George Eliot's commitment to teaching motivates her writing from the first. Like many of those whose thinking was shaped by early nineteenth-century evangelicalism, she saw education as a vital responsibility. In 1847, when she was twenty-eight years…
In George Eliot's first piece of published fiction, the hero - if that's the right word for the hapless Reverend Amos Barton - is no advertisement for the conventional schooling of a middle-class Englishman. Though he has managed to struggle through…
