George Eliot was not eligible to vote in 1880, the last general election held before her death. What's more, she didn't care, much to the disappointment of her feminist friends who were always pestering her for a statement in favour of female suffrage. Apart from a brief intoxication with political radicalism in 1848, which never got much further than some daringly slangy remarks about the Queen, Eliot was a romantic conservative who believed that the only change worth having was social, organic and snail slow. Writing around the time of the second reform bill of 1867, she displaced her fears and criticisms of the political process on to two accounts of the elections held during the first reform bill debate of 1832. In Middlemarch and Felix Holt, The Radical, the hustings are noisy, corrupt and violent, rupturing a social process which, if left alone, would have got there in the end.
But although Eliot would have hated the fuss and bother of the present election, she would have recognised many of its contested sites. New Labour's attempts to re-imagine community resonate with her own concerns about how to salvage the authentic moral self of the country dweller in the anomic, rootless suburb. Just as today's new communication technologies threaten both to fragment local community and reconstitute it globally in "virtual" terms, so Eliot saw the potential for the railway and the telephone, which she tried before she died, to reconnect people in ways more vibrant than those available under the fag end of feudalism.
She would have loved, too, the rhetoric of moral rearmament which goes with New Labour's version of community. Like Blair, and possibly Major, she mistrusted the free market's capacity to deliver more than selfish individualism-hence her suspicion of the mid-century female suffrage campaign with its intellectual roots in Bentham and the Mills. She would have warmed to the suggestion of Geoff Mulgan, of Demos, that more civic-minded "mentalities" must be created, duties substituted for rights, gratification delayed. And she could just as easily be accused of a sinister coerciveness in the process.
Likewise, New Labour's difficulties in explaining how you get from the think tank to the high street also dogged Eliot's attempts to concretise community. It is unclear how a trip to the post office or the police station would be different under New Labour. In the same way, although Eliot could endlessly ponder the need to transfer the social cohesiveness of Gemeinschaft into heavily industrialised late 19th century Britain, she never managed to show it happening. In Daniel Deronda, the only novel set in the present, it is left to the eponymous hero, who has recently discovered his own Jewishness, to head off to the Holy Land and start building a community in the guise of Zion. The gentiles, meanwhile, are left behind in Britain with no more specific project than trying to be nice.
What of John Major? Eliot always had a quarrelsome relationship with Toryism. She loathed the Young England movement of the mid-1840s with its aristocratic leaders and its silly attempts to revive a rural England that never was. She was as clear as only a land agent's daughter could be that, as she put it, getting everyone to grow prize turnips was not an answer to Chartism. Yet by the end of her life she was backing Disraeli, that odd ally of the Young Englanders, finding his one-nation Toryism more palatable than Gladstone's fishy-eyed liberalism.
So she would probably have responded to the fissure running through Majorism with a similar ambivalence. Is Major's model citizen a socially responsible individual? Or is he the atomised individual leftover from Thatcher's bleak, loveless Britain? Does providing for your own infirmity and old age and participating in the appointment of your children's teachers mean you are a generous, outward-looking soul, or a grabby, anxious one? Eliot would have found it as hard to be sure as anyone going into the polling booth on 1st May.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that she would have preferred the Majors to the Blairs every time. Their palpable dowdiness would be, for her, an index of their moral worth. Major's south London accent would be rendered into the dialect with which she loved to spatter her books-much to the bewilderment of her readers. Norma Major's determination to put aside her obvious loathing of the public spotlight in order to support her husband would have had Eliot in raptures, much to the disapproval of her feminist friends who wanted spunkier destinies for her heroines.
The Blairs, by contrast, would have annoyed her with their tricky lawyer ways-a symbol to romantic conservatives of everything that is wrong with urban culture. In the guilty recognition that she was herself a countrywoman who spent all her fiction-writing life in town, she would have thought Islington full of sound and fury. The one thing which might just have softened her towards Cherie Blair, whose particular brand of feminism she would have hated, is Tony Booth. Eliot's books have several embarrassing and sometimes tipsy old dads who insist on popping up and mouthing off at the most inopportune moments. It is this one little bit of human frailty which would, finally, have swung George Eliot towards New Labour.
