Hello, Romola--chaps 1-5 (July 1862)

Dear Serial Readers,


Welcome to a collaborative reading of George Eliot's Romola. Here is the plan: each week I'll post a short entry on the installment of the novel. At the end of this post you can click "comment" (there will be a number, showing how many have left comments); you'll see a box where you can respond in any way you like to this segment. If you are purchasing or borrowing a copy, I recommend the Oxford edition because it includes the monthly divisions in which the novel was originally published in The Cornhill Magazine. But I'll also indicate weekly which chapters to read for the next installment, so any edition of the novel works (even the online version mentioned in the sidebar). Next week: chapters 6-10.


A bit of background first: George Smith, publisher of the magazine, secured the rights to publish Romola in The Cornhill only three weeks after Eliot began writing the novel. He paid her ten thousand pounds, an unprecedented sum, far more than any author had received at the time. Although originally Eliot agreed to write the novel in 12 parts of 32 pages each, in the end she wrote 14 installments. Because of the enormous amount of meticulous research Eliot folded into this historical novel, it was never received as "popular," but many critics considered it her "greatest." Henry James called Romola "the most important of George Eliot's works...the one in which the largest things are attempted and grasped."


As I began reading the novel, I marveled at how Eliot's narrator becomes a virtual tour guide conducting readers back in time to early modern Florence. The "Proem" (a word that almost suggests a hybrid genre--part prose, part poem--that suits the hybrid time of then/now) establishes how "we" might view a culture "three centuries and a half ago" (five centuries for us) from the present vantage point of "now" (a word that comes up often). This shuttling back and forth between "then" and "now" mediates the brief tour of the major sites of Florence including Brunelleschi's Duomo, the Pitti Palace, the Ponte Vecchio. If you are lucky enough to read this novel while touring Florence, you'll discover how the narrative provides an itinerary through the city, even calling attention to changes between "then" of 1492 and "now" of 1862. But if you're not able to make it to Florence, this novel is packed with historical and visual details, much like a thorough guidebook. The story only unfolds between the lines of this virtual tour, so I can imagine if early readers were eager for story over exposition, they might've felt impatient at first.


The first chapter uses Tito, a "stranger," as a stand-in for the reader as foreigner in Florence in 1492. Like any tourist, Tito is first eager to find food, lodging, and some money (and a pretty girl to seduce perhaps), as he orients himself in this city. Nello the barber is quite the networker--his clientele brings him lots of information through conversation, sort of the hub or pulse of the gossip and news of the city.

Given all the scholarly knowledge of Renaissance Florence that Eliot pours into this opening, the final chapter of the installment about "the blind scholar and his daughter" seems almost ironic. Bardo is dependent on Romola in order to pursue his scholarship (much like Dorothea and Casaubon a decade later in Middlemarch), and yet he complains about "the wandering, vagrant propensity of the feminine mind" and regrets his son's absence. Bardo does concede that Romola has "a wide-glancing intelligence" and a "man's nobility of soul," and Romola mentions Cassandra Fedele, a Venetian woman scholar, as her role model.

Two more quick observations before signing off. First, I was intrigued by the references to the new print technology of the era--the printing press--and Bardo's resistance to "these mechanical printers who threaten to make learning a base and vulgar thing." Shades of today and the digital divide, the anxiety of the Kindle, perhaps? Second, as close readers of Eliot know, webs and rivers are favorite extended metaphors, and both crop up in the early pages of this novel. The Proem describes fifteenth-century Florentine culture as "a strange web of belief and unbelief," also echoing the 1860s in the wake of Darwin's Origin of Species, an era of increasing agnosticism and atheism.

Please feel free to add brief comments--I promise briefer ones too, and I'll also include some of Frederic Leighton's wonderful illustrations that accompanied the Cornhill installments.

