By Lechi Eke
Middlemarch is George Eliot’s magnum opus: a novel she wrote when she was in her 50s. Virginia Woolf called it a novel written for grown up people. It was first published in 8 parts between 1871 and 1872 spreading over 848 pages in 79 chapters, very typical, in form, of Victorian prose. In 1872, it was republished, this time in four volumes.
Written in the 3rd Person omniscient narrator, and set in a fictitious town called Middlemarch in central England, the tone of the novel is cheerless. Every class in the society is represented in this multi-plotted novel with many characters. The style is psychological realism with political undertone.
The narrator is intelligent, considerate and astute towing Socrates’ admonition that an unexamined life is not worth living. The characters reveal psychological or inner turmoil. Marriage and vocation are the main themes of the novel; of marriage, in the context of idealized aim of the pursuit of self-realization or fulfillment in marriage, the challenge of choosing a spouse; then career dilemma, limitation of choices, heroic ambitions, and moral struggles in a dysfunctional world.
The story is set in a time of economical and social change touching on the British Reform Act of 1832, early railroads, and the accession of King William IV. Eliot using a settled community explores people’s views concerning these changes including views on contemporary medicine.
Some critics who dislike Eliot’s Middlemarch do so for the same reasons they dislike Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights – too depressing, too intellectual for women writing, too unconventional. In fact, for Wuthering Heights, many credited it to Emily’s brother, Branwell Bronte, but Charlotte who outlived them was quick to affirm that Emily, not Branwell, wrote Wuthering Heights.
In 2007 TIME magazine Authors’ Poll voted Middlemarch as one of the best ten English novels. However, in 2015, by a ‘landslide’ vote, writers outside the United Kingdom chose Middlemarch as the best British novel of all time!
Born Mary Anne Evans (1819-1880), she wrote under the pseudonym George Eliot because she hated not being taken seriously as a writer or being stereotyped.
The Plot
Dorothea Brooke is the chief protagonist of the first volume of Middlemarch and remains relevant throughout the story. She and her sister, Celia, after losing their parents, come to live in an estate in Middlemarch that belongs to their uncle. She has a young suitor (Sir James) who is handsome, wealthy and is a baron. But Dorothea desires an epic life. She wants to improve her mind and engage in some social reform. So she seeks that which would launch her into her purpose in life. This quest makes her reject Sir James and opts for a middle-aged man, believing he has what it takes to improve her and help her find her purpose in life.
Edward Casaubon, the middle-aged clergyman Dorothea accepts to marry, is a scholar; an intellectual who she believes will help her in life. She seeks to be his assistant, taking active participation in his work.
Casaubon is writing a treatise he calls the Key to all Mythologies. To Dorothea’s chagrin, she finds her husband’s ideas archaic and unlikely to fly. And he’s spent 30 years in writing it! She also discovers that he’s pompous, vain and insecure. He’s a failed scholar and an unskilled writer who wants his beautiful wife as a secretary, and someone to relegate to domestic duties.
It takes no time for Dorothea to discover that she has made a costly mistake, but she resolves to stay because of her religious and moral inclinations. Soon, a cousin of her husband’s arrives in Middlemarch. He has come to work for her uncle, Mr Brooke. Dorothea and Will Ladislaw become friends. They share in common youth, quest for a vocation in life, and certain chemistry.
Dorothea’s husband, Casaubon is very jealous of his cousin who although has fallen in love with Dorothea is managing his feelings well and not showing it. Casaubon bans his cousin from visiting his home and makes life unbearable for his young wife who magnanimously continues to suffer him. But, Casaubon will stifle her with his insecurity. One day after an emotionally charged altercation with Dorothea, he suffers a heart attack.
His wife still remains committed to him, making efforts to please him, but he’s too concerned about his cousin taking his wife when he dies, and tries to force a promise from Dorothea that she will keep his wishes after his death. His wife is slow in giving this promise being a thoughtful person. Before she makes the promise, Casaubon dies.
Dorothea finds out that her dead husband’s will has an addendum, a codicil which states that his widow will lose his wealth and estate if she ever marries his cousin, Will Ladislaw!
Tertius Lydgate is a secondary protagonist in the novel. Lydgate is a medical doctor with an ambition. He arrives in Middlemarch with the hope of participating in medical research and making a scientific discovery of importance. Determined and overconfident in his quest for achieving greatness, Lydgate does not envisage love. He meets and falls in love with the beautiful Rosamund Vincy whom he thinks has all the qualities he wants in a woman, not knowing that she’s shallow and self-serving.
On his wife’s part, she erroneously thinks that the young doctor was rich, and that marriage with him will move her up the social ladder.
Alas, Lydgate is not rich. His education was sponsored by a rich aristocratic uncle who still thinks ill of Lydgate’s involvement in a vocation that smacks of working class!
Lydgate, in his bid to set up house and home for his beautiful narcissist wife and keeps her in a life of luxury, goes into heavy debts. Also, for his new ideas and airs, Lydgate makes enemies; other medical men in the town loathe him. He loses patients and is insolvent. Friendless, and struggling in his profession his financial situation worsening, he discovers that his wife does not really love him. He views her as an expensive decoration, milking him!
Fred Vincy, Rosamund’s brother is a minor character in the novel. But with his character, Eliot presents the balance to the story she wants to push, of fulfillment both in vocation and in marriage (I believe this is how she came by the title Middlemarch – the middle – the balance). He lives a wasteful life losing money through gambling and hoping to inherit his uncle, Featherstone’s money and land when he dies, but his miser uncle dies and leaves his money to his illegitimate son!
