The Ethics of George Eliot's Works

Transcribed from the 1884 William Blackwood and Sons edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
BY THE LATE JOHN CROMBIE BROWN
FOURTH EDITION
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCLXXXIV
All Rights reserved
The greater part of the following Essay was written several years ago. It was too long for any of the periodicals to which the author had been in the habit of occasionally contributing, and no thought was then entertained of publishing it in a separate form. One day, however, during his last illness, the talk happened to turn on George Eliot’s Works, and he mentioned his long-forgotten paper. One of the friends then present—a competent critic and high literary authority—expressed a wish to see it, and his opinion was so favourable that its publication was determined on. The author then proposed to complete his work by taking
up ‘Middlemarch’ and ‘Deronda’; and if any trace of failing vigour is discernible in these latter pages, the reader will bear in mind that the greater portion of them was composed when the author was rapidly sinking under a painful disease, and that the concluding paragraphs were dictated to his daughter after the power of writing had failed him, only five days before his death.
It is a source of great gratification to the friends of the author that his little volume has already been so well received that the second edition has been out of print for some time. In now publishing a third, they have been influenced by two considerations,—the continued demand for the book, and the favourable opinion expressed of it by “George Eliot” herself, which, since her lamented death, delicacy no longer forbids them to make public.
In a letter to her friend and publisher, the late Mr John Blackwood, received soon after the appearance of the first edition, she writes, with reference to certain passages: “They seemed to me more penetrating and finely felt than almost anything I have read in the way of printed comments on my own writings.” Again, in a letter to a friend of the author,