Tracks are still visible in these sections of the two separate stories “Middlemarch” one was. How would our experience be different if Eliot had begun with Lydgate, the Vincys, the Garths, Featherstone, and Bulstrode?
I never thought of myself as a "narratologist" before, but if the shoe fits .. : )
It's interesting to see where Dorothea disappears from the narrative, in Ch. 10 where GE throws a convenient dinner party and deftly shifts to another group of Middlemarchers. I do miss Dorothea and Celia when they disappear - and I mean the two of them together, for Dorothea needs to be "thrown into relief" to borrow a phrase from the beginning! On her own I don't think she can carry the narrative for long. They all need each other for that.
I was thinking along those lines reading the chapters about Lydgate. GE seems almost more interested in him, his past, what makes him tick, his personality, than she does Dorothea. Maybe it's Dorothea's way of thinking that sets the tone for the rest, so the others are all compared to her in some way, when it comes to their assumptions and blindnesses? Lydgate thinks he's not going to make an error after making one before -thinking he'd fallen in love with a woman who actually killed her own husband on purpose - a murderer !.. and still he lives in this kind of self-satisfaction that he knows what he's about .. re-reading that chapter yesterday I saw more of the dark humor in it and the way GE is both building Lydgate up and alerting us to his vulnerabilities to which he himself is comfortably insensible.
I think starting with Dorothea was a good idea because it makes you think you are going to read a love story but you get something different .. if she had started with the Vincy's she would have lost the determining factor of Dorothea's idealism .. it is a very tight little picture in the beginning that sort of naturally widens out to include others who in some way are all variations on Dorothea's pure example.
There's a really interesting section in Michael Gorra's Portrait of a Novel in which he talks about how serial publication affected the structure of the Victorian novel generally and Middlemarch specifically. Worth a read!
Thanks for another great introduction to these chapters! The imaginative exercise you urge on us, to ask what if Book Two had been presented first, is a challenging one. At first, i was flummoxed. From simplicity to complexity is part of it, doubtless, as you say. And into a new kind of striving and status-consciousness? Not sure. Here is what I was able to come up with, and doubtless multiple answers are possible. Eliot introduces us first to the landed gentry of/around Middlemarch. We learn to like and perhaps even love some of them. Then, we are introduced to the "lower orders," those who have to make money and strive. We might be tempted to look down our noses at such, as indeed does the beautiful Rosamund (with her reverence for rank) and her suitor Lydgate. Not so fast, is Eliot's message. For here too is nobility, but of a different sort (there is even an aunt named Noble, a subtle hint)! Here too are gentlefolk. earn to love those Middlemarchers, with their whist suppers, their bowls of punch and their fine social distinctions. This is a profoundly radical subversive message (even if it presents itself in the guise of a capitalist bourgeoisie). This message is enabled by setting up a cognitive trap of sorts, presenting at first an appealing but too-limited world of landed gentry.
Much to think about here! Dorothea and Lydgate are offered as having "finer" aspirations (larger than themselves?); Will and Fred and Mary also have "finer" aspirations in that they are attuned to ideas and skeptical about material success. One senses that these aspirations are going to cause all these people trouble … And certainly Casaubon as well. But Eliot is not opposed to being aspirational! We are seeing something fine-grained about how intellectual worlds and material worlds intertwine and borrow from each other. Of course many of us know from real life that caring about ideas in now way exempts one from being a merciless climber.
Fred also appreciates morally finer things--namely, Mary Garth. That seems to be what Eliot admires most about him:. Yes, he can be petulant; yes, he can be lazy. But he does recognize Mary's beauty/goodness, and that's a sign of his own discernment and, possibly, his capacity for change.
I agree. Eliot will take us beyond the social fabric by following these younger characters into unknown regions. Still, it’s worth relishing almost from a Geertzian perspective this incredibly vital social system with its board meetings and horse trading and whatever else...
I am puzzled by the favorable treatment of Anglican (church of England) Farebrother over the unseen Tyke and brooding Bulstrode when in previous novels Eliot showed herself capable of some of the most powerful portraits of evangelical Christians, especially Dinah Morris in Adam Bede, but also in Felix Holt the evangelical milieu is portrayed much more favorably. Could be a case of “been there done that.”
