DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Conference Report George Eliot's Beginnings: Scenes of Clerical Life Celebrated

Authors

Juliette Atkinson

Date of this Version

2009

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 40 (2009)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

Over three dozen people from around the United Kingdom and beyond gathered on Saturday 1 November 2008 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication, in volume form, of George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life. Barbara Hardy warmly welcomed the audience and presented the day's alluring programme. The conference promised to be both a celebration of the three short stories that marked Mary Ann Evans's fictional debut and an exploration of the personal and artistic influences that prompted her to change direction at the age of thirty-seven

Echoing the words of Eliot's famous journal entry with the title 'How George Eliot Came to Write Fiction', Rosemary Ashton (UCL) began by taking the audience back from the opening words of Scenes of Clerical Life to several years earlier in the life of George Eliot in search of 'demonstrations of her talent'. Letters, journal entries and caricatures provided powerful, and often very amusing, glimpses of Eliot's first attempts to identify herself as a writer and the early responses of her intrigued publisher and readers. Eliot's alternating self-doubts and confidence, together with her self-deprecation, tenacity, and humour were all vividly brought to life and set the stage for the following discussions of her first published work of fiction.

Alain Jumeau (Paris-Sorbonne) drew attention to the surprising nature of Eliot's choice of subject for this first work in his paper on 'George Eliot's own Version of Conversion'. Despite Eliot's earlier engagement with the works of Strauss and Feuerbach and her satire of religious fiction in 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists', Scenes of Clerical Life displays no hostility towards the various religious denominations it depicts. On the contrary, the work embodies 'religious fiction of a new kind', in which Christian charity is softly converted into a form of human sympathy with 'sacramental' qualities. In a provocative conclusion, Jumeau suggested that, notwithstanding her agnosticism, Eliot was tempted to think of her new vocation in quasireligious terms.

With 'Idlers and Collaborators: Enter the Dog', Beryl Gray (Birkbeck) offered a tantalizing taste of her forthcoming book on dogs in Victorian literature and society. The unusual thoroughness with which Eliot integrates dogs within Scenes of Clerical life, and indeed many of her novels, was thrown into sharp relief by a comparison with Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels, in which dogs are used principally as characterization tools. Gray revealed how, in contrast, Eliot 'acknowledges that dogs have their own history' and 'excelled in giving a sense of a dog's interior life'. Ranging from the charming, opportunistic Jet in Scenes of Clerical Life to Celia's dog in Middlemarch, the paper deftly illustrated how the canine characters of Eliot's fiction form an important part of her extraordinarily inclusive creative vision.