When reading George Eliot’s (Mary Anne Evans’s) novels it often feels like you are a species accidently peering back in time to witness your own evolution. But rather than any physical change, in Eliots’ novels, we are fortunate to see the early stages of the social evolution of the middle class. A class whose habits and beliefs dominate democratic politics today like no other section of society. Eliot is able to offer this sort of picture, because she constructs characters with incredible psychological insight. By this I don’t mean the often heard praise that characters are “relatable”. Many of her characters are aliens to us living in an alien world. Rather they are fully formed, psychologically coherent, to the extent any of us are, and faithful to themselves.

In Middlemarch Eliot puts the obsession with money and inheritance into sharp relief through Mary Garth. When Mary tends to her dying uncle, she accepts her life is unlikely to go as planned after her and her mother’s savings are forfeited to pay her lover’s debts. But she is determined to take life as it comes and not give up her moral views for cynicism. This belief is immediately put to the test. Mary is suddenly asked by her dying uncle for her to help alter his will. Garth’s refusal to advantage herself, or make it seem as though she did, by helping her uncle change his will on his deathbed is one of the best passages in Middlemarch. This moral defiance is enriched by Eliot by describing how Mary sees the irony and pity of her uncle not being able to do what he wants with his money at the end of his life.

Eliot deals with the same sort of obsessions in Silas Marner as well. Silas Marner develops an obsession with money over social relationships after being falsely framed by his friend for stealing. This is then tested by the loss of his small fortune which produces a vacuum in his life that is only replaced by adopting a daughter. Alongside this, Godfrey Cass the eventual Lord of Raveloe and landlord, is consumed by a lifelong internal conflict after disowning his first wife and daughter for the sake of potentially losing his inheritance and social status. When his daughter rejects him as an adult, he is left to rue the irony of originally disowning her so he could marry his second wife with whom he cannot seem to have children.

Eliot uses Maggie Tulliver in Mill on the Floss, to highlight the malevolent side of an obsession with social status. Maggie as a child struggles to understand how others cannot recognise her intellect or her insight into her own flaws. This confrontation with society’s expectations boils over when she breaks decisively from this childlike love for her brother after he shows his bigotry in admonishing Philip for daring to love Maggie. Maggie cannot tolerate her brother’s demeaning attitude towards Philip and his disability. When she seeks employment as a teacher in defiance of her brother’s willingness to support her, she is looked down upon as someone ‘going into service’.

What makes Eliot’s psychologically rich characterisations interesting is that they are situated in a sort of economic realism. Characters are brought down by debts, reduced to lower living standards in the face of wealthier relatives, forced into the jobs they do not enjoy doing, and forced to choose between money and their conscience. This is refreshing amidst so many contemporary novels where economic reality never seems to exist; these are novels where characters are never wearied by their jobs or limited means it affords them. But this realism in Eliot’s novels are limited to the middle class with the working or lower class mostly absent. Servants are barely described and working class characters that are featured are incidental to the journey of a main character or one-dimensional morally virtuous caricatures.

What we end up seeing in Eliot’s novels is the very early development of the social norms and beliefs of the middle class. Central to this is that Eliot’s characters are highly conscious of their class. But this consciousness is not aimed towards the class structure but more an anxiety about class status. This is the origin of middle class status anxiety. This is anxiety from falling economically and socially. A central animation of many characters in Eliot’s novels is the belief it is bad to be poor, it is a lazy, slothful and imprudent life. It is a rational and moral error. When the Tulliver’s lose their family mill due to debts in Mill on the Floss, this is not met with sympathy from their extended relations. Mr Tulliver is admonished for entering the costly lawsuit and not assisted in any way by those in his wife’s family who could. In Middlemarch, Rosamund Vincy’s attitude towards her fiance and then husband Lydgate are all concerned with not losing he social status. Her father on the other hand swears to never help Rosumand and her husband financially because he is not wealthy. For him, Rosamund is lowering herself and possibly failing economically by marrying Lydgate. This anxiety with falling is also coupled with an anxiety to rise. Much of the Vincy family is obsessed with a possible inheritance that would set their eldest son for life.

While these anxieties are perhaps more tempered now, they are still pervasive enough to animate a lot of contemporary public discourse. For instance, I think negative attitudes towards unemployment benefits, and the obsession with means testing welfare in general comes from a deep belief that individuals are the sole authors of their economic situation. As a consequence, to become poorer is a personal fault. Life then becomes an effort to avoid that personal fault at all costs. Political parties across the spectrum have preyed on this anxiety in various ways to succeed at the ballot box. Either through demonising the welfare state as giving to the undeserving or by creating ever more complicated taxes and benefit structures which people need to game to receive.

This wealth anxiety is also I think in part to blame for the lack of any significant policy that would make housing affordable in countries like Australia. Housing assets owned by households in Australia are worth more than $9 trillion in 2023, making up about 68% of household net worth. Any significant policy change that makes housing affordable, would involve some intervention in the property market that lowers the price of homes and therefore a large part of household net worth. But, this is undesirable to many or at least thought to be. This shows itself through local opposition to new development, and a media and a political class obsessed with simple narratives that treat the demand and supply pressures of housing like it was a commodity. For some households, it involves an anxiety that requires pouring more and more money into housing as investment.

The anxiety of losing social status is a bit more complicated these days. Most industrialised societies have grown more egalitarian as traditional social hierarchies disappeared. But, we can still see bits of this in the obsession with university education as a credential factory and to a lesser extent with private schooling.. Lacking the former especially excludes people of a range of office or ‘knowledge economy’ service jobs. The latter involves parental anxiety to sculpt a child’s social network so as to either avoid the influence of those they see as beneath them or to enter them into a social class that provides employment and social opportunities later in life.

For all that, I don’t think Eliot’s novels give us any special solutions. They can only provide us some perspective. They show us that sometimes the ebbs and flows of a society’s norms and widely held beliefs have been around for much longer than we think.