After the epic recapitulation of European culture and mythology carried out in Romola, the scope of Felix Holt seems drastically curtailed. Indeed, the introductory chapter of this novel reads like a domesticated pastiche of the proem to Romola. Instead of the opening sweep across the contours of Europe we have a coach ride through the Midlands; instead of the angel of the dawn pausing meaningfully over Florence, the pivot of the Renaissance, we have the coachman gossiping about the towns and villages he passes through until his narrative focuses on Transome Court. But, even though the style of this ‘modern Odyssey’ is ironic and mock-heroic, these are also disturbing times: as in Renaissance Florence, the old synthesis is fragmenting and, with the approach of the First Reform Bill, competing forces are laying claim to the nation's inheritance. The Masque of the Furies in Romola is replaced by an election riot. The coach ride is George Eliot's device for making a preliminary survey of these forces and interests, and also for introducing the reader to the interpretative problems they pose.

The mode of this introductory chapter to Felix Holt is essentially apocalyptic. Like her modernist successors who announced that human nature changed in 1910 or that the old world ended in 1915, George Eliot chose 1832 as her year of cosmic crisis after which things could never be the same again. And she was, of course, writing in the 1860s, with a repetition of that crisis in the offing with the Second Reform Bill about to be passed in 1867, the year after the novel was published. But the mode is also ironic.