ABSTRACT
In one of the most sympathetic and perceptive contemporary reviews of Romola, R. H. Hutton described the Renaissance as that era which has so many points of resemblance with the present.1 George Eliot was pleased with the review and expressed herself satisfied that Hutton had divined her intentions.2 Other readers, both contemporary and modern, have been less pleased with the weight of Renaissance scholarship, to which George Eliot's notebooks and correspondence bear eloquent testimony. The correspondence has been edited in a masterly fashion; the fact that the notebooks in the British Library and the Beinecke Library at Yale are still unpublished is perhaps an indication that George Eliot's learning is a trifle formidable. The 'dried jokes', 'the light Florentine buzz', 'two pages of cram'3 are damning indictments from a generation, more serious than our own, more anxious to learn, and less likely to dismiss historical novels as neither good history or good novels. There were, it is true, great Victorians who admired Romola especially when they read the novel as a whole rather than in monthly parts, and the verdict of these immense bigwigs, as Eliot rather touchingly calls them, should be borne in mind when considering the reputation of Romola* Contemporary critics of course pined for the world of A dam Bede, another novel set in the past, but a recognizable past. Modern critics look to the careful structure of Middlemarch, also set in the past, a past as remote now in 1995 as the Renaissance was to Victorian readers, but one that Eliot recreates
firmly but unobtrusively. In Romola, however, the dried husks of Florentine history are perpetually getting in the way of the reader eager to explore the universal themes of love and heroism, temptation and corruption, which Romola, Tito and to a lesser extent Savonarola, Bardo and Baldassarre represent.
