Middlemarch is a novel about sympathising with everyone.

"Widening the skirts of light." Dorothea's self-reformation and her sympathy for Casaubon

This is the first part of a short series of pieces about Middlemarch, which recently went viral on Substack. As well as these essays, I have a podcast coming with Clare Carlisle, who wrote a really wonderful biography of Eliot recently. And if there is enough interest, I will run a zoom session for paid subscribers too.

In this piece, I trace the major themes of Middlemarch—the ideas that are expressed throughout the novel and which are used to structure the plot. In the next installment, I will look at the origins of these ideas—their roots in German theology and in Spinoza, whom Eliot translated. Finally, I will write a piece about the historical context.

In this piece, I have tried to limit my remarks to Dorothea, Rosamond, Lydgate, and Casaubon, for the sake of simplicity. Obviously there is much to be said about others, especially Mary Garth. If you are not all sick of Middlemarch by the time I have written the next two posts, I might add a short piece about these other characters.

I have used lots of quotations from the novel, to show you how Eliot has made these ideas explicit. But reading block quotations is often deemed to be boring, so I have bolded the most important words.

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Let us endeavour always to look at the virtues and good qualities that we find in others, and to keep our own great sins before our eyes, so that we may see none of their failings. This is one way of working; and although we may not be able to manage it perfectly at once, we shall acquire one great virtue by it: we shall consider everyone else better than ourselves. Then, with God’s grace — which is always necessary, since when we do not have it all efforts are useless — we shall begin to progress. At the same time we must beg Him to grant us this particular virtue, which He denies to no one who makes efforts himself.

from The Life of Saint Teresa

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The web of Middlemarch

Middlemarch is a web. Everything is connected. The word web recurs throughout the novel. George Eliot said of her final novel, Daniel Deronda, written after Middlemarch, “I wanted everything to be connected to everything else.” That is an idea she had been developing since at least Romola, which came two books before Middlemarch. All of our lives affect each other.

This is true of the way our actions ripple out through the community in their financial and moral consequences (Fred and the Garths), in the way we affect each other in our daily conduct (Mary Garth and Rosamond Vincy), in the ideas we hold (Bulstrode and Lydgate), and in our little actions (think of all the gossip in Middlemarch, all the unsecret secrets); but it is also true of politics and religion: institutions create the scope for our moral action.

In Middlemarch, the various plots are all the consequence of a series of reforms that are being made to the connections between people.

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Saint Teresa and reform

The great theme of Middlemarch is reform. This is not just the Reform Bill that is going through Parliament, and which will extend the franchise shortly after the novel closes. Private zeal can be just as transformative as public reform, perhaps more so. Middlemarch opens and closes by talking about Saint Teresa, who reformed religious practices in sixteenth century convents. Teresa began wanting epic adventures as a child, but became a secluded nun.

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.

Not all reforming zeal is put to work. But Teresa’s was. She became a central figure of the Counter-Enlightenment, founding a convent that was much more spiritually pure, less corrupt, less worldly—more holy. Dorothea is the Teresa of Middlemarch. Her “spiritual grandeur” discovers the “meanness of opportunity” in her life with Casaubon, and as a woman. But she reforms herself, and thus finds ways of putting her spiritual energy to work to improving Middlemarch.

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The modern Puritans

Reform is mentioned as a theme on the first page, with the account of the Brooke ancestors.

…the Brooke connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably “good:” if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers—anything lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell.

Puritans who served under Cromwell were men of tremendous zeal, so reforming that they smashed windows and altars, and whitewashed church walls. (The chapel underneath Westminster Hall was used as a stables.) So we begin to see the web being weaved: Dorothea is not just the product of her innate disposition, upbringing, and circumstances; she had been determined, too, by her Puritan heritage. Mr. Brooke does not have her Puritan energy, but she is described in the first chapter as coming back from the infant school she had founded in the village, a sign of her reforming temperament.