Starting serially,
Susan

Edwin Drood #4 (chaps 13-16) July 1870

Dear Serial Readers,

Is anyone out there in Serial Reading Land? I would love to know that you're reading along serially, either the novel or these entries, or both! For the next selection, how about branching out with a Trollope or Collins novel? Check the MOUSEHOLD WORDS catalogue which includes both Trollope's HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT and Collins's THE EVIL GENIUS. Or Trollope's wonderful THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON (a magazine serial) would be a nice change of pace. If you'd like to vote on one of these, or suggest another Victorian serial, please indicate your choice here or email me. We'll be ready to start the next novel in early January. And one more thing--I'd appreciate it if you'd email the link to SERIAL READERS to at least one other person, and encourage anyone to share this blog with book club readers. There was an article in the New York Times yesterday about book clubs including the online variety (Joanne Kaufman, "Fought Over Any Good Books Lately?") in which the mere suggestion of reading Trollope appears to prompt a violent reaction. I hope whoever wants to read Trollope joins THIS group!

This fourth (of six) installment of DROOD is superb! Rather than the "mystery of Edwin Drood" and his rather predictable disappearance at the hands of Jasper, we're prompted to pay close attention to the peripherals, especially the somersaulting mind and behaviors of Jasper, and the accumulation of clues, even circumstantial evidence that we know adds up to a false accusation against Neville.

Again, I marveled at all the allusions to time--the early reference to the "revolving year" (crucial to the serial form itself) as Miss Twinkleton's young ladies leave for the holiday season; the references to time of day as well as time of year in chapter 14 where Edwin's watch has stopped, the description of Edwin "surrounded by vestiges of old time and decay," the image of time torn asunder--the hands of the Cathedral clock destroyed by the night wind, and finally in chap 16 the discovery of Edwin's watch in the Weir, "run down, before being cast into the water." All these sundry references in the larger context of putting readers (both internal and external) on the watch--for the "mystery" of Edwin's disappearance, for signs of his body, for signs of Jack's guilt. The most melodramatic instance of this last item is Jasper fainting upon hearing that his motive for removing his nephew as an obstacle to his marriage plotting against Rosa no longer holds. And all this time I thought that illustration of the body on the floor *was* the Mystery of Edwin Drood!

Related to this halting of time is chapter fourteen, where Dickens employs that increasingly suspenseful present tense. I loved the staginess of this chapter which begins with sentence fragments without verbs at all, like stage directions to set the scene: "Christmas Eve in Cloisterham. A few strange faces in the streets..." Then the chapter divides into three parts, each following the key actors of the scene, all bound to converge at Jack's house for the fateful encounter, as each of these sections on, respectively, Neville, Edwin, John Jasper concludes with "And so *he* goes up the postern stair." Yet of course that pivotal scene is foreclosed from the narrative. We can only speculate and test our hunches against the narratives Neville and Jasper provide of last seeing Edwin.

The last point I want to mention is the treatment of Neville as suspect. Besides the heap of circumstantial evidence, all given with many large grains of salt, Dickens suggests the prejudice of racism--the mayor's assessment of Neville's guilt ("the case had a dark look") linked to Neville's "Un-English complexion," and then the passage about "the wildest frenzy and fatuity of evil report arose against" Neville. Here these rumors picture Neville as a ruthless imperious force who "had caused to be whipped to death sundry 'Natives.'" I found this passage especially double-edged, since on the one hand it seems to ridicule the ignorance of Cloisterham people about others across the globe, Neville included. On the other hand, Dickens seems to ridicule their ideas of "Natives" as "nomadic persons" who were "vaguely supposed in Cloisterham to be always black, always of great virtue..." Neville's "Un-English complexion" incriminates him in the eyes of these cloistered English people, yet the narrator sets the reader up as more worldly, less prejudiced, since we know--as much as we can for certain--who is responsible for Edwin's disappearance. And here I must mention the female opium eater Edwin encounters just before he goes to his uncle's house. He recognizes in her curious state the signs of opium usage he'd noted in Jack. But there is another mystery: how does this woman know that "Ned" is a "threatened name"? We know she must be the "haggard woman" of the opening of the novel in an opium den in London. But how does she make her way here with this remark about "Ned"? Although she's less a character than a suspense intensifier, I'm still intrigued by the female characters in this novel, and wish Helena had appeared in this installment!

I'm steeled for many unresolved pieces of this story, since I know Dickens had already died in July 1870 when these words were first read in the fourth number.

Serially devoted,
Susan