Fiction · 1864
Brother Jacob
David Faux, a confectioner's apprentice with a high opinion of himself and low expectations of everyone else, steals his mother's guineas and sets off for the West Indies to be somebody. His half-witted brother Jacob catches him burying the money, and remembers — chiefly the yellow lozenges David gave him to keep quiet. Years later David has resurfaced in the town of Grimworth as Edward Freely, confectioner, with an invented past, a growing business and an engagement to a respectable girl. Then Jacob arrives in Grimworth, and is very pleased to see him.
George Eliot wrote the story in 1860 and published it in the Cornhill Magazine in 1864. It is her only sustained piece of comic malice — a small, exact fable about a man destroyed by the one relation he could not lie his way out of.
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About the author
1819–1880 · Victorian
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), born in Warwickshire, who came to London in 1851 as assistant editor of the Westminster Review and lived, from 1854, with the writer George Henry Lewes. Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) was followed by Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola, Felix Holt, Middlemarch (1871–72) and Daniel Deronda (1876). She also translated Strauss and Feuerbach.
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