John Banville said in an interview recently that he couldn’t finish Middlemarch, and managed to imply that anyone who could, was a bore. Oddly, I can’t get beyond the first page of any of Banville’s novels, even when he is writing as Benjamin Black – and the fact that he feels he has to adopt a pseudonym to write ‘popular’ fiction says a lot about the kind of writer he aspires to be. I really don’t understand how anybody would find it hard to finish George Eliot’s great big soap opera of a novel. But maybe that’s it – maybe Middlemarch is just too interesting and too human for Banville.
I first came across it in university, in an English curriculum heavily influenced by F.R.Leavis. I’ve never felt the urge to re-read Henry James (reading him was like eating mashed potatoes, boring but nourishing), or Jane Austen (my sister, my daughters, the whole world is against me on this – I cannot stand Jane’s spare style). Dickens, we were told solemnly, only wrote two Good Novels – Great Expectations and Bleak House. (I’ve re-read both several times, but I think Dickens wrote lots of Good Novels – David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Our Mutual Friend , A Tale of Two Cities, The Old Curiosity Shop? I could go on…) Ah but Middlemarch – I still have the copy I bought on 27/1/79, a Pan paperback with Dorothea in green on the cover, and all my underlinings and biro’d comments.
The novel, set in the early 1830s in the midlands of England, tells the intertwined stories of so great a cast of characters it is hard to imagine how Eliot kept hold of them all.(There are also many minor characters, all of them rounded, none of them shoddily made. ) She was a methodical worker so she could very well have kept diagrams and lists – and why wouldn’t she. Phyllis Rose’s book, listed below, describes the diligent working habits of both Eliot and George Henry Lewes, her ‘husband’.
So – quick plot summary, and I promise, no spoilers. Dorothea Brooke is idealistic, spurning all the advantages of her youth, beauty and class (upper-middle, landed) to marry the middle-aged clergyman-scholar, Edward Casaubon, because this is the only way she believes that she can be of moral use in the world. Her sister Celia, soon happily married to the uncomplicated Sir James Chettam (who proposed to Dorothea first), is alarmed, and their uncle, Mr Brooke, is both proud of having a scholar like Casaubon in the family and bewildered at what Dorothea sees in him. We are meant, I think, to scorn Mr Brooke, the elderly gentleman-dabbler whose favourite phrase is ‘I went into all that a great deal at one time’, a phrase I find myself using the older I get, and not always ironically. I love Mr Brooke’s soaring, witless optimism. This is when he suggests to a convalescent Casaubon that Dorothea could cheer him up by reading aloud to him some racy eighteenth-century novels:
‘Smollett – Roderick Random, Humphry Clinker: they are a little broad, but she may read anything now she’s married, you know. I remember they made me laugh uncommonly – there’s a droll bit about a postilion’s breeches’.
The thought of Dorothea and Casaubon being amused by a postilion’s nether garments is laugh-out-loud funny. (A postilion was a man who guided horse-drawn vehicles through difficult terrain.) When Casaubon and Dorothea are in Rome and she asks him his opinion on some Raphael frescoes they are looking at, his reply is one that would be sadly familiar to anyone who either is an academic or has spent time around academics:
‘They are, I believe, highly esteemed. Some of them represent the fable of Cupid and Psyche, which is probably the romantic invention of a literary period and cannot, I think, be reckoned as a genuine mythical product…..’
And so on, in that vein. Meanwhile, back in Middlemarch, an idealistic young doctor Tertius Lydgate has arrived, with great plans for the new hospital; the 1820s and ’30s were packed with medico-social reformers on these islands. (The book is a historical novel, really, though written from a distance of only forty years.) Lydgate falls into the habit of visiting, of an evening, the comfortable home of Mr Vincy the mayor (manufacturing background,upwardly mobile) and his pleasant, plain-spoken wife, who have reared a large family that includes the selfish Rosamond and the lazy Fred. Rosamond, pretty and wilful, decides she wants Lydgate and she gets him. Fred loves Mary Garth, the intelligent and sharp farmer’s daughter (described as ‘brown’ with ‘stubborn curly’ hair) who works as a companion for Fred’s tyrannical uncle Mr Featherstone; Mary is also pursued by Camden Farebrother, a clergyman who likes the good life, but is bright and kind, and moreover, partly dependent on what he wins at cards to support his female relations. Mary’s mother hopes she will choose Farebrother, particularly as Fred has defaulted on a loan for which Mary’s father went guarantor. (We kind of know Fred is going to do this, so this isn’t a spoiler.)There is a businessman, Mr Bulstrode, who is connected to the Vincys, and there’s a young journalist, Will Ladislaw, who is connected to Casaubon and ends up working for Mr Brooke on his ill-fated political campaign.
