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Definition of Verbal Irony
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging outside and someone remarks "what... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean... read full definition
Book 2, Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Mr. Stelling:
With the character of Mr. Stelling—Tom’s teacher and an Oxford-educated minister—Eliot is satirizing clergymen who have no integrity in relation to teaching yet receive high praise and high incomes anyway. The following passage—which contains verbal irony—communicates Eliot’s satirical intentions:
Any of those low callings in which men are obliged to do good work at a low price were forbidden to clergymen: was it their fault if their only resource was to turn out very poor work at a high price? Besides, how should Mr Stelling be expected to know that education was a delicate and difficult business? any more than an animal endowed with a power of boring a hole through a rock should be expected to have wide views of excavation.
Here Eliot makes it clear that Mr. Stelling is a stand-in for this type of clergyman generally (by speaking of clergy as a collective) and also mocks him for his lack of teaching abilities. She does not actually believe that Mr. Stelling should not be expected to understand education as “a delicate and difficult business,” but is using verbal irony. She goes farther still by comparing him to an animal whose sole purpose is “boring a hole through a rock” with no wider views of excavation. In other words, Mr. Stelling's sole purpose is to earn money by doing the bare minimum, and he has no wider views of what education could be.
It is notable that part of the reason Mr. Stelling is highly regarded despite his lack of skills is due to the ignorance non-clergy (like Mr. Tulliver) have about what types of training clergy actually receive. Unlike the narrator, Mr. Tulliver is not aware of Mr. Stelling’s extreme limitations.
Related Themes:
