Book One
'I doubt whether any young person can read with pleasure either Felix Holt, Middlemarch, or Daniel Deronda,' Anthony Trollope wrote in his Autobiography. I'm not a young person any more, and when I first read Middlemarch, thirty-five years ago, I possibly wasn't the young person Trollope had in mind. In any case he probably had a minor axe to grid against the clever Mrs Lewes. Middlemarch is a Trollope novel deconstructed; it is The Last Chronicle of Barset with an advanced degree from Heidelberg; it's Barsetshire on acid (or laudanum at the very least).
But it isn't, as Trollope goes on to say, an easy read. He critiques Eliot's style. It is affected, it lacks ease, he says. Style is the great Trollope thing: the sly tolerant tone keeping the reader company through the inevitable longueurs of a classic three-decker. Eliot's voice is more bracing. She does not compromise. There are indeed passages in Book One where the reader is on his or her mettle. Take the first half of chapter 10, which proceeds from a challenging epigraph to a subtle comparison between Casaubon and Ladislaw, and their differing approaches to endeavour. But midway through the chapter the novel sharply shifts gear and we find ourselves enjoying the banter of a group of Middlemarch worthies at dinner. This serves to introduce Dr Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy, and in the next chapter we're treated to a fast-talking breakfast scene between Rosamond and her brother Fred. The veering between high and low, or perhaps high and middle, between seriousness and comedy, is a feature of the book, and the contrasts aren't assimilated in, say, the Trollopian fashion. But George Eliot probably doesn't want it that way.
Middlemarch is a political book, and not just in its depiction of the passing of the Reform Bill. I like, as a sort of parlour game, to track the political sympathies of the Victorian novelists. I imagine them in the political world of Britain today. Would Dickens have voted Labour? Would George Eliot be a Corbynista? We know Trollope stood for Parliament as a Liberal, but nowadays we'd probably call him a liberal conservative. I sense Henry James too would be a centrist Tory - just centrist enough for the tastes of some modern readers. Whereas some of Thackeray's current neglect is possibly owing to the jaundiced Right-leaning tone of his novels. Not that George Eliot doesn't send up from time to time the earnest Miss Brooke, who is disappointed to discover the tenants of her betrothed aren't disgracefully poor and therefore in need of her social work:
The small boys wore excellent corduroy, the girls went out as tidy servants, or did a little straw-plaiting at home: no looms here, no Dissent... (Ch. 9)
But the irony is also at the expense of those comfortable folk who might think straw-plaiting a suitable occupation for anyone.
'Fred's studies are not very deep,' says Rosamond of her brother in the final chapter of Book One; 'he is only reading a novel.' George Eliot might have been more comfortable prosing away in some Whiggish paper, but we should be grateful she chose instead the novel, even if her handling of the form feels at times a little schizophrenic.
Book Two
In chapter 14 Mary Garth teases Fred Vincy with a list of literary lovers. The modern reader is on familiar ground with Ophelia and with Juliet, but then things get dicey. Mme de Staël's Corinne is name-checked, along with characters from Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield. Then it's the turn of Scott. Most people have heard of Waverley and Flora MacIvor. But Brenda and Minna Troil, Mordaunt Merton and Clement Cleveland? My edition of Middlemarch informs me they're to be found in Scott's 1822 novel The Pirate, which surely hasn't been in print for at least the last half-century. Did it have a better reputation in Eliot's time? Very likely. You sense Scott's influence throughout. Middlemarch is a historical novel. Then there are the Scott-style epigraphs, not a few of which Eliot, like Scott, composed herself.
(Scott eventually lost out to Jane Austen, who didn't achieve her current status until the later Victorian period. It's interesting to reflect that her pre-eminence wasn't there for George Eliot, Dickens or even Trollope. They wrote their novels almost as if Jane Austen had never lived, whereas now her influence is unavoidable. Which novelists of today, little regarded now, will be seen quite differently in times to come? I can think of one.)
George Eliot is alert to historical change. Of Fielding's age:
But Fielding lived when days were longer [...], when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. (Ch. 15)
We're not far here from Matthew Arnold's
...strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o'ertax'd, its palsied hearts... ('The Scholar-Gipsy')
though progressive Eliot takes a more hopeful view of the future, most evident in Middlemarch in the figure of Lydgate, who comes forward in this Book. Her vision opens out in other directions, taking in the cynicism and worldliness of the entomologist clergyman Mr Farebrother ('I feed a weakness or two lest they should get clamorous' - ch. 17) as a counterweight to the idealism of Lydgate.
In like manner Eliot gives us memorable foreign scenes, which leaven the stodgy parochialism of Middlemarch. The Book ends in Rome, that 'city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar' (ch. 20). But Dorothea's life has narrowed to 'dreamlike strangeness': one thinks of Little Dorrit in Italy, bewildered by sudden unassimilable riches. As for Casaubon, he's rapidly becoming cold and appalling, engrossed in a futile literary project that Eliot, the successful writer, pities as much as she deplores. It will be only a short step (as others have said) from Casaubon to James's Gilbert Osmond.
