Motooka argues in The Age of Reasons: Quixotism,
Sentimentalism and Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Britain, eighteenth-century
texts—both fictional and non-fictional—emphasize the insanity of quixotic characters.
Motooka goes on to argue that quixotes in eighteenth-century texts are used to critique
empiricism: because quixotes see what everyone else sees but come to vastly different
conclusions about their sensory perceptions, they call into question some of the widely
held tenets of empiricism as well as eighteenth-century views on human reason.
The quixotes that populate the pages of nineteenth-century novels, in contrast, are
sane. Moreover, unlike the characters Motooka describes, nineteenth-century quixotic
9
characters do not see the world around them in a different way than their more practical
peers. On the contrary, they respond to and describe the same social problems as do
more traditional reformers. Their quixotism lies less, then, in how they view the world,
and more in how they go about trying to change it.
4

The focus of the Victorian quixotes’ quests (both as represented in novels and in
the works of real social critics) also differentiates them from their eighteenth-century and
even early nineteenth-century predecessors. Eighteenth-century literary quixotes, such as
Charlotte Lennox’s Arabella, Fielding’s Parson Adams, and Sterne’s Yorick (or Tristram,
Walter, or Toby), and early nineteenth-century quixotes, such as Austen’s Catherine
Morland or Emma Woodhouse and Scott’s Waverley, do not seek grand social changes.
Instead, their quixotism tends to be quite narrow in its scope, centering largely on the
pursuit of personal desires. Victorian quixotes, on the other hand, seek radical social
reforms in keeping with the spirit of progress and improvement characteristic of the
Victorian period. Their focus is on social improvement rather than on personal
wellbeing.
5

4
At the same time, Victorian quixotes fall prey, much like their eighteenth-century
predecessors, to the tendency to invest too much in their own romances. Although the
quixotic characters of Victorian novels view the social problems they encounter in a
realistic way, they dream up unrealistic approaches to solving those problems and view
their own goals as much more practical and easily attainable than they really are.

5
For more on the connection between the pursuit of social justice and quixotism in the
traditional quixotic novel, see Alexander Welsh’s Reflections on the Hero as Quixote. In
this unconventional but brilliant book, Welsh traces the influence of Cervantes’s Don
Quixote in six novels—five English and one Russian—spanning the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The title of the book—as Welsh is quick to point out—is quite apt
in that it reflects his decision not to provide a systematic analysis of a set of novels in the
conventional sense, but instead to posit a series of “reflections”—intelligent yet
10
This focus on social improvement makes quixotic reform a uniquely Victorian
phenomenon, one made possible by the particular social and historical conditions of
England in the period between 1840 and 1900. Victorian quixotic reformers, as I
mentioned earlier, take up their beautiful lost causes because they lose faith in the ability
of more traditional reform efforts to bring about the changes they see as necessary to
saving the nation; thus, quixotic reform is primarily a response to the failure of more
traditional approaches to reform and requires such failures in order to come into being.
Quixotic reform narratives do not appear until the 1840s, I argue, because it took that
long for people to lose faith in the reform efforts of the 1820s and 1830s. The late 1820s
and 1830s offered the first major legislative reforms in a century, and the political
attitude of these decades is characterized by a general investment (although driven by a
variety of motives) in righting the social wrongs of the previous century and finding ways
to deal with the rapidly changing conditions brought about by the rise of industrialism.

disconnected musings on quixotic narratives. My project converges with Welsh’s in its
attention to the legacy of Don Quixote in British fiction from the nineteenth century and
in the reading of quixotes as knights errant in pursuit of social justice. However, I differ
from Welsh in that I am not interested in making careful, precise comparisons between
Victorian novels and Don Quixote. In fact, none of the novels I discuss would qualify for
Welsh as “true” quixotic narratives in that they do not follow the exact narrative patterns
used by Cervantes.
My object, then, is to do exactly what Welsh seems to have wanted to avoid: to
provide a systematic study of one particular aspect of quixotism—the knight errant on a
quest for social justice—in novels drawn from one particular time period. The novels I
examine also differ from those that Welsh studies in that he limits himself almost entirely
to the comic tradition (Joseph Andrews, Tristram Shandy, The Vicar of Wakefield,
Pickwick Papers, and The Newcomes); the novels I identify as belonging to the quixotic
reform tradition, in contrast, fit more easily into the genre of tragedy than that of comedy.

11
There were two major causes for the reform frenzy of the 1830s. The first was a
genuine concern for ameliorating the deplorable social conditions, particularly of the
working classes, brought on by new modes of industrial production. This concern was
frequently tied to a sense of Christian duty, one emphasized by the evangelical revival of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Amanda Claybaugh explains,
reform in nineteenth-century England, which sought to prevent or eliminate suffering,
functioned as an alternative to charity, the primary response to social problems of
previous centuries, which sought only to alleviate misery (21).
The other major cause for the popularity of reform in the first third of the
nineteenth century in England was a fear of revolution. The history of reform is a history
of compromise, and reform efforts, particularly ones regarding class privileges, were
frequently made as a means of preventing more radical social transformations. England
was terrified of the possibility of a violent social revolution such as France had
experienced at the end of the eighteenth century, and one of the ways of preventing such
a revolution was to make gradual changes that kept those who were troubled by the way
the nation was run just content enough to maintain social stability.
This particular fear of revolution was unique to England, which never did go to
war to alter radically its government or national policy after the seventeenth century, and
serves as an explanation for why quixotic reform was a particularly English phenomenon.
The causes taken up by the fictional quixotic reformers I will be discussing, as well as
those taken up by their real life counterparts, are certainly radical, yet they are never
violent or associated with any form of political revolution. Quite significantly, they are
12
also doomed to failure, for the radical changes these narratives suggest are necessary in
order to achieve lasting social improvements require the very sorts of social upheaval the
English reformers were unwilling to embrace. Rather than take up revolutionary politics
or espousing a violent alteration in national governance—the more practical path to
changing the way society thinks and feels—English quixotic reformers, both fictional and
real, instead turned to lost causes, which were heroic yet mostly benign. Although
quixotic reformers proposed changes in society that were revolutionary in their
uniqueness and scope, they were more willing to admit defeat than to turn to revolution in
its traditional sense.
Strange though it may sound, the quests of the quixotic reformers are also
practical in their very impracticality. While quixotic reformers were unwilling to
promote political revolution, they were also loath to leave their troubled world behind in
favor of any sort of utopian vision. Quixotic reform narratives (and the ideas of the real
social critics who held similar views to those represented in the novels of the period)
always remain in some way bound to the social problems they illuminate; rather than
portraying utopian societies in which particular social problems had somehow been
solved, the authors of quixotic reform narratives dedicate themselves to thinking through
the process of how to achieve a desired change. Thus, these novels are quite different—
both formally and ideologically—from the utopian fictions that emerged at the very end
of the Victorian period.
Because the quixotic quest is historically contingent, the tone and spirit of the
quest changed over the course of the century as Victorian attitudes towards reform
13
evolved. Thus, the quixotic narratives of the earlier part of the century are much more
optimistic about the possibility of change, whereas the narratives from the end of the
century reveal a despairing hopelessness. After seventy years of failed reforms, the
quixotic narrative at the end of the nineteenth century represents the quest for reform as a
foolhardy endeavor; only a complete alteration of culture and society could possibly
make the slightest difference in the world, and such an alteration was, these narratives
seem finally to admit, impossible. The death of the quixotic reform narrative
corresponds, significantly, with the decline of “the novel of purpose” and the rise of more
aesthetically-driven fiction, a trajectory that reveals not only changing attitudes towards
the possibility of social progress, both by the authors of reform novels and by Victorian
culture more generally, but also a shift in beliefs about the role of fiction, and particularly
that of the novel, in society. Perhaps the genre of the social novel was gradually
abandoned because the possibility of changing the world through fiction—the underlying
ideal that seems to inspire the great novels of the Victorian period—was eventually
recognized as also quixotic.
* * *
Several of the novels that I analyze in my study of quixotic reform are not widely
recognized as social or reform novels at all, however. Much of what makes these novels’
protagonists quixotic is their adherence to quests that are of a romantic nature
incongruent with what is usually associated with the “Condition of England.” Indeed,
one of the aims of this project is to draw attention to the importance of reform and social
issues for Victorian fiction more generally, and to redefine what counts as social fiction.
14
I argue that quixotic reform novels offer more complicated and, in many ways, more
sophisticated evaluations of social problems than do the more traditional reform novels
that comprise the subgenre of the “Condition of England” or industrial novel, a small
body of texts primarily written during the 1840s and early 1850s (with the exception of
George Eliot’s Felix Holt from 1866) that have been the focus of almost all research on
reform and the Victorian novel.
6
The study of quixotic reform narratives can provide us,
I argue, with a better understanding of the many ways the Victorians evaluated and
attempted to resolve the problems of their time. Moreover, by moving away from the
cultural studies model of literary criticism that has focused on blue book reports and non-
fiction works, and by introducing a new framework through which to consider Victorian
efforts at social improvement, I hope to encourage a re-thinking of the intersections of
Victorian politics, reform, philosophy, and literature.
I begin in my first chapter, “‘Dreaming over an unattainable end’: Disraeli’s
Tancred and the Failure of Reform,” by illustrating how quixotic reform narratives work
through a reading of Benjamin Disraeli’s Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847), the little
known third installment of the “Young England” trilogy and a novel that has many
parallels to Cervantes’s tale of knight errantry. Because of its romantic Middle Eastern
setting and its at times fantastic quest narrative, Tancred has been dismissed both by
Victorian readers and modern scholars as apolitical. I argue, however, that the mission of

6
One exception to this is Amanda Claybaugh’s recent book The Novel of Purpose:
Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. Claybaugh’s work also
functions as an important reconsideration of the connections between reform and the
nineteenth-century novel. However, her focus on the literary marketplace and
transatlantic literary and reformist exchanges takes her argument in a different direction
than that which I pursue.
15
the novel’s hero, a young man who rejects a parliamentary career in favor of pursuing a
quixotic plan to invigorate Europe, both spiritually and morally, through the influence of
the Middle East, provides a sophisticated reevaluation of the politics of the earlier novels
in the trilogy. By refusing to offer any simple solution to the complex social problems all
three novels illustrate, Tancred reveals a much more complex and revolutionary view of
reform than is outlined in Disraeli’s other fiction.
From Tancred, I turn in my second chapter, “‘Never meant to go right’: Bleak
House and the Limits of Liberalism,” to Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-53), which I
interpret as showing all reform—both institutional and personal—to be quixotic. More
importantly, the novel illuminates the glorious rewards of martyrdom that make beautiful
lost causes so attractive yet troubling for the quixotic reformer, the very nobility of whose
quest prevents him from ever achieving the complete erasure of self-interest required of
true altruism. While Bleak House ends on a seemingly happy note, I argue that the
protagonists’ journeys to that happy ending call into question the legitimacy of their
contentment.
While Tancred and Bleak House present the quixotic quest as a noble endeavour
even while both novels hint at the darker implications of their reform efforts, later novels
seem less willing or unable to ignore the repercussions of quixotic reform, which,
although the reformer’s aim is social improvement, always involves some degree of self
interest or even egotism that casts a shadow over what would otherwise be an admirable
project. I argue that George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), the novel I discuss in my
third chapter, “‘Tragic and yet glorious’: Dueling Plots and Dueling Causes in Daniel
16
Deronda,” represents a turning point in the representation of quixotic quests through its
use of a dual-plot structure. In this chapter, I read the Deronda/“Jewish question” plot as
representing quixotic reform—a cause, to borrow Daniel Deronda’s description of Jewish
history, that is “tragic and yet glorious”— and the Gwendolen/“Woman question” plot as
representing the traditional reform it rejects—a cause that is merely tragic. In its
endorsement of the Deronda plot and condemnation of the Gwendolen plot, the novel
reveals the painful implications of choosing the beautiful lost cause over the cause that is
merely lost. Although, like the earlier quixotic reform novels, Daniel Deronda has a
(moderately) happy ending, Eliot is only able to reward the protagonist of one of her
plots; the bleak future assigned to Gwendolen overshadows the heroic mission of Daniel
Deronda and, thus, lends a sense of falsity to the project the narrative seems to endorse.
In this novel, quixotic reform functions as a desperate attempt to escape the tragic
recognition of the impossibility of significant and lasting social change.
Eliot’s representation of quixotic reform is nonetheless hopeful compared to that
of George Gissing in his “slum” novels of the 1880s (Demos, Thyrza, and The Nether
World), which I discuss in my fourth chapter, “‘Often noble, but never heroic’: Embattled
Idealism in Gissing’s Demos, Thyrza, and The Nether World.” These novels, I argue,
reveal the quixotic quest for social justice as having ignoble repercussions that are at odds
with the nobility of the causes espoused. The goals of Gissing’s male quixotic reformer
heroes are shown as inescapably egotistical as well as ineffective. Moreover, their plans
come into conflict with the novels’ heroines’ humble efforts towards survival; in looking
so far into the distance, the reformers fail to acknowledge or understand the pressing
17
needs of their wives, lovers, daughters, and mothers at home. Social reform, these novels
suggest, is by its very nature destined to destroy the domestic happiness of those who
seek it; while the causes the reformers espouse may still be beautiful, the means required
to support those causes are shown to lead to personal misery and suffering.
Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), the novel I discuss in my final chapter,
“‘A tragic Don Quixote’: Jude the Obscure and the Tragedy of Reform,” presents an
even darker vision of quixotic reform, and, I argue, is representative of the end of the
quixotic reform tradition. By presenting quixotic protagonists who combat not legislative
or political failures but deeply-rooted social prejudices, Jude the Obscure suggests that
no amount of progressive reform will make the slightest difference in alleviating the
misery of the modern condition. Unlike the earlier quixotic narratives, Hardy’s novel
does not allow its protagonists any asylum from the gloom. Jude Fawley and Sue
Bridehead, both of whom start out believing in their ability to overcome social barriers to
their happiness, are eventually forced to recognize their quests for social justice as
quixotic; thus, they despair, and their narratives end tragically.
The Victorian zeal for beautiful lost causes dissipated by the end of the nineteenth
century and was gradually replaced by a more openly pessimistic cultural attitude toward
reform. No longer was the quest for social justice a delightful end unto itself; rather, the
possibility for grand social improvements seems to have become so clouded with gloom
that only the foolhardy, not the heroic, would pursue such an unachievable end. At the
end of the century, the quixote’s narrative ceases to be noble and venerable, and instead
becomes tragic before disappearing altogether.
18

Chapter One
“Dreaming over an unattainable end”:
Disraeli’s Tancred and the Failure of Reform

The “condition of England” in the middle of the nineteenth century was, for most
Victorians (and is, indeed, for most modern scholars of the Victorian period), about as far
removed from desert pirates and neo-Grecian queens as London from Jerusalem. But
such was not the case in 1847 for the ambitious novelist-turned-politician Benjamin
Disraeli, himself a mixture of political and social incongruities, who chose to conclude
his political trilogy with a novel that bore greater resemblance to an Arabian Nights
fantasy than to any mid-Victorian reform fiction. Contemporary readers of Tancred, or
The New Crusade (1847) were understandably perplexed: “There is no principle of
cohesion about the book, if we except the covers,” complained one reviewer (qtd. in
Stewart 229). And, while critics have expanded upon this dismissive condemnation
throughout the twentieth century, not much has changed regarding the general critical
appraisal or thoughtful analysis of what Disraeli regarded as the favorite of his
compositions (Blake 215). The least popular of the Young England novels both in its
own day and in ours, Tancred has most frequently been viewed as an anomaly—an
abandonment of the political manifesto Disraeli began in Coningsby and continued in
Sybil.
Contemporary reviewers seem to have been so busy forming jokes that they failed
to consider the complexity of Tancred’s political agenda. Contributing to this was their
obsession with Disraeli’s idiosyncratic views on Judaism, which, unsurprisingly, are the
19
focus of almost all contemporary reviews. The anti-Semitism of the period is evident in
the number of blatant misreadings of the novel offered by Disraeli’s contemporaries. For
example, a reviewer for The Times wrote regarding the purpose of Tancred:
We hope we shall not peril Mr. Disraeli’s seat at the coming election, and render
him an object of hatred to the liberal and enlightened body of Dissenters, when
we state the hon. gentleman’s purpose to be, as far as we can with difficulty
discern it—to make Europe don the graceful and variegated costume of the
nations of the East, and—hear it, hall of Exeter!—to convert the whole world,
converted Jews and all, back to Judaism!
7
(qtd. in Stewart 232)

When Victorian reviewers could distinguish any purpose at all in the novel, this was
almost invariably the one upon which they settled.
Twentieth-century critics, although working from more generous motives, have
nonetheless succumbed to the same tendency to dismiss Tancred in their discussions of
Disraeli’s political fiction
8
because of the novel’s religious center. For instance, Arthur

7
This attack is so consumed with its purpose that it does not reflect on the fact that the
hero of the novel, Tancred, never converts to Judaism or wishes to convert anyone else.
His mission, as I will explain in more detail later, is more to invigorate Europe with the
fervour characteristic of the early Christian church than it is a desire for mass conversion;
while Tancred admires Judaism, he views it as an incomplete version of Christianity, and
throughout the novel he remains devoted to his form of Protestantism. I interpret this
critic’s misreading, as well as those offered by so many of Disraeli’s contemporaries, as
an expression of anxiety over the influence of Jews in British politics during the 1840s.

8
That is, when they acknowledge the novel at all. Very little has been written about
Tancred. Aside from the essays I mention later in this chapter, there are really only three
other notable articles: Daniel R. Schwarz’s “Progressive Dubiety: The Discontinuity of
Disraeli’s Political Trilogy,” which argues that Tancred represents a complete political
and aesthetic break from the earlier Young England novels (an argument directly opposed
to the one I make here); Richard A. Levine’s “Disraeli’s Tancred and ‘The Great Asian
Mystery’,” which argues that Tancred makes sense in the context of the trilogy because it
reiterates the ideology of Coningsby and Sybil (Levine completely ignores the second half
of the novel, which allows him to maintain a suspiciously optimistic reading); and Daniel
Bivona’s excellent “Disraeli’s Political Trilogy and the Antinomic Structure of Imperial
20
Pollard, in his discussion of Disraeli’s role as a politician and novelist, omits Tancred
from his analysis, arguing, “This novel [Tancred], filled with [Disraeli’s] quasi-mystical
Semitism, leads him to propound that continuity between Old and New Testament which
enables him to speak of an ‘Hebraeo-Christian’ faith. That kind of thing goes beyond the
bounds of my present concern [politics and the novel]” (6). Rolf Lessenich, although
reluctantly willing to accept Tancred as part of the Young England trilogy, draws a sharp
distinction between the final novel and its predecessors: “The monk and the monarch
represent the two means by which Disraeli sought to renew Europe and indeed the World,
religion and politics. Coningsby and Egremont are the political heroes, Tancred is the
religious hero of Disraeli’s trilogy: this is the trilogy’s unifying principle” (35).
Enlightenment democracies have long viewed politics and religion as uneasy bedfellows,
and this unwillingness to think of the two together has clearly influenced the way this
particular novel has been read.
Just because Tancred emphasizes the importance of religion to the wellbeing of
society does not, however, prevent the novel from being political, and Tancred is every
bit as concerned with politics and reform as are the other Young England novels.
Although Tancred includes no factories, no indigent members of the working classes, and
no Chartists, it is nonetheless deeply invested in the social reformation of England.
Tancred does not exhibit any of the defining characteristics of the so-called “Condition of
England” genre, with which Sybil is often classed, but its apparent failure to meet such

Desire,” which reads the novel as a manifesto for imperialist expansion, a point that falls
outside the focus of my argument.
21
criteria reflects, I think, more on the limitations imposed by our own tendency to classify
novels rigidly than it does on Tancred’s political agenda.
Rather than disregarding reform, Tancred simply takes a different approach to
reform than do the earlier Young England novels; Tancred, I argue, is more characteristic
of the quixotic reform tradition than more traditional reform narratives such as Sybil. By
actively dismissing the reform politics of the two earlier political novels and proposing
instead a much more radical approach to social change—one that requires a fundamental
alteration in the assumptions that dictate social operations—Tancred suggests that the
problems plaguing England are far greater in scope and infinitely more complicated in
nature than the plots of the earlier novels acknowledged. And while the novel presents its
social and political insights through the medium of a fanciful quest narrative, Tancred’s
romanticism is used artfully to present a radical political agenda. By replacing the
optimism and complacency of the earlier novels (as well as of Disraeli’s earlier Young
England ideology) with a recognition of the complexity and deep-rootedness of
England’s social problems, Tancred ends up being much more practical in its take on
reform than either Coningsby or Sybil.
The term “quixotic” is particularly a propos to Tancred not just because of its
hero’s social quest, but because of its many similarities to Cervantes’s novel; like Don
Quixote, Tancred is the tale of an idealistic dreamer who sees himself as the champion of
a heroic cause that no one else understands. His peculiar worldview, one that is shaped
by a romantic nostalgia for a rosy past that never was, prompts him to set out on a quest,
and much of the novel is devoted to recounting his adventures in the deserts of Syria.
22
More importantly, however, Tancred’s eponymous hero, like his Cervantean ancestor, is
disillusioned by the end of the novel. Although his goals of changing the world and its
fundamental operations are admirable, he is ultimately forced to recognize that what he
desires cannot be. Just like Don Quixote, Tancred’s narrative draws to an abrupt
conclusion as soon as the hero is “cured” of his idealism.
The questions Tancred raises are too complex and too subtle to yield to any easy
solutions. While the novel’s hero searches desperately for a means of combating such a
decentralized and foundational problem as the widespread moral corruption he feels is at
the root of England’s national misery, he inevitably fails. Thus, the novel is unable to
solve any of the issues it raises. This lack of closure—this refusal to resort to any
“Morrison’s Pill”-type solution—is not, however, a mark of incompetence on Disraeli’s
part, but rather evidence of a more mature, nuanced understanding of the Condition of
England than is demonstrated in the earlier novels, a point I will illustrate first by looking
at the political agendas of Sybil and Coningsby and then at Tancred in comparison.
* * *
Published in 1844, Coningsby, or The New Generation marked Disraeli’s first real
attempt at breaking away from his earlier forays into “silver fork” and autobiographical
fiction, as well as his first effort at using his newfound political knowledge to create
fiction “with a purpose.” In recent decades, Joseph W. Childers has given a savvy
explanation of how Coningsby works as a political novel. He points out the originality of
Disraeli’s manipulation of genre, arguing, “Coningsby remodels fiction’s connection to
politics, making the discourse of parliamentary party politics more overtly the object of
23
interpretation than any earlier novel had” (46). While Childers’s sophisticated reading of
the way in which Coningsby utilizes novelistic and political discourse provides a useful
reminder to modern readers of the political nature of what would otherwise be an
ordinary Bildüngsroman, Victorian readers, with different assumptions and expectations,
seem to have had no trouble identifying the novel as primarily concerned with politics.
In fact, contemporary reviewers proved quite uninterested in the Bildüngsroman-aspects
of Coningsby, and instead focused most of their attention on either the political agenda
espoused in the novel or Disraeli’s technique of basing his characters upon prominent
members of the aristocracy and the fashionable world.
Shorn of its political trappings, Coningsby is the tale of young Harry Coningsby’s
path to maturity. Despite his portrayal as a rather lackluster, ordinary sort of fellow in the
narrative, we are told that Coningsby is something special—a political genius in the
making. He and his friends at Eton sit and ponder the problems of the nation and
conclude that the future of England is in their hands. Although they are prevented by
their youth from actually acting to alter British politics, Coningsby and his young
followers nonetheless conclude that their elders—both Whig and Conservative—have
gotten everything wrong and that it is their responsibility to set things right. Much of the
novel, then, becomes devoted to explaining the various plans by which the young men
plan to save England—plans that bear a striking resemblance to the ideas espoused by
Disraeli and his Young England compatriots.
In 1844, Disraeli was still invested in the coterie of young aristocrats known as
Young England, to whom he acted as the older and wiser guide. Although there were
24
never more than a handful of members in the group, they enjoyed a surprising amount of
publicity for their romantic political agenda, which included returning England to a sort
of enlightened feudal society in which a generous aristocracy and a loyal peasantry would
work together for mutual benefit. Other of their ideas for reforming England included a
revival of traditional English festivals and pageantry, as well as a return to more
ritualized, High Church practices in the Church of England. As Robert Blake succinctly
puts it, “Young England was the Oxford movement translated by Cambridge from
religion into politics” (171).
9

Coningsby was consistently identified by Disraeli’s contemporaries as a sort of
manifesto for Young England. Thackeray, with his usual caustic wit, provides a
surprisingly accurate summary of the novel’s political agenda:
Politically, “Coningsby” is an exposure and attack of [sic] Whigs and
Conservatives. Of Whigs much, but of Conservatives more. The author exposes
the cant and folly of the name, and the lies of the practice. He lays bare dirty
motives and intrigues…; calls upon the elders of the Conservative party to accept
the Reform Bill and the new institutions consequent upon it; but calling in vain,
and seeing how powerless the old party are to avert from the menaced country the
dangers of anarchy, poverty, revolution, hanging over it—intimates that YOUNG
ENGLAND is likely to save us from these evils…. (qtd. in Stewart 185)

9
Blake provides a lengthy, yet lovely description of Young England: “The history of
Young England has all the charm and nostalgia which attend tales of forlorn hopes and
lost causes…. The success of such movements of protest cannot be measured by their
immediate political failure. They must, rather, be regarded as symbols and examples that
lend an imaginative glow to the dull course of party politics; showing that there are other
ways to fame than conformism, diligence and calculation; showing that a gesture,
however absurd it may seem to contemporaries, may sometimes live longer than many
Blue Books. Neither Young England nor the Fourth Party achieved anything significant,
but their memory will always beckon to those incurable romantics for whom political life
is something more than a humdrum profession” (168).
25
Although Young England is not specifically named in the novel, contemporary readers
such as Thackeray had no trouble in recognizing the fictional manifestation of Disraeli’s
actual political project at the time. To its Victorian readers, Coningsby was quite clearly
a political novel.
Although the bulk of the narrative is devoted to describing Coningsby’s personal
and romantic adventures, the plot crux is of a political nature. Coningsby’s grandfather
demands that Coningsby, with all of his Young England ideals, stand as a candidate for
the Conservatives, and the young man is disinherited when he refuses to comply.
Nonetheless, he is rescued from his poverty through an advantageous marriage and a
fortuitous return of his grandfather’s fortune by the end of the novel. More importantly,
Coningsby’s manufacturer father-in-law secures him a seat in Parliament, where we are
left to presume he will exert the same powerful influence he did at Eton. While the novel
closes with his not having done anything and with Parliament still teeming with
corruption and incompetence, the hero’s happy ending functions as a harbinger of
political regeneration. With the intelligent and upright Coningsby, as well as many of his
Eton friends, in office, the future gleams bright on the horizon.
While Coningsby concerns “the derivation and character of political parties”
(1870 General Preface), Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) focuses on “the condition of
the people which had been the consequence of them [the political parties]” (General
Preface). Of the three Young England novels, Sybil has received by far the most
attention from literary critics, mostly because it fits nicely into what, judging from the
criticism, one would think to be the only type of nineteenth-century fiction concerned
26
with politics and reform: the “Condition of England” or industrial novel. Sybil has for its
hero another young aristocrat, Charles Egremont—a dissipated youth who lacks a
purpose to which he can devote himself. He discovers this purpose when he meets
Walter Gerard, a common laborer of aristocratic Saxon ancestry, and his daughter, Sybil.
The novel traces Egremont’s growing awareness of the “two nations,” which leads him to
recognize the horrific state of poverty imposed upon the working classes by irresponsible
aristocrats. At the same time, Sybil and Gerard come to realize the futility of working
class-organized movements such as Chartism, and the novel ultimately reaffirms the
political message of Coningsby and Young England: resolving the problems of “the
people” is the responsibility of the aristocracy.
Like Coningsby, Sybil ends with a marriage, but with nothing having been
accomplished towards the regeneration of England: Egremont’s evil elder brother is
killed, Chartism is quashed, and Sybil is restored her rightful title (she was of noble blood
all along), but nothing significant has changed for the better. Egremont and Sybil retire
to an idyllic life as enlightened landlords and Egremont shows promise of an influential
Parliamentary career, but no one actually does anything to alter the deplorable condition
of the working classes highlighted in the earlier part of the narrative. Nonetheless, the
novel ends with promises of good things to come, with Disraeli, the author, addressing
his readers:
And thus I conclude the last page of a work which though its form be light and
unpretending, would yet aspire to suggest to its readers some considerations of a
very opposite character. A year ago, I presumed to offer to the public some
volumes that aimed at calling their attention to the state of our political parties;
their origin, their history, their present position. In an age of political infidelity,
of mean passions, and petty thoughts, I would have impressed upon the rising race
27
not to despair, but to seek in a right understanding of the history of their country
and in the energies of heroic youth, the elements of national welfare. The present
work advances another step in the same emprise. From the state of Parties it now
would draw public thought to the state of the People whom those parties for two
centuries have governed. The comprehension and the cure of this greater theme
depend upon the same agencies as the first: it is the past alone that can explain the
present, and it is youth that alone can mould the remedial future. (420-21)

He goes on, very much in the spirit of Young England and Coningsby: “That we may
live to see England once more possess a free Monarchy, and a privileged and prosperous
People, is my prayer; that these great consequences can only be brought about by the
energy and devotion of our Youth is my persuasion” (421-22). Once again, Disraeli
leaves his readers with only promises of a brighter future—a future to be brought about
by turning the welfare of the nation over to the Coningsbys and Egremonts of England.
Coningsby and Sybil thus reflect the optimism of Disraeli’s early political views.
Although both novels highlight political and social problems that were plaguing the
nation, Disraeli turns in both cases to the panacea of Young England: if the nation would
only put its trust in the genius and enthusiasm of its young aristocrats, it could be rid of
the debilitating political pettiness and moral decay characteristic of the leaders of the two
major political parties. Coningsby and Sybil both denounce Parliament as teeming with
corruption and incompetence, yet both novels suggest that solving the problem is merely
an issue of replacing corrupt MPs with enlightened ones and enacting specific legislation.
Thus, the first two Young England novels espouse a classic liberal and not-at-all
revolutionary solution to the “condition of England” problem; when the narratives offer
any answers at all to the issues they raise, those answers are firmly grounded in the
28
political process: England simply needs more morally upright, selfless (young) men in
positions of power.
But that was in 1845, when Young England had not quite yet become politically
irrelevant. By 1847, when Tancred, or The New Crusade was published, Disraeli’s
political agenda for the trilogy seems to have undergone a dramatic change.
* * *
Tancred begins with a setting characteristic of Disraeli’s society fiction—a lavish
coming of age celebration for Tancred, Lord Montacute, a protagonist who shows
promise, even before he formally enters the narrative, of becoming the next great Young
England hero (he is of even nobler blood than either Coningsby or Egremont, and he has
the ideal upbringing for fostering the kind of romantic idealism characteristic of Young
England). However, when Tancred does enter the narrative, we learn that this novel will
not follow the model of its predecessors. Immediately following his coming of age
celebration, Tancred is offered a seat in Parliament; but this path to political power—one
that both Coningsby and Egremont would have envied at the time of their majority—is
not to be his. To his parents’ astonishment, Tancred declines the offer, explaining that he
simply cannot devote himself to a government in which he has no faith. In what should
be at least moderately surprising to anyone who has read Coningsby or Sybil or who
knows anything about Disraeli’s career, Tancred denounces and rejects Parliament, which
he sees as completely ineffective in bringing about social change. When Tancred’s
father, the Duke of Bellamont, attempts to explain to his son that his duty is to act as a
29
“pillar of the State,” Tancred replies, “Ah! if any one would but tell me what the State is.
It seems to me your pillars remain, but they support nothing” (47).
In an attitude most uncharacteristic of a Young England hero, Tancred dismisses
Parliament as a useless antiquity. He says to his father:
“You have proposed to me to-day to enter public life. I do not shrink from its
duties. On the contrary, from the position in which I am born, still more from the
impulse of my nature, I am desirous to fulfil [sic] them. I have meditated on
them, I may say, even for years. But I cannot find that it is part of my duty to
maintain the order of things, for I will not call it system [sic], which at present
prevails in our country. It seems to me that it cannot last, as nothing can endure,
or ought to endure, that is not founded upon principle; and its principle I have not
discovered.” (49)

Gone are the self-confidence and optimism of Coningsby and Egremont, as well as the
general promising expectation of better things to come if the current political structure
were enlivened. Tancred, the new hero, sees only a bleak future for England. He
recognizes many of the same problems denounced by his predecessors—materialism,
venality, selfishness—but he has no hope in a practical, political solution. Moreover, he
identifies the British political and social system itself as one of the primary sources of
social problems. “The people of this country have ceased,” he laments, “to be a nation.
They are a crowd, and only kept in some rude provisional discipline by the remains of
that old system which they are daily destroying” (51).
By refusing to enter Parliament, Tancred effectively dismisses the mild liberal
political ideology of the earlier novels and replaces it with a philosophy that has
revolutionary implications. In Tancred, a brilliant young aristocrat in a position of
political power is no longer the answer to England’s problems, for, according to the
novel’s hero, the nation’s social problems are much too deeply rooted to be altered by
30
anything so insignificant as Parliament or the aristocracy. Instead, England must look to
God for a means of regenerating the nation. After explaining his reason for not entering
Parliament and his views on the condition of England, Tancred exclaims to his father “in
a tone almost of anguish,” “If an angel would but visit our house as he visited the house
of Lot!” (51). But, alas! Tancred, despite his spiritual devotion, has been deprived of
such a divine visitation. Thus, he decides that, in order to have a positive impact on his
nation (the goal of any Disraelian hero), he must journey beyond England to Jerusalem.
Because God will not speak to him in England and convinced that he can improve his
odds of receiving divine notice in God’s chosen land, Tancred decides that he must travel
to the Holy Land in order to receive his celestial inspiration. Only in Jerusalem can he
ask the questions that torment him and expect to receive an answer: “I, too, would kneel
at the tomb; I, too, surrounded by the holy hills and sacred groves of Jerusalem, would
relieve my spirit from the bale that bows it down; would lift up my voice to heaven, and
ask, What is DUTY, and what is FAITH? What ought I to DO, and what ought I to
BELIEVE?” (55). Plagued by a profound sense of doubt and unable to act because of his
uncertainty, Tancred sets his eyes on Jerusalem and places all of his hope for his future
and England’s in a direct response from God.
I would like to pause for a moment to explain that I am not arguing that Tancred’s
rather peculiar views are synonymous with Disraeli’s—far from it. In fact, I think it
would be a mistake even to say that Tancred and the narrator share the same viewpoint;
as Nils Clausson has pointed out, the narrator is generally much more witty and worldly-
wise in tone than is the almost comically naïve Tancred. Clausson goes on to argue, then,
31
that the novel should not be read in relation to Coningsby or Sybil or thought of in any
way as a political novel; instead, he proposes that the novel be read as an ironic
Bildüngsroman in the tradition of Scott’s Waverley.
10

While the heroes of Tancred and Waverley do share some similarities, the two
novels end quite differently, and, as I will show, come to radically different political
conclusions because they operate from different ideological bases. Moreover, it is
possible, I would contend, to read Tancred as a political novel without reading it as
autobiographical. While Tancred is connected to the earlier novels in the trilogy through
the fact that it again illuminates some of the same social problems and the focus of its
narrative is on finding a way to regenerate the nation, it does not function as a direct
manifesto for a corresponding real political group in the way that Coningsby and Sybil
do. Rather, Tancred can be read as an articulation of a more complex and radical
understanding of politics and the “condition of England” without offering any explicit
program for actual political reform. It would be foolish to assume that Disraeli was ready
to give up his Parliamentary career in 1847, but I do not think it so far-fetched to read
Tancred as evidence of Disraeli’s waning optimism in any simple Parliamentary solution
to vast social problems.

