Search

Etonnamment peu d’etudes critiques ont porte sur l’influence de Jonathan Swift sur la litterature victorienne. Cet article est fonde sur l’idee que Swift est l’un des intertextes importants, quoique sous-estimes, des œuvres de George Eliot, notamment dans son dernier ouvrage, Les Impressions de Theophraste Untel. Certaines references explicites ou allusions indirectes dans son œuvre de fiction, ainsi que certaines mentions dans ses notes de travail, ses journaux et sa correspondance, montrent qu’Eliot connaissait et appreciait l’œuvre de Swift, en particulier Le conte du tonneau et les Voyages de Gulliver. Se pencher sur Swift permet d’expliquer certains aspects originaux de son ecriture, tels que son penchant anti-scientifique ou sa tendance a la satire. Des travaux recents ont etudie la presence des animaux chez Eliot a partir des notions darwiniennes ; cependant, une analyse de l’influence du quatrieme livre des Voyages de Gulliver sur son ecriture permet de mieux comprendre ses representations des animaux, en general, mais aussi son utilisation de la satire et de la fable, en particulier dans Les Impressions de Theophraste Untel.

Clinician burnout is presumed to negatively impact healthcare quality; yet scant research has rigorously addressed this hypothesis. Using a mixed-methods, randomized, comparative effectiveness design, we tested two competing approaches to improve care-one addressing clinician burnout and the other addressing how clinicians interact with consumers-with 192 clinicians and 469 consumers at two community mental health centers. Although qualitative reports were promising, we found no comparative effectiveness for either intervention on burnout, patient-centered processes, or other outcomes. Discussion includes identifying ways to strengthen approaches to clinician burnout.

Measuring quality of care can transform care, but few tools exist to measure quality from the client's perspective. The aim of this study was to create concordant clinician and client self-report quality-of-care scales in a sample of community mental health clinicians (n = 189) and clients (n = 469). The client scale had three distinct factors (Person-Centered Care, Negative Staff Interactions, and Inattentive Care), while the clinician scale had two: Person-Centered Care and Discordant Care. Both versions demonstrated adequate internal consistency and validity with measures related to satisfaction and the therapeutic relationship. These measures are promising, brief quality assessment tools.

Drawing on recent work by Paul Fyfe and Ruth Livesey, the essay explores the dangers of relying on horses for transportation, economic gain and pleasure, showing how Eliot transmuted this reality into formal conventions that marked turning points in her narratives. On a trip to Italy in 1861, Eliot’s horse falls on the edge of a precipice. She is unhurt, but Lewes, who sees her fall, feels “very sick and faint from the shock” (Lewes Journals). While such hazards of foreign travel may seem extraordinary, accidents involving horses were common both in everyday life and in Victorian fiction. Horse accidents appear in Eliot’s fiction including “Janet’s Repentance,” The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. The essay concludes with a discussion of the tension between Eliot’s representation of horses as commodities and her sympathy with horses as sentient creatures.

This chapter considers the ethics of inheriting money perceived to be tainted by a corrupt past and the choices that Eliot’s characters face when considering how to invest for the future. Henry situates Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda in the context of the investment cultures of Eliot’s late career, specifically her relationship to her financial advisor and future husband, John Walter Cross. She pays particular attention to Eliot’s uniquely progressive portfolio of diversified investments, overseen by Cross, which put her at the forefront of modern investing practices.

This chapter focuses on how influential male authors of the Victorian period represented women investors. W.M. Thackeray represents female investors in the East India Company with ironic skepticism about their power as voting shareholders. Anthony Trollope introduces various types, including the widow of business and the timid investing spinster. Charles Dickens railed against the American worship of dollars and the regime of shares. Strongly influenced by Dickens and Trollope, George Gissing focuses on lower-middle-class women investors. His novels explore the ambiguities of the New Woman’s place in society, suggesting that limited financial empowerment did not always lead to independence.

In the eighteenth century, women were voting shareholders in the East India Company and Bank of England. In the mid-nineteenth century, financial legislation expanded opportunities for investing in publicly traded shares by limiting the liability of shareholders. The Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 brought married women into the market as independent investors. This chapter discusses patterns of women’s investments in government securities, canals, docks, and banks, as well as in domestic, foreign, and colonial railways to set the stage for the following literary analyses and to support the argument that female authors’ personal experiences of gaining independence through investing moderated their critique of capitalism compared to that of their male contemporaries.

