1. Ermarth argues that, in Eliot, the mediating force between individual and unknowable social whole is some kind of historical tradition: ‘Her open-ended networks of influence cannot be grasped as a whole because they are dependent on individuals and therefore are constantly changing. This community need not be grasped as a whole, however, because it is securely rooted in historical traditions.’ Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton University Press, 1983), 222.
2. Thackeray, Catherine, 132–3, 132, 131. In his edition of Catherine, Sheldon Goldfarb argues that Thackeray overstated the revulsion of the critics, who were ‘not that negative’. He speculates that Thackeray turned against his work because in his retelling he had actually softened some elements of the original crime, giving Catherine a reason to kill her brutal husband, and hence had not written ‘an anti-Newgate satire but one in which ruffians were presented almost affectionately’. ‘Historical Commentary’, to William Makepeace Thackeray, Catherine: A Story, ed. Sheldon F. Goldfarb (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 144, 146.
3. Macdonald Daly, ‘Introduction’ to Mary Barton, by Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. Macdonald Daly (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), xiii, xii, xvii, xxi.
4. Jill L. Matus, ‘Introduction’ to Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, ed. Jill L. Matus (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3.
5. Important analyses of the distinction between agape and cosmopolitanism include the volume Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).