SOURCE: "The Mill on the Floss: Growing Up in St. Ogg's," in George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations: A Reading of the Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 106-39.

In this essay, Carroll examines the world-views of the Dodsons and Tullivers and their effect on Tom and Maggie's "search for an interpretative key to life."

In both Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot interrupts her narrative to deliver a lengthy apologia for the kind of novel she is writing. It is prompted in each case by what appears to be an anomaly. In Adam Bede, the vicar of Hayslope fails as Christian mentor and appears to a putative reader as 'little better than a pagan'. Chapter seventeen which follows is the famous aesthetic justification based on a contrast between the 'secret of proportion' of classical art and 'the secret of deep human sympathy' of...