| Title | : | Scenes of Clerical Life |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 019283780X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780192837806 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 338 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1857 |
This book has 387 pages and originally published in 1857.
Scenes of Clerical Life Reviews
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“It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbor is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.”
Eliot uses her characteristic empathy to look behind the “scenes of clerical life” portrayed in this volume. She tells three stories, connected in that they take place in and around the fictional English town of Milby and each concerns a certain Anglican clergyman whose religious views are under criticism.
In “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” we watch the Reverend picked apart by his parishioners, and then see how his good deeds lead to misfortune. It is unsparingly tragic.
“Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story” is also sad, but is more high romance than tragedy, full of chivalry and unselfish passion.
The culmination is reached in “Janet’s Repentance.” By this time your heart has been pummeled by the first two “scenes,” and you are ready for a happy ending. But Eliot, true to form, has created a real life heroine and hero. They struggle with their own “sins” and their purgatory is harrowing, but this final installment ends with a beautiful triumph of the soul.
Each story has a long, drawn-out build up, and a couple of times I was confused by the timeframe or narrative point of view. Otherwise I found them gorgeous, dense, and moving, and I loved all three.
I can’t resist a few more thoughts …
Have you ever received a gift box that you thought contained one item but turned out to have multiple extra gifts tucked under the wrapping? That’s what a George Eliot story is like. You think it is one gift, but when you open it, you realize it’s overflowing with extra little surprise gems. And I could say that reading this book took effort, but that would be like complaining about the trouble it takes to unwrap all those extra gifts. Like almost missing one of hidden items in the gift package, as I read, I often thought, “Oh, that sentence! And I almost read too fast and missed its impact!”
Here’s an example of one such loaded sentence:
“I, at least, hardly ever look at a bent old man, or a wizened old woman, but I see also, with my mind’s eye, that Past of which they are the shrunken remnant, and the unfinished romance of rosy cheeks and bright eyes seems sometimes of feeble interest and significance, compared with that drama of hope and love which has long ago reached its catastrophe, and left the poor soul, like a dim and dusty stage, with all its sweet garden-scenes and fair perspectives overturned and thrust out of sight.”
Not the fastest reading, right? But worth it, don’t you think?
I also kept thinking of the Virginia Woolf quote that Eliot’s Middlemarch was “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” which I believe applies to all of Eliot’s work. What does Woolf mean by this? One possibility is that being a grown-up is about handling the truth: things don’t happen the way you plan; everyone dies; people are more complicated than you think they are. Eliot is particularly good at that last one.
A quote from the author presented in the introduction may provide the key to her grown-up, empathetic style. In a letter to a friend, she wrote, “…our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.”
Each of the stories in this book was about unique and specific individuals. Each surprised me. And maybe they helped me to grow up just a little bit more. -
While the first story in this collection would only garner a 3.5 rating from me, the other two more than make up for it and thus find me giving the book a firm 5-stars.
This is not technically a novel, but a collection of three stories that are all centered around the clergy in the same area of Milby and Shepperton, England. We meet, and are told the stories of, three separate clergyman who serve the district at separate times.
The first story is titled, The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, and his fortunes are indeed sad. I liked the story and caught glimpses of George Eliot’s masterful style, but I never felt overly attached to any of the characters and did not relate on an emotional level. Here is the shadow of greater things to come, I thought.
The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way imagined to ourselves.
Little did I know that the greater things were to be found in the second story of the series, Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story. Here is a man who did touch and pull at my heartstrings. Here is a story with depth and meaning, that keeps you captivated beginning to end. I could feel George Eliot blossoming as she wrote. Maynard Gilfil is one of the finest and sweetest characters in Eliot’s fine fiction.
But it is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow, which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty…
And, finally, the crowning glory is Janet’s Repentance, a story of reclamation and salvation and hope. This one brought me to tears, for I could not fail to feel Janet’s desperation and Mr. Tryan’s martyrdom at the hands of a society that purposely failed to appreciate or understand him. There is a sweetness and a sense of feeling that permeates this story that reminded me of why I loved The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch so much. There is moral instruction, without preaching, and there is example that is uplifting and yet ever human.
It is apt to be so in this life, I think. While we are coldly discussing a man’s career, sneering at his mistakes, blaming his rashness, and labeling his opinions--’he is Evangelical and narrow’, or ‘Latitudinarian and Pantheistic’ or ‘Anglican and supercilious’--that man, in his solitude, is perhaps shedding hot tears because his sacrifice is a hard one, because strength and patience are failing him to speak the difficult word, and do the difficult deed.
Could we not all take a lesson from that passage. Do unto others.
...everywhere there come sweet flowers without our foresight or labour. We reap what we sow, but Nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit that spring from no planting of ours.
And finally:
They might give piety to much that was only puritanic egoism; they might call many things sin that were not sin; but they had at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted, and colour-blindness, which many mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total blindness, which sees no distinction of colour at all.