Fred is in jeopardy. He has to finish university and considers becoming a clergyman for lack of a better vocation. Mary Garth, the lady he loves dearly, threatens not to marry him should he choose to become a clergyman, a vocation he’s ill-prepared for. Mary wants her man to become a responsible adult. However, her father saves the day by offering Fred a job in land management as an apprentice. By this, Fred gets the opportunities of gaining a profession and becoming engaged to Mary.
Another important character who helps to move the story forward is Mr Nicholas Bulstrode. Bulstrode is a powerful banker, an Evangelical Christian, and a philanthropist. Many of the townspeople resent Bulstrode because he judges them harshly for their moral behaviour. Meanwhile, he himself hides great secrets. In his former life, he owned a pawnshop and used to buy stolen goods, and had snatched his dead first wife’s inheritance from her heirs.
To this man, Lydgate goes for a loan to save himself from bankruptcy, but is refused. Only when Bulstrode needs Lydgate does he offer to loan him the money he asked for. Lydgate builds a hospital for fever (tuberculosis and typhoid). Bulstrode’s past catches up with him when an old business colleague of his, John Raffles, comes into town. He had contracted Raffles to find his dead first wife’s heirs – her daughter and grandchild (the child happens to be Will Ladislaw!).
Now, Raffles is a drunk and a swindler, and although Bulstrode paid him to keep his secret about Ladislaw and his mother, Raffles begins to blackmail Bulstrode to keep his secret. After a while, Raffles has alcohol poisoning and is quite sick. Bulstrode takes him to his property, Stone Court, and calls in Dr Tertius Lydgate to treat him.
Bulstrode doesn’t follow Lydgate’s treatment instructions in the treatment of Raffles, this kills the patient.
When Bulstrode passively kills Raffles, the story begins to wrap up. Townspeople find out about Bulstrode’s disgraceful past, and that Lydgate took a loan from him, they turn against Lydgate believing he has a hand in the death of Raffles. Townspeople hold him under suspicion because of the loan he took from Bulstrode. Dorothea is the only one who believes Lydgate’s innocence. She defends Lydgate and the doctor is touched by her kindness and empathy. His wife also clarifies the mix-up. Lydgate is forced to leave the town with his wife, Rosamund. They relocate to London where Lydgate becomes rich, but dies at age 50, unfulfilled.
At this time, Dorothea also has developed feelings for Ladislaw. Nevertheless, the two of them try to stay apart avoiding scandal. But, since love is inviolable, despite Dorothea’s family’s objection, Dorothea and Ladislaw defy Casaubon’s codicil, and get engaged and eventually marry. They move to London where Ladislaw becomes a politician and engages in public reform. He becomes rich, and Dorothea is content as a wife and mother of two.
Dorothea becomes domesticated. She has not achieved her ambition, this the narrator sees as a waste. Eliot seems to be of the opinion that women should not be confined in the domestic sphere alone. However, the narrator doesn’t think Dorothea does well to her quest in life by ending up marrying and being content with being a wife and mother.
Lydgate is another wasted life. Although he ends up wealthy in London, he considers himself a failure in life, and dies at 50. At death, he has not fulfilled his life ambition nor reaches his potential. I perceive that being stuck with a shallow-minded wife and the inability to make any medical discovery, send Lydgate to an untimely grave.
Fred and Mary also marry. Theirs seem to be the portrait of a successful marriage in the story. They are depicted as making the right choices: in vocation and in marriage, unlike Dorothea and Edward Casaubon, and Tertius Lydgate and Rosamund Vincy.
The narrator’s conclusion is that the world no longer makes room for exceptional persons to live epic lives. Those who aspire, the narrator opines, are the unsung heroes of the mundane who “live faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” Eliot’s principal characters (Dorothea and Lydgate) do not fulfill their dreams in life. Their idealized ambitions are thwarted. Through the bad choices they made in marriage because of wrong judgment of character, the two married the wrong people. Dorothea is saved because the wrong person died and she marries a better person, Lydgate is not saved. The two are losers as they end up not achieving their ambitions, but Lydgate is a greater loser, he dies!
Middlemarch is a realist Victorian novel about choices in marriage and vocation. It deals with relationships between many characters in the story. No character occupies the centre of the action because one person cannot represent provincial life. It has to be about different people living in a province and how they deal with internal and external issues: such external issues like social reforms, industrial revolution, etc., then, such internal issues as choice of vocation, who to marry and how to manage present situations.
The author limns the characters in a way that engages the readers’ sympathies in an unstable manner. For example, now, the reader is sorry for Casaubon, next, the reader is judging him harshly. Someone wrote that “The complexity of her (Eliot’s) portrait of provincial society is reflected in the complexity of individual characters (in the novel).”
Middlemarch is not intended by the author as entertainment. Her aim was to draw a portrait of real issues in real human beings – ordinary people’s life is complex. Life is about contradictions and these contradictions are reflected in the lives of characters like a clergyman such as Edward Casaubon being so mean spirited and tyrannical. A respected and highly moral banker being found out as an ex fraudster! The contradictions are also seen in Dorothea choosing wrongly in marriage; Lydgate’s error in marrying Rosamund; Rosamund’s miscalculation when she chooses Lydgate thinking he’s rich and will help push her up the social ladder, and so on. Life is full of disappointments.
The author also explores the connectivity of human existence. There seems to be a web connecting people who live in the world, and individual actions affect other people. Bulstrode is step grandfather to Will Ladislaw who latter married Dorothea. Will has arrived in Middlemarch to work for Mr Brooke, Dorothea’s uncle. Will himself is Dorothea’s husband’s cousin. The young doctor, Lydgate needs Bulstrode’s money; Bulstrode needs him to treat an old friend, John Raffles. Raffles is stepfather to Fred and Rosamund Vincyl’s uncle, Joshua Rigg Featherstone, and so on and so forth…
