‘Thick-rinded fruit of the tree of knowledge’: mathematics education in George Eliot's novels

Abstract

L eaving aside Lewis Carroll, George Eliot was almost certainly the most mathematically proficient novelist of the mid-Victorian age. She also had a strong interest and belief in education, particularly mathematics education. As a woman, Eliot was inevitably an autodidact, and the need for and value of independent learning is reflected in her views about effective education. I shall demonstrate how she expressed these views within her novels, and conclude by discussing her depiction of the education of girls. In order to go far with mathematics, Eliot as a woman would have needed to have taken control of her own learning, and so posing her own mathematics problems was a necessity. But in this she was like her father, a farmer and eventually an estate manager. John Cross, Eliot’s widower, wrote about Eliot’s father’s ability to ‘calculate with almost absolute precision the quantity of timber in a standing tree’ (Cross 1885, 1:9). Eliot clearly admired this ability and alluded to it in her first novel when describing Adam Bede.