John Plotz
When I asked a colleague to name some important Victorian provincial novels, she looked at me as if I were insane: “All of them,” she explained gently, as to a drooling child. What is it, though, that nineteenth-century writers thought made a novel not simply extra-urban but downright provincial? In 1824, Mary Russell Mitford offered up a long-lived answer. She praised Jane Austen’s novels for successfully delineating a knowable and loveable world. In fact a world lovable because knowable:
Even in books I like a confined locality … nothing is so delightful as to sit down in a country village in one of Miss Austen’s delicious novels quite sure before we leave it to become intimate with every spot and every person it contains. (1846, 7)
Readers’ interest in any known place, that is, depends on intimacy predicated on the possibility of reciprocity and connection. Austen’s success is that her readers forget they have a book in hand, and instead imagine they are within a geographically and psychologically compassable world. This sense of readerly security might theoretically arise in a novel not so firmly rooted as Austen’s, but Mitford is skeptical that the form is capable of inducing a sense of placid stability if its subject matter is peripatetic: “Nothing is so tiresome as to be wheeled over half Europe at the chariot wheels of some hero” (7).
In praising both the knowability and the secure totality of Austen’s represented worlds, Mitford does more than affirm the famous reading of Austen as a miniaturist, toiling on “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour” (Austen 1959, 468–469). She initiates the tradition of praising the provincial novel for what is left out – troubling aspects of modern life – as much as for what is put in – evocations of a placid, rural, backward-looking England. Interestingly, Mitford’s account of a comforting literature based on compassability also indirectly acknowledges the distancing effect of what James Buzard has described as the nineteenth-century novel’s autoethnographic impulses (2005, 3–18). We are happy in the world of the novel, Mitford explains, because we can contemplate, closely and yet with a consciousness of our own distinction from them, characters who all coexist like “ants in an ant-hill [or] bees in a hive” (1846, 7).
The very features Mitford singles out for praise in the provincial novel are those that Mikhail Bakhtin influentially defines as epitomizing the residual and irrelevant features of both provincial life and provincial novels. Bakhtin emphasizes the importance of the Bildung tradition specifically in contradistinction to the comparative unimportance (and rural placidity) of the “petty-bourgeois provincial town,” with its “commonplace, philistine, cyclical … viscous and sticky … ancillary time” (1981, 248):
In the provincial novel we witness directly the progress of a family-labor, agricultural or craft-work idyll moving into the major form of the novel. The basic significance of provinciality in literature – the uninterrupted age-old link between the life of generations and a strictly delimited locale – replicates the purely idyllic relationship of time to space, the idyllic unity of the place as locus of the entire life process … The provincial novel has the same heroes as does the idyll – peasants, craftsmen, rural clergy, rural schoolteacher. (1981, 229)
Though the taxonomy has been somewhat nuanced and qualified in recent years, Bakhtin’s template, too, has proved surprisingly durable. According to Ian Duncan’s persuasive account, the British provincial novel presents a world that is “compact” (usually traversable on foot or horseback) and “familiar,” yet also “distinctive” (distinct from the metropolis, that is – in the regional novel, an intriguing variant of the provincial novel, the world is marked as peculiarly distinct from other provinces as well; Plotz 2008, 93–121). Duncan also notes the provincial setting’s “comparative historical backwardness,” which helps account for the “nostalgic mode” through which it is generally viewed (2002, 320–326). To Duncan’s five criteria, we might also add Franco Moretti’s description of the provincial as defined primarily negatively, through the sorts of possibilities and plots that provinciality rules out (2005, 52). Virtually everything that delineates the provincial novel is included in those cogent criteria: compactness, familiarity, distinctiveness (usually from the metropole), nostalgia-inducing comparative backwardness, and negative definition.
Consider the opening paragraph of perhaps the most instantly recognizable set of British provincial novels of all, Trollope’s Barchester series:
The Rev. Septimus Harding was, a few years since, a beneficed clergyman residing in the cathedral town of —; let us call it Barchester. Were we to name Wells or Salisbury, Exeter, Hereford, or Gloucester, it might be presumed that something personal was intended; and as this tale will refer mainly to the cathedral dignitaries of the town in question, we are anxious that no personality may be suspected. Let us presume … that the west end of Barchester is the cathedral close.
(Trollope 2008b, 1)
The disavowal of temporal and geographic specificity, and of personality, is provincialism at its finest: all six of the Duncan/Moretti criteria are in view by the bottom of the first page.