From here on, almost everything in Middlemarch touches the reform theme. Sir James talks of new agricultural methods (Davy’s Agricultural Chemistry, which appears in Felix Holt too); Bulstrode wants a new hospital, with new practices; Lydgate brings new medical ideas from Europe; there is a train being built; and, in the background of it all, the Reform Bill is being debated, to extend the franchise and change Parliamentary democracy. Several different sorts of Puritans exist in Middlemarch. Not just Bulstrode’s unbending religion, but the medical practise of Lydgate, the scholarship of Casaubon, Caleb Garth’s commitment to business. Eliot traces the Puritan zeal throughout the town and shows how this culture can lead to a wide range of consequences.

We are all born morally stupid, Eliot writes, and must find our way out of ignorance. Reform gives opportunities to discover moral knowledge. As the world expands politically, scientifically, and economically, so can we expand morally. Not all characters are capable of this: Rosamond and Casaubon are the two least reformed people in the novel. Both labour under the mistaken ideas they have learned in their youths and remain sadly unreformed at the novel’s end.

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Determinism in ordinary life

Though their actions are unworthy, Eliot pleads sympathy for Rosamond and Casaubon. Of Casaubon, she tells us he made the same mistake we are all prone to make.

Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

We all of us. Eliot exempts none. Rosamond is several times described as “infantine”, which displays her innocence and her lack of moral awareness, which has made her into a spoilt child.

The Vincys lived in an easy profuse way, not with any new ostentation, but according to the family habits and traditions, so that the children had no standard of economy, and the elder ones retained some of their infantine notion that their father might pay for anything if he would.

Like Casaubon, Rosamond has misapprehensions which are not all her fault. She was raised badly.

The web of Middlemarch shows us how the upbringing of a spoilt child and the false beliefs of a solitary bachelor can magnify and become dominating factors in several lives. (Several characters complain about the Vincy children being spoiled; Fred nearly ruins the Garths with his own infantine behaviour). Eliot insists on the great complexity of “provincial life” because of this determinism.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

These human lots are more given to us than created by us. When Dorothea marries Casaubon, her ambitions are thwarted. Learning is all that is left to her. This is not, Eliot tells us, so unusual. (It also becomes the basis of Dorothea’s sympathy with Lydgate).

…in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.

What happens to Dorothea is sorrowful, but it is not especially unusual. Eliot makes that very clear. We ourselves, Eliot tells us, play a part is such disappointments.

The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change! In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it came with the vibrations from a woman’s glance.

Thus every piece of dialogue has moral importance. Those marvellous gossip scenes are not just provincial realism, that are part of the web that is enfolding everyone in Middlemarch and shaping and determining their days, their character, and their moral actions. Lydgate is the victim of his own superciliousness and of the infecting breath of Middlemarch.

It is debated whether Eliot was a full determinist or a compatibilist (how much she believed in the role of free will). But what is clear is that Middlemarch is based quite significantly on the philosophy of determinism; however much free will Eliot allows, it is not purely free. She draws an analogy with the human body, telling us that even after the discoveries of Bichat, (which saw that the body “must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues, out of which the various organs—brain, heart, lungs, and so on—are compacted”) most people were still working on the old system. Reform filters through to people slowly.

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Sympathising with the immoral characters

But, Eliot is constantly working to find mutuality among her characters. We are not instructed by her to blame one or the other, but to see them equally involved in the web. Look how she equates Rosamond and Lydgate.

Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing.

Just as we see Lydgate slipping into minor tragedy (“Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably”), we are shown Casaubon at the end of his sorry tale. At Dorothea’s lowest moments, when she is weeping and forlorn, when we are most sympathetic with her, most angry at her situation (which, Eliot has insisted on telling us, was the result of her Puritanism, as much as anything else), Eliot says this of Mr. Casaubon.

Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was lost among small closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness about the Cabeiri, or in an exposure of other mythologists’ ill-considered parallels, easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to these labors. With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men’s notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

The difference between Dorothea and Casaubon is that she is young, and she is able to resist the assimilation that is happening to her. She is shown, in time, to have much greater strength of character than Lydgate. “She was alive to anything that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy.” Whatever freedom is left to her, she uses in this vein. As she develops her sympathy—moving away from Puritanism towards the humanistic religion Eliot promotes throughout her novels—Dorothea comes to sympathise even with Casaubon.

Today she had begun to see that she had been under a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from Mr. Casaubon, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on his side as on her own.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.

So few of the characters manage to untangle themselves from the web of life and to see other people clearly. Certainly, Rosamond and Lydgate never manage it. And when Dorothea does begin that spiritual journey, she begins by sympathising a little with her awful husband.

Eliot is concerned to show us this mutuality because it is the basis of society. The mutual workings of the web of life is what keeps us all alive and prospering. “Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the indispensable might of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labor by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed.” We must see things from all sides to understand them: sympathising with one is insufficient.

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Feeling sorry for Casaubon

Hence Eliot comes back, again, to Casaubon’s perspective. “Mr. Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us.” Chapter twenty-nine is devoted to sympathising with Casubon. As she does with all characters, Eliot delineates the innate temperament that shapes his life.

He had not had much foretaste of happiness in his previous life. To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul. Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic

Just as she tells us that Rosamond’s indulgent education made her as she was, Eliot insists on our being told that Casaubon is not all to blame for who he is.

For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted

It is easy for a person to become crushed by the world, by their upbringing and education, by the determined assimilation of other people, and to find themselves smaller and less kindly than they ever imagined, or can even now conceive. As Eliot says when discussing Featherstone,

… goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.

She describes Will as always intending to be generous, but excuses him by saying tongues are “little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.” Again and again, she excuses moral faults by showing us that they are less within our control than we think, less capable of being resolved than we imagine.

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A Puritan reformed

Dorothea is the one blessed to understand all of this, and she explains her new religious beliefs to Will.

… by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower

The puritan has reformed herself. (This is in striking, but sympathetic, contrast to the way Bulstrode is reformed.) Casaubon, Rosamond, and Lydgate all make the same mistake: they shrink inward, they are silent, they withdraw. Dorothea is brave enough to do the opposite. We might expect better of her characters, but Eliot does not. Remarking that Lydgate lives beyond his means even while he adjusts the prices of his services for his poor customers, Eliot writes,

dear me! has it not by this time ceased to be remarkable—is it not rather that we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

Dorothea though does compare the strands of her life. She tells Lydgate there is no sorrow she has thought about more than “to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.” She has known that for herself and for Casaubon, as she grew in sympathy for him. Eliot has been careful to tell us “no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.” Dorothea is starting to realise that, and thus to see her way to doing good reforming works on a smaller scale, within the web of Middlemarch.

Lydgate we are told always regarded himself as a failure, just as Casaubon died thinking he was a failure. Dorothea escaped this trap because she did not, any longer, think of her youthful dreams and failures as “the last of their kind.”

Unlike the men, Dorothea reformed herself.

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Insignificant people?

In the final paragraphs, Eliot reinforces her determinism: “there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.” Something is still left to us, though. A new Teresa will not have a convent to reform, but she may be able to do good works in her town. Those readers still left sympathising with one character but not another, are given a final reminder.

…we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.

To still not sympathise with Casaubon, or Rosamond, or Lydgate at the end is to have missed the chance to expand your moral consciousness, like Dorothea. And so we are ready for the final lines, so often quoted out of context, and now, surely, seen in another light altogether.

…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.

Those of us who retain grand ambitions and high ideals are perhaps to liable to become Casaubonnish, to become like Lydgate, so preoccupied with the dreams of youth and so stung with the perpetual sense of failure as we became assimilated to our lives, that we forgot to do the good that we can do in the time we have to do it in.