Note 67 to Chapter 6 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
David Leon Higdon, "The Iconographic Backgrounds of Adam Bede, Chapter 15," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 27 (1972), 155-70. Only one clear connection between a specific emblem and a specific passage in George Eliot has been demonstrated to date. Gordon S. Haight has linked Quarles's emblem I, 12 with the image of "the world as an udder" in Middlemarch (21:323); see Middlemarch, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 156n. Professor Haight has also pointed out in correspondence that the same emblem informs Book 1, lines 104-05 of The Spanish Gypsy.
Last modified 20 September 2000