ABSTRACT
Many major Victorian novelists look back to the romantic decades for settings, a retrospective habit which is itself romantic. They often regard the romantic period as an ideal time whose lost virtues are needed by a more complex modern age. With darkly luxurious word portraits suggesting John Constable's painting, the opening chapter of George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) describes the graceful vistas and provincial charm of a past lost to the anxious, industrial present. These nostalgic rural vignettes constitute Eliot's own Wordsworthian mergence through memory with the harmonies of the earlier age.
