George Eliot and Solomon Maimon
The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon (1754-1800) was published in Berlin (1792-3) in two parts, under the title Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte. Moses Mendelssohn befriended Maimon, in so far as it was possible to befriend so wayward a personality. Maimon made real contributions to philosophy.
The description of Daniel Deronda’s purchase of the volume is contained in ch. xxxiii of the novel. In Holborn, Deronda came across a “second-hand book-shop, where, on a narrow table outside, the literature of the ages was represented in judicious mixture, from the immortal verse of Homer to the mortal prose of the railway novel. That the mixture was judicious was apparent from Deronda’s finding in it something that he wanted—namely, that wonderful piece of autobiography, the life of the Polish Jew, Salomon Maimon.”
The man in temporary charge of the shop was Mordecai. This is his first meeting with Deronda, who, after an intensely dramatic interval, “paid his half-crown and carried off his ‘Salomon Maimon’s Lebensgeschichte’ with a mere ‘Good Morning.’”