A Dialogue of Forms: The Display of Thinking in George Eliot’s ‘Poetry and Prose, From the Notebook of an Eccentric’ and Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Abstract

It is my habit to give an account to myself of the characters I meet with: can I give any true account of my own?" (Theophrastus Such 3). Literary criticism has never really known what to do with Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), George Eliot's last published work, a compilation of character sketches, essays and autobiography unified by the voice of failed author and bachelor Theophrastus. As Nancy Henry, one of the few critics to pay the work any serious attention, writes, confusion is understandable, for if "there is no plot, or development of the characters from chapter to chapter, where is the coherence and how do these seemingly random and puzzling elements fit into the whole of the work?" (ix). 1 Generally speaking, this peculiar work has been ignored, except for the occasional use as an autobiographical source on Eliot's early childhood and the odd pairing with Eliot's earliest published prose work, a series of short articles that appeared in the Coventry Herald and Observer entitled "Poetry and Prose, From the Notebook of an Eccentric" (1846-47). However, this pairing, although often made, has never been properly explored. Rather, it has been used as a means to reaffirm the individual relegation of the texts from the canon of Eliot's works. The reasons for this are apparent: unsuccessful on publication, connected by an undoubtedly inadvertent symmetry, the similarities of form that link them have been viewed as nothing more than failed experimentations and as such have been treated as aberrations that criticism can safely set aside without much exploration. The question of what Eliot was attempting to achieve with such experiments and in what way these