Cubiertas de andenes y/o Refugios:

Strauss, Wesley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge certainly represent a wide diversity of theological voices influencing nineteenth-century thought. As I have argued up to now,²⁰ the hermeneutic approach to scripture and, in turn, other written texts such as the novel, advocated by each one of these movements came to shape the social imaginaries of Victorian readers, including George Eliot. At various stages in her life, Eliot professed

19 Jasper. The Sacred and Secular Canon in Romanticism: Preserving the Sacred Truths, 31.

20 Specifically on pages 78-88 and 90-98.

deep personal interest in Pietism, Romanticism, and Higher Criticism, and despite the significant shifts her thought underwent, her hermeneutic approach, which shaped both her reading and writing of texts, remained profoundly influenced by each of these movements throughout her entire life. Each movement enabled scripture to maintain some form of centrality in day to day life, even as it was increasingly questioned within society. Scripture regained authority within the lives of individuals only when interpreted through its relation to personal experience. Even though significant hermeneutic shifts had taken place, the old conventional centrality of scripture was, in a way, preserved.

What had changed is that authority of scripture had loosened, which equipped readers to both question and re-interpret biblical narratives in such a way which reflected their own personal experiences as men and women.

In 1841, when Eliot was in her early twenties and still closely tied to

Evangelicalism, she wrote to her mentor Maria Lewis explaining a recent devotional method she was utilizing with success which involved “taking the parables or other portions of the New Testament for analyzation—writing in words other than those of Scripture the general truths contained or implied in the passage.”²¹ Eliot here emphasizes a desire to distill the meaning of scripture into its specific teachings through a

hermeneutic method that involves the rewriting of scripture in order to realize the personal application of scripture within her own pious action.

John W. Cross, the man George Eliot married less than a year before she died, recounts in his biography of Eliot how they would begin their daily readings with a passage of scripture “which was a very precious and sacred book to her, not only from early associations, but also from the profound conviction of its importance in the

21 Eliot. “GE to Maria Lewis, Foleshill, [21 August 1841].” GEL. Vol. 1, 106.

development of the religious life of man.”²² Cross, though having only met Eliot later in life, was well aware of the impact that her Evangelical upbringing had in stressing the importance of the Bible, even if other factors had strongly influenced her reading of scripture in her adulthood. In 1859, Eliot would recount the seriousness with which she pursued Evangelical piety, writing of “the strong hold evangelical Christianity had on me from the age of fifteen to twenty-two and of the abundant intercourse I had with earnest people of various religious sects.”²³ She continues by explaining that for some time she rebelled against her religious upbringing but that ten years of experience had made her more sympathetic towards dogmatic Christianity, which she had not returned to, but nonetheless held as “the highest expression of the religious sentiment,” and she remained deeply interested in “the inward life of sincere Christians.”²⁴ In this same letter, Eliot closes her reflections on her religious background by stating, “[M]y most rooted

conviction is that the immediate object and the proper sphere of all our highest emotions are our struggling fellow-men in this earthly existence.”²⁵ The relation here between emotion and the everyday, along with the earthly experience of humanity betrays the impact Romanticism had on Eliot’s religious thought. In 1839, Eliot first purchased The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, which, after reading, she excitedly wrote to Maria Lewis about: “What I could wish to have added to many of my favorite morceaux is an indication of less satisfaction in terrene objects, a more frequent upturning of the soul’s eye. I never before met with so many of my own feelings, expressed just as I could

22 John W. Cross. George Eliot’s Life: as Related in her Letters and Journals, 721.

23 Eliot. “GE to Francois DAlbert-Durande, Wandsworth, 6 December 1859.” GEL. Vol. 3, 230.

24 Ibid, 231.

25 Ibid.

<wish> like them.”²⁶ Almost forty years later, her admiration for Wordsworth remained, as she wrote to a friend about how “we are agreed in loving our incomparable

Wordsworth.”²⁷

Her letters are sprinkled with references to other Romantic writers: Goethe, Shelley, Byron, and Coleridge—reflecting her interest in the influential texts of the day.

However, Eliot professed that she did not read the works of writers who greatly

influenced her as “oracles,” and that even though they “profoundly influenced” her, this did not mean that she even “embrace[d] one of their opinions.”²⁸ Here Eliot distinguishes between “embrace” and “influence.” Eliot was influenced by many of the philosophical and theological movements of the day, but she avoided allegiances to any one school of thought. Instead, she adapted new thoughts as a means of formulating her own beliefs. As a young woman, she explained in a letter how readings influenced her:

My mind presents just such an assemblage of disjoined specimens of history, ancient and modern, scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth and Milton, newspaper topics, morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology and chemistry, reviews and metaphysics, all

arrested and petrified and smothered by the fast thickening every day accession of actual events, relative anxieties and household cares and vexations.²⁹

At the time Eliot thought that this made her beliefs fragmentary, but this really reflects the constant connections she was making between the diversity of beliefs she encountered in her wide exposure to the philosophy and theology of the day. What is particularly striking in her reflections here is how she includes her personal experiences as a woman along with her reading and studies as influencing her philosophy. As she grew older, this

“assemblage of disjoined specimens” only continued to broaden, and yet she continued to

26 Eliot. “GE to Maria Lewis, Griff, 22 November 1839.” GEL. Vol. 1., 34.

27 Eliot. “Letter to Miss Charlotte Carmichael, London, 26 December 1877.” GEL, Vol. VI., 439.

28 Eliot. “GE to Sara Sophia Hennell [Foleshill, 9 February 1849].” GEL. Vol. 1, 277.

29 Eliot. “Letter to Maria Lewis, Griff, 4 September 1859.” GEL. Vol. 1, 29.

interpret these thoughts through her own experiences to create a philosophy that was wholly her own.