10
Clausson argues, “Critics have consistently misplaced Tancred within the ‘intertextual
grid’ of Coningsby, Sybil and other condition-of-England novels. But since Tancred
belongs to a different genre, the novel will make a great deal more sense if we stop
(mis)reading it as an autobiographical roman a these and instead read it as a combination
and transformation of two well-established genres: the quixotic or ironic Bildüngsroman,
such as Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) and, even more relevantly, the
historical romance, with Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) as the primary prototype”
(1).
32
In addition to offering a new evaluation of the state of the nation and the means
required to improve that state, Tancred quite explicitly rejects the political agenda lauded
in the two earlier novels. Disraeli accomplishes this by introducing characters from the
first two Young England novels to his new hero. In making plans for his trip to Palestine,
Tancred is referred by a family friend to Sidonia—the mysterious Jewish sage who acted
as a mentor to Coningsby in the first Young England novel. Just as he saw something
remarkable in Coningsby, Sidonia immediately identifies Tancred as someone worthy of
his attention: “He recognised in this youth not a vain and vague visionary, but a being in
whom the faculties of reason and imagination were both of the highest class, and both
equally developed…. [H]e possessed all the latent qualities which in future would qualify
him to control society” (123-24). That Tancred receives the endorsement of Sidonia,
who is always presented as the sagacious expert on the world and its workings whenever
he appears in the trilogy, suggests that the hero is not to be dismissed as just a silly young
man in need of some life lessons.
In order to help his new young friend blossom into the political savant he knows
Tancred will eventually become, Sidonia introduces Tancred to the heroes from the
earlier novels. Thus, at a dinner party, Tancred meets Coningsby, Egremont (now Lord
Marney), and Lord Henry Sidney (Coningsby’s friend from the first novel). However,
the former heroes are not shown to have fulfilled the expectations set up by their
narratives. Coningsby, we learn, spends a great deal of time in Westminster, but owes
much of his success to his wife, Edith, who, after having developed into a brilliant society
wit, functions as her husband’s social representative. Lord Marney, despite the
33
promising beginning to his political career outlined in Sybil, remained “[a] man of fine
mind rather than of brilliant talents, [who] found, in the more vivid and impassioned
intelligence of Coningsby, the directing sympathy which he required” (139). Coningsby
and Marney “were both men entirely devoted to public affairs, and sitting in different
Houses, both young, and both masters of fortunes of the first class, they were indicated as
individuals who hereafter might take a lead” (137, emphasis added). Despite at least a
year having passed since the conclusion of the second novel (Sybil, we are told in
Tancred, is in her second season of mingling with the fashionable world), Coningsby and
Marney are still suspended in a state of inaction. They are not said to have done anything
to affect their lofty goals, and instead are only “indicated” (by whom, we are not told) as
men who might eventually lead the nation. Their actions are defined by the future and
the conditional, never the past tense. For Young England, the regeneration of the nation
is still just over the horizon.
Tancred, skeptic that he is, is quick to point this out. He says to Sidney, “If a
Parliamentary career could save this country, I am sure you would be a public
benefactor… But Parliament seems to me to be the very place which a man of action
should avoid…In this age it is not Parliament that does the real work…Parliament has
become as really insignificant as for two centuries it has kept the monarch” (136-37).
And although Tancred is still the naïve political ingénue, nothing in the narrative exists to
contradict his evaluation. For instance, Sidney is shown to have been more active than
both Coningsby and Marney, but he too has not yet made a lasting impact on the nation.
His name was “significant of a career that would rescue public life from that strange
34
union of lax principles and contracted sympathies which now form the special and
degrading features of British politics” (134, emphasis added). Although he “seemed to
possess all the qualities of a popular leader” (136, emphasis added), Sidney had not yet
demonstrated his ability to lead.
Judging from the careers of the earlier Young England heroes, Tancred’s view of
Parliament as being a place of inaction seems quite valid. Thus, the last novel in the
trilogy dismisses the path to reform espoused by Coningsby and Sybil—in Tancred,
Parliament cannot solve the nation’s problems. Moreover, this dissatisfaction with the
more traditional method of affecting change (Parliament) is what prompts the hero of the
third novel to set out on his quest for divine inspiration. The fact that Disraeli includes
this scene with the protagonists from the earlier novels—a scene that is unnecessary to
the basic plot of Tancred—emphasizes the connection between the politics of the first
two Young England novels and those of the last at the same time as it highlights the
political nature of Tancred’s mystical religious faith. Tancred does not venture to
Jerusalem as a means of seeking (just) personal inspiration; he leaves England in search
of a way to help his country.
* * *
After a lengthy delay, the young knight errant sets forth on his quest to the Holy
Sepulcher. He spends his first few days in Jerusalem praying in places of spiritual
significance without any divine response; frustrated by his failure, he then embarks on a
journey into the desert in order to pray on Mount Sinai. However, because his mind is
dedicated to spiritual musings, he fails to consider the material ramifications of his
35
residence in Jerusalem and is kidnapped
11
while on his pilgrimage. Although Tancred
views Palestine and Lebanon as the land of spirituality, he finds himself upon his arrival
in the Holy Land embroiled in what amounts to a criminal political scheme. News of his
wealth immediately circulates, and with this information, rumors of his political influence
(he is mistakenly thought to be the brother of Queen Victoria). The Emir Fakredeen,
12
a
conniving prince of the Lebanon who is constantly in debt, decides to take advantage of
Tancred’s presence by holding the English aristocrat for ransom. Thus, although Tancred
remains blind to it, his idealized land of mysticism and spirituality shows an uncanny
resemblance to the politically-corrupt England he left behind.
Fortunately for Tancred, his captor, Fakredeen, exists in a perpetual state of
inconstancy—although Fakredeen devotes himself wholeheartedly to various causes, he
discards one and takes up another without compunction. Thus, when he goes to meet his
victim (Fakredeen presents himself to Tancred as a friend sympathetic to his situation and

11
The ambush in the desert during which Tancred is kidnapped presents one of the hero’s
most comical chivalric moments. In a foolishly courageous attitude worthy of his
Cervantean predecessor, Tancred says to his men (who are surrounded and
outnumbered),“There is, then, but one course to be taken; we must charge through the
defile. At any rate we shall have the satisfaction of dying like men. Let us each fix on
our opponent. That audacious-looking Arab in a red kefia shall be my victim, or my
destroyer. Speak to the Sheikh, and tell him to prepare his men. Freeman and Trueman
[Tancred’s servants], we are in extreme peril; I took you from your homes; if we outlive
this day, and return to Montacute, you shall live on your own land” (234). Tancred fails
to take into account that he lives in the civilized nineteenth century and that he is in a
land where men have material and political motives just as they do in England. He
instead interprets his situation as a heroic battle in which the only option left to him is to
die a valiant death.

12
Fakredeen is, incidentally, the foster-brother of Eva, the daughter of Tancred’s Jewish
financial liaison in Jerusalem and, eventually, the novel’s heroine. Tancred meets Eva
just prior to his departure on the journey that ends in his abduction.
36
desirous of aiding his release), he becomes enamored of the young lord and his strange
ideas. Tancred, in turn, becomes fascinated by Fakredeen’s position as a Christian
13

prince of the Lebanon and envies the possibilities his title and race bestow. When
Fakredeen relates the history of his “combinations” with France and England, Tancred
responds: “If you wish to free your country, and make the Syrians a nation, it is not to be
done by sending secret envoys to Paris or London, cities themselves which are perhaps
both doomed to fall; you must act like Moses and Mahomet” (258). Rather than
recognize the outlandishness of Fakredeen’s schemes, Tancred takes the fanciful young
prince seriously and gives him advice that encourages Fakredeen to become even more
quixotic. Moreover, Fakredeen sparks in Tancred an interest in a new approach to
reforming England: for the first time, Tancred begins to ponder ways in which he could
go about reinvigorating England and Europe with the spiritual fervor of the Middle East.
Although he does not attach himself to any particular plan or cause, Tancred allows his
always grand but hopelessly abstract ideas to take a more defined shape.
When Tancred finally comes to understand, rather to his disappointment, that his
captivity does not represent an opportunity for martyrdom,
14
he resumes his obsessing

13
Fakredeen is no more committed to any particular religion than he is to any particular
political cause. He espouses whichever faith he deems most advantageous in any given
situation.

14
Tancred clings to this notion of martyrdom with great fervor. His advisor, Baroni,
finally grows impatient with his master’s quixotic views of their situation and says, “With
submission, I cannot agree with any of your lordship’s propositions. You take an
extreme view of our case. Extreme views are never just; something always turns up
which disturbs the calculations formed upon their decided data. This something is
Circumstance. Circumstance has decided every crisis which I have experienced, and not
the primitive facts on which we have consulted. Rest assured that Circumstance will
37
over finding a way to get God to communicate with him. Although he is still technically
a prisoner, he is allowed a great deal of freedom and luxury, and Fakredeen arranges for
Tancred to complete the pilgrimage to Sinai he had been in the process of making when
kidnapped. Tancred journeys to the holy mountain and prays:
“O lord God of Israel … I come to thine ancient Arabian altars to pour forth the
heart of tortured Europe. Why art thou silent? Why no longer do the messages of
thy renovating will descend on earth? Faith fades and duty dies. A profound
melancholy has fallen on the spirit of man. The priest doubts, the monarch cannot
rule, the multitude moans and toils, and calls in its frenzy upon unknown gods. If
this transfigured mount may not again behold Thee … at least, of all the starry
messengers that guard thy throne, let one appear, to save thy creatures from a
terrible despair!” (289)

Tancred’s prayer emphasizes his commitment to social change—he does not seek
personal consolation from above. Instead, his individual plea to God is made on behalf
of “the multitude” and “tortured Europe.” His quest is not for personal development or
spiritual favor, but for mass regeneration. Because he sees no one else in Europe seeking
aid from the only source he believes capable of providing sufficient assistance, he takes
the social burdens of Europe upon his own shoulders and carries them before God.
And God does not ignore his plea. In what is likely the strangest episode in the
novel, Tancred actually receives a divine visitation.
15
And, quite significantly, the angel
who visits Tancred responds to the social dimension of his plea:

clear us now” (255). Tancred responds, “I see no room, in our situation, for the accidents
on which you rely. Circumstance, as you call it, is the creature of cities” (255).

15
It is unclear whether Tancred hallucinates or dreams this encounter or whether we are
supposed to believe he actually received a visit from an angel. The episode is recounted
in a sort of flashback after Tancred has begun to suffer the physical effects of his
excitement. His encounter with the angel leaves him in a state of fevered delusion,
during which time he babbles incoherently and does not sleep. Regardless of whether he
38
“Yet again, and Europe is in the throes of a great birth. The multitudes again are
brooding…. Since the first sun of this century rose, the intellectual colony of
Arabia, once called Christendom, has been in a state of partial and blind revolt.
Discontented, they attributed their suffering to the principles to which they owed
all their happiness, and in receding from which they had become proportionably
[sic] miserable … But the eternal principles that controlled barbarian vigour can
alone cope with morbid civilization. The quality of man can only be
accomplished by the sovereignty of God … In the increased distance between
God and man have grown up all those developments that have made life
mournful. Cease, then, to seek in a vain philosophy the solution of the social
problem that perplexes you. Announce the sublime and solacing doctrine of
theocratic equality. Fear not, faint not, falter not. Obey the impulse of thine own
spirit, and find a ready instrument in every human being.” (290-91)

The angel’s message is disappointingly oracular—Tancred journeyed to the Holy Land
assuming that if he received divine communication, his heavenly messenger would give
him particular instructions on how to change the world. While the angel does provide
advice, that advice is not exactly of the practical nature Tancred had expected. The
angel’s command to “[a]nnounce the sublime and solacing doctrine of theocratic
equality” is as good as saying, “Just put your faith in God.”
The angel’s message, while surprising to Tancred, does not seem all that unusual
for a Victorian novel, considering that Christian brotherhood and a belief in things being
better in the hereafter were, at the time, common responses to social problems. What
makes Tancred so remarkable, however, is the way in which the novel rejects this
philosophy. Tancred does not return to England to offer moral advice to the working
classes, fallen women, orphans, or any other oppressed group, and the “doctrine of
theocratic equality” is not so solacing to him. In fact, he receives no consolation at all

actually did receive a visit from an angel, the severe physical repercussions of his
experience reflect the serious intellectual and emotional impact the angel’s message has
on him.
39
from his divine visitation and is instead left in a state of greater confusion than when he
departed England. Thus, he deems the angel’s plan for social reform inadequate and
begins to formulate his own scheme for affecting the change he desires.
Failed by both English politics and heaven, Tancred assigns himself a new quest
that involves using political power to bring about religious and moral regeneration in
Asia and Europe. He says to his advisor Baroni: “Work out a great religious truth on the
Persian and Mesopotamian plains … it would revivify Asia. It must spread. The
peninsula of Arabia, when in action, must always command the peninsula of the Lesser
Asia. Asia revivified would act upon Europe” (303). Tancred decides that if he can only
gain the support of Lebanon and Syria, he can put into effect a political chain reaction,
with Arabia revivifying Asia, and Asia then revivifying Europe.
16

Fortunately for Tancred, he finds the ideal instrument for his plan of moral
revolution in Fakredeen. Blind to the quixotic nature of his own plan, Tancred fails to
recognize the lack of real political influence of his friend and instead sees in Fakredeen
what Fakredeen would have him see—a devoted Christian prince deprived of his rightful
throne. Moreover, Tancred continues to ignore the political nature of his imprisonment
and instead views his captors and the other desert tribes “now as they were in the time of
Mahomet, of Moses, of Abraham: a sublime devotion is natural to them, and equality,

16
Many critics and biographers read this portion of Tancred as a harbinger of Disraeli’s
later imperial actions, especially of his crowning Victoria Empress of India. However,
what Tancred is suggesting here is not that England colonize Asia, but rather the
opposite. Contrary to what we would expect, the novel presents England as in need of
the moral and cultural influence of Asia, not vice versa. Thus, Tancred advocates a sort
of reverse-imperialism; it is the English who are the barbarians in need of the spiritual
refinement of the Arabs and Jews.
40
properly developed, is in fact the patriarchal principle” (367). Caught up with the
heroism of his own vision, Tancred blots out reality in favor of the projections of his own
imagination. When Fakredeen, always eager to take up a cause in order to provide some
temporary entertainment, expresses doubts as to the practicality of his hero’s plan,
Tancred replies, “The instruments will be found, for it is decreed that the deed should be
done” (368). Tancred becomes so enamored of his ideological quest that he foolishly
imagines his success to be fated.
Of course, his plan is doomed to failure even before he attempts to put it into
action. Because Tancred views the only solution to England’s problems as being a
complete revolution in the nation’s moral constitution (he wants, after all, a national—or
international—spiritual reformation), he must resort to a plan on a scale equal to the size
of the problem being tackled. And, because he is the only one who has the clarity of
vision to see what needs to be done, he must single-handedly bring about this vast social
change. His plan is indeed heroic—the stuff of myths and legends—but what makes it
heroic is also what makes it utterly impracticable. In his very effort to avoid the petty
world of politics, Tancred dooms himself to failure, for lone knights errant cannot simply
disregard monarchs, prime ministers, and parliaments.
Tancred fails to understand that he is not the hero of an epic—he views the world
in abstract terms and remains blind to the corruption that surrounds him. Of course, his
peculiar situation does not exactly aid in his disillusionment—after he is released from
being held hostage, he travels with Fakredeen to the prince’s idyllic mountain castle and
then to the myth-infused land of the Ansarey, a small kingdom of people who fled from
41
Greece long ago in order to avoid persecution for worshipping the Greek gods. Tancred
meets Astarte, the young queen of the Ansarey, who lives a Dido-like existence in a
secluded palace and whom Tancred hopes to convert both to his religion
17
and to his
cause. Ensconced in such a romantic setting and accompanied by a woman who seems
almost a goddess, Tancred reaches the zenith of his quixotism. He explains to Astarte his
plan: “We wish to conquer the world, with angels at our head, in order that we may
establish the happiness of man by a divine dominion, and, crushing the political atheism
that is now desolating existence, utterly extinguish the groveling tyranny of self-
government” (422). The result of this scheme, he then elaborates to Fakredeen, is
fantastic:
“[A]nd then, when the East has resumed its indigenous intelligence, when angels
and prophets again mingle with humanity, the sacred quarter of the globe will
recover its primeval and divine supremacy; it will act upon the modern empires,
and the fainthearted faith of Europe, which is but the shadow of a shade, will
become as vigorous as befits men who are in sustained communication with the
Creator.” (428)

But just as Tancred becomes fully immersed in his own delusions, his idealism is
brought to an abrupt end. Even though he is safely tucked away amongst a people whose
entire way of life is based upon spirituality, and even though he is far removed from the
venality and materialistic corruption of cosmopolitan Europe, Tancred is forced to

17
Astarte is the only character in the novel Tancred desires to convert, and he chooses
her simply because he sees her devotion to ancient gods as resulting from her seclusion
from the outside world. His concern with Astarte’s spiritual wellbeing is also self-
serving, as he needs the support of her people in order to conquer the surrounding lands.
Also, contrary to the way in which Victorian readers interpreted the hero’s religious
mission, Tancred seeks to convert Astarte to Christianity, not to Judaism.

42
recognize his position as the victim of political intrigue. Through the reintroduction of
Eva, the beautiful Jewish daughter of Tancred’s patron in Jerusalem and the woman with
whom the hero has fallen in love, the novel provides a convoluted detour in the romantic
plot that ends in Fakredeen’s betrayal of Tancred. This betrayal devastates Tancred, and
his dream of saving Europe through Asia crumbles as he is forced to recognize that Asia,
too, is full of moral corruption. He does not lose hope entirely, however; he says to
Astarte, “I have been the unconscious agent in petty machinations. I must return to the
Desert to recover the purity of my mind. It is Arabia alone that can regenerate the world”
(465). In order to avoid further moral contamination, he must retreat to what he still
rather foolishly assumes to be a society of spiritual purity.
His departure is prevented, however, by news of Turkish forces invading the land
of the Ansarey. Tancred, who seems to have vowed allegiance to chivalry and not to any
particular country or faction, volunteers to stay and fight for Astarte and her people.
However, this heroic vow marks the last of his knightly actions. As he rides out to battle,
he finds himself in a situation in which he must choose either to flee or to be captured
and, most likely, killed. Quite significantly and without any comment by the narrator,
Tancred bids farewell to his romanticism by choosing freedom and running off into the
desert. The next we see him, he has arrived safely back in Jerusalem only to find that he
hasn’t even been missed by his English companions.
Although Tancred is stripped of his romantic delusions and reintegrated into
society, he does not experience the mature recognition of his mistakes characteristic of
what Clausson terms the ironic Bildüngsroman (such as Scott’s Waverley, for example).
43
Unlike Waverley, the point of the narrative has not been to teach the hero a lesson and
transform him into a functional member of society. Rather, the novel traces a socially-
conscious young man’s efforts to find a radical means of remedying the problems that
plague his nation. Tancred is not simply a silly young man who views the world through
a comically romantic lens. Instead, he is shown throughout the novel to be of nobler and
more genuine sentiment and a more profound thinker than anyone around him (save
Sidonia and Eva); the problems with England and Europe he identifies are taken seriously
by the narrative (and are emphasized and developed in Coningsby and Sybil), and the
novel offers no contrasting view in order to suggest that Tancred’s social diagnosis is
incorrect. His disillusionment—however necessary—is tragic rather than comforting, for
his failure to find a means for regenerating England is not simply a personal loss.
As the final Young England hero, Tancred’s failure also represents the failure of
his predecessors and of reform more generally. More significantly, the fact that his
narrative ends without providing any hope or validation for the hero suggests rather bleak
prospects for the future. No longer is the success of the nation just beyond the horizon;
all of the glimmerings of hope offered at the end of the other two novels in the trilogy are
consumed by the murky grayness of uncertainty that permeates the conclusion of the final
novel. This uncertainty is particularly highlighted by the novel’s lack of closure for the
marriage plot, a narrative refusal that marks a sharp distinction between Tancred and its
predecessors.
When he is stripped of his romantic ideas about moral, spiritual, and political
regeneration, Tancred turns away from the social and towards the personal by putting all
44
of his faith in Eva. Eva, the woman of fine mind and spiritual purity who aids Tancred
on several occasions during his adventures, recognizes the tragedy in Tancred’s failure.
When he visits her after his return to Jerusalem, she perceptively remarks, “I have a
vague impression that there have been heroic aspirations wasted, and noble energies
thrown away; and yet, perhaps, there is no one to blame. Perhaps, all this time, we have
been dreaming over an unattainable end, and the only source of deception is our own
imagination” (485). Unlike every other character in the novel, including Tancred, Eva
recognizes the quixotic nature of the hero’s quest: what Tancred sought was both noble
and impossible. She goes on to lament the loss of Tancred’s heroic innocence: “Your
feelings cannot be what they were before all this happened; when you thought only of a
divine cause, of stars, of angels, and of our peculiar and gifted land. No, no; now it is all
mixed up with intrigue, and politics, and management, and baffled schemes, and cunning
arts of men…. You no longer believe in Arabia” (485).
In what seems a desperate attempt to counteract the tragedy of his political failure,
Tancred replies with a marriage proposal: “Why, thou to me art Arabia. The angel of
Arabia, and of my life and spirit! Talk not to me of faltering faith: mine is intense. Talk
not to me of leaving a divine cause: why, thou art my cause, and thou art most divine! O
Eva! deign to accept the tribute of my long agitated heart!” (485). Much like the speaker
in Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Tancred turns away from the problem-plagued world that
surrounds him and focuses all of his faith and devotion on the woman he loves. Yet, he
proves himself to be just as quixotic as he was about his mission of reform. While he
formerly ignored all of the ignoble aspects of the political world in his attempt to save
45
England, he disregards all of the practical familial and religious issues that make it
impossible for him to marry Eva. He passionately pleads, “Talk not to me of others, of
those who have claims on you or on myself. I have no kindred, no country, and, as for
the ties that would bind you, shall such world-worn bonds restrain our consecrated aim?
Say but you love me, and I will trample them to the dust” (486). Eva’s final words are,
quite fittingly, “Oh! this is madness!” (486). She then faints, and Tancred’s proposal
goes unanswered.
As if this were not enough to wrench the rose-tinted glasses from our hero’s eyes,
his meeting with the now-unconscious Eva is interrupted by his servants, who come to
inform him that “[t]he Duke and Duchess of Bellamont [Tancred’s parents] had arrived at
Jerusalem” (487). And it is with this contradiction of Tancred’s claim of having no
kindred that the novel ends. England in effect follows Tancred to Jerusalem, and he is
unable even for a few moments to ignore his familial and national ties. What is to
become of him, we do not know, but it seems highly unlikely that his relationship with
Eva, who shows no sign of abandoning her religion or her family, could continue. Thus,
the hero’s final disillusionment—his failure to have his love reciprocated or validated—
ends his narrative. Much like his Cervantean ancestor, the end of his quixotic adventures
must also be the end of his tale.
Perhaps more significant, however, is the fact that this abrupt ending also
functions as the conclusion of the entire trilogy. All of the social problems illuminated in
Coningsby and Sybil remain at the close of Tancred, and the final, most promising hero is
thwarted in every one of his plans. Contrary to Clausson’s argument that the end of
46
Tancred is very similar to that of Wavereley, Tancred concludes by refusing to resort to
the superficial melding of opposing political views characteristic of Scott’s works.
Tancred has no Rose Bradwardine with whom to set up house and live the happy,
carefree life of an English nobleman. Instead, he is haunted by his awareness of the
nation’s problems, doomed to a future of uncertainty and unease, and then deprived of the
one source of consolation he sees available to him: Eva. Europe and Asia cannot be so
easily joined in a disregard for difference as England and Scotland are at the end of
Waverley. The later hero must, then, remain alone, without romantic, spiritual, or
political solace.
The fact that this novel, and the trilogy as a whole, lacks closure is, however, both
logical and appropriate. The recognition that there are no simple answers to England’s
tremendously complex and deeply-rooted social problems and the refusal to offer any
simplistic solutions reflects, in fact, a more mature, sophisticated understanding of the
“condition of England” than the idealistic political agenda offered in Coningsby and
Sybil. Tancred belongs to a different tradition of reform literature than its predecessors—
one that places Disraeli more in line with Carlyle and the later Dickens than with the
“industrial” writers such as Gaskell and Kingsley, with whom he is usually categorized.
Moreover, Tancred shows that a novel does not need factories or grime in order to be
political; in fact, exotic queens and desert pirates can have just as much to do with
politics and reform as prime ministers and MPs. By reading Tancred as a political novel,
we are able not only to gain a fuller sense of the complexity of Disraeli’s nearly-tragic
47
views on the condition of England in the 1840s, but also to reevaluate and expand our
notion of what counts as political or social fiction.
48
Chapter Two
“Never meant to go right”: Bleak House and the Limits of Liberalism

While Tancred presents an extended lamentation on the condition of England, the
novel does not include any narrative excursions to actual sites of social infirmity.
Disraeli had already attempted to describe the miserable living conditions of the working
classes in Sybil, and devoted most of his descriptive energies in Tancred instead to the
homes of the aristocracy or the romantic setting of the Middle East. The problems
Tancred merely gestures towards using general, distant terms were left, then, to be
unveiled more fully by other, perhaps more experienced hands. And few novelists were
more familiar with or more adept at describing the complex social condition of England
in the middle of the nineteenth century than Charles Dickens, the great chronicler of
nineteenth-century London life.
Although Dickens had been attacking social injustices through the genre of the
novel since the time of Pickwick Papers (1837), it was not until 1852-53 with Bleak
House that he began to evaluate the condition of England through his fiction in much
vaster, darker terms. While Dickens had shown through his early novels that social
embarrassments such as the New Poor Law and Yorkshire schools could be combated
and overcome by cheerful protagonists,
18
the portrait of England he paints in Bleak House

18
Dickens’s early novels do not present actual solutions to the social problems they
highlight. They do, however, provide means for their protagonists to defeat their social
impediments, even if those victories are only personal. Thus, Mr. Pickwick is able to free
himself and his friends from the Fleet prison, Oliver Twist is allowed to escape from the
dangerous environments that threaten to ruin his innocence, and Nicholas Nickleby
witnesses the destruction of Squeers’s academy. Despite the fact that no significant
social improvements occur, these novels provide much more optimistic conclusions
through the triumphs of their heroes. They also differ from Bleak House in that each of
49
suggests that the problems plaguing the nation, and London in particular, are both larger
and more complex than any one particular corrupt institution. From the novel’s famous
opening description of a fog-enveloped Chancery to the concluding illustration of a
decaying Chesney Wold, Bleak House makes clear that England is in a bad way.
Like Tancred, Bleak House lays at least part of the blame for the nation’s social
infirmity on national institutions. Through its satire on the court of chancery and
parliament, the novel reveals a profound lack of faith in institutions that were designed to
enforce justice doing anything but the opposite. As a quixotic reform novel, Bleak House
rejects these traditional systems of justice—namely, the legal and political systems—and
attempts to locate an alternative means of reforming the nation and improving the
conditions it goes to such great lengths to describe. Through the noble efforts of its
protagonists, John Jarndyce and Esther Summerson, Bleak House seems to advocate a
plan of personal charity and generosity as the best way of making social progress, a
reading many scholars have accepted, albeit at times derisively or with a sense of
disappointment, throughout the novel’s long and complicated critical history
19
.

the early novels focuses much of its social critique on a few institutions. The scope of
Bleak House’s social critique is significantly broader.

19
Of the vast heaps of criticism devoted to Bleak House, surprisingly few articles give
extended attention to the novel’s function as a social critique. Noteworthy among those
that do are Bruce Robbins’s subversive reading of the novel’s treatment of telescopic
philanthropy in “Telescopic Philanthropy: Professionalism and Responsibility in Bleak
House,” Robert Tracy’s reading of Bleak House as offering an alternative view of the
nation to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in “Lighthousekeeping: Bleak House and the
Crystal Palace,” Laura Fasick’s reading of contagion and disease in the novel in “Dickens
and the Diseased Body in Bleak House,” and, particularly, Simon Joyce’s analysis of the
novel’s indictment of institutions in “Inspector Bucket versus Tom-all-Alone’s: Bleak
House, Literary Theory, and the Condition-of-England in the 1850s.”
50
What I will argue, however, is that, while Bleak House may laud as noble
Jarndyce’s and Esther’s battles against the misery and corruption they encounter, the
narrative ultimately shows that such individual efforts are in fact futile. While Jarndyce
and Esther are certainly admirable characters and their endeavors are begun with the best
of intentions, their quests are quixotic—always doomed to failure because the enemies
they combat are too numerous and pervasive to be defeated by any lone knight. Although
Dickens continued to work tirelessly during the period of Bleak House’s composition
until his death at making social progress through small, individual-oriented projects (for
example, Urania Cottage and his other collaborations with Angela Burdett-Coutts
20
), he
reveals in Bleak House a profound skepticism in the possibility of making any significant
and lasting social improvements through such small-scale endeavors. Moreover, while
Dickens, with few exceptions, exhibited a great degree of distrust and even hostility
towards social institutions both in his own political views and in his fiction, thus making
his critique of institutions in the novel unsurprising, Bleak House shows individual
reformers and the family to be equally incapable of saving the nation.

While all of these essays acknowledge Bleak House’s failure to provide answers to the
questions it raises, none really offers an explanation of why the novel comes to such a
reformatory stalemate.

20
Dickens had begun plans with his friend, the heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts, to
establish a home for rehabilitated prostitutes and other troubled women back in 1846, and
those plans were realized in 1847 with the opening of Urania Cottage. Aside from his
lifetime of observing all of the social miseries of urban London, Dickens had, by the time
of the composition of Bleak House, the personal experience of directing this small effort
towards social justice for several years. He later went on to supervise many of Miss
Coutts’s philanthropic endeavors, including plans begun in the spring of 1852 to build
model tenements for the poor on a site similar in misery to Tom-All-Alone’s. For more
on Dickens’s collaboration with Miss Coutts, see Edgar Johnson’s edition of Dickens’s
letters to the heiress in The Heart of Charles Dickens.
51
Lauren Goodlad, in Victorian Literature and the Victorian State, makes a similar
point. Goodlad argues that, in Bleak House, Dickens points out the need for institutional
control (what she terms “pastoral agency”) while at the same time criticizing and
showing distrust of institutions. She writes:
Dickens thus failed to imagine a collective foundation (either religious or
secular), on which safely to predicate the deployment of modern expertise.
Instead he fell back on the family, a private institution … Although Dickens
recognized the limitations of individual and family self-reliance, he could not
envision a supra-individual authority that would not threaten the latter’s autonomy
and purpose. (107)

Goodlad concludes by pointing out the irony that Bleak House suggests a need for a type
of non-governmental, volunteer-driven institution such as the Charity Organization
Society—an organization characterized by a kind of philanthropy very like that which the
novel satirizes through the characters of Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle. In Bleak
House, Goodlad argues, Dickens failed to envision the “halfway house” between
individual agency and institutional control that the C.O.S. eventually embodied.
Goodlad seems understandably disappointed in Dickens’s failure to provide a
solution to the problems he illuminates in Bleak House, at his inability to imagine an
institution like the C.O.S. (which was not formed until 1869, the year prior to Dickens’s
death and over a decade after the publication of Bleak House). She neglects, however, to
recognize the truly visionary nature of Dickens’s social critique in Bleak House. In Bleak
House, I will argue, Dickens suggests something very much like an understanding of the
condition of England arising not from individuals, but from something resembling “the
social”—a concept historians contend did not really exist until much later in the century.
An organization like the C.O.S. would not, then, have provided an answer to the
52
problems the novel illuminates because it was still grounded in the same liberal paradigm
that Bleak House shows to be ineffective in battling social ailments. In Bleak House,
Dickens did not so much fail to imagine a “halfway house” between institutional and
volunteer-driven reform as he failed to discover a way of affecting social change
according to an utterly new understanding of the workings of society.
At the same time, the failure of reform in Bleak House highlights what makes the
reform tradition to which it belongs quixotic. Because quixotic reform novels criticize
British society as in need of a complete revolution in thought and sentiment yet remain
committed to an individual approach to bringing about that revolution (the reformer-
hero’s quest)—an approach grounded in a particularly English liberal devotion to
individual agency that went hand in hand with an opposition to both political revolution
and increased state governance—the quixotic reformer’s quest was doomed to failure.
As Goodlad explains, Dickens in Bleak House (and, I would add, all of the other
Victorian authors in the quixotic reform tradition) seems on the brink of recognizing this
contradiction between the need for drastic social change and the commitment to
individuals bringing about that change; however, he is ultimately unable or unwilling to
abandon either ideal, and ends his novel with only a false sense of resolution for the
social plot. With individual reformers shown to be incapable of affecting large-scale
changes, and institutions too distanced and incompetent to benefit anyone but themselves,
the condition of England is left to devolve into further misery with no savior in sight.
This realization is indeed bleak, and the only thing Dickens can do to prevent his
53
protagonists from being crushed by despair is to remove them from London—the
epicenter of the social malaise—and provide them a temporary asylum from the gloom.
Even the novel’s moderately happy ending is not presented in the most glowing of
terms, however. While the novel critiques the liberal approach to reform—an approach
dependent on individuals changing other individuals—it simultaneously illuminates the
problems associated with individuals pursuing any sort of social change. In Bleak House,
even admirable quixotic reformers, such as John Jarndyce and Esther Summerson, are not
spared censure, for the novel shows all charitable enterprises—even those as seemingly
selfless as Jarndyce’s and Esther’s—to be tainted by a disturbing element of self-interest.
While the hero’s quest in Tancred was represented as always noble, even in its failure,
the quixotic quest in Bleak House is shown to be not entirely altruistic. This renders the
beautiful lost cause problematic, its beauty drawing out the same selfishness in the
quixotic reformer as is condemned in his less admirable peers. The personal happiness of
the reformer is represented as troublingly intertwined with his devotion to social
improvement, an incompatibility between the self and the social that plagues quixotic
reform throughout the century.
* * *
The world of Bleak House is saturated by social problems. Pollution, legal chaos,
political incompetence and instability, disease, domestic violence, poverty, debt,
homelessness, illegitimacy, illiteracy, and child labor, to name just a few, are all alluded
to as symptoms of the modern condition. Much has been made of the accuracy of
Dickens’s portrayal of slum conditions, open graves, and disease in Bleak House, and the
54
vividness of those descriptions as well as the prominence they receive in the narrative
reveal the extent to which the novel works to emphasize the utter bleakness of mid-
Victorian London. The sheer number of deaths, also much noted, underscores the
lethality of the problems plaguing the nation, as well as the helplessness of members of
all classes, who are always in danger of falling victim to one debility or another.
Bleak House is similarly saturated with characters who are, in one way or another,
quixotic. Richard Carstone slowly destroys his health and state of mind by putting his
faith in a bright future that only he can imagine. Miss Flite, whose degree of madness is
always debatable, “expect[s] a judgment. Shortly. On the Day of Judgment” (34).
Living according to the strange delusions with which she seems unwilling to part, Miss
Flite, like Richard, looks to a brilliant day that will never come, when she will be able to
confer estates. Likewise, Mrs. Jellyby stares far off into the distance to Africa, creating a
reality for herself that excludes the squalid conditions that actually surround her, and
Harold Skimpole, although perhaps the most worldly-wise citizen in the Bleak House
world, creates the illusion of being the most quixotic of quixotes—one who cannot see or
understand the troubles of society, who looks at everything through a lens of innocence
and naïvete.
The quixotes who relate most significantly to my argument and on whom I will
focus, however, are John Jarndyce and Esther Summerson—the two protagonists whose
reform efforts receive the most positive attention from the narrative and who work the
hardest to dispel some of the bleakness they encounter. Both Jarndyce and Esther find
themselves, to a greater or lesser extent, victims of breakdowns in the national justice-
55
enforcing system: Jarndyce is born into the hopelessly convoluted legal mire of Jarndyce
v. Jarndyce, and Esther, the child of no one, enters the world with virtually no legal rights
or protection. Jarndyce, disgusted by the “wiglomeration” of chancery and the
destruction he has seen wrought by the follies of the English legal system, distances
himself as much as possible from the suit that bears his name and, in what seems an effort
to counteract the propagation of injustice by the national courts, sallies forth on his own
quest to do some good in the world. Likewise, Esther turns away from the cold biblical
justice embraced by her aunt and vows “to be industrious, contented, and kind-hearted,
and to do some good to some one, and win some love to [herself] if [she] could” (20).
Jarndyce, with his mysterious and seemingly limitless fortune, goes about
shedding light in the darkness through a variety of personal and semi-institutional
charities. When notified of Esther’s helpless orphan status, he provides her with an
education designed to make her domestically useful and prosperous. When presented
with his court-ward distant cousins, he takes in Richard and Ada and does his best to
remove them from the tainting atmosphere of chancery. And when informed about the
sad state of the orphan Neckett children, he takes in Charley, providing her with a home,
an education, and a role model in Esther, and ensures the welfare of her younger siblings
as well.
Beyond his own domestic circle, Jarndyce associates with a number of organized
charities. Although the novel is quick to satirize the likes of Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs.
Pardiggle and never gives any specific information on their connection to John Jarndyce,
that connection nonetheless exists. The wind is often in the east when Mrs. Pardiggle and
56
her fellow philanthropists are around, yet Jarndyce remains in some way tied to them.
Esther explains, “Mr. Jarndyce had fallen into this company, in the tenderness of his heart
and his earnest desire to do all the good in his power” (183). Despite his aversion to the
methods and practices of the begging letter writers and charitable women, Jarndyce
appears to contribute to their efforts in hopes of benefiting someone somehow.
On the other hand, Esther’s mission to bring improvement and good to the world
is more limited in scope. The paragon of domestic wellbeing, Esther allows her
optimism, cheerfulness, and household knowledge to influence those around her. When
she does leave the home to embark on missions of social improvement, she doesn’t travel
far and limits her energies to only a few sufferers, such as Jo, Caddy Jellyby, and the
brickmakers’ wives, Jenny and Liz. Although Esther develops into a keen observer and
social critic by the end of the novel, one capable of recognizing and pointing out both
individual and social flaws (she, after all, sees through Harold Skimpole’s mask of
innocence and condemns chancery for what it does to Richard), she limits her
reformatory efforts to the people and conditions nearest her.
That Jarndyce and Esther are both lauded as exemplary individuals (primarily in
Esther’s narrative, but nothing in the third-person narrative exists to contradict Esther’s
evaluation) seems to suggest that the novel is advocating their means of bringing about
social improvements. Yet, neither Jarndyce nor Esther is very successful in any of his
or her charitable efforts. For a novel that devotes a great deal of narrative space to
describing social problems and drawing attention to the need for reform, the reform
narrative of Bleak House, which we would expect to culminate in the improvement of at
57
least some of the social problems outlined, is surprisingly static. The two locations that
receive the most attention in the narrative—urban London and rural Chesney Wold—
remain unchanged at the end of the novel, the one still shrouded in legal, parliamentary,
and literal fog, the other “abandoned to darkness and vacancy” (767), inhabited more by
the dead than the living. While Esther and Allan Woodcourt are allowed to retreat to the
temporary respite of their sunny second Bleak House (temporary, we would assume,
because of the contagious nature of the social malaise outlined elsewhere in the
narrative), the world they leave behind continues on its apocalyptic journey into darkness.
Perhaps more significantly, even Jarndyce’s and Esther’s small charitable projects
fail, implying that, while institutions of justice such as chancery and parliament cannot
bring about necessary social improvements, neither can individual efforts at doing good.
All of Jarndyce’s philanthropic connections are shown to be ineffective. That model
project of telescopic philanthropy, Mrs. Jellyby’s Borrioboolan endeavor, ends
disastrously, its great, far-sighted advocate forced to redirect her energies into a new and,
the narrative implies, equally unworthy cause. Mrs. Pardiggle’s efforts at enlightening
and converting the brickmakers come to nothing, as do Esther’s attempts at kindness
towards the same individuals. While Jarndyce seems to provide an inspirational presence
for Gridley and, to a lesser extent, Jo, he can save neither, nor can he do anything to help
George Rouncewell in his time of need.
Esther’s efforts also end in defeat. Her altruistic attempt at saving Jo brings both
her and her maid Charley near death and results in Esther’s disfigurement, not to mention
that Jo eventually succumbs to the illness from which neither Esther nor Woodcourt can
58
save him. While Esther embarks on a heroic journey through the wilds of London on a
frigid winter night in a valiant rescue effort, she can do nothing to prevent the death of
her mother. Gridley dies, Miss Flite continues her lonely, mad existence, and even
Caddy Jellyby—one of the characters who benefits most from her interaction with
Esther—ends the novel working to support her lame husband and deaf, mute child in
much the same way that led to the exhaustion and early death of her would-have-been
mother-in-law. Despite the narrative’s persistent focus on Esther’s and Jarndyce’s good
deeds, the charitable pair do very little to change anything in their world for the better.
Perhaps what is most telling about the inefficacy of the Jarndyce/Esther project
for changing the world one person at a time, is their inability to save or even alter the
fates of those closest to them. If the novel were actually advocating charity at home as
the ideal means of reforming the nation, we would expect to see Jarndyce’s and Esther’s
efforts in this field hailed as great successes. What we get instead, however, is an
account of Esther and Jarndyce doing all that they can to save their friend Richard, but to
no benefit. Jarndyce’s strong personal example—he is, after all, the one member of the
family not harmed by the suit—as well as his financial generosity, paternal advice, and
patience, and Esther’s cheerfulness, domestic wisdom, and genuine care cannot
overpower the seductive siren’s song of chancery for Richard. Where they should exert
the most influence if charity at home were indeed an effective way of bringing about
social change, Jarndyce and Esther show themselves to be powerless, unable to save even
one young man with whom they are intimately connected.
59
Richard’s demise also brings about the at least partial debilitation of Ada, who, as
Christopher Herbert points out, exhibits, as do so many characters in Bleak House, a
disturbing tendency towards self-destruction.
21
Despite having been warned by Esther
and Jarndyce of Richard’s dangerous preoccupation, Ada nonetheless sacrifices herself in
an attempt to help her doomed cousin. She marries Richard with the slight hope of
convincing him of his error, and then, after she loses faith in her own ability to complete
this quixotic task, invests in the ability of her unborn child, if not immediately, then
perhaps as an adult, to redeem his father from his ruin. But just as Jarndyce and Esther
cannot prevent Ada from proceeding on her wearying journey of self-sacrifice, Ada
cannot prevent Richard from being consumed by his deadly obsession with the suit, and
her child is never given the opportunity even to try. In the case of Ada and Richard,
domestic warmth and caring prove rather frail opponents to the potent darkness that lurks
just beyond the hearth.
Esther’s and Jarndyce’s attempts at saving Richard and Ada, while noble and
necessary (doing nothing to prevent their friends’ demise would certainly seem heartless),
are quixotic—doomed from the outset to failure—for they battle an invisible enemy that
disregards the wills of its victims. Indeed, Richard’s debilitating enchantment by the suit

21
In his essay “The Occult in ‘Bleak House,’” Herbert provides a fascinating reading of
the terrifying quality of “familiar things” in the novel. He explains the characters’
obsession with self destruction as a means of dealing with their inability to remedy the
sad state of society: “In the course of Bleak House Dickens elaborately analyzes the
forms of neurosis, and his terms strikingly prefigure Freud’s conception of a state of
groundless guilt that, since no amount of virtuous conduct can possibly expunge it,
‘expresses itself as a need for punishment.’ In the context of puritanical Victorian
culture, Dickens implies, a disposition to moral goodness almost necessarily implies a
proneness to debilitating guilty anxieties” (109).

60
is referred to on many occasions, by both the third person narrator and John Jarndyce, as
something irresistible. When Jarndyce v. Jarndyce is first described at the beginning of
the novel, the third-person narrator explains,
Shirking and sharking, in all their many varieties, have been sown broadcast by
the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the
outermost circle of such evil, have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of
letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the
world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right. (9)
While these anonymous parties to the suit have only a “loose belief” that if things go
wrong for them, their destruction was somehow fated, they nonetheless are tempted
“insensibly”—both without reason and without sense, consciousness, or awareness—into
their dangerous romance with chancery. Although the suitors allow bad things “to take
their own bad course,” the narrator hints that the temptation is not easy to resist, even to
those most distantly connected with the case. The suit itself proves to have more power
of will than do the ill-fated suitors.
This almost speculative remark by the narrator is supported later in the narrative
by John Jarndyce, who repeatedly insists that Richard cannot be blamed for his fall.
Jarndyce says to Esther:
“Ah, my love, my love, it is in the subtle poison of such abuses to breed such
diseases. His blood is infected, and objects lose their natural aspects in his sight.
It is not his fault…. In any case we must not be hard on him. There are not many
grown and matured men living while we speak, good men too, who, if they were
thrown into this same court as suitors, would not be vitally changed and
depreciated within three years—within two—within one. How can we stand
amazed at poor Rick? A young man so unfortunate… cannot at first believe (who
could?) that Chancery is what it is. He looks to it, flushed and fitfully, to do
something with his interests, and bring them to some settlement. It procrastinates,
disappoints, tries, tortures him; wears out his sanguine hopes and patience, thread
by thread; but he still looks to it, and hankers after it, and finds his whole world
treacherous and hollow.” (435)

61
Like the disease that strikes Charley, Esther, and Jo, the lure of chancery is an infection
for Richard that is beyond his power to control. And, like Jarndyce’s evaluation of
Richard, Miss Flite’s account of her history identifies something beyond her power—the
“cold and glittering devils” of Chancery (440)—as the reason for her demise. Despite
having seen her father, brother, and sister fall prey to the suit in which they found
themselves entangled, and knowing full well that chancery was the cause of their doom,
Miss Flite finds herself helpless to resist the demons that haunt her. She knows her
constant attendance at court will bring about her ruin, yet this knowledge does nothing to
prevent her from becoming a slave to her suit.
This almost magical removal of one’s ability to choose a path of action makes
social reform according to the liberal model—one dependent on individuals being
persuaded to improve themselves, and the dominant model of political thought in the
period —irrelevant. If an individual has no control over her actions, or if her fate is
essentially determined by her social conditions (say, her being born into a chancery suit),
then reform dependent on bringing about changes in individuals (such as the personal
charity model Esther and Jarndyce seem to espouse) is ineffective. Richard cannot be
saved by Jarndyce’s warnings and social alternatives (the career paths he goes to great
lengths to make available to his ward, for example) because Richard lacks complete
control over his actions. As Jarndyce tries to make clear to Esther, “It is not his
[Richard’s] fault” (435).
But if chancery has such an irresistible draw—one that Richard and Miss Flite
cannot resist—why does John Jarndyce remain immune to the enchantment of the suit?
62
The only plausible answer the narrative provides is that Jarndyce’s social position—his
mysterious financial security—enables him to reject the charms of promised wealth the
suit offers to those with no secure future. The reason Richard succumbs to the lure of the
suit is that he believes it may grant him the gentlemanly independence he desires.
Likewise, Miss Flite’s far from wealthy family (her father and brother are builders, and
she and her sister take in sewing work) is drawn in by the hope of wealth. Miss Flite only
gives way to the suit after the demise of her father and siblings, when she “was ill, and in
misery” (441) and thus, we would assume, prey to any promises of removal from her dire
situation. John Jarndyce, who appears affluent enough to support a dozen destitute
victims of chancery, in addition to his entourage of charitable dependents, is offered no
glittering future by the suit because his present state of affairs is already quite glowing;
he is therefore immune to the dangerous charms of chancery. This is no more his fault—
his wealth seems as inherent to him as his kind-heartedness, for no mention is made of
his ever having worked or earned his fortune—than the susceptibility to which Richard’s
and Miss Flite’s precarious economic positions make them subject is theirs.
What Bleak House suggests, then, is that an individual’s agency—her ability to
determine her own future and actions or even her ability to shape her own character—is
limited. Characters find themselves in bad situations not so much because they
themselves are bad, but because circumstances beyond their control determine their fates.
For example, Jo’s illiteracy and homelessness are conditions that have nothing to do with
his character and cannot be altered by any act of individual initiative, and Guster’s
crippled physical and psychological state that keep her in a position of poverty and
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powerlessness result from the misfortune of being born into the Tooting baby farm, not
from any personal flaw. Neither Jo nor Guster is shown to be morally depraved or in any
way responsible for his or her bad situation. Both, in fact, are portrayed as worthy of
sympathy, not condemnation.
Even characters in less dire situations than Jo and Guster find themselves
entangled in webs of causality that they enter by no choice of their own. What makes
Bleak House one of Dickens’s most sophisticated novels—the remarkable interweaving
of plots and characters and the multitude of connections between seemingly disparate
events—also works to create an impression of a world in which an individual’s actions
are beyond her control. Esther is swept into the realm of gothic romance, complete with
a full-blown murder mystery, through a chance encounter with a woman bearing uncanny
resemblance to her, while visiting a country church neighboring the residence of a friend-
of-a-friend who just happens to be the rejected suitor—rejected because of circumstances
resulting from Esther’s birth—of her own aunt.
22
George Rouncewell finds himself
accused of a murder he did not commit because of his long ago friendship with a
dissipated captain (who happens to be the father of his student’s guardian’s fiancée), who

22
That Esther narrates her experiences in the past tense contributes to the sense of
fatedness that haunts her narrative. Because she tells of events for which she already
knows the outcome, she is able to insert elements of foreshadowing that make those
outcomes seem as if they were always inevitable. For example, in leading in to her
account of the night in which she tries to save Jo, the action that leads to her
disfigurement, she writes, “I had no thought, that night—none, I am quite sure—of what
was soon to happen to me. But I have always remembered since that when we had
stopped at the garden-gate to look up at the sky, and when we went upon our way, I had
for a moment an undefinable impression of myself as being something different from
what I then was” (380). This suspicious retrospective account makes it seem as if
nothing could have prevented the chain of events that would lead to the marring of
Esther’s beauty.
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happens to be of interest to a powerful lawyer, the executor to the aristocratic family for
whom his [George’s] estranged mother works and the same family that includes the
former lover of his dissipated captain friend—a lawyer who holds rather dubious
connections to an aged usurer, the brother-in-law to the man who holds possession of the
will that eventually brings an end to George’s student’s chancery suit, who holds George
in a financial stranglehold and who blackmails him into turning over the evidence the
lawyer needed in order to gain power over the former lover of the dissipated captain,
which action and the reaction to that action leads to George’s being accused of murdering
said lawyer.
Dickens’s convoluted arabesques of plot are dazzling and, at times,
overwhelming. The effect such intricate plotting creates is one of a mysterious and
unavoidable determinacy. One gets the impression that Esther and George could not
escape their plots (or fates, we might say)—that somehow things had to be so. All of the
characters find themselves participants in a bizarre and uncanny labyrinth of action that
they cannot gain a distant enough perspective on to understand. The interconnectedness
of the characters’ lives and histories suggests that they are all minute actors in something
much larger, a narrative effect that facilitates thinking of the “world” of Bleak House as,
indeed, a world. The novel invites us to believe, like Mr. Snagsby, that “[s]omething is
wrong, somewhere; but what something, what may come of it, to whom, when, and from
which unthought of and unheard of quarter, is [a] puzzle” (315), the explanation of which
exists already but will only be revealed with time, its outcome inevitable. Like the
65
litigants in Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, we get the impression that when “the world go[es]
wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right” (9).
Aside from illustrating how masterful of a novelist Dickens had become since the
time of Pickwick and Oliver Twist, the hopelessly over-determined atmosphere that Bleak
House creates has significant political ramifications. Unlike other “condition of
England” novels and in contrast to the generally held belief in the mid-Victorian period
about the cause of social problems, Bleak House invokes a sense of social problems as
resulting from deeply rooted flaws in the structure of society rather than in widespread
individual defects. Because individuals do not hold complete control over their actions
and lives, they cannot be held responsible for the general state of misery; something
larger, the novel suggests, must be behind the depressing condition of society.
However, this notion of the social did not officially exist in the 1850s—the idea
that problems in society could arise from anything but problems deriving from
individuals was simply not available. Robert F. Haggard in The Persistence of Victorian
Liberalism cites most historians as identifying the span of time from the mid-1860s
through the end of the First World War as the period of general transition from classical
liberal thought to the view of society that led to the emergence of the modern Welfare
State. The view that the majority of social problems plaguing England (particularly the
kinds that are illustrated in Bleak House) were the result of morally infirm individuals
persisted well into the 1880s. For example, Haggard cites Professor Leone Levi in 1887
as espousing the generally accepted view about the roots of poverty, the same view that
informs the politics of other novels from the 1850s: “poverty proper … was more
66
frequently produced by vice, extravagance and waste, or by unfitness for work, the result
in many cases of immoral habits, than by real want of employment or low wages” (qtd in
Haggard 54).
23
Philanthropic societies—including (and especially) Goodlad’s example
of the Charity Organization Society—worked according to the principle that “[t]he rich
had a responsibility both to oversee the distribution of their own wealth for the public
good and to aid those of good character; charity should be organized for the promotion of
virtue, not—as was so often the case—the rewarding of vice” (Haggard 59, emphasis
added).
Josephine Guy, in her savvy analysis of Victorian social problem novels, offers
this as an explanation of why “condition of England” novels have plot resolutions that are
so dissatisfying to modern readers. She argues:
[W]hether the Victorians took as their explicit subject economic activity, the
principles of justice, or the development of species, in every case they started
from the premise that agency is defined in terms of the actions, desires and needs
of individuals … [T]he concept of what I shall term ‘atomistic’ agency was so
pervasive and unexamined that it constituted the key element of the mid-
Victorians’ mental set. Importantly, it informed their understanding of the social,
ensuring that the problems which they identified in their society were invariably
seen to have individual causes, and that the solutions which they subsequently
advocated invariably recommended changes in the actions and beliefs of
individuals (rather than changes in social structures). (72-73)

23
This view of social problems did not, of course, disappear at the turn of the twentieth
century, although it ceased to have as powerful an influence on British social policy as it
did in the nineteenth century. It lives on, even now, particularly among certain political
groups in the United States, the great defender of liberalism and the rights of the
individual.
67
Novelists writing in the 1840s and 50s (Guy restricts her study to the traditional set of
“condition of England” novels from which Bleak House is excluded
24
) thus could not
imagine social problems as stemming from anything other than individuals, hence their
tendency to resort to solutions along the lines of Christian brotherhood or individual
moral redemption (the solutions proposed by the endings of Alton Locke and Mary
Barton, for example).
But Bleak House provides no such solutions because it holds a different outlook
on social problems and belongs to a different reform tradition. While the novel certainly
identifies a good number of morally corrupt characters whose selfish and at times
malicious actions bring misery to their fellow Londoners, it at the same time gestures
towards something larger as the cause of England’s being in a bad way. Unlike a novel
such as Little Dorrit, in which social problems are illuminated but ultimate plot resolution
is brought about by the bringing down of an identifiable villain, Bleak House provides no
focused outlet of blame for the problems it presents; although Nobody’s Fault was
originally intended as the title for Little Dorrit, it would have been perhaps more
appropriate for Bleak House.
While many of the characters in the novel are unpleasant (the Smallweeds,
Tulkinghorn, Mrs. Snagsby, Krook), none are outright evil, nor can they be made
responsible for the general infirmity of society that the novel outlines. Tulkinghorn’s

24
Hard Times, not Bleak House, is usually classified as Dickens’s contribution to the
“condition of England” genre. Although Bleak House provides a more complete vision
of the state of society, it features no factories (at least not as focuses of the main
narrative), which makes it less easy to compare with the other, more industrial novels in
the sub-genre.
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death makes absolutely no difference in setting anything right, nor does Krook’s
spontaneous combustion or Mrs. Snagsby’s shaming significantly benefit anyone, much
less society. Moreover, none of these characters have motives that are unquestionably
malevolent. Tulkinghorn’s reasons for hounding Lady Dedlock are far from clear,
25

Krook is himself a victim of his ignorance and illiteracy (the results of social problems
mostly beyond his control), and Mrs. Snagsby acts from a genuine feeling that she has
been wronged. The Smallweeds perhaps come closest to living up to true villain status,
yet the fact that Dickens presents them in generational form suggests that their venality
and desire for monetary gain are flaws carved into them at an early age when they are
helpless to resist, rather than individual shortcomings. We can imagine that Young Bart
and Judy would have turned out quite differently had they been raised in a home that had
not “discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy tales, fictions, and
fables, and banished all levities whatsoever” (258). Born into the Smallweed household,
however, it was impossible for them to become anything other than Smallweedian.
Because there is no clearly defined source for England’s social infirmity, one is
tempted like Gridley, to attack individuals so as to at least have a recognizable opponent.
‘The system!,” Gridley complains, “I am told, on all hands, it’s the system. I mustn’t
look to individuals. It’s the system…. But if I do no violence to any of them, here—I
may! I don’t know what may happen if I am carried beyond myself at last!—I will
accuse the individual workers of that system against me, face to face, before the great

25
Stanley Tick, in “In the case of Bleak House: a brief brief in defense of Mr.
Tulkinghorn,” provides a compelling evaluation of the ambivalence with which
Tulkinghorn is treated by the narrative. He argues that Tulkinghorn never actually does
anything reprehensible; we distrust him simply because of his excessive furtiveness.
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eternal bar!” (193). “The system”—and I mean here a general notion of social structure
rather than the more limited legal system to which Gridley is most likely referring—is a
frustrating opponent, for its slippery, shadowy, amorphous nature makes it terribly
difficult to combat, especially if it cannot be seen through the blindfold of a liberal
paradigm.
But Bleak House offers no means of removing this liberal blindfold. The social
institutions that would seem the most effective way of battling the systemic problems to
which the narrative gestures, come out as more villainous than any of the individual
pseudo-villains and receive the bulk of the third-person narrator’s wrathful satire. Even
the Metropolitan Police and its seemingly heroic detective force prove inefficient and
incapable of remedying the problems they combat. Inspector Bucket not only comes to
understand Lady Dedlock’s evasive trick too late, an error with fatal ramifications, but he
also proves himself incapable even of dealing effectively with the problem of Jo, whose
transience he can only direct and accelerate, not prevent or resolve.
26

To return to one of the points with which I began, the novel seems to offer
personal charity, especially through the examples of John Jarndyce and Esther
Summerson, as alternatives to the inefficiency and incompetence of the national
institutions. However, as I have shown, the novel reveals this type of reform to be
equally ineffective. Unable to imagine a new form of institutional governance that could

26
Simon Joyce provides a convincing critique of D.A. Miller’s influential argument
about the pervasiveness of policing in Bleak House by pointing out the general
incompetence of methods of surveillance and discipline in the novel, particularly those
used by Inspector Bucket. Joyce compares Bucket’s treatment of Jo to the Metropolitan
Police’s efforts at stopping vagrancy, which were equally unsuccessful.
70
affect widespread social improvements, yet also unable to believe wholeheartedly in the
power of the individual to bring about such revolutionary changes, Dickens is forced to
conclude his extensive exploration of the condition of England without providing any real
solutions to the problems he highlights. He is still able to achieve some sense of closure,
however, by turning all of his narrative attention to the small triumphs of his quixotic
reformer protagonists; instead of leaving Bleak House open-ended, as Disraeli did with
Tancred, Dickens, quixotically and desperately, leads his readers away from the gloom.
However, even this optimistic turn is problematic.
* * *
At the end of Bleak House, Dickens turns away from all of the hopelessly
complex social problems he highlights elsewhere in the novel and focuses on providing
happy endings for his noble protagonists, Esther Summerson and John Jarndyce.
However, even the small triumphs of the two admirable reformers are presented with a
degree of skepticism that calls into question the purity and nobility of the motives that
drive the hero and heroine. At one point in Esther’s narrative, when she, Ada, and
Jarndyce encounter Lady Dedlock while seeking shelter from a storm at Chesney Wold,
Lady Dedlock says to Jarndyce, “You will lose the disinterested part of your Don
Quixote character, if you only redress the wrongs of beauty like this” (229). Lady
Dedlock’s comment is directed at Jarndyce’s two lovely dependents and is offered as a
compliment to Ada and Esther
27
; yet her observation draws attention to one of the

27
Lady Dedlock’s comment ironically hints at her own self-interest, for in
complimenting the beauty of Esther—her mirror image—she in effect praises her own
beauty.
71
problems of pursuing beautiful lost causes: that the beauty of the cause does not allow
those who pursue it to do so selflessly. Moreover, Lady Dedlock’s observation proves to
be quite accurate: John Jarndyce’s interest in helping Esther (and, we might also add,
Ada
28
) is far from disinterested.
Bleak House reveals the quixotic reformer’s devotion to beautiful lost causes to be
troublingly entangled with his own best interests. Not only is the possibility of ever
pursuing reform with purely noble and selfless intentions called into question, but the
heroic aura that results from pursuing a beautiful lost cause is made to seem less innocent
as well. The primary example of this in the novel is, as Lady Dedlock is quick to
identify, John Jarndyce. Although his general benevolence and Esther’s continual praise
set Jarndyce up as an angelic, selfless being of the Pickwickian/Cheeryblian sort, his
relationship with Esther calls into question the reasons for his charity. He admits to her
that his plan of making her his wife was “an old dream I sometimes dreamed when you
were very young” (751), a revelation that gives a whole new meaning to the generosity
Esther attributes in her narrative to his inherent benevolence and desire to help the less
fortunate.
Indeed, Jarndyce’s most successful charitable endeavors are connected to his own
desire for someone to share his home. While rescuing the orphan Neckett children is

28
Jarndyce is quick to have Ada fill the position in his home that Esther vacates when she
marries Woodcourt. Although we do not see Jarndyce in any sort of romantic
involvement with Ada, it is not too difficult to imagine him eventually pursuing the same
course of action with her as he did with Esther, especially since Ada is left penniless and
with a child to support, a position very different from that in which she commences her
relationship with Jarndyce at the beginning of the novel.
72
certainly a noble deed, Jarndyce makes sure that he presents his actions as done in the
service of Esther. Little Charley comes to Esther having been well indoctrinated with
Jarndyce’s reasons for rescuing her: “If you please, miss, I’m a present to you, with Mr.
Jarndyce’s love” (299). Esther ignores the rather disturbing implications of this, crying
in praise of her guardian’s generosity, “O Charley dear, never forget who did all this!” In
childish obstinacy, Charley again tries to clarify Jarndyce’s meaning: “Yes, miss, but it
was all done for the love of you, and that you might be my mistress. If you please, miss,
I am a little present with his love, and it was all done for the love of you” (299).
Jarndyce’s rescue of Charley and the strange message he requires the girl to deliver
emphasize that his charity benefits not only the orphan girl, but also Jarndyce himself, as
it bolsters his image as an altruistic rescuer of those in need—an image that makes him a
more eligible candidate for Esther’s heart.
Charley, however, is not truly a lost cause—she is one of the very few characters
in the novel whose condition improves because of her interaction with Esther and
Jarndyce. It is Esther, rather, who exemplifies the beautiful lost cause for Jarndyce, for in
losing her, he succeeds in increasing his own reputation for selflessness.
29
Although he
prolongs his engagement with Esther long beyond the point in which he must have
realized her unhappiness, Jarndyce eventually resolves to admit defeat and give his
beloved to the man she prefers. Jarndyce’s initial engagement to Esther seems an act of

29
I do not think Jarndyce consciously plans to benefit from his loss of Esther. However,
that Jarndyce does benefit is difficult to miss in Esther’s account of her betrothal to
Woodcourt. Jarndyce sacrifices Esther because doing so is noble and indeed generous,
but the fact that he is rewarded for his good deed leaves him with no bitterness for
attaching himself to beautiful lost causes.
73
generosity: despite having desired her for a wife since her childhood, he does not propose
to Esther until after her disfigurement, when we presume he assumes her chances on the
marriage market have been destroyed. While his proposal ensures his own happiness, his
actions can also be read as kind and generous. Likewise, after he has so generously
shown himself willing to provide a future for a woman whose lack of beauty, shameful
origins (Jarndyce knows of Esther’s illegitimacy), and lack of income and connections
would otherwise have placed her in a precarious social and financial position, he
generously decides to free her from her obligation to him and bestow her (much as he did
with Charley) upon the man she loves.
This losing of the beautiful cause proves much more ennobling for Jarndyce than
would have successfully taking Esther as his wife. As with his gift of Charley, Jarndyce
turns his sacrifice of Esther into a ceremony of sorts. He invites her out to inspect and
suggest improvements for the house he is supposedly preparing for Allan Woodcourt.
Esther expresses her gratitude—or is it her sorrow at being asked to temporarily fill the
position she longs for but thinks she is forbidden?—by sobbing her thanks then going off
to bed to cry some more. Jarndyce, aware of Esther’s attachment to Woodcourt, must
know the emotional turmoil he is causing, yet he puts off his surprise until the morrow, a
delay that makes his eventual revelation all the more dramatic.
On the next day, he explains, with much aplomb, how he realized his elaborate
plan for testing Woodcourt (or is it Esther?) and ensuring that Esther would enter a home
where she was truly appreciated. His explanation of his actions draws attention to the
way in which he takes control of Esther’s and Allan’s fates in an almost god-like manner.
74
Esther’s response—to weep in gratitude—offers no challenge or rebuke of Jarndyce’s
dubious actions, and nothing else in the narrative exists to indicate that we are supposed
to view Jarndyce’s sacrifice as anything but noble. Indeed, Jarndyce appears to Esther
even more benevolent than he had before his renunciation of her. “What a light, now,”
she thinks, “on the protecting manner I had thought about!” (753). After calling
Woodcourt out to receive his “willing gift” (753), Jarndyce reassures the happy pair that
they need not worry about him. “Let me share its [the new Bleak House’s] felicity
sometimes,” he says, “and what do I sacrifice? Nothing, nothing” (753).
He does, of course, sacrifice something: the future with Esther that he had
dreamed of for so long. His sacrifice, however, is more than recompensed, for his noble
act of renunciation endows him with an aura of near divinity. We almost expect him to
be crowned with a halo, as Esther gazes at him in appreciation, the sun “shining through
the leaves, upon his bare head…as if the brightness on him must be like the brightness of
the Angels” (752). Jarndyce is compensated for the loss of his beautiful cause through
being raised almost to the status of a god in the eyes of those whom he cares about the
most.
To lose the beautiful lost cause is not to be left necessarily with a sense of defeat
and disappointment, for noble defeats lend an aura of nobility to those defeated. The
propensity for self-destruction that so many of the characters in Bleak House exhibit turns
into a penchant for martyrdom when the causes to which they sacrifice themselves are of
noble enough pretensions. Martyrs, of course, have a tendency to be made into saints,
their noble defeats imbuing them with far more heroism than any moderate victory ever
75
could. By showing even a character as morally and ethically upright as John Jarndyce to
be incapable of a truly altruistic form of charity, Bleak House calls into question the
possibility of such altruism and places all types of efforts at social improvement in a
dubious light. Later quixotic narratives struggle, albeit more desperately, with this same
problem of selves pursuing missions of selflessness—a paradoxical task doomed to result
in conflict.
Bleak House does not condemn its protagonists to any such fate, however. Even
John Jarndyce is allowed to retire with peace of mind, satisfied with the results of his
efforts. Moreover, the beneficial effect of losing noble battles provides one explanation
for why Bleak House ends on other than a tragic note. Although no solutions are
provided to the mire of social problems the novel presents, and despite the fact that, as I
have shown, all approaches to reform are shown to be quixotic, Bleak House’s main
protagonists are nonetheless allowed temporary asylum away from the darkness they
must abandon with no hope of improving. They form a community of martyrs—Esther,
Woodcourt, Ada, Jarndyce, Caddy, and, though a distance away, George Rouncewell and
Phil Squod—who, we presume, can keep pursuing their lost causes without succumbing
to despair because doing so is the noble, heroic thing to do. In a way, they are allowed to
hold back the encroaching gloom with the light of their own halos, even if that light has
not the strength to penetrate beyond their immediate circle or to sustain itself indefinitely.
These quixotes in the middle of the nineteenth century are able to continue fighting their
battles in relative optimism either because they do not recognize their causes as lost, or,
76
as was most likely the case for Dickens, because they choose not to recognize the futility
of their efforts, a luxury that later quixotes could not enjoy.

77
Chapter Three
“Tragic and yet glorious”:
Dueling Plots and Dueling Causes in Daniel Deronda

“Was she beautiful or not beautiful?”
George Eliot’s final novel thus begins with an aesthetic question, which is
perhaps one reason why Daniel Deronda (1876) is rarely thought of as a social problem
novel.
30
Eliot had already contributed her share to the “condition of England” genre,
most obviously in Felix Holt, The Radical (1866), a tale of the working classes and the
expansion of the franchise, and with more subtlety in Middlemarch (1871-72), a novel
set, like Felix Holt, in the period immediately preceding the First Reform Bill, and one
concerned with, among other things, the rapidly changing conditions of provincial life in
England; one would expect her to offer something different in the novel that followed
Middlemarch, and indeed she does. Daniel Deronda begins not in England, but in a
European gambling hall, and it describes events not of the comfortably distant past, but of
the decade before it was written. And, unlike Felix Holt and Middlemarch, Daniel
Deronda begins not with the sagacious Eliot narrator expostulating on a philosophy of
historical process,
31
but with a question of beauty:

30
One exception to this is Clare Cotugno, who, in her article “Stowe, Eliot, and the
Reform Aesthetic,” classifies Daniel Deronda as social fiction. Cotugno compares
Eliot’s ideas about the use of fiction for social change to those of Harriet Beecher Stowe
and is most interested in the critique of middle-class English prejudice in the novel. I,
however, read Daniel Deronda as a social problem novel for the same reason Roslyn
Belkin does: because it “explores with great profundity the social and economic forces
which shaped the lives of women in Victorian England” (482).

31
Eliot cannot quite deny herself this sort of beginning, so she relegates her
philosophizing to the chapter’s epigraph. The novel proper, however, begins in free
indirect discourse, with Daniel’s contemplation of Gwendolen’s gambling.
78
Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression
which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius
dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of
unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as
coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents? (3)

While this debate over Gwendolen’s beauty may seem to place Daniel Deronda on a
different intellectual plane than the earlier social novels, this seemingly superficial
aesthetic question is, I argue, central to understanding the novel’s politics, as well as the
extent to which Eliot’s complex formal structure functions to create a cohesive narrative.
Similar to Dickens’s strategy in Bleak House, Eliot chose a dual-plot structure for
her final novel. Because Eliot maintains the same narrative perspective throughout
Daniel Deronda, we would expect Victorian readers to have found Deronda’s structure
to be far less noteworthy than that of Bleak House. Surprisingly, Victorian reviewers
revealed themselves to be relatively uninterested in Bleak House’s narrative structure but
obsessed with the division of plots in Daniel Deronda. Immediately following the
publication of Book V,
32
the book in which Eliot introduces the first extended sections
focused on the character Mordecai, Victorian readers began to complain about the
abandonment of the Gwendolen plot (Martin 92). Ever since, Daniel Deronda has most
often been discussed as if it contained two separate, unrelated narratives—one centered
on Gwendolen Harleth and the other on Daniel Deronda’s investment in Judaism. The
most famous example of this approach to the novel is, of course, F. R. Leavis’s labeling
of the Jewish plot as the “bad half” (80), an evaluation that prompted him to suggest
excising the Gwendolen plot from what he saw as the embarrassing failure of the Jewish

32
Daniel Deronda was published in eight monthly parts from February to September
1876.
79
sections, in order to create the truly great novel George Eliot should have written:
Gwendolen Harleth.
But Eliot did not write Gwendolen Harleth, and to cut away what makes the novel
Daniel Deronda would be to destroy the brilliantly complex structure that ranks Eliot’s
final novel among her finest works. From the novel’s opening paragraph, Eliot
intertwines the Deronda and Gwendolen plots, making the two so interdependent that one
would make little sense without the other. Deronda is of course an important actor in
Gwendolen’s marriage plot, but Gwendolen is also vital to Deronda’s Jewish plot. And
both plots turn upon a question of beauty.
“Was she beautiful or not beautiful?” The question has an answer, although it
does not come until the novel’s final chapters; that answer is: not beautiful enough.
While Gwendolen vies for the status of a beautiful lost cause throughout the novel, she—
and the feminist cause I will argue she represents—is ultimately rejected. The novel’s
quixotic reformer hero, Daniel Deronda, begins by debating Gwendolen’s physical
beauty, but that superficial inquiry develops into a question about the beauty of
Gwendolen’s troubled circumstances, one that extends far beyond the gambling hall at
Leubronn and that colors Deronda’s interaction with Gwendolen through the duration of
their relationship. But, while Deronda is fascinated by Gwendolen’s suffering, her
misery making her a prime candidate for his heroic attentions, he eventually becomes too
involved in Gwendolen’s pain to view her situation from a romantic distance. Thus, he
abandons her immediate, nearby concerns for a cause that is both abstract and distant.
80
Like Tancred,
33
Deronda turns his gaze away from the prosaic yet pressing problems at
home—especially those of gender inequality with which he is confronted on so many
occasions
34
—and focuses on the East. His plan to leave England in an effort to begin

33
Even though Tancred never enjoyed a great deal of popularity, Victorian reviewers
nonetheless remembered Disraeli’s critically neglected novel when Eliot introduced the
Zionist plot in Daniel Deronda, presumably because novels offering anything other than
standard Jewish stereotypes were rare. Eliot’s and Disraeli’s novels are similar in their
focus on the Middle East as an idealized contrast to England and in their quixotic heroes;
their politics, however, are quite different. Nonetheless, the prevalent misreadings of
Tancred that were offered by reviewers in 1847 persisted or were revived in 1876,
drawing faulty comparisons that made the two novels seem more similar than they really
are; thus, reviewers of Daniel Deronda who compared it to Tancred again cited Disraeli’s
hero as an advocate for Judaism. Carol Martin cites one contemporary reviewer of
Daniel Deronda who offers a particularly amusing comparison: “Perfect, however,
[Deronda] is not, for the author makes him play a bad second-fiddle to Tancred as a
would-be explorer of an Asian mystery, which is an absurd position for so wise a man.
Nobody minded Tancredism in Mr. Disraeli, because it is his function to make mystic
epigrams out of absolute nothingness. But from George Eliot we expect no such
nonsense” (94). Martin cites a few Victorian readers who speculated on a connection
between Disraeli’s important political position in the 1870s and Eliot’s focus on Jews;
however, Eliot’s correspondence and journals offer no evidence for any such connection.
William Baker cites George Eliot as having read Tancred in 1847; in a letter written in
1848 she expresses a revulsion to Disraeli’s “assumption of the superiority in the Jews”
in the novel (qtd. in Baker 53), yet there is no indication that she had Tancred in mind
when she began writing Daniel Deronda.

34
Daniel Deronda is a novel swarming with troubled women, and Daniel is brought into
close contact with all but one of them. As if to emphasize that Gwendolen’s troubles are
by no means extraordinary, Eliot provides a host of women whose precarious financial
and social positions echo or anticipate in one way or another Gwendolen’s. Mrs.
Meyrick is a poor widow who must take in sewing for very little profit in order to support
her family. Her daughters must also sew or teach, and the novel offers no hints of
brighter prospects for them. Lady Mallinger is plagued by guilt for not having delivered
a son, her procreative failure ensuring her and her daughters’ poverty upon the death of
her husband. Catherine Arrowpoint offers herself up to social disgrace and is temporarily
disinherited when she decides to accept the hand of a man her parents consider
unacceptable. Mirah Cohen must run away from her father to avoid being sold to support
his gambling habit, and she is on the brink of suicide because of her hopeless position
when Deronda finds her. Lydia Glasher, whom Deronda never meets but whose story he
knows, owes her and her children’s livelihood to the whims of her former lover; she is
81
creating a national political presence for the Jews is heroic, yet what makes it heroic—the
enormity and difficulty of the project—also makes it utterly quixotic.
Eliot’s contemporaries were quick to condemn the quixotic nature of Deronda’s
quest. Of the many complaints that have been made against Daniel Deronda, one of the
most popular has been an objection to the “idealism”
35
of the Jewish plot. For example,
in a review published shortly after the novel’s completion, the Manchester Guardian
described Daniel Deronda’s Zionist mission as “his quest of the Sangraal” (qtd. in Martin
102). Another reviewer for Vanity Fair asked, “What are we to suppose is the result of
the vague and Quixotic design of Deronda?” (qtd. in Martin 102). Considering that the
term “Zionism” did not exist until the 1890s and that the idea of building a Jewish
community in Palestine was not popular among European Jews in the 1870s,
36
it is

only granted financial stability when her husband makes her son his heir in an effort to
pass his inheritance to a male relative. Deronda’s mother, the Alcharisi, presents one of
the most startling examples of a woman who suffers because of her gender, but I will
discuss her at length later in the chapter. For an interesting reading of Daniel Deronda as
a revision of Jane Austen’s plots of female financial dependence, see K. M. Newton’s
“Revisions of Scott, Austen, and Dickens in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda.”

35
For an interesting account of Eliot’s ideas concerning idealism and reality, especially in
relation to her involvement in Lewes’s philosophy, see George Levine’s “George Eliot’s
Hypothesis of Reality.” See Sara M. Putzell-Korab’s “The Role of the Prophet: The
Rationality of Daniel Deronda’s Idealist Mission” for a discussion of the philosophical
roots of Mordecai’s beliefs.

36
For a thorough account of the politics of proto-Zionism and the role of the Zionist
mission in Daniel Deronda, see Susan Meyer’s “‘Safely to their own borders’: Proto-
Zionism, Feminism, and Nationalism in Daniel Deronda.” Because the historical
position of the Jewish elements in the novel has been explored extensively elsewhere, I
will not cover this much trod ground here. For more on Judaism in the novel, see, for
example, Baker, Johnson, Martin, Putzell-Korab, Röder-Bolton, and Tucker.
82
unsurprising that Eliot’s readers were perplexed by the learned and socially-conscious
author’s choice of Zionism for her hero’s noble cause.
This choice was, however, entirely appropriate if we consider Daniel Deronda as
a quixotic reform novel. More than any of the other novels I have discussed, Daniel
Deronda illustrates through its dual-plot structure not only how quixotic reform works,
but also why this narrative pattern is so appealing. Although Eliot goes to great lengths in
the novel to emphasize the pitiable social position of women in nineteenth-century
England—a cause that, as an unconventional Victorian woman who had experienced the
social strictures imposed by her gender, was close to heart—in the end, she has her hero
turn his back on the “girl-tragedies” that he finds so intriguing in order to pursue a cause
that is both more beautiful (he has no weeping, miserable Jewish Gwendolen to plague
his conscience) and less painful (Deronda’s upbringing as an English gentleman protects
him, at least during the span of the novel, from the social stigma attached to Jewish
identity). Thus, Zionism represents in the novel a cause that is beautifully distant,
abstract, and hopeless, the hopelessness of which, however, does not detract from the
heroism associated with pursuing such a grand and venerable project for the novel’s hero.
What I will term “feminism” for simplicity’s sake
37
, represents the more traditional social

37
By “feminism,” I mean all of the gender-based problems that the novel highlights:
women’s subjection to their husbands and male relatives; the legal discrimination women
faced even after the Married Women’s Property Act; the financial dependency created for
women by lack of respectable employment; and the less tangible forms of subjugation,
such as the psychological oppression Gwendolen experiences in her relationship with
Grandcourt. As is well known, Eliot did not espouse feminism proper in her lifetime, and
her beliefs about women’s rights and women’s roles were often ambivalent. That she did
not wholeheartedly embrace feminism does not, however, mean that she was not critical
of the double-standards applied to women, as well as the many social limitations that
83
cause that is rejected because of its uncomfortable closeness and familiarity; although
feminism too is a lost cause in the novel, the misery and pain inherent to it threaten the
hero with despair, not glory. Thus, in this late novel that offers what I argue is Eliot’s
most extended and daring exploration of gender criticism, the beautiful lost cause—that
which is “tragic and yet glorious” (310, emphasis added) and not merely tragic—
provides a means for the novel’s hero and its author to escape without guilt from fighting
a social battle that was both doomed and personally painful.
38

To illustrate this argument, I will follow Eliot’s organizational lead. Having
begun by discussing Gwendolen and Deronda together, I will now look just at
Gwendolen’s plot in order to show the feminist leanings of much of the first half of the
novel, as well as the extent to which Eliot works to establish sympathy for Gwendolen by
illustrating the complexity of her situation. I will then consider Deronda’s plot and the
ways in which the narrator works to undermine Deronda’s status as hero when he is not
presented in relation to Gwendolen. Lastly, I will show how the two narratives are
interdependent, each defining how the other can be read, the one representing the
beautiful lost cause, the other simply a cause that is lost.
* * *

women faced, many of which she had experienced personally. Thus, Daniel Deronda
can still be read as a feminist text even if its author does not conform so neatly to the
label “feminist.” For a reading of the contradictory presentation of feminist values in the
novel, see Belkin.

38
Meyer comes to a similar conclusion in that she argues the novel displaces the feminist
social critique of the “English” half onto the Jewish plot. She sees the novel as working
to remove transgressive women and the culturally and racially alien Jews from the main
social body in order to ensure the stability of patriarchal British culture. I, however, will
argue that Eliot’s politics are more complicated and conflicted than this.
84
Gwendolen Harleth is, in many ways, George Eliot’s most fascinating heroine—
fascinating because of the extent to which Eliot develops for her a complex psychology
that differentiates her from her fictional predecessors. As Baruch Hochman notes, “[I]n
Gwendolen George Eliot conflates qualities of the two kinds of girls on which her work
centres: the active, aspiring ones, like Maggie, Romola and Dorothea, who desperately
crave love, but generally can’t find it; and the passive man-traps, like Hetty and
Rosamund, who are loved, but end up destroying the men who love them” (126).
“Gwendolen,” he explains, “is the only sylph-like, siren-like, narcissistic girl in George
Eliot who is both dangerously self-involved and possessed of an incipient moral
consciousness, both a siren and, potentially, an aspiring moral agent” (127). Indeed, Eliot
highlights the mesmerizing quality of Gwendolen’s enigmatic self from the novel’s
opening paragraph, in which Deronda ponders whether it was the “good or evil genius”
revealed in the lovely gambler’s beauty. This “iridescence of her character—the play of
various, nay, contrary tendencies” (33) is one of the sources of Gwendolen’s power,
making those she encounters both fear and admire her, and it is arguably what has made
so many of Eliot’s readers enamored of the Gwendolen plot, a devotion Eliot encourages
by making Gwendolen the focal point of the first third of the novel.
Eliot creates in Gwendolen a more complex psychology than her other spoiled
heroines. In her egoism and her talent in all feminine occupations, Gwendolen seems
very similar to Middlemarch’s Rosamond Vincy, yet Gwendolen exhibits an ambition—a
desire for independence—that Rosamond never approaches. Gwendolen is unique
among George Eliot’s major heroines in her complete antipathy toward marriage and the
85
properly feminine sphere of domestic responsibility. Gwendolen’s “thoughts never dwelt
on marriage as the fulfillment of her ambition; the dramas in which she imagined herself
a heroine were not wrought up to that close” (30). While Rosamond romances only about
marriage and the social ascendancy she sees as coming with it, and even Middlemarch’s
more intellectually active heroine, Dorothea, sees marriage as her means to a fulfilling
life, Gwendolen fantasizes about freedom and power outside of any relationship with a
man. Gwendolen’s “observation of matrimony had inclined her to think it rather a dreary
state, in which a woman could not do what she liked, had more children than were
desirable, was consequently dull, and became irrevocably immersed in humdrum” (30-
31).
In place of enduring the “humdrum” of married life, Gwendolen “meant to lead”
(31). Exactly what she means to lead is unclear, but this lack of specificity in
Gwendolen’s goal seems due more to the nonexistence of any opportunity for a woman to
hold a position of power than to any fault of her own. Her “knowledge being such as
with no sort of standing-room or length of lever could have been expected to move the
world,” she must resort to doing “what was pleasant to herself in a striking manner” (31).
Of course, her main source of knowledge is somewhat dubious: “what remained of all
things knowable, she was conscious of being sufficiently acquainted with through novels,
plays, and poems” (31). She is presented, then, as the classic female quixote who expects
reality to conform to the rules of fiction. However, this naivete should not be taken as a
sign of Gwendolen’s foolishness, for her quixotism results not from any lack of
intelligence or good sense, but from her sadly deficient education. She excels in all that
86
she is taught, but, as a middle-class girl, what she is taught in no way prepares her to
utilize her talents and wit beyond the domestic sphere.
Although the narrator frequently pokes fun at Gwendolen’s petty romanticism,
which results from her deficient education, this playful mockery contrasts distinctly with
the seriousness of Gwendolen’s own critique of the society in which she is trapped.
Although she is portrayed as romantic, Gwendolen’s status as a female quixote is
constantly undermined by her refusal to accept the marriage plot normally allotted to the
heroines of romance. “Girls’ lives are so stupid: they never do what they like,” she tells
her cousin Rex (56). When Rex protests, she responds, “I never saw a married woman
who had her own way” (57). Judging from her limited experience, particularly of her
mother’s
39
miserable second marriage, Gwendolen’s observation is correct. In rejecting
the traditional marriage plot, however, she is left without a distinct path upon which to
proceed: “What she was clear upon was, that she did not wish to lead the same sort of life
as ordinary young ladies did; but what she was not clear upon was, how she should set

39
For an interesting interpretation of Gwendolen’s antipathy towards marriage and
intimacy, see Louise Penner’s “‘Unmapped Country’: Uncovering Hidden Wounds in
Daniel Deronda”, in which she uses Lewes’s studies on physiology and memory to read
the strange gaps in Gwendolen’s narrative about her childhood and her relationship with
her stepfather. In addition to Gwendolen’s psychological history, Eliot makes sure to
explain that Gwendolen has had no example of a happy marriage or of a talented,
intelligent woman content with her domestic position (Mrs. Gascoigne seems relatively
content with her life, but she is a timid, fearful woman, completely lacking Gwendolen’s
liveliness and spirit). The novel only provides one example of a clever and happy
married woman—Catherine Arrowpoint Klesmer—but she differs significantly from
Gwendolen in that she is an heiress. Even though Catherine proves herself willing to
sacrifice her fortune for love, she is never at risk of entering the dire financial situation
Gwendolen faces when she accepts Grandcourt. In Daniel Deronda, happy marriages
seem to be reserved for the financially independent; when women are left with no means
of supporting themselves, they resort to a polite form of prostitution, as, it is implied, was
the case with Mrs. Davilow and as becomes true of Gwendolen as well.
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about leading any other, and what were the particular acts which she would assert her
freedom by doing” (43). Her dreams of adventure—she informs Rex she would like to
“go to the North Pole, or ride steeplechases, or go to be a queen in the East like Lady
Hester Stanhope” (57)—are, of course, quixotic, but Gwendolen proves herself to be
completely aware of this. She says to Grandcourt, “We women can’t go in search of
adventures—to find out the North-West Passage or the sources of the Nile, or to hunt
tigers in the East. We must stay where we grow, or where the gardeners like to transplant
us. We are brought up like the flowers, to look as pretty as we can, and be dull without
complaining” (113). While Gwendolen may lapse into moments of romantic visions, she
(as well as the narrator) is all too aware of the constraints placed upon her by her position
as a woman, her failures resulting from “the pettiness of circumstances, the narrow
theatre which life offers to a girl of twenty” (51).
Above all else, Gwendolen desires freedom, but it is this desire for independence
that leads her into her dangerous position with Henleigh Grandcourt. Before she meets
her future husband, Gwendolen constructs a pretty romance for her mother: “My arrow
will pierce him before he has time for thought. He will declare himself my slave” (79).
Gwendolen is being facetious in creating her fantastic narrative, yet she reveals her true
desire to enslave. Even though she is aware of the less than ideal life that would await
her as a wife, Gwendolen, in her first phase of real quixotism, begins to believe in her
own fantasy and imagines that marriage will offer her freedom. In her first conversation
with Grandcourt, she concludes, “[T]he life of an unmarried woman who could not go
about and had no command of anything must necessarily be dull through all the degrees
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of comparison as time went on” (93). Her financial dependence on her mother and uncle
prevents Gwendolen from doing as she likes, but her notion of freedom through marriage
is at odds with her earlier protests against marrying. She knows that married women
never have their own way, yet she begins to realize that unmarried women without
independent fortunes are equally confined.
Gwendolen’s realistic view of marriage keeps her from ever being completely
taken in by Grandcourt. In their initial courtship, she shows no desire to hurry along to
the wedding chapel, and in fact resorts to playing the coquette in order to prevent
Grandcourt from proposing. When she receives the note requesting her to meet Lydia
Glasher, her initial reaction is to think, “It is come in time” (126). She reveals no
attachment to Grandcourt and is only too ready to receive testimony against him that will
give her an excuse to escape. When she finally meets the woman who will become such
a tremendous weight on her conscience, Gwendolen “felt a sort of terror: it was as if
some ghastly vision had come to her in a dream and said, ‘I am a woman’s life’” (128).
And Lydia Glasher is the representation of a woman’s life—sad, lonely, punished for
acting on her desires, a foreshadowing of the fates of both Gwendolen and the Alcharisi.
Confronted with this disturbing warning of what a woman’s life could become,
Gwendolen flees from such a fate by abandoning her suitor and escaping to Leubronn.
The events in the novel leading up to Gwendolen’s flight to Germany work to
establish the feminist roots of her plot. Even though Gwendolen is proud and thinks
more of herself than she ought, the open hostility she expresses toward marriage and her
recognition of her own entrapment as a woman in the restrictive culture by which she is
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circumscribed make her a sympathetic character and set up the tension surrounding her
reappearance in the third book, ironically titled “Maidens Choosing.” Gwendolen proves
her moral conscience and her ability to act unselfishly by fleeing from Grandcourt,
eliminating (she believes) her chance at making such a socially and financially desirable
match. But Eliot denies her heroine this ability to shun so easily such an advantageous
marriage by removing Gwendolen’s family’s financial independence. Gwendolen’s
ability to lead the sort of middle-class lifestyle of ease and to showcase her ladylike
talents for desirable suitors of her class is destroyed, and she, her mother, and her sisters
must resort to living on the charity of their relatives while they figure out how to go about
acquiring an income. Not fully understanding the limitations of her class and gender,
Gwendolen naively promises, “I will do something. I will be something” (196), and
decides to take her family’s future into her own hands by pursuing a career as an actress
or opera singer.
Gwendolen’s desire to pursue a career of her own is endearing—even
commendable—but not quite realistic. Lacking formal training as well as any sort of
remarkable talent, Gwendolen nonetheless begins to construct fantasies about her
potential success on stage. Gwendolen’s fantasies about her own power and success are
put into stark contrast, however, with her practical awareness of the limited choices
available to her: “Poor thing! She was at a higher crisis of her woman’s fate than in her
past experience with Grandcourt. The questioning then, was whether she should take a
particular man as a husband. The inmost fold of her questioning now, was whether she
need take a husband at all—whether she could not achieve substantiality for herself and
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know gratified ambition
40
without bondage” (214). Her nervousness in her interview
with Klesmer reflects her understanding of the precarious position in which she is placed
as a woman without an income. She again sees marriage as “bondage” and clings to the
hope of being able to support herself and her family through her own talents.
Gwendolen’s hopes are soon shattered, however, by Klesmer’s refusal to create a
romanticized picture of the artist’s life for her. Sympathizing with her situation but
unwilling to give her any false hopes, Klesmer informs Gwendolen that acting, too, can
only lead her on another path to marriage. Gwendolen is devastated, and the chapter ends
with her despair and resignation to a life of poverty and servitude. Her quixotism is
rather brutally destroyed, and she is forced to confront the reality of her insignificant
position: “For the first time since her consciousness began, she was having a vision of
herself on the common level, and had lost the innate sense that there were reasons why
she should not be slighted, elbowed, jostled—treated like a passenger with a third-class
ticket, in spite of private objections on her own part” (223).
41
While the destruction of
her egoism may be read as a necessary step in her development, the disillusionment
Gwendolen experiences regarding her own helplessness deserves to be viewed with pity.
Because her high opinion of herself was inextricably linked to her belief in a path to

40
Rosemarie Bodenheimer in The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans explores Eliot’s vexed
attitude towards female ambition in her biographical reading of Eliot’s late works
(Chapter 6 “Ambition and Womanhood”). While Eliot would have condemned
Gwendolen’s ambition here, the fact that Eliot ties that ambition to a desire for an
independent means of survival makes the merit of Gwendolen’s ambition ambiguous.

41
Eliot seems to forget this moment of epiphany by the end of the novel, when she has
Gwendolen experience essentially the same thing for the “first time” (“for the first time
being dislodged from her supremacy in her own world…” [689]).
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independence that did not involve marriage, her injured ego entails a devastating
resignation to a future of “third-class” status.
While Gwendolen consents to become a governess in order to help her family
financially, she views “the life before her as an entrance into a penitentiary” (231). What
Gwendolen despises most about being a governess is the complete denial of her own
desires, the absence of all freedom, inherent to such a profession. “For a lady to become a
governess,” the narrator explains, “was to descend in life and to be treated at best with a
compassionate patronage” (232), and patronage, for Gwendolen, is simply a more genteel
form of enslavement. Her “daring was not in the least that of the adventuress,” however,
and she soberly agrees to do whatever will respectably provide for her mother. She
constructs no Jane Eyre fantasies, and accepts her position as an unlucky obligation. The
narrator comments sympathetically: “Naturally her grievances did not seem to her
smaller than some of her male contemporaries held theirs to be when they felt a
profession too narrow for their powers … Her griefs were feminine; but to her as a
woman they were not the less hard to bear, and she felt an equal right to the Promethean
tone” (234-35). Gwendolen’s tragedy is of the everyday sort—a fate allotted to many
girls unlucky enough to be born without large fortunes—but this does not prevent her, or
Eliot’s readers, from lamenting the absence of some greater use for her talents.
Gwendolen’s willingness to mourn the death of the brighter future she had
imagined is not, however, a sign of her self-absorption. In fact, her concern for her
prospects is always tied to a desire to support her mother and sisters. Gwendolen’s
reason for accepting the position at the Momperts’ is the same as that which convinces
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her finally to accept Grandcourt: she wishes to save her mother from further sorrow. “I
shall get some money for you,” she tells Mrs. Davilow; “[Y]ou need not stitch your poor
fingers to the bone, and stare away all the sight that the tears have left in your dear eyes”
(234). When Gwendolen receives a letter from Grandcourt requesting an interview, she
only decides to meet his request when she imagines Grandcourt’s helping her mother; she
is met with “a vision of what Grandcourt might do for her mother if she, Gwendolen,
did—what she was not going to do” (249). As she awaits Grandcourt’s arrival, she
thinks, “If anything could have induced her to change, it would have been the prospect of
making all things easy for ‘poor mamma:’ that, she admitted, was a temptation” (253).
When she finally gets to speak with Grandcourt, she begins to think of herself—she is
“overcome by the suffused sense that here in this man’s homage to her lay the rescue
from helpless subjection to an oppressive lot” (256)—but she only makes her decision to
accept Grandcourt when he refers to the poverty of Mrs. Davilow. In fact, Grandcourt
makes his marriage proposal in terms of Mrs. Davilow, not in reference to Gwendolen
herself: “You will tell me now, I hope, that Mrs. Davilow’s loss of fortune will not
trouble you further. You will trust to me to prevent it from weighing upon her. You will
give me the claim to provide against that” (256). His words succeed in lifting a terrible
weight from Gwendolen’s mind, and “[s]he imagined herself already springing to her
mother, and being playful again” (256). No illusions of love, no thoughts of joy at
becoming Mrs. Grandcourt—just relief at “her own release from the Momperts, and her
mother’s release from Sawyer’s Cottage” (257).
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Despite her romantic tendencies, Gwendolen proves herself to be completely
aware that “Maidens Choosing” really involves no choice at all. Whether she were to
bind herself to the indignity of working as a governess or agree to be the wife of a man of
dubious integrity, she must in either case bid farewell to her habit of doing as she likes.
She knows immediately after she has accepted Grandcourt that she has sold herself, has
made herself into a cheaply bought courtesan,
42
and her decision leaves her terrified:
“The brilliant position she had longed for, the imagined freedom she would create for
herself in marriage, the deliverance from the dull insignificance of her girlhood—all were
immediately before her; and yet they had come to her hunger like food with the taint of
sacrilege upon it, which she must snatch with terror” (262). While Grandcourt delights in
having “brought [her] to kneel down like a horse under training for the arena” (269),
Gwendolen also recognizes that she has entered a new form of servitude. She attempts to
revive her belief in her own power but fails to delude herself. No true quixote she,
Gwendolen suspects the misery that awaits her: “[S]he was walking amid illusions; and
yet, too, there was an under-consciousness in her that she was a little intoxicated” (300).
Throughout the first half of the novel, Eliot creates tension between Gwendolen’s
illusions and her awareness of them. Gwendolen is no Rosamond, and her inability to
believe in her own fantasies keeps her from becoming silly, shallow, or trite. While the
narrator seems to condemn Gwendolen at times for her egoism—“Could there be a
slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl,
busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant?”

42
For more on the role of prostitution in the novel, see Catherine Gallagher’s essay
“George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question.”
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(102)—we are made aware very early on in the novel that Gwendolen suspects her own
insignificance: “Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined feeling of
immeasurable existence aloof from her, in the midst of which she was helplessly
incapable of asserting herself” (52). In revealing the way in which Gwendolen is
channeled into marrying Grandcourt by events beyond her control (her family’s loss of
fortune and the unavailability of a means other than marriage for her to provide for them),
Eliot engages the reader’s sympathy for those quixotic dreams Gwendolen espouses
before her entrapment.
43
We, too, want something better for Gwendolen, and, because
we invest in her desire for freedom, we share her devastating disappointment. The
“Gwendolen” section of the novel also establishes Daniel Deronda as a reform narrative
in that Eliot goes to such great lengths to illustrate, through the example of Gwendolen
and through the more minor examples of the other oppressed women who appear in the
first third of the narrative, a society in great need of gender reform. This critique of the
limited opportunities for and double standards placed upon women becomes, however,
less central to the narrative as the novel’s other protagonist, Daniel Deronda, is granted
more narrative space.
* * *

43
Belkin provides an accurate summary of Eliot’s feminist narrative strategy employed
here: “[Eliot] makes it abundantly clear through her plot turns and narrative comments
that [her heroines] come to grief because they are nineteenth century women and,
therefore, relatively powerless. Simply, they are at the mercy of a society which insists
that the only proper vocation for females is marriage, and, indeed, is inimical to those
who have intellectual aspirations or who dream of vocations aside from that of governess.
However, when they do fail, it is the women who must be morally purified, not the
society which destroys them” (473).
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The fascination in Gwendolen that Eliot so successfully creates contrasts with the
more distanced portrayal of Daniel Deronda, the novel’s hero. While Gwendolen has her
moments of quixotism, Daniel Deronda is established less ambiguously as a quixote in
his own right. The first instance we see of this is Daniel’s childhood fantasy of
parentage. In his moment of epiphany about the dubious nature of his origin, Deronda
chooses Shakespeare as his reference point:
Having read Shakespeare as well as a great deal of history, he could have talked
with the wisdom of a bookish child about men who were born out of wedlock and
were held unfortunate in consequence, being under disadvantages which required
them to be a sort of heroes [sic] if they were to work themselves up to an equal
standing with their legally born brothers. But he had never brought such
knowledge into any association with his own lot, which had been too easy for him
ever to think about it—until this moment when there had darted into his mind
with the magic of quick comparison, the possibility that here was the secret to his
own birth …. (141)

The majority of his knowledge having been derived from reading fiction, the young
Deronda quickly applies the literary formula to his own life and assumes himself to be a
modern day Edmund: “The impetuous advent of new images took possession of him with
the force of fact for the first time told, and left him no immediate power for the reflection
that he might be trembling at a fiction of his own” (142). Thus, Deronda proves to be a
much better quixote than Gwendolen in that he is able to believe in his own illusions.
This early establishment of Daniel’s quixotic leanings is important in that it colors the
way we read Deronda in the rest of the novel. Daniel’s confession that “[h]is fuller
knowledge had tended to convince him that Sir Hugo was his father” (148) should make
us wary of trusting his analytical powers, and his reluctance to make any effort towards
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discovering the truth of his parentage should alert us to his tendency to put his faith in
what he does not understand.
As a child, Deronda’s imaginative musings center on his own mysterious history
or on the fantastic histories of other, more famous great men. His romancing is given a
new outlet, however, when he first sees Mirah Cohen, about whom he immediately
constructs a story to please his own fancy: “He fell again and again to speculating on the
probable romance that lay behind that loneliness and look of desolation” (159). As he
rows along listlessly in his boat, “[h]is mind glanced over the girl-tragedies that are going
on in the world, hidden, unheeded, as if they were but tragedies of the copse or hedgerow,
where the helpless drag wounded wings forsakenly, and streak the shadowed moss with
the red moment-hand of their own death” (160). “Girl-tragedies” are, however, not a
source of major concern for Deronda but a sort of picturesque suffering, like that of
wounded birds, with which he cannot truly empathize. The ease with which he dismisses
this reflection in favor of speculating on his own destiny foreshadows his painful
interaction with Gwendolen and the Alcharisi later in the novel. For Deronda, the
tragedies of women are fascinating dramas to be watched—just as he watches
Gwendolen’s gambling—but only to be participated in when convenient.
Of course, Deronda has no trouble becoming involved in the drama of the
beautiful Jewess, Mirah. Mirah, in her misery, evokes another of Deronda’s fantasies: his
romanticized vision of his mother. “Perhaps my mother was like this one,” Daniel thinks
(162), and he seems to be rather fond of the notion that his mother might be alone,
helpless, and romantically tragic, like Mirah. While the narrator contends that “[t]o say
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Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him” (175), this statement is quickly
undermined when we learn of Deronda’s susceptibility to finding “poetry and romance
among the events of everyday life” (175). Thus, for Deronda, “this event of finding
Mirah was as heart-stirring as anything that befell Orestes or Rinaldo” (175). His
sympathy is quickly engaged because Mirah’s attempted suicide and his rescue of her
provide the promise of a romance as engaging as the mystery of his origins.
As if this susceptibility to romancing did not make Deronda’s perceptions
untrustworthy enough, Eliot makes it quite clear that Deronda’s worldview is somewhat
tainted by his position as a wealthy English gentleman.
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Daniel, a “Spoiled Child” in his
own right, is able to reject the career Gwendolen so desperately desired—“he set himself
bitterly against the notion of being dressed up to sing before all those fine people who
would not care about him except as a wonderful toy” (144)—because he has a
“bachelor’s income” of “seven hundred a year” (149). The narrator rather bitterly
remarks on Deronda’s idleness: “[H]e was in another sort of contemplative mood perhaps
more common in the young men of our day—that of questioning whether it were worth
while to take part in the battle of the world: I mean, of course, the young men in whom
the unproductive labour of questioning is sustained by three or five per cent on capital
which somebody else has battled for” (157, emphasis added). This intrusive commentary