Crucial among those criteria, perhaps, is a special kind of provincial compactness, a curiously portable kind of geographic fixity. John Locke points out that when a chessboard moves without disturbing the pieces on it “we say [the pieces] are all in the same place, or unmoved” (1838, 100). Provincial novels similarly are interested not in absolute location, but in the way that the pieces are situated in relation to one another. Small wonder that many begin with the arrival of a naïve stranger (or better yet a returning native), who must be briefed on everyone’s comparative standing – and address. Moretti argues that “one cannot map provincial novels – you cannot map what is not there” but he also proposes a very helpful distinction: between mapping (of the real geographically knowable world), and diagramming, which simply establishes a differential relationship between locations (three houses down from the corner; next town after Middlemarch, etc.) (2005, 53, 54). Provincial novels are unmappable, but they must be diagrammable – as witness the one drawing George Eliot made of the world of Middlemarch, a relational chart of distances between villages (Kitchel 1950, 2).
The importance of this diagram-logic to the provincial novel should also help draw our attention to another aspect of the genre, equally important, but distinctly unamenable to diagramming. Bakhtin emphasizes the sticky and idyllic qualities of provincial life, but in doing so he overlooks the ways that even the most seemingly sedentary provincial worlds always contain linkages to a greater world beyond. That greater world crucially discloses itself within the provincial location, even if only by way of the characters’ awareness of their imbrication in an extraterritorial realm: Jane Eyre touching Roman history in Miss Temple’s Roman books, Miss Marjoribanks laying Napoleonic plans to conquer Carlingford – but also Maggie Tulliver materializing (in Chapter 1 of The Mill on the Floss [1860]) in the narrator’s cold study.
Victorian readers possessed a vast arsenal of terms to describe what it felt like to get lost in a novel. Readers are engaged or enthralled; the novelist is a magician or a time traveler. The annihilation of present space and time often seems a blissful consummation (cf., on novelistic reverie, Arata 2004). The highest praise a reviewer can give Dracula (1897) is to admit that “at ten we could not even pause to light our pipe” and by midnight “we listened anxiously for the sound of bats’ wings against the window” (Review of Dracula 1897, 363–364), while Robert Louis Stevenson envies Fyodor Dostoyevsky beyond all writers because “it is not reading a book, it is having a brain fever to read [Crime and Punishment]” (Stevenson 1995, 151). For many readers, then, a novel succeeded if it could engender absorption so complete that actions the work merely represented could trigger “the ‘creepy’ effect, as of pounded ice dropped down the back” (quoted in Sweet 1999, xvi).
What of those novels, though, that present themselves neither as brain fevers nor as pounded ice? A wide range of Victorian novels implicitly or explicitly propose self-limiting claims about the sorts of power that an aesthetic experience has – or ought to have – over its readers. In such works, the reader is imagined as getting lost in a book, but remaining simultaneously aware of the real world from which she or he has become semi-detached. How does such semi-detachment shape the Victorian provincial novel? Pervasively. One manifestation is what might be called “phase shift” moments, in which the narrator discovers that what had seemed to be a sensation within an artwork’s imagined world is actually a sensation that can be tied to the here-and-now as well. The musing narrator whose voice opens The Mill on the Floss, for instance, finds himself located at once in the world of the Tullivers (staring at Maggie by the mill) and in his own readerly space:
It is time the little playfellow went in, I think; and there is a very bright fire to tempt her: the red light shines out under the deepening gray of the sky. It is time, too, for me to leave off resting my arms on the cold stone of this bridge …
Ah! my arms are really benumbed. I have been pressing my elbows on the arms of my chair, and dreaming that I was standing on the bridge in front of Dorlcote Mill, as it looked one February afternoon many years ago.
(Eliot 2008, 12, ellipsis original)
The reader, like the narrator, is suspended between the world of the mill and the study – Eliot’s peculiar ellipsis marks the moment (of waking, of dizziness?) where that confusion arises (cf. Byerly 2012).
