Middlemarch

Summary

Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, follows several households in and around a Midlands market town from 1829 to 1832, the years leading to the first Reform Act. Its Prelude recalls Saint Teresa of Ávila and asks what becomes of women with a similar longing for a great life who are born into an age that gives it no outlet. Dorothea Brooke, nineteen, ardent and devout, lives with her sister Celia and their rambling uncle Mr. Brooke at Tipton Grange. Refusing the kindly Sir James Chettam, she marries the Reverend Edward Casaubon, a dry scholar nearly thirty years older, hoping to serve his great work, a Key to all Mythologies. On their wedding journey in Rome she discovers that the work is futile and her husband cold and jealous, and she meets his young cousin Will Ladislaw, a lively, unsettled artist and writer whom Casaubon supports. Tertius Lydgate, a new doctor trained in Edinburgh and Paris, arrives in Middlemarch meaning to reform medical practice and to discover the primitive tissue underlying all bodily structures. He accepts the patronage of the banker Nicholas Bulstrode, an evangelical with a hidden past, to run a new fever hospital, and votes for Bulstrode's candidate as chaplain against his friend, the Reverend Camden Farebrother. Lydgate marries Rosamond Vincy, the mayor's charming and self-willed daughter, and falls into debt. Her brother Fred, idle and hoping for an inheritance from the old miser Peter Featherstone, loves Mary Garth, who will not accept him until he has a useful calling. Featherstone leaves his estate to an unknown son, and Fred, after a near-fatal fever, learns land management from Mary's father Caleb Garth. Casaubon, warned by Lydgate of heart disease, adds a codicil depriving Dorothea of his property if she marries Ladislaw, and dies before she can give the promise he demands. Bulstrode's past returns in the drunken blackmailer Raffles, who knows that Bulstrode built his fortune in a disreputable trade and concealed the existence of his first wife's daughter, Ladislaw's mother. When Raffles falls ill at Bulstrode's house, Bulstrode allows brandy to be given against Lydgate's orders and Raffles dies. The scandal ruins Bulstrode and stains Lydgate, who had just accepted a loan from him. Dorothea alone defends Lydgate, and her visit to Rosamond leads to a reconciliation that frees Ladislaw to declare his love. Dorothea gives up Casaubon's fortune to marry him. Lydgate moves to a fashionable London practice and dies at fifty, and the Finale praises those who live faithfully a hidden life. The novel appeared in eight parts from December 1871 to December 1872.

Plot or Argument

• Prelude and Book I: Miss Brooke (Chapters I-XII)

  Saint Teresa as an image of thwarted greatness; Dorothea and Celia divide their mother's jewels; Dorothea accepts Casaubon; Lydgate and the Vincys are introduced; Fred Vincy's debts and his hopes of Featherstone's will.

• Book II: Old and Young (Chapters XIII-XXII)

  Lydgate's history and medical ambitions; the vote for the hospital chaplaincy, in which Lydgate supports Bulstrode's man Tyke against Farebrother; Dorothea's honeymoon in Rome, where she weeps alone and meets Will Ladislaw.

• Book III: Waiting for Death (Chapters XXIII-XXXIII)

  Fred's horse deal and his failure to repay the debt Caleb Garth has guaranteed; Fred's typhoid fever, which Lydgate treats; Rosamond and Lydgate's courtship; Casaubon's first attack at Lowick; Featherstone's last night, when Mary Garth refuses to help him burn a will.

• Book IV: Three Love Problems (Chapters XXXIV-XLII)

  Featherstone's funeral and the reading of the will in favor of Joshua Rigg; Mr. Brooke's entry into Reform politics with Ladislaw as editor of the Pioneer; Raffles's first appearance; Lydgate tells Casaubon he has a disease of the heart.

• Book V: The Dead Hand (Chapters XLIII-LIII)

  Casaubon's demand for a promise and his death in the Yew-tree Walk; the codicil concerning Ladislaw; Mr. Brooke's failed election speech; Bulstrode buys Stone Court and Raffles returns to threaten him.

• Book VI: The Widow and the Wife (Chapters LIV-LXII)

  Dorothea as widow at Lowick; Fred defends the railway surveyors and becomes Caleb Garth's assistant; Rosamond's loss of her child after riding against her husband's wishes; Ladislaw learns of his mother's history from Raffles and refuses Bulstrode's money.

• Book VII: Two Temptations (Chapters LXIII-LXXI)

  Lydgate's debts and Rosamond's secret interference; Lydgate's brief resort to opium; Raffles's illness at Stone Court and Bulstrode's fatal permission of brandy; the public meeting at which Bulstrode is accused and collapses.