The conflict over the hospital chaplaincy is significant because it raises deeper religious issues. It seems pretty clear (Bulstrode=bullying, Tyke=childish) these religious dissenters want to to get into that hospital and put the fear of Hell into people in order to strengthen their position in Middemarch, not a very appealing strategy, so one sympathizes with Farebrother's more easygoing approach to the chaplaincy (get there when i can-yawn). We know that people when ill and dying are vulnerable to religious conversion, but Farebrother is reluctant to exploit that method, rightly, I'd say. He's a deep character, blighted by some cynicism and failure but still extremely appealing in his way, and I love his household of old ladies, mother sister aunt keep him busy and there is much wry humor in that chapter lost on poor Lydgate.
I'm afraid in the above comments I mistakenly equated "evangelical" Christians with "dissenters." It was possible to be an evangelical (follower of John Wesley) within the Church of England I now learn. I am suddenly no longer certain whether Bulstrode and Tyke are to be understood as dissenters or evangelicals but the different religious attitudes of Farebrother (tolerant) and Tyke (puritanical) are evident regardless. I apologize for sowing confusion but I remain convinced that an understanding of these fine religious differences would enhance our appreciation of Eliot's art.
OK, it does seem from various hints that Bulstrode is a Methodist and seeks reform within the Church of England. Eliot does give us a portrait of an out and out dissenting minister, Mr. Lyon in Felix Holt, but Bulstrode is an evangelical, not a dissenter.
I really appreciate some clarification of this feature! The notes in my edition are frustrating me with their pedantry and neglect of the larger picture. Certainly the fact that Dorothea (and everyone else) understands her aspirations as religious; and the whole plot of the hospital opens with a dispute about its cleric; are signs that this is a salient dimension of the story, easy to lose track of in our era. One doesn't really feel that these divisions are that meaningful for people except as social markers but perhaps I project...
I should have put it in the post, so sorry! We are finishing Book Two (through Chapter 22). I always update it here, but I'll try to remember to add it to the posts! https://books.substack.com/s/read-along
Success and finer aspirations missed out what is beautiful about the social fabric of Middlemarch. The Middlemarchers I most love the Vincys and Farebraother and many of the minor characters exist beyond that dichotomy, playing a beautiful game. I can hardly explain what I mean...
Thank you all for the chance to reread Middlemarch - and with such fascinating contributors. It is making reading thoroughly enjoyable.
I have a question about the quotes at the beginning of chapters. Many aren't attributed, not that I'm likely to know the attribution anyway. They don't really seem to reflect much of what's happening in the chapter. I'd be interested in hearing anything anyone wants to say about them.
I'm never sure if I should answer the person who asks the question, or the last person who answers it! Just poking in to say, I am away from my edition (Oxford), but in the first unattributed epigraph the editor says in a note that it is probably Eliot, and then he goes quiet. I do think it's a funny ruse--not sure how common it is. It's a little like a chorus, she takes on the voice of "conventional wisdom," or is putting herself forward as some sort of artificial authority, which may or may not be the most wise or sophisticated take on what is to come. It is another kind of voice in the story.
Stendhal does that too. It’s a kind of overarching thought, often ironical, to what’s to come. The first chapter of “Red & Black” begins: “Put thousands together / Less bad / But the cage less gay. HOBBES”
Great question. Many if not all the unattributed epigraphs to chapters are by Eliot herself, I believe. They form an oblique and whimsical commentary. More to puzzle over than say aha, but the mention of idleness “that sauce to dainty meat” before 14 is surely a Mary-like hint to Fred, to work, and the epigraph to the Lydgate chapter seems to be saying ‘when will you ever learn?’ What do you think?
Interesting. I'll start looking more carefully. I hadn't caught those references. And the style of them seems different from the narrative. Perhaps also it was a way for her to play with writing? I'll start looking for more whimsy and less "this is what is about to happen". Thanks for your response.
My parents were kind and convivial (as Mona describes the Vincys). I could never figure out why their children are more like Rosamond and Fred-- calculating, willful, vaguely dissatisfied. So, perhaps we are the children of “strivers”. Thank you, Mona, for the therapy!
Yes a lot to chew on with respect to real-life experience of the pendulum swinging in families! The Vincys have "aspirations" for their children which they interpret straightforwardly, we will give the kids these advantages and they will be better off. But then once the kids have these opportunities they are looking at them from a different vantage. I think my father, a successful second-generation immigrant himself, had similar feelings. I wanted to help my children, to make them "me with things I lacked," but by helping them I made them not-me.