What is it that makes Eliot commence a novel that ends up located entirely inside the world of Dorlcote Mill with this antechamber, half bridge and half study armchair, located so oddly between worlds? If a novel sought mainly to immerse its readers in a sensually complete shadow world, a moment like this would be a glaring anomaly, a signal of failed aesthetic effect. Enough similar instances exist, though, for us to think about semi-detachment not as an inadvertent way station but as a state deliberately sought out. We might for example trace through Victorian realist novels moments when a movement toward pure abstraction gets unavoidably anchored in the physical location from which that flight to abstraction began. Think of the self-abnegating Jane Eyre (1847), reading for life in a window seat screened from and yet connected to a cold world beyond the glass: she is also cousin Jane, aware that at any moment the red curtain will be thrown back and her book turned into another weapon in a daily domestic war. The Jane who contemplates the glories of the world of Roman history opened up in the talk (and inside the glowing temples) of Helen Burns and Miss Temple is also the Jane blissfully aware of what it is like to be well-fed and ensconced within the only “temple” to be found in profane Lowood.
The role that semi-detachment plays in Victorian provincial novels is linked to the way that mid-Victorian culture increasingly came to be defined by a network of vicarious attachments. Even the most localized lives (say, those “Amazons” who possess Cranford [1851–1853]) were now increasingly imagined as tied by gossamer threads – green tea, pearls, letters from India – to a greater world of trade, capital exchange, and dispersed kinship networks. The occurrence of semi-detachment as a thematic concern – and a formal feature – of Victorian novels is also linked to the growing sense of what Elaine Hadley has called “abstract embodiment” (2010, 16) among journal readers of the Victorian era. By her account, such readers find that (much like the paper ballot) signed political articles transform the public realm of letters into anything but an impersonal realm of ideas. British provincial novels can be distinguished from their Continental counterparts by the important role that various forms of semi-detachment plays in novelists ranging from Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope to George Eliot and even Thomas Hardy.
The doubleness in the moments from The Mill on the Floss and Jane Eyre above (the reader is lost in thought, yet also right inside the room, and vulnerable; see Price 2004 and Gettelman 2007) is exemplary of the paradoxical ways in which local attachments actually end up abetting rather than thwarting moments of detachment. The experience of semi-detachment that comprises a fully realized provincial life – that is, living a life far away from the seemingly inescapable centrality of the metropolis, yet still connected to it – is in important ways analogous to the sort of semi-detached relationship that the reader (half leaning on the stone bridge, half still back at home in an armchair) is meant to have to the text itself. A sense of doubleness characterizes sophisticated novels that thematically reflect on the problem of partial absorption (Middlemarch [1871–1872]) as well as novels that resist such attempts at reflexivity (The Chronicles of Barchester [1855–1867]). At the heart of the provincial novel, then, lies not a triumph of the local over the cosmopolitan (Little Englandism), but a fascinating version of magnum in parvo, whereby provincial life is desirable for its capacity to locate its inhabitants at once in a trivial (but chartable) Nowheresville and in a universal (but strangely ephemeral) everywhere.
One marker of the logic of semi-detachment that powers the provincial novel is a recurrent tendency towards generic parody and half-appropriation of other genres in British provincial novels. Not just the relatively awkward genre parodies in Trollope’s The Warden (1855), but also Gaskell’s gesture towards the fairy tale in “old rigmarole of childhood” in the opening line of Wives and Daughters (1996, 5) – and in_Cranford_, towards the realm of Greek myth: “In the first place, Cranford is in the possession of the Amazons” (Gaskell 2011, 3). Such parody is on display in Emily Eden’s Semi-Detached House (1859), for example, in which the suburban langours of Dulwich are animated by a persistent “dropping into quotation” (of ballads and of Shakespeare, principally). In quoting, characters make their lives meaningful by analogizing them to the lives they devour in distinctly nonprovincial (and nonprosaic) artworks. And a fascinating palette of generic parodies is at the core of the (unjustly) neglected provincial novels of Margaret Oliphant: especially Miss Marjoribanks (1866). For Oliphant (much like Gaskell in her half-heroic, half-mock-heroic Cranford [1853]) the provincial novel holds its power precisely by simultaneously borrowing and renouncing the seemingly more grandiloquent plots and formal devices of various other genres.
If for Bakhtin the provincial novel is defined by the sense that any meaningful event has to happen elsewhere, one of the striking elements of the British provincial novel is how this disjunction is routinely turned on its head. Going up to London, which looks like productive activity, frequently turns out instead to be a misguided, even fatal loss of focus. In the novels of Trollope, Gaskell, and Margaret Oliphant, core and periphery frequently get reversed, so that what matters to the nation’s center happens on its edges: Drumble waits on Cranford’s decisions, and Barchester’s family dramas run back upstream to shape metropolitan politicking.
