Tulliver, Edward

Miller; Tom and Maggie's father; an honest, generous, quarrelsome man whose passion for lawsuits ruins him. "Mr. Tulliver was, on the whole, a man of safe traditional opinions; but on one or two points he had trusted to his unassisted intellect, and had arrived at several questionable conclusions; among the rest, that rats, weevils, and lawyers were created by Old Harry." "Mr. Tulliver was a strictly honest man, and proud of being honest, but he considered that in law the ends of justice could only be achieved by employing a stronger knave to frustrate a weaker. Law was a sort of cockfight, in which it was the business of injured honesty to get a game bird with the best pluck and the strongest spurs." He is devoted to Maggie, "the little wench," and generous to his less fortunate sister, Mrs. Moss, but his hot temper leads him into numerous lawsuits and eventually he loses Dorlcote Mill and becomes bankrupt. In order to save money for his creditors he manages the mill for his enemy, Lawyer Wakem, who has purchased it. When his debts are paid he gives way to his temper and hate, violently assaults Mr. Wakem. and dies from the shock to his enfeebled system. It has been suggeeted that a certain Tom Hollick, a farmer and miller of Nuneaton, whose mill George Eliot used to pass on her way to school, may have been the original of Mr. Tulliver. Hollick was described by one who remembered him as a sanguine high-tempered man, impatient of any attempt to impose upon him, who was involved in a lawsuit. (Manuscript information; also article in Great Thoughts, March, 1901, p. 370.) Mr. Tulliver is not George Eliot's father, although the tender affection which Mr. Tulliver feels for Maggie may be drawn from the author's recollection of her own father.

<em>The Mill on the Floss</em>

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