Untangling the “Romantic Web”: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Reformist Ideals in Middlemarch

George Eliot’s dialogue with Romanticism is a significant, albeit not unproblematic, aspect of her fiction. In examining the importance of memory in her writings, and her organic view of society, Newton (1981) defined Eliot a “Romantic humanist”, suggesting that she embraced the philosophical humanism of the early nineteenth century without its metaphysical views and aesthetic egotism. Eliot’s letters amply document her reading of English and European Romantic writers, and critics have especially traced the influence of William Wordsworth and George Gordon Byron in The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Middlemarch (Dramin 1998; Wilkes 2013; Kei 2015). Her response to Percy Bysshe Shelley, instead, has only marginally been explored. Yet in Middlemarch she makes explicit reference to the poet twice. Mr. Brooke defines Ladislaw as “a kind of Shelley”, “a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley” (Eliot 2003, 359; 499). The purpose of my paper is to investigate Eliot’s dialogue with Shelley with a focus on the political and reformist aspect of her writings. To this end, I shall firstly focus on biographical evidence, discussing the role of G. H. Lewes and Thornton Leigh Hunt – co-editors of the radical paper The Leader in the 1850s – as possible mediators. Subsequently, I shall examine Shelley’s influence on Eliot with a focus on Ladislaw’s and Dorothea’s socialist and utopian views in Middlemarch.