44
Deronda’s suspected illegitimacy denies him the full rights of a gentleman (he cannot
inherit Sir Hugo’s estate), yet it never places him in a position of social disgrace. This
seems due at least in part to Sir Hugo’s being a man and an extremely likeable one at
that. Had Deronda been the suspected bastard son of Lady Mallinger, he would likely not
have been greeted with such social openness. Likewise, if he had himself been female,
his position—which would require the eventual acquisition of a respectable husband—
would have been much more precarious. Compare his situation, for example, to that of
Esther Summerson in Bleak House.
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draws attention to the contrast between Daniel’s wealthy independence and the
impoverished dependence that forces Gwendolen to sell herself to Grandcourt. Whereas
Daniel has the choice of participating in “the battle of the world,” Gwendolen is forced to
fight, unarmed and alone. And, Amy Meyrick’s comment that Daniel “leans on some of
the satin cushions we prick our fingers over” (191), proposes the disconcerting idea—
disconcerting, at least, if we are to accept Deronda as the novel’s hero—that Deronda’s
comfort is bought at the expense of women’s pain and labor.
Deronda’s quixotism, in which his genteel lifestyle allows him to indulge,
develops as he becomes immersed in the romances of Mirah and Gwendolen, both of
whom attract him as beautiful lost causes, for “[p]ersons attracted him … in proportion to
the possibility of his defending them, rescuing them, telling upon their lives with some
sort of redeeming influence; and he had to resist an inclination, easily accounted for, to
withdraw coldly from the fortunate” (273). His fascination with the two troubled women,
however, serves only to further undermine his integrity for the reader; instead of choosing
one heroine to rescue and love, Deronda fluctuates between two. Moreover, once the
complicated chronology of the novel is untangled, we find that Deronda becomes
interested in Gwendolen in Leubronn after he rescues Mirah. Thus, his involvement with
both heroines spans the entire duration of the novel.
Deronda finds himself attracted by “fascination of [Gwendolen’s] womanhood”
(273). Gwendolen exudes a sexual attraction for him, a charm “he was very open to” and
which he “mingled … with the consciously Utopian pictures of his own future” (273).
He considers her “decidedly attractive” (280) and when he sees her after her marriage to
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Grandcourt, her beauty “flashed on him as more unquestionable if not more thoroughly
satisfactory than when he had first seen her at the gaming-table” (348). It is not
surprising that Sir Hugo accuses Deronda of flirting with Gwendolen (304), for
Deronda’s fascination with her shows far more than friendly interest. At the same time,
however, he is equally enamored of Mirah: “no man could see this exquisite creature
without feeling it possible to fall in love with her” (319). Hans Meyrick laughs at
Deronda for “having something of the knight-errant in his disposition” for becoming
enthralled with the two damsels in distress (274). The narrator then, however, interjects
quite ambiguously: “he [Hans] would have found his proof if he had known what was
just now going on in Deronda’s mind about Mirah and Gwendolen” (274). What exactly
goes on in Daniel’s mind about the two heroines remains unknown, and his relationship
with the women continues to be ambiguous until his rejection of Gwendolen at the very
end of the novel. The way in which this uncertainty about Deronda’s love interest is
drawn out, however, makes Deronda seem indecisive and makes Gwendolen’s
misreading of his interest in her all the more worthy of sympathy.
At least part of Daniel’s fascination with Mirah is, of course, inextricable from his
fascination with the Jews. While Mordecai and his friends in the Philosophers Club show
themselves to be extremely learned in the history of the Jews and the contemporary
debates within Judaism, Deronda always approaches the Jews, as he does Mirah, through
the lens of romance. His insistence on the London Jews he meets conforming to his
romantic notions veers dangerously, as Susan Meyer has shown, into the realm of anti-
Semitism. As he begins his exploration of the Jewish community in London, he
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confesses his revulsion to the thought that Mirah’s brother might be “common.” He
“particularly desired that Ezra Cohen should not keep a shop” (322) and wanders in dread
of seeing Cohen’s name carved above the door of any public establishment. When he
discovers that Ezra Cohen does, in fact, own a shop, he acts selfishly according to his
own prejudice and delays doing anything that would confirm Cohen’s relationship to
Mirah.
Deronda’s first interview with the Cohen family reveals his persistent loathing of
ordinary Jews, a disgust that never quite leaves him. Upon meeting the woman he
assumes to be Mirah’s mother, he thinks, “Not that there was anything very repulsive
about her” (327, emphasis mine), implying that her repulsive qualities are present but not
as horrifying as he had anticipated. Deronda is disappointed to find these Jews unlike the
(apparently positive) literary representations he had previously encountered. He
concludes Ezra “to be the most unpoetic Jew he had ever met with in books or life: his
phraseology was as little as possible like that of the Old Testament; and no shadow of a
Suffering Race distinguished his vulgarity of soul from that of a prosperous pink-and-
white huckster of the purest English lineage” (331). The Cohens, in all their prospering
prosaicness, fail to live up to Deronda’s romantic expectations and, thus, have no place in
his quixotic vision of Judaism.
As Deronda becomes better acquainted with the Cohen family, his view of them
improves only slightly: “[H]is first sense of repulsion at the commonness of these people
was beginning to be tempered with kindlier feeling. However unrefined their airs and
speech might be, he was forced to admit some moral refinement in their treatment of
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[Mordecai]” (444). While his repulsion may decrease, his view of the Cohens as
common and vulgar does not dissipate entirely.
45
He is delighted when he learns that
Mordecai, and not Ezra Cohen, is the brother of Mirah: “His own deliverance from the
dreaded relationship of the other Cohens, notwithstanding their good-nature, made him
resolve if possible to keep them in the background for Mirah” (464). Surprisingly, the
novel does not condemn Deronda’s intolerance for “common” Jews; instead, the reader is
forced to focus, with Daniel, on the more romantic Mordecai, who becomes the
representative of the suffering Jewish nation for Deronda and who, because of his poetic
nature, transforms the future of the Jews from a source of minor curiosity into a beautiful
cause worthy of devotion.
Unlike Ezra Cohen, who “was not clad in the sublime pathos of the martyr” and
who “was not a symbol of the great Jewish tragedy” (441), Mordecai “happened to have a
more pathetic aspect, a more passionate, penetrative speech than was usual with such
monomaniacs: he was more poetical than a social reformer with coloured views of the
new moral world in parallelograms, or than an enthusiast in sewage; still he came under
the same class” (435). Deronda ultimately concludes “that this man [Mordecai]… had
the chief elements of greatness: a mind consciously, energetically moving with the larger
march of human destinies” (465). Although Ezra Cohen is shown to be kind, generous,

45
It could be argued that Deronda’s initial anti-Semitic views are given in order to show
his moral development as he learns to see Jews for who they really are. If this is what
Eliot intended, and we do know that Eliot intended the novel to combat English anti-
Semitism (see, for example, Cotugno’s discussion of Eliot’s correspondence with Harriet
Beecher Stowe), Deronda’s enlightenment is not very convincing, for he never learns to
embrace ordinary Jews such as the Cohens. His fascination is always with what Meyer
terms “refined Jews.” Throughout the novel, Deronda stays as far away from the Cohens
as possible, removing Mordecai to a more genteel residence at the earliest opportunity.
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and devoted to his family, he inspires no true admiration in Deronda because he seems so
emblematic of the everyday. Mordecai, on the other hand, fits Deronda’s preconceived
notion of a suffering Jewish prophet-reformer much more readily. His “poetical” and
“pathetic” qualities appeal to Deronda’s romantic imagination, and, thus, it is Mordecai,
not Cohen, who comes to represent the Jewish people for Deronda.
Mordecai, like Daniel and Gwendolen, is portrayed as a quixote, although his
quixotism is endorsed by the novel in more positive terms as “visionary”: there was a
“strain of visionary excitement in Mordecai, which turned his wishes into overmastering
impressions, and made him read outward facts as fulfillment” (438). Unlike Gwendolen
and Daniel, both of whom are condemned either by the narrator or the plot for their
quixotic tendencies, Mordecai is given prophet-status and his grand belief in
“transmission” is exalted. No ironic commentary by the narrator here, Mordecai is
presented as the wise and mystical sage who will eventually lead Deronda to his destiny.
Deronda, enamored of the Jewish dreamer, immediately begins to search for his own
place within Mordecai’s vision by beginning to romance about the possibility of his
Jewish heritage: “And, if you like, [Deronda] was romantic. That young energy and
spirit of adventure which have helped to create the world-wide legends of youthful heroes
going to seek the hidden tokens of their birth and its inheritance of tasks, gave him a
certain quivering interest in the bare possibility that he was entering on a like track”
(439). Even though he suspects himself “of loving too well the losing causes of the
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world”
46
(307-08), Deronda plunges on in his fantasy of becoming part of that “binding
history, tragic and yet glorious” (310).
Eliot presents Deronda’s fascination with Mordecai and his ideas about Judaism
quite seriously and without irony. In fact, Eliot’s portrayal of Deronda undergoes a
change when he meets Mordecai. Whereas the first part of Daniel’s history presents him
as overly romantic and as an untrustworthy observer, the tone of the remainder of the
novel (in addition to what we know about Eliot’s own endorsement of the Zionist
project
47
) implies that his visionary destiny is to be taken seriously. Thus, when Deronda
takes up the beautiful lost cause of Zionism, he is granted some of the heroism associated
with that cause and graduates from “quixote” to “visionary.” This turn in the narrative
attitude toward Daniel is, however, not quite as satisfactory as one would expect from an
author as skilled as George Eliot. It is here in Daniel’s transformation from quixote to
visionary that the two plots, which I have hitherto treated separately, collide, and the

46
Deronda’s love of lost causes is brought up in connection with his search for a course
of action in life. Eliot writes: “Deronda suspected himself of loving too well the losing
causes of the world. Martyrdom changes sides, and he was in danger of changing with it,
having a strong repugnance to taking up that clue of success which the order of the world
often forces upon us and makes it treason against the common weal to reject. And yet his
fear of falling into an unreasoning narrow hatred made a check for him: he apologized for
the heirs of privilege; he shrank with dislike from the loser’s bitterness and the
denunciatory tone of the unaccepted innovator. A too reflective and diffusive sympathy
was in danger of paralyzing in him that indignation against wrong and that selectness of
fellowship which are the conditions of moral force; and in the last few years of confirmed
manhood he had become so keenly aware of this that what he most longed for was either
some external event, or some inward light, that would urge him into a definite line of
action, and compress his wandering energy” (307-08). Deronda stumbles upon an
external event and receives an inward light in finding Mordecai, yet the cause he takes up
is as lost as those he leaves behind.

47
See Baker for Eliot’s research and views on what became known as Zionism.
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beautiful lost cause of Zionism begins to take precedence over Gwendolen’s feminist
cause, one that is represented as no longer beautiful, but merely lost. In order for this to
occur, however, Gwendolen must develop a new form of quixotism that allows her, and
through her eyes, the reader to view Deronda as heroic.
* * *
Gwendolen’s quixotism in the early part of the novel, as I have shown, is
problematic. She indulges in brief fantasies of her own power to dominate, yet she is
always aware of her own insignificance, her potential to fail. Moreover, she is shown as
defeated and remorseful after her marriage to Grandcourt, and her former visions of
independence and success are replaced by an inescapable guilt over her involvement with
Lydia Glasher and Grandcourt’s illegitimate children. As her girlish quixotism
disappears, however, she develops a much more powerful form of romantic belief in her
relationship with Deronda.
The strange fascination and reverence for Deronda Gwendolen exhibits originate
in the shame she feels when he “educates” her by returning the necklace she sells to earn
money for her trip home from Leubronn. When she first receives the necklace,
Gwendolen interprets Deronda’s action as “an unpardonable liberty” that placed her “in a
thoroughly hateful position” (14). “He knew very well,” she suspects, “that he was
entangling her in helpless humiliation: it was another way of smiling at her ironically,
and taking the air of a supercilious mentor” (14). Gwendolen’s initial reaction seems just
in that she has not even officially met this man who has taken such a marked interest in
her. And, her reading of his motive—“he was entangling her in helpless humiliation”—
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proves to be quite accurate by the end of the novel, even if Deronda does not initially set
out to reveal Gwendolen’s moral inadequacies.
Despite her annoyance at his impertinence in returning the necklace to her,
Gwendolen becomes hopelessly drawn to Deronda and experiences “an uneasy longing to
be judged by [him] with unmixed admiration” (279). At her first meeting with Deronda
after the encounter in the gambling hall at Leubronn, Gwendolen judges him for
possessing “a superiority that humiliates” (279). When they meet again after her
marriage, however, her attitude has become one of awe and reverence: “he was unique to
her among men, because he had impressed her as being not her admirer but her superior:
in some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience” (355). Even though
Gwendolen has no evidence besides her own unexplainable emotions to validate her faith
in Deronda, she clings blindly to her own idea of him and uses that idea as her moral and
emotional support.
The devotion Gwendolen expresses towards Daniel is rather unsettling in that her
willing subjection contrasts greatly with the desire for independence and freedom she
voices so passionately in the first half of the novel. Moreover, her faith in Deronda
seems unwarranted. His advice to her—advice given in spite of his complete inability to
empathize with her sad situation—is simply to be less selfish
48
: “Try to care about
something in this vast world besides the gratification of small selfish desires. Try to care
for what is best in thought and action—something that is good apart from the accidents of

48
Deronda’s advice to Gwendolen is disturbingly reminiscent in its disappointingly
abstract quality of the angel’s advice to Tancred in Disraeli’s novel. Gwendolen,
however, proves much more willing to attempt to adhere to such ambiguous guidance
than does Tancred.
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your own lot” (383). While Gwendolen Harleth certainly had her moments of egoism,
Gwendolen Grandcourt proves almost pitifully selfless in the mental torture she inflicts
on herself for having sold herself and wronged Lydia Glasher. Nonetheless, Deronda
encourages Gwendolen to seek “real knowledge” in order to foster her “interest in the
world beyond the small drama of personal desires” (387). “It is the curse of your life,” he
tells her, “that all passion is spent in that narrow round, for want of ideas and sympathies
to make a larger home for it” (387). Deronda seems unable to understand the guilt
Gwendolen experiences for having acted selfishly, and condemns her for dwelling in
“that narrow round” from which she turns to him for aid in finding an escape.
Deronda’s words are hardly encouraging; in fact, he shows himself to be cold,
reserved, and unsympathetic in his role as Gwendolen’s mentor. Gwendolen, however,
remains blind to Deronda’s faults and becomes more and more dependent on his approval
and support as she becomes more desperate in her relationship with Grandcourt.
Unwilling to trust her own judgment, which failed her before, she depends entirely on
Deronda to guide her actions. She learns “to see all her acts through the impression they
would make” on the “terrible-browed angel” (576-77) and depends on him as “her only
hope” (577). Her brief visions of escape are shattered by her remembrance of Deronda’s
advice, and he haunts her even in her dreams: she wakes in Genoa “from a strangely-
mixed dream in which she felt herself escaping over the Mont Cenis, and wondering to
find it warmer even in the moonlight on the snow, till suddenly she met Deronda, who
told her to go back” (579). By instructing the impressionable woman to be selfless and to
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accept her hard lot without offering a means of accomplishing such a feat, Deronda
becomes at least partially responsible for Gwendolen’s bondage and misery.
As their relationship careens forward, the tension between Gwendolen’s ideal of
Deronda and the Deronda the narrator presents grows ever tighter. When Deronda
discovers Gwendolen after the suspicious death of Grandcourt, he is slow to sympathize
with her misery. The great advocate of selflessness, when confronted with the
extraordinary pain of Gwendolen’s position, retreats into himself and shrinks from giving
himself completely to the woman so in need of his help. Deronda “dreaded hearing her
confession” and “shrank from the task that was laid on him” (591). “[H]e wished,” the
narrator reveals, “that she could bury her secrets in her own bosom. He was not a priest.
He dreaded the weight of this woman’s soul flung upon his own with imploring
dependence” (591). When Gwendolen asks if he believes she could be a murderess, he
responds, “Great God! don’t torture me needlessly” (591). This “girl-tragedy” that
seemed so small before proves to be overwhelming, and the man whom we are to believe
will found a nation quails before the weight of what Gwendolen must bear. Moreover, by
openly admitting and revealing her suffering, Gwendolen makes her suffering less and
less romantic; she ceases to be to Deronda a beautiful woman trapped in a romantically
miserable marriage and instead becomes a bothersome plague to his conscience.
Only grudgingly does Deronda bestow his promise not to forsake Gwendolen. As
he gives his promise, he feels “as if he were putting his name to a blank paper which
might be filled up terribly” (592). Gwendolen, however, in her blind faith, reads Daniel’s
action quite differently: “That grasp was an entirely new experience to Gwendolen: she
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had never before had from any man a sign of tenderness which her own being had
needed, and she interpreted its powerful effect on her into a promise of inexhaustible
patience and constancy” (592). Thus, Gwendolen’s belief in Daniel’s goodness is shown
to be quixotic. Instead of heeding the coldness that borders on cruelty Deronda directs
toward her, Gwendolen clings to an image of Daniel’s divinity that is of her own
creation. None of the other characters in the novel—except perhaps Mordecai, who
simply molds Daniel into a copy of himself, and Mirah, for whom Deronda is a literal
savior—view Daniel as Gwendolen does; while he is generally well liked, he is never
given prophet status or seen as an infallible arbitrator of judgment. On the contrary,
much of the novel works to undermine his authority. However, the novel seems to ask
that Gwendolen’s quixotism become that of the reader. Because Deronda is portrayed
without irony and with reverence in regards to his Zionist mission at the end of the novel,
Eliot seems to expect us to see Daniel through Gwendolen’s eyes; indeed, the only way to
find satisfaction in the conclusion of the novel is to trust Gwendolen’s judgment and
accept Deronda as a heroic leader capable of guiding a nation. Such an identification is,
however, nearly impossible, not only because of the earlier, less sympathetic portrayal of
Daniel, but also because of the irreconcilable conflict between the feminist and Jewish
plots.
* * *
Deronda is shown to be aware of the conflict between his relationships with
Gwendolen and Mordecai relatively early on in the novel: “There was a foreshadowing of
some painful collision: on the one side the grasp of Mordecai’s dying hand on him, with
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all the ideals and prospects it aroused; on the other this fair creature in silk and gems,
with her hidden wound and her self-dread, making a trustful effort to lean and find herself
sustained” (482). Deronda is torn between the “ideals and prospects” associated with
Mordecai’s Zionist vision, and the heroism that rescuing such a “fair creature” as
Gwendolen would entail. This conflict, however, is not just between the two characters
Gwendolen and Mordecai, but actually between the feminist underpinnings of the novel
(most apparent in the early section of the Gwendolen plot) and the utopian nationalism of
proto-Zionism. Neither Mordecai nor Gwendolen appears in the scene in which this
conflict ultimately surfaces: the meeting between Daniel and his mother, the Alcharisi.
Daniel had always imagined his mother as lonely and helpless, as wandering the
world lamenting the separation from her son. However, the mother he meets in Italy does
not conform to his suffering ideal. Although she experiences physical pain, her
demeanor is regal and cold, and she expresses no regret for the choices she made to
advance her career and satiate her ambition. Moreover, she voices a strong
condemnation of patriarchal oppression, her status as a great artist and as a Jewish
woman permitting her to speak openly what Eliot’s English heroines can only hint at.
As if to emphasize the connection to the earlier portion of the novel, Eliot chooses
statements on marriage and freedom for the Alcharisi that are remarkably similar, albeit
more fiery and indignant, to those Gwendolen espouses in her maidenhood. “I did not
want to marry,” she tells Daniel; “I had a right to be free. I had a right to seek my
freedom from a bondage that I hated” (537). Like Gwendolen, the Alcharisi refuses to
conform to the social standards established for her sex and attempts to differentiate
110
herself from other women. “Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives,”
she says, “or else to be a monster. I am not a monster, but I have not felt exactly what
other women feel—or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others” (539).
However, in her desire for independence, the Alcharisi is forced to resist not only the
patriarchy of the culture at large, but also the particular form of oppression brought on
her by her father’s strict Judaism, the Judaism that Deronda is so eager to embrace.
The Alcharisi explains her trouble with her father’s religion by saying, “I was to
be what he called ‘the Jewish woman’ under pain of his curse. I was to feel everything I
did not feel, and believe everything I did not believe” (540). Her Jewish identity
nonetheless provides her with an opportunity that is denied middle-class, English
Gwendolen: the Alcharisi is able to pursue a life on the stage. Like Gwendolen, the
Alcharisi saw acting as “a chance of escaping from bondage” (541), but whereas
Gwendolen was never given that chance of escape, the Alcharisi succeeds in winning
temporary freedom.
These parallels between Gwendolen and the Alcharisi are impossible to ignore
and serve to revive the feminist element of the novel that all but disappears after
Gwendolen’s marriage. The sympathy the first half of the novel develops for
Gwendolen, then, is transferred to her elder, Jewish double—the woman who undergoes
the same hardships, but who is able, for a while at least, to break free from the gender
restrictions that bind her. Like Gwendolen, the Alcharisi is eventually coerced into
marrying, but she concedes to her father’s demand only when she decides that marriage
will allow her to have her way: “I wanted not to marry. I thought of all plans to resist it,
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but at last I found that I could rule my cousin, and I consented” (543). Her foresight
proves to be less faulty than Gwendolen’s, and she succeeds in mastering her husband.
Not until much later is she punished for her audacity.
The Alcharisi’s story is, much like Gwendolen’s, both dramatic and emotionally
moving, yet Deronda has difficulty overcoming his own selfish anger at having been
abandoned and is unable to identify with his mother’s troubled past. He takes much more
interest in his dead grandfather than in the live mother whose history is so tragic. Daniel
unsympathetically pleads with the Alcharisi to understand her father’s attempts at
preventing her from pursuing her career, in effect defending the patriarchal oppression
she so greatly loathed. The Alcharisi gravely replies, “You are not a woman. You may
try—but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet
to suffer the slavery of being a girl” (541). She warns, “[S]uch men [as my father] turn
their wives and daughters into slaves. They would rule the world if they could; but not
ruling the world, they throw all the weight of their will on the necks and souls of women”
(541). Girl-tragedies, however, are not Daniel’s concern, and he presses on in his zeal for
his grandfather’s ideals. He says to his mother:
“Your will was strong, but my grandfather’s trust which you accepted and did not
fulfil [sic]—what you call his yoke—is the expression of something stronger, with
deeper, farther-spreading roots, knit into the foundations of sacredness for all
men. You renounced me—you still banish me—as a son … But that stronger
Something has determined that I shall be all the more the grandson whom also
you willed to annihilate.” (568)

Thus, Daniel chooses the patriarchal heritage that seeks to destroy the wills of women,
and he is at least partially validated in that both Gwendolen and the Alcharisi—the two
women in the novel who seek to escape the confines of womanhood—are punished. The
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Alcharisi leaves “a shattered woman” (569) and is “forced to be withered, to feel pain, to
be dying slowly” (541).
The romantic ideals of his heritage provide for Deronda a less painful focus for
his energy than is offered by either the Alcharisi or Gwendolen. In reaction to Daniel’s
professed joy at learning of his Jewish heritage, the Alcharisi says, “Ah! you are glad to
have been born a Jew. You say so. That is because you have not been brought up as a
Jew. That separateness seems sweet to you because I saved you from it” (540). Thus, the
Alcharisi voices what the narrator has already made clear in showing Daniel’s disgust for
“common” Jews such as the Cohens: Deronda is in love with a romanticized, idealized
vision of the Jews. Moreover, in adhering to such a romantic ideal, Daniel ignores the
oppression and prejudice the majority of his people face. Because he has never had to
experience personally the ugliness of anti-Semitism, he can embrace Jewish identity as a
romantic abstraction, sweet because of its separateness. Though he has no experience as
a Jew and knows next to nothing about Jews in general (all of his information comes
from the few books he has read and from Mordecai), Deronda decides “to bind [his] race
together in spite of heresy” (642). His desire to restore “a political existence to [his]
people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre” (688) provides him
with the grand purpose he had been seeking.
This grand, heroic cause also gives him a suspiciously convenient means of
escaping the entanglements of his girl-tragedies. By so readily taking up the Jewish
heritage his mother had tried to keep him from experiencing, Daniel is able to punish the
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Alcharisi for what he views as her betrayal of her father,
49
avenging the pain he feels
because of her inability to love him. His noble mission also gives him a reason to
abandon Gwendolen; because he must become the savior of an entire race, he can
decline, without feeling too much guilt, from acting as savior to a woman whose troubles
he can no longer view as romantic.
* * *
After Deronda discovers his lost heritage and finds a purpose for his life in
carrying out his grandfather’s and Mordecai’s plans, he becomes increasingly less
sympathetic towards Gwendolen, who turns up inconveniently at Genoa, preventing him
from going to retrieve his grandfather’s remaining possessions. Gwendolen’s confession
after the death of Grandcourt evokes, as I have shown, emotions in Deronda that fall far
short of heroic. In spite of his former instruction on selflessness, Deronda proves, in his
last interview with Gwendolen in Genoa, his inability to surmount his own selfish
desires: “[H]e was in one of those moments when the very anguish of passionate pity
makes us ready to choose that we will know pleasure no more, and live only for the
stricken and afflicted … At last he felt impelled to turn his back towards her” (595).
Deronda is tempted by the opportunity to sacrifice himself in a heroic effort to save
Gwendolen, but he decides against martyrdom, choosing instead to pursue an even nobler

49
Bodenheimer draws attention to the sadistic element of Deronda’s treatment of his
mother: “The self-punishment of Alcharisi’s unloving marriage in exile attests to the
burden of female guilt temporarily allayed only by the guarantee of a world-class talent.
It is not her only punishment. Alcharisi spends a good portion of her time with Daniel
defending her choices against her father and her son, only to have Daniel become an
embodiment of his grandfather before her eyes; caught in the patriarchal myth of
motherhood, Daniel cannot, for all his sympathy, understand or condone her failure to
love him” (187).
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cause. This pursuit of a higher calling allows Deronda to abandon Gwendolen without
being condemned as selfish or cowardly. He feels it his duty to take up his grandfather’s
ideals, and, thus, sees no real choice but to sever his ties with a woman whose troubles
seem insignificant compared to those of the Jewish nation. Moreover, the very neediness
with which Gwendolen approaches Deronda troubles him. Gwendolen, in a moment in
which she is almost able to break through her quixotic belief in Deronda, recognizes that
her suffering has become a burden to her savior: “I make you very unhappy,” she says to
him (595), and he does not deny this.
Deronda’s aversion to Gwendolen grows stronger and stronger the more she
confides in him and the closer he comes to her tragedy. While he proved himself willing
to act as Gwendolen’s mentor and to enjoy the privileged position of authority she placed
him in when she was kept at a safe distance by her husband, he ceases to be fascinated by
her beauty and her troubles when she threatens to become a constant presence in his life.
He turns all of his admiration instead to the far less emotionally personal cause of
Zionism, and whatever romantic interest he had felt for Gwendolen is redirected towards
Mirah, who seems to offer in her quiet meekness a drastic contrast to Gwendolen’s
passionate grief.
Mirah, however, is not as passive and submissive as Deronda believes her to be;
she simply hides her passion, approaching Deronda only in gratitude for all he does for
her and Mordecai. Because she is placed in a position of dependency on Deronda and the
Meyricks, Mirah strives to show her indebtedness and to make herself seem worthy of
her friends’ generosity. Her behavior around Deronda and the Meyricks makes it easy to
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forget that she has a history very similar to the Alcharisi’s. Both women refuse to accept
the futures their fathers choose for them: the Alcharisi rebels in order to pursue a career
on the stage, and Mirah flees in order to escape such a future. Mirah chooses a more
properly feminine course, yet she still acts out against her father, proving her strength of
will by traveling alone across Europe in search of her mother.
Mirah never espouses strong feminist views in the style of the Alcharisi, but she
does on one occasion voice her views on female self-sacrifice.
50
Towards the end of the
novel, when Mirah believes that Deronda will marry Gwendolen, the following
conversation takes place between Mordecai and Mirah:
“And yet,” said Mordecai, rather insistently, “women are specially framed
for the love which feels possession in renouncing, and is thus a fit image of what
I mean. Somewhere in the later Midrash, I think, is the story of a Jewish maiden
who loved a Gentile king so well, that this was what she did:—She entered into
prison and changed clothes with the woman who was beloved by the king, that
she might deliver that woman from death by dying in her stead, and leave the king
to be happy in his love which was not for her. This is the surpassing love, that
loses self in the object of love.”
“No, Ezra, no,” said Mirah, with low-toned intensity, “that was not it. She
wanted the king when she was dead to know what she had done, and feel that she
was better than the other. It was her strong self, wanting to conquer, that made
her die.” . . .
. . . “My sister, thou hast read too many plays, where the writers delight in
showing the human passions as indwelling demons, unmixed with the relenting
and devout elements of the soul. Thou judgest by the plays, and not by thy own
heart, which is like our mother’s.”
Mirah made no answer. (629)

Mirah rejects Mordecai’s reading of the Jewish maiden’s actions as admirably selfless,
and instead interprets the woman’s sacrifice as driven by her own selfish desire to be
glorified as a martyr. The story of course parallels her own situation—she, a Jewish

50
Meyer connects this episode to a pattern of female refusals of self-sacrifice in the
novel.
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maiden, loves Deronda, whom she believes to be a Gentile in love with Gwendolen.
Although Mirah does not pursue any desperate course of action, her reading of the story
reveals her passionate spirit and her potential, already evidenced by her flight from her
father, to act on her will. Moreover, her willingness to correct the brother whom she
adores illustrates her refusal to bury her ideas and beliefs even for someone she loves and
reveres.
But Deronda is not present during this conversation, and he never recognizes the
similarities between Mirah and his mother. Instead, Mirah remains comfortably distant
from him. He views her as the dutiful sister of Mordecai, and nothing she does ever
corrupts his initial vision of her as a romantic damsel in distress. Her unappealing father
disappears before their marriage, and Mirah brings no other ugly baggage to their
relationship. Her rescue proves much easier than Gwendolen’s, and her connection to
Mordecai and his grand nationalist vision endows her with a sort of heroic inheritance.
She worships her brother and believes in his ideals; thus, she is the perfect wife for
Deronda—one whom he supposes will invest wholeheartedly in his quixotic plans.
Eliot rewards her hero with a happy ending to his courtship plot—Deronda
marries Mirah, offering her an escape from her troubled past by reuniting her with her
brother and providing her a properly Jewish path to follow as a means of spiritually
connecting with her dead mother, and he sails off on a romantic adventure to do
something related to restoring the Jews to their homeland (Eliot is not clear on this point),
leaving England and all of his responsibilities there behind. This ending is not entirely
satisfactory, however, for, as so many readers have noted, it does not provide any true
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resolution to the Gwendolen plot, which Eliot develops so extensively throughout the
novel.
The time the novel devotes to generating sympathy for Gwendolen, Deronda’s
own wavering between the two heroines throughout most of the novel, those other
George Eliot novels in which the heroine is saved through being educated by the hero—
all of these work to prepare the reader for Gwendolen’s ultimate redemption through
marriage to Deronda. Eliot seems to toy with her readers by voicing the expected
outcome of the novel through the character of Sir Hugo Mallinger: “[H]e was convinced
that Gwendolen had a passionate attachment to Deronda, the seeds of which had been
laid long ago … To him it was as pretty a story as need be that this fine creature and his
favourite Dan should have turned out to be formed for each other, and that the unsuitable
husband should have made his exit in such excellent time” (654). This is the ending that
Gwendolen, too, expects (as does every other character in the novel except Deronda), but
it is not to be hers.
Deronda puts off informing Gwendolen of his engagement to Mirah and his plans
to leave England until the last possible moment. Reluctant to involve himself and
Gwendolen in what must be a painful scene of leavetaking, he allows Gwendolen to
hope, and she is all the more devastated when she finally understands her abandonment.
Deronda’s last words to her are: “I shall be more with you than I used to be. If we had
been much together before, we should have felt our differences more, and seemed to get
farther apart. Now we can perhaps never see each other again. But our minds may get
nearer” (691). He leaves, and Gwendolen spends the day and half the night falling into
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“fits of shrieking” (692). She exits the narrative by reassuring her mother that she will
survive: “I shall live. I shall be better” (692).
Deronda’s final words to Gwendolen explain the trajectory of his relationship
with her, even if they alter the truth in order to make his actions appear less blameworthy
(he was certainly with her enough to feel their differences). As a means of justifying his
decision to abandon the woman he had encouraged to lean on him for support, he claims
that their separation will make their relationship stronger, and he is to some degree
correct. Deronda cannot bear the pain of continuing his troubled relationship with
Gwendolen; he is not prepared to sacrifice his own happiness in an effort to try to save
her, a rescue attempt that would likely only bring him grief. Thus, he leaves her in order
to pursue an equally doomed cause (there is no actual Zionist movement for him to lead;
he and Mirah are alone in their hopelessly vague plan to do something in the equally
vague location of “the East”
51
), but one that is comfortably abstract and at the same time
heroic. His last act towards Gwendolen is an attempt to remove her to a safe distance;
only when she is no longer a pressing personal concern can he renew their friendship.
Gwendolen does not reappear in the novel. Eliot closes with the marriage of
Mirah and Daniel followed by the death of Mordecai. We are only reminded of
Gwendolen—still unhappy but making an effort to live—through a brief letter to Deronda
that arrives on his wedding day, asking him not to grieve for her. The focus of the

51
The only time Deronda articulates his actual plan is in his farewell interview with
Gwendolen. He says to her: “I am going to the East to become better acquainted with
the condition of my race in various countries there. The idea that I am possessed with is
that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving
them a national centre, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the
face of the globe” (688).
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narrative very quickly shifts back to the journey to the East, and the closing words of the
novel are not about Gwendolen or Deronda, but about Mordecai. Thus, at the very end of
the novel, Eliot turns our gaze away from Gwendolen and the problems that still plague
her and towards Mordecai’s Zionist vision. In doing this, Eliot treats her plots much as
Deronda does his dueling causes.
Deronda is not the only one to pursue the beautiful lost cause as a heroic means of
escaping the personally painful. Eliot, too, turns away from the critique of women’s
social positions that she voices throughout the novel, and focuses her narrative attention
on the much more distant, impersonal cause of Zionism.
52
This is not to say that Eliot did
not sympathize with Jewish nationalism; her notes and correspondence show that she did.
It does, however, provide an explanation for why this novel ends the way it does, as well
as why the narrative seems at so many points conflicted about its heroine and her fellow
female sufferers. Eliot shows the problems that plague the women in the novel to be so
complex that she is left with no means of rescuing her heroines. Marrying Gwendolen to
Deronda would not restore the girl’s independence of mind (she is hopelessly dependent
on him as a guide for all she does) or remove the social and financial strictures that
caused her to lose her self-respect in the first place. Uniting the Alcharisi and her son in
familial bliss would not destroy the widely-held belief that women should not have public

52
In her biography of George Eliot, Rosemary Ashton draws attention to the use of the
Zionist plot for Eliot: “The choice of the Jewish ideal for her subject had one advantage
which she may not have articulated to herself. It liberated her from certain difficulties
she would have faced had she tried to envisage a better British society in this, her only
work set in the near-present, rather than the past. She shrank from party politics, as well
as from systematic Positivism. By choosing a vision which was hers only by imaginative
adoption, she avoided being harnessed to any cause closer to home, whether Comtist,
Marxist, universal suffragist, feminist, or any other” (348-49).
120
careers, even when they possess extraordinary talents. Any sort of satisfactory resolution
to the feminist plot was simply unavailable. As Bonnie Zimmerman notes, “Eliot
foresaw that alleviating the causes of women’s oppression would require more than
colleges and the vote. It would require fundamental alterations in marriage, family, and
access to power—in other words, revolution rather than reform” (236). But Eliot, in
keeping with the quixotic reform tradition, was unwilling to endorse such a revolution,
and to represent any such drastic social change in Daniel Deronda would have required
her to abandon her formal realism and venture off into the realm of the fantastic.
Instead of dwelling on the despairing implications of the lack of happy endings
for the women in the novel, Eliot concludes her narrative by investing in a cause that is
quixotic, yet mysterious enough to remain noble, heroic, and, because of its
indistinctness, remotely plausible. This more beautiful lost cause allows Eliot to
conclude her novel on a hopeful note, leaving girl-tragedies behind in the interest of
tracing the glorious future of a people to which she did not belong. Perhaps the plight of
the ambitious heroine lost its romance for Eliot, as it did for her hero, precisely because,
as a woman writer living an unorthodox lifestyle in Victorian England, there was no way
for her ever to achieve the distance necessary to view the feminist cause from a romantic
perspective.
At the same time, Eliot’s use of the dual-plot structure in Daniel Deronda
highlights a fundamental conflict within the quixotic reform tradition. Because quixotic
reform novels describe reformers who turn away from ordinary efforts at social
improvement in favor of doomed projects that seek larger changes, these narratives never
121
actually offer suggestions for contributing to actual social improvement. Daniel Deronda
marks a turning point in the history of quixotic reform in that it allows a glimpse at the
despairing implications of the attachment to lost causes; in other words, because Eliot
offers what can be considered two endings to the novel—Gwendolen’s tragic ending and
Deronda’s romantic, triumphant one—she presents the darker side of any quixotic effort
(no real change for the better ever occurs) while she simultaneously offers an optimistic
conclusion. While Tancred ends with no real plot resolution and, thus, no reflection on
the hero’s failure, and Bleak House concludes by ignoring the major failures of its
protagonists in favor of celebrating their small accomplishments, Daniel Deronda ends
both tragically and optimistically, a paradoxical conclusion that hints at the problems
inherent to abandoning one doomed cause for another.

