Even set among other nineteenth-century authors, George Eliot's vigilant awareness of the ends and means of attention-both her own, as author, manifested in her 2 Acts of attention, then, are crucial both for the characters and for the narrators of nineteenth-century British realist novels in these works, attention often becomes an object as well as a means of scrutiny. Such immediacy is essential to realist literature, a conventional pretense of which is usually that the world of fiction is not only being imagined and summoned before us, but is in fact really there, present, with the narrator choosing to attend to certain features, and to draw our attention to certain features, in that world. When someone says, ' I am paying attention to such-and-such, ' whatever that ' such-and-such ' might be is assumed to present in his mind, such that we do not say we are ' paying attention to our vacation next month, ' but we say that we are ' paying attention to our plans for our vacation next month ' we might say, ' he is giving all of his attention to the future, ' but this would mean that the future exists as a reality before him, as a daydream or set of plans. Attention can be given only to what is immediate, or assumed to be immediate, before a person, whether it is imagined or real, concrete or abstract. Another reason: one of the dominant conventions of nineteenth-century British realist fiction. ' 1 These are acts of attention into which we are invited, as readers, to enter: characters attend, our attention follows theirs. Harry Shaw, in Narrating Reality, groups together the ' acts of attention ' of Austen, Scott, and George Eliot, as acts which ' can create, if we enter into them, a readiness to encounter subsequent unpredictable but cognizable movements of reality. One reason: their preoccupation with the ways in which characters attend. But since all authors, at all times, care about what to attend to and how, why is it that nineteenth-century realist novels should, or could, be set apart from other literary traditions on account of their relationships to attention? For two reasons, at least. Sustained acts of attention are a hallmark of nineteenth-century realist novels.

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