George Eliot and the idea of travel.

Compared with Dickens, George Eliot makes little use of her extensive foreign travels in her fiction. This essay traces the incidental role of travel in the novels until it becomes central to Daniel Deronda. In the early fiction the circumscribed lives of provincial England are framed by the narrative discourse of a well-traveled mind. The journey, particularly for women, dramatizes a crisis of identity, a theme continued in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, where it is contrasted with the male experience of travel as self-culture. In Daniel Deronda travel defines the unstable world of modernity and the condition of Jews, culminating in the problematic journey to the East.

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On their way to Munich in April 1858 George Eliot and G. H. Lewes stopped for a night in Nuremberg and on the following morning, a Sunday, 'wandered about the beautiful streets and wondered at every turning, until it was time to go to dinner'. (1) If her admiring but measured appreciation of the town in her journal can be seen to express what Henry James was later condescendingly to describe as 'the tempered enjoyment of foreign sights, which was as near as she ever came to rapture', (2) the ebullient Lewes, in a letter to John Blackwood, was less restrained in conveying their enthusiasm for the place, using terms that directly challenge James's assessment:

Our journey was like every other journey except the two days at Nurnberg, which was one protracted oh! Were you ever there? If so, you will understand our rapture; if not, I don't think any description bearing the marks of sanity would convey a proper feeling of the pleasure we received. (3)

He concludes his letter by holding out to the publisher an intriguing possibility: 'Who knows but some day we may have a Nurnberg novel, as the product?' Despite the couple's intense excitement no such novel ever emerged, and its absence is indicative. With the exception of Romola, whose laborious reconstruction of fifteenth-century Florence owed in any case more to the lamp and the library than to the observing eye and the experience of contemporary Italy, George Eliot's extensive foreign travels left no novels as their direct product. Only the Roman scenes of Middlemarch and a few brief and scattered episodes elsewhere, most notably in Daniel Deronda, bear immediate testimony to her European journeys. The life and the writing took different roads. The adventurous traveler who, from the time she became independent on the death of her father in 1849 until the last year of her life, made frequent and often lengthy journeys to the Continent, exploring with eager interest most of the great cities of Western Europe as far east as Berlin and Vienna, wrote novels of a singularly stay-at-home kind. Of course her fiction, however provincially English its setting, is always informed by a profound knowledge of the literature, culture, and history of the wider world of Europe and beyond; so much so that Barbara Hardy has justifiably argued that a need for foreignness was an essential component of the novelist's creative life, while Deirdre David has shown how that wider world was a fertile presence in her literary imagination. (4) Nevertheless, foreign travel itself, or even journeying of a more limited kind, plays little obvious part in her fiction before the 1870s. The impact of abroad is confined to 'spots of foreignness' (Hardy, p. 9) rather than the extended engagement that travel implies. Yet the idea of travel, so important for the life, is still interestingly present in the wings of the fiction, so to speak, before it finally takes centre stage in Daniel Deronda; and to trace that presence can be to throw light not only on that last novel but also on some of the distinctive qualities of George Eliot's fiction as a whole.

The composition of her first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, was bound up with her travels with Lewes around the coasts and islands of southern England as he collected material for his Sea-Side Studies. The title of 'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton' came to her one morning in Tenby; the fourth part of 'Mr Gilfil's Love-Story' was written in the Scilly Isles; and 'Janet's Repentance' was begun in Jersey. At the beginning of the epilogue to 'Mr Gilfil's Love-Story', written in Scilly while 'sitting on the Fortification Hill, one sunshiny morning' (Journals, p. 291), she draws on the memory of a longer and more distant journey to describe the disjunction between Gilfil's romantic youth and his lonely old age:

This was Mr Gilfil's love-story, which lay far back from the time when he sat, worn and grey, by his lonely fireside in Shepperton Vicarage. Rich brown locks, passionate love, and deep early sorrow, strangely different as they seem from the scanty white hairs, the apathetic content, and the unexpectant quiescence of old age, are but part of the same life's journey; as the bright Italian plains, with the sweet Addio of their beckoning maidens, are part of the same day's travel that brings us to the other side of the mountain, between the sombre rocky walls and among the guttural voices of the Valais. (5)

The commonplace metaphor of a life's journey is given some appropriate colour by the remembered details of crossing the Alps from Italy to Switzerland on her first trip to the Continent in 1849. (6) This glimpse of the foreign is not arbitrary, since the Italian plains are the birthplace of Caterina, Gilfil's great love and short-lived wife; but it is a rare one, and it points up how little George Eliot makes use of her foreign journeys in the fiction. Her 'Recollections of Italy. 1860' in her journal begin, for instance, with an account of crossing the Alps by sledge on a starlit night (Journals, pp. 336-37), but when Dorothea and Casaubon travel to Rome in Middlemarch, the journey itself is passed over in silence. The obvious contrast here is with Dickens. When in Little Dorrit the Dorrit family is freed from the Marshalsea prison and travels to Italy, the journey, beginning with the great set-piece description of the climb to the Great Saint Bernard convent, is a crucial stage in introducing the heroine to the unreality of her new life. It is not just that, while George Eliot focuses primarily on the inner life, Dickens seizes the chance offered by a foreign location to exercise his extraordinary gift for vivid description, but that his understanding of life in Little Dorrit, and more generally, is informed by the particular dynamism of travel. Where George Eliot famously uses the static image of the web to convey her sense of the interaction and interdependence of individual lives in Middlemarch, Dickens typically has recourse to the dynamic metaphor of the journey, as at the end of the second chapter of Little Dorrit:

And thus ever, by day and night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another, move all we restless travelers through the pilgrimage of life. (7)

The metaphor that provides a passing embellishment in 'Mr Gilfil's Love-Story' is more like a structural principle in Dickens's novel, and his emphasis on dramatic journeying is far removed from 'the stealthy convergence of human lots' and the 'subtle movement' of lives up and down the ladder of class in the 'old provincial society' of Middlemarch. (8) The travel motif may be seen as 'the essential medium of narrative' in some of Dickens's writing, (9) but the same claim cannot be made for George Eliot's work before Daniel Deronda.

This difference can also be seen in the extent to which the two novelists exploit in their fiction one essential feature of their own life's journey, their progress from the provincial margins to the metropolitan centre of society. In David Copperfield and Great Expectations Dickens creates his own versions of that classic fable of nineteenth-century fiction, the journey of the provincial protagonist to the capital; and it is also vestigially present in other novels of the mid-century, such as Charlotte Bronte's The Professor and Villette, where Crimsworth and Lucy Snowe respectively experience the excitement of lodging in the shadow of St Paul's. But it is singularly absent from George Eliot's novels. Maggie Tulliver, unlike her creator, seems unable to conceive of a life for herself beyond the bounds of her provincial upbringing. When Dr Kenn urges her to leave St Ogg's, she can only imagine a featureless existence as 'a lonely wanderer' rather than a move to London or any other specific location. (10) Although the journey to the capital is referred to at the end of Middlemarch, Dorothea's move to London with Ladislaw is only stated, not shown, and the dramatic magnitude of her displacement has simply to be inferred from her sister Celia's poignant and comically uncomprehending question, 'How can you always live in a street?' (p. 807). Only in Impressions of Theophrastus Such at the end of her creative life does George Eliot convey anything of her own transformation, when her persona, the elderly bachelor Theophrastus, reflects on the distance he has traveled from his contented childhood as a parson's son in the English midlands:

Since then I have learned to care for foreign countries, for literatures foreign and ancient, for the life of Continental towns dozing around old cathedrals, for the life of London, half sleepless with eager thought and strife, with indigestion or with hunger; and now my consciousness is chiefly of the busy, anxious metropolitan sort. My system responds sensitively to the London weather-signs, political, social, literary; and my bachelor's hearth is imbedded where by much craning of the head and neck I can catch sight of a sycamore in the Square garden: I belong to the 'Nation of London'. (11)

Significantly, the move to London is conflated with foreign travel and the widening of mental horizons, as though travel were necessarily an aspect of the sophisticated metropolitan existence. Although Theophrastus suggests that his is one of the 'many voluntary exiles in the world' (p. 24), it remains an exile, and his emotions seem primarily to be invested in the world of his origins: he implies that he is one of those who 'would willingly have kept sight of the familiar plains, and of the hills to which they first lifted up their eyes' (p. 25).

George Eliot cannot be simply identified with the figure of Theophrastus, and for her the move to London was as much a liberation as an exile, but the tension between the much-traveled metropolitan mind and an imaginative and emotional investment in a world familiar from childhood is certainly central to her creative life. The action of her early fiction up to Romola rarely strays beyond those familiar plains and hills, and when it does, the world beyond them is barely comprehensible to the travelling character, whose very identity is threatened by the displacement. When Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede sets out on her 'journey in hope' to find Arthur Donnithorne, her movement 'away from the familiar to the strange' (12) takes her ultimately into 'cold, and darkness, and solitude' (p. 386) that anticipate the grave. (13) Her identity is threatened with obliteration by her passage beyond the bounds of her familiar world and she ends as the shadowy 'poor wanderer' (p. 538) that Maggie Tulliver will later dread becoming. Similarly, when Silas Marner leaves Lantern Yard at the beginning of that novel, he leaves behind his identity and has to create a new one for himself in Raveloe, a place marked by its narrow horizons and its isolation from the modern world of travel and transport, 'nestled in a snug well-wooded hollow, quite an hour's journey on horseback from any turnpike, where it was never reached by the vibrations of the coach-horn, or of public opinion'. (14) The peasants who inhabit places like Raveloe are suspicious of the unfamiliar, mistrustful of anyone who comes from outside, and barely able to grasp the idea of travel: 'to their untravelled thought a state of wandering was a conception as dim as the winter life of swallows that came back with the spring; and even a settler, if he came from distant parts, hardly ever ceased to be viewed with a remnant of distrust' (p. 3). In this setting Silas's life after his initial displacement is not a journey but a process of integration into the community in which he has come to rest; and when he does undertake a journey back to the town of his origins, he finds that Lantern Yard and all traces of his own past have been swept away. Similarly to Hetty, when he steps outside the by now familiar world, he encounters only darkness, in this case the darkness of an irretrievable past and an impenetrable epistemological uncertainty. As he says to his neighbour about the robbery of which he was unjustly accused and the drawing of lots which pronounced him guilty: 'It's dark to me, Mrs Winthrop, that is; I doubt it'll be dark to the last' (p. 173).