I am happiest when I close a book and feel that I have something worthwhile and meaningful to take away, that the impact is not temporary and will last, perhaps forever, in the part of the soul that craves instruction. Today I am happy.
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This collection of three stories, about the lives and work of clergymen in and near the small English town of Milby, was George Eliot’s first fictional work. As the Penguin Classics cover notes, it may seem odd that she chose church life for her stories, since she had broken with orthodox Christian belief some time earlier. After reading scholarly analyses of the Gospels, George Eliot had become convinced that they were essentially mythological stories. And, the introductory essay by David Lodge explains, this loss of belief led her to a stance of bold freethinking; she refused to attend church and for a time adopted a tone of confident secular scorn toward defenses of Christian faith.
There is none of that tone in the Clerical Life stories. They are, instead, beautiful stories of compassion and kindness, in which the church figures are more often portrayed sympathetically than otherwise. The plot of each can be told in a sentence. In the first story, the feelings of the parishioners toward their mediocre but well-meaning curate shift from laughing disregard to tender concern after calamity befalls his household. George Eliot had a rare power for making the commonplace moving and profound, and that power was already evident in this book.
If the plots are simple ones, Eliot’s purpose and message are somewhat less so. Two of the stories begin with energetic rifts in the community over some item of worship or church practice (e.g., Will the congregation sing a psalm or a more modern hymn for a newly married couple? Will Sunday evening lectures by the curate be tolerated? Will extemporaneous sermons in the evangelical style corrupt the congregation?). As people take sides against their neighbors over these issues, while giggling or sleeping through the sermons themselves, you the reader are lulled at first into imagining that Eliot’s project is a straightforward satire on the irrelevancy of much of what the Church does. It isn’t. Just as you’re chuckling or shaking your head at one of the characters along with the chorus of gossipy townspeople, something happens to jar you into recognition of a profound human need. And as your sympathy is awakened, so is the town’s; characters cast off their pettiness, and their better natures shine forth. Even the selfish and flawed characters reveal admirable capacities. You’re left regretting your own assumptions about the characters, having, as in Middlemarch, been taught a lesson by Eliot about hasty judgments.
What, then, is Eliot’s point about the Church? Why did she choose clerical life as the backdrop for her stories? My sense is that she’s conveying that, in the religion of humanity she’s espousing, Christian doctrine actually gets a lot of it right, and may be one of its best expressions. And by furnishing plentiful chances to serve others, life in a church community provides an avenue toward your own growth and fulfillment. It’s as if she’s saying that religious precepts, even if founded on mistaken beliefs, call us in the right direction for any kind of purposeful achievement in life: “No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and impulses.” Eliot’s claim for the mediocre curate in her first story is, at first, a modest one made with her characteristic gentle humor: by having the illusion that he is admired and doing much good, he is sustained to do a little good. By the end of the story, however, when he has unintentionally provided an occasion for his parishioners’ sympathy and generosity, he has done immense good.
Is there anything in Eliot’s writing relevant to today’s reader? If I were to describe my generation in broad terms, I would say that not many of us delve regularly into the Bible in search of enlightenment, yet we often still find ourselves drawn to church, especially as we reach parenting years. If this is a correct perception, then Eliot has a lot to say to us.
Even aside from its message, there is much to admire in Scenes of Clerical Life, especially if you enjoy Victorian literature. If the stories are not fast-paced, they are compelling, and told with an utter command of the English language that it is hard to find in today’s novels. Sentences go on for a paragraph, paragraphs go on for a page, but her prose throughout is lucid and elegant. I also especially enjoy her occasional interjections of dry but gentle humor. This is a good litmus test: if you find these two sentences delightful and amusing, you will probably like the book. If you find them annoying, it may not be for you. Passage #1: “Coffee despatched, the two young men walked out through the open window, and joined the ladies on the lawn, while Sir Christopher made his way to the library, solemnly followed by Rupert, his pet bloodhound, who, in his habitual place at the Baronet’s right hand, behaved with great urbanity during dinner; but when the cloth was drawn, invariably disappeared under the table, apparently regarding the claret-jug as a mere human weakness, which he winked at, but refused to sanction.” Passage #2: “The rooks were cawing with many-voiced monotony, apparently – by a remarkable approximation to human intelligence – finding great conversational resources in the change of weather.” I love the passages, and the book. -
Eliot's first novel is more like three short stories thematically linked through religious examination, female prerogative and compassionate love. A way for the budding author to control the plots without getting lost and yet while reading the assured prose one doubts that a possible outcome. Eliot breathes such life into her characters, examining them in complex intellectual, spiritual and emotional terms, so much so that one is forced to admit our current fiction writers are all defeated by personal/political narcissism. The balance she finds between men and women, faith and reason, is so subtle and ambiguous that the work becomes nothing less than high-art and should be a template for how an artist engages with the world around them.
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I received this from Blog A Penguin in return for which we had to post a review on the Penguin blog (which is now defunct, I think). It was easy because I loved this book and it made me wonder why I waste my time reading some contemporary stuff - most of which never warrants re-reading like the classics do.