The fifteenth-century Florentineworld that George Eliot studied and recreated inRomola(Cornhill Magazine, July 1862–August 1863) was characterized by the idea of love between males and the practice of sex between males. Same sex desire took various forms from the love of the older teacher for his pupil to the illegal but common practice of penetrating adolescent boys, for which many fifteenth-century Florentine men were prosecuted, particularly under the regime of the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola (1494–98). The monasteries themselves constituted an intense, all-male community of voluntary celibacy. These various sexual behaviors co-existed with more visible heterosexual institutions and practices, from the often politicized arranged marriages of the wealthy elite to the casual coupling of the peasant classes.

Women are occasionally governors of prisons for women, overseers of the poor, and parish clerks. A woman may be ranger of a park; a woman can take part in the government of a great empire by buying East India Stock.— Barbara Bodichon, A Brief Summary in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (1854)ON OCTOBER 5, 1860, GEORGE HENRY LEWES VISITED a solicitor in London to consult about investments. He wrote in his journal: “[The Solicitor] took me to a stockbroker, who undertook to purchase 95 shares in the Great Indian Peninsular Railway for Polly. For £1825 she gets £1900 worth of stock guaranteed 5%” (qtd. in Ashton, Lewes 210). Thus Marian Evans, called Polly by her close friends, known in society as Mrs. Lewes and to her reading public as George Eliot, became a shareholder in British India. Whether or not Eliot thought of buying stock as taking part in the government of a great empire, as her friend Barbara Bodichon had written in 1854, the 5% return on her investment was a welcome supplement to the income she had been earning from her fiction since 1857. From 1860 until her death in 1880, she was one of a select but growing number of middle-class investors who took advantage of high-yield colonial stocks.1 Lewes’s journals for 1860–1878 and Eliot’s diaries for 1879–80 list dividends from stocks in Australia, South Africa, India, and Canada. These include: New South Wales, Victoria, Cape of Good Hope, Cape Town Rail, Colonial Bank, Oriental Bank, Scottish Australian, Great Indian Peninsula, Madras. The Indian and colonial stocks make up just less than half of the total holdings. Other stocks connected to colonial trade (East and West India Docks, London Docks), domestic stocks (the Consols, Regents Canal), and foreign investments (Buenos Aires, Pittsburgh and Ft. Wayne) complete the portfolio.2

‘Charles Dickens was paid by the word/ Many of today’s undergraduates have never read a Victorian novel; nonetheless they know that the daunting length of Bleak House and Little Dornt is a consequence of this perverse and antiquated form of payment without which they would be spared many a laborious description and extraneous character. The belief that Dickens was paid by the word persists with the tenacity of urban myth and carries an implicit rebuke to the teacher of Victorian literature: is it fair that we should suffer because Dickens had so many pages to fill and Victorian readers so little else to do?

… and yet, how little do we still know of Africa. George Eliot Like many of her contemporaries, George Eliot looked to the empire for solutions to poverty and unemployment in England. In January 1851, she moved from Coventry to London, and between 1851 and 1854 she edited the Westminster Review for its publisher, John Chapman. On December 20, 1851, her brother-in-law Edward Clarke died, leaving her sister Chrissey with six children and a considerable debt. Although Eliot had emigrated to London rather than to a colony to escape the “moral asphyxia” of the Midlands, she thought Australia was just the place for her widowed sister and six orphaned children. Chapman had traveled to Australia before becoming a publisher and he was at the time engaged in preparing Sophia Tilley, the sister of his mistress, Elisabeth Tilley, to emigrate to Australia ( GEL , 2:93). Writing to her friends Charles and Cara Bray in Coventry, Eliot asked: “What do you think of my going to Australia with Chrissey and all her family?” According to this plan, Chrissey was to relocate permanently because she seemed to have so few alternatives in England; it may have been the one way to keep the family together. Eliot did not intend to stay, merely “to settle them and then come back” ( GEL , 2:97). Chrissey's emigration would give her a chance to travel, see the world, and return home, perhaps to write for an English audience about what she had seen in Australia.

For some time now, literary critics have addressed Daniel Deronda and the eighteenth chapter of Impressions of Theophrastus Such — ‘The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!’ — as important treatments of anti-Semitism in Victorian culture.1 But should it matter to us that George Eliot never used the term anti-Semitism? Does it make a difference to our description of these works that her attempt to identify and articulate the historical manifestations of Jew-hating came before their conceptual synthesis within a single category? The case of ‘The Modern Hep!’ suggests that the use of the now-current term ‘anti-Semitism’ is an obstacle to our interpretation of Eliot’s writing about Jews in late nineteenth-century England, oversimplifying and distorting her historical understanding of how inherited texts and habits combined to shape the national character of England, a character she thought was troubled by a history of irrational hatred.