Middlemarch

Middlemarch is the masterpiece of George Eliot and, for many readers and critics, the greatest novel in English. Subtitled “A Study of Provincial Life”, it is set in the fictional Midlands town of Middlemarch between 1829 and 1832 — the years of the first railways, the death of George IV, cholera, new medicine and the great political struggle over the Reform Bill — and interweaves the lives of dozens of characters across every class. At its centre are two ardent, idealistic young people who make disastrous marriages: Dorothea Brooke, a passionate, earnest young woman who longs to do something great for the world and marries Edward Casaubon, a desiccated clergyman-scholar many years older, believing him a great mind; and Tertius Lydgate, a brilliant, ambitious young doctor who wants to reform medicine and discover the basic tissue of the body, and who marries Rosamond Vincy, the beautiful, self-absorbed daughter of the town’s mayor. Around them are the love story of the good-natured, idle Fred Vincy and the plain, clever Mary Garth, and the downfall of the pious banker Nicholas Bulstrode, whose hidden past returns to destroy him.

It is a novel of extraordinary breadth and depth — a whole society seen with irony, intelligence and compassion — and a meditation on vocation, marriage, egoism, sympathy and the meaning of ordinary lives.

At a glance

The story

A Prelude recalls St Theresa of Ávila, who as a child set out to seek martyrdom and found her “epos” in the reform of a religious order; it asks what becomes of later Theresas, born into an age without such opportunities, whose “ardent” natures find “no epic life”, only “a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity.”

Dorothea Brooke, nineteen, beautiful, puritanical in taste and full of plans to build better cottages for the poor, lives with her pretty, practical younger sister Celia and their genial, rambling, muddle-headed uncle Mr Brooke at Tipton Grange. The cheerful young baronet Sir James Chettam courts her; she does not notice, thinking he wants Celia. Instead she is drawn to the Rev. Edward Casaubon of Lowick Manor, a pale, dry scholar of forty-five who is writing a vast work, the Key to All Mythologies, which will show all the world’s myths to be corruptions of a single original revelation. She imagines that marrying him would be “like marrying Pascal”, that she would learn from him and help him. He proposes in a stilted letter; she accepts eagerly, to the dismay of everyone. Mrs Cadwallader, the rector’s sharp-tongued wife, says that Casaubon has “no good red blood in his body”; Sir James mutters that he is “a mummy”; Celia notes that he blinks before he speaks and makes a noise with his spoon when he eats soup.

In Middlemarch, the young doctor Tertius Lydgate has just arrived, determined to practise the new scientific medicine he learned in Paris and Edinburgh, to reform the corrupt local medical practice, and to discover the “primitive tissue” from which all organs are formed. The rich banker Bulstrode, a pious evangelical, makes him director of the new fever hospital, and Lydgate, needing Bulstrode’s support, votes for Bulstrode’s candidate as hospital chaplain, the unworthy Tyke, against the kindly Mr Farebrother, his friend — a first small compromise.

The Vincys are a prosperous manufacturing family. Rosamond, the mayor’s daughter, is the beauty of the town, accomplished, graceful and secretly self-centred; she sets her sights on Lydgate because he is a stranger, well-born (his uncle is a baronet) and not a provincial. Her brother Fred, educated to be a clergyman but unsuited to it, idle and in debt, expects to inherit from his rich old uncle, the miser Peter Featherstone of Stone Court. Fred loves Mary Garth, plain, witty and honest, who nurses Featherstone and who will not marry Fred unless he finds a useful profession and stops gambling. When Fred cannot pay a debt for which Mary’s father, the upright land agent Caleb Garth, stood surety, the Garths lose their savings, and Fred is mortified.

Dorothea and Casaubon spend their honeymoon in Rome. Casaubon spends his days in the Vatican library and is cold and unresponsive; Dorothea, overwhelmed by the city’s ruins and splendour, sits weeping alone. She begins to realise that his great work is futile — out of date, ignorant of the German scholarship that has superseded it, a heap of notes never to be finished — and that he is a narrow, jealous, frightened man. There she meets Will Ladislaw, Casaubon’s young cousin, whom Casaubon supports — an artistic, impulsive, charming dilettante of Polish descent, who tells her bluntly that Casaubon’s work is worthless because he doesn’t read German. Will is drawn to Dorothea.

Back at Lowick, Dorothea tries to be a dutiful wife. The narrator famously turns, in chapter 29, from Dorothea’s disappointment to Casaubon’s: “But why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?” — and shows his anxiety, his sense of failure, his loneliness. Casaubon has a heart attack; Lydgate attends him and warns that he may die suddenly. Casaubon grows jealous of Will, who has settled in Middlemarch as the editor of Mr Brooke’s newspaper, supporting the cause of Reform. Casaubon asks Dorothea to promise to carry on his work after his death, sorting his useless notes; she hesitates, in anguish, and goes out to the garden to give him her answer — and finds him dead.

His will contains a codicil: Dorothea will lose his property if she marries Will Ladislaw — a posthumous insult implying an attachment she had not even imagined. The codicil makes her aware for the first time of her feelings for Will. Will, proud and poor, determines not to court a rich widow.

Old Featherstone dies, after trying, on his deathbed, to make Mary burn one of his two wills; she refuses. The will that stands leaves his fortune not to Fred or to the greedy relatives who had hovered around him but to his illegitimate son, Joshua Rigg. Fred, disappointed, at last chooses to work as an assistant to Caleb Garth, learning land management, and gradually earns Mary’s respect.