There was some silly stuff in the intro about Eliot being conflicted over her loss of faith and the clerical life she depicts - I don't see the problem. These are affectionate portraits of ordinary people and their faults and foibles, and there's nothing unkind or strident in any of it. Eliot wrote as Austen and Trollope did, with a gentle wit and clever satire, relying on the perspicacity of her readers to discern the issues that mattered. So she knows how the wife of Amos Bates is worn out by child-bearing; how the social strata of English country life could trifle with a foundling's heart and break it; and how the religious controversies of the day were all so much of a storm in a tea cup.
I loved these gentle stories and am sorry to come to the end of them. Maybe I should read Middlemarch again... -
After reading Janet's Repentance I was compelled to read the first two stories and I think enjoyed them more because Eliot allowed more humour and gentleness, although the understanding and sensitivity she shows in her portrayal of domestic abuse in Janet's Repentance is very fine. Eliot's writing never disappoints me.
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I finished this a couple of weeks ago. All I can say is that this is astonishingly good, both intellectually and emotionally. The writing is truly gifted and I enjoyed every minute.
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An engaging, interesting book consisting of two novellas and a short novel. All three stories concerns clergymen in Warwickshire, England in the 1850s. I enjoyed each story. The characters are well developed and each story has an interesting plot.
George Eliot and Victorian literature fans should find this book a very satisfying reading experience.
This book was first published in 1857. -
4.5*
Me encantaron los tres relatos que componen este volumen. "El arrepentimiento de Janet" me pareció espectacular. Costumbrismo con una crítica sutil pero a la vez despiadada a muchos usos y costumbres de la época. Por momentos me recordaba a la moralidad de Jane Austen pero por momentos más ácida.
Mary Ann Evans se convertido en una de mis favoritas. -
In my Penguin Classics edition there is an appendix 'How I Came to Write Fiction' written by George Eliot and dated Dec 6 1857 in which she describes the background to this book. That and the introduction by David Lodge proved enormously interesting in helping to portray how the book took shape. It details what suggestions the publisher, Blackwood made when the stories were sent to him to be published in his magazine and how Eliot responded to his criticism.
The religious themes of the stories may not be of any great interest to the modern reader although I understand they were 'hot topics' in their day but the stories are mainly well-written. Already Eliot is showing an ability to create and describe life in a small industrial town and people it with an array of believable characters from the pauper in the workhouse to the country knight in the manor house.
Some of the writing is over-sentimental and melodramatic but that was very much the fashion of the time. There are flashes of brilliance and some humour amongst all the angst. I thought the weakest of the novellas was 'Mr Gilfil's Love Story'. The main characters were boring, the hero too good to be true and the love interest not at all lovable but petulant and ill-tempered. Lots of animal imagery, I didn't count how many times Caterina was compared to a bird or a timid animal or a monkey but it was far too much and detracted from the narrative. An experienced George Eliot would have handled it more skilfully.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the development of a great novelist and to any admirer of Eliot who, like me,has read all of her other books but overlooked this one. -
It's always interesting to see where a great author started but this is not her best. Some great characters and pieces of writing but a little slow at the beginning of each story.
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“The drowning man, urged by the supreme agony, lives in an instant through all his happy and unhappy past: when the dark flood has fallen like a curtain,memory,in a single moment, sees the drama acted over again. And even in those earlier crises, which are but types of death-when we are cut off abruptly from the life we have known, when we are ourselves by some sudden shock on the confines of the unknown-there is often the same sort of lighting-flash though the dark and unfrequented chambers of memory.”
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I wouldn't have stuck with this if it weren't for the author. Because I love George Eliot's later books, I figured these 3 short stories would be worth reading even if they started out slow and ended up melodramatic and not quite believable. (How can people so conveniently, or unexpectedly, die?) I love George Eliot's insights and writing, and I enjoyed reading her first published work. She definitely matured and improved as a writer by the time she wrote Silas Marner and Middlemarch!
A taste of George Eliot's wisdom:
“Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.”
“We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence.”
Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.
Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.
[Most people] are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. … Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.
The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men. -
I discovered this classic writer as a result of a scene from the latest CBC version of Anne of Green Gables in which Aunt Josephine gives Anne a book by George Eliot. George Eliot was a woman writing under a pseudonym. Published in 1857 serially in a magazine, the success of "Scenes of Clerical Life" encouraged the writer to pursue her career. Lucy Maud Montgomery, born in 1874 would no doubt have been influenced by the stories that George Eliot artfully describes to us.
The third, and longest story of this book, "Janet's Repentance" brought the Methodist (dissenting sects) history of that era to life for me. George Eliot was well familiar with the Methodists as she has been described as having lived an "earnestly Evangelical girlhood". It is a thoroughly sympathetic and artful portrayal of a woman who comes under Methodist influence in the early 19th century. To me, it brought a historical period that I have lately been reading in to life. This is also important reading in a study of the role of women in that era. -
Scenes of Clerical Life is the first book by George Eliot I have read. I had an idea that I would read Middlemarch, her most popular work, and then decided, instead, that it would be interesting to read that novel in the context of Eliot’s other work. For this reason, I decided to read her books in the order of their publication. As I read the books I may return to this review to amend or add to it.