This is a novel which works itself out slowly and satisfactorily and there are plenty of surprises in it and a few plot twists. There is a will, and even a murder mystery (of sorts) in it. And it isn’t just about human relationships at the level of love and friendship – the hospital and other civic institutions have committees and hiring decisions have to be made, and characters have to make hard moral choices about appointments and alliances. Eliot has an unerring instinct for the ins and outs of municipal life. Skipping over the ‘boring politics’ bits is a temptation (and one I succumbed to when I was younger), but this is like skipping over the military campaigns in War and Peace – you lose a lot of the book’s background. The early 1830s was an era of political turmoil and reform in Britain, as elsewhere, and Middlemarch shows how this all played out at local level.
Our lecturer in college thought that the real tragedy in this novel was that Dorothea didn’t marry Lydgate in the first instance, that they would have made a powerful couple, with their combined idealism. Robert Speaight thinks this too. But Lydgate would never have wanted a wife as opinionated as himself. Men like Lydgate are easy prey for the soft, yielding eyelash-flutterers who intend to get everything their own way, always: ‘She was not a fiery young lady and had no sharp answers, but she meant to live as she pleased’. Lydgate fondly imagines himself to be overlooking what he sees as Rosamond’s intellectual and social inferiority. In doing so he blinds himself to her yawning moral emptiness. She is one of the greatest fictional monsters ever written – and one of the most believable, too.
Dorothea’s devotion to her husband is constant and unwavering – or rather, it wavers only when she perceives him to be unjust. Eliot manages to make us feel sorry for Casaubon, whose (completely unjustified) jealousy is described as ‘hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.’ When a man who perceives himself to be a great moral leader in the town is brought low towards the end of the story, Eliot manages to make us feel sorry for him, too, where Dickens would have revelled in a colourful description of his disgrace. (But I love Dickens too. Am I allowed to love both George Eliot and Charles Dickens? The good Dr Leavis is turning in his grave.) But she is devastating on the stubborn self-deception of the pseudo-religious, when describing this character’s recourse to prayer at a critical time:
Does anyone suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid – necessarily goes to the roots of action! Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?
Does the novel have a happy ending? I think so. Its concluding sentences have been celebrated by many, which doesn’t make them any less powerful. Read them, and apply them to your parents or grandparents (if they were good people) or other forebears, or to other good, non-famous people you have known in your life. I find them so moving that I cannot read them aloud. Here they are; the female referred to is Dorothea as she goes through a life with none of the heroic endeavours she dreamed of:
Her full nature….spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffuse: 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.
The BBC aired an adaptation of this novel in 1994 and nearly all the characters in it are as I imagine them to be in the book; Rosamond, Lydgate, Dorothea,Casaubon and Mr Brooke are particularly well-cast and Will Ladislaw is what Roddy Doyle’s female characters would call a ‘ride’ (which is what he is meant to be.) It is really good. Try to get it on DVD – get thee to a charity shop! Charity shops are now full of DVDs, because so many people have turned to streaming. But big corporations like Netflix and Apple and Disney and Amazon shouldn’t be able to dictate what we watch and don’t watch, should they?
George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Blackwood 1871-2). It was first published in monthly parts, which explains the dates. My edition is London: Pan Classics 1973, with an introduction and notes by Robert Speaight. It is falling to bits – I should really invest in a new copy.
Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: five Victorian marriages (London: Chatto & Windus 1984; republished by London: Daunt 2020.) Originally published in America, this is one of the best books of women’s history I have ever read and I only discovered it in 2020. A meditation on marriage and what it meant, and what it means today, and how it works and doesn’t work, it looks at John and Effie Ruskin (nee Gray), the Carlyles (Thomas and Jane), Dickens and his wife Catherine (nee Hogarth), John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, and the partnership between George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, which wasn’t a marriage at all. I can’t understand why this book is not more celebrated.
I should really cite F.R.Leavis’s books too, but I won’t – I think he and his wife Queenie (yes, really, but that name was the only fun thing about her) did incalculable damage to literary studies with their narrowness and snobbery. Read John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: pride and prejudice among the literary intelligentsia 1880-1939 (London: Faber 1992) for a skilful demolition of all they stood for, and an insistence on true literary values.
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