The 'untravelled thought' and circumscribed lives of these 'peasants of the old time' (Silas Marner, p. 3) are framed by a larger consciousness that can draw specifically on the experience of travel. In The Mill on the Floss the narrowness of the lives of the Dodsons and Tullivers is illustrated by a meditation on the contrasting landscapes of the Rhone and the Rhine which assumes that the reader is familiar with an experience such as 'journeying down the Rhone on a summer's day' (p. 271). Similarly, when Hetty Sorrel sets out on a fine February morning to buy things for her wedding with growing despair at her pregnant condition, the conjunction of smiling landscape and inner agony prompts the narrator to reflect on similar days and other journeys both at home and abroad:

What a glad world this looks like, as one drives or rides along the valleys and over the hills! I have often thought so when, in foreign countries, where the fields and woods have looked to me like our English Loamshire--the rich land tilled with just as much care, the woods rolling down the gentle slopes to the green meadows--I have come on something by the roadside which has reminded me that I am not in Loamshire, an image of a great agony--the agony of the Cross. (Adam Bede, p. 363)

The analogy between the wayside crucifix and the suffering of the 'young blooming girl, not knowing where to turn for swift-advancing shame' (p. 364), lies beyond the experience of Hetty and the community of Hayslope in general, but it serves to mediate between the peasant life and that of amore sophisticated readership by asserting the general human truth of the limited particular case. It conveys the novelist's determination, first expressed in her essay on 'The Natural History of German Life', to look behind the attractive surface of the rural world as represented in 'idyllic literature, which has always expressed the imagination of the cultivated and town-bred', in order to convey 'the truth of rustic life'. (15) That truth, the narrator of The Mill on the Floss concedes, may not be easy to grasp for minds whose very experience of mental travel and wider horizons can be an obstacle to the understanding of more rooted lives such as that of Mr Tulliver, who cannot conceive of living apart from the mill that has been the centre of his existence since birth:

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans--which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi--can hardly get a dim notion of what an old-fashioned man like Tulliver felt for this spot, where all his memories centred, and where life seemed like a familiar smooth-handled tool that the fingers clutch with loving ease. (p. 263)

Irony here does not condescend to the old-fashioned Tulliver but turns against the mobility of the modern educated mind, whose familiarity with the distant and the exotic amounts to a form of rootlessness. The 'vagrancy' imputed to narrator and reader suggests that the wandering fate which Maggie Tulliver fears when she contemplates life outside St Ogg's has become something like the common condition of a later, more instructed generation.

The difficulty for the traveled mind of grasping the rootedness of a Mr Tulliver implies that the very pace of modern life militates against the kind of reflective attention available to an older and slower vagrancy, which enjoys 'lingering by the hedgerows'. In her earlier work as a reviewer the future George Eliot selected a pertinent quotation from a fellow novelist: '"We no longer travel, we arrive at places," says Thackeray, regretting the incident and variety of the old-fashioned journey'; (16) and this observation is echoed ten years later in the Author's Introduction to Felix Holt, the Radical, where just such an old-fashioned journey by stagecoach is the appropriate device for conveying the variety of landscapes and forms of life in the English midlands: farmland and parkland, pre-industrial villages and industrial towns, labourers' cottages and gentlemen's estates. There is a self-conscious nostalgia in this choice of perspective--'Five-and-thirty years ago the glory had not yet departed from the old coach roads' (17)--and in imaginatively reverting to the days of the stagecoach the novelist is setting herself at a deliberate distance from the pace of the railway age, whose ability to annihilate time and space is implied, and intensified, in a fanciful futuristic image:

Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow old-fashioned way of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory. The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as barren as an exclamatory O!' (p. 3)

The needs of the storyteller are better served by the leisurely transport of the past, and its narrative potential is illustrated by reference to the most venerable literary antecedent: the outside passenger on a coach would, in the course of a day's journey, have 'gathered enough stories of English life [...] to make episodes for a modern Odyssey' (p. 3). Felix Holt is, of course, not such a work. Although it begins with the return of a traveler, Harold Transome's experiences in the Middle East are given only the most cursory mention; and if the Author's Introduction presents an Odyssey in miniature, it is one that ends, characteristically for George Eliot, in the private world of the Transomes, a world of suffering which is defined by an allusion to two later epic writers, Vergil and Dante, 'poets [who] have told us of a dolorous enchanted forest in the under world', where the thorn-bushes 'have human histories hidden in them' and 'the power of unuttered cries dwells in the passionless-seeming branches' (p. 10). The inner landscape displaces the outer.