Marian / Mary Anne / Mary Ann Evans
Scenes of Clerical Life was Marian Evans first published fiction. Writing under the pseudonym ‘George Eliot’, she would become one of England’s best novelists and receive praise from literary giants like Charles Dickens and William Thackeray. For the purposes of this and other reviews that follow, I will refer to Marian Evans by her literary name, hereafter.
The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton
When discussing the first story of Scenes of Clerical Life, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’, I will not refrain from revealing aspects of the plot, although I will not discuss details of the most salient moments. For the last two stories, I will avoid spoilers when discussing their plots.
In ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’, Eliot’s narrator asks her audience to picture Shepperton Church and the improvements that have been made over the last 25 years since Amos Barton was curate: the slated roof that replaced the old tiled roof, the tall windows, the oak-grained doors, and so on. During the period of Reverend Amos Barton’s tenure, the church was smaller. It is a part of the story that Barton is undertaking a renovation of the church. The improvements, the narrator quips, “are as smooth and innutrient as the summit of the Rev. Amos Barton’s head.” The word ‘innutrient’ is a peculiar choice. It refers to the walls upon which “no lichen will ever again effect a settlement.” Barton is bald, we smile to ourselves. But the real point is that the ‘improvements’ lack character. Half a page later, when it becomes apparent that Barton’s church is a metaphor for the changing landscape of English culture. There has been “the New Police” (the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 introduced by George Peel replaced watchmen and parish constables with a professional police force), “the Tithe Communication Act” (of 1836, which abolished payments of tithes in kind) and “the penny-post” (the Uniform Penny Post system employing postage stamps was introduced in 1840). Eliot’s narrator laments,… that dear, old, brown, crumbling, picturesque inefficiency is everywhere giving place to spick-and-span new-painted, new-varnished efficiency, which will yield endless diagrams, plans, elevations, and sections, but alas! No picture.
The three stories that comprise Scenes of Clerical Life are set across a fifty year period. ‘The Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton’ is set “five and twenty years ago”. Internal evidence suggests it is set sometime around 1837-8: “The new Poor-law had not yet come into operation,” we are told. The Poor-law, passed in 1834, took several years to implement in some counties. We are also told that Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers has recently been completed, placing the date close to November 1837. However, that would make the ‘current’ date around 1862 (the story was published 1857), suggesting some internal inconsistency.
The second story, ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’, predates the first by five years (“When old Mr Gilfil died, thirty years ago”) to begin with, but extends as far back as 1788 in chapter 2, to tell Caterina’s origin story.
The final story, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, is set “More than a quarter of a century” before the time of the narrator (who appears occasionally in this final story and is male). The narrator stresses the social advances made since the time of his narrative: the church has been enlarged; a grammar-school has been built; there is a book club; there is gas lighting on the streets. None of these innovations are apparent in the first story, either.
In ‘Amos Barton’, Eliot immediately creates a dichotomy between past/present that appeals to the atavistic emotions that nostalgia evokes. And a few pages later she further embellishes this dichotomy by suggesting there is even a qualitative difference between country and city life – between country and city people, who represent conservative and progressive classes, respectively – with a contemptuous aside at her reader: “Reader! did you ever taste such a cup of tea as Miss Gibbs is this moment handing to Mr Pilgrim?” she asks. Eliot's reader, she assumes, has been bred upon something inferior: “No – most likely you are a miserable town-bred reader, who think of cream as a thinnish white fluid, delivered in infinitesimal pennyworths.” Eliot’s relationship with her reader is most peculiar in this first story. At the beginning of chapter 5 – the first chapter in the second part of the story published by Blackwoods – she imagines her audience almost as a presence: “I think I hear a lady reader exclaim – Mrs Farthingdale, for example …”, and continues by provoking her readers, “if you please, decline to pursue my story farther.” Eliot is challenging her audience, not merely to stop reading – we assume that is not what she really intends – but to accept her fiction on her terms. Rather than seeking “remarkable novels, full of striking situations, thrilling incidents, and eloquent writing”, she suggests that her readers find “pathos” in the insignificance of her characters: “in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share.”