• Book VIII: Sunset and Sunrise (Chapters LXXII-LXXXVI) and Finale

  Dorothea believes in Lydgate and pays his debt; Harriet Bulstrode stands by her husband; Dorothea finds Will with Rosamond, spends a night of anguish, and returns; Will and Dorothea are united; Fred and Mary marry; the Finale records the later lives of all.

Characters

• Dorothea Brooke, heroine

  An idealistic, generous young woman seeking a life of great usefulness, who marries Casaubon and later Will Ladislaw.

• Tertius Lydgate, doctor

  A gifted, ambitious young physician who comes to Middlemarch to reform medicine and is worn down by debt and marriage.

• Edward Casaubon, Dorothea's first husband

  A learned, self-doubting clergyman whose life's work, the Key to all Mythologies, will never be finished.

• Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's cousin

  A quick, warm-hearted young man of partly Polish descent and uncertain calling who loves Dorothea.

• Rosamond Vincy, Lydgate's wife

  The mayor's beautiful, polished daughter, quietly determined to have her own way.

• Fred Vincy, Rosamond's brother

  An amiable, idle young man who must give up his expectations to win Mary Garth.

• Mary Garth, Fred's beloved

  Plain, witty and honest, she nurses old Featherstone and refuses to marry a man without a useful life.

• Caleb Garth, land agent

  Mary's father, a builder and estate manager who honors good work as a kind of religion.

• Nicholas Bulstrode, banker

  A powerful evangelical banker whose religious self-justification conceals a dishonorable past.

• Camden Farebrother, vicar

  A tolerant, humorous clergyman and naturalist who gives up his own hopes of Mary to help Fred.

• Mr. Brooke, Dorothea's uncle

  A good-natured, muddled landowner who dabbles in everything, including a Reform candidacy.

• Celia Brooke, Dorothea's sister

  Practical, gently ironic, she marries Sir James Chettam.

• John Raffles, blackmailer

  A swaggering, drunken figure from Bulstrode's past who returns to extort money.

• Peter Featherstone, miser

  The rich old master of Stone Court, who enjoys tormenting his hopeful relatives.

Lessons

• The hidden life that does good

  The Prelude begins with Saint Teresa and the Finale ends with those who rest in unvisited tombs. Dorothea never founds a convent or finishes a great work, yet her influence on the people around her is, in Eliot's word, incalculably diffusive. The novel honors faithfulness in small and unseen acts.

  • Why does Eliot begin with Saint Teresa and end with unvisited tombs?
  • List three people whose lives Dorothea changes. How does she change each?
  • Is the Finale's view of Dorothea's life hopeful, sorrowful, or both?

• Marriage and the knowledge of another person

  Dorothea marries Casaubon thinking he is a great mind; Lydgate marries Rosamond thinking she is a decorative and docile companion. Each discovers too late a separate person with a separate center of self. Eliot shows marriages tested by debt, jealousy and disappointment, and the Garths' and Farebrother's loyalties as quieter models.

  • What does Dorothea expect from marrying Casaubon, and what does she find in Rome?
  • What mistakes do Lydgate and Rosamond each make about the other?
  • Harriet Bulstrode chooses to stand by her disgraced husband. What does that scene reveal?

• Egoism and the scratched mirror

  In Chapter XXVII Eliot compares each person's mind to a candle that makes the random scratches on a mirror seem to circle around it. Almost every character imagines events arranged around himself or herself: Rosamond, Casaubon, Fred, Bulstrode. Growing up morally, in this novel, means learning that others have an equal center of self.

  • Explain the pier-glass parable in your own words. Whose egoism does it first describe?
  • Where does Dorothea move out of moral stupidity, and what causes the change?
  • Can a person ever fully escape seeing the world from his own center?

• Vocation and compromise

  Lydgate comes to town meaning to be a unit who makes a difference in medicine. Small concessions, such as the vote for Tyke, a debt, an anxious marriage, a loan from Bulstrode, bind him until he trades research for a profitable practice. Fred, by contrast, finds a humble vocation under Caleb Garth and keeps it.

  • Why does Lydgate vote for Tyke rather than Farebrother, and what does it cost him?
  • How does Caleb Garth's love of good work differ from Lydgate's ambition?
  • Is Lydgate's fate his own fault, Rosamond's, Middlemarch's, or chance's?

• Bulstrode: the past and self-deception

  Bulstrode explains his past wrongs to himself as instruments of Providence. When Raffles lies ill, he does not commit a clear act of murder, but leaves an instruction unspoken and hands over the key to the brandy. Eliot traces with care how a religious vocabulary can be used to quiet conscience, while also giving Bulstrode a final, painful honesty with his wife.

  • How does Bulstrode justify to himself the way he made his fortune?
  • Is Bulstrode guilty of Raffles's death? Weigh what he did and left undone.
  • What does Harriet's silent act of loyalty in Chapter LXXIV suggest about mercy?

