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While Eliot published poetry, she achieved lasting fame for her prose. Eliot's writing emerged during the Victorian era, a time of great social and intellectual change. Her works reflect the concerns of her time, including the shifting role of women, the impact of industrialization, and the clash between traditional values and modern thought.
This week, you will be discussing the complete works of George Eliot. You may talk about anything related to their work that interests you. We also encourage you to provide a 1-10 ranking of their collected bibliography via this link. At the end of the year, we'll provide a ranked list of each author we've discussed in these threads (like our ...
- Summary
- Analysis of in A London Drawing Room
- About George Eliot
This speaker’s exact location is not specified, making this poem applicable to anyone living anywhere in London at the time. The poem begins with a dark description of what is outside the speaker’s home. The sky is described as “yellowed” and the houses are so drab in their shape and form, as a line of fog. There is nothing in this landscape for on...
Lines 1-6
The first section of this poem, like the remainder, focuses heavily on descriptions of the landscape from this speaker’s window, doorway, or home. The speaker is looking out upon the whole, or at least a representative whole, of London and seeing it as dark, dirty, and ragged. It exists in shadow. This is made clear in the first line as the speaker describes the sky as “cloudy,” and tinted yellow by the smoke of industry. During the time in which this poem was written, England entered full fo...
Lines 7-12
In the next section of ‘In a London Drawing Room’, additional details are given about the state of the city. When birds fly through the sky over the city they cast no shadow. This is a roundabout way of saying that they are not touched by the sun. The sun cannot penetrate through the thick layer of smoke and smog. “All is shadow” as if a huge piece of the “thickest canvas” has been hung over the city, blocking out the sun. The rays of the sun are “clothed in hemp,” (hemp being a common materi...
Lines 13-19
The last section of this poem concludes the description of this dreary world. All those who walk along the streets do not pause for anything, they “hurry on” with their eyes cast “upon the ground.” They make no effort to communicate with anyone they pass, or with the speaker, something that she would most likely relish. The cars, cabs, and carriages mimic those walking on the streets. They too hurry along, their wheels quickly spinning. The doors, windows, and roofs are all closed up, making...
Mary Ann Evans, better known as her pseudonym George Eliot, was born in November of 1819 in Warwickshire, England. Evans developed a great religious fervor while in school as a young woman but moved away from the church after becoming acquainted with more radical beliefs. After finishing school Eliot lived with her father in Coventry until his deat...
- Female
- October 9, 1995
- Poetry Analyst And Editor
In a London Drawingroom. By George Eliot. The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke. For view there are the houses opposite. Cutting the sky with one long line of wall. Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch. Monotony of surface & of form. Without a break to hang a guess upon.
By George Eliot. "I grant you ample leave. To use the hoary formula 'I am'. Naming the emptiness where thought is not; But fill the void with definition, 'I'. Will be no more a datum than the words. You link false inference with, the 'Since' & 'so'. That, true or not, make up the atom-whirl. Resolve your 'Ego', it is all one web.
George Eliot's 1865 poem "In a London Drawingroom" is a scathing critique of urban life in Victorian London. The speaker describes the city, which had become the largest in the world by the time Eliot wrote the poem, as a filthy, hectic place that robs life of its color, warmth, and joy. London's residents are utterly alienated from nature ...
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George Eliot is widely recognized as one of the most important writers of the nineteenth century; yet her two volumes of poetry are often ignored in modern critical assessments. Like so many of her contemporaries, Eliot tried to make significant literary contributions in more than one genre; her poems—both narrative and lyric—deal, however, with some of the same themes which inform her ...
