SOURCE: Pykett, Lyn. “George Eliot and Arnold: The Narrator's Voice and Ideology in Felix Holt The Radical.” Literature and History 11, no. 2 (autumn 1985): 229-40.

In the following essay, Pykett examines the relationship between Eliot's Felix Holt and Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy.

It has become commonplace for students of George Eliot to reach for their Arnold when discussing the ideology of her later novels. It is also clear, as a number of commentators have pointed out, that in that problematically transitional work, Felix Holt, the Radical, George Eliot made a common cause with the Arnold of the roughly contemporaneous Culture and Anarchy ‘in the task of redefining the relationship between what is and what ought to be’.¹

Certainly George Eliot periodically strikes a distinctly Arnoldian note in letters written during the period of the gestation and writing of Felix Holt; for example, in the Arnoldian ennui which colours her...