ABSTRACT
Mary ann Evans’s first contact with the culture of Continental Europe was through playing its music and admiring its art, learning its languages and reading its literature. By her mid-twenties she had a good reading knowledge of French, German and Italian, as well as classical Greek and Latin, and she was later to add Spanish and finally Hebrew (which, if not European, she saw as having made a central contribution to the culture of ‘western people who have been raised to Christianity’ (L, vi: 301-2)). The art and literature of Europe formed an intrinsic part of the culture in which the future George Eliot grew up. The imagined community to which she belonged, and which her writings were later to serve, was as much European as British or English. although she was fully aware of national differences (some of which will be explored in the next chapter), like many Victorian intellectuals she did not see the culture of England and the British Isles as separate from that of Continental Europe.1 Matthew arnold, for instance, was not striking a merely personal attitude when he declared in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864) that the only useful criticism in the future would be one ‘which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result’.2 To judge from Victorian periodicals that was already substantially the case. The review pages of journals like the Westminster Review, to which George Eliot herself was to contribute so significantly, show how the serious reading public was kept up to date with the latest developments in art and literature, philosophy and history in France and Germany, Italy and austria, and the smaller countries of Europe. That sense of a common intellectual culture coexisted with an awareness of national differences and could survive the conflicts generated by the resurgent nationalisms of the nineteenth century, such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871.
