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Abstract
This article reads George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871–2) in the context of what I argue is a recurring pattern in Victorian fiction: inheritance is recast as a form of “relational speculation” – a practice that imbricates the period’s rising logics of credit and contract with older structures of kinship, marriage, and property. Middlemarch draws on this pattern by aligning manipulative testators with expectant heirs, but also complicates it by placing these relational speculations within a longer history of tensions around ownership. Focusing on the recurring image of the “dead hand,” I reveal its complex allusion to the term mortmain. Originating in feudal law, mortmain statutes restricted the alienation of land to corporations and later came to limit bequests to charities, and yet mortmain’s role was still debated in the nineteenth century. Legal accounts reflect this lingering uncertainty, describing mortmain’s effects in terms of both limitless ownership and its curtailment or loss. I contend that Eliot draws on mortmain’s shifting history and multivalence, especially its association with restraint, to challenge relational speculation and outline a necessary constraint on speculative subjectivity. The paper concludes by suggesting that mortmain’s dynamic of curtailment emerges in the novel’s self-reflexive, interventionist narration and poetics of generative constraint.
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Notes
1 George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Bert G. Hornback. 2nd ed. (New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1999), 114. Further citations from this source are given in the text.
2 “Speculate, v,” in OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/186112 (accessed January 20, 2021).
3 John Robert Reed, Victorian Conventions (Cleveland: Ohio University Press, 1975), 268. For a recent example, see Tamara S. Wagner’s claim that “[n]arratives of inheritance and courtship became incorporated into” speculation plots (4). Tamara s. Wagner, Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815–1901 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010).
4 Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
5 See, for instance, Ayelet Ben-Yishai, Common Precedents: The Presentness of the Past in Victorian Law and Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Anat Rosenberg, Liberalizing Contracts: Nineteenth Century Promises Through Literature, Law and History (New York: Routledge, 2017); and Daniel Stout, Corporate Romanticism: Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).
6 David C. Itzkowitz, “Fair Enterprise or Extravagant Speculation: Investment, Speculation, and Gambling in Victorian England,” in Victorian Investments: New Perspectives on Finance and Culture, ed. Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 102.
7 Anna Kornbluh, Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 3.
8 See Rebecca Stern, Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 20.
9 Audrey Jaffe, The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel and the Stock-Market Graph (Victorian Critical Interventions, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 46.
10 Wolfram Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Law of Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10. See Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France: A Critical Edition, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Burke describes the English political system as an “entailed” inheritance characterized by a “condition of unchangeable constancy,” and “grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever” (par. 58).
11 Kieran Dolin, Fiction and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 116.
12 Cathrine O. Frank, Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837–1925 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 3, 45.
13 Thus, for example, reforms targeted primogeniture as well as the strict family settlement. The latter had become popular in the seventeenth century as a way to consolidate land in the family and the aristocracy, but since it prohibited alienation, it now conflicted with agricultural and commercial needs. See Eileen Spring, “Landowners, Lawyers, and Land Law Reform in Nineteenth-Century England,” The American Journal of Legal History 21, no. 1 (1977): 40–59. See also Schmidgen, Eighteenth-Century, and Stout, Corporate.
14 John Ramsay McCulloch, A Treatise on the Succession to Property Vacant by Death (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1848), 11.
15 John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy: And Chapters on Socialism (Oxford University Press, 1998), II:2:3.
16 Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law, Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1906), 170.
17 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Richard Gaughan (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 367.
18 Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now, ed. John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Ch. 57.
19 See Jerome Beaty, “History by Indirection: The Era of Reform in ‘Middlemarch,’” Victorian Studies 1, no. 2 (1957): 173–9.
20 Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See also Phoebe Poon, “From Status to Contract: Inheritance and Succession in George Eliot’s Late Fiction,” Sydney Studies in English vol. [no number] 38 (2013) and Paul Milton, “Inheritance as the Key to All Mythologies: George Eliot and Legal Practice,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 28, no. 1 (1995): 49–68.
