“Such cognizance of men and things”: Glimpses of Life and Work in the Margins of George Eliot’s Fiction

In her 1856 review of Browning’s Men and Women George Eliot highlights lines about the poet’s powers of observation as he “stood and watched the cobbler at his trade” and “took such cognizance of men and things.” As a novelist she shows similar powers, and such glimpses of life and work can be found throughout her fiction in the margins of the main action, from the handloom weaver seen through a window in the first of the Scenes of Clerical Life, through Dorothea’s famous view from her window of rural figures in the dawn in Middlemarch, to the small boy in fancy dress in the opening scene of Daniel Deronda. These and similar scenes involve a shift of attention away from the principal characters that may serve different purposes but is an intrinsic feature of her realism and its power to surprise us into new insight and understanding.