About Rosamond’s feelings and Lydgate’s family connections: “consider whether red cloth and epaulets had never had an influence of that sort. Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but ... bring their provisions to a common table and mess together...” I was thinking that Rosamond was vain and self-centered compared to Dorothea. But GE sets me straight Now I get that the two women mirror each other-- as was suggested in previous comments from the group.
There’s something to be said for loving the main character of a novel. After reading David Copperfield, I couldn’t read Dickens for several years. I knew no other character would capture me in the same way. Dorothea for all her faults is a great heroine. I’m betting that Middlemarch wouldn’t work without the first 10 chapters, and in that order!
I had the feeling when I read about how Eliot sort of ran aground with the first version of her story that it was because she had not yet created a character she could love herself. Mary Garth is kind of a version, but she is trapped, almost buried (so far) by social and economic constraints...
Mr Bulstrode is such an interesting character; the small town provincial version of the Victorian capitalist villain: Melmotte in Trollope's masterpiece, The Way We Live Now, is the cosmopolitan equivalent, but both men share the feature that their backstory is mysterious, and of course will turn out to be their undoing. 'five and twenty years ago nobody had ever heard of a Bulstrode in Middlemarch '... and as Trollope says of Melmotte 'Altogether the mystery was rather pleasant as the money was certain'. And in Dickens' Little Dorrit we find Mr Merdle, like Bulstrode and Melmotte, a banker: ‘Mr Merdle was immensely rich; a man of prodigious enterprise; a Midas without the ears, who turned all he touched to gold. He was in everything good, from banking to building. He was in Parliament, of course. He was in the City, necessarily. He was Chairman of this, Trustee of that, President of the other.' All three are newcomers to that shallow class of people eager to welcome them in, looking to them for favours and handouts, and all three men hide terrible secrets. They stand as symbols for the authors' contempt for the hypocritical standards of 'smart society'. For both Merdle and Melmotte, the con they are practising eventually falls apart with disastrous consequences. I'm very worried about poor Mrs Bulstrode....
I never thought of myself as a "narratologist" before, but if the shoe fits .. : )
It's interesting to see where Dorothea disappears from the narrative, in Ch. 10 where GE throws a convenient dinner party and deftly shifts to another group of Middlemarchers. I do miss Dorothea and Celia when they disappear - and I mean the two of them together, for Dorothea needs to be "thrown into relief" to borrow a phrase from the beginning! On her own I don't think she can carry the narrative for long. They all need each other for that.
I was thinking along those lines reading the chapters about Lydgate. GE seems almost more interested in him, his past, what makes him tick, his personality, than she does Dorothea. Maybe it's Dorothea's way of thinking that sets the tone for the rest, so the others are all compared to her in some way, when it comes to their assumptions and blindnesses? Lydgate thinks he's not going to make an error after making one before -thinking he'd fallen in love with a woman who actually killed her own husband on purpose - a murderer !.. and still he lives in this kind of self-satisfaction that he knows what he's about .. re-reading that chapter yesterday I saw more of the dark humor in it and the way GE is both building Lydgate up and alerting us to his vulnerabilities to which he himself is comfortably insensible.
I think starting with Dorothea was a good idea because it makes you think you are going to read a love story but you get something different .. if she had started with the Vincy's she would have lost the determining factor of Dorothea's idealism .. it is a very tight little picture in the beginning that sort of naturally widens out to include others who in some way are all variations on Dorothea's pure example.
There's a really interesting section in Michael Gorra's Portrait of a Novel in which he talks about how serial publication affected the structure of the Victorian novel generally and Middlemarch specifically. Worth a read!
Thank you for this tip!
Thanks for another great introduction to these chapters! The imaginative exercise you urge on us, to ask what if Book Two had been presented first, is a challenging one. At first, i was flummoxed. From simplicity to complexity is part of it, doubtless, as you say. And into a new kind of striving and status-consciousness? Not sure. Here is what I was able to come up with, and doubtless multiple answers are possible. Eliot introduces us first to the landed gentry of/around Middlemarch. We learn to like and perhaps even love some of them. Then, we are introduced to the "lower orders," those who have to make money and strive. We might be tempted to look down our noses at such, as indeed does the beautiful Rosamund (with her reverence for rank) and her suitor Lydgate. Not so fast, is Eliot's message. For here too is nobility, but of a different sort (there is even an aunt named Noble, a subtle hint)! Here too are gentlefolk. earn to love those Middlemarchers, with their whist suppers, their bowls of punch and their fine social distinctions. This is a profoundly radical subversive message (even if it presents itself in the guise of a capitalist bourgeoisie). This message is enabled by setting up a cognitive trap of sorts, presenting at first an appealing but too-limited world of landed gentry.
