Middlemarch

About this edition

Introduction

Middlemarch opens with a prologue about Saint Theresa, who found no epic life waiting for her and had to make do with an ordinary one, and then gives us a town full of people in the same position. Dorothea Brooke wants to be useful on a large scale and marries a pedant. Tertius Lydgate wants to reform medicine and marries a woman who wants a comfortable house. Nicholas Bulstrode wants to be respected and is destroyed by a man who knows what he did thirty years ago. Nobody in this book is stopped by a villain. They are stopped by debts, marriages, gossip, and the ordinary friction of other people’s expectations — which is precisely the argument.

The novel is usually described as the first English novel to take a whole society as its subject, and the description is accurate in a technical sense that matters. Eliot interleaves four plots so that a decision taken in one is paid for in another, and she does it without a central hero to carry the weight. The famous image is a web: pull one thread and the rest trembles. The book’s method is to make the reader feel the trembling.

It is also, for a book with this reputation, unexpectedly funny and unexpectedly cold. Eliot’s narrator is one of the great characters of Victorian fiction — a voice that knows everything, likes almost no one entirely, and interrupts to tell you what a character’s face is doing while they say something else. The famous last sentences, about the unhistoric acts and the growing good of the world, are usually quoted as consolation. They arrive after eight hundred pages of evidence about how little good intentions accomplish, and they are more honest than consoling.

What makes it endure is the accuracy of its psychology. Casaubon’s jealousy, Lydgate’s slow entanglement in debt, Rosamond’s serene self-interest, Fred Vincy’s gradual decision to become a person — none of it is explained by plot, and all of it is recognisable. The book is a machine for producing the sensation that other people are as complicated as you are, which is a harder effect to achieve in fiction than it sounds.

This edition gives the complete text, unaltered, in eighty-six chapters across eight books, with the original Prelude and Finale. The notes gloss the institutions the plot runs on — the Reform Bill, the living, the land agent, the fever hospital — and the reading guide is for anyone who wants to argue with the book rather than simply be impressed by it.

The author

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, born on 22 November 1819 in Warwickshire and died on 22 December 1880 in London. She was, before she was a novelist, one of the best-informed minds in English journalism: a translator of Strauss and Feuerbach, an editor of the Westminster Review, and a writer on religion, philosophy and social thought at a time when women were not expected to hold opinions in public.

Her decision to live with George Henry Lewes, who was legally married to another woman and could not divorce her, put her outside respectable society for the rest of his life; the couple were excluded from much of the social world they might have entered, and Eliot wrote under a male pen name partly to keep her fiction from being read as the work of a notorious woman. That the novels are so cold-eyed about social exclusion is not a coincidence.

Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) was her first fiction, Adam Bede (1859) her first success. The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863) and Felix Holt (1866) followed. Middlemarch appeared in parts in 1871 and 1872, and Daniel Deronda in 1876. Lewes died in 1878; she married John Walter Cross in 1880 and died seven months later, aged sixty-one. Her reputation has survived the reaction against Victorian earnestness better than almost any of her contemporaries’, largely because the earnestness in her books is always tested against consequences.

Publication history

Middlemarch was published in eight parts between 1871 and 1872 by William Blackwood & Sons, and then in book form. It grew out of an earlier project, a story about a provincial doctor, which Eliot merged with a second story about a young woman’s marriage; the decision to combine them produced the structure that makes the novel what it is.

The part-issue method shaped the book’s reception and, to some extent, its shape. Readers bought instalments over more than a year and discussed each one as it appeared; Eliot could adjust emphasis as she went, and did. The novel was a commercial and critical success on a scale unusual for a serious book of its length, and it made her, by the end of the decade, the most admired novelist in England.

Eliot revised the text for later editions in small ways. The text reproduced here follows the first-edition text as transcribed for Standard Ebooks, and not a word of it has been changed.

Notes

A short glossary of the town’s institutions, and of the public questions the novel assumes its readers already argue about. Almost every plot in the book is set off by one of them.

• The Reform Bill — the Reform Act of 1832, which redistributed parliamentary seats and widened the franchise. The novel is set in the years immediately before it, and the town’s politics run on who will be the borough’s member.
• Rotten borough / the borough member — a constituency with few voters, controlled by a local landowner, and the seat that Middlemarch’s gentlemen compete to fill. It is the novel’s running illustration of how public life is a private arrangement.
• Living — a parish benefice; the right to appoint its clergyman was property and could be given away as patronage. Casaubon’s refusal to provide for Dorothea after his death is entirely legal and entirely devastating.
• Prebend / prebendary — a cathedral appointment carrying an income without much parish work. Casaubon’s expectations of one are the reason his marriage looks like a career move to everyone except Dorothea.
• Fever hospital and sanitary reform — Lydgate’s attempt to build a hospital and improve drainage in a town that would rather not pay for it. The opposition he meets is not villainy but ratepayer economics.
• Land agent — the man who manages an estate for its owner: rents, repairs, leases, tenants. Caleb Garth’s profession, and one of the few in the novel that Eliot treats as unambiguously decent work.
• Dissent / Nonconformist — Protestant congregations outside the Church of England. Middlemarch’s religious divisions are social divisions, and Bulstrode’s bank and his chapel are part of the same power structure.
• The hundred-pound note — a sum that appears, disappears and reappears in the Bulstrode plot. Money in this novel is never only money; it is memory, obligation and leverage at the same time.
• Prelude and Finale — the frame Eliot gives the book. The Prelude introduces the problem of a soul with no epic to inhabit; the Finale returns to the same question and refuses to solve it.
• Turnpike and the mail coach — the road system, and the reason a journey of thirty miles is an event. Distance is a social fact in Middlemarch, and leaving is difficult in every sense.

Reading guide

Six questions for a first or a fifth reading. None of them has a settled answer.

1. The Prelude sets up a great soul with no epic life. Which characters does the novel treat as having failed that test, and which does it treat as having passed in a smaller way?
2. Dorothea and Lydgate both have ambitions larger than their town and both are defeated by marriage. Is the parallel an argument about marriage, about provincial life, or about ambition itself?
3. Eliot’s narrator knows everything and comments freely. Does that authority make the book more honest, or does it protect the reader from having to judge for themselves?
4. Bulstrode is the closest thing to a villain. Is the novel’s treatment of him a condemnation, an examination of hypocrisy, or a demonstration that respectability is a financial instrument?
5. Rosamond is not cruel and not stupid, and she destroys her husband’s life. What is Eliot doing by giving the novel’s most damaging character nothing but good manners?
6. The Finale says the growing good of the world depends partly on unhistoric acts. Having spent eight hundred pages showing how little good intentions achieve, does the novel earn that sentence?