The Mill on the Floss

With the character of Mrs. Glegg, Eliot is satirizing middle-class women who take themselves too seriously and view themselves (wrongly) as members of the elite upper classes. While Eliot is sympathetic toward all of her characters, there are a few like Mrs. Glegg who exist in part for comedic effect. The humor in Eliot’s portrayal of Mrs. Glegg comes through in passages like the following:

Mrs Glegg chose to wear her bonnet in the house to-day — untied and tilted slightly, of course — a frequent practice of hers when she was on a visit, and happened to be in a severe humour: she didn’t know what draughts there might be in strange houses […] One would need to be learned in the fashions of those times to know how far in the rear of them Mrs Glegg’s slate-coloured silk-gown must have been; but from certain constellations of small yellow spots upon it, and a mouldy odour about it suggestive of a damp clothes-chest, it was probable that it belonged to a stratum of garments just old enough to have come recently into wear.

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With the character of Mr. Stelling—Tom’s teacher and an Oxford-educated minister—Eliot is satirizing clergymen who have no integrity in relation to teaching yet receive high praise and high incomes anyway. The following passage—which contains verbal irony—communicates Eliot’s satirical intentions:

Any of those low callings in which men are obliged to do good work at a low price were forbidden to clergymen: was it their fault if their only resource was to turn out very poor work at a high price? Besides, how should Mr Stelling be expected to know that education was a delicate and difficult business? any more than an animal endowed with a power of boring a hole through a rock should be expected to have wide views of excavation.

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