The Market of Distinction: Signification and Class in Middlemarch and its Advertisements

Introduction

In the history of scholarship surrounding George Eliot’s Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, the work has seldom, if ever, been categorized as a “beach read.” A careful look at its initial eight-volume publication, however, suggests that its earliest readers may indeed have had beach reading in mind. Before immersing themselves in the conjugal woes of Casaubon and Dorothea, those who purchased “The Dead Hand,” the work’s fifth installment, would have been greeted by an advertisement for Rowlands’ Kalydor, a skin product aimed at “tourists and travelers, visitors to the seaside, and others” (“Advertisements” 3). For modern readers, the association of Eliot’s sprawling “home epic” with sunbathing might be a provocative one, at odds with the stuffy, tension-laden drawing rooms in which the novel’s action unfolds. The advertisements that bookend the Middlemarch installments, however, provide valuable cultural context, situating the work within a larger market structure that contemporary readers might otherwise overlook. 

Eliot herself might have preferred this context go unnoticed, suggests Elaine Freedgood, who detects in Middlemarch an attempt to “construct and then actively police the boundary between . . . the literary or highbrow novel, on the one hand, and the commercial or middlebrow novel, on the other” (114). Highbrow as it may be, the advertisements in Middlemarch bracket the work as irrefutably commercial. The publisher, William Blackwood & Sons, errs on the side of good taste: the advertisements, notes Gillian Beer, are “quite decorous,” especially compared to the “scandal[ous]” content of the advertisements flanking Dickens’s Bleak House (18). This respectable presentation is typical of Blackwood & Sons, whose periodical, Blackwood’s, was a venerable institution compared to the “shilling monthlies” like Cornhill Magazine and Macmillan’s that arose in the 1860s (Shattock 13). These latecomers, however, were beginning to crowd the market; Cornhill, in particular, quickly began to eclipse Blackwood’s in sales (13). In order to keep apace of the competition, Middlemarch would need to make money, something its eight-part installments were designed to accomplish. This “radically new” format, as Krista Lysack notes, was devised by John Blackwood and George Henry Lewes, allowing them to “circumvent the Libraries” with a modest price tag that would encourage readers to “buy instead of borro[w]” (Lewes, qtd. in Lysack 80). Eliot had a particular vested interest in the installments’ success, stipulating her preference to be paid in royalties, an unprecedented arrangement at the time (Lysack 81). 

While the material history of Middlemarch illustrates the salience of market concerns for publisher and author alike, this is not to say that Eliot found artistic and commercial aims easy to reconcile. In fact, the text is suffused with an anxiety over the destabilization of cultural boundaries occasioned by the rise of consumer society. Neither, though, does Eliot commit to a wholesale disavowal of commercial imperatives. By reading Middlemarch alongside its advertisements, the pervading sense is one of ambivalence, evoking an era in which upward social mobility and the proliferation of mass culture provide an escape from the “dead hand” of tradition while simultaneously requiring a submission to the “free hand” of the market.

 

Rowlands' Kalydor

Unless impelled by necessity, the characters in Middlemarch seldom travel. Even the obligatory honeymoon is made to serve a practical purpose, giving Casaubon an opportunity to research his “Key to all Mythologies” and Rosamond an opportunity to ingratiate herself with Lydgate’s wealthy relatives (Eliot 95; 295). The need to maximize the value of travel can be explained by the lack of a comprehensive national rail system at the time in which the novel is set, making long-distance voyages a costly and difficult undertaking. This would soon change: by mid-century, the rail system had grown exponentially, “enabl[ing] elites to journey to any place they chose at reduced costs,” as Robert C. Ritchie explains (90). “[E]conomic development,” furthermore, “had created a growing middle class . . . who all expanded their ability to enjoy leisure” (90). Government-mandated fare reductions, along with the gradual introduction of national holidays, would further widen social access to leisure travel (90-91); however, another impediment remained: the Protestant work ethic. In Victorian society, notes Ritchie, “[i]ndolence was a sin, work a virtue, thus holidays were suspect” (91). 