We know how little can be expected from the new Bishop in Barchester Towers (1857), for instance, when we read:
Dr. Proudie was, therefore, quite prepared to take a conspicuous part in all theological affairs appertaining to these realms, and having such views, by no means intended to bury himself at Barchester as his predecessor had done. No! London should still be his ground: a comfortable mansion in a provincial city might be well enough for the dead months of the year … The resolution was no doubt a salutary one as regarded the world at large but was not likely to make him popular either with the clergy or the people of Barchester.
(Trollope 2008a, 18)
For London to “still be his ground” it is necessary for the Bishop to give up hope of a meaningfully active role in Barchester, or in the novel that takes Barchester as its locus amoenus. The Bishop is instantly judged irrelevant, consigned, structurally, to the very same category as the various London-based writing forms that Trollope satirizes in The Warden (the blowhard newspaper, the Carlylean prophetic ranter, and the lachrymose Dickensian social-problem novelist). An 1882 critic summed up Trollope’s ability to center the world on his provincial microcosm nicely: Barchester, writes R. H. Hutton, is “the center of all sorts of crowding interests, of ecclesiastical conflicts, of attacks of the press, of temptations from the great London world” (18). Not a retreat, but the moving center of a moving world.
A sly remark of Hardy’s rings true: even the sprawling European plot of The Dynasts (1904–1908) is provincial – when viewed from the heavens. Although this is not the place to launch into a full-bore investigation of the distinctiveness of the British provincial novel in the nineteenth century, this widespread tendency to center fiscal, romantic, and vocational plotting in the hinterlands stands in striking contrast to the role that bucolic interludes play even in provincially inclined Continental novels. In Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1873–1877), for instance, Levin’s remarkable night spent sleeping among his peasant laborers gives us a crucial benchmark. During that blissful night, Levin resolves to give up everything related to his social position, and immerse himself in both rural labor and the contemplation of natural beauty.
At the very instant Levin casts his psychic lot with the peasantry, though, he hears a coach flying towards him, and in it he sees “a young girl, apparently just awakened, … Bright and thoughtful, all filled with graceful and complex inner life to which Levin was a stranger, she looked through him at the glowing sunrise” (2003, 277). It is Kitty, his eventual wife, whom Levin has, by pure chance, happened to see speeding by. With her back in mind his purely bucolic interlude ends abruptly – as it generically must. Anna Karenina, no matter how lovable a sidelight Levin’s rural improvement schemes may be, is born from Bildung. It begins with a love affair born on a train and ends with a railway suicide.
As Bakhtin’s account of the provincial novel suggests, Levin’s temporary retreat from his classed role offers a compact, familiar, distinctive, historically backward domain that serves as the negative space against which the metropolitan world can unfold in all its active, emergent plottedness. With a very few exceptions, in the rest of Europe the appeal of the provincial remained, like the idyll or the eclogue, a possibility glimpsed on the margins, briefly entertained and then discarded – as in this suggestive moment where Levin half succumbs to the allure of a timeless life he can never fully envision. Or worse: when Flaubert casts a cold eye on the “moeurs de province” in Madame Bovary (1856), the dread provincial mundanity Emma Bovary has married into is embodied in “Charles’s conversation … flat as a sidewalk, … everyone’s ideas walked along it in their ordinary clothes” (2012, 35). Emma’s only refuge from that flat anti-cosmopolitan ordinariness is a Walter-Scott-fuelled Quixotism (“And you were there too, you sultans with long pipes, swooning under arbors in the arms of dancing girls, you Giaours, Turkish sabers, fezzes, and you especially, wan landscapes of dithyrambic countries”) which makes Emma wish (perfect motto of the stranded provincial dreamer) “both to die and to live in Paris” (33, 51).
The British provincial novel, by contrast, is willfully centered on out-of-the-way eddies, and the flotsam and jetsam that wash up in them. Life may seem to be elsewhere in Trollope’s novels, but the novel takes place in the very elsewhere where life is. One way to think about the logic is by way of a recent parallel, the Ang Lee film The Ice Storm (1997), set in 1970s suburban Connecticut. The young would-be protagonist of the film (who thinks he’s in a Bildungsroman) leaves his provincial town for New York in pursuit of a girl and some adventures; twelve hours later, he returns home from a series of disappointments – no girl, no stories. Meanwhile back in his hometown, where he is convinced nothing ever happens, everything – intoxication, sex, love, and death – has.
