George Eliot’s Middlemarch and I have had a difficult relationship. Forty-five years ago, having just passed my entrance exam, I went up to Cambridge in the snow-engulfed Winter of Discontent to talk to my director of studies about what I should read before starting my undergraduate English degree: “Middlemarch,” he replied in an instant, in a tone that suggested I shouldn’t have had to ask. It was, he added, simply the finest novel in the English language.
I have since read enough to dispute that (Joyce’s Ulysses gets my vote); but literature is not a competition. I quickly realised that Middlemarch is wasted on the young. One has to have lived to understand what Eliot (in her early 50s when she wrote it) was trying to achieve. I struggled with Middlemarch as a teenager: too diffuse, and some of the characters simply too bonkers: Casaubon, the controlling husband of the heroine, Dorothea Brooke, being the main offender. I recently read the novel again, and thought it rather special.
Middlemarch deals with politics with a small “p”, notably among the middle classes who control the town, and when it looks at the national picture, does so in comical fashion. Dorothea’s uncle, Arthur Brooke, a despised landowner, decides to stand for a pro-Reform party, but such is his ineptitude that he doesn’t survive until polling day.
The novel is subtitled “A Study of Provincial Life”. Most of the action takes place in an isolated part of England. That isolation is coming to an end, as men arrive in the fields to plan the first railway in the area. The novel is partly about the resistance of such communities to change. There is a current of Luddism that prevents the labouring classes from seeing the opportunities in changes to their way of life. But their opponents fail also to appreciate the benefits of allowing people a say in how they are governed.
There are unchanging attitudes in other areas. Lydgate, the new surgeon, has studied abroad and experiments extensively to find new cures; as a result, he finds the town’s other doctor is jealous of him. There are gossips and enmities, and these come through in the romantic affairs. One simply cannot understand what possessed Dorothea to marry a humourless nonentity twice her age; or why her uncle and guardian allowed it.
Lydgate himself marries Rosamond Vincy, the daughter of an arriviste, who lives far beyond his means, which is the cause of their marital conflict. Her brother Fred – that staple of the 19th-century novel, the young man pursued by debtors – has to redeem himself before he is allowed near his potential bride. But the key story is of the desire that Will Ladislaw has for Dorothea, and which Casaubon seeks to prevent from beyond the grave.
Eliot writes better than her rival Dickens. She does not so intently string things out to fill a weekly serial. Middlemarch is a great, absorbing novel: and if not the greatest novel in our language, certainly just about the greatest of the 19th century.