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Chapter Four
“Often noble, but never heroic”: Embattled Idealism in
Gissing’s Demos, Thyrza, and The Nether World

While Daniel Deronda has much in it that is tragic, the novel nonetheless ends
with a hopeful investment in the hero’s future. Gwendolen is left in despair, but Deronda
sails off into the distance, presumably to accomplish great nationalistic feats on the behalf
of his people. The quixotic reformer is able to maintain his dream of a better world by
leaving his more troubled and familiar home in England for the distant and romantic East.
Just as in Tancred and Bleak House, the idealized quest for social improvement is, in the
end, waged outside the location the narrative reveals to be in most need of reform. And
hope, as well as a continued investment in quixotic reform, is maintained through this
distance from the social problems in need of improvement.
Such is not the case in the novels of George Gissing, particularly in the “slum”
novels of the late 1880s. Although Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World
(1889) all present idealistic reformers very much in the quixotic reform tradition,
Gissing’s narratives prove much more critical of the quixotic reform agenda than do the
novels discussed in the preceding chapters. While quixotic reformers in Gissing’s novels
are often noble, pursuing ambitious and charitable social projects, they are, as Mrs.
Ormonde in Thyrza says of that novel’s quixotic hero Walter Egremont, never heroic, for
they both fail to achieve their ends and cause more harm than good. Caught up in losing
battles between achieving social improvement and securing personal happiness, these
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heroes suffer defeats that call into question the feasibility and desirability of social
projects.
53

That Gissing’s novels take a much more critical approach to quixotic reform than
do those of Disraeli, Dickens, and Eliot is unsurprising considering Gissing’s personal
history and his ideological differences from these earlier authors. Gissing was himself a
sort of quixotic reformer, one who, like his heroes, experienced bitter defeats that left him
with a gloomy outlook on England’s future. Contrary to what his novels would indicate,
Gissing did not come from a working class background and was not a native of London.
The son of a Yorkshire apothecary, Gissing attended good schools on scholarship and
showed promise of eventually becoming a professional scholar. This all changed,
however, when he was expelled from Owens College at the age of eighteen for stealing
from his fellow students, an event that most Gissing scholars identify as crucial to
Gissing’s development as both a writer and social critic.

53
Many scholars have noted the theme of doomed idealism in Gissing, although none
have placed Gissing’s recurring representation of the attachment to lost causes in a
tradition of such approaches to reform. One discussion of Gissing’s novelistic treatment
of failed reform that stands out is David Grylls’s in The Paradox of Gissing. Grylls
argues, “This conflict between energetic aspiration and a certainty that all ambitions are
vain is possibly the key to Gissing’s self-divisions, for what typifies his treatment of his
central values—social reform, artistic integrity, intellectual striving, romantic passion—is
the way he remains attached at once to their futility and their necessity. Gissing is a
pessimist who believes in will power, an author who exposes the falsity of hope while
commending strenuous endeavour” (1). Grylls goes on to tie Gissing’s literary
attachment to lost causes to his view of his own personal and social failures, particularly
at the beginning of his career. Stephen Arata also notes Gissing’s fascination with
narratives of failure: “The typical Gissing heroine or hero of the 1880s—Adela Waltham
in Demos, Walter Egremont in Thyrza, Sidney Kirkwood in The Nether World—finds
that every attempt to lift up one's social, intellectual, or economic inferiors is by the
sternest law of nature doomed to fail” (36).

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Gissing was not a dishonest, criminal delinquent; he was an outstanding student
with a bright future. What prompted him to risk and, as it were, sacrifice that future was
not some base, selfish impulse, but rather a noble, albeit misguided, effort at social
justice. The money was not for him, but for the young, working-class prostitute, Nell
Harrison, with whom he had become infatuated. Gissing’s attempt at saving Nell
54

barred him for decades from a comfortable, middle-class social and financial position and
initiated a doomed relationship that would bring him years of pain. Although he
persisted in his efforts at rescuing Nell, both from her ignorance and from poverty,
eventually marrying her (even after writing Workers in the Dawn, the novel in which he
details the disastrous outcomes of such a marriage), Gissing’s noble sacrifice failed
utterly. Nell turned out to be a hopeless alcoholic, unable to sever herself from her
former occupation, and Gissing was forced to separate from her to ensure his own
financial and emotional survival.
55

This experience was only one of Gissing’s many quixotic attempts at bettering the
world. An extremely bright and highly educated man forced to live most of his life in
poverty, Gissing was intimately familiar with the dark side of the industrial progress of

54
Gissing did not offer money to Nell as an ordinary gift; he instead desired to provide
for her so that she would not have to turn to prostitution to support herself. Gissing’s
schoolmate Morley Roberts later reported that, prior to the theft, Gissing had bought Nell
a sewing machine so that she could take up a more reputable trade (Donnelly 23).
Gissing blamed society, not Nell, for the girl’s moral downfall, and because he had no
money or power of his own, he took to rectifying Nell’s situation by stealing from the
rich in order to help the poor, making himself into a sort of Victorian Robin Hood.

55
For a more detailed account of Gissing’s experience with Nell Harrison and his
academic and literary efforts prior to the publication of his first novel, see John
Halperin’s Gissing: A Life in Books and Gillian Tindall’s The Born Exile: George
Gissing.
125
the nineteenth century. His education had also left him a skilled linguist, and he was well
read in the social theories circulating on the Continent. His early friendship with the
German exile Eduard Bertz paired with his own remarkable facility with the German
language helped him develop an appreciation for the work of Schopenhauer years before
such ideas were in wide circulation in England. This Schopenhauerian pessimism mixed
with his own bitter personal experiences created for Gissing a skepticism concerning
reform and the possibility of social progress much darker and more intense than that of
Disraeli, Dickens, or Eliot.
Gissing began his novelistic career by writing “fiction with a purpose” that
detailed the deplorable conditions of working class slums as well as the tremendous gulfs
between classes within British society. Five of the seven novels Gissing published
56
in
the 1880s were “slum” novels: Workers in the Dawn (1880), The Unclassed (1884),
Demos (1886), Thyrza (1887), and The Nether World (1889). All of these novels feature
an idealistic hero who attempts unsuccessfully to improve the world in some way or
another. However, I will be looking only at the last three, which represent Gissing’s
more mature writing style and reflect the social debates of the 1880s (as opposed to the
1870s, as in Workers in the Dawn, or the author’s peculiar history, as in The Unclassed)
and Gissing’s more developed views on those debates.

56
Gissing wrote another novel, Mrs. Grundy’s Enemies, in the 1880s that would likely
have fit into the same category. John Halperin speculates that the novel attacked
“prudery in all its forms, as well as Radical idealism and democratic socialism” (49).
The novel was accepted for publication by Bentley in 1882, and Gissing spent many
months revising the manuscript, excising what Bentley found objectionable. However,
although the novel was advertised, it never appeared. No copies of the proofs or the
manuscript have been found.
126
Demos, Thyrza, and The Nether World all feature essentially the same plot
structure: an idealistic would-be reformer attempts to improve the lot of the working
classes, and through his efforts, brings unhappiness both to himself and to those nearest
him. Although they share the same basic plot, each novel is unique in its approach to
reform, the character of its reformer, and its more specific storyline. Through the use of a
rags-to-riches-back-to-rags story with a working class, socialist anti-hero, Demos
critiques socialist, working-class driven reform for lacking imagination, culture, and an
appreciation for beauty. Thyrza, on the other hand, through its tale of doomed love,
presents art and culture as unable to improve the lot of the working poor. The Nether
World, in contrast, abandons the romantic conflict between the reformer and his lover
that Gissing had used to fuel the plots of the earlier novels, and instead shows idealistic
projects to be incompatible with domestic happiness even in non-conjugal familial
relationships. Read together, these novels attack quixotic reform, or to use Gissing’s
word, “idealism,” as ineffective and harmful in all its varying forms. The idealistic
reformers are shown to be selfish and, to differing degrees, egotistical, even though all
are sincerely invested in their social projects. As Gillian Tindall says of The Nether
World, “Altruism itself stands exposed and condemned as the classic resort of the egotist”
(121), and the same is true in Demos and Thyrza. Moreover, each novel acts as a revision
of its predecessor(s), offering a correction to previously identified problems only to
locate new sources of failure.
57

57
John Goode makes an interesting point: “In one sense, as Gissing implies when he says
that Our Mutual Friend appeared when Dickens was already an anachronism, the
distance between Dickens and Gissing is marked by Darwin. The struggle for success
127
These novels also reveal, much more explicitly than the other novels I have
discussed, that quixotic reform is a masculine project. All three novels associate quixotic
reform with a particularly masculine form of egotism, one in which the reformer’s
dedication to the public good is both a form of hubris and in direct opposition to the
needs and desires of the women closest to him. Gissing’s heroines, however socially-
minded they may be, are shown to be ill-equipped to take on heroic projects for social
improvement simply because they are women; the working-class female protagonists are
shown to be too busy working and worrying about how to ward off starvation to be able
to focus on problems beyond the scope of their immediate domestic circle, and the
middle-class heroines are represented as circumscribed by society’s definition of
femininity and lady-like behavior, which prevents them from acting with the freedom of
their male peers.
At the same time, this identification of quixotic reform with masculinity functions
as another critique of liberalism, for selves and society are shown to be utterly
incompatible. As much as Gissing’s male heroes try to devote themselves to the good of
the many, they cannot disregard their status as individuals with private, domestic lives,
nor can his heroines break free enough from their private, domestic lives to be able to
devote themselves to the good of the many. In Demos, Thyrza, and The Nether World,
the pursuit of reform is shown to be both quixotic and destructive of personal happiness.

and recognition, the pleas of private benevolence, the belief in reform, give way to the
struggle for survival, the sense of a world in which oppression is systematic and
inescapable” (26). Gissing’s rewriting of the same reform plot only to have that plot end
in failure enforces this revelation that all methods of reform are lost causes.

128
* * *
Gissing’s unfortunate experiences in the late 1870s—his expulsion from Owens
College, prison sentence, and subsequent inability to find employment suited to his level
of education—exposed him to some of the evils of late Victorian urban life that, had it
not been for his sunken social position and poverty, he likely would never have
encountered. His journey through America (1876-77), during which time he barely eked
out a livable income by selling short stories, and his return to London to take up
residence with Nell left him critical of the social conditions that kept him, despite his
education, struggling to survive. But Gissing’s personal experience was not the only
source of his interest in social fiction. The time in which he began to write novels
witnessed a revival of a concern with the “condition of England” that made such writing
particularly popular.
The publication of Andrew Mearns’s “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” a
sensationalistic account of the urban poor published in 1883 as a pamphlet within the Pall
Mall Gazette, sparked a new interest in many of the social questions that had been raised
but not resolved in the 1840s and 50s. The popularity of Mearns’s pamphlet was aided
by the new sensationalistic journalism introduced by William T. Stead, who took over the
editorship of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1883. PMG readers were bombarded by horrifying
accounts of urban squalor, and the new work of social scientists provided troubling
statistics that made poverty in the nation’s capitol seem a pressing concern.
58

58
See Haggard, p. 27-28.
129
Although the condition of the urban poor was in fact no worse than in the
preceding decades, the political climate of the 1880s fostered the sense of an urgent need
for change in order to save the future of the nation. As Robert F. Haggard explains,
The “Condition of England” question, therefore, revived at a moment of great
stress. The crucial period between 1884 and 1887 witnessed the ‘Scramble for
Africa’ in international affairs, the further democratization of the British
electorate under the Third Reform Act, the splintering of the Gladstonian Liberal
Party over Home Rule for Ireland, the sharpest downturn in the national economy
since the 1840s, and the most serious rioting in London in a century. Each of
these factors, by raising doubts about the stability of either the British economy or
its political system, helped to perpetuate a culture of crisis conducive to the
continuation of popular discontent and, in this case, the discussion of
metropolitan poverty. (36)

Gissing, who had already been interested in social questions and who had published his
first slum novel, Workers in the Dawn, prior to the public panic over urban poverty, took
advantage of the popularity of social novels with Demos—his seventh novel written, but
third published.
Gissing began writing Demos in the fall of 1885 as a critique of working-class
reform movements and socialism. Although most of Gissing’s career could aptly be
described as unlucky—he had no talent for negotiating with publishers and rarely made
any sort of significant profit from his writing until late in his career—he proved quite
fortunate in his choice of topic for Demos. On February 8
th
, 1886, a riot broke out in
Trafalgar Square when several thousand members of the Social Democratic Federation
disrupted a meeting of the Fair Trade League. Due to mismanagement by the
Metropolitan Police, the rioters were able to break windows and loot stores in Pall Mall
for several hours. The event was immediately reported in the London newspapers, and
Gissing decided to take advantage of what could function as publicity for his new novel.
130
He went to his publisher, Smith, Elder, the very next day with the first two volumes of
Demos. The novel was accepted on the condition that Gissing complete the third volume
immediately so as to reap the benefits of current events.
59

Demos: A Story of English Socialism was Gissing’s first critical success. It is the
story of a working-class man, Richard Mutimer, who, in that favorite of Victorian plots,
inherits a large fortune from his wealthy, industrialist uncle, who dies intestate. Unlike
other rags-to-riches novels, however, Demos features a plot twist in which Mutimer loses
his newfound wealth when his wife discovers the uncle’s will tucked away in the family
pew at church. The novel traces the moral degeneration of Mutimer through his journey
from riches to rags and at the same time offers a bitter critique of socialism.
Aside from the contemporary appeal of the topic, one of the most celebrated
elements of Demos was the character of Richard Mutimer, whom Gissing portrays with
admirable complexity. Mutimer begins the novel as a passionate socialist who loses his
job because of his democratic ideas. He is more educated than the average working man
and dreams of spreading the gospel of socialism as a lecturer. While his interest in
socialism and the improvement of the living and working conditions of the poor are
sincere, his visions of his future are always plagued by too great an interest in his own
power and glory. The narrator explains:
Richard … was unmistakably zealous .… One saw from his way of speaking, that
he believed himself about to become a popular hero; already in imagination he
stood forth on platforms before vast assemblies, and heard his own voice
denouncing capitalism with force which nothing could resist. The first taste of
applause had given extraordinary impulse to his convictions, and the personal
ambition with which they were interwoven. (33)

59
For more on the publication of Demos, see Halperin p. 74.
131

His idealism is, from the beginning of the novel, tied to his egotism and his inability to
sympathize with the troubles of those nearest to him, especially the troubles of women.
Even when his betrothed, Emma Vine, tells him of her sister’s illness, he “had to summon
his thoughts from a great distance; his endeavour to look sympathetic was not very
successful” (32). Although he cares for the working classes in the abstract sense,
Mutimer offers little sympathy to victims of class oppression within his immediate reach
(Emma’s sister is ill because she has to walk miles to work due to not earning enough to
afford any other mode of transportation).
Mutimer’s habit of looking into the distance and of fixating on the glory he
receives from his social projects only worsens when he inherits his uncle’s fortune and
gains the means of actually carrying out some of his plans. Soon after learning of his
good luck, he thinks,
Aye, but he would prove himself such a one as you do not meet with every day;
and the foresight of deeds which should draw the eyes of men upon him, which
should shout his name abroad, softened his judgments with the charity of satisfied
ambition. He would be the glorified representative of his class. He would show
the world how a self-taught working man conceived the duties and privileges of
wealth. He would shame those dunder-headed, callous-hearted aristocrats, those
ravening bourgeois. Opportunity— what else had he wanted? No longer would
his voice be lost in petty lecture-halls, answered only by the applause of a handful
of mechanics. Ere many months had passed, crowds should throng to hear him;
his gospel would be trumpeted over the land. (45)

Thus, from the moment Mutimer acquires his fortune, his desire for social reform is tied
to his personal ambition and his longing to be recognized for heroism and greatness.
Mutimer’s egotism is contrasted, however, with his plans to do good. Instead of
using his fortune to live a life of luxury and material enjoyment, he decides to transform
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his inherited industrial works into a socialist community in which the men are paid decent
wages and provided with respectable living conditions. He explains to the Westlakes, his
middle-class, socialist friends:
“We shall be working not only to support ourselves, but every bit as much set on
profit as any capitalist in Belwick. The difference is, that the profit will benefit
no individual, but the Cause. There’ll be no attempt to carry out the idea of every
man receiving the just outcome of his labour, not because I shouldn’t be willing to
share in that way, but simply because we have a greater end in view than to
enrich ourselves. Our men must all be members of the Union, and their prime
interest must be the advancement of the principles of the union. We shall be able
to establish new papers, to hire halls, and to spread ourselves over the country.
It’ll be fighting the capitalist manufacturers with their own weapons.” (52)

Mutimer’s intentions for New Wanley are noble, and he is sincere in his desire to
implement socialist principles in order to help his new employees. However, as he comes
into closer contact with his social superiors, his socialist visions become clouded by his
desire for rank and fame.
The strongest example of Mutimer’s moral and ethical weakness is the obsession
with marrying a “lady” he develops soon after moving to New Wanley. After meeting
Adela Waltham, a beautiful young woman of average middle-class education but
possessing no fortune, Mutimer cannot bring himself to marry uneducated, working-class
Emma Vine. He tries to convince himself that his desire is tied to his social plan, that a
marital union of two classes would help further his cause, but his attraction to Adela
stems more from his desire to possess such a refined creature than from any selfless aim:
“[T]o have a ‘lady’ for his wife was now an essential in his plans for the future, and he
knew that the desired possession was purchasable for coin of the realm” (127). His
assumption that he can buy Adela proves, sadly, correct, and the naïve young woman is
133
coerced by her mother and brother into marrying a man she does not know or understand.
Although Adela does not, like the Vine sisters, have to slave as a factory girl or
seamstress in order to survive, she nonetheless falls prey, like Daniel Deronda’s
Gwendolen Harleth, to financial insecurity and familial pressure to marry respectably.
Much of the novel is devoted to tracing the conflicts between Mutimer and Adela,
and it is through this ill-matched marriage that Gissing makes his most poignant social
critiques. Adela, having been frightened away from the man she truly desired (Hubert
Eldon, the rightful heir to Mutimer’s fortune) by rumors of his dissipated past, accepts
Mutimer’s proposal in the mistaken belief that she can do some good in the world by
providing her socially-minded husband with religious guidance. She admires Mutimer’s
plans for New Wanley and believes the only thing missing from his mission of social
justice is a properly Christian attitude. As she learns more about Mutimer’s projects, she
realizes how unprepared she is to approach such problems of the world, and takes it upon
herself to study socialism (even to learn German) in order to be an able helpmate:
As a girl, her fate had been that of girls in general; when she could write without
orthographical errors, and could play by rote a few pieces of pianoforte music, her
education had been pronounced completed. In the profound moral revolution
which her nature had recently undergone her intellect also shared; when the first
numbing shock had spent itself, she felt the growth of an intellectual appetite
formerly unknown. Resolutely setting herself to exalt her husband, she magnified
his acquirements, and, as a duty, directed her mind to the things he deemed of
importance. (238)

Adela seeks to expand upon her faulty education in order to prepare to act as the wife of
an influential socialist, and she is quite successful.
Unfortunately, her intellectual development surpasses her husband’s
understanding, and the gulf between the two grows even wider. As Adela increases her
134
appreciation of social theory as well as of art and culture (her friendship with Stella
Westlake introduces her to the joys of poetry), her husband becomes more and more
obsessed with material concerns. Mutimer’s once-noble vision of New Wanley turns into
a project for exercising his own power and control. When Adela pleads with him to have
mercy on a worker guilty of breaking one of the rules of the community, Richard is
unwilling to consider the details of the man’s situation and give him a second chance.
Instead, he insults Adela for interfering with what he believes she cannot understand.
Because she is a woman, Adela is excluded from any of the actual management of the
New Wanley works, and her keen intelligence and impressive understanding of socialist
theory prove quite useless, for she is never given the chance to act. Richard becomes
increasingly threatened by Adela’s intellectual superiority and makes every effort to
confine her to a properly ladylike domestic role; instead of helping to improve the
workings of the socialist community, Adela is assigned to giving tea parties at the manor
house for the local children.
As Richard becomes more infatuated with his quest for glory (he even decides to
stand as a candidate for Parliament, an endeavor that fails miserably), he becomes
increasingly insensitive to Adela and the other women in his family. Because he is
shamed by Adela’s refinement and moral superiority, he reasserts his control by
antagonizing his wife. Adela’s health weakens, and she sinks into a sort of depression.
Instead of seeking to alleviate her unhappiness, Richard delights in aggravating his wife’s
fragile condition:
She was ill; he had a distinct pleasure in observing it. She longed for quiet and
retirement; he neglected his business to force his company upon her, to laugh and
135
talk loudly. She with difficulty read a page; he made her read aloud to him by the
hour, or write translations for him from French and German. The pale anguish of
her face was his joy; it fascinated him, fired his senses, made him a demon of
vicious cruelty. (277)

Richard’s refusal to recognize the failure of the lost cause to which he is attached and his
fear of his wife’s pointing out that failure, drive him to a sadistic attempt at destroying
Adela’s mental peace.
Richard asserts a similar degree of oppressive control over his younger sister,
Alice, who quickly grows tired of Richard’s pressure for her to become a lady. Upon
inheriting part of her uncle’s fortune, she enjoys her ability to buy expensive clothes and
her freedom from working as a factory girl, but her awareness of her lack of education
makes her uncomfortable interacting with women like Adela. She comes to resent the
boredom of the life of leisure granted her and seeks to escape her brother’s control.
Although he loves his sister, Richard does not understand her inability to adapt to her
new social situation, and his attempts at controlling Alice by telling her what she can and
cannot do are thwarted when she decides to marry without Richard’s approval. Richard
is horrified by his sister’s choice to marry someone without a title or fortune, but he can
do nothing to stop her because she threatens to reveal to Adela his ignoble treatment of
Emma Vine.
Richard’s efforts at controlling the women in his immediate domestic circle are
ultimately unsuccessful—Adela simply turns inward and maintains her spiritual purity,
and Alice does exactly what she wants, despite her brother’s orders—yet he does succeed
in making both Adela and Alice unhappy. However, he causes even more misery to the
women more removed from his direct control: his mother and Emma Vine. At the
136
beginning of the novel, Mrs. Mutimer is presented as a respectable, flourishing working-
class woman, whose home is clean and orderly, and who holds high standards of conduct
for her children. When Richard moves her to a larger house and asks her to give up her
old housekeeping occupations in order to live like a middle-class matron, she loses all of
her vitality and succumbs to depression. Her children no longer respect her, and she
maintains very little respect for herself. She is horrified by Richard’s abandonment of
Emma and refuses to speak to her son again. Mrs. Mutimer curses her son’s inheritance,
which brings her nothing but misery.
Likewise, Emma Vine’s life begins to crumble after Richard leaves her. Although
Richard offers to support her and her sisters just as he did when he and Emma were
engaged, Emma has too much pride and self-respect to accept his assistance. Instead of
being angry with Richard for his betrayal, she gives way to grief; her health fails, and she
and her remaining sister nearly starve. Richard, however, makes no real effort at helping
Emma or his mother. Both women deteriorate rapidly, but Richard remains too
immersed in his plans for New Wanley and his career in politics even to notice.
Throughout the novel, Richard’s social ideals are shown as inconsistent with his
personal actions. His disregard for the actual human suffering of the women around him
belies the hypocrisy of his attachment to public causes. Only after he loses his fortune
and sinks to an absolute moral low, resorting to venting his anger on Adela through
physical violence, does he begin to approach reform as aimed at helping actual people
rather than an abstract notion of the people. He loses some of his selfishness and egotism
and settles down to a quieter domestic life. His transformation is shown to be complete
137
when he sacrifices his public reputation by choosing to search for his sister, who, driven
mad by her bigamous husband’s abandonment of her, wanders away from Richard’s
home, rather than attend the socialist meeting he had scheduled to clear his name of
criminal charges; thus, Richard must sacrifice his public aims in order to salvage his
private life. Adela at this moment recognizes that Richard has finally learned to stop
gazing into the distance and attends the meeting in his place in order to defend his
name.
60
Their reconciliation is cut short, however, when Richard is killed by an angry
mob the following day.
Demos, thus, presents idealistic reform as having the potential to turn into a quest
for glory and power that is harmful both to the reformer and to those nearest him.
Although Richard fails in New Wanley because of the legal revocation of his fortune and
ownership of the works, the novel focuses on his moral downfall and the personal effects
of his misguided efforts. Moreover, Demos shows other socialist endeavors to be just as
flawed: the socialist working men are portrayed as insincere and opportunistic, and the
idealistic middle-class supporters of the movement, particularly Stella Westlake, are
depicted as impractical and unable to understand the actual lives of the poor. Through its

60
The scene is vaguely reminiscent of one in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854-
55) in which the middle-class heroine, Margaret Hale, stands up in front of an angry mob
in order to protect the manufacturer she eventually marries. In both novels, the middle-
class heroines are terrified by their brief public experiences but are able to benefit from
the shock-value of their public femininity; in Gaskell’s novel, Margaret’s intervention
breaks the mob out of its frenzy and, thus, saves the home of the novel’s hero, and in
Demos, Adela’s public defense of her husband grabs the mob’s attention long enough for
them to consider her words. However, the fact that both women are represented as
unusually brave for getting up in front of a crowd of men illustrates just how
unimaginable a public political career was for a woman during the period.
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presentation of the Vine sisters, the novel illustrates the need for reform, yet it reveals
socialism as the wrong means of achieving the desired ends.
Unfortunately, Gissing does not provide any satisfactory alternative to socialism.
The novel does not end with Mutimer’s redemption and death but instead proceeds to
follow Adela, who continues to defend Richard’s reputation, but whose sympathy
eventually lies with non-social ideals. In the end, she marries Hubert Eldon, the novel’s
advocate of art, beauty, and culture. He razes New Wanley and attempts to return the
rural countryside to its former natural splendor. Gissing seems to strive for a happy
ending of sorts by uniting his heroine with the educated, cultured man whom she desired
all along. However, as many contemporary reviewers noted, Eldon is such a thin
character that it is nearly impossible to put faith in his devotion to culture as a means of
improving the world. No evidence is given of aesthetic appreciation helping anyone but
Adela, the heroine in less need of help than Emma Vine or Mrs. Mutimer. As the
reviewer for the Spectator wrote,
Aestheticism appears to be the only alternative in the author’s mind for the
materialistic ideal in the realisation of which his Socialist hero so miserably fails.
Demos is the book of a pessimist with no belief in the power of what are called
progressive ideas, but also with little or no spiritual faith which might prove a
higher motive-power than that of which equality and fraternity are the favourite
watch-cries. (qtd. in Coustillas and Partridge 85)

Another reviewer for The Times concluded, “[O]n the general problem we get but
negative results, leading us nowhere, and sadly bidding us despair of the future of the
human race” (qtd. in Coustillas and Partridge 81).
As these reviewers make clear, Gissing’s inability or unwillingness to invest in
any alternative to Mutimer’s approach to social justice leaves Demos with a rather
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gloomy ending. Class divisions are not bridged, and nothing is done to improve the lot of
the workers in New Wanley or London. The social message of the novel is, however,
rendered somewhat dubious by the fact that Gissing devotes so much attention to
Mutimer’s personal flaws. Richard’s lack of imagination and inability to empathize with
others is attributed throughout the novel to his lack of education. The novel implies that,
had Mutimer only been taught to appreciate literature and art and thus learned to extend
his sympathy to his fellow sufferers, things might have turned out differently. His
transformation comes too late, and the harm that he caused cannot be undone;
nonetheless, Gissing did not give up entirely on Richard Mutimer. Instead, he chose to
re-work the same plot in his next novel, Thyrza, correcting the very faults that brought
about Richard’s downfall and, in doing so, offering a quite different critique of reform.
* * *
Thyrza: A Tale is, as its title implies, more in the tradition of romance than its
predecessor, despite the fact that most of the narrative is devoted to chronicling the lives
of the working classes in Lambeth. The novel features a hero, Walter Egremont, much
more typical of a Gissing novel than Richard Mutimer. The son of a self-made man,
Egremont is a gentleman with a university education who takes great interest in social
projects. He begins the novel as a young enthusiast eager to devote himself to the
betterment of society but having lacked, until recently, a specific object for his attention.
He is granted the title of “Idealist” by both the narrator and his friends, a sure sign in a
Gissing novel that his efforts are doomed to failure:
Somebody had called him “the Idealist,” and the name adhered to him. At two-
and-twenty he published a volume of poems, obviously derived from study of
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Shelley, but marked with a certain freshness of impersonal aspiration which was
pleasant enough. They had the note of sincerity rather than the true poetical
promise. The book had no successor. Having found this utterance for his fervour,
Egremont began a series of ramblings over sea, in search, he said, of himself. The
object seemed to evade him; he returned to England from time to time, always in
appearance more restless, but always overflowing with ideas, for which he had the
readiest store of enthusiastic words. (10)

Egremont is described as a bright young man with the education and financial means to
do something noteworthy. However, “his striving always seemed to be for something
remote from the world about him” (11). Like Daniel Deronda, Egremont sets his gaze on
the far edge of the horizon, which prevents him from settling on a worthy career at home
in London.
Egremont eventually does, however, find an object for his social passion: he
decides to give a series of lectures to a small group of working men in Lambeth, the
location of his family’s factory. Egremont approaches reform in exactly the way we
would expect to succeed, judging from the conclusion of Demos: he seeks to teach
working men an appreciation of literature and culture in order to inspire them to live
better lives. He explains to his friends, the Newthorpes:
“Those who want to be of social usefulness for the most part attack the lowest
stratum. It seems like going to the heart of the problem, of course, and any one
who has means finds there the hope of readiest result—material result. But I
think that the really practical task is the most neglected, just because it does not
appear so pressing. With the mud at the bottom of society we can practically do
nothing; only the vast changes to be wrought by time will cleanse that foulness,
by destroying the monstrous wrong which produces it. What I should like to
attempt would be the spiritual education of the upper artisan and mechanic
class…I believe such men as these have a great part to play in social
development—that, in fact, they may become the great social reformers, working
on those above them—the froth of society—no less than on those below.” (14)

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Unlike Richard Mutimer, Egremont does not neglect the spiritual side of those in need of
help. He instead places intellectual development at the heart of his reform agenda. He
continues, “If one could only stir a few of them to enthusiasm for an ideal of life!
Suppose one could teach them to feel the purpose of such a book as ‘Sesame and Lilies’”
(15). To aspire towards an ideal life, to have hope of something beyond the grinding
daily existence of the factory is, for Egremont, what working men must learn before they
can make changes in their material conditions. These enlightened working men could, he
believes, undo the harm caused by all of the Richard Mutimers in London:
“The work of people who labour in the abominable quarters of the town would be
absurdly insignificant in comparison with what these men might do. The vulgar
influence of half-taught revolutionists, social and religious, might be
counteracted; an incalculable change for good might be made on the borders of
the social inferno, and would spread. But it can only be done by personal
influence. The man must have an ideal himself before he can create it in others.”
(15)

