ABSTRACT
George Eliot spent the summer of 1856, when the article on Riehl was written, at Ilfracombe and Tenby with Lewes, helping him in the work that resulted in his Sea-Side Studies (1858), and thereby increasing her respect for the value of scientific observation and the weight of fact. At the same time she kept a journal of their life at Ilfracombe in which she set down a number of minute and finished descriptions of the surrounding countryside, inspired by her desire 'to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct, vivid ideas. The mere fact of naming an object tends to give definiteness to our conception of it—we have then a sign that at once calls up in our minds the distinctive qualities which mark out for us that particular object from all others.' 1 Her 'Recollections of Ilfracombe' are in fact an exercise in the manner of Ruskin, whose 'doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature' she had praised in her review of Modern Painters, III, in the Westminster of April, 1856. Finally, it was during this summer that she was planning her first attempt at fiction, and in consequence was redefining for her own guidance her ideas about the nature and value of realism in art.
