Simon Jarrett argues that George Eliot’s loveable but pitchfork-wielding ‘idiot’ Jacob represents a challenge to social progress in the mid-nineteenth century.
Brother Jacob
By George Eliot
Published 1860 (43 pages)
George Eliot published her novella Brother Jacob in 1860 at a time of great social change. A new class of tradesmen and small-business people were challenging the traditional power of the land-owning classes and new ways of capitalist thinking were dominating society.
Radical thinker
Eliot herself was part of this process of change. As a woman writer, intellectual and radical political thinker, she believed that her writing would not be taken seriously by male society and therefore swapped her real name of Mary Ann Evans for the masculine pen name of George Eliot.
In this context she told the story of Jacob, ‘a very healthy and well-developed idiot,’ one of seven sons of a modest, rural family.
Jacob is very large, wears a smock and carries a large pitchfork, in a classic representation of the ‘village idiot’. His wicked brother David dreams of starting a confectionary shop, selling delicacies to the booming, consumer-oriented middle class. Planning first to make his fortune in the West Indies, he steals the few guineas his mother has saved over the years.
Almost foiled by Jacob, who surprises him in the act of burying the money prior to fleeing the family home, David only escapes by convincing him he is burying the guineas so that they will grow as sweets.
Years later David returns to England with a false, aristocratic identity and a modest fortune, to open a confectionary shop in a nearby town. The shop is successful but his plans to marry into a wealthy merchant family are foiled by his idiot brother. Jacob bursts into the shop one day, terrifying David’s future wife and prospective in-laws. Stuffing himself with David’s magnificent pies and sweets and never letting go of his pitchfork, he hugs David and tells the in-laws that this is his brother ‘Zavy’ who has come back from the Indies with his mother’s ‘zinnies’ (guineas), now grown into the sweets he sees before him.
David’s deception is unmasked and he is jeered out of the village, his business ruined.
Jacob is in some ways a classically ambiguous Victorian portrayal of an idiot. He is endearingly innocent and gullible but alongside this loveable simplicity lie his dangerousness, his menacing pitchfork, and his propensity to violence if thwarted in his animal desires. His innocence and truthfulness unmask the manipulations of his evil brother.
New capitalism
Yet Jacob represents something else. The confectionary shop changes the town. Housewives and maids no longer cook but buy luxurious prepared foods. This leaves them, dangerously, with time on their hands. The new capitalism represents a threat to the social order and challenges assumptions about the place of women. The actions of the simpleton Jacob restore the old order. The shop closes and the women start to cook again.
For Eliot Jacob may represent a loveable, traditional past, but he is also a threat to progress with his obstinate, timeless, unchanging ways.
