At the center of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss is the Tulliver family of Dorlcote Mill: proud, impulsive Edward; his conventional wife, Elizabeth; and their sharply different children, Tom and Maggie. The tree matters because nearly every turn in the novel grows from kinship. Edward’s ruin becomes Tom’s inheritance, the Dodson aunts embody the claims of respectability, and Maggie’s deepest attachments repeatedly collide with the loyalties her family demands.
Elizabeth Tulliver was born a Dodson, one of four sisters whose marriages map the family’s social world. Jane Glegg, married to the mild Mr. Glegg, is censorious but lends money after the Tullivers’ fall. Sophy Pullet and her wealthy husband form another prosperous branch. Susan Deane marries the practical Mr. Deane of Guest & Co.; their daughter Lucy is Maggie and Tom’s cousin. Lucy’s engagement to Stephen Guest draws Maggie into the crisis that divides the younger generation.
The decisive feud begins when Edward Tulliver loses his water-rights lawsuit against Mr. Pivart, whose lawyer is Mr. Wakem; Wakem then acquires Dorlcote Mill. Tom works for years to repay the family’s debts and clears them while his father is still alive; Edward’s dying charge is that Tom recover the mill, and it hardens his hatred of the Wakems. That hatred forces Maggie’s tender bond with Philip Wakem into secrecy. Later, her overwhelming attraction to Stephen nearly becomes an elopement, betraying both Philip and Lucy. Maggie turns back, Lucy forgives her, but Tom casts his sister out until the flood reunites them and they drown together.
This tree follows the relationships in Eliot’s novel, published in 1860, including its conclusion, which implies that Lucy and Stephen eventually reunite. Eliot drew on the remembered landscape of her Warwickshire childhood and on the emotional pattern of her bond with her brother, but the Tullivers and Dodsons belong to fiction. Their family still matters because Eliot makes inheritance more than property: pride, obligation and wounded loyalty pass between generations as relentlessly as the Floss itself.
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