Despite its outward secularity, a Protestant superego presides over Middlemarch, shaping its moral stance toward leisure. Casaubon speaks derisively of Will’s desire to  “go abroad . . . without any special object, save the vague purpose of what he calls culture” (Eliot 91), a judgment we may be tempted to dismiss on the grounds of Casaubon’s bitterness toward his nephew; the narrator, however, seems to concur, favourably comparing Will’s dedication to Middlemarch politics to the aimless life he might otherwise be leading, “rambling in Italy . . . , trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and finding it too artificial, beginning to copy ‘bits’ from old pictures, leaving off because they were ‘no good’” (374). The wariness of leisure evinced in these passages extends to the advertisement for “Rowlands’ Kalydor” that precedes “The Dead Hand.” Of the several beneficial properties ascribed to the product (an Almond oil-based skin cream, according to the Oxford English Dictionary [“Kalydor, n.”]), “dispelling the [post-vacation] cloud of languor and relaxation” takes precedence (“Advertisements” 3). While the company’s decision to market their product to beachgoers speaks to the widespread popularity of leisure-travel in the 1870s, the tone of the advertisement relies on an attendant sense of guilt among its readers. The seaside vacation, though now commonplace, is treated as a vice, instilling a laxity that must be “dispell[ed].”

Cramers' Three Years' System

As the ranks of the middle class expanded, so did their purchasing power, granting them access to a wide array of items once considered luxuries. If an item lay outside a family’s immediate means, the market provided solutions, one of which was the installment plan. By the 1870s, this practice, also known as “hire purchase,” facilitated the acquisition of pianos and other “consumer durables” across the class spectrum, as Roy Church explains (637). An advertisement in “The Dead Hand” for “Cramers’ [sic]”—presumably J.B. Cramer & Co., whose offices were on London’s Regent Street (Sala 223)—mentions the “three years’ system” (“Advertisements” 7), likely a form of hire purchase that would allow cash-strapped consumers to obtain pianos by agreeing to pay in installments over a three-year span. In Middlemarch, the impact these developments would have on the piano’s prestige value had yet to occur. Derek Scott notes that, “[f]rom the 1830s on, pianos were a proud feature of middle class homes, and girls there were expected to play them” (69), a timeline that would put the Vincy family—who have purchased both a piano and lessons for their daughter—at the vanguard of a wider cultural trend. Rosamond Vincy’s proficiency at the instrument, described by the narrator as “almost startling” (Eliot 152), is clearly a mark of refinement, though her choice of material presages the cultural shift that would occur later in the century. As the household piano became more widely adopted, in part due to the hire system and the ease of transport by rail (Scott 62), a distinction began to be drawn between “a ‘better class of music’ and another kind (soon to be seen as degenerate) that appealed to ‘the masses’” (64). In Middlemarch, Mr. Brooke gives voice to the opinion of the day, stating that “[a] woman should be able to sit down and play you or sing you a good old English tune” (Eliot 79). Rosamond vastly exceeds this criteria, performing “Meet Me by the Moonlight” and “Haydn’s canzonets” with equal aplomb (152). If her accomplishments are impressive to an 1830s audience, though, her undiscerning taste would betray her ignorance to the novel’s contemporary readers. In her cultural precocity, Rosamond represents the middle-class interloper of the late century, adopting the trappings of sophistication without possessing a meaningful appreciation of their value. 

Along with destabilizing the extant class hierarchy, Rosamond’s luxury appetites pose a more direct threat to the social order. As Lydgate struggles to satisfy Rosamond’s needs, he falls into debt, leading him to abandon his high-minded ambitions and succumb to dissolution—represented, in his case, by a dalliance with opium and a gambling spree at the notorious “Green Dragon” (Eliot 523-5). The moral implications of debt are a central theme of Middlemarch, “[w]ritten,” as Lysack notes, “in the wake of the financial panic of the late 1860s” (84). Attenuating the socially corrosive perception of debt, however, was its integral role in the market economy, of which the advertisement for “Cramers’ Three Years’ System” serves as a reminder. Rosamond, notes Lysack, is a “shrewd reader of signs” (96), which enable her to “reac[h] her objective of social solvency” by the end of the novel (97), despite Lydgate being driven to the brink of bankruptcy and, eventually, a premature death. As a provider, Lydgate is a serviceable “starter,” and his seduction by Rosamond underscores the practical value of her piano playing, a lure to which Farebrother alludes in an off-handed mention, to Lydgate, of the “sirens” at the Vincy household (Eliot 257). While Roy Church, in a study of nineteenth-century British advertising, echoes Lori Anne Loeb in concluding that middle-class Victorian consumers were driven by “hedonistic inclinations above aspirational impulses” (638), Rosamond shows that these motives can exist in tandem, and are not easily separable from a rational economic interest.

