Abstract
The epigraph fromMiddlemarchviews character as an organism. Like an organism, character grows and develops, while nonetheless retaining its individuation (presumably Eliot means that character may grow and develop beyond its hypothetical point of maturation in childhood). Contra Eliot, in several of his essays William Hazlitt emphasises not the organic qualities of character but its fixedness: its permanent conformation at birth – not, say, at age six, as Thomas Jarrold argued in 1825 – and its role thereafter as a determinant of all individual feeling and action. Yet in other contexts Hazlitt suggests, like Eliot, that character is fluid, changeable. In