The point driven home by the semi-detachment that runs through Victorian provincial novels, however, is not simply that great plots happen in small places. Rather, such novels aim to represent what it feels like for characters (and implicitly readers) to be confined to a restricted locale – and yet also, simultaneously, aware of an indirect connection to the currents of a greater world beyond. One way to read the provincial novel’s evident anti-Londonism is to emphasize that England, unlike France and Russia, has multiple geographical centers of power (Moretti 2005, 52–53). However, there is also something more at play here. If Matthew Arnold warns that the English are in danger of succumbing to provincialism because “we all of us like to go our own way and not to be forced out of the atmosphere of commonplace habitual to most of us” (1865, 46), the British provincial novel pointedly inverts Arnold’s logic: the most far-flung, least appealing and most seemingly cloistered reaches of the country are its secret weapons not despite but precisely because of their “commonplace” quality. You might think of the characters in provincial novels responding to Arnold’s condemnation of their provinciality not by moving to London, but by hunkering down at home and ordering more books and journals so as to read about how cut off and backward they are.
The relationship between provinces and larger realms (the nation, the world) is unmistakably shaped in certain ways by the neat inversion that Benedict Anderson (1983) proposes in understanding how novels make up “imagined communities”: that in their depiction of a plurality of multiple locales, novels can create a nation united across vast swaths of space and time. If for Mitford provinces are beautifully self-contained worlds, for an Andersonian reading they become potentially metonymic: the part that can also stand in for the whole, as a church stands for churches, a house for the houses of the nation as a whole. What is still missing from Anderson’s account, though, is the doubled sensation that keeps recurring in these novels: the awareness that one is living at once inside a tiny world, a trivial world, caught in the middle of nowhere, and yet one is also located within the larger currents of the day, potentially locatable anywhere.
The provincial character, then, is in place to body forth the significantly insignificant life, a life worth remarking on because it is invisible, and its channels are, like Dorothea Brooke’s, diffusive. In part this simply underscores Philip Larkin’s maxim: “nothing, like something, happens anywhere” (2004, 82). It is remarkable how well such instances of cloistered worldliness succeed – at least inside the dream world of the Victorian provincial novel. The number of Gaskell characters who manage cosmopolitan acts of introspection and abstract cogitation – minutely inspecting leaves (Roger Hamley in Wives and Daughters [1864–1866]) or beetles (Job Legh in Mary Barton [1848]; see Coriale 2008) – is an important reminder that in the Victorian provincial novel every place, no matter how common, is defined in part by its uncharted edges – edges understood as trailing undiagrammably off into Belgium and Canada (Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley [1849]) or even into the sky (Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower [1882]). Those who travel abroad clutch to their copies of Gilbert White’s Selborne (a book that reached a wider readership only in the mid-nineteenth century, when it became a common companion for émigrés; Menely 2004) in order to materialize their “home thoughts from abroad”; those who stay home gaze ruminatively into terraria and Ward’s boxes.
Insect contemplation, in fact, is a surprisingly useful figure with which to grasp how Victorian provincial novelists reflexively understand their own project. The era’s new ways of understanding magnum in parvo were, I argued above, crucial for understanding the ways that Victorian provincial novels both acknowledged and worked beyond the way that their characters resembled “sheep in a fold” or “ants in an ant-hill.” Accordingly, whenever we come across an instance of the microcosmos in these novels, it is worth considering not just what such a metonym means to readers, but also what it seems to mean to the characters themselves. Thus in Middlemarch, just before her climactic scene with Rosamond, we find Dorothea “dilating with Mr. Farebrother on the possible histories of creatures that converse compendiously with their antennae” (Eliot 2000, 483). The two conversations – Dorothea’s talk with Farebrother while her mind is truly occupied with her coming talk with Rosamond, and the conversation going on between the insects whose little world looms mysteriously below – resonate curiously with one another. Readers are privy to Dorothea’s effort to divert herself from private miseries by envisioning another world that lies somewhere just beneath the limits of her myopia.
