SOURCE: Thomson, Fred C. “Politics and Society in Felix Holt.” In The Classic British Novel, edited by Howard M. Harper, Jr. and Charles Edge, pp. 103-20. Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 1972.

In the following essay, Thomson claims that Felix Holt is mistakenly considered a political novel and that Holt himself is more Positivist than radical, reflecting Eliot's basically conservative politics.

Felix Holt, the Radical has seldom been considered altogether satisfying as a political novel. The rather mannered descriptions of electioneering and the heavy-handed didacticism of Felix's speeches suggest that George Eliot was ill at ease in the field of practical politics. Yet, properly understood, this neglected book is an important guide both to George Eliot's vision of English society and to the techniques of rendering it that she perfected in Middlemarch.

Despite the title (deliberately equivocal) it becomes readily apparent that Felix Holt is not a...