The imaginary coach journey of the Author's Introduction is the nearest thing in George Eliot's fiction to travel-writing, which also barely features in her non-fictional published work. The two articles in Fraser's Magazine generated by her first visit to Germany with Lewes, 'Three Months in Weimar' and 'Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar' (Essays, pp. 82-122), are her only published exercises in a genre to which some of her contemporaries, such as Dickens and Thackeray, made significant contributions. The fact that she did write up her travels in her journals and that these accounts remained unpublished in her lifetime is an indication of how travel's primary importance for her was private and personal. (18) As she makes plain at the beginning of her 'Recollections of Italy. 1860', the value of travel for her lay in its contribution to personal development, to self-culture: she had traveled to Italy, she maintains, 'with the hope of the new elements it would bring to my culture' and believes that 'Travelling can hardly be without a continual current of disappointment if the main object is not the enlargement of one's general life' (Journals, p. 336). There is a note of earnestness here, of duty stoically undertaken in the face of the 'weariness and annoyances' (p. 336) that journeys inevitably entail, but the association of travel with self-scrutiny is characteristic. It is present in an early letter of 1847 giving an account of a journey back to Coventry from the Isle of Wight, where she had been staying with her ailing father:

We staid at Brighton on our way home [...]. I find one very great spiritual good attendant on a quiet meditative journey among fresh scenes. I seem to have removed to a distance from myself when I am away from the petty circumstances that make up my ordinary environment. I can take myself up by the ears and inspect myself, like any other queer monster on a small scale. (Letters, I, 239-40)

Displacement from the quotidian creates the conditions for reflection on and revision of the self, a self made unfamiliar--a 'queer monster'--by distance from its habitual setting.

The impulse to self-scrutiny and the demands of self-culture are closely connected in George Eliot's idea of travel, but when they appear in the fiction they tend to be separated along gender lines. More often than not self-scrutiny is a painful imposition on the female while self-culture is the privilege of the male. (19) For George Eliot's female protagonists the journey typically dramatizes a crisis of selfhood. Maggie Tulliver's acquiesence in the boat journey down the Floss with Stephen Guest, when she allows herself to be borne along by the tide of desire, issues in an agonizing awakening and a struggle in which she chooses to obey the promptings of conscience and reject the possibility of life with Stephen for the sake of obligations entered into in the past. Similarly, Romola's boat journey after her flight from Florence is an experience of drifting away from her marriage and from her faith in Savonarola, and potentially from life itself as she wishes 'she might be gliding into death'; (20) but it ends with her waking to a new life and a liberating struggle to save the victims of pestilence. The journey leads through crisis to a resolution, although in the case of Maggie only after another boat journey to rescue her brother from the flood and in the abrupt resolution of untimely death. Distinctions of gender are erased, not armed, in that tragic conclusion; but they are clearly present in Middlemarch in Dorothea's and Will Ladislaw's different reactions to Rome. In Dorothea's wedding journey to Rome her unhappiness at her misguided marriage is compounded by her inability to make any sense of 'the city of visible history' (Middlemarch, p. 190) and a feeling of being overwhelmed by 'this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation' (p. 191). Ladislaw, by contrast, can be seen to be one of 'those who have looked on Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a glowing soul into all historic shapes' (p. 190), for he finds that 'Rome had given him quite a new sense of history as a whole: the fragments stimulated his imagination and made him constructive' (p. 209). For him the Roman experience contributes to his development and amounts indeed to an enlargement of his general life.

Ladislaw's journey to Rome, like his studies in Heidelberg, are driven by a desire, as Casaubon disparagingly puts it, 'to go abroad again, without any special object, save the vague purpose of what he calls culture, preparation for he knows not what' (p. 79). As Joseph Wiesenfarth has shown, Ladislaw shares traits with the young Goethe as the writer appears in G.H. Lewes's biography, (21) and it could be said of him as Lewes says of Goethe on his Italian journey, 'he came for self-culture'. (22) As the Goethe parallel suggests, in Ladislaw's peripatetic life on the Continent there is an echo of the Romantic journey, the kind of journey Goethe himself records in his Italienische Reise. Ladislaw, like Daniel Deronda after him, stands in the tradition of Wilhelm Meister and the protagonists of other works of the Romantic period which arm the creative value of 'independent, unprogrammed travelling'. (23) Privileged by their gender and their class, George Eliot's young men are permitted to travel as part of what is explicitly termed in Daniel Deronda an 'apprenticeship to life', with its reminder of the German Bildungsroman and of the indulgence which that form of fiction typically bestows on its protagonist. Such travel may enlarge the self, but not by exposing it to crises that are potentially fatal.

