That is interesting! As someone who knows next to nothing about English history, and has English as their second language, I am really excited about details like this.
That is interesting! As someone who knows next to nothing about English history, and has English as their second language, I am really excited about details like this.
I think Mona might return to this question. I saw in something she sent me a mention of the novel being set in Eliot's grandparents' generation. The time of our youth is a time we can look at with a bit of retrospection, but also intimacy, perhaps.
Yes, that seems right. Also, Eliot says it was a more innocent time, innocent тАЬof future goldfields...that gorgeous plutocracy...тАЭ so she may be interested in recovering something from that more innocent, romantic time and fathoming the intervening social change.
I too have been wondering about when the story was set (time period) and am glad others are too. It has been a something my mind has been puzzling over.
Felix Holt, Radical is set around the 1832 Reform Bill as well, and there in the opening Eliot is much more explicit about her ambivalence about the ways technology and is changing the old ways of life in the Midlands. She was in some ways conservative, suspicious of too rapid, non-organic changes in society. Her father was a Tory, and the Wordsworthian part of her clung to happy memories of early days?
I do experience these layers as a bit mysterious. That there were in her time probably received ideas about the authors whose names she drops that are more complex than what we remember about them. I feel too that part of the story is that they (or the girls at least) live away from the city and don't travel. They participate in the metropolis only when their uncle brings them a pamphlet or something. it's not really clear to me how up Dorothea is on the goings-on of her age.
That is interesting! As someone who knows next to nothing about English history, and has English as their second language, I am really excited about details like this.
I think Mona might return to this question. I saw in something she sent me a mention of the novel being set in Eliot's grandparents' generation. The time of our youth is a time we can look at with a bit of retrospection, but also intimacy, perhaps.
Yes, that seems right. Also, Eliot says it was a more innocent time, innocent тАЬof future goldfields...that gorgeous plutocracy...тАЭ so she may be interested in recovering something from that more innocent, romantic time and fathoming the intervening social change.
I too have been wondering about when the story was set (time period) and am glad others are too. It has been a something my mind has been puzzling over.
Felix Holt, Radical is set around the 1832 Reform Bill as well, and there in the opening Eliot is much more explicit about her ambivalence about the ways technology and is changing the old ways of life in the Midlands. She was in some ways conservative, suspicious of too rapid, non-organic changes in society. Her father was a Tory, and the Wordsworthian part of her clung to happy memories of early days?
I do experience these layers as a bit mysterious. That there were in her time probably received ideas about the authors whose names she drops that are more complex than what we remember about them. I feel too that part of the story is that they (or the girls at least) live away from the city and don't travel. They participate in the metropolis only when their uncle brings them a pamphlet or something. it's not really clear to me how up Dorothea is on the goings-on of her age.
Thanks for raising that question, how up on things she is. Will have to think further on that, and definitely a good thing to track as we read along!
We're counting on you! One of our most learned commenters!
Still havenтАЩt found the Key.
Me too!