Impressions of Theophrastus Such
1879
George Eliot's final work is her most radical departure: not a novel but a series of eighteen penetrating character sketches narrated by Theophrastus Such, a minor scholar whose eccentric voice reveals far more about himself than his targets. Such prowls Victorian society with a blend of waspish satire and anxious self-scrutiny, cataloguing the follies of his contemporaries while obsessively wondering how they perceive him. The pleasure lies in the double exposure: as he dissects the pomposity of a provincial clergyman or the self-importance of a literary critic, we watch him fail to see his own ridiculousness with delicious clarity. Yet Eliot, ever the moral psychologist, refuses simple mockery. Theophrastus is pitiable too, a lonely figure desperate for recognition in a world that largely ignores him. Some scholars detect Eliot herself behind the mask, her own frustrations and intellectual isolation refracted through this invented narrator. The result is a strange, intimate book about the impossibility of truly knowing oneself or others, and the endless human habit of trying anyway.
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“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.””
— George Eliot
“Perhaps we are not fond of proletaries and their tendency to form Unions, but the world is not therefore to be rid of them.””
— George Eliot
“millions scattered from east to west”
— George Eliot
“The pride which identifies us with a great historic body is a humanising, elevating habit of mind, inspiring sacrifices of individual comfort, gain, or other selfish ambition, for the sake of that ideal whole;””
— George Eliot
“All which is mirrored in an analogy, namely, that of the Irish, also a servile race, who have rejected Protestantism though it has been repeatedly urged on them by fire and sword and penal laws, and whose place in the moral scale may be judged by our advertisements, where the clause, "No Irish need apply," parallels the sentence which for many polite persons sums up the question of Judaism”
— George Eliot
“Again, it has been held that we have a peculiar destiny as a Protestant people, not only able to bruise the head of an idolatrous Christianity in the midst of us, but fitted as possessors of the most truth and the most tonnage to carry our purer religion over the world and convert mankind to our way of thinking.””
— George Eliot
“A common humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various activity which makes a complete man.””
— George Eliot
“We do not call ourselves a dispersed and a punished people: we are a colonising people, and it is we who have punished others.””
— George Eliot
“A man cannot show his vanity in a tight skirt which forces him to walk sideways down the staircase; but let the match be between the respective vanities of largest beard and tightest skirt, and here too the battle would be to the strong.””
— George Eliot