Context

The action runs from about September 1829 to May 1832, the years of agitation that led to the Reform Act of 1832, of the first railway surveys in the Midlands, of fear of cholera reaching England, and of change in the medical profession after the Apothecaries Act of 1815. Eliot looks back from about forty years later, so the novel is itself a work of historical reflection on a provincial society on the edge of change.

Composition

Eliot began a story called Middlemarch, centered on Lydgate, in 1869, and late in 1870 started a separate tale, Miss Brooke, which she then joined to it. The novel was published by William Blackwood and Sons in eight parts, bimonthly from December 1871 and monthly at the end, concluding in December 1872, and then in four volumes. She researched the medical history of the period with care, reading on Bichat, Laennec, typhus and typhoid, and the reform of medical practice.

Reception

The book was a great success with readers and reviewers and confirmed Eliot as the leading English novelist of her time. Virginia Woolf later called it one of the few English novels written for grown-up people, and it is often named in surveys as among the greatest novels in English. Critics have discussed its moral psychology, its narrator's essays, its portrait of a provincial medical career, and its view of how individual lives depend on a web of others.

Comparisons

• silas-marner

  Eliot's earlier and shorter novel of a Midlands village shares Middlemarch's concern with hidden pasts and slow moral change; Godfrey Cass's concealed marriage anticipates Bulstrode's concealed history.

• bleak-house

  Two great Victorian panoramas with a doctor at the moral center, Woodcourt and Lydgate, and with buried pasts that a lawyer or a blackmailer drags into the open.

• emma

  Austen's Highbury and Eliot's Middlemarch are both close studies of provincial society; Emma's misjudgments and Dorothea's both turn on learning how little one sees of other people.

• the-portrait-of-a-lady

  Henry James admired Middlemarch, and Isabel Archer's marriage to the cold aesthete Gilbert Osmond echoes Dorothea's to Casaubon: an ardent young woman choosing a husband she mistakes for a great soul.

• pride-and-prejudice

  Where Austen's marriage plot ends at the wedding, Eliot begins with Dorothea's marriage in Book I and studies what follows.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The Prelude's Saint Teresa and the Finale's unvisited tombs: read them together when you finish.
• The epigraphs at the head of each chapter, many written by Eliot herself.
• Images of sight and seeing: Casaubon's dim study, the pier-glass of Chapter XXVII, Lydgate's microscope, Dorothea at the window at dawn in Chapter LXXX.
• Wills and documents: Featherstone's two wills, Casaubon's codicil, Lydgate's certificate for Raffles.
• How the Reform Bill, the railway surveyors and the cholera scare press into private lives.

Key terms and names

Key to all Mythologies

Casaubon's never-finished scholarly project, meant to show that all myths are corruptions of one original tradition.

Primitive tissue

The common basis of all bodily structures that Lydgate, following Bichat's doctrine of tissues, hopes to discover.

Codicil

An addition to a will; Casaubon's codicil takes his property from Dorothea if she marries Will Ladislaw.

Reform Bill

The measure to reform parliamentary representation passed in 1832; Mr. Brooke stands as a Reform candidate and Ladislaw writes for the cause.

Pier-glass parable

Eliot's image in Chapter XXVII of random scratches on a mirror that seem to circle around a candle, as events seem to arrange themselves around each person's ego.

Stone Court

Peter Featherstone's house, inherited by Joshua Rigg, bought by Bulstrode, and the place where Raffles dies.

Delirium tremens

The alcoholic illness from which Raffles suffers; Lydgate's newer treatment forbids alcohol and limits opium.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why does Dorothea choose Casaubon over Sir James Chettam?
2. Comprehension What does Casaubon's codicil say, and how does the town learn of it?
3. Comprehension What happens at Stone Court during Raffles's last illness?
4. Interpretation How does Eliot use Lydgate's vote in the chaplaincy election to show the beginning of his compromises?
5. Interpretation Why does Dorothea return to Rosamond the morning after finding her with Will, and what does that visit accomplish?
6. Interpretation Compare Mary Garth's refusal to burn Featherstone's will with Bulstrode's handling of Raffles. What does each choice reveal?
7. Big Question Does a good life require public achievement, or can faithfulness in hidden things be enough?
8. Big Question How far are we responsible for the evil we permit by silence or omission rather than by action?

Faith Connections

• Galatians 6:2 (Scripture)

  Bearing one another's burdens is the substance of Dorothea's question about making life less difficult to each other, which she puts into practice by paying Lydgate's debt.

• Matthew 6:1-4 (Scripture)

  Christ's teaching that good done in secret is seen by the Father gives a Christian frame for the Finale's praise of those who lived faithfully a hidden life.

