Middlemarch

Overview

Eight books, published in parts across 1871 and 1872, about 880 pages. Eliot was writing two separate novels, one about Dorothea and one called Middlemarch about Lydgate, and fused them. The joins do not show, and the fusion is the book’s method: a town where everyone’s affairs run through everyone else’s.

The setting is deliberately specific. Middlemarch in 1829 to 1832, during the agitation over the Reform Bill, the coming of the railway, and a period of change in medicine. Eliot was writing forty years later and chose a moment when everything was about to alter and nobody in the town could see how.

The subtitle is A Study of Provincial Life, and study is exact. Eliot had translated Feuerbach and Strauss and read widely in science, and her narrator works like a naturalist: patient, comparative, willing to explain why a specimen behaves as it does before judging it.

What happens

Dorothea Brooke is nineteen, rich enough, and wants her life to mean something. With no education available and no work open to her, she marries the Reverend Edward Casaubon, a dessicated scholar thirty years older, believing she will assist his great Key to All Mythologies. On the honeymoon in Rome she discovers he has been taking notes for decades toward a book he will never write, and that German scholarship has already made it worthless. He knows. She meets his young cousin Will Ladislaw, and Casaubon, who suspects, alters his will so that Dorothea forfeits his money if she marries Will.

Tertius Lydgate arrives to practise medicine and to do research. He has real ideas, refuses to dispense drugs for profit, and makes enemies. He marries Rosamond Vincy, who is beautiful, accomplished, and entirely certain of what she is owed. They furnish a house on credit. When the bills come, Rosamond will not economise and quietly undoes every arrangement he makes, and Lydgate’s independence goes piece by piece.

Nicholas Bulstrode, the evangelical banker who funds the new hospital, is blackmailed by John Raffles, who knows that Bulstrode’s fortune came from a stolen inheritance. Raffles falls ill in Bulstrode’s house. Bulstrode lets the housekeeper give him brandy against Lydgate’s orders, and Raffles dies. Bulstrode has just lent Lydgate a thousand pounds. The town concludes they conspired, and both are finished, one justly and one not.

Fred Vincy, Rosamond’s amiable brother, is expected to inherit from old Featherstone, fails to, and has to find something to do. Mary Garth will not have him until he does. Their story is the one that ends well, and it is the smallest.

Dorothea, widowed, gives up the money and marries Will. Lydgate becomes a fashionable doctor at a spa, writes a treatise on gout, and dies at fifty, considering himself a failure. Rosamond thinks she did well.

How to read it

Read the Prelude and the Finale together before you start, and again at the end. Eliot frames the whole novel as the story of a latter-day Saint Theresa with nothing to found, and the last paragraph tells you what she thinks that amounts to. Everything between is the case.

Do not skip the political and medical material. Lydgate’s quarrel about fever hospitals and the arguments over the Reform Bill are not background; they are what makes the town resist him, and Eliot is precise about the science of 1830.

Watch the narrator. She will give you a character’s self-justification in their own terms and then turn one sentence to show the self-deception inside it. Casaubon gets this treatment in chapter 29, where Eliot interrupts herself: but why always Dorothea, he too had an intense consciousness. That pivot is the book’s moral method in miniature.

Give Rosamond her due. It is easy to read her as a monster, and Eliot is careful to show she was raised for exactly this and is doing what she was trained to do. The novel is more interesting if you can see her as a person who has never once been asked to imagine another mind.

Read it in long stretches. Eight hundred pages of fine discrimination will feel slow in twenty-page doses, and the plots only start converging around Book V.

The common misreading is that this is a novel about a bad marriage. It is a novel about vocation: what happens to a large desire to be useful when the available channels are small.

Questions it raises

• Dorothea gives up a fortune and marries Will, and the Finale calls her effect on those around her incalculably diffusive. Is that a triumph or a consolation prize?
• Lydgate is ruined by furniture, a loan and his own choice of wife. At what point could he have turned it round, and does the novel allow one?
• Eliot says we are all born in moral stupidity and the cure is learning that others exist as fully as we do. Does anyone in the book fully learn it?
• Bulstrode does not kill Raffles; he withholds care. Where is the line between letting happen and doing?
• The Finale blames a society that offered Dorothea no channel. Is the novel then a work of social criticism, or does its sympathy for everyone blunt the charge?
• If unhistoric acts do the growing good of the world, why does Eliot need 880 pages to persuade us of it?