In short, Eliot attempts to excise the modern sensibilities and assumptions of her audience – its sophisticated cynicisms and narrow interests she seems to assume – to embrace a narrative about an England now bygone or going:
These tensions play out in the story about Rev. Amos Barton, his wife Milly Barton, and Countess Czerlaski, who comes to live with them after her brother marries a servant. The Bartons must try to live on 80 pounds annual stipend for Barton’s work as curate in Shepperton. They have six children with another on the way, and their financial resources are stretched to their limits. And Barton faces opposition in the town, between those who adhere to traditional Anglican practises, and those who suspect Barton is a Dissenter, possibly a Methodist: he leads in the singing of unapproved hymns and he attempts to preach without reference to the Bible, extempore, although he has no talent for it. Many of his parishioners are poor, but he seems incapable of drawing upon his own experience to appeal to them. Instead, his preaching tends to be a little too academic, and he can be tone deaf to their needs. Added to this, Barton is squeezing his parishioners – even those who disapprove of him – to contribute to the building fund for the church renovation. When Countess Caroline Czerlaski arrives in town with her brother, Mr Bridmain, the town further turns against Barton. The Countess’s husband has died three years before and she has come to Shepperton where she hopes that competition for another husband will not be as fierce. After her separation from her brother, her presence in the Barton home is the fuel of salacious gossip, further damaging Barton in the eyes of the town. Added to this, the Countess’s presence in the Barton home during Milly’s illness and pregnancy puts further financial strain upon the family, without the mitigation of financial help, which the Countess is unable to give, or practical help. The Bartons suffer reputational and economic setbacks as a result.
This first story achieves the emotional impact that Eliot signals she wishes to achieve. The Bartons’s difficulties are complex and multifaceted, exacerbated by his parishioners who face the pressures of social changes to come. However, the voice of Eliot’s narrator is not quite as intrusive in the second half of the story, and she does not continue as strongly with its themes of social change. Instead, there is more concern over the matter of the Countess and her impact on the family, particularly on Milly, who is sick. I think this signals that there is no simple correlation to be assumed between the “picturesque” and “inefficient” past, and the religious values that are the subject of conflict in the story. Eliot’s relationship with faith was already complex: she claimed to be an atheist, so it is not possible to suggest she therefore defends Anglicanism against newer dissenting church creeds. In fact, if anything, the opposite may be argued. Barton is a suspected Methodist for whom Eliot garners a great deal of sympathy, especially with the poignant death of Milly and the loss of his position at the end of the story, replaced by Mr Carpe whose sole intention seems to be to pave the way for his own brother-in-law. And we will later read about Edgar Tryan in Eliot’s final story, whose Evangelicalism is to be admired rather than reviled. Rather than advocating a religious and cultural position, we find Eliot has challenged the reader to lay down their own prejudices to begin with in this first story, and by the end, the tragedy Barton faces has caused the people of Shepperton to abandon theirs.
The Religious Sphere
Eliot's chosen title suggests religion is the primary concern in these stories, and it does form their realistic backdrop. But by the end of ‘Amos Barton’ it seems clear that Eliot is most interested in the impact of religious and social changes on people's lives. The three stories work effectively together to progress these themes. The three narratives of Scenes of Clerical Life are often referred to as short stories, although I think by modern standards we might call them novellas. The longest, ‘Janet’s Repentance’, is 153 pages long in the Penguin edition, the shortest, ‘Amos Barton’, 69 pages. All three stories feature a church curate, but despite Eliot’s title, the book ostensibly focuses on the lives of four women: Countess Czerlaski and Milly Barton in ‘Amos Barton’; Caterina Sarti in ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’; and Janet Dempster in ‘Janet’s Repentance’. The stories feature some religious conflict, mainly around the issue of dissenting creeds like Methodism and Evangelism, but the “poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy” rests primarily with the experiences and fates of each of the women.
The tension between the public religious sphere – ostensibly patriarchal – and the private, represented by the fortunes of women, drives some of the conflict within the stories, which are at their most interesting when they focus upon the impact on the lives of Eliot’s female protagonists. Particularly in the third story, but also apparent in the first, the religious conflicts may be somewhat alienating for some modern readers. If, like me, you have no religious background, you may find yourself conducting searches on Google to pin down the history of some Christian sects, and the theological differences that brought groups of people with essentially the same beliefs, into conflict. This was even a problem in Eliot’s period. Her publisher, Blackwood, thought the opening chapters of ‘Janet’s Repentance’ too overburdened with description, along with the introduction of so many characters who form the factions within the town. Added to that are arguments over the origin of Presbyterianism at the beginning of the story, with references to Baptists, Methodists and Independents, not to mention the Tryanites and anti-Tryanites, whom the reader learns are factions either supporting or opposing a new Evangelical curate, Edgar Tryan, and the practices he has attempted to introduce to Milby. In ‘Amos Barton’, the conflict is not as fierce. There are disagreements about the choir and the Barton’s preaching extempore, not to mention the fact that he simply is not good at appealing to the ordinary folk of the town. But in ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’ the source of conflict does not reside with Gilfil, the curate, but Anthony Wybrow, a young cad who has wooed and won the heart of Caterina, only to cast her aside when the opportunity for a more socially acceptable (and profitable) marriage with Miss Assher presents itself.
Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story
What is unusual about ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’ is that it is hardly a love story at all. Eliot once again forces the action into the past, this time five years before Barton’s story. At the start, Gilfil has already died and is being mourned by his parishioners. His sermons were simple, often repeated and liked, yet he also appealed to the more well-to-do of his flock. And for the reader, Eliot’s narrator is once again intrusive, this time to speculate upon the nature of Gilfil’s romance:But in the first place, dear ladies, allow me to plead that gin-and-water, like obesity, or baldness, or the gout, does not exclude a vast amount of antecedent romance, any more than the neatly executed ‘fronts’ [false curls] which you may some day wear, will exclude your present possession of less expensive braids. Alas, alas! We poor mortals are often little better than wood-ashes – there is small sign of the sap, and the leafy freshness, and the bursting buds that were once there; but wherever we see wood-ashes, we know that all that early fullness of life must have been.
It is a sentiment that echoes themes of ‘Amos Barton’. In that first story, Eliot argues for the pathos of ordinary lives as a proper subject for her fiction, in a line that extends right back to Wordsworth’s defence of ordinary themes in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Now, Eliot enlarges her scope to include the romantic lives of ordinary people, even old people past our ordinary speculation about romantic pasts. Like the burned ashes of a tree which are evidence of a tree once bursting with life, the withered trunks of the old, perhaps now pruned and misshapen, are evidence of the lives which shaped them:But it is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical misshapen trunk.
Despite Eliot's title for this story, Gilfil is not our primary interest. Apart from his grief at the death of his wife, Caterina, only six months after their marriage – the fact is revealed in the opening chapter – Gilfil is not a complex character demanding our attention. He loves Caterina, which is in contrast to Wybrow’s ill-usage of her. It is Caterina’s “marble tablet, with a Latin inscription in memory of her”, and represented by the vague memories of the oldest town residents, which is the ‘wood-ash’ we are to sift......
Read my
full review of Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot on the Reading Project -
Simply beautiful stories in a prose style that is both dense and poetic but also extremely readable.
The first story of Amos Barton is sort of like a reverse Madame Bovary, where it's a sort of boring, unfulfilling marriage and the woman wants more, but she stays by him. For some reason near the end of it I was holding back tears, even though the scene wasn't particularly sad or shocking or moving, just something about the humanity of it got to me.
The second story of Mr Gilfil is even better, though the ending plot twist is a bit "ehhh". The story's setup and structure is just flawless though, it's extremely easy to be pictured in your mind as a TV series.
The final story of Janet is probably the most complicated and dense. It's first part is basically long, confusing, religious discussions which slowly lead in to the plot of competing religious doctrines forcing the town in to two camps, and then the stage is set. It's pretty difficult to follow unless you have a strong grasp of the religious landscape of country towns in England from 1790 to 1830 (read: very few people), but once that's out of the way it's pretty smooth sailing.
In short, this book was solid in every aspect. -
Three tenuously linked novellas are grouped into one volume here. Only the first ("Amos Barton") delivers the promise that eventually led to Eliot's (Mary Anne Evans's) masterpiece, "Middlemarch." All three stories blend a more tart version of Jane Austen's observations of small-town society in England in the early 19th century with Charles Dickens's taste for an often exaggerated sentimentality. The first nicely balances the two impulses and offers naturalistic writing along with a fairly clean story line. The next two take the reader into thick swamps of sentimentality and moralizing, too often stretching pathos into bathos, and tightly wrapping plots into acceptable Victorian norms. The third story ("Janet's Repentance") does, however, include an interesting historical view of religious conflicts in small communities of the time, as well as a surprising account of the psychological factors at play in spousal abuse. Eliot's dry humour and acute perceptions are generally on display throughout. The whole book is interesting, but a bit of a chore to get through, even if you accept a prose style that's stilted by today's standards.
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Eliot's earliest attempt at fiction, this comprises three novellas, "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton", "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story", and "Janet's Repentance". I found the novellas a little on the melodramatic side (particularly the latter two) compared to her later works, but they show Eliot's developing artistry as a writer of fiction: subtle characterization, quiet humor, and most of all, interest in searching out and presenting truths about humanity. Scenes of Clerical Life wouldn't be my first recommendation for a reader new to Eliot, but for those who have already read her more mature works, Scenes is well worth reading.
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Certainly dragged at times. Perhaps the book was not quite to my taste as much of its content is that of the humdrum life rather than the fantastic adventures that I find I am rather more prone to. Witty nonetheless, with some excellent quips on the state of religion or lack thereof, particularly one on the origins of Presbyterianism. Having read ‘Middlemarch’, I was expecting greater things. Not terrible by any means, but a bit too dull for my tastes.
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Don't care if this is her first "novel". It is a sublime collection and example of narratives of the humanity of clerics who serve their communities. So much discussion and commentary about religion, the nature of love, the nature of service, humanity, and redemption. Evans has a fascinating history in religious faith and belief; considering her history, this collection is contemplative and beautiful in its portrayal of the reality of faith and the transparency of those who serve. I loved it.
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great read
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Classic Eliot - she has a way of making the mundane intriguing. Pure realist Victorian fiction.