 

Singer Sewing Machines

The Singer Manufacturing Company, like Cramer & Co., touts an installment plan, offering sewing machines “[w]ithin the means of every family, and even the poorest Seamstress” through weekly payments “on the company’s novel system of hire” (“Advertisements” 8). Launching the first sewing machine “for family use” in the mid-1850s, Singer would dominate the worldwide market within a decade, “profoundly chang[ing] the textile industry” (31-2). By the 1830s, the textile trade was already reeling from industrial advances; worker revolts against the power-loom, explains Eric Hobsbawm, played a part in the “widespread wrecking movements” that defined the era (63), as alluded to by the repeated references to “machine-breaking” within Middlemarch (Eliot 49, 296, 373).

Advances in textile production would also have a profound effect on fashion: due to the ease with which garments could now be produced, notes Andrew H. Miller, the sewing machine intensified “an increasing flattening of fashion distinctions” (193), while Christine Kortsch observes that “[f]ashion . . . responded . . . by creating new and increasingly elaborate designs” ( 39). In the 1830s, Rosamond’s “cambric frilling,” hand-sewn by Mary Garth (Eliot 289), would have been very much in vogue. The technologically-driven escalation of “elaborate designs,” however, would provoke a backlash, evinced in Middlemarch by the narrator’s palpable distaste for Rosamond’s showy outfits, as well as the fawning tribute paid to Dorothea’s “Quakerish gray drapery” (Eliot 176). “[T]he attention [Eliot] pays [to Dorothea’s dress],” Miller observes, “is characteristic of the later decades” of the nineteenth century (193). 

Some historians claim the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a turning point in the English valuation of ornateness in design. Nikolaus Pevsner posits the power-loom as a culprit: describing a tapestry from the Exhibition with an “extremely elaborate pattern, the charm of which, during the Rococo period, would have been based on the craftsman's imagination and unfailing skill,” Pevsner laments that “[the pattern] is now done by machine, and it looks it” (41). The Exhibition’s organizers, “unanimous in their condemnation of the exhibits,” happened to agree (Naylor 20). One organizer, Owen Jones, decried the “novelty without beauty, or beauty without intelligence,” of the goods on display (20). In 1863, Eliot and George Henry Lewes would recruit Jones as an interior decorator, and Eliot would later praise Jones in print for “rescu[ing] that form of art which is most closely connected with the sanctities and pleasures of our hearths from the hands of uncultured tradesmen” (qtd. in Miller 190). In this piece, a review of Jones’s Grammar of Ornament, Eliot questions whether “the vulgarity of our upholstery, ha[s] not something to do with those bad tempers which breed false conclusions,” and asserts that “unmeaning, irrelevant lines are as bad as irrelevant words or clauses, that tend no whither” (Essays 274). Eliot’s reasoning draws a connection between a person’s moral development and the tastefulness of their home decor; furthermore, as Miller observes, she makes an implicit suggestion that this relationship is “analogous to the relationship between novels and their readers” (191). Eliot’s mention of “words [and] clauses” reminds us that tastes in literature, no less than furniture and garments, were to be drastically impacted by the spread of consumer culture.

 

Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings

Elaine Freedgood, countering the general recognition of Eliot’s project as socially inclusive, instead argues that the level of erudition Middlemarch demands of its readers serves to “put [them] in their social and cultural places” (114). Freedgood’s Eliot is not an ambassador, but a gatekeeper, deliberately refusing potential readers, along with their money, in the name of elitism. The advertisements in the Middlemarch installments, though, remind us that Eliot could not easily extricate herself from market imperatives. The installment’s back cover, for example, promotes a book entitled The Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Work of George Eliot ("Advertisements" Back Cover), providing a relatively accessible introduction to Eliot’s dense, challenging oeuvre. Clearly the publisher, at least, saw the remunerative potential of expanding Eliot’s readership beyond the haute-bourgeoisie. Publication of the Sayings was, in fact, arranged by Lewes, who wrote to John Blackwood proclaiming its potential “to deepen and extend the reputation of [Eliot’s] works” (qtd. in Hughes 162). The book, released a month prior to “The Dead Hand,” would also serve as “a blatant piece of promotion” for Middlemarch, as Linda K. Hughes has observed (163). Eliot’s misgivings about the project are evident in a letter she writes to John Blackwood as the second edition of the Sayings is being prepared for publication. In response to a syrupy preface proposed by Alexander Main, who compiled the volume, Eliot bristles at the sententious light in which he casts her work: “I have always exercised a severe watch against anything that could be called preaching,” she writes, “and if I have ever allowed myself in dissertation or in dialogue [anything] which is not part of the structure of my books, I have there sinned against my own laws” (qtd. in Hawes 51-2). Eliot’s letter indicates an apprehensiveness over how her books are read, rather than who reads them. She conjures the image of a reader who skims her novels without seriously engaging their themes, scouting instead for easy “lessons” to be extracted. Middlemarch supports this perspective, turning its critical eye toward the careless upper-middle-class reader, rather than the precocious lower-middle-class reader. Casaubon, despite a lifetime of research into antiquity, lacks the critical faculties to form an opinion on Raphael’s frescoes, and can only regurgitate “the opinion of conoscenti” (Eliot 183), while Mr. Brooke seems to have retained little more than the names of the authors in his library. Twice in the novel, Brooke invokes Adam Smith, once to dismiss Dorothea’s philanthropic interests with a vague gesture toward “political economy” (41), and again in his disastrous speech to the Middlemarch townsfolk with a halfhearted appeal to “trade, manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples—that kind of thing” (407). 

