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with moral corruption. You will have your punishment. I desire it with all my soul . That is Lydia Glasher’s curse, sent with the poisoned diamonds, and I have heard our own author muttering this splendid formula to herself in the bathroom, when she thinks no one is listening.
    The Sibyl entered this world in 1819, a world moving at the slower pace of coaches, a world lit by oil lamps and candles upstairs. The railways had not yet reached her local town; the Channel was traversed under sail and no one had ever heard of the telegraph, the telephone or the bicycle. Lavatory paper had not been invented, and so it fell to her, when their kitchen maid succumbed to a bilious attack, to cut up the gazetteer, and the cattle auction posters into little squares, thread them into a plump and fluttering mass and suspend them from a nail on the inside wall of the jakes. No bathroom ever existed in that house. Everyone managed with enamel chamber pots, or a brisk dash through the walled vegetable garden to the little house above the septic tank. The faint scent of urine, faeces and dark menstrual blood drifted through the rooms in summer, but without central heating, human excrement seldom festers with flies, as it would now. The Sibyl felt the cold; she wrapped herself in shawls, mantles, woollen stockings, fur-lined boots. Thrift is an admirable moral quality, but she adored discomfort for its own sake, and only ordered a fire when the windows threatened to freeze on the inside.
    Behold the onset of modernity! The Sibyl witnessed the inventions of Alexander Bell and saw the last years of gas light before the advent of electricity. And one thing supported her magnificent advance into the world of celebrity and the ranks of those writers who gained great wealth through their intelligence and genius. An increasing mass within the population could now read. No mysteries here. The Education Acts of the 1870s began with the creation of ‘school boards’ to construct and manage schools where they were needed, to build upon the work of philanthropic charities, religious foundations and working-men’s associations. The 1876 Royal Commission on the Factory Acts recommended that education be made compulsory in order to stop child labour. And the 1880 Education Act did exactly that. Thou shalt attend school between the ages of five and ten. But of course the reforms took time to enforce. Most children worked outside school hours and their families could not live without that income. Revolution follows literacy with giant strides; if the people can read then they must be carefully influenced by the right opinions. They must also be brainwashed into making extensive purchases. The front and back pages of the newspapers were given over to advertisements for hoses, corsets, dental fixtures and tennis lessons. Look at the first printed versions of Middlemarch . The frontispiece and back flaps were surrounded with adverts for the very tonics, purges, vitamin tablets and chest expanders against which Lydgate inveighed with such fruitless zeal.
    And here comes the age of cheap editions: pocket editions, abridged editions, one-guinea editions, with illustrations, and magnificent collected editions in embossed covers. Buy the lot for a knockdown price. Cheap wood-pulp paper and one-penny-a-week subscription libraries nourished a universal desire for self-improvement. Reading is good for the bowels and enlarges the soul. The self-help message proved unbeatable.
    But what of the young Countess, Sophie von Hahn, whose vivid sexual energy enticed Max into a sequence of sentimental fantasies, which went no further than undoing her plaits and allowing his fingertips to brush her flushed and angry cheeks, as he rocked home in his brother’s carriage? Sophie von Hahn was born in the Year of Our Lord 1854, the same year in which the self-styled Mr. and Mrs. G.H. Lewes first visited Frankfurt, Weimar and Berlin. Lewes achieved fame in Germany as the biographer of