21 See Rosenberg, Liberalizing, Part I, Ch. 4.
22 Graver, Eliot, 48.
23 Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
24 Gillian Beer, Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (Routledge, 1989), 109.
25 These are instances when “the word has dropped out of the text, or perhaps was subauditum; that is, present in the king's mind, but not uttered.” See Eliot, Middlemarch, 51, emphasis in original.
26 Mortmain law originated in Magna Carta and was then encoded in the de Viris Religiosis statute of 1279. See Chantal Stebbings, “Charity Land: A Mortmain Confusion,” The Journal of Legal History 12, no. l (May 1991): 7. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 2, A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–1769 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 269.
27 Coke notes that “bodies politic and corporate never die” (190). See J. H. Thomas, A Systematic Arrangement of Lord Coke’s First Institute of The Laws of England: On the Plan of Sir Matthew Hale’s Analysis (London: S. Brooke, 1818).
28 Stebbings, “Charity,” 8.
29 Blackstone, Commentaries, 270–1.
30 This confusion was solidified by an eighteenth-century statute that came to be known as the Mortmain Act, which prohibited both charitable donations and the alienation of land to corporations. See Stebbings, “Charity,” 9–11.
31 William Francis Finlason, An Essay on the History and Effects of the Laws of Mortmain (London: C. Dolman, 1853), i.
32 Both the Mortmain Act and the 1844 committee refer to the fear that dying proprietors could be manipulated by the Church. See Stebbings, 11–13.
33 See Stebbings, “Charity,” on the history of Acts related to mortmain and charitable bequests, 11–15.
34 Thomas, Systemic, 190. Blackstone, Commentaries, 468.
35 Thomas, Systematic, 190–91. Coke’s account of mortmain in Institutes of the Lawes of England appears to have served as the basis for subsequent explanations.
36 Thomas, Systemic, 190.
37 On Featherstone and charity see Daniel Siegel, “Losing for Profit,” in Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Karen Chase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
38 The phrase is repeated four times, echoing, as I discuss below, the discourse around Dorothea’s marriage. It appears to allude to Matthew Arnold’s use of the phrase in Culture and Anarchy (1869) to satirize the period’s misguided understanding of liberal freedom. See Arnold, “Culture and Anarchy” and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
39 Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 12.
40 See Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 179, 82, 85.
41 Siegel, “Losing,” 161.
42 Shelford, Treatise, i.
43 Casaubon’s expectation that his widow will extend his life’s work, Paul Milton points out, evokes both the position of the wife in coverture and that of the heir under succession according to Maine. See Milton, “Key,” 62.
44 Shelford, Treatise, 3, emphasis in original.
45 See Rosenberg, Liberalizing, 127, and throughout her discussion of Middlemarch.
46 Eliot parodies liberal discourses in the statements made about Dorothea’s marriage as well as widowhood. For instance, Casaubon’s posthumous efforts at “hindering” (342) are echoed by Chettam and Brooke (334, 335), while Lydgate advises: “Let Mrs. Casaubon do as she likes …” (341).
47 See also Siegel, “Losing,” on renunciation.
48 See, for instance, J. Hillis Miller, “Optic and Semiotic in Middlemarch,” in The Worlds of Victorian Fiction, ed. Jerome Hamilton Buckley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); and Neil Hertz, George Eliot’s Pulse (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
49 See Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 115.
50 See Kornbluh, Realizing, 69.
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Notes on contributors
Noa Reich
Noa Reich holds an Azrieli International Postdoctoral Fellowship based at the University of Haifa. She received her PhD in English from the University of Toronto, where she won the A. S. P. Woodhouse award for the best dissertation defended in 2017–2018. Her article, “Seeing ‘No Guiltless Minds’: Inheritance and Liability in Wilkie Collins’s Armadale,” was published in Nineteenth-Century Literature, and her review of Elaine Freedgood’s World’s Enough will appear in a special issue of Partial Answers in 2021. She is currently at work on a book manuscript, Relational Speculation: Rereading Inheritance in Victorian Fiction.