Five-minute digest
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.
Top 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Verified Quotes
“Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.”
“He meant to be a unit who would make a certain amount of difference towards that spreading change which would one day tell appreciably upon the averages”
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
“We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves”
“These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent”
“he had once or twice tried a dose of opium. But he had no hereditary constitutional craving after such transient escapes from the hauntings of misery.”
“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.”
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.
- Book III, Chapters XXVI-XXVII
Lydgate diagnoses Fred Vincy's typhoid fever against the prior opinion of Mr. Wrench and supervises his nursing.
- 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.
- Book VII, Chapter LXVI
Lydgate's trial of opium as an escape from debt and domestic misery, set against his indifference to drink.
- 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.
- 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.