For me, the short story structure is the main negative - I'm not a fan of short stories, as I find it difficult to get invested in the characters. -
Very much enjoyed this clearly early work by Eliot, such an up close and personal look at the lives of clerics in the countryside, even when sometimes the three stories veer off into dramatic black and white situations and resolutions.
Sure, the author would later round out more and become more consistent in delivering high quality writing, but the impact of ideas and powerful emotions important in everyday life shine through clearly here - all the more forcefully at times. -
A book containing three stories centred on clergymen in a small rural town, though not an uncommon theme in George Eliot’s day, will hardly ignite much passion in the modern reader. Indeed it is a curious choice of subject matter for Eliot herself, who was an agnostic.
Still Eliot’s agnosticism was always tied in with respect for religion, from this, her first book, through to Daniel Deronda, her last. It says something about the unconventionality of Eliot that this last book was about Judaism, a religion not her own. In general, she enjoyed her religion to be like her politics – dissenting and outside the mainstream.
Sadly we never got a great work about Eliot’s lack of faith, perhaps because it would be hard to get such a book published in the deeply Christian world of Victorian England. There would be no religious work equivalent to Felix Holt, Radical.
This may be because Eliot came from a devout background, and was intensely religious herself for many years. Even though she relinquished her religious beliefs and pursued a relationship with a married man for many years, Eliot never lost a sense of awe around religion. She wanted a religion of humanity, seeking to keep what was best in religion without its rites and occasional bigotry.
Eliot’s religion of humanity caused her to focus her books away from the world of the upper class, so common in much of the literature of her time, and to focus more on middle and working class characters. Tired of the silly books written by many women of her time (Eliot wrote an amusing essay decrying them), she wished to deal with characters who were more realistic, believable, and even mundane.
That is the background to the writing of Scenes of Clerical Life. Eliot’s new worldview is reflected best in the first story in the collection, "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton". The title prepares us for this not being a happy tale.
Amos Barton is the curate of a church near Milby, the town around which all the stories take place. He is portrayed with a mixture of humour and sympathy. He is a commonplace man, a mediocrity with nothing to commend him.
Nonetheless in the narrow world of Shepperton, the village in which he performs his work, Amos has a curious ability to get people’s backs up. He is not quite educated enough, and yet not stupid enough to comfortably mock.
Amos is fussy about tiny procedural matters in church, and alienates people who help out there. His sermons are dull, and focus on non-existent problems that mean little to the congregation. He even antagonises the local doctor by favouring another doctor or treating conditions himself.
There is only one thing that Amos has got right, and that is his marriage to Milly, a hard-working wife who loves him. They have many children together, but Amos earns so little money from his work that the family are perpetually impoverished and in debt.
Matters are not helped by his close acquaintance with Countess Caroline Czerlaski. Locals do not like the Countess. They suspect she is not a real Countess at all, and that her brother is actually a lover. In fact the gossip is mistaken, and the Countess is exactly who she says she is.
When the Countess falls out with her brother, and moves in with the Bartons, their problems increase greatly. The Countess is selfish, and allows herself to be waited on hand and foot by Milly. The family’s money problems increase since the Countess has no income of her own. Milly’s health deteriorates.
On top of this, the locals gossip about this unusual situation, and cast aspersions on the relationship between the Countess and Amos. Finally the Countess is shamed into leaving the house, but the damage has been done.
Eliot writes the story with great poise and humour, making it the best of the three stories. Her attempts to offer balance do sometimes prevent the story from having bite. The Countess is not as evil as her reputation. She is selfish, but can be shamed by the Barton’s servant into leaving the house. When she does leave, she does not denigrate the servant in front of the Bartons, but discreetly goes.
Even the townsfolk, whose spiteful gossip against the Bartons helps to cause so much mischief, are not the villains in the story. They show belated kindness to Amos when his problems grow. In any case Amos’s problems are partly his own doing, and partly the circumstances of his poverty.
"Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" is the least interesting of the three stories. Maynard Gilfil is a Shepperton vicar who is widowed and childless. This is sad, because he clearly loves children. After this introduction, the story goes back in time to describe his love story.
Strictly speaking Gilfil is not the leading character in the story. Instead the focus is on the woman he loves, an Italian orphan called Caterina Sarti. Tina is raised in England by wards after her father dies. There is no stereotyping of Italians here, and Eliot presents Tina with the same sensitivity as she does with any other character.
When she grows up Tina falls in love with the unworthy Captain Anthony Wybrow, the nephew of the family who raised her. Gilfil loves Tina, but she does not feel the same way about him. Wybrow on the other hand is affianced to Beatrice Assher, a more socially suitable partner.
This does not prevent Wybrow from trifling with Tina’s feelings. Trifling is the word since this self-centred man cannot love anyone but himself. Naturally this affair cannot work out. Gilfil briefly benefits from Tina’s broken heart, but her health does not hold out for long.
Overall this is a more conventionally romantic story. While it is not without points of interest, there is not likely to be much to enthuse the reader here.