If the epigraphs in Middlemarch are hooks that lift characters up out of their narrow neighborhood, allowing readers to reimagine the novel’s social world as if it were a Renaissance play, the compendious conversations of the insects suggest that looking down is another way to shift scales. Both raise the possibility of a life that is coterminous with one’s own and yet (as with the narrator’s numbed forearms at the beginning of The Mill on the Floss) phase-shifted so as to be only semi-present. A melodramatic tableau looms for Dorothea: both she and her readers can predict (incorrectly, it turns out) just the sort of well-worn plot that awaits her. Instead, what she calls the “social spirit” leads her to talk insects with Farebrother and soil conditions with “old Master Bunney” (483). Like lifting our eyes up to the epigraph, these downward glances to earth and insects propose that the affairs of our local world can be reassessed by approaching them from a different sort of perspective altogether. Is it time, then, to reclassify Edwin Abbot’s Flatland (1884), with its satirical account of characters incapable of grasping the truth about the three-dimensional solid moving through their planar world, as the ultimate Victorian provincial novel?
Such glimpses of a different set of axes or a new vantage point on distant worlds, which nonetheless permit characters to continue their old provincial life in some altered way, form a near-omnipresent element of the Victorian provincial novel. Even at the grimmest moments, these shifts in vision recur: when Tess Durbeyfeld teaches her brother to see the stars as worlds, “most of them splendid and sound – a few blighted,” he has to look up and survey the sky in order to grasp that he and his sister live “on a blighted one” (Hardy 2005, 37).
This pattern of looking downward so as not to look in the mirror of one’s own life, or looking upward to abstract ideals in the sky for the same reason, is one that Hardy perfectly captures and anatomizes in that coldest of climaxes to the Victorian provincial novel, Jude the Obscure. That novel anatomizes Jude and Sue’s semi-detachment: apart or together, the two appear “gliding steadily onward through a dusky landscape of some years later leafage,” always moving on, never arriving (Hardy 2009, 87). Like Father Time himself, who glides wearily over the earth as if no part of it were any different from any other, Jude is afflicted with the modern vice of restlessness. The form that it takes in Jude is, though, peculiarly pathological – he knowingly turns everything about him from a particular space into a general one, and every problem from a unique one to merely a case of a general rule. Faced with the arrival of his son, Jude enunciates a principle rather than acknowledging a blood-claim: “all the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time and entitled to our general care” (324).
For Jude to reclassify the boy that way (and for the novel itself to accept the relabeling, referring to him as Father Time from this moment onwards) is somehow to make his son available as subject matter for ongoing conversations with Sue. These conversations are poignant in their upstream effort always to strive towards some abstract human realm even at the moments that Jude and Sue’s lives (making baked biscuit replicas of the colleges Jude once longed to enter) are defined by material circumstances straitened almost beyond belief. Hardy is charting what it means to take local exigencies (thwarted education, bad marriage, “too menny” children) and reimagine them as instances of unapproachably distant universal truths. For Hardy to accomplish this – especially within a novel that had initially seemed firmly anchored in the “Wessex” that supplied the frame through which Hardy’s work was nearly inevitably interpreted – requires him, by way of Jude and Sue, to explore what it means to treat one’s own griefs as the property of the universe, making (or at least striving to make) one’s life into a sounding-board of abstract concerns rather than a painfully contingent and personal set of experiences.
My claim is not that such novels simply permit the reader to establish a semi-detached relationship to this world, but that they insist upon that semi-detachment by modeling it with the forms of attention and of quasi-removal that open up for the novels’ own characters. Mitford and Bakhtin both presume that the readers of provincial novels have a voyeuristic and a detached interest in woes and gladness not their own. In Middlemarch, though, the implicit readerly response is modeled in the characters’ own evident awareness of what it means to observe half-removed worlds. Farebrother not only immerses himself in the parliament of bugs, he also urges Lydgate to immerse himself in the microscopic world of his own work. If we never see a character looking up to the head of a chapter to observe and reflect on the epigraph under which the forthcoming actions have been gathered (though there are moments in Middlemarch when characters seem to quote from a chapter’s epigraph, an unsettling trick), we do find characters looking downward at yet smaller worlds (Henrietta’s involuntary “beaver-like notes” as she hunts up her “tortoise shell lozenge-box,” a gift of Will [Eliot 2000, 484]) to find a kind of transient attachment to such microcosms – accompanied by a reflexive semi-detachment from their own woes.
One way to understand the kind of novelistic reflections about semi-detachment that I have been tracing is to reconsider Ian Watt’s famous account of the ordinariness, the nobodyness of realist novel characters (1957, 9–34). In ways that resonate with contemporary developments in the fledgling fields of anthropology and philology, nineteenth-century provincial novels became chronicles not just of the humdrum and insignificant details of everyday life (a longstanding ambition of the realist novel) but specifically of the significantly insignificant. That is, these novels rely upon a world that matters precisely because it does not seem, by any earthly calculus, to matter in any significant way.
