Very many of her readers and critics regard Middlemarch as George Eliot’s greatest novel.  This is said to have been her own opinion.  With great unanimity her readers pronounce Felix Holt her weakest and least interesting work.  So far as the dramatic and artistic execution are concerned, these judgments are not entirely correct.  The machinery of Middlemarch is clumsy, and the plot desultory in aim and method.  On the other hand, Felix Holt is strongly thought out and skilfully planned.  It has much of passion and enthusiasm in it, and not a little of pure and noble sentiment, while Middlemarch is never impassioned, but flows on calmly.  The author evidently put herself into Felix Holt with the purpose of teaching her own views about moral and social life.  She lived in the characters, felt and hoped with them, and wrote out of a deep, spontaneous purpose.  The sensational element has been more fully used, and the unity of the plot more thoroughly developed, than in any other of her works, while there is a living, breathing purpose in the story which is absent from her later works. Felix Holt is one of the two or three novels by George Eliot which have an affirmative and thoroughly constructive purpose.  It is this purpose which makes the chief interest of the work.  It is a story of social reform, and is to be read as an embodiment of the author’s political ideas.  From this point of view it is a story full of interest, and it is the one of George Eliot’s novels which will most strongly impress those who are fully in sympathy with her ideas of progress and social regeneration.  The purpose of Middlemarch is critical, to show how our modern social life cramps the individual, limits his energies, and destroys his power of helpful service to the world.  This critical aim runs through the whole work and colors every feature of it.  The impression made by the whole work is saddening; and the reader, while admiring the artistic power and the literary finish of the book, is depressed by the moral issue.  In strength of imagination, intellectual insight, keen power of analysis, this novel surpasses anything else George Eliot has written.

Felix Holt is a novel with an ethical purpose.  It aims to show how social and political reform can be brought about.  Felix is George Eliot’s ideal working-man, a man who remains true to his own class, seeks his own moral elevation, does not have much faith in the ballot, and who is zealous for the education of his fellows.  He is a radical who believes in heredity, who is aware of our debt to the past, and who would use the laws of social inheritance for the elevation of mankind.  The account Felix gives of his conversion contains George Eliot’s conception of what is to be done by all workingmen who rightly understand what social reform is and how it can be most truly brought about.  It is to be secured by each workingman living not for self and pleasure, but to do what good he can in the world.