The privileged continental wanderings that are ascribed to Ladislaw and more fully represented in the case of Deronda are one of the means George Eliot uses to set English life in a wider European context and to extend the horizons of her readers by urging them 'to journey beyond the narrow compass of their own existences' (David, p. 271). From this perspective the encounter with abroad can be seen to serve an ethical purpose, to promote that extension of sympathy that was central to the novelist's work. In her earlier work as a reviewer she was able, too, to perceive an ethical potential in travel-writing, recommending the reading of two books on Arctic exploration for their morally bracing effect:

But to people who are taking life in a lethargic fashion, or who are grumbling at small inconveniences, we say--take up these Arctic voyages; they will rouse you to more energetic thought; they will silence you into more patient endurance. (24)

What provoked her most scathing criticism in travel-writing was a failure to instruct, to have anything original to say about the novelty of foreign scenes, as with two books about Germany and the Tyrol which she dismisses for 'containing scarcely a single scrap of knowledge which was not long ago familiar to instructed, and easily accessible to uninstructed, men'. (25) But the representation of foreign scenes and foreign travel, whether fictional or non-fictional, may not always be a matter of instruction and enlightenment; and the painful continental experience of George Eliot's women, such as Dorothea and later Gwendolen Harleth, shows that travel in her novels does not simply serve as a means of acquiring new insight and understanding. Rome does not benignly widen the reader's horizons, for its 'stupendous fragmentariness' (Middlemarch, p. 190) is also fragmenting, both in its effect on Dorothea's sense of identity and on the formal coherence of the novel. As Barbary Hardy has argued, 'Rome displaces Middlemarch, but offers ruins, confusion, deconstruction' (p. 13). Travel can be subversive, confronting the traveler with unmanageable vistas of ruin and decay rather than benignly formative insights. Thus the oppressive effect of Rome on Dorothea is anticipated in the earlier tale The Lifted Veil, when the narrator Latimer is offered a European tour by his father to help him recover from a serious illness. The mere mention of the itinerary, 'through the Tyrol and Austria [...] to Vienna, and back by Prague', (26) triggers a premonitory vision of that last city as another lowering historical remnant, arrested in the past and 'doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories':

The city looked so thirsty that the broad river seemd to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day. (p. 9)

This vision of a world ruled by monuments to the dead is disturbing not only in its desolation, but also in its prophetic power. The city turns out to be exactly as Latimer has foreseen; and in foreseeing with hallucinatory clarity his destination as a traveler, he is experiencing his fatal destiny to suffer from the unwanted visionary gift, a gift that will enable him to foretell but not forestall his final journey to the grave.

The different aspects of travel outlined above come together in Daniel Deronda, the one novel by George Eliot in which travel is a central motif. Her aim in writing the novel, 'to widen the English vision a little' as she put it to Harriet Beecher Stowe (Letters, VI, 304), involves stretching the imagination of her readers not only by introducing them to the largely unknown world of Jewish culture, but also by extending the geographical reach of the story through the travels of the principal characters. The novel begins in a German spa, moves back to provincial England and then on to London; it embraces Deronda's journeys to Germany and Italy, Mirah's account of her travels to New York and across central Europe, and Gwendolen's and Grandcourt's fatal yacht trip around the Mediterranean; and it ends with Deronda and Mirah about to set out on a journey to the East. The centrality of travel is a symptom of the restless modernity that George Eliot explores for the first time in a novel, as she abandons the security of historical distance and sets the action in the 1860s, near enough to the time of writing for Daniel Deronda to be read as a critique of the contemporary world. The narrator may famously proclaim the value of a settled upbringing--'A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land' (27)--but such rootedness seems to be here a thing of the past, an object of nostalgia rather than the common condition of existence. This can be seen not only in Gwendolen Harleth's early life, which prompts the narrator's observation and has consisted of a nomadic 'roving from one foreign watering-place or Parisian apartment to another' (p. 20), but also in the more privileged Deronda, who, even before he is uprooted by the discovery of his origins, is impatient with the established order of upper-class English life and leaves Cambridge to study abroad, following an inclination already present in childhood 'in his boyish love of universal history, which made him want to be at home in foreign countries, and follow in imagination the travelling students of the middle ages' (p. 173). For him, like Ladislaw, the nomadic life is freely chosen rather than imposed, as Gwendolen's is, by circumstances, and yet in both cases it bears the mark of the modern condition--a restlessness of spirit in the case of Deronda, and for Gwendolen the material insecurity created by the instabilities of an economic system in which the failure of a bank can destroy the income of a rentier family.