Lydgate and Rosamond fall into an engagement almost by accident — he finds her crying and is overwhelmed by tenderness — and marry. Rosamond furnishes their house expensively; Lydgate, used to living like a gentleman, spends freely; they sink into debt. Rosamond is quietly, unshakeably wilful: when Lydgate forbids something, she does it anyway, and her “torpedo contact” numbs him. She loses a baby after riding against his advice. As his practice suffers — the townspeople distrust his new methods and his connection with Bulstrode — and his debts mount, Lydgate abandons his research and is reduced to begging for money. Rosamond secretly writes to his rich uncle and countermands his plans to economise.

Meanwhile Bulstrode’s past returns. Years ago, as a young man in London, he made his fortune as a partner in a pawnbroker’s business that dealt in stolen goods, and married the widowed owner, concealing from her that her lost daughter — who had run away — had been found; the daughter’s child was Will Ladislaw, who should have inherited the money. A dissolute blackmailer, John Raffles, who knows the story, turns up. Raffles falls ill with alcohol poisoning at Bulstrode’s new house, Stone Court; Bulstrode calls in Lydgate, who prescribes that he be given no alcohol and only small doses of opium. Bulstrode, wishing Raffles dead, lets the housekeeper give him brandy, and does not correct her overdose of opium; Raffles dies. Just before, Bulstrode had lent Lydgate the thousand pounds he desperately needed.

The scandal breaks. Raffles had talked before he died. At a public meeting, Bulstrode is denounced and leaves the room, a broken man. Everyone assumes that Lydgate took Bulstrode’s money as a bribe to help Raffles die. Lydgate is ruined. Only Dorothea believes in him, and offers to help him and to take over the hospital. In a great scene, Mrs Bulstrode, learning of her husband’s disgrace, puts on a plain black dress, goes to him and silently sits beside him: “Look up, Nicholas.” She stands by him.

Dorothea calls on Rosamond to tell her she believes in Lydgate — and finds Will Ladislaw holding Rosamond’s hands, Rosamond in tears. Dorothea leaves. That night she suffers alone, weeping on the floor of her room in anguish and jealousy; at dawn she rises, looks out at the people going to work in the fields, and recognises “the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life.” She resolves to go back to Rosamond and help. Her generosity moves even Rosamond, who for once acts unselfishly and tells her that Will loves only Dorothea.

Will comes to say goodbye; in a thunderstorm, he and Dorothea declare their love. She gives up Casaubon’s fortune to marry him; her family is scandalised. They live in London; Will becomes a reforming member of Parliament; they have children.

The Finale tells what became of everyone. Fred and Mary marry and are happy; Fred writes a book on the cultivation of green crops, which everyone assumes Mary wrote, and Mary writes a children’s book, which everyone assumes Fred wrote. Lydgate becomes a successful doctor in London and at a fashionable spa, writing a treatise on gout, “a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side”; he dies at fifty, always regarding himself as a failure; he once calls Rosamond his “basil plant”, which “flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains”. Rosamond marries a rich older physician. Dorothea’s life has no great fame; many thought her marriage a mistake:

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Themes

The web. Eliot compares her method to a scientist’s: “I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web.” Middlemarch is an organism in which every life touches others — through gossip, money, marriage, inheritance, politics, illness — and no one acts alone. Chapter 27’s famous image of the pier-glass shows how each person, like a candle held to a scratched mirror, sees all the random scratches arranged in circles around himself: “These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.”

Egoism and sympathy. The novel’s moral drama is the struggle to see others as they are. Dorothea learns that Casaubon has “an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.” Rosamond, Casaubon and Bulstrode are trapped in egoism; Dorothea, Mary, Caleb Garth and Farebrother achieve, in different ways, a larger vision.

Vocation. Dorothea and Lydgate are both ardent people who want to do great things — and both are defeated, partly by their own mistakes (marrying wrongly, compromising) and partly by “the meanness of opportunity” and the “hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions”. For Dorothea the limits are those of her sex: Victorian society offered a woman no career, only marriage. Lydgate, a man with every opportunity, is defeated by “spots of commonness”, money and marriage.

Marriage. The novel is a study of marriages — Casaubon and Dorothea, Lydgate and Rosamond, the Bulstrodes, the Garths, the Cadwalladers — and of how marriage tests, reveals and constrains character.

Reform and history. Set in the years of the Reform Bill, the coming of the railways, cholera and medical change, the novel is about the slowness of change, both political and personal. Written forty years later, after the Second Reform Act of 1867, it looks back with both sympathy and irony at the hopes of 1832.

Knowledge and failure. Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies and Lydgate’s search for the primitive tissue are parallel quests for a single key that would explain everything; both fail.

Reception and afterlife

Middlemarch was a great success on publication; Emily Dickinson wrote, “What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory.” Virginia Woolf’s 1919 essay called it “the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” F. R. Leavis made it central to The Great Tradition. It tops many polls of the greatest British novel. The BBC adaptation (1994) was popular; Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014) explores what it means to re-read it across a lifetime.

In conversation

• A Casaubon — a dry, pedantic scholar working on a futile, never-finished life’s work (a “key to all mythologies”).
• “Unhistoric acts” — the hidden good done by forgotten people.
• “The roar which lies on the other side of silence” — the overwhelming reality of all the suffering we do not notice.