The Rival Afterlives of George Eliot in Textual and Visual Culture A Bicentenary Reflection

Abstract

George Eliot (1819–80) received markedly less national and international acknowledgment during the bicentenary of her birth in 2019 than Charles Dickens did for his bicentenary in 2012. In seeking to understand why, this article conducts a comparative evaluation of Eliot and Dickens in textual and visual media to examine how and where enduring authorial celebrity is constructed. Using Google Books Ngrams, the presence of Dickens and Eliot in textual culture from the 1800s to 2000 is assessed. Eliot is found to keep pace with and/or supersede Dickens in this mass digital repository, a fact that sits at odds with her secondary position in twenty-first-century popular culture. The online catalog of the British Film Institute Reuben Library discloses that adaptations of Eliot’s work in film and TV are vastly outnumbered by those of Dickens. We argue that this disparity between Eliot’s textual and visual legacies can be traced to extrinsic factors relating to the idea of celebrity and the posthumous management of her reputation, combined with the robust afterlife of nineteenth-century insults about her appearance. At the same time, the intrinsic qualities of her works delimit their easy remediation into mass visual culture. Despite this, our methods of distant reading Eliot’s vibrant afterlife in mass textual repositories open up new avenues for exploring her legacy beyond the bicentenary.