The last story is a better one, though not without serious flaws. "Janet's Repentance" takes place in Milby, and focuses on various religious disputes of the time. A new chapel, Tryan, is setting the cat among the pigeons by preaching a more evangelical form of religion.
This leads to some bigoted attempts to undermine Tryan by rousing people against him to make protests, and by discriminating against his supporters. Tryan’s followers are shunned by some townsfolk and denied employment in some areas.
This might seem as if Eliot is making a statement about religious bigotry, since there is clearly something pointless about discriminating against others on the basis of minor doctrinal quibbles. However Eliot made it clear that this was not her intention, and the story is about the difference between religion and irreligion.
Eventually the story settles around Janet Dempster, the wife of one of the more narrow-minded locals. Given that she is the story’s leading figure, Eliot is slow to let her take centre stage, perhaps indicating that like many readers she is more interested in the minutiae of day-to-day interaction in the town than she is in her heroine.
Dempster is as much of a bully in his household as he is in religious matters. He mistreats Janet, and the unhappy wife takes to drinking. It is rare to see a story in which the lead character has a drink problem, and is treated sympathetically.
One day Dempster has an argument with his wife, and drives her out of the house. This leads her to turn to Tryan, a man who has shown her sympathy, and she begins to adopt his beliefs. From this point, the story heads along a conventional route to religious salvation, marked only the oddity of it coming from an evangelical rather than a mainstream Christian source.
What connects these stories? Clearly a common sense of place and history. They take place around the same town, and within a period of time where characters can remember other characters from earlier stories.
Each story is marked by morbid sentimentality which prevents them from being Eliot’s best work. A major character must die in each story, thereby preventing an easy happy ending. On the other hand, Eliot can be commended for avoiding the standard romantic finish that readers might have wanted.
There is a concern for social injustice in all the stories. Amos Barton could have survived better if he was not struggling with poverty. If he had been paid enough, his wife might have lived. Then again a woman is expected to constantly bear children until her health is destroyed, and this was a factor too.
Tryan embraces his poverty, but this takes a toll on his physical health, and hastens his death. Janet Dempster is an abused wife and alcoholic who has no place to go. She must stay in her marriage for as long as she can, because conventional morality gives her no options.
Caterina Sarti occupies a lower status because she is an orphan and a foreigner. This prevents her from being suitable for marrying the man she wants, and allows him to treat her as a plaything.
Eliot shows the dangers of small-town life. Gossip and spitefulness undermine the Bartons. Religious issues are inflated to the level of violent prejudice. Options are few in a little town of judgemental people, and this leaves everyone trapped with limited chances of finding a good spouse, or of changing their lives.
On the other hand, with typical balance Eliot does show much kindness. The very people who are mean towards Amos or judgemental towards Janet Dempster are also capable of showing kindness towards them when their fortunes take a downward turn.
Then there is religion, supposedly the main focus of the book. Eliot is strictly ambiguous. Anyone expecting a satire on religion will be disappointed. Despite her freethinking ways, Eliot portrays all three clergymen at the centre of her stories as being saintly.
Amos is absurd and fussy and very ordinary, but his suffering in the later part of the story raises him to a Christ-like status. He must endure the effects of his well-meaning actions, and take on the burden of the sins of others.
Gilfil too is a model of decency. His love for Tina remains pure. He stands by her in every crisis, and attempts to guide her towards happiness. Finally he brings love to her in the final months of her life. He is again a non-judgemental Christ figure.
However the most Christ-like of all is Tryan. He faces the calumny and scorn of much of the town. He works in poverty and lives in bad conditions, rather than try to better himself. He sacrifices his health performing his duties. He is kind and forbearing, without judgement against Janet Dempster or anyone else.
Such saintly clerics may irritate readers, and Tryon in particular is too good to be true. However Eliot is not glorifying the clergy. She is offering up an ideal standard of behaviour that she would like to see in religion. This is her religion of humanity. If clergymen can adopt these values, then they can make Christianity worthy, even if the rites and beliefs of the religion are wrong.
There are notable omissions here. We do not see Amos or Gilfil praying or seeking comfort in God. There is no deus ex machina that rescues any of the characters from an unhappy faith. At best they find short-lived comfort and redemption. Eliot also refrains from writing the usual paeans to God that are so tiresome in books of her period.
Scenes of Clerical Life is certainly not Eliot’s best work. Occasionally she gets caught in minutiae or writes longer passages than are strictly necessary for keeping the story moving. Eliot is always a little too focused on detail.
I will however acquit her of the charge of pedantry. Are her works really more intellectually showy than, say, those of Henry Fielding, a man whom nobody calls pedantic. Is it possible that the word ‘pedant’ is applied to her because she is a woman?
The subject matter is more interesting than might be expected but is still not the most inspiring. I am not too excited by glum tales of religious aspiration either.
Nonetheless Eliot is always an engaging and unconventional writer, one of the true Victorian greats. Eliot would go on to write much better novels, but this was a good start to her work.
