Daniel Deronda
Edinburgh & London: Wm. Blackwood & Sons, 1876. First edition. Four volumes bound in contemporary quarter-calf and marbled boards; rubbed; good to very good. Paul Johnson in A History of The Jews (1987) points out the enormous importance of this novel, "...in terms of its practical effects it was probably the most influential novel of the nineteenth century." In the novel, a Judaic scholar, Mordechai (based on Eliot's friend Emmanuel Deutsch) echoes Eliot’s own Zionism, “The world will gain as Israel gains. For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and sympathies of every great nation in its bosom; there will be a land set for a halting place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East...” Johnson notes the “...tragic ironies...” of this hope. The establishment of Israel has hardly pacified the Mid-East. At the end of the novel, the Messiah-like figure of Deronda prepares to restore “...a potential existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe.” Johnson points out that the for the political generation of Balfour (who met Eliot the year after publication and whose Balfour Declaration led directly to the establishment of the state of Israel), Daniel Deronda introduced them to the Jewish issue. Furthermore, this book is one of only a handful of sympathetic portraits of Jews in Victorian English literature. While little read today (perhaps like Eliot’s Middlemarch, it must wait for a Masterpiece Theater presentation, or a film version), this novel has probably had greater impact on world events than any other single work of fiction of its era.
[Book #16613P]
Price: $750.00