Thus, Egremont begins his project without any of the flaws that plagued Richard
Mutimer.
Egremont’s project is initially successful in that he meets a working man who is
able to benefit from the lectures on English literature. Although almost all of the other
attendees of the lectures cannot understand Egremont’s ideas or ideals, Gilbert Grail
eagerly absorbs all that he can from Egremont. To Grail, the lectures provide a much-
needed break from his dreary existence. Having spent years reading on his own what
books he could afford, he appreciates the cultural contact Egremont provides. Of course,
Gilbert Grail is not the average factory worker, a point Egremont quickly comes to
understand:
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[Grail’s] hours were from six in the morning to seven at night. Ah, that terrible
rising at five o’clock, when it seemed at first as if he must fall back again in sheer
anguish of fatigue, when his eyeballs throbbed to the light and the lids were as if
weighted with iron, when the bitterness of the day before him was like poison in
his heart! He could not live as his fellow-workmen did, coming home to satisfy
his hunger and spend a couple of hours in recreation, then to well-earned sleep.
Every minute of freedom, of time in which he was no longer a machine but a
thinking and desiring man, he held precious as fine gold. How could he yield to
heaviness and sleep, when books lay open before him, and Knowledge, the
goddess of his worship, whispered wondrous promises? To Gilbert, a printed
page was as the fountain of life; he loved literature passionately, and hungered to
know the history of man’s mind through all the ages. (67)

Grail is everything that Richard Mutimer (and almost all of the other working men in
Gissing’s novels) was not. He has a keen appreciation for art and beauty, and his only
sign of selfishness is his willingness to devote time to his personal development.
Although Egremont’s other students prove disappointing and the lecture series as
a whole is a failure, Egremont is pleased just to have been able to help Grail. After
getting to know the man better, Egremont decides that he can help Grail even further—
and help all of the other Grails that might be lurking in Lambeth—by opening a free
library and making Grail the librarian. Grail is extremely grateful for the opportunity to
exercise his mind and not his hands. Moreover, the newly granted financial freedom—
Egremont offers to pay Grail a stipend much larger than the worker’s meager factory
wages, as well as to provide housing on the premises of the library—prompts Grail to
propose to Thyrza Trent, a beautiful, young factory girl living in his building. Mistaking
her respect and admiration for Grail for love, Thyrza accepts his offer, and Grail’s
happiness is complete.
Up until this point in the novel, Egremont’s philanthropic efforts are both noble
and, to a small degree, effective. He displays none of Richard Mutimer’s egotism, and
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his plans are carried out with no thought to his own glorification or benefit. Indeed, he
lives a lonely life in rather dilapidated lodgings, and sacrifices his social connections in
London to his project in Lambeth. Egremont views the working poor in Lambeth as
actual people with thoughts and feelings, and he does his best to enlighten a few men in
order to make their lives feel less of a burden. However, his project is nonetheless
doomed to failure, not because of any personal shortcoming but simply because of his
natural human emotions.
When Thyrza and Egremont meet, they fall in love, and although they try to hide
their feelings, neither is able to carry on with his or her life as before. Thyrza makes
herself ill pining for Egremont and worrying over hurting Grail, whom she truly cares
about. Egremont, too, fears hurting Grail and tries his best to banish Thyrza from his
thoughts. Unable to resist Thyrza’s attraction when near her, Egremont decides to flee
England in hopes of his passions dissipating and Thyrza’s and Grail’s marriage occurring
as planned. Unfortunately, Thyrza cannot bring herself to marry Grail while loving
Egremont, and she, too, flees, but to the East End of London; she does so under the
assumption that no one will reveal her love for Egremont to Grail so that he can continue
working at the library. However, Thyrza’s sister, Lydia, informs Grail of what has
happened, and he renounces the librarianship. This brings Egremont’s plan for social
improvement to an end.
The quixotic reformer fails in Thyrza not because of personal or ideological flaws,
as was the case in Demos, but because of circumstances beyond his control. Both
Egremont and Thyrza do everything possible to prevent their feelings for each other from
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destroying the plan for the public library. However, personal emotions supercede public
zeal, and Egremont’s good intentions come to nothing. Moreover, the plan to educate
working men in order to give them an understanding of the finer things in life—a favorite
Victorian reform scheme—succeeds only in bringing greater misery to those most likely
to benefit from it. Grail’s knowledge of what his class position and work obligations
deny him only makes him dissatisfied. Likewise, Thyrza’s encounter with great music
and genteel manners after her escape from Lambeth feeds her discontent with the sort of
life her sister and friends are able to enjoy. All of the other working people that
Egremont attempts to help are simply unaffected; their lack of education and lifestyle
prevents them from understanding or caring for the kind of intellectual development that
Egremont prizes.
At least part of Egremont’s philanthropic failure stems from his middle-class
values and worldview and the way the working-class people he interacts with interpret
his actions and motives according to stereotypes of gentlemen. Egremont’s education
and upbringing keep him from being able to understand fully the average working man,
which leads to his choosing an impractical philanthropic project. His class position
combined with his sex lead to his downfall regarding Thyrza, for when people learn of
his involvement with her, they assume he is simply acting like the average rake,
interested only in getting what he can from Thyza without any respectable intentions.
Both Thyrza and Egremont fall victim to the dubious appearance created by their pure-
hearted actions (everyone assumes that they have fled together, when in fact, neither
knows of the other’s departure), and much of their misery is caused by the pressures
145
created from the stereotype of the debauched middle-class man ruining the weak-willed,
working-class woman that the residents of Lambeth regard as an accurate model of cross-
class interaction. Egremont isn’t given much of a chance to succeed in his charitable
plans because the people he seeks to help are suspicious of his motives and unwilling to
view his genuine concern for their well-being as innocent and sincere.
The most positive examples in the novel of successful charity for the poor are
provided not through middle-class men, but through working-class women. Lydia Trent,
Thyrza’s sister, and Mary Bower, the daughter of one of Egremont’s least successful
students, help the aged and disabled Mr. Boddy, the kindhearted man who raised the
Trent sisters, by sharing what they can from their meager earnings and, in Mary’s case,
family kitchen. Similarly, Thyrza’s friend Totty Nancarrow assists her widower neighbor
Mr. Bunce by helping care for his children; her charity is complete when she inherits a
small sum from a middle-class uncle and marries Bunce in order to give him a fresh start
in life. None of these women—Lydia, Mary, Totty—are educated or refined, yet all are
loving and generous. While the novel reveals philanthropy from above to be doomed to
failure, even when practiced with the best intentions and by the most noble of
practitioners, small acts of charity between members of the same class, particularly
performed by women, are shown as having the potential to brighten the gloom of
working-class life, if only temporarily. However, none of the working-class charitable
women are shown to be capable of making any significant improvements beyond their
domestic circles. As in Demos, Gissing invests no faith in large-scale philanthropic
efforts, but unlike in the earlier novel, he presents a miniscule degree of hope in personal
146
kindness as a means of alleviating misery. His next novel, however, removes even this
glimmer of optimism.
* * *
Just as Gissing offered a revision and correction in Thyrza of his reformer’s faults
in Demos, he revises the problems outlined in Thyrza—the investment in educating the
working classes, the dangers of philanthropic work done across class lines, the troubles
caused by the reformer’s romantic involvement—in his final slum novel, The Nether
World. The Nether World is unique among Gissing’s reform novels in that it focuses
entirely on the working classes, and in that it abandons the plot device of the reformer’s
cross-class romantic entanglement. The novel follows the lives of several working class
characters in Clerkenwell, one of whom is an aged man returned from Australia with his
deceased son’s fortune. Michael Snowdon appears, as Gillian Tindall puts it, “like a
cross between the Ancient Mariner and the beggar-king of folk-tale” (119), eager to use
his son’s fortune to help the people suffering in the London slums as he had suffered
years before.
Instead of, like Richard Mutimer, forging a romantic alliance to further his cause,
Snowdon takes under his paternal wing his young granddaughter, Jane, whom he rescues
from domestic slavery. After discovering the girl’s natural good temper and kindness,
Snowdon designates her as the future savior of her people. He tells his friend, the artisan
Sidney Kirkwood and the man who loves Jane,
“[The idea] came to me in that form whilst I was sitting by [Jane’s] bed, when she
was ill at Mrs. Peckover’s. I knew nothing of her character then, and the idea I
had might have come to nothing through her turning out untrustworthy. But I
thought to myself: Suppose she grows up to be a good woman—suppose I can
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teach her to look at things in the same way as I do myself, train her to feel that no
happiness could be greater than the power to put an end to ever so little of the
want and wretchedness about her—suppose when I die I could have the certainty
that all this money was going to be used for the good of the poor by a woman who
herself belonged to the poor?” (178)

Snowdon’s plan is to make of Jane a sort of professional Lydia Trent or Mary Bower,
endowed with the financial means to alleviate the misery of the Clerkenwell poor. He
does not educate her to become a lady, but instead instructs her in lessons of mercy,
helping her develop her natural sympathy for those of her class in need of help. His
dream is for her to remain true to her class—she is not to use any of the money for her
own luxury—so that she can best understand how to aid those who cannot help
themselves.
While working-class women’s charity was extolled in Thyrza, this admirable form
of personal kindness is presented in a much darker light in The Nether World, not because
of any fault of Jane’s, but because of her grandfather’s obsession with his dream. As
Gissing’s final commentary on quixotic reform, The Nether World reveals any organized
plan to aid the poor—even efforts carried out by kindhearted people who understand
those they aim to help—as both futile and, strangely, corrupt. Reform, the novel
suggests, is always a means of controlling other people; the power to help others is still a
form of power, and guidance quickly transforms into tyranny.
61

61
Dan Bivona and Roger Henkle make a similar point: “Unfortunately, [Michael
Snowdon’s] scheme is as impracticable as any of the others, and it is thwarted in the plot
of the novel, as if Gissing were bent on exposing the fecklessness of the entire concept of
such wish-fulfilling, guilt-dispelling interventions. It is thwarted because the
grandfather’s desire for reform is traced by the contradictions that are, in Gissing’s view,
unresolvable: one cannot make people ‘better’ without exercising a kind of manipulative
power over them that constitutes a well-meaning tyranny, but tyranny nonetheless. The
148
Although Michael Snowdon proves his benevolence by rescuing Jane and is
shown to be a loving grandfather, the novel focuses on the way in which Snowdon’s
charitable dream becomes an obsession that blinds him to the needs and desires of his
granddaughter. His thoughts seem to possess him; as he relates his ideas to Kirkwood,
“[h]is eyes gleamed with that light which betrays the enthusiast, the idealist” (177). As in
Demos and Thyrza, the title “idealist” is not flattering and belies the quixotic, doomed
nature of Snowdon’s plans. He even idealizes Jane into a social saint, taking no heed of
the responsibilities and pressures he places upon her. When he first tells her of his
plan—after he tells Kirkwood and approves the socially-minded man as a fit helpmeet for
his protégé—Jane is distressed by what is expected of her:
The immediate effect of the disclosure made to [Jane] by Michael whilst he was
recovering was to overwhelm her with a sense of responsibilities, to throw her
mind into painful tumult. Slow of thought, habituated to the simplest views of her
own existence, very ignorant of the world beyond the little circle in which her life
had been passed, she could not at once bring into the control of her reflection this
wondrous future to which her eyes had been opened….[I]nstead of inspiring her
with his own zeal, [Snowdon] afflicted her with grievous spiritual trouble. For a
time she could only feel that something great and hard and high was suddenly
required of her. (222-223)

Although Jane repeatedly demonstrates her ability and willingness to help those of her
class in need—her cheerfulness and gentle nature inspire Kirkwood to abandon some of
his pessimism, and her charity and kindness serve as lifelines for her friend Pennyloaf—
she does not feel herself strong enough to carry out the formal mission her grandfather
assigns her. She only agrees to do what he asks once she learns that Kirkwood will be
there to support her.

very desire to escape such tyranny is valorized as heroic individualism; here it is at war
with the desire to make people better” (126-27).
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But Kirkwood is quickly made uncomfortable by the position Jane’s wealth
places him in. He confesses his love for Jane before he learns of her fortune, and as he
ponders how his marriage to her will be interpreted (his worries are aggravated by Jane’s
scheming father, whose only interest is to secure the inheritance for himself), he comes to
loathe the idea of being understood as having courted Jane for base motives. He also
comes to realize that Snowdon’s plan for Jane is likely to destroy the girl’s happiness:
The struggle went all against idealism. It was a noble vision, that of Michael’s,
but too certainly Jane Snowdon was not the person to make it a reality; the fearful
danger was, that all the possibilities of her life might be sacrificed to a vain
conscientousness. Her character was full of purity and sweetness and self-
forgetful warmth, but it had not the strength necessary for the carrying out of a
purpose beset with difficulties and perils. (233)

He dreams of telling Snowdon what he really thinks of the plan for Jane:
“You have formed a wild scheme, the project of a fanatic. Its realization would
be a miracle, and in your heart you must know that Jane’s character contains no
miraculous possibilities. You are playing with people’s lives, as fanatics always
do. For Heaven’s sake, bestow your money on the practical folks who make a
solid business of relieving distress!...Jane is a simple girl, of infinite goodness;
what possesses you that you want to make her an impossible sort of social
saint?”
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(233)

Although Jane seems to Snowdon the ideal person to act as philanthropist and activist for
her community, Kirkwood points out the unlikelihood of Jane’s being able to succeed.

62
Kirkwood’s prediction of Jane’s inability to perform all that is asked of her seems
harsh and overly reliant on stereotypes of feminine weakness. However, Jane views
herself in the same terms, and the narrative offers nothing to contradict this view of her.
Adrian Poole makes an interesting comparison between Jane and Dickens’s Amy Dorrit:
“If this sort of discrepancy between the excessive passivity of the two central characters
[Jane and Sidney] and the energy of the narrator puts us in mind of Little Dorrit, it must
be to register first that Jane Snowdon is not vitalised by incorporation in a set of dynamic
metaphors as Amy Dorrit is, and secondly, that this is deliberate on Gissing’s part.
Indeed, Jane is as near as possible to being a deliberate exposure of the fictional ‘Angel
of Mercy’ image, for it is precisely in this role that her idealistic grandfather casts her”
(99).
150
Indeed, Gissing presents Jane as almost a parody of the idealized Victorian woman by
making her so self-effacing, so meek, so devoted to minor domestic accomplishments,
and so naïve about the general workings of society that only the half-mad Snowdon
would think her capable of carrying out a complex plan for improving an entire
community. This image of Jane serves less as a critique of Jane herself or of
philanthropic women in general, and more as an “exposure of the fictional ‘Angel of
Mercy’ image,” as Adrian Poole argues (99). Jane cannot be a social savior because she
lacks the education and social conditioning that would have been necessary to prepare her
for such a role.
This section of the novel also reveals the tyrannical aspect of reform, for as soon
as Snowdon attempts to alter the life of his granddaughter—in other words, to re-form
Jane—he threatens to destroy her selfhood and her ability to act for herself. When
Kirkwood tells Snowdon that he cannot marry Jane (he does not tell Jane this himself,
there having been no formal engagement but only communication through Snowdon),
Snowdon does not consider the effect of such news on his granddaughter but instead sees
the turn of events as beneficial to his plan. He decides that Jane’s remaining unmarried is
really in the best interest of her future, since without a husband and family to care for, she
could devote herself more completely to her social concerns. The narrator comments:
Michael had taken the last step in that process of dehumanization which threatens
idealists of his type. He had reached at length the pass of those frenzied votaries
of a supernatural creed who exact from their disciples the sacrifice of every
human piety. Returning home, he murmured to himself again and again, ‘She
must not marry. She must overcome this desire of a happiness such as ordinary
women may enjoy. For my sake, and for the sake of her suffering fellow-
creatures, Jane must win this victory over herself.’ (255)

151
Although Snowdon is mostly correct in realizing that Jane could not focus on a public
project if she had to fulfill the many duties of a wife and mother, his noble plan
nonetheless becomes a source of madness for him—his obsession with redeeming his
sordid past by putting his son’s ill-begotten fortune to good use turns into a controlling
passion that prevents him from seeing his granddaughter as a thinking, feeling woman.
His own desire for improving the world makes him willing to disregard the desires of the
woman he depends upon for success.
Jane begs Snowdon to give the money to someone else, to relieve her of her
responsibility. She faints in front of her grandfather, and her wasted appearance reveals
the toll Michael’s dreams have taken on her health: “Pale face, showing now the thinness
which it had not wholly outgrown, the inheritance from miserable childhood; no face of a
stern heroine, counting as idle all the natural longings of the heart, consecrated to a
lifelong combat with giant wrongs. Nothing better nor worse than the face of one who
can love and must be loved in turn” (308). Gissing draws attention to the absurdity of
placing such a heavy social burden on an ordinary girl. Jane is no “stern heroine”—such
women, the narrator implies, only exist in novels far less realistic than The Nether World.
Refusing to offer a romantic portrayal of a working-class heroine, Gissing suggests,
through the example of Jane, that the dreadful conditions of urban poverty leave lasting
emotional scars; Michael Snowdon’s belief in Jane’s ability to rise above her past and
develop into a clever, strong-willed, persevering working-class version of Jane Eyre is, in
Gissing’s quasi-naturalist literary world, quixotic.
152
Sadly, Jane’s apparent frailness does not touch her grandfather, and he decides to
alter his will and leave his fortune to organized charity. A few days later, Jane learns that
Kirkwood has become engaged to someone else; with no hope of personal happiness,
Jane apologizes to her grandfather and promises to do all that is asked of her. The two
are reconciled, but Snowdon dies suddenly the day before he is to make his new will,
having destroyed his former one. All of the inheritance goes to Jane’s debauched father,
who loses everything in financial speculations in America.
In The Nether World, Gissing goes to great lengths to illustrate the poverty and
squalor endured by the working classes. The novel makes a clear case for the need for
social reform of some sort, yet, as in the previous novels, from whence that reform should
come is unclear. Michael Snowdon’s benevolent plan for a working-class woman to help
the suffering members of her class comes to nothing because, the novel suggests, one
woman is not capable of caring for an entire section of the city. As in Demos and Thyrza,
social projects are shown to be antithetical to domestic and personal happiness; to look to
the public good is to sacrifice personal contentment. At the same time, the novel
condemns organized charity as ineffective. Through the brief descriptions of Miss Lant,
a middle-class lady philanthropist, and her failure running the Clerkenwell soup kitchen,
Gissing condemns the most plausible alternative to the sort of project that Snowdon
undertakes. In the end, The Nether World suggests that all charitable projects come to
nothing.
* * *
153
Each of Gissing’s slum novels from the late 1880s offers, on its own, a limited
critique of social reform. However, read together, the set of novels provides a
condemnation of quixotic reform more pointed and sustained than in any of the other
works I have discussed. In a way, Gissing brings together the two narratives of Eliot’s
Daniel Deronda by showing the selfishness inherent to seeking social improvement at the
expense of domestic happiness. Instead of focusing on the heroism of pursuing beautiful
lost causes, Gissing’s final slum novels reveal the pain caused by the male quixotic
reformer’s disregard for the women in his life who are forced to struggle with the
unpleasantness of reality. One gets the impression that, if Gissing had written his own
version of Deronda, he would have made the title character far less likeable, and the
novel surely would have concluded by focusing on Gwendolen’s misery rather than on
Daniel’s departure from all that threatened to intrude upon his happiness.
By drawing attention to the gendered nature of quixotic reform, Gissing also
highlights other of the paradoxes that plague the tradition. Reformers are not able to
pursue the public good without hurting their domestic happiness but, at the same time,
they cannot focus on their domestic happiness and accomplish anything significant for
the public good; the pursuit of noble, heroic causes is haunted by the taint of egotism, yet
true selflessness prevents one from maintaining the strength to change society; and the
world is in dire need of major reform, but all attempts at reform are both futile and,
strangely, destructive. Gissing’s slum novels reveal a profound skepticism in the
possibility for positive social change and hint at the madness of pursuing the lost cause of
significant social improvement.
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Chapter Five
“A tragic Don Quixote”: Jude the Obscure and the Tragedy of Reform

Although Gissing stands out as one of the most pessimistic chroniclers of
working-class life in urban London at the end of the nineteenth century, he was certainly
not alone in offering a bleak forecast for the future of British social reform, nor was his
tone of general gloom unique. Gissing’s work was most frequently identified by
Victorian reviewers with the naturalist novels of Emile Zola, a comparison that Gissing
resented and tried to ward off throughout his career. Instead of aligning himself with the
French naturalists, Gissing placed himself in the British realist tradition, and he was
particularly influenced by the career of Thomas Hardy. Hardy, another writer of humble
origins, mostly self-educated and without a university degree, had achieved critical
success in 1874 with the publication of Far from the Madding-Crowd. Although Hardy
had gone through his own struggle with breaking into the competitive world of novel-
writing, he had by the mid-1870s found his literary niche and was celebrated for his
Wessex novels. Gissing learned from Hardy’s success and chose to chronicle a particular
way of life in a particular geographical area. That he selected as his topic working-class
life in the slums of London made him seem more of a naturalist, but Gissing was, in fact,
just modeling himself on the career-path of Thomas Hardy.
What Gissing did not intentionally copy from Hardy was his pessimism; indeed,
at the time Gissing published his relentlessly gloomy slum novels in the 1880s, Hardy
was still channeling his despair into the appropriate genre of tragedy, where a certain
degree of sadness was to be expected and appreciated. Reviewers condemned Gissing for
his pessimistic portrayal of the lives of the urban poor, yet they were more praiseworthy
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of Hardy for his tragic narratives, presumably because the rural setting of the Wessex
novels made suffering enjoyably picturesque. Hardy toyed with more experimental, non-
tragic, non-pastoral forms in the middle of his novel-writing career, but his efforts were
not appreciated
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and he returned to his familiar mode in 1886 with The Mayor of
Casterbridge, followed by The Woodlanders (1887) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles
(1891). Although Tess created quite a stir because of its sexual content and, in particular,
because of Hardy’s defense of his heroine, the novel sold extremely well and partly met
the expectations readers had developed for Hardy’s Wessex narratives: a picturesque
rural setting and a tragic plot.
And then came Jude the Obscure (1895), Hardy’s final novel, and the one in
which he presents the darkest view of British society. Jude is also Hardy’s only reform
novel,
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and the novel’s critique of reform is inextricably tied to its extreme pessimism.

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Victorian readers seem to have had little tolerance for novelists experimenting with
new genres or topics. George Eliot’s attempts at breaking away from writing about
English rural life, primarily in Romola and Daniel Deronda, were met with the same
complaints and requests to return to the type of novel she had perfected as were Hardy’s
efforts at innovation. Even Gissing, whose slum novels never enjoyed the kind of
success as Eliot’s or Hardy’s best known works, was initially condemned for abandoning
“what he knew” when he turned to writing about middle-class life after The Nether
World.

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As Amanda Claybaugh notes, none of Hardy’s most successful novels were explicitly
engaged with issues of reform, primarily because they all fell under the non-reformist
modes of tragedy or pastoral. Claybaugh explains, “Tragedy, of course, is necessarily
opposed to reform. It attributes suffering to individual or cosmic, rather than social,
causes, and it discharges through catharsis the readerly response that reformist texts
instead seek to transform into social action. Pastoral, by contrast, had been a reformist
mode in the past. In Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590, 1593) and William Shakespeare’s As
You Like It (1598-1600), the temporary retreat to a simplified natural space makes
possible the renovation of the existing social and political world. But in Hardy, the
simplified natural space is discontinuous with the existing world and so does not admit of
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In Jude, Hardy successfully annoyed his readers by using a more modern, urban setting;
shocked them with his attack on marriage, his focus on sexuality, and his insistence on
describing decidedly unpicturesque scenes of suffering; and, quite remarkably, called into
question the merits of the British tradition of the novel of purpose by portraying a world
in which reform is quixotic. And, by presenting quixotic protagonists whose failures are
not noble but instead deeply tragic, Jude marks the end of the quixotic reform tradition.
Unlike earlier quixotic reform novels, Jude does not feature a hero who abandons
traditional reform in favor of a more noble, yet impractical cause. Instead, the novel
features three protagonists—Jude Fawley, Sue Bridehead, and Richard Phillotson—who
disregard the need for reform altogether and attempt to live as if the society they think
should exist actually does. All three start out with an endearing devotion to pursuing a
course of action that they feel is right, and all three are punished ruthlessly for their
failure to recognize and acknowledge social realities. Quite remarkably, none of the
three needs the sort of political or legislative reform that most reform narratives
advocated; instead, Jude shows that some of the reforms Jude, Sue, and Phillotson seem
to need have already been achieved. The three benefit from more relaxed divorce laws,
moderate educational reforms, and a greater degree of gender equality (Sue still suffers
because of her gender, but she is allowed much more freedom and more social and
economic opportunities than, say, Gwendolen Harleth), yet none of these advantages
makes much of a difference in securing happiness for the three.

reformist thinking. In all of Hardy’s novels until the last, potentially reformist subject
matter is contained within modes that either distance or rechannel readerly response”
(189).

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Reform, the novel implies, cannot alter the true source of Jude, Sue, and
Phillotson’s misery, which is caused not by individual sources of oppression, but by the
general narrow worldview and intolerance of society. Like the earlier quixotic reform
novels, Jude emphasizes the need for a fundamental change in the workings of society in
order for significant and lasting social improvements to be made. However, unlike
earlier novels, Jude shows such a change to be utterly impossible. Those who pursue
such an ideological change—which Jude, Sue, and Phillotson all do to some extent—are
punished for their naïve idealism, and their futile attempts at thwarting convention can be
read as foolhardy. Moreover, none of the three is granted any sort of hope for a better
future. Unlike earlier quixotic reform novels, Jude the Obscure does not turn away from
the failure of its heroes; instead, it focuses intensely and almost perversely on their
downfalls, offering no reprieve from the gloom for the tragic quixotes or for readers.
* * *
As George Levine has noted, Jude the Obscure begins as a fairly standard
quixotic narrative by detailing the progress of a young man who privileges the ideal over
the real.
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Indeed, Hardy claimed to have organized the entire novel around such a
conflict. He wrote to Edmund Gosse in response to Gosse’s review of Jude:

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Levine, in his excellent Cartesian reading of Jude, sees the novel as too pessimistic to
be categorized as a traditional Bildungsroman or disenchantment narrative. He explains,
“Cervantean ‘disenchantment’ is a key element in such stories [of transformation], but
Hardy handles that motif rather differently. For one thing, Jude persists irrationally in his
obsession with Oxford—sufficiently in fact to die there—so that the redemptive
transformation of behavior through disenchantment does not play itself out in the novel.
Moreover, Jude is different from the usual realist hero in that while like them he cannot
attain his ideal, he is allowed no realist compromise, no accommodation to the harsh
unaccommodating actual, no inner spiritual salvation, and no Agnes pointing upward.
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The “grimy” features of the story go to show the contrast between the ideal life a
man wished to lead, and the squalid real life he was fated to lead. The throwing
of the pizzle, at the supreme moment of [Jude’s] young dream, is to sharply
initiate this contrast.… The idea was meant to run all through the novel. It is, in
fact, to be discovered in everybody’s life, though it lies less on the surface perhaps
than it does in my poor puppet’s. (qtd. in Millgate 9)

Although Hardy claims in his letter to Gosse to have felt he failed miserably in conveying
the meaning behind the launching of Arabella’s “novel artillery” (Jude 34), a scene to
which even sympathetic reviewers like Gosse strongly objected,
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Hardy was right in
identifying the conflict between the ideal and the real as being most apparent in the life of
his “poor puppet,” Jude.
This emphasis on Jude’s quixotism is underscored by the fact that Hardy begins
the novel by describing the source of the boy’s obsession. Young Jude laments the loss
of his favorite teacher, Richard Phillotson, who leaves Marygreen for Christminster in
hopes of gaining acceptance to the university and eventually becoming a curate.
Impressionable and sensitive, Jude sees no reason to doubt the feasibility of his mentor’s
plan and dreams of someday following Phillotson to the magical land of learning.

Some of Hardy’s earlier books buy happiness with compromise. Jude and Hardy see no
compromise possible: body and spirit cannot accommodate, and body conditions every
thought. There can be no retreat here into the English conservatism of the
Bildungsroman tradition” (110). Levine provides an insightful analysis of the mind-body
conflict in Jude. However, he does not connect the novel’s pessimism to the issue of
reform, which is my purpose here.

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As with Hardy’s other novels, Jude was originally published in two versions: a
serialized and heavily bowdlerized version for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
(distributed in monthly installments in both America and England from December 1894
to November 1895), and a volume form (although a single volume, unlike the three-
volume editions of Hardy’s other novels) that restored most of the material Hardy was
asked to modify or omit from the family-oriented periodical version. I will be referring
to the final 1912 revision of the volume-form of the novel.
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Because his life in Marygreen is so dreary, the imaginative boy chooses to spend most of
his time fantasizing about a Christminster that is of his own creation:
Through the solid barrier of cold cretaceous upland to the northward he was
always beholding a gorgeous city—the fancied place he had likened to the new
Jerusalem, though there was perhaps more of the painter’s imagination and less of
the diamond merchant’s in his dreams thereof than in those of the Apocalyptic
writer. And the city acquired a tangibility, a permanence, and hold on his life,
mainly from the one nucleus of fact that the man for whose knowledge and
purposes he had so much reverence was actually living there; not only so, but
living among the more thoughtful and mentally shining ones therein. (20)

In imagining Christminster as “the new Jerusalem,” Jude sets himself up to be
disappointed. He focuses on the ideal and does all that he can to minimize the pain
caused by the injustice, however small, of the real (for example, his job of helping his
Aunt Drusilla) that threatens to overtake his fantasies. Like Don Quixote, he gazes into
the distance and imagines a world of romance, taking no heed of the ugliness of
circumstance and limited opportunities imposed on him by his poverty.
But Jude’s enthrallment with Christminster is more immediately tied to an issue
of reform than the adventures of his chivalric predecessor, for the goal towards which
Jude aspires (a university education) is only an impossibility because of economic and
social strictures.
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Hardy creates the reformist aspect of this narrative strand by making
the young Jude a sympathetic character. The persistence with which Jude adheres to his
dream is endearing, as is the naivete he demonstrates in remaining blind to all of the

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The social critique implied by Jude’s story is also quite obvious because Hardy makes
no attempt to make Christminster into a genuinely fictional place. Christminster is
Oxford—Hardy populates the city of Jude’s imagination with the ghosts of the actual
historical figures most associated with Oxford and describes the city as it in fact was at
the time. In making a real university the focus of Jude’s obsession—a university that had
already come under attack for its elitism and triviality—Hardy encourages reading Jude’s
tale of disenchantment from a reformist viewpoint.
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social and economic barriers that bar him from achieving his goal. Hardy makes sure that
Jude’s ignorance is apparent (we see him swindled by Physician Vilbert, and the narrator
draws attention to the futility of trying to learn Greek and Latin alone, especially using
outdated books), and thus encourages pity for the boy’s hopeless task. Jude’s class
position, we know, prevents him from realizing his dream, and this is unfair; had Jude
been brought up in a middle-class or aristocratic family, he would most likely have been
given the resources and assistance to enable him to attend Christminster.
Jude’s fantasies of intellectual eminence are interrupted, however, by the
“characteristic part of a barrow-pig” (33), and he briefly stops gazing into the distance
long enough to indulge his un-intellectual passion for Arabella. David Lodge argues that
Jude’s entanglement with Arabella weakens Hardy’s critique of the elitist university
system by attributing Jude’s failure to his own weakness and his involvement with
women (Lodge 193). However, as Marjorie Garson points out, Jude’s Christminster
dream is doomed to failure before he meets Arabella. Although Garson offers a
compelling defense of Arabella’s role in the destruction of Jude’s university dream, she
nonetheless comes to the same conclusion as Lodge: that Hardy failed in presenting a
coherent class critique (Garson 186).
Both critics are correct in criticizing the effectiveness of Hardy’s attack on
Oxford’s elitism. As a reform narrative, Jude’s tale fails to make a truly strong case
against the university system because Jude’s inability to gain admittance does not seem
entirely due to his class position. Even though, as Garson points out, Jude’s severely
limited education and lack of financial resources are what really prevent him from
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attending school at Christminster, Hardy devotes so much time to describing Jude’s
personal shortcomings, particularly his weakness for Arabella, that the class critique is
diluted (Garson 186). This, however, is not because Hardy lacked the skill and
experience to write a convincing reform narrative, but because the novel makes a much
broader social critique, one that extends beyond the relatively minor issue of the elitist
university that, because of its absurd removal from the world of practical concerns, was
unworthy of Jude’s devotion in the first place. The novel implies that Jude’s problem
isn’t just his class position; rather, he suffers much more intensely because of his
idealistic worldview.
Jude’s brief period of living with Arabella serves as a crash-course in economic
realities (Arabella, who has a keen understanding of what things cost and what it takes to
survive, acts as tutor), yet Jude absorbs nothing from his experience and continues, rather
foolishly, to disregard his ignorance of the real world once he is rid of his wife. He
moves to Christminster and focuses his energy on doing what he thinks is necessary to
prepare for admittance to the university:
Like enthusiasts in general he made no inquiries into details of procedure.
Picking up general notions from casual acquaintance, he never dwelt upon them.
For the present, he said to himself, the one thing necessary was to get ready by
accumulating money and knowledge, and await whatever chances were afforded
to such an one of becoming a son of the University. ‘For wisdom is a defence,
and money is a defence; but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth
life to them that have it.’ His desire absorbed him, and left no part of him to
weigh its practicability. (71).