Much to think about here! Dorothea and Lydgate are offered as having "finer" aspirations (larger than themselves?); Will and Fred and Mary also have "finer" aspirations in that they are attuned to ideas and skeptical about material success. One senses that these aspirations are going to cause all these people trouble … And certainly Casaubon as well. But Eliot is not opposed to being aspirational! We are seeing something fine-grained about how intellectual worlds and material worlds intertwine and borrow from each other. Of course many of us know from real life that caring about ideas in now way exempts one from being a merciless climber.
Fred also appreciates morally finer things--namely, Mary Garth. That seems to be what Eliot admires most about him:. Yes, he can be petulant; yes, he can be lazy. But he does recognize Mary's beauty/goodness, and that's a sign of his own discernment and, possibly, his capacity for change.
It's funny though that a flag of his laziness is the reading of novels …
I agree. Eliot will take us beyond the social fabric by following these younger characters into unknown regions. Still, it’s worth relishing almost from a Geertzian perspective this incredibly vital social system with its board meetings and horse trading and whatever else...
The dichotomy you are setting up between material
I am puzzled by the favorable treatment of Anglican (church of England) Farebrother over the unseen Tyke and brooding Bulstrode when in previous novels Eliot showed herself capable of some of the most powerful portraits of evangelical Christians, especially Dinah Morris in Adam Bede, but also in Felix Holt the evangelical milieu is portrayed much more favorably. Could be a case of “been there done that.”
The conflict over the hospital chaplaincy is significant because it raises deeper religious issues. It seems pretty clear (Bulstrode=bullying, Tyke=childish) these religious dissenters want to to get into that hospital and put the fear of Hell into people in order to strengthen their position in Middemarch, not a very appealing strategy, so one sympathizes with Farebrother's more easygoing approach to the chaplaincy (get there when i can-yawn). We know that people when ill and dying are vulnerable to religious conversion, but Farebrother is reluctant to exploit that method, rightly, I'd say. He's a deep character, blighted by some cynicism and failure but still extremely appealing in his way, and I love his household of old ladies, mother sister aunt keep him busy and there is much wry humor in that chapter lost on poor Lydgate.
I'm afraid in the above comments I mistakenly equated "evangelical" Christians with "dissenters." It was possible to be an evangelical (follower of John Wesley) within the Church of England I now learn. I am suddenly no longer certain whether Bulstrode and Tyke are to be understood as dissenters or evangelicals but the different religious attitudes of Farebrother (tolerant) and Tyke (puritanical) are evident regardless. I apologize for sowing confusion but I remain convinced that an understanding of these fine religious differences would enhance our appreciation of Eliot's art.
OK, it does seem from various hints that Bulstrode is a Methodist and seeks reform within the Church of England. Eliot does give us a portrait of an out and out dissenting minister, Mr. Lyon in Felix Holt, but Bulstrode is an evangelical, not a dissenter.
I really appreciate some clarification of this feature! The notes in my edition are frustrating me with their pedantry and neglect of the larger picture. Certainly the fact that Dorothea (and everyone else) understands her aspirations as religious; and the whole plot of the hospital opens with a dispute about its cleric; are signs that this is a salient dimension of the story, easy to lose track of in our era. One doesn't really feel that these divisions are that meaningful for people except as social markers but perhaps I project...
Are we on to chapters 17-19 next week? I can no longer find the schedule.
I should have put it in the post, so sorry! We are finishing Book Two (through Chapter 22). I always update it here, but I'll try to remember to add it to the posts! https://books.substack.com/s/read-along
Loving it!
Thanks for joining!
Success and finer aspirations missed out what is beautiful about the social fabric of Middlemarch. The Middlemarchers I most love the Vincys and Farebraother and many of the minor characters exist beyond that dichotomy, playing a beautiful game. I can hardly explain what I mean...
Thank you all for the chance to reread Middlemarch - and with such fascinating contributors. It is making reading thoroughly enjoyable.
