Dorothea Dreams of Drains

When Dorothea Brooke imagines a utopian community, she imagines draining the land. This concern with irrigation becomes a point of confluence for otherwise divergent theories of political economy and property within the nineteenth century. Drainage reflects a common horror of uselessness—whether wasted lands or the quagmires of scholarship. Yet this confluence is not totalizing. Natural history offers a critique of drainage, and Eliot's own work is marked by two contrary theories of drainage: circulation that adds value or circulation that subtracts value. These concerns then become a point for considering the primary metaphor of literary studies: the field.