Brooke’s undisciplined reading habits are glimpsed early in the novel, as he shares his “documents” with Casaubon, “pick[ing] up first one and then the other to read aloud from in a skipping and uncertain way, passing from one unfinished passage to another” (49). Both he and Casaubon are inundated with entirely too much information, overwhelming their faculties of discernment. The cheap, easy availability of a wide variety of printed material, intensified by industrial advances in the printing press, would facilitate the kind of wide, shallow reading in which Casaubon and Brooke partake.

If the distillation of Eliot’s “wisdom” into a book of excerpted passages provided a foothold for the pseudointellectual, it could also, perhaps, act as a corrective for their inattentive habits, “bringing distinctly before people’s minds what they see only indistinctly,” as Lewes puts it in his letter to Blackwood (qtd. in Hughes 162). Eliot, whatever her reservations, seemed to recognize this potential as well, writing to Main that his Sayings have given her “that sort of delight which comes from seeing that another mind underlines the words one has most cared for in writing them” (qtd. in Hughes 162). In this letter, Eliot praises Main as “one who takes into his own life the spiritual outcome of mine” (qtd. in Hughes 162). Similarly, in her journal, she describes the success of Middlemarch as a “growth of [her] spiritual existence when [her] bodily existence is decaying” (qtd. in Flint 76). Eliot’s words, here, indicate that she saw in the diffusion of her ideas a transcendent potential, unlocked by wide readership and aided, perhaps, by the spiritual stewardship of Main’s book of Sayings.  That these feelings exist alongside a reticence toward seeing her work reduced to “preaching,” however, suggests a conflicted stance towards the market structure in which she found herself enmeshed, which facilitated her popularity even as it compromised her artistic integrity. 

 

Conclusion

Will, in “The Dead Hand,” seems to take satisfaction in the “futility of his passion” for Dorothea: her reciprocal affection, the narrator implies, would compromise this satisfaction, serving as a “flaw appearing in his crystal” (380). “Do we not shun the street version of a fine melody?,” asks the narrator, “or shrink from the news that the rarity . . . which we have dwelt on even with exultation in the trouble it has cost us to snatch glimpses of it, is really not an uncommon thing, and may be obtained as an every-day possession?” (380). Will, reluctant to see Dorothea descend from the pedestal on which he has placed her in his thoughts, echoes the plight of the consumer, for whom the affordability of a luxury item necessarily implies a devaluation. 

As long as Dorothea is unattainable to Will, she exists—for him—outside the market, and can continue to represent an ideal. Freedgood, in her critique of Middlemarch, describes a similar dynamic, in which a “middle-class cultural elite, . . . fully tied to the market and therefore to the tastes and desires of those readers from whom it wishes to distinguish and distance itself, imagines a mode of literariness that would, ideally or eventually, place its invaluable works outside the market and beyond the reach of these readers” (125). Salient in this formulation is the imaginary nature of the work’s ability to place itself beyond the market. Middlemarch illustrates the impossibility of this desire: the novel’s arc, in which its idealistic protagonists gradually accede to economic realities, demonstrates an awareness that the retreat from the market is futile, a fact underscored by the prominent placement of advertisements in the book’s original installments. In Middlemarch, readers are confronted by a market from which they cannot opt out. To exist in a consumer society, as Dorothea accepts late in the novel, is to “learn what everything costs” (622). 

 

Works Cited

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