ABSTRACT
The composition of her first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, was bound up with her travels with Lewes around the coasts and islands of Southern England as he collected material for his Sea-Side Studies.2 The title of ‘The Sad Fortunes of
the Reverend amos Barton’ came to her one morning in Tenby; the fourth part of ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’ was written in the Scilly Isles; and ‘Janet’s Repentance’ was begun in Jersey. at the beginning of the epilogue to ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’, written in Scilly while ‘sitting on the Fortification Hill, one sunshiny morning’ (Journals, 291), she draws on the memory of a longer and more distant journey to describe the disjunction between Gilfil’s romantic youth and his lonely old age:
The commonplace metaphor of a life’s journey is given some appropriate colour by the remembered details of crossing the alps from Italy to Switzerland on her first trip to the Continent in 1849.3 This glimpse of the foreign is not arbitrary, since the Italian plains are the birthplace of Caterina, Gilfil’s great love and shortlived wife; but it is a rare one, and it points up how little George Eliot makes use of her foreign journeys in the fiction. Her ‘Recollections of Italy. 1860’ in her journal begin, for instance, with an account of crossing the alps by sledge on a starlit night (Journals, 336-7), but when Dorothea and Casaubon travel to Rome in Middlemarch, the journey itself is passed over in silence. The obvious contrast here is with Dickens. When in Little Dorrit the Dorrit family is freed from the Marshalsea prison and travels to Italy, the journey, beginning with the great setpiece description of the climb to the Great Saint Bernard convent, is a crucial stage in introducing the heroine to the unreality of her new life. It is not just that, while George Eliot focuses primarily on the inner life, Dickens seizes the chance offered by a foreign location to exercise his extraordinary gift for vivid description, but that his understanding of life in Little Dorrit, and more generally, is informed by the particular dynamism of travel. Where George Eliot famously uses the static image of the web to convey her sense of the interaction and interdependence of individual lives in Middlemarch, Dickens typically has recourse to the dynamic metaphor of the journey, as at the end of the second chapter of Little Dorrit:
The metaphor that provides a passing embellishment in ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’ is more like a structural principle in Dickens’s novel, and his emphasis on dramatic journeying is far removed from ‘the stealthy convergence of human lots’ and the ‘subtle movement’ of lives up and down the ladder of class in the ‘old provincial society’ of Middlemarch (11, 93). The travel motif may be seen as ‘the essential medium of narrative’ in some of Dickens’s writing,5 but the same claim cannot be made of George Eliot’s work before Daniel Deronda.
