Middlemarch: Chapters 8–12

George Eliot began writing Middlemarch at the beginning of 1869, as a story of provincial life in a small eponymous manufacturing town, with Lydgate and the Vincys at the center. When she got stuck on the book, near the end of 1870, Eliot wrote “Miss Brooke,” which she conceived of as a separate project altogether. She didn’t think of merging the two narratives until 1871. The chapters that conclude with Chapter 10, which some of you noticed we mistakenly last week called “Book One,” are the pages Eliot wrote as “Miss Brooke.”

Through the second half of the last century and into our own, novelists have bemoaned and grieved the end of the marriage plot. 

In the first centuries of the novel, when marriage was marriage (for its denizens permanence, property, cocker spaniels, status, pearls, and likely children), it provided more than just a way to close a book; it offered the most plausible form for a happy ending, though from the beginning providers of those happy endings (Austen, Dickens, Trollope) chafed under the conventions, and for every Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy (who get to have repartee, youth, beauty, presumably mind-blowing sex, and the Pemberly estate), there are also a few pages devoted to a Charlotte who finds contentment in a life with Reverend Collins. (And, for that matter, Mr. Bennett, who tolerates his silly wife with an ironic sense of humor.)

We’ve now finished Book One of Middlemarch, around a hundred pages, an eighth of this monumental novel, and swoosh, our heroine is no longer Dorothea Brooke (Dorothea is now Mrs. Casaubon and on her way to Rome). Not only did the wedding take place—off the page—and needless to say we feel none of the warm, sweet closure of the marriage plot—but we feel less and less as if we are still in a world which contains a definite heroine. Dorothea is utterly absent from the last two chapters of Book One and, even before that, she seemed to recede in Chapter 10 during her own final engagement party.

It’s disorienting for the heroine, on whom we’ve been so intensely focused, to disappear from the narrative. We’re reminded, dizzyingly, of a larger world. 

Let’s consider for a moment some of the differences between the world we’ve been in and the one we’ve now entered. 

The “Miss Brooke” story has elements of a fairy tale. A beautiful, sheltered, idealistic heiress with her slightly less beautiful but more grounded sister. Their kindly, tottering, repetitive guardian, who hesitates to “go too far.” The underpinning, mechanical workings of their world are largely invisible. (Only occasionally a servant appears, conveniently, to remove a dog when it has been determined to be unwanted or to fix Celia’s hair or to accompany Dorothea on her honeymoon to see to her clothes and dress her.)

Except, that is for Casaubon. He does not fit into a fairy tale or a romance novel, although he is our heroine’s, if not our, idea of a prince. 

As if to probe this disparity (Dorothea’s instinct regarding her fiancé vs. the reader’s) Eliot canvasses the other characters’ opinion of Mr. Casaubon as a suitable husband for Dorothea. For the most part, those who care are outraged or sad. 

Sir James: “Look at his legs! … Has he got any heart?”

Mrs. Cadwallader: “He dreams footnotes and they run away with all his brains.”

Mr. Brooke keeps telling himself the same things over and over to convince himself that he was right not to interfere.

Celia is so certain as to the unsuitability of Dorothea’s marriage that the whole matter has given her more agency and equality in her relationship with her sister.

Notably, after her engagement, Sir James and Dorothea become closer. He makes good on his promise to renovate his cottages according to Dorothea’s designs. They experience the free-ranging pleasure of a friendship without any tinge of romantic hope.

Dorothea’s first visit to her future home is not auspicious to us, though it mostly charms her, with the exception of her discovery that the cottages at Lowick are in much better order than those on her uncle’s estate. They are double cottages, given at a low rent. “Speckled fowls” abound and each family keeps a pig and a neat garden. Boys wear corduroy, the girls are sent out as “tidy servants or did a little straw plaiting at home.” No dissent is brewing. Dorothea feels “some disappointment, of which she was yet ashamed, that there was nothing for her to do in Lowick.”

She tries to open her soul to her fiancé whose means of reassuring her seem to miss the point. “I have known so few ways of making my life good for anything. Of course, my notions of usefulness must be narrow. I must learn new ways of helping people,” she says.

Mr. Casaubon answers. “Each position has its corresponding duties. Yours, I trust, as the mistress of Lowick, will not leave any yearning unfulfilled.”

We don’t trust.

Eliot devotes the opening of Chapter 10 though to exploring the sensibility and experience of Mr. Casaubon, the thorn in the fairy tale. 

“If to Dorothea Mr. Casaubon had been the mere occasion which had set alight the fine inflammable material of her youthful illusions, does it follow that he was fairly represented in the minds of those less impassioned personages who have hitherto delivered their judgments concerning him? I protest against any absolute conclusion, any prejudice derived from Mrs. Cadwallader’s contempt for a neighboring clergyman’s alleged greatness of soul, or Sir James Chettam’s poor opinion of his rival’s legs,—from Mr. Brooke’s failure to elicit a companion’s ideas, or from Celia’s criticism of a middle-aged scholar’s personal appearance.”

Perhaps this is a good place to mention that many contemporaries of George Eliot guessed as to the real-life sources and models for Mr. Casaubon, and Eliot claimed she identified with her character herself, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”

She said, after putting together the “Miss Brooke” sections with the Middlemarch pages, that she feared she had “too many momenti.” (One thinks of Mr. Casaubon’s many tiny cubby holes of research.)

“Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause.”

When Eliot gently gives us access to Mr. Casaubon’s internal life, the verdict is kind and forgiving if not promising. “He did not confess to himself, still less could he have breathed to another, his surprise that though he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl he had not won delight—which he had also regarded as an object to be found by search.”