When Trollope imagines the real politics of the nation as occurring while bishops are busying themselves pointlessly in London, he is participating in an upheaval in notions about the importance, and the representability, of the ordinary and of the insignificant. In a variety of discourses of the mid-century there emerges the notion that certain sorts of evidence are significant only because they are insignificant. Their interest is in those details that come to light precisely because there is no reason they ought ever come to light, being too ordinary, too incidental, too forgettable. In the work behind the project of the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, Richard Trench describes the unremarkable chitchat of ordinary speech as made up of numberless “flashes of genius” (1852, 33); in Primitive Culture (1871) Edward Tylor argues that children’s rhymes or proverbs, trivial beyond belief and forgotten as soon as uttered, are the only satisfactory clues to what preceded our current culture – clues satisfactory because of their utter triviality. In Walter Scott novels a talisman or amulet long worn casually turns out at a key moment to become evidence that a character is actually the long-lost heir. Here, the evidentiary basis shifts: the haystack is no longer disguising one true needle; rather, every piece of hay becomes a needle in its own right.
In both Tylor and Trench, accreted insignificant details turn out – precisely because of their mundane, ordinary, everyday roles – to be the concrete basis for large claims about the past nature of the human institution under study: in Trench’s case, the English language, in Tylor’s, “primitive culture” and its telltale “survivals.” The provincial novel is of great interest in the mid-Victorian era because it is a genre that nicely captures the fact that all significant human activity takes place, precisely, among insignificant people, in places that do not matter in any world-historical sense. It is only mute inglorious Miltons who are Miltonic, only nameless and unobserved St. Theresa’s who can live truly saintly lives.
By this reading, the final page of Middlemarch formulates the distinctive charge of the British provincial novel in a distinctive and innovative way:
We insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.
Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
(Eliot 2000, 515)
Readers are asked to envision a curious kind of mimetic relationship to the characters here, as if in Dorothea’s life they can see, but only partially (as witness the unsettling introduction of the notional “many Dorotheas”), the lives around them. It is a version of this boldness about correspondences, along with this palpable hesitation in completing the analogy, that makes many Victorian provincial novels notable for their odd mixture of presumption and modesty.
Twentieth-century British provincial novels have an utterly different range of possibilities. Some of Eliot’s sense for the paradoxical centrality of provincial experience is still preserved in the opening few chapters of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), but the absurdity of imagining there could be any true intellectual engagement in rural life becomes the central comic device of E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia series (1920–1939), in which to quote (or more likely misquote) Nietzsche in the confines of Riseholme is simply to reveal one’s completely risible provincial pretentiousness. A similar refusal to admit the compatibility of the cosmopolitan and the world of the “village green preservation society” shapes the Bovaryisme of William Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life (1950; “que je m’ennuie” exclaims its hero to an audience of schoolboys [45]), the parodic exuberance of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954; the novel’s senile old villain has no higher ambition than making it onto a radio program devoted to “provincial culture” [2000, 24]), and the genteel resignation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop (1978). That refusal shapes as well the 1963 film Billy Liar, the 1968 concept album The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1989; provincialism deconstructed) and a thousand subsequent high-, middle-, and low-brow restagings of what precisely is wrong with the provinces.
Dorothea Brooke and her Middlemarch cohort are, by contrast, semi-detached provincials: half engulfed in daily cares yet half aware that their lives are shaped by forces at work elsewhere in the great world. If Middlemarch ends with Dorothea’s commitment to the invisible diffusive currents that link her to her neighbors, its other axis – the epigraphs that lift us away from Lowick to an imagined Renaissance scene, the spiritual half-parallels that make Dorothea simultaneously like and unlike St. Theresa, and the insect kingdoms that open beneath her feet – all work to remind us that the provinces are in fact like the distant world to which their inhabitants aspire. Like that world, that is, precisely in being unlike any other place. In their dislocation, their location; in their provinciality, their cosmopolitanism.
I am very grateful to Stephen Arata, Matthew Rowlinson, Ivan Kreilkamp, Rae Greiner, Jonathan Farina, Nick Dames, Alison Byerly, and Adam Grener for helpful advice and for generously sharing relevant portions of their work. A shorter earlier version of this piece appeared as “The Semi-Detached Provincial Novel” in Victorian Studies 53, 3 (Fall 2011): 405–416.