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As Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) was first appearing in Blackwood's Magazine, George Eliot endorsed John Blackwood's wish that their “literary intercourse may continue”: “it means that I shall go on writing what will stir men's heart to sympathy as well as that I shall have all the pleasures and advantages involved in the possession of a generous editor” (2: 353). Yet that correspondence involved as much antipathy as sympathy. In the late 1840s Lewes had participated in a similarly mixed interchange with Charlotte Brontë, which she received “in anger” and “agreement and harmony” (Gaskell, Life 276). The case study of Lewes, Brontë, and Eliot allows us to see how a lengthy literary intercourse that involved letters, biographies, and reviews, novels responding to other novels, and mixed negative and positive critical responses enabled multiple participants to reshape the form of fiction in the middle of the nineteenth century.

The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Catherine Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of value from the realm of transcendent spirituality to that of organic \"life,\" making human sensations--especially pleasure and pain--the sources and signs of that value. Classical political economy, this book shows, was not a mechanical ideology but a form of nineteenth-century organicism, which put the body and its feelings at the center of its theories, and neoclassical economics built itself even more self-consciously on physiological premises. The Body Economic explains how these shared views of life, death, and sensation helped shape and were modified by the two most important Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens and George Eliot. It reveals how political economists interacted crucially with the life sciences of the nineteenth century--especially with psychophysiology and anthropology--producing the intellectual world that nurtured not only George Eliot's realism but also turn-of-the-century literary modernism.

Scenes of Clerical Life and Silas Marner, the two works that bookend George Eliot's “early” period, have much in common. Both are short in form‐the first a collection of three inter‐related stories and the second a novella‐distinctive for that reason alone given Eliot's general reputation as a writer of massive novels. Both deal thematically with questions of suffering, confession, and redemption, questions that arise in the context of anthropologically‐oriented explorations of the state of contemporary religious belief within small provincial or rural communities. And both are fictions of memory, deeply imbued with personal recollection. Yet for all their realism, both works came to their author in what might be called visionary moments. Indeed it is striking that with Silas Marner, the story to which F. R. Leavis long ago affixed the tag of “moral fable”, realism grows out of the initial romantic vision, and not the other way around.

The novel does not attempt a portrait of a gay lifestyle within clerical life, though there are hints at it. One wishes that a writer of [Brian Bouldrey]'s skills had gone deeper into the clerical closet, giving readers a sense of the psychosexual conflicts behind those closed doors. As it is, the life whose scenes we follow is primarily that of [Dennis Bacchus], and if his reasons for becoming a priest are elusive, the priestly environment through which he passes is more elusive. The same stone-faced monsignor tells Dennis that to enter the seminary \" `you'll have to get rid of most of your things' \":