Rise of the Dutch Republic, The.
George Eliot’s Annotated Copy
[Eliot, George]. Motley, John Lothrop. The Rise of the Dutch Republic. A History. A new edition. Complete in one volume. London: Routledge, Warne and Routledge, 1865.
8vo.; frontispiece; a.e.g.; brown cloth, panels bordered in gilt and spine elaborately stamped. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
New edition, so stated on the title page, of this work apparently employed by Eliot in her research for Spanish Gypsy. In reading this 900+ page work, printed in minute type in double column pages, Eliot used restraint with her pencil, jotting notes on the rear blank regarding three passages, two of which she marked with a simple pencil line in the appropriate margin. The notes are as follows:
Earliest charter of Middleburg, p. 19
Chimes at Antwerp above the horror, p. 639
Last struggle of the Moors in Spain, p. 650
The source of the second reference merits extracting:
Women, children, old men, were killed in countless numbers, and still, through all this havoc, directly over the heads of the struggling throng, suspended in mid-air above the din and smoke of the conflict, there sounded, ever half-quarter of every hour as if in gentle mockery, from the belfry of the cathedral, the tender and melodious chimes. (p. 639)
As Leslie Stephen notes in his essay on Eliot, when she was immersing herself in Spanish history while working on Spanish Gypsy, “[s]he then tried to find an appropriate embodiment, and could think of nothing except the moment of Spanish history when the struggle with the Moors was attaining its climax.” She could not make use of Moors and Jews, because the “facts of their history were too conspicuously opposed to the working out of my catastrophe.”
This volume was purchased by George Henry Lewes at Rotterdam, June 12, 1866 (see his Journal; footnote, Vol. IV, p. 202, George Eliot’s Letters edited by Gordon Haight), and appeared at the Lewes Sale in 1923, with the heraldic label on the front pastedown noting the sale along with the docket, “Ex Libris George Eliot.” It comes to us from the library of Eliot biographer and Yale scholar Gordon Haight.
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