[FIGURE 1]

Contextually, it is crucial to locate the literary form of the multi-volume novel in its original Victorian context. Eliot is not inventing intertextuality in Middlemarch, but instead she is trading in what is emerging as a necessary grounding of literary work as both aesthetically useful, but now commercially viable. By the Victorian period, print media had become accessible on a far broader scale than ever before, and with it came a burgeoning market for print materials that was rapidly creating a new class of literary audience (Freedgood 113). Not only were new works now finding their way into mass print market, but the literary canon at large was now in the constant state of being printed and reprinted, itself a sort of Victorian capitalist form of iteration that forms the basis for which Middlemarch as haunted novel becomes aesthetically and politically viable. In the original eight-volume publication of Middlemarch advertisements can be found in the front and back matter seeking to find audiences for the works of Thomas Malory, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, et al (Fig. 1). The apt nature that these advertisements would appear in Eliots novel is fortuitous (Beer 18), but not incidental. The advertisements themselves are keenly tethered to the market that Middlemarch is both reacting to rhetorically, but also being published through in a very literal sense. Shakespeare and Spenser are both advertised in the front matter of the novel’s third volume, indicative of a commercial audience overlap within the Victorian market – one that reads emerging contemporary works, á la Eliot’s novel, but also an audience that is receptive to reading the literary canon. This is, in essence, Eliot’s novel being used to sell other novels – by no means an uncommon practice to the Victorians – but moreover, the advertising of classic literary works inside a novel that is so tightly wound in referentiality is an auspicious reminder that the Victorians were not just interested in the posterity of the written word, but were commercially invested in the proliferation of nostalgia. Blackwood & Sons, Middlemarch’s original publishing house, are using new written material to sell reprisals of old material that has been lodged within the British zeitgeist as culturally significant. This foregrounds the Victorian British print market as something that is itself haunted; haunted by a conservative rhetoric that fixates on nostalgia as a cultural and political economy.

[FIGURE 2]

[FIGURE 3]

Nostalgia as a political tool is an especially useful way of thinking through the Victorian print market, especially given the choices of intertextual citations that Eliot relies on throughout. As articulated in Gillian Beer’s “What’s Not in Middlemarch,” the advertisements that were affixed to Middlemarch were outside of Eliot’s control, and likely were not given much thought at all (18-19). Yet these advertisements themselves exist in many contemporary novel publications, so it is rather unlikely that these were specifically chosen due to the intertextual nature of Eliot’s novel. Yet between these two possibilities lies the Occam’s Razor of it all, that indeed these ads and the intertextual citations of the novel overlap by sheer coincidence. Coincidence, as a term, does not imply sheer random encounter, but indeed the presence of the epigraphs and the advertisements are revealing – they represent the coinciding of market and political discourse built around conserving a fundamentally British cultural identity. Take, for example, Eliot’s reprisal of the Spenserian sonnet in vol. three of Middlemarch (Fig. 3). This epigraph is situated just above an extended section on the political sphere of Middlemarch (and pre-reform England at large), but perhaps more curious is that it appears without any tangible grounding in the novel. Surely the obvious implication is that the “self-assured” and “steadfast” woman is referring to Dorothea, who, to this point in the novel, is in the process of navigating her unhappy marriage to Casaubon while Ladislaw’s appearance begins to create disharmony. Yet this is assumptive on the reader’s part, and indeed could theoretically relate to several characters in the novel.

But consider it beyond mere narratological implication, and the function of Spenser within this section is a potent elucidation on the theme of reform in the novel. Spenser, as a surrogate for British high culture, is a compelling citation to bring into this chapter, particularly as it opens a section in which political discourse is being scrutinized by Eliot’s narrator. This passage discusses “the Pioneer,” a liberal newspaper, and “the Trumpet,” a conservative paper, and the issues each were facing due to the ongoing tension and changing attitudes on both sides of the political spectrum (Eliot 242-243). This underpins the theme of political reform that ebbs throughout Middlemarch, gesturing toward the fraught nature of British political identity in the mid-19^th century. Indeed the Pioneer losing readers due to its support of Peel’s pro-Catholic emancipation position is useful to frame the political theatre that Middlemarch is caught up in, but moreover the decline of both newspapers is suggestive of a broader decline in unified identity amongst the British, and inevitably one that would be tackled during the several reformations that would occur in the coming decades. Spenser slots into this equation as a relic, both literally a relic of literary greatness, but also as a haunting echo of 17^th century British political identity. The work which Spenser is most famous for was, in essence, an attempt at creating the definitive British origin myth, seeking to have The Faerie Queene be to the British what The Aenid was to the Romans. This is, on its own, a political undertaking.

The broad cultural identity of the British is being channeled into myth by way of literary formulation, and yet it is moreso a potent unfurling of the cyclicality of British political theatre. Spenser’s staunchly anti-Catholic position in the centuries prior has apparently not been resolved in Eliot’s time, yet it remains a conversation that divides the British. The fact that reform is such a potent theme throughout is not incidental, but instead is indicative of Eliot’s awareness of these rhetorical cycles. The project of maintaining a British identity is invariably a project of maintaining certain traditional rhetorics: a literary canon that is British first, a religion that is British in nature, and a historiographical approach that is always mediated through a British lens. In essence, these concessions are rooted in nostalgia. It is nostalgia that influences the posterity of British literary works, but it is also nostalgia that allows for them to be drawn upon aesthetically and procured commercially. It was nostalgia, or the lack of something to be nostalgic for, that led to Spenser to attempt to create the uncontested British origin myth. And it is nostalgia again that led to Eliot transposing the written works of the British tradition into her own work unchanged. Unchanged, but not unaltered. They are formally altered, losing the context of their original binding, but more over the words themselves are received differently narratologically, now seemingly referring to events they were never intended to fit, to describe characters alien to the original author.

[FIGURE 4]