ABSTRACT
All George Eliot's works of fiction are the products of a cultivated intelligence made European through travel, translation, and formidably extensive reading. What George Eliot herself called the 'epische Breite' * of the first two volumes of The Mill on the Floss is indicative of the scope of her vision for this novel. Her presentation of St Ogg's and its inhabitants depends as much on the implications of her perspectives of the Rhone and the Rhine, on her allusions to Aristotle, Sophocles, and Homer, on her application of Greek and Roman mythology, and on her engagement with the German cultural historian, Wilhelm von Riehl, as it does on the sense of an intimatelyrecollected past a sense that, in turn, recognizes the abiding spiritual, local presence of Roman, Saxon, and Dane. These allusions and presences permeate the novel, vastly extending its referential world beyond the horizons of those who belong to the tiny, trading society of St Ogg's. They are intrinsic to the 'large vision of relations'2 which George Eliot invites the reader to share, serving as one of the ways in which 'the small pulse' (II, 6) of the focal organism is linked with 'the world's mighty heart' (II, 6), and unobtrusively substantiating the observations of life which, in The Mill on the Floss, means life in all its forms.