The difference between the two characters and the implications of their respective kinds of mobility reproduce the gender distinction seen in the earlier novels in relation to travel. Deronda's travels to Germany, where he visits the Frankfurt synagogue and discovers his life's mission in Mainz, and his journey To Genoa to meet his mother, may all be stages in a developing crisis of identity, but it is a crisis that never threatens to be fatal. Rather, it opens the way to a new life as a Jew, which he is able to embark upon without having to sacrifice the privileges of his old life as an English gentleman. Gwendolen's experience is altogther more testing. As a young woman whose 'horizon was that of the genteel romance' (p. 49), she can talk airily of travel, replying to her cousin Ralph's question as to what she would like to do in her life with revealing insouciance: 'Oh, I don't know!--go to the North Pole, or ride steeple-chases, or go to be queen in the East like Lady Hester Stanhope' (p. 65). The casual mention of the North Pole and the East can be taken as an illustration of the 'instructed vagrancy' of a conventionally educated young woman, but the image of female independence and sovereign control suggested by the allusion to Lady Hester Stanhope is, of course, entirely ironic. Although Gwendolen feels 'well equipped for the mastery of life' (p. 36), her position as a young female in an impecunious family ensures that she will be numbered among those 'other people' she initially despises, 'who allowed themselves to be made slaves of, and to have their lives blown hither and thither like empty ships' (p. 36). The simile of unsteered ships, of uncontrolled travel, is ominously proleptic. It is during the journey in miniature of the roving archery match (with its echo of her roving early life) that she is first confronted with the 'ghastly vision' of a woman's life as vulnerable and dependent when she talks to Lydia Glasher by the Whispering Stones (p. 145); and her own subjugation to Grandcourt's brutal will is powerfully demonstrated in their Mediterranean yacht trip, where the 'floating, gently wafted existence, with its apparently peaceful influences' becomes 'as bad as a nightmare' (p. 650), as Grandcourt watches her 'with his narrow, immovable gaze, as if she were part of the complete yacht' (p. 647). Travel becomes a form of emotional travail in which the woman is made aware of her status as little more than a commodity, as it is, too, for Mirah when she is paraded across the cities of central Europe by her father with his eye on her profitable prostitution.

The yacht journey also contributes to widening the English vision by bringing out some of the conventional characteristics of Englishness in juxtaposition to the foreign setting. The Grandcourts, travelling the Mediterranean on their 'tiny plank-island of a yacht' (p. 645), appear to illustrate Thackeray's observation about English insularity in 'The Kickleburys on the Rhine': 'We carry our nation everywhere with us; and are in our island, wherever we go. Toto divisos orbe--always separated from the people in the midst of whom we are.' (28) When Gwendolen and her husband emerge from their hotel to go boating, they stand out in their haughty Englishness from the life around them to such an extent that the scene is 'as good as a theatrical representation for all beholders':

This handsome, fair-skinned English couple manifesting the usual eccentricity of their nation, both of them proud, pale, and calm, without a smile on their faces, moving like creatures who were fulfilling a supernatural destiny--it was a thing to go out and see, a thing to paint. The husband's chest, back, and arms, showed very well in his close-fitting dress, and the wife was declared to be like a statue. (p. 656)

The English vision is widened here by the device of viewing the upper-class English through the eyes of the local onlookers. By slipping into the perspective of ordinary Europeans the narrator exposes the strangeness of what to English eyes might appear normal, reveals the sheer eccentricity of those who consider themselves to be at the centre of civilized life. The effect is ironic. Gwendolen, who once had dreams of being an actress like Rachel on the international stage, is now seen as a theatrical figure in performing her social role as the wife of an aristocrat and is appreciated as an aesthetic spectacle, while the superior Englishman, contemptuous of foreigners, is appraised by them simply as a physical specimen.

The superior detachment from all around her that Gwendolen displays here is replaced on her return from the fatal boating trip by a pitiful vulnerability, when, 'pale as one of the sheeted dead, shivering, with wet hair streaming' (p. 660), she is brought ashore by Italian boatmen. The journey abroad has turned out to be a journey into a spiritual underworld of suffering, from which she only begins to emerge when the forward momentum of travel is arrested. In a pause at a railway station on the way back from Genoa she looks out over the sunlit, hedgeless foreign fields and has a vision of the Wessex countryside 'of Pennicote and Ouendene under their cooler lights', with 'the grey shoulders of the downs, the cattle-specked .elds, the shadowy plantations' and 'the neatly clipped hedges' (p. 734). The familiar lineaments of an English landscape bring relief, a 'restful escape' from the 'long Satanic masquerade' that her life has become, and serve as a measure of the moral distance she has traveled in her miserable marriage. Foreign travel thus brings into focus the momentous inner journey that has 'turned the brilliant, self-confident Gwendolen Harleth of the Archery Meeting into the crushed penitent impelled to confess her unworthiness' to Deronda (p. 679).