I have a question about the quotes at the beginning of chapters. Many aren't attributed, not that I'm likely to know the attribution anyway. They don't really seem to reflect much of what's happening in the chapter. I'd be interested in hearing anything anyone wants to say about them.
I'm never sure if I should answer the person who asks the question, or the last person who answers it! Just poking in to say, I am away from my edition (Oxford), but in the first unattributed epigraph the editor says in a note that it is probably Eliot, and then he goes quiet. I do think it's a funny ruse--not sure how common it is. It's a little like a chorus, she takes on the voice of "conventional wisdom," or is putting herself forward as some sort of artificial authority, which may or may not be the most wise or sophisticated take on what is to come. It is another kind of voice in the story.
Stendhal does that too. It’s a kind of overarching thought, often ironical, to what’s to come. The first chapter of “Red & Black” begins: “Put thousands together / Less bad / But the cage less gay. HOBBES”
Since we started talking about it I've gone back to reread them after each chapter, and they are interestingly oblique.
Great question. Many if not all the unattributed epigraphs to chapters are by Eliot herself, I believe. They form an oblique and whimsical commentary. More to puzzle over than say aha, but the mention of idleness “that sauce to dainty meat” before 14 is surely a Mary-like hint to Fred, to work, and the epigraph to the Lydgate chapter seems to be saying ‘when will you ever learn?’ What do you think?
Interesting. I'll start looking more carefully. I hadn't caught those references. And the style of them seems different from the narrative. Perhaps also it was a way for her to play with writing? I'll start looking for more whimsy and less "this is what is about to happen". Thanks for your response.
My parents were kind and convivial (as Mona describes the Vincys). I could never figure out why their children are more like Rosamond and Fred-- calculating, willful, vaguely dissatisfied. So, perhaps we are the children of “strivers”. Thank you, Mona, for the therapy!
Yes a lot to chew on with respect to real-life experience of the pendulum swinging in families! The Vincys have "aspirations" for their children which they interpret straightforwardly, we will give the kids these advantages and they will be better off. But then once the kids have these opportunities they are looking at them from a different vantage. I think my father, a successful second-generation immigrant himself, had similar feelings. I wanted to help my children, to make them "me with things I lacked," but by helping them I made them not-me.
About Rosamond’s feelings and Lydgate’s family connections: “consider whether red cloth and epaulets had never had an influence of that sort. Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but ... bring their provisions to a common table and mess together...” I was thinking that Rosamond was vain and self-centered compared to Dorothea. But GE sets me straight Now I get that the two women mirror each other-- as was suggested in previous comments from the group.
There’s something to be said for loving the main character of a novel. After reading David Copperfield, I couldn’t read Dickens for several years. I knew no other character would capture me in the same way. Dorothea for all her faults is a great heroine. I’m betting that Middlemarch wouldn’t work without the first 10 chapters, and in that order!
I had the feeling when I read about how Eliot sort of ran aground with the first version of her story that it was because she had not yet created a character she could love herself. Mary Garth is kind of a version, but she is trapped, almost buried (so far) by social and economic constraints...
Mr Bulstrode is such an interesting character; the small town provincial version of the Victorian capitalist villain: Melmotte in Trollope's masterpiece, The Way We Live Now, is the cosmopolitan equivalent, but both men share the feature that their backstory is mysterious, and of course will turn out to be their undoing. 'five and twenty years ago nobody had ever heard of a Bulstrode in Middlemarch '... and as Trollope says of Melmotte 'Altogether the mystery was rather pleasant as the money was certain'. And in Dickens' Little Dorrit we find Mr Merdle, like Bulstrode and Melmotte, a banker: ‘Mr Merdle was immensely rich; a man of prodigious enterprise; a Midas without the ears, who turned all he touched to gold. He was in everything good, from banking to building. He was in Parliament, of course. He was in the City, necessarily. He was Chairman of this, Trustee of that, President of the other.' All three are newcomers to that shallow class of people eager to welcome them in, looking to them for favours and handouts, and all three men hide terrible secrets. They stand as symbols for the authors' contempt for the hypocritical standards of 'smart society'. For both Merdle and Melmotte, the con they are practising eventually falls apart with disastrous consequences. I'm very worried about poor Mrs Bulstrode....
One senses that it is the disruption these characters introduce that sort of puts the novel in motion as a form…
Absolutely, I hadn't thought of it like that. It gives a hard surface for the other characters to bounce off, as well, and survive, or not....