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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.