Gwendolen's painful development is contrasted with the lack of deeper change that has been the mark of her family's existence over the same period, and in reflecting on that contrast and on the 'variable intensity' of human experience, the narrator reaches revealingly for journeys as a means of illustration:

A man may go south, and, stumbling over a bone, may meditate upon it till he has found a new starting-point for anatomy; or eastward, and discover a new key to language telling a new story of races; or he may lead an expedition that opens new continental pathways, get himself maimed in body, and go through a whole heroic poem of resolve and endurance; and at the end of a few months he may come back to find his neighbours grumbling at the same parish grievance as before, or to see the same elderly gentleman treading the pavement in discourse with himself, shaking his head after the same percussive butcher's boy, and pausing at the same window to look at the same prints. (p. 679)

The moral advantage here lies with the travelers and their energetic curiosity, while those who stay rooted in their native earth and experience 'that quiet recurrence of the familiar, which has no other epochs than those of hunger and the heavens' (p. 679), remain intellectually as well as literally passive and parochial. But what is striking about these illustrative metaphors is their inappropriateness to Gwendolen's experience. This kind of exploratory travel is the prerogative of men, and, in this novel, of men like Deronda. Travel for Gwendolen is not exploratory and formative, but unsettling and painfully destructive of her sense of self. Her inner development may be conveyed by a metaphor drawn from the experience of travel, the metaphor of the widening horizon, but from the outset that process is one of hurtful displacement rather than positive growth, as when Klesmer's criticism of her singing leaves her with 'a sinking of heart at the sudden width of horizon opened round her small musical performance' (p. 45). And in the final widening of horizons caused by Deronda's revelation to her of his Jewish blood and proto-Zionist mission, she feels 'herself reduced to a mere speck' by 'the bewildering vision of these wide-stretching purposes' (p. 774). With her inner journey still problematically unfinished at the end of the novel, she is left bereft by his departure and inwardly alone, another version of the 'lonely wanderer' that Maggie Tulliver feared to become and Hetty Sorrel became.

The narrator's impercipience about the appropriateness of metaphors of masculine exploration to Gwendolen is an illustration of a well-known critical imbalance, of the way the novel leans towards the male protagonist, treating him with a generosity denied to the female. With Deronda's travels George Eliot takes up again the unprogrammed romantic journey and the ideal of self-culture seen earlier with Ladislaw in Middlemarch, but here they are given a particular inflexion by his Jewishness. The figure of the Wandering Jew is variously implied and invoked in the novel. The musician Klesmer is the only character actually to use the term, when he thwarts the pompous Mr Bult's attempts to categorize him as a Panslavist by declaring, with mocking irony, 'My name is Elijah. I am the Wandering Jew' (p. 232). But Klesmer, who acts as the spokesman of European high culture to the philistine English upper class and eventually marries into that class, is less of a wanderer than other Jewish figures. Mirah's and Mordecai's father Lapidoth, adept at languages and restlessly moving between London, New York, and the cities of Central Europe, is the Wandering Jew of a materialist kind, whose loyalty is to infinitely mobile capital rather than to any place or country. He is a creature of the modern metropolis, emerging out of the streets of London to haunt his daughter and fading back into them again after he has stolen Deronda's ring. At the other end of the moral spectrum is Kalonymos, the friend of Deronda's grandfather, for whom wandering is an elected way of life: 'I choose to be a wanderer [...] I am a wanderer, carrying my shroud with me' (p. 696). This existential wandering is, he maintains, a characteristic of his race, and more fundamentally rooted than the experience of the diaspora: 'Our people wandered before they were driven' (p. 697). It is this kind of existence that Deronda appears to embrace when he abandons his course at Cambridge to study abroad, and although his planned journey to the East at the end of the novel, a journey with a mission, seems to align him, not with the nomadic Kalonymos, but with his politically motivated grandfather, who 'thought continually of our people's future' (p. 697), the possibility remains that the reality of the life he is committing himself to will turn out to be perpetual travel rather than national homecoming.

That final journey remains an abstraction beyond George Eliot's own experience and power convincingly to imagine, and it is an abstraction with troubling implications: the orientalist assumption that the East is a blank canvas on which the West may inscribe its ambitions, and the affinity between Deronda's intention to play a role of 'social captainship' (p. 723) in foreign lands and the colonizing adventures of British imperialism frequently alluded to in the novel. These qualifications are characteristic of a novel which consistently questions its own asseverations; but the implications of the planned journey to the East are not exclusively political, for its very abstractness allows it to be read as a journey of the imagination which goes beyond the bounds of physical travel. The nearest the novel comes to representing such a journey is Mordecai's recollections of the morning on the quay at Trieste when he was about to embark for Beirut, before being summoned back to England by a letter from his mother. The remembered scene combines colourful detail with visionary transcendence:

The bright morning sun was on the quay [...] the garments of men from all nations shone like jewels--the boats were pushing off [...] and standing on the quay, where the ground I stood on seemed to send forth light, and the shadows had an azure glory as of spirits become visible, I felt myself in the flood of a glorious life, where in my own small year-counted existence seemed to melt, so that I knew it not. (p. 521)