• 1 John 1:8-9 (Scripture)

  Bulstrode's long refusal to confess his past, explained away as Providence, shows the self-deception John warns of; his brief, honest admission to Harriet is the closest he comes to confession.

• Teresa of Ávila, The Book of Her Life (Church Fathers)

  Eliot's Prelude takes Teresa as the model of a soul who found an epic vocation in the reform of a religious order; Dorothea has the same ardor but no such outlet.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Every person is a center of self who tends to see the world arranged around him; lives in a community are bound so closely that each choice affects many others; therefore moral growth means learning sympathy for other centers of self, and the good done by ordinary faithful people, though unrecorded, sustains the world.

Rhetorical device: extended metaphor (parable). The pier-glass and candle of Book III, Chapter XXVII, introduced by the narrator as a parable of egoism and applied at once to Rosamond.

Debate: Resolved: that Lydgate's failure was caused more by his own choices than by the town of Middlemarch.

Memory Work

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

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.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Trace Dorothea's growth from the young woman of Book I who wants to serve a great man to the woman of Book VIII who defends Lydgate and visits Rosamond. What has she learned?

Comparison with Silas Marner: Compare Godfrey Cass in Silas Marner and Nicholas Bulstrode in Middlemarch as men who conceal a past wrong. How does Eliot show the cost of concealment in each?

Medical Lens

Middlemarch contains the most detailed portrait of a provincial medical career in Victorian fiction, and Eliot researched it carefully. Lydgate, trained in Edinburgh and Paris, follows Bichat's doctrine of tissues and hopes to find the primitive tissue beneath them; he uses the stethoscope, then still new in English provincial practice, distinguishes typhus from typhoid, and refuses to dispense drugs for profit as the apothecaries did, which offends both the old physicians and the local druggists. The new fever hospital, the chaplaincy vote and the town's fear of cholera in 1832 reflect the institutional medicine of the reform years. Casaubon's heart disease is identified by Lydgate as fatty degeneration of the heart, a diagnosis linked in the text to Laennec. Two passages bear on psychopharmacology: Lydgate's own brief use of opium under the stress of debt, which Eliot describes as an escape for which he had no hereditary craving; and Raffles's alcoholic illness, which the text names delirium tremens. Lydgate orders very moderate doses of opium and no alcohol, a newer approach than the heavy opium and brandy treatment of older practitioners; Bulstrode omits to say when the opium should stop and allows brandy, and Raffles dies. The episode raises questions of medical ethics, of a doctor's dependence on a patron, and of how far a death certificate can be trusted.

• Book II, Chapter XV

  Lydgate's history: his first reading of anatomy as a boy, his studies in London, Edinburgh and Paris, and his ambition to continue Bichat's work on tissues.

  Physicians Doctors Anatomy Dissection
• Book III, Chapters XXVI-XXVII

  Lydgate diagnoses Fred Vincy's typhoid fever against the prior opinion of Mr. Wrench and supervises his nursing.

  Fever Infection Physicians Doctors
• Book III, Chapter XXX; Book IV, Chapter XLII

  Lydgate examines Casaubon with the stethoscope and later tells him he has a disease of the heart that may prove sudden.

  Physicians Doctors
• Book VII, Chapter LXVI

  Lydgate's trial of opium as an escape from debt and domestic misery, set against his indifference to drink.

  Opium Laudanum
• Book VII, Chapters LXIX-LXX

  Raffles's illness at Stone Court, Lydgate's instructions on opium dosage and no alcohol, and Bulstrode's fatal omissions.

  Alcohol Opium Laudanum Medical Ethics
• Book VII, Chapter LXXI

  The town debates Lydgate's certificate of delirium tremens; the public meeting on sanitary measures against cholera where Bulstrode is accused.

  Medical Ethics Plague Epidemic Public Health Sanitation

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Compare the vocations of Dorothea, Lydgate and Fred Vincy. Which of them fulfills a calling, and what does the novel count as success?

• Fiction

  Write Dorothea's diary for the night in Chapter LXXX after she finds Will with Rosamond, ending at dawn.

• Classroom

  Draw a web of Middlemarch: place each household as a node and connect them by debts, marriages, wills and secrets.

Further Reading

• Silas Marner, George Eliot

  Eliot's short novel of a weaver restored to life by a child.

• George Eliot: A Life, Rosemary Ashton

  Standard modern biography.

• My Life in Middlemarch, Rebecca Mead

  A reader's lifelong engagement with the novel, combined with biography.

• Middlemarch from Notebook to Novel: A Study of George Eliot's Creative Method, Jerome Beaty

  Study of Eliot's notebooks and of how the two separate stories were joined.

• The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity, Roy Porter

  Broad history of medicine, including the early 19th-century medical reforms behind Lydgate's career.