He knows this is supposed to be an exceptionally happy time of his life, with pleasures owed to him by the many sacrifices he’s made at the altar of The Key to All Mythologies. But instead he feels only “a certain blankness of sensibility.”

With her expectant ardor and his blankness and shame at not feeling more, our author sends the couple off on their honeymoon.

At the final celebratory prenuptial dinner party at the Grange, though, Dorothea is appraised with the skepticism that we’ve seen trained, so far, only on Mr. Casaubon, for her uncle has invited the gentlemen of Middlemarch, who frankly assess and compare her sexual desirability with that of the town beauty Rosamond.

Mr. Chichely thinks, “There should be a little filigree about a woman–something of the coquette … and I like them blond, with a certain gait, and a swan neck. Between ourselves, the mayor’s daughter is more to my taste.”

Lydgate, recently introduced as the town’s new, forward-thinking doctor, reflects that Dorothea “did not look at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.”

Even little Celia is evaluated (in this case, by Lady Chettam, who likes her physicians on a footing with the servants): “Certainly; she is fonder of geraniums, and seems more docile, though not so fine a figure.”

In the following two chapters, with Dorothea absent, we see much that has been hidden or subdued at Tipton Grange and Lowick. Money seems to move all these new characters in town. (In the “Miss Brooke” chapters, any and all mention of the characters’ fortunes felt allegorical. Dorothea and Celia already had inheritances—their numbers seemed arbitrary, fabulated; Dorothea will someday inherit Mr. Brooke’s land; Mr. Casaubon’s proposal is generous with all the nuptial arrangements; Mr. Brooke feels pleased.)

Contrast all this ease with Mr. Lydgate’s plight: “Lydgate was young, poor, ambitious. He had his half-century before him instead of behind him.”

He assumes he’ll be able to marry only once he’s made a career for himself and he knows he’s not chosen an easy path. “To a man under such circumstances, taking a wife is something more than a question of adornment, however highly he may rate this; and Lydgate was disposed to give it the first place among wifely functions.”

We also meet the Vincys, “old manufacturers” who “had kept a good house for three generations, in which there had naturally been much intermarrying with neighbors more or less decidedly genteel.” Mr. Vincy has sent his son to be educated at Cambridge to become a clergyman and his daughter to “Mrs. Lemon’s school, the chief school in the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female–even to extras, such as the getting in and out of a carriage.”

The son, Fred, carries on much of his parents’ warmth, kindness, and sense of hospitality, but also their imprudence and class anxiety. He’s run up debts in town and is now beholden to an elderly, dying step-relative, who might—potentially—leave him money. Mr. Featherstone is rich from manganese, childless (and so without an obvious heir), manipulative for sport, and mean. Mrs. Vincy urges both her children to visit him, with the hopes that he’ll leave them “something.” 

Mary Garth, another distant step-relative and Rosamond’s poorer schoolmate, is there taking care of him. “Mary Garth can bear being at Stone Court, because she likes that better than being a governess,” Rosamond answers her mother, to whom she feels superior by dint of her education. “Rosamond felt that she might have been happier if she had not been the daughter of a Middlemarch manufacturer. She disliked anything which reminded her that her mother’s father had been an innkeeper.”

The two siblings ride over the midlands, appreciating the landscape which they’ve known since birth. George Eliot divides herself up in this novel. She gives Fred and Rosamond her own feelings for her native countryside (Dorothea and Celia didn’t grow up here).

Mary is fond of reading.

“I can’t abide to see her reading to herself. You mind and not bring her any more books, do you hear?” Mr. Featherstone asks Fred.

“‘Yes, sir, I hear.’ Fred had received this order before, and had secretly disobeyed it. He intended to disobey it again.”

Eliot avoids sentimentality in all directions. 

“Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty,” she writes. “At the age of two-and-twenty Mary had certainly not attained that perfect good sense and good principle which are usually recommended to the less fortunate girl, as if they were to be obtained in quantities ready mixed, with a flavour of resignation as required. Her shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be contented, did something to make her so.”

“Rembrandt would have painted her with pleasure, and would have made her broad features look out of the canvas with intelligent honesty.”

Eliot paints her with pleasure too, particularly in her tart dialogue.

“Quarrel?” she says to Rosamond. “Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?”

Eliot finally introduces some purely flat characters here, like Mrs. Waule, Mr. Featherstone’s sister, who emphasizes that she’s his blood sister in almost every line of she utters. There’s pure comedy in the varieties of scheming for Mr. Featherstone’s fortune and a minor suspense as to who will finally get it.

And before the close of Book One another romance has begun. Rosamond and Lydgate: “their eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze.”

Here, Eliot, skates on the edge of the oldest clichés—their eyes met—but manages to lift it onto the plane of the lightly ironic. “Yet this result, which she took to be a mutual impression, called falling in love, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand. Ever since that important new arrival in Middlemarch she had woven a little future, of which something like this scene was the necessary beginning … These things happened so often at balls, and why not by the morning light, when the complexion showed all the better for it?”

Talk about structure. We now have two sisters in the country, one more beautiful, the other a bit more sensible, two young women in town, one beautiful and rich, one poorer and plain. “Rosamond, though no older than Mary, was rather used to being fallen in love with…” Mary has moments of tenderness with Fred. We have two more marriage plots, neither of which feels particularly promising. 

Read on!

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Mona Simpson is the author of seven novels, most recently Commitment, which appeared this spring.

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Image: Detail from Charles Green, Christmas Comes But Once a Year (1896), a chromolithograph in Pears Pictorial