The bright light of the Mediterranean merges here with what the narrator of The Mill on the Floss calls 'the visionary sunlight of promised happiness' (p. 469), which, together with the oceanic sense of a flood in which the single soul melts into a larger life, defines this moment as a foretaste of transcendence. The impressionistic play of water and sunlight is taken up again later in another visionary scene when Mordecai sees Deronda stepping ou a boat by Blackfriars Bridge, the 'prefigured friend' coming from 'the golden background' (p. 474) of a sunset on the Thames, with 'the grey day dying gloriously, its western clouds all broken into narrowing purple strata before a wide-spreading saffron clearness, which in the sky had a monumental calm, but on the river, with its changing objects, was reflected as a luminous movement' (p. 473). For George Eliot such scenes can launch the mind on a journey of the imagination towards another world, as she herself experienced twenty years earlier gazing on the orange and crimson sky of a sunset over the sea at Ilfracombe:

How lovely to look into that brilliant distance and see the ship on the horizon seeming to sail away from the cold and dim world behind it right into the golden glory! I have always that sort of feeling when I look at a sunset; it always seems to me that there, in the west, lies a land of light and warmth and love. (Journals, p. 272)

West may be exchanged for East in Daniel Deronda, but the planned journey is a voyage to a promised land, and while Deronda prepares for it in practical fashion, receiving from the Mallingers 'a complete equipment for Eastern travel' (p. 780), Mordecai dwells on it 'with a visionary joy' (p. 767). And in the closing paragraphs the intended journey is elided into Mordecai's passage to the next world, with Mirah's and Deronda's arms around him and a metaphorical 'ocean of peace' beneath him (p. 780). At the very end of her career as a novelist George Eliot uses the idea of travel to reach out to a realm of transcendence where the intractable problems of modernity are suspended and history fades into myth.

(1) The Journals of George Eliot, ed. By Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 309.

(2) George Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. by David Carroll (London: Routledge @ Kegan Paul, 1971), p. 499.

(3) The George Eliot Letters, ed. by Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1954-78), II (1955), 449.

(4) Barbara Hardy, 'Rome in Middlemarch: A Need for Foreignness', George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, 24-25 (1993), 1-16; Deirdre David, 'Getting Out of the Eel Jar: George Eliot's Literary Appropriation of Abroad', in 1830-1876: Creditable Warriors, ed. by Michael Cotsell, English Literature and the Wider World, 3 (London: Ashfield Press, 1990), pp. 257-72.

(5) Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. by Graham Handley (London: Dent, 1994), p. 192.

(6) With her friends, the Brays, she traveled from Lake Maggiore over the Simplon Pass to Martigny in the Valais: Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 70.

(7) Little Dorrit, ed. by Angus Easson (London:Dent, 1999), p. 32.

(8) Middlemarch, ed. By David Carroll, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 93.

(9) John M. L. Drew, '"Voyages extraordinaires": Dickens's "Travelling Essays" and The Un-commercial Traveler', Dickens Quarterly, 13 (1996), 76-96, 127-50 (p. 76).

(10) The Mill on the Floss, ed. By Gordon S. Haight, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 496.

(11) The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ed by D. J. Enright (London: Dent,1995), p. 24.

(12) Adam Bede, ed by Valentine Cunningham, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 369.

(13) Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, 'Incarnations: George Eliot's Conception of Undeviating Law', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 29 (1974), 273-86 (p. 276).

(14) Silas Marner, ed. By Terence Cave, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 5.

(15) Essays of George Eliot, ed. by Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge @ Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 269.

(16) Westminster Review, 64 (July 1855), 307. She is using Thackeray's remark to define the disadvantages of short stories, which bring one too rapidly to 'the shock or terminus of a d<enouement'.

(17) Felix Holt, the Radical, ed. by A. G van den Broek (London:Dent, 1997), p. 3.

(18) For a discussion of these two articles and the journals as travel-writing see Margaret Harris, 'What George Eliot Saw in Europe: The Evidence of her Journals', in George Eliot and Europe, ed. by John Rignall (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), pp. 1-16.

(19) That distinction is already suggested in Adam Bede, where Hetty's journeys are contrasted with Arthur Donnithorne's complacent ride home from Liverpool, contemplating his future as a 'fine country gentleman' (p. 437). See Carol A. Martin, 'The Reader as Traveler, the Traveler as Reader in George Eliot', George Eliot Review, 29 (1998), 18-23 (p. 21).

(20) Romola, ed. by Andrew Brown, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 475.

(21) 'Middlemarch: The Language of Art', PMLA, 97 (1982), 363-77 (p. 370).

(22) The Life and Works of Goethe (London: Dent, 1959), p. 303.

(23) Roger Cardinal, 'Romantic Travel', in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. by Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 135-55 (p. 139).

(24) Westminster Review, 67 (1857), 288-306 (p. 303).

(25) Saturday Review, 2 (6 September 1856), 424-25.

(26) The Lifted Veil, ed. by Helen Small, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 9.

(27) Daniel Deronda, ed. by John Rignall (London: Dent, 1999), p. 19.

(28) The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, 13 vols (London: Smith Elder, 1895), XII, 135-95 (p. 158).