ABSTRACT
The reader's education, stubbornly resisted by early readers who corresponded with Richardson and doubtless by many readers since, demands yielding the satisfactions of romance. Christopher Flynn speaks of "the cannibalistic period that preceedes and the imperialistic one that follows". Case Croskery argues for "essentially Romantic" qualities in Haywood's work, pointing out how deftly the novelist treats emotion, making her protagonist's emotional development central to her moral education and privileging "passion as a site of psychological complexity and moral sophistication". Case Croskery suggests that we customarily connect reliance on emotion with Romanticism. To retrospectively declare it peculiarly characteristic of something we call Romanticism falsifies and simplifies history. Romanticism changed the terms of some educational endeavors in fiction, but Middlemarch, like The Man of Feeling, instructs its readers in intricacies and the importance of sympathy. To ponder the subject of emotion further might lead to a claim that quality particularly conspicuous in many novels of the 1790s, on very cusp of Romanticism.
