SOURCE: Lesjak, Carolyn. “A Modern Odyssey: Realism, the Masses, and Nationalism in George Eliot's Felix Holt.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 30, no. 1 (fall 1996): 78-97.

In the following essay, Lesjak discusses Eliot's representation of the working class, which she removes from the productive sphere and situates within the domestic sphere in order to minimize class conflicts and disparities in income.

The industrial novel occupies a unique place in the context of debates about realism. As Erich Auerbach suggests, the subject matter of the realist novel—the masses or “the common people”—comes into being as a serious subject for literature as part of realism's inexorable logic:

Realism had to embrace the whole reality of contemporary civilization, in which to be sure the bourgeoisie played a dominant role, but in which the masses were beginning to press threateningly ahead as they became ever more conscious of their own function and...