Eliot at Yale

Abstract

This article locates the origins of George Eliot scholarship in the archival collecting practices and editorial priorities of Chauncey Brewster Tinker and Gordon Haight at Yale University in the early twentieth century. If archives are the prehistory of reception, as the article suggests, then the collecting practices of individuals and institutions have an influence on scholarly production that is pervasive and also directive. This prehistory of The George Eliot Letters recounts how Tinker acquired her letters for Yale and his own collection, and how Haight’s perspective emerged from the institutional subjectivity of the university, library, and English department. Eliot scholarship emerges from the world of elite male book collecting and queer attachments to each other and to the Rare Books Room. The study of the Victorian novel at Yale itself developed in the shadow of eighteenth-century studies, and its dynamism contrasted markedly with the static curriculum of Victorian poetry. These factors contributed to Haight’s neglect of the significance of Eliot’s poetry, and to his exclusion of correspondence addressing it in the Letters. Haight’s sense of ownership of Eliot’s life and achievements has lastingly impacted the horizons of George Eliot studies, which remains artificially secular and oriented toward the novel.