1. Eliot’s Double Mirror

Many of the chapter epigraphs in Middlemarch are quoted from specifically attributed sources: ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Old Song’ and so on. Others come without attribution, and in these cases Eliot herself is the author—a snatch of poetry, or an excerpt from an Elizabethan-sounding play, which she is passing-off as a ‘quotation’. Take, for instance, the epigraph to Part 8 Chapter 72, near the end of the novel: Full souls are double mirrors, making still An endless vista of fair things before, Repeatin...