![]() 1 Certainly, Spencer was among Eliot’s numerous friends and intellectual compeers (along with William B. Nancy Paxton identifies Herbert Spencer as the “eminent philosopher among my friends” (Eliot, Middlemarch 248) to whom the narrator credits the pier-glass metaphor. The lines on the glass, “minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions,” represent life’s events, while the “exclusive optical selection” that arranges the scratches into “concentric circles” in the candlelight (248) is analogous to the circuitous mental revolutions created by the grooves or etchings of habit: the subjective perceptions of an individual’s habitual mental associations. This parable, which critics have consistently read (in company with Middlemarch’s own narrator) as the text’s most poignant metaphor for self-centredness, is also a striking illustration of the Victorian conception of the mental mechanics of habit. Urn:oclc:877101488 Republisher_date 20120417170219 Republisher_operator Scandate 20120416192134 Scanner Middlemarch (1871–72), George Eliot introduces her famous metaphor of the candlelit pier-glass to illustrate Rosamond Vincy’s superlative selfishness while also illuminating the habitual selfishness of all human beings: “The candle is the egoism of any person now absent” (248). ![]() OL20937W Origin-contact Origin-note Physical items are owned or controlled by and digitized by Internet Archive Origin-organization Internet Archive Page_number_confidence 94.23 Pages 886 Ppi 514 Related-external-id urn:isbn:8853001666 ![]() Identifier middlemarch00elio_0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t42r4xz3s Isbn 9780140433883Ģ6026547 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.11 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Openlibrary OL1207048M Openlibrary_edition ![]() Urn:lcp:middlemarch00elio_0:epub:bdad2c60-4d4d-4d37-a66b-de13fc6c0a76 Extramarc University of Toronto Foldoutcount 0 Homepage Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 19:25:34 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA177201 Boxid_2 CH103001 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City Harmondsworth Donorīlogistics Edition Repr. ![]()
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