Books Three and Four
Eliot seeks to be fair, or she gives a show of evenhandedness:
One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea - but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? (Ch. 29)But what she finds out about Casaubon is devastating: he'll never be possessed, she tells us, by 'the glory we behold' (note the 'we'); his self is 'hungry' and 'shivering'; he is 'scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted'. So much for Casaubon's 'point of view'; one almost feels indignant on his behalf. He's no match for George Eliot - and how great the contrast between the steadily growing Books of Middlemarch, and poor Casaubon's hopeless notebooks. Sometimes a limited view has greater integrity.
One thing worthy of note in Books Three and Four is George Eliot's playing with the narrative conventions beloved of her contemporaries. Old Mr Featherstone's deathbed scene, his venal mourners, and the issues with his will invoke the cliches of, among others, Dickens and Trollope. I'm not sure Eliot does anything with them, other than view them with a superior and slightly mocking eye. But only slightly mocking. The love lives of her characters, for example - she's as much invested in them as is the most innocent reader.
A further point I may have overlooked on my original reading: the care with which Eliot delineates the social classes in the novel. This is clear at Featherstone's funeral, when Mrs Cadwallader speaks to the Chettams condescendingly of the Vincys. It's a sharp surprise to find that these characters, whom we know so well, not only don't know each other, but wouldn't think or choose to.
Book Four ends with a night scene between Dorothea and Casaubon that prefigures the relationship between Isabel Archer and Gilbert Osmond. The connections between Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady are fruitful.
Book Five
At that time young ladies in the country, even when educated at Mrs Lemon's, read little French literature later than Racine, and public prints had not cast their present magnificent illumination over the scandals of life. (Ch. 43)It's interesting to realise that Eliot thinks her own age so sexually knowledgeable. The mention of Racine recalls another innocent character, Betsy in Brookner's The Rules of Engagement, who is always quoting idealistically from Bérénice: 'Que le jour recommence, et que le jour finisse / Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice…'
Style:
It may seem strange, but it is the fact, that the ordinary vulgar vision of which Mr Casaubon suspected [Will] - namely, that Dorothea might become a widow, and that the interest he had established in her mind might turn into acceptance of him as a husband - had no tempting, arresting power over him; he did not live in the scenery of such an event, and follow it out, as we all do with that imagined 'otherwise' which is our practical heaven. (Ch. 47)I hesitate to say this, but I don't altogether get on with Eliot's style. Again and again I come across passages like the above - passages that, well, work but not quite. There's a metaphor at work in the second part - the 'scenery' - but why would it be 'followed out'? And what exactly is a 'practical heaven'?
Book Six
Will seems a less sympathetic figure, and the chapter has bathetic elements I hadn't previously noted. Altogether the parting feels stagy and artificial, as if Eliot were deliberately performing an exercise in this kind of writing. At one point Will is said to require 'a narrative to make him understand [Dorothea's] present feeling'. This is close to being metafictional.
It must be remembered that by 'business' Caleb never meant money transactions, but the skilful application of labour. (Ch. 56)The indebtedness to Scott is clear in chapter 57's epigraph, a sonnet by Eliot that celebrates her childhood love of Scott, who sent, from 'far away', 'this wealth of joy and noble grief'. We must leave such books behind, she says - somehow 'In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran' (the grammar of the line is muddy) we still live the book: in our own lives write the tale day by day.
Will Ladislaw is once more presented less than sympathetically in his confrontation with Bulstrode (ch. 61). How could I have missed these things on first reading? On first reading, Will was for me the hero of Middlemarch. But now? Now I see he is 'too arrogantly merciless towards a man of sixty, who was making efforts at retrieval when time had rendered them vain'.
Books Seven and Eight and Finale
'[Bulstrode] went on with the same interrupted enunciation - as if he were biting an objectionable leek' (ch. 67). Earlier in the chapter Lydgate privately objects to a 'broken metaphor' used by Bulstrode. But what are we to make of Eliot's leek simile? Is it meant to be funny? This isn't a humorous scene. When exactly does anyone bite into a leek, and what would an objectionable leek be like?
Middlemarch is indeed political throughout. Even in the personal it is political. The perfectibility of human nature is a matter of debate between Farebrother and Dorothea in chapter 72. Farebrother, we know from an earlier scene, is Whiggish, but his views are jaundiced, almost Tory, and he gives a jaundiced view on this topic. But ultra-progressive Dorothea rejoins, 'Then [character] may be rescued and healed'. No one could mistake her for a Tory.
But at least we have chapter 76, Dorothea and Lydgate's meeting, in which the nobility of Dorothea is able to bloom without check: 'a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity'.
It's a mark of Eliot's judgement that the novel's final chapter, prior to the magisterial Finale, focuses on Mary and Fred. The Olympians have left the stage, and the story ends sweetly in comedy.
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Prince Esterházy’s Councillor Mathias Kerzmann with his second wife and daughter, 1835 |
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| (Detail of above) |
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| Seated girl in white satin dress, 1839 |
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| Dr Josef August Eltz and family, 1835 |
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| Woman in iridescent green and salmon-pink gown, 1837 |
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