Jude’s class position does not exclude him from knowing the basic requirements of
attending Christminster. His idealism and blindness to practical matters are what keep
him marching down his doomed path, for even the working people of Christminster, who
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are less refined than Jude, understand what Jude does not. In fact, it is a fellow working
man who first alerts Jude to his small chances of success. A villager says to him, “Such
places be not for such as you—only for them with plenty o’ money” (92). Jude refutes
this argument, but “the remark was sufficient to withdraw Jude’s attention from the
imaginative world he had lately inhabited, in which an abstract figure, more or less
himself, was steeping his mind in a sublimation of the arts and sciences, and making his
calling and election sure to a seat in the paradise of the learned” (92). Until this moment,
Jude lives entirely according to his idealistic vision of the world; while his lack of money,
education, and social status prevents him from having any chance of attending
Christminster, his impractical views keep him from making even the slightest progress
towards achieving his goal or realizing the futility of the project he has undertaken.
While Jude’s dream of attending Christminster is quixotic, his desire for an
education is not. By the 1890s,
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technical colleges, free lectures, and artisans’ societies
were quite common, and Jude could have pursued any of these options as at least a
beginning to a means of self-improvement (he does eventually become a member of an
artisans’ society, but only briefly and after he has failed to gain access to the university).
However, Jude wants more than an education; as so many critics have pointed out, Jude’s
dream of earning a university degree is tied to his dream of entering the clergy, earning a

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The period in which Jude is set is somewhat ambiguous. Michael Millgate contends
that Hardy meant the story to take place in the 1860s (Biography 346), which would
somewhat explain the characters’ ignorance of the 1857 divorce reforms. However, Sue
Bridehead, with all of her urbanity and modern views, seems very much a creature of the
1890s. Overall, the novel reflects the pessimistic tone of the time in which it was written,
and it was interpreted by most Victorian readers as an attack on contemporary morals and
values.
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middle-class income, and taking part in a romanticized tradition of exalted learning.
Although there were examples of “self-made” men who successfully transcended class
boundaries that Jude could have emulated, he has no desire to pursue a career in trade or
manufacturing—the unromantic, less-than-noble fields in which he would have had
slightly better odds of success. Reforms had already taken place
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to improve the
opportunities available to someone of his class, but this makes no difference to Jude
because he only cares about turning his own imagined vision of success into a reality.
When Jude begins to lose hope of achieving his goal as he waits for replies from
the dons he selected as his lifelines to the university, he blames Christminster for his
woes:
He saw what a curious and cunning glamour the neighbourhood of the place had
exercised over him. To get there and live there, to move among the churches and
halls and become imbued with the genius loci, had seemed to his dreaming youth,
as the spot shaped its charms to him from its halo on the horizon, the obvious and
ideal thing to do. ‘Let me only get there,’ he had said with the fatuousness of
Crusoe over his big boat, ‘and the rest is but a matter of time and energy.’ It
would have been far better for him in every way if he had never come within sight
and sound of the delusive precincts, had gone to some busy commercial town with
the sole object of making money by his wits, and thence surveyed his plan in true
perspective. (94)

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Amanda Claybaugh also argues that the educational reforms the novel calls for (in the
Jude/Christminster narrative) had already taken place, but she gives as her reason the
example of Sue’s access to the Melchester Training School. While providing formal
training so that women could become licensed teachers was certainly an important
educational reform, this social improvement does not relate to Jude’s situation. What
Jude seems to need, as so many educational activists at the turn of the century pointed
out, is something along the lines of Ruskin College, which was not founded until 1899.
However, the merits of Ruskin College for Jude would have lay primarily in that it was
located at Oxford, the city of his dreams. The sorts of courses the school offered were
available to working men in the early 1890s (indeed, even much earlier), but such
educational programs did not confer the sort of prestige or removal from common
concerns that Jude desires. Jude does not even bother to investigate more realistic
alternatives to Christminster, however, because he is so single-minded about his future.
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As lamentable as Jude’s exclusion from Christminster because of his class position is, his
resentment towards the city and the “curious and cunning glamour” it had “exercised
over him” is illogical. His vision of Christminster, although aided by the general cultural
glorification of the universities, was mostly of his own creation, and his failure to
recognize that he was pursuing an impractical course of action without seeking help from
anyone who had more experience in such matters (someone such as the already-
disillusioned Phillotson) is his own fault. Moreover, his quixotic vision of Christminster
is in no way unique, for Jude views most of the important aspects of his life through a
cloud of idealism that only sets him up for disappointment.
Although Jude’s initial attraction to Arabella is fueled by lust, he endures their
relationship after his initial passion has cooled by ignoring the real flesh and blood
woman and focusing on his own more romantic vision of her. Jude “knew well, too well,
in the centre of his brain, that Arabella was not worth a great deal as a specimen of
woman kind,” yet he remains relatively calm when he decides to marry her and “take the
consequences” for having indulged his sexual appetite (48). He isn’t able to invest in his
fantasy of Arabella with the same enthusiasm and sincerity he is able to direct towards
Christminster, but he deceives himself nonetheless: “For his own soothing he kept up a
factitious belief in her. His idea of her was the thing of most consequence, not Arabella
herself” (48). And, although he intentionally creates a quixotic view of Arabella, his
willingness to focus on the ideal over the real is symptomatic of a general, somewhat
absurd tendency in his character.
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He does the same with Sue, but with more success and less awareness. Jude’s
fantasies of Sue go back to his discovery of his cousin’s portrait at his Aunt Drusilla’s,
but Jude chooses to indulge his romantic vision even after he has the opportunity to meet
and get to know Sue. He puts off introducing himself and instead simply watches his
cousin: “Thus he kept watch over her, and liked to feel she was there. The consciousness
of her living presence stimulated him. But she remained more or less an ideal character,
about whose form he began to weave curious and fantastic day-dreams” (72). Just as
with Christminster and Arabella, Jude focuses on the idea of Sue that he creates, rather
than on the real person. To what extent Jude continues to love the idea of Sue rather than
Sue herself throughout their relationship is certainly questionable.
In all that he does, Jude privileges the ideal over the real, and it is this disregard
for the practical workings of the world that gets him into trouble. While the society he
lives in is far from perfect, Jude contributes to his own downfall by passionately pursuing
his own idealistic dreams. Sue says to him, “You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear
Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they
were stoning him, could see Heaven opened” (162). The comparisons Sue makes are
telling, for Jude’s visionary predecessors all saw a better world than what they were
forced to experience. However, as Sue notes, dreamers aren’t usually rewarded for their
idealism. She warns Jude, “O my poor friend and comrade, you’ll suffer yet!” (162), and
she is correct: Jude’s quixotism only brings him misery.
Although Jude has moments of clarity in which he can recognize his ideals as
incongruent with reality, he nevertheless proves extremely reluctant to abandon his
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dreams entirely, perhaps because abandoning them would be to resign himself to the
dreary lack of prospects before him. After having admitted his mistake in pursuing the
lost cause of a Christminster education and after having left behind his city of dreams in
order to be with Sue, Jude perversely and desperately reestablishes his attachment to
Christminster after he and Sue hit hard times, and decides to return to the place that
caused him so much pain. He says to Sue,
“Well, I do, I can’t help it. I love the place—although I know how it hates all
men like me—the so-called Self-taught,—how it scorns our laboured acquisitions,
when it should be the first to respect them; how it sneers at our false quantities
and mispronunciations, when it should say, I see you want help, my poor friend!
… Nevertheless, it is the centre of the universe to me, because of my early
dream: and nothing can alter it. Perhaps it will soon wake up, and be generous. I
pray so! … I should like to go back to live there—perhaps to die there! In two or
three weeks I might, I think. It will then be June, and I should like to be there by
a particular day.” (252)

When Jude and Sue first begin to live as a family, they have a period of happiness before
reality crashes back in and they are forced to recognize the prejudice they face for living
together without being legally married. As soon as Jude makes this first encounter with
unpleasant reality, he retreats back to the comfort of his initial dream and focuses again
on Christminster. Thus, Jude’s quixotism functions as an avenue for him to remove
himself, although not successfully, from the harsh world that refuses to allow him the
opportunity to live the life he wants.
His return to his New Jerusalem is not quite in the spirit that he left the city,
however. Instead of approaching Christminster armed with the lessons derived from his
former experience there, he enters the city suffering from a sort of mad fascination with
the university’s traditions. Much like his Cervantean predecessor, his quixotism here is
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associated with madness. He arrives with his family on Remembrance Day, and instead
of heeding Sue’s warning that they should search for lodging, he ignores the comfort of
his family and insists on trying to catch a glimpse of the academic festivities. Again, like
Don Quixote, Jude fails to consider the physical ramifications of his actions and, in
indulging his madness, brings harm upon himself. He raves like a madman, frightening
Sue and the children, and is soaked by the rain. This disregard for practical
considerations, to which Jude is driven by society’s intolerance for his views, leads to the
illness that plagues him through all of his final sorrows until his death; for Jude,
quixotism proves to be lethal.
The episodes leading up to Jude’s return to Christminster work to build sympathy
for him and Sue. As he struggles with his complicated relationship with Sue, Jude is
forced to battle unemployment, poverty, and illness, largely because his and Sue’s
definition of a just life does not correspond to society’s. The Remembrance Day scene at
Christminster, however, functions differently by showing Jude’s destructive obsession.
While Jude is still a victim of society, and, as he sees it, of Christminster in particular,
Sue and the children are Jude’s victims, as they are the ones who suffer most, initially at
least, for his refusal to take care of practical matters. Jude’s pathetic verbal assault on
Christminster has the potential to serve a tragic purpose by illustrating what his social
failure has driven him to, but it also an absurd gesture that cannot possibly accomplish
anything.
Rather than following the pattern of quixotic reform that I have argued is
characteristic of Victorian reform novels, Hardy does not grant his doomed hero an aura
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of nobility or heroism in order to conclude Jude’s tale on a positive note. Hardy’s
quixote is not the Romantic Knight of the Sad Face, who battles hopelessly but heroically
against the real in an attempt to achieve the ideal; rather, he is the eighteenth-century
madman whose efforts are almost comically futile, a representation that is despairingly
tragic. The novel as a whole depicts a troubled world in need of reform, but quixotism,
or idealism, is not an effective means of bringing about change. Jude’s narrative arc (as
well as Sue’s and Phillotson’s, as I will show) suggests that, tragically, idealism has no
place in the real world. Between the real and the ideal is an unbridgeable chasm, and to
focus on the ideal is to doom oneself to walk blindly into the dangerous obstacles of the
real. Efforts to remove the obstacles of the real prove just as futile, however, for once
those are gone, the giant gulf that makes the ideal unattainable still exists. This is best
demonstrated in Sue’s narrative.
* * *
Poor Sue has borne the burden of a great deal of critical assessment. Most readers
and scholars have, throughout the novel’s history, found her a far more interesting
character than Jude, and the bulk of criticism from recent decades has been inspired by
feminist interest in the concept of the New Woman. While the debates over how closely
Sue resembles the heroines of New Woman writers or how indebted Hardy was to his
female contemporaries are certainly interesting and important, I would like to consider
Sue outside of any strict literary category in order to show how she compares to earlier
Victorian heroines rather than to the heroines of other novels from the 1890s. Although
Sue couldn’t have existed as a literary creation without the literary, political, and cultural
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movements that allowed Hardy even to imagine her, I think it is useful to read her as a
unique character, the product of all of the incongruous ideas about gender, marriage, and
religion circulating at the end of the nineteenth century. As Terry Eagleton eloquently
notes,
Sue, like Jude himself, is a ‘representative’ character, in the great tradition of
nineteenth-century realism which Hardy inherited; and her elusive complexity
stems in part from the fact that she points beyond herself, to a confused,
ambiguous structure of feeling which belongs to the period in general. Her
opaqueness and inconsistency as a character are thus neither merely personal
attributes nor evidence of some failure of full realisation on Hardy’s part; it is
precisely in her opaqueness and inconsistency that she is at once more fully
realized and most completely representative. (68)

Part of what makes Sue such a fascinating character is the fact that she doesn’t fit easily
into any literary or ideological categories.
Sue is, as Hardy reminds us repeatedly, very similar to Jude in temperament and
feeling. She, too, is a quixote. In fact, she is really the first true female quixotic reformer
I’ve discussed.
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In all of the earlier quixotic reform novels, the female protagonists were
so busy with domestic and economic concerns, that they did not have the freedom or the
time to gaze into the distance and make large-scale plans for social improvement or even
to develop their own views on how they thought society ought to operate. Ava,
Tancred’s heroine, spends her time caring for her father and family and uses her talents
as a healer to help, on occasion, people who are in pain. She is described as intelligent,
practical, and level-headed, and she offers useful advice to her quixotic companions
Tancred and Fakredeen; however, the novel implies that, were she to pursue some

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Esther Summerson is the only other heroine who could be considered a quixotic
reformer. However, her plans and view of the world are always limited to her domestic
circle; she does not have the far-sightedness of the male quixotes.
170
quixotic plan of her own, domestic chaos would ensue and she would likely be
reprimanded for unfeminine behavior.
Likewise, in Bleak House, it is again male characters who are the most quixotic.
While the narrative invests quixotically in Esther’s ability to change the world, Esther
does her best to keep her efforts as hidden and as appropriately domestic as possible. The
one female character who does pursue a truly quixotic plan, Mrs. Jellyby, is condemned
by the more likeable characters for her failure to carry out her domestic duties. In Daniel
Deronda, on the other hand, Gwendolen has moments of quixotic belief in her own
power, but she does not and cannot take on any grand scheme such as Daniel Deronda’s,
because she is too busy worrying about obtaining the means to live. Even if she didn’t
have to worry so much about the sordid needs of income, the novel makes clear that her
ability to act or to do anything of real significance in the world is severely limited by her
gender. Similarly, Gissing’s novels, as I have shown, depict female characters who either
spend all of their time struggling to fend off starvation or who must devote all of their
energy to domestic concerns.
Sue, in contrast, benefits from the decades of feminist activism that, by the 1890s,
provided middle-class women with a few more educational opportunities and slightly
greater social freedom. Sue enjoys greater physical mobility than most of her literary
predecessors (she moves about from Marygreen to London to Christminster to
Melchester), which allows her access to different ideas and ways of life. Although she
isn’t much better off financially than Jude, she is surprisingly well-read (thanks to her
undergraduate friend but not to any formal education) and has learned a respectable trade
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that allows her to support herself without having to worry about finding a husband.
When she decides to become a teacher, there is a women’s school for her to attend so that
she can obtain a teaching license. And when she finds that she has made a mistake in
marrying Phillotson, she is able to get a divorce
71
and start a new life with Jude.
Because Sue has no family to care for, does not need to worry about finding a
husband or earning enough to survive, and is decently educated, she has the time and the
ability to develop her own ideas about the world and the way she wants to live her life.
Unlike Jude, however, she has no definite goal; much like Gwendolen Harleth, Sue seems
bent on simply doing as she likes. Moreover, she seems unaware of or unconcerned with
what is or is not socially permissible and goes about making important decisions without
considering the implications of her actions. Like Jude, she is fairly ignorant of reality
because she lives according to her own ideals. Soon after she has realized her mistake in
marrying Phillotson, she says to Jude, “Before I married him I had never thought out
fully what marriage meant, even though I knew. It was idiotic of me—there is no
excuse” (170). But just as she had no real understanding of marriage, she is ignorant of
the means of getting out of her bad situation. She pleads with Phillotson for her release:
“Why can’t we agree to free each other? We made the compact, and surely we can

71
Sue, Jude, and Arabella benefit from the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which
placed divorce cases under the jurisdiction of the legal courts rather than Parliament.
However, as William A. Davis, Jr. points out, both Jude’s and Sue’s divorces are really
obtained illegally (Sue has not consummated her relationship with Jude and thus has not
committed adultery, and Jude and Arabella are “in collusion” about their separation,
which, had it been known, would have gotten their case dismissed), and Sue could not
have petitioned for divorce herself. That Hardy ignores all of these technicalities and
allows his protagonists easy releases from their marriages allows him to attack
fundamental problems with the institution of marriage that legal reforms cannot fix.
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cancel it—not legally, of course; but we can morally, especially as no new interests, in
the shape of children, have arisen to be looked after” (176). There is, of course, a way to
cancel the marriage legally, but Sue (and Jude) knows nothing about divorce.
Fortunately for Sue (at least in the short term), Phillotson is willing to let her go,
and he is eventually able to make her departure from their relationship legal. Sue is able
to do as she pleases—to live with Jude and, for a while at least, to do so on her terms.
However, the legal freedom she enjoys and her ability to envision a way of life that suits
her
72
do not make much of a difference for Sue in the end. At one point, she asks
Phillotson, “Well—why should I suffer for what I was born to be, if it doesn’t hurt other
people?” (176), but Sue overestimates society’s tolerance for letting her do as she likes.
Sue is well-versed in J.S. Mill’s version of liberalism, but her narrative shows the
impossibility of following her own ideals, even if they harm no one; the tyranny of the
majority proves to be a powerfully oppressive force, even for someone as socially
insignificant as Sue.
In the end, reform makes no difference for Sue. Her divorce legally frees her
from Phillotson, but Hardy suggests that this doesn’t really matter; Sue takes up her new
life with Jude before she learns of the possibility of getting a divorce, and then she
refuses to legalize her relationship with Jude, which is the only real benefit (other than a
small degree of peace of mind) the divorce could provide for her. As Amanda Claybaugh
explains, “The availability of divorce makes no difference in the lives of Sue and Jude

72
Like Kathleen Blake, I see Sue’s aversion to sex as a means of protecting herself and
her independence as well as a benign lifestyle preference, rather than as a psychological
defect or personal failing.
173
because they want something more radical than what divorce can provide. Divorce frees
them to marry one another, but they want to be free of marriage altogether” (208).
Moreover, Sue’s education and teaching license are useless to her because she cannot
work as a respectable teacher while living with Jude in the way that she wants. What Sue
needs is for people to accept her as she is and allow her to live the life she desires, but her
desire for such tolerance is quixotic.
Sue and Jude are able to live in blissful ignorance of social dictates for a short
while, but then they are forced to acknowledge the limits of their freedom. At the auction
of their belongings “[t]hey found that, instead of the furniture, their own personal
histories and past conduct began to be discussed to an unexpected and intolerable extent
by the intending bidders. It was not till now that they really discovered what a fools’
paradise of supposed unrecognition they had been living in of late” (208). And while this
unpleasant realization affects both Jude and Sue, the brunt of the social condemnation
falls upon Sue, whose relationship with Jude is judged according to the unforgiving
standards of female sexual purity. She proves less capable than Jude of living in her own
fantasies and develops an awareness of the importance of practical matters long before
Jude does (if he ever does, that is). Part of her disenchantment surely stems from having
given in to Jude’s sexual pressure, having taken on an ordinary domestic role (even
though Sue never becomes very motherly), and having thus become strapped with many
of the financial and familial worries from which she was free in her maidenhood.
The ability to imagine and believe in an ideal world requires the ability to ignore
the sordidness of reality, and Sue loses this ability when she sacrifices her independence.
174
She is forced to see that she cannot live the life she chooses because society shuns
unmarried women with children. Sue, not Jude, is forced to deal with the family’s
financial stress and the difficulty of acquiring lodging without lying about her marital
status, and Sue, not Jude, must take care of the family in their times of greatest need. By
the time she returns to Christminster with Jude and the children, she is tired and worn and
retains none of her former optimism. Little Father Time’s murder-suicide and the loss of
her unborn child destroy whatever was left of Sue’s former self, and she repudiates all of
her unorthodox views and embraces religious conservatism. In a hopelessly misguided
attempt to atone for her former “sins” (her idealistic worldview and quixotic behavior
that she thought could harm no one), Sue inflicts her own punishment and returns to
Phillotson, forcing herself to enact the traditional wifely role she still loathes.
As with Jude’s example, Sue’s narrative shows idealism to be antithetical to the
workings of the modern world. Despite all of the progressive reforms she enjoys, Sue is
punished for trying to live the just life she thought was best suited to her and ends up
worse off than the heroines of earlier novels who lacked her education, opportunities, and
freedom. Sue is doomed to suffering because the only thing that can make her happy is a
revolution in the way society thinks; but while this idea was common to earlier quixotic
reformers, Hardy does not let Sue (or Jude) find any consolation in her realization.
Instead, she is made to see that such a revolution is impossible. Modest reforms make no
difference at all, and those who try to ignore social conventions suffer for their audacity.
Tragically, both Sue and Jude are complicit in their own downfalls. Neither
idealist is truly free from the bonds of social convention, and their inability to abandon all
175
investment in social values makes their experiences all the more painful. Although Jude
can see past class prejudice and envision a world in which young men from poor rural
families can attend prestigious universities, he cannot question why the universities
should be given so much social prestige in the first place. Likewise, Sue wishes to love
without a legal license, yet in her period of greatest intellectual independence, she
worries about how her, in her view, innocent relationship with Jude appears to the
strangers she and Jude encounter. Both Jude and Sue try very hard to be revolutionary,
but neither is entirely successful. This highlights the incredible difficulty of achieving
what Sue and Jude desire—a revolution in the way people think—because even the most
open-minded opponents of social conventions cannot fully escape the strictures they
condemn.
* * *
Because Sue and Jude are such odd creatures who seem to suffer from some
hereditary susceptibility to dangerous idealism, it is tempting to read their tale of woe as
driven by their own peculiarities. However, Hardy makes clear that this is not the case—
that there isn’t something wrong with Sue and Jude, but rather something terribly wrong
with society—by including a third quixote in the form of the utterly ordinary Richard
Phillotson. Because Jude and Sue are so dramatic in their idealism and so given to
philosophizing about their ideas, it is easy to forget that the much calmer, quieter
Phillotson shares the same ideological weakness that dooms his theatrical friends.
Phillotson rarely gets to stand in the narrative spotlight, but when he does, he proves
176
himself to be idealistic in his own way, and he suffers just as intensely as Jude and Sue
for his idealism.
Phillotson, in fact, embraces the peculiar forms of quixotism of both Jude and
Sue. Although we hear almost nothing about his youthful plans for his future or the
details of his disenchantment, we know that Phillotson is the original Christminster
quixote—Jude only develops his own university dream after he hears of his mentor’s plan
to make something of himself at Christminster. When Phillotson reappears in the
narrative, he is “an obviously much chastened and disappointed man” (82). Like Jude, he
had a sadly mistaken belief in his power to break through class barriers through the
merits of his intellect, and like Jude, he learns that the real world is not in any way
sympathetic to his dreams.
While the young Phillotson resembles Jude in his quixotic dream of gaining
access to a Christminster education, Phillotson resembles Sue in his ability to envision a
world in which people should have the freedom to fix their mistakes and live as they
please. He is shockingly open-minded when Sue presents her plea for a release from her
marital commitment. He tells his much more practical friend Gillingham about his
strange situation, and Gillingham replies, “But if people did as you want to do, there’d be
a general domestic disintegration. The family would no longer be the social unit” (184).
Phillotson responds, “Yes—I am all abroad, I suppose! I was never a very bright
reasoner, you remember…. And yet, I don’t see why the woman and the children should
not be the unit without the man” (184). Gillingham is astounded: “By the Lord Harry!—
Matriarchy! … Does she say all this too?” Phillotson replies, “O no. She little thinks I
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have out-Sued Sue in this—all in the last twelve hours!” (184). And, although he is given
little credit for it in the narrative, Phillotson does out-Sue Sue! He is able to think more
radically than his wife and imagine a whole different way of organizing society. Unlike
Sue, who tends to act based on impulse, Phillotson carefully weighs his true beliefs about
how society should operate and backs up his unorthodox views with action. He releases
Sue, even though he loves her and before he knows of any legal way of dissolving their
union, and he does so because he sincerely believes what he is doing is right.
What is even more commendable is that Phillotson stands by his idealistic views
even when doing so threatens to cause him incredible suffering. He has more to lose than
either Jude or Sue (Phillotson has already struggled past his disappointment with
Christminster and secured a respectable position as a schoolmaster) and absolutely
nothing to gain (Sue and Jude at least have each other, whereas Phillotson has no promise
of happiness to reward him for his sacrifice). He is also forced to weather a more direct,
sustained battle against social convention than his fellow quixotes, for Jude and Sue,
because they have no ties to any communities, are able to wander about and, to a large
extent, avoid confrontation. Phillotson has the opportunity to abandon his values and
save himself by condemning Sue, but he stays true to his beliefs and is severely punished
for his honesty. He loses his school and his reputation, and rapidly sinks into poverty and
anonymity. Although his benevolent action towards his former wife harms no one
(except himself), he is nonetheless ruthlessly chastised for disregarding social
conventions.
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But Phillotson is not portrayed as a hero or as a noble martyr for his willingness to
take a small step towards realizing his and Sue’s idealistic view on marriage. Instead, he
is described as utterly miserable and broken. He crawls about the countryside,
resembling Physician Vilbert more than any of the other characters in the novel, and is
stripped of all of the markers of middle-class status that he had worked so hard to earn.
Ironically (or appropriately), he ends up back at Marygreen, where he began his journey,
and ekes out a living teaching at the shoddy school he initially left in order to pursue a
better life. When he crosses paths with Arabella and learns of Sue’s tragic loss of her
children, he takes the final step in losing all of his self-respect and gives in to his
yearning for companionship by writing to Sue and, taking advantage of her guilt, asking
her to return. He drafts his letter to Sue and explains, “To indulge one’s instinctive and
uncontrolled sense of justice and right, was not, he had found, permitted with impunity in
an old civilization like ours. It was necessary to act under an acquired and cultivated
sense of the same, if you wished to enjoy an average share of comfort and honour; and to
let crude loving-kindness take care of itself” (282). Like Sue, he learns that acting on an
unorthodox understanding of justice can only bring suffering. However, unlike Sue, he is
not able to believe wholeheartedly that society is right; at the end of his life, he simply
learns to play by the social rules for awhile in order to alleviate his own misery.
Whether Sue’s return brings Phillotson any happiness at all is unclear, but the
narrative seems to imply that happiness for either from their re-marriage is impossible.
Sue still loathes Phillotson’s physical presence, and Phillotson is still aware of Sue’s
aversion to him. Neither former idealist ends the novel as a hero; both succumb to social
179
pressure and abandon their quixotic views (even though Phillotson seems aware of his
self-treachery). Like Jude, their demise accomplishes nothing, and the novel gives no
hope for a brighter future.
* * *
While Jude the Obscure references the injustices of the educational system and
problems with the institution of marriage, what the novel seems to teach is not that
society needs more reform, but that society is beyond hope. The world that Hardy
describes in his final novel is so cruel, intolerant, and bound by unjust social conventions
that there is no hope for improvement. Efforts at focusing on the ideal rather than the real
are shown to be foolish, and those who pursue such a perilous path towards justice
inevitably suffer.
Amanda Claybaugh also sees the novel as highlighting the inefficacy of reform.
She argues, “Jude is, or at least seems to be, a reformist novel: it describes the injustices
of marriage law, as well as the impediments to working-class education. In the end,
however, it shows that reform is not enough. And in doing so, it points beyond the novel
of purpose to something more utopian and visionary” (186). She locates the utopian
potential of the novel in Hardy’s brief inclusion of two possible forms of community for
social rebels such as Sue, Jude, and Phillotson: the itinerant fair workers who defend
Phillotson at Shaston, and Sue’s seventy classmates at the Melchester school, who protest
the severity of the punishment Sue receives for staying out with Jude. Claybaugh argues
that the fair workers and the Melchester girls represent alternative societies in which the
three social misfits could have found acceptance and happiness. While Claybaugh’s
180
attempt at finding a glimmer of hope amongst all of the gloom that clouds the world of
the novel is admirable, I see the two alternative communities as reinforcing the general
pessimism of the novel rather than providing a retreat from the bleakness. However
much Claybaugh may want to see the fair workers and the seventy students as aligned
with New Woman utopian communities, neither group’s protest makes the least bit of
difference in changing the trajectory of the novel’s plot. If anything, Hardy’s decision to
include such failed protest efforts simply underscores the novel’s overall theme of the
futility of trying to alter social conventions.
Attempting to read Jude the Obscure as presenting anything but a despairing
vision of British society is in itself a quixotic endeavor. As Aaron Matz argues in his
brilliant reading of the satiric aspects of Jude, Hardy pushes his emphasis on the
protagonists’ failures so far that the narrative no longer conforms to the realist tradition or
even to the tragic mode. Matz points out that the novel perversely refuses to end, even
after it reaches what should have been its tragic climax with the deaths of Jude and Sue’s
children, an episode that in itself seems almost farcical in its horror. Matz aligns Jude’s
relentlessly dreary ending with the social criticism of the eighteenth-century satirists
Hardy had been reading during the composition of the novel, rather than with that offered
by Victorian reform novelists in the Dickensian tradition. Matz contends, “Jude the
Obscure exists at the remote frontier of Victorian realism, where the detachment of the
novelist blurs into the scourge of the satirist, who forfeits any semblance of objectivity in
the interest of fury and abuse” (524).
73

73
Matz provides a smart reading of the novel’s dark conclusion: “This is the novel's final,
181
Although Matz is most interested in Hardy’s connections to Swift and Voltaire, I
would add that laughing at the sufferings of a foolish idealist (and the disturbing
implications of such mockery) is also in the tradition of Cervantes, especially as Don
Quixote was read in the eighteenth century. In Jude the Obscure, Hardy takes the
quixotic narrative back to its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century roots by focusing on
the idiocy of living in a world that does not exist. While the earlier novels in the quixotic
reform tradition embraced the Romantic reading of quixotism as noble and heroic, Hardy
departs from that tradition and focuses in Jude on the absurdity of pursuing lost causes.
However, because he continues to align quixotism with reform, the downfalls of his
quixotes are not in any way funny, for, unlike Don Quixote’s madness, the quixotes’
various forms of idealism do not indicate just personal weaknesses. Instead, their failings
still highlight social failures, and, thus, their drawing attention to their futile attempts at
getting beyond those social failures implies the horrifying realization that the world is a
dreadful place that cannot be saved.

perverse cruelty: it ends with Arabella and her bleak recognition. But in a larger sense it
is also a glaring rejection of the conventions of the Victorian novel maintained even in a
work as dark as Tess. Instead of providing a man and a woman, and the promise of
regeneration that such a couple implies, it leaves us with the figure who most
complicated the story of Jude and Sue in the first place. To conclude with the woman
who laughs rather than the woman who cries—for in theory Jude the Obscure might have
shifted to Sue in its closing scene—is to bestow one final reminder of the novel's great
debt to the grotesque, the farcical, and the satirical. This ending offers no hint of what
may come next. There is no suggestion of Sue’s future life, or even Arabella’s. There are
no children to pin our hopes on—they have all been killed off. There is, rather, a sense
that this ending seeks to be a total ending, the expression of an absolute silence. The arc
of Jude the Obscure is an arc of noisy fury: it reaches its height in the brash sounds of
Sue's convulsions upon seeing the hanging children, then in the dissonant noise of
Arabella’s laughter. But when this arc has reached its full distance, and when all this
noise has been exhausted, there is nothing the novel can do but fall silent” (544).

182
Matz ties Jude’s uncompromisingly pessimistic conclusion to Hardy’s decision to
leave behind the genre of the novel not because of Jude’s reception,
74
but because the
realist novel was incompatible with the sort of ideas Hardy wished to convey through his
art. After Jude, Hardy turned to the much more ideologically open medium of poetry,
through which he could write in a more experimental form without being tied to certain
generic traditions and expectations. This move to lyric poetry, which, while still
political, was by nature of its form not as openly didactic as the Victorian realist novel,
was entirely appropriate for an author whose final reform novel illustrated the futility of
seeking reform. Without any faith in reform, the novel of purpose simply lost its purpose
altogether.
The quixotic reform tradition ends, significantly, at the same time as the realist
novel of purpose ceased to be the predominant genre in the British literary market.
Amanda Claybaugh ties the death of reformist novels to changes in publishing practices
and authorial boredom with writing the same sorts of plots. Although these practical
changes certainly did contribute to the end of the British reform novel tradition, I would
add that a general cultural loss of faith in the possibility of significant and lasting social
change also contributed to the decline of reform narratives. While novelists and readers
in the early nineteenth century looked to the future with hope as they saw the first major
legislative reforms in centuries enacted, there was no way to sustain such hope at the end

74
The uproar Jude caused amongst Victorian readers only supports the critique of society
Hardy makes in the novel. Clearly, the novel-reading public was not ready to change the
way it thought, for many of Hardy’s readers proved to be as intolerant of poor Jude and
Sue as the straight-laced townspeople the pair encounters within the world of the novel.
Even in its reception history, Jude the Obscure points to the futility of trying to alter
social conventions and prejudices.
183
of the nineteenth century, when the British literary public had to acknowledge that
England was still nowhere near becoming the ideal, egalitarian nation that had been
imagined decades earlier. Efforts at reform of course continued, but the widespread
cultural investment in social improvement that had made realist reform novels so popular
was gone. The cultural climate that enabled a novel such as Jude the Obscure to be
written was one in which the novel of purpose itself was likely to be seen as quixotic.
* * *
Jude the Obscure is a novel haunted by the ideals of Matthew Arnold, and it is
strikingly appropriate that the novel’s quixotic hero chooses Oxford, the home of lost
causes, as the source of all his yearning. In Jude, Hardy identifies the same need for a
fundamental change in the way society thinks that Arnold had called for in Culture and
Anarchy decades earlier. However, while Arnold seemed aware that his idealistic plan
would never be realized, he still presents his social critique as a call to action, the
relevance of which depends on an investment in the possibility of social change. Hardy,
on the other hand, shows in Jude both the need for such an intellectual revolution and the
impossibility of any such change ever taking place. Instead of dwelling on the heroism of
pursuing a beautiful lost cause, he describes the suffering that must result from such a
quest. Jude the Obscure reveals the necessity and impossibility of the kind of
fundamental ideological changes Arnold described, and the novel’s refusal to present an
optimistic view of the present or the future reflects a despairing worldview that made
reform novels culturally irrelevant.
184
Quixotic reform was inextricably tied to an investment in imagining ways to
improve society that got at the roots of social problems. By the end of the nineteenth
century, faith in the possible success of making fundamental changes in ideology in
England, especially without the use of violence, was increasingly difficult to sustain.
Such alterations began to be represented as fantastic; no longer could changing the
ideological foundations of society be articulated in the realist tradition. Instead, novelists
interested in social problems turned away from realism and imagined ways in which
society might be organized differently through utopian and, later, dystopian fiction.
Other writers abandoned social fiction altogether and created more aesthetically-focused,
introspective novels that, interestingly enough, placed narrative emphasis on characters’
ideas and unique perspectives rather than on how to change those views.
The trajectory of the quixotic narrative corresponds with the cultural attitude
toward reform during the Victorian period. It seems quite reasonable that by the end of
the century, belief in the power of reform would have dwindled, for, while the “condition
of England” was in many respects improved from what it was in the 1830s—the
Victorians did succeed in, among other things, improving working conditions for
laborers, abolishing slavery, bringing about significant improvements in sanitation, and
drastically expanding the franchise—England was far from the ideal society that had been
imagined in the early decades of the century. Quite remarkably, the Victorian quixotes
turn out to have been right about reform: the society that more practical reformers
imagined could be created by making one legislative change at a time, by the end of the
century is seen as a possibility only through a complete alteration of society. Perhaps this
185
is why, of Victorian reformers, it was primarily the ones that could be considered
quixotic—for example, social critics such as Matthew Arnold—whose works continued
to be read and to influence thinkers well into the twentieth century, and whose ideas
about social change seem still relevant, even in a world so very different from Victorian
England.

186

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Asset Metadata

Creator Conary, Jennifer D. (author)

Core Title Beautiful lost causes: quixotic reform and the Victorian Novel

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 06/20/2010

Defense Date 04/14/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag novel,OAI-PMH Harvest,quixote,reform,victorian

Language English

Advisor Kincaid, James R. (committee chair), Levine, Philippa (committee member), Russett, Margaret (committee member)

Creator Email jcossey@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1279

Unique identifier UC1206318

Identifier etd-Conary-20080620 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-74794 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1279 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Conary-20080620.pdf

Dmrecord 74794

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Conary, Jennifer D.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu