Tom Tulliver

“ A truly respectable young man, Mr Tom Tulliver; quite likely to rise in the world! His sister’s disgrace was naturally a heavy blow to him. It was to be hoped that she would go out of the neighbourhood,—to America, or anywhere,—so as to purify the air of St Ogg’s from the stain of her presence, extremely dangerous to daughters there! ”

“ Excited by the dinner given to celebrate the payment of his creditors, he met Mr. Wakem near the mill. From angry words it came to blows, and Tulliver fell on the lawyer furiously, only ceasing from attack when Maggie and Mrs. Tulliver appeared. Wakem went off without serious injury, but Tulliver only lived through the night; the excitement had killed him.
"You must take care of her, Tom," said the dying man, turning to his daughter. "You'll manage to pay for a brick grave, Tom, so as your mother and me can lie together? This world's...too many...honest man..." ”

“ Mr Stelling’s faculties had been early trained to boring in a straight line, and he had no faculty to spare. But among Tom’s contemporaries, whose fathers cast their sons on clerical instruction to find them ignorant after many days, there were many far less lucky than Tom Tulliver. Education was almost entirely a matter of luck—usually of ill-luck—in those distant days. The state of mind in which you take a billiard-cue or a dice-box in your hand is one of sober certainty compared with that of old-fashioned fathers, like Mr Tulliver, when they selected a school or a tutor for their sons. ”

“ Christmas was cheery, but not so Mr Tulliver. He was irate and defiant; and Tom, though he espoused his father’s quarrels and shared his father’s sense of injury, was not without some of the feeling that oppressed Maggie when Mr Tulliver got louder and more angry in narration and assertion with the increased leisure of dessert. The attention that Tom might have concentrated on his nuts and wine was distracted by a sense that there were rascally enemies in the world, and that the business of grown-up life could hardly be conducted without a good deal of quarrelling. ”

“ Perhaps his father might have helped bringing them all down in the world, and making people talk of them with contempt, but no one should talk long of Tom Tulliver with contempt.
The natural strength and firmness of his nature was beginning to assert itself, urged by the double stimulus of resentment against his aunts, and the sense that he must behave like a man and take care of his mother. ”

“ They're pretty nigh all one, and they're not far off being even wi' the law, I believe; for Riley looks Lawyer Wakem i' the face as hard as one cat looks another. He's none frightened at him."
Mr. Tulliver was speaking to his wife, a blonde, comely woman, nearly forty years old.
"Well, Mr. Tulliver, you know best. I've no objections. But if Tom's to go to a new school, I should like him to go where I can wash him and mend him, else he might as well have calico as linen. And then, when the box is goin' backwards and forwards, I could send the lad a cake, or a pork-pie, or an apple." ”

“ His pride is hurt by financial disaster; he becomes a hireling of the man he hates; his fortunes are redeemed by his son, but he dies soon afterward.
Tulliver (Mrs.) , a weak, garrulous woman, vain of her “Dodson blood.”
Tulliver (Maggie) , fine, upright, imaginative, affectionate girl, understood by few, and passionately loved by two men. She resists her love for her cousin’s almost betrothed, and suffers the loss of reputation patiently. Tom Tulliver, her brother, is the sternest of her censors. The two are drowned together in a river-flood.--George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss. ”

“ Tulliver, "as the lad should take after the mother's side instead o' the little wench. The little un takes after my side, now: she's twice as 'cute as Tom."
"Yes, Mr. Tulliver, and it all runs to naughtiness. How to keep her in a clean pinafore two hours together passes my cunning. An' now you put me i' mind," continued Mrs. Tulliver, rising and going to the window, "I don't know where she is now, an' it's pretty nigh tea-time. Ah, I thought so—there she is, wanderin' up an' down by the water, like a wild thing. She'll tumble in some day." ”

“ Tom Tulliver’s sufferings during the first quarter he was at King’s Lorton, under the distinguished care of the Rev. Walter Stelling, were rather severe. At Mr Jacob’s academy life had not presented itself to him as a difficult problem; there were plenty of fellows to play with, and Tom being good at all active games,—fighting especially,—had that precedence among them which appeared to him inseparable from the personality of Tom Tulliver. Mr Jacobs himself, familiarly known as Old Goggles, from his habit of wearing spectacles, imposed no painful awe ”

“ This strikes the key-note of a character whose stern inflexibility, combined with much practical insight and dogged persistence of effort, is at the same time dignified by a high, if somewhat narrow, sense of family honour. Conventional respectability, in fact, is Tom Tulliver's religion. He is not in any sense bad, or mean, or sordid; he is only so circumscribed in his perceptive faculties, that he has no standard by which to measure thoughts or feelings that transcend his own very limited conception of life. ”

“ Tulliver.
"Maggie," said Mrs. Tulliver, beckoning Maggie to her, and whispering in her ear, as soon as this point of Lucy's staying was settled, "go and get your hair brushed—do, for shame. I told you not to come in without going to Martha first; you know I did."
"Tom, come out with me," whispered Maggie, pulling his sleeve as she passed him; and Tom followed willingly enough.
"Come upstairs with me, Tom," she whispered, when they were outside the door. "There's something I want to do before dinner."
"There's no time to play at anything before dinner," said Tom. ”

“ Tulliver, "if he's good to you, try and make him amends and be good to him. He's a poor crooked creatur, and takes after his dead mother. But don't you be getting too thick with him; he's got his father's blood in him too."
By the time Tom had reached his last quarter at King's Lorton the years had made striking changes in him. He was a tall youth now, and wore his tail-coat and his stand-up collars. Maggie, too, was tall now, with braided and coiled hair. She was almost as tall as Tom, though she was only thirteen ”

“ Is it some little gell you've picked up in the road, Kezia?"
"Why, she's gone and cut her hair herself," said Mr. Tulliver in an undertone to Mr. Deane, laughing with much enjoyment. "Did you ever know such a little hussy as it is?"
"Why, little miss, you've made yourself look very funny," said Uncle Pullet.
"Fie, for shame!" said Aunt Glegg in her loudest tone. "Little gells as cut their own hair should be whipped, and fed on bread and water—not come and sit down with their aunts and uncles." ”

“ Tulliver reprovingly. "You mustn't say so. You must learn what your master tells you. He knows what it's right for you to learn."
In the second term Mr. Stelling had a second pupil--Philip, the son of Lawyer Wakem, Mr. Tulliver's standing enemy.
Philip was a very old-looking boy, Tom thought. His spine had been deformed through an accident in infancy, and to Tom he was simply a humpback. He had a vague notion that the deformity of Wakem's son had some relation to the lawyer's rascality, of which he had so often heard his father talk with hot emphasis. ”

“ Mr Tulliver was not by any means an exception in mistaking brazenness for shrewdness; most laymen thought Stelling shrewd, and a man of remarkable powers generally; it was chiefly by his clerical brethren that he was considered rather a dull fellow. But he told Mr Tulliver several stories about “Swing” and incendiarism, and asked his advice about feeding pigs in so thoroughly secular and judicious a manner, with so much polished glibness of tongue, that the miller thought, here was the very thing he wanted for Tom. ”

“ Tulliver spoke she drew a bright bunch of keys from her pocket, and singled out one, rubbing her thumb and finger up and down it with a placid smile while she looked at the clear fire.
"I think I've hit it, Bessy," said Mr. Tulliver, after a short silence. "Riley's as likely a man as any to know o' some school; he's had schooling himself, an' goes about to all sorts o' places—auctioneering and vallyin' and that. I want Tom to be such a sort o' man as Riley, you know—as can talk pretty nigh as well as if it was all wrote out for him, and a good solid knowledge o' business too." ”

“ Then the door was thrown open; but instead of the tea-tray, Sally brought in an object so startling that both Mrs. Pullet and Mrs. Tulliver gave a scream, causing Uncle Pullet to swallow a lozenge he was sucking—for the fifth time in his life, as he afterwards noted.
The startling object was no other than little Lucy, with one side of her person, from her small foot to her bonnet-crown, wet and discoloured with mud, holding out two tiny blackened hands, and making a very piteous face. ”

“ Tulliver was quite proud to leave his little wench where she would have an opportunity of showing her cleverness to appreciating strangers. So it was agreed that she should not be fetched home till the end of the fortnight.
"Now, then, come with me into the study, Maggie," said Tom, as their father drove away. "What do you shake and toss your head now for, you silly?" he continued; for though her hair was now under a new dispensation, and was brushed smoothly behind her ears, she seemed still in imagination to be tossing it out of her eyes. "It makes you look as if you were crazy." ”

“ The lad's a poor deformed creatur. It's a sign Wakem thinks high o' Mr. Stelling, as he sends his son to him, and Wakem knows meal from bran, lawyer and rascal though he is."
It was a cold, wet January day on which Tom went back to school. If he had not carried in his pocket a parcel of sugar-candy, there would have been no ray of pleasure to enliven the gloom.
"Well, Tulliver, we're glad to see you again," said Mr. Stelling heartily, on his arrival. "Take off your wrappings and come into the study till dinner. You'll find a bright fire there, and a new companion." ”

“ Tulliver's wonder, for he had been paying a visit to a married sister, and had not yet been home.
"Why, what's the meaning o' this?" he said, checking his horse, while Maggie slipped from the donkey and ran to her father's stirrup.
"The little miss lost herself, I reckon," said the gipsy. "She'd come to our tent at the far end o' Dunlow Lane, and I was bringing her where she said her home was. It's a good way to come arter being on the tramp all day."
"Oh yes, father, he's been very good to bring me home," said Maggie—"a very kind, good man!" ”

“ It 'ud break my heart to send Tom where there's a housekeeper, an' I hope you won't think of it, Mr. Tulliver."
"You may set your mind at rest on that score, Mrs. Tulliver," said Mr. Riley, "for Stelling is married to as nice a little woman as any man need wish for a wife. There isn't a kinder little soul in the world."
"Father," broke in Maggie, who had stolen to her father's elbow again, listening with parted lips, while she held her doll topsy-turvy, and crushed its nose against the wood of the chair—"father, is it a long way off where Tom is to go? Shan't we ever go to see him?" ”

“ Riley. "Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son's education than leave it him in your will."
"I dare say, now, you know of a school as 'ud be just the thing for Tom," said Mr. Tulliver.
Mr. Riley took a pinch of snuff, and waited a little before he said,—
"I know of a very fine chance for any one that's got the necessary money, and that's what you have, Tulliver. But if any one wanted his boy to be placed under a first-rate fellow, I know his man. He's an Oxford man, and a parson. He's willing to take one or two boys as pupils to fill up his time. ”

“ The children were used to hear themselves talked of as freely as if they were birds, and could understand nothing, however they might stretch their necks and listen; but on this occasion Mrs. Tulliver manifested an unusual discretion, because she had recently had evidence that the going to school to a clergyman was a sore point with Tom, who looked at it as very much on a par with going to school to a constable. Mrs. Tulliver had a sighing sense that her husband would do as he liked, whatever sister Glegg said, or sister Pullet either ”

“ Tulliver's way, if she blamed Tom, to refer his misdemeanor, somehow or other, to Maggie.
The idea of Maggie sitting alone by the pond roused an habitual fear in Mrs. Tulliver's mind, and she mounted the horse-block to satisfy herself by a sight of that fatal child, while Tom walked–not very quickly–on his way toward her.
"They're such children for the water, mine are," she said aloud, without reflecting that there was no one to hear her; "they'll be brought in dead and drownded some day. ”

“ But I should like Tom to be a bit of a scholard, so as he might be up to the tricks o' these fellows as talk fine and write with a flourish. It 'ud be a help to me wi' these lawsuits and things."
Mr. Tulliver was speaking to his wife, a blond, comely woman in a fan-shaped cap. ”

“ Maggie could see clearly enough, now the thing was done, that it was very foolish, and that she should have to hear and think more about her hair than ever. As she stood crying before the glass she felt it impossible to go down to dinner and endure the severe eyes and severe words of her aunts, while Tom, and Lucy, and Martha, who waited at table, and perhaps her father and her uncles, would laugh at her—for if Tom had laughed at her, of course every one else would; and if she had only let her hair alone, she could have sat with Tom and Lucy, and had the apricot pudding and the custard! ”