Lydgate

• Middlemarch is often cited as a template of that now familiar mode.
• The novel’s subtitle – “A Study of Provincial Life” – suggests a serious project guided by ethical and scientific principles.
• This aim was a far remove from the conventional marriage plots and melodramatic style of “silly lady novelists”, as Eliot snarkily called them.
• In the process, we are invited to think about the complex nature of character, memory, love, friendship, work, greed, hypocrisy, discovery, community and so much more.
• Read more:
  Friday essay: George Eliot 200 years on - a scandalous life, a brilliant mind and a huge literary legacy

The fabric of life

• It is set in a small English village called Middlemarch in the 1830s, a period of heated political debate and unrest.
• Machine breaking (anti-industrialism), vociferous crowds and the shifting moods of popular opinion unsettle the lives of Middlemarch’s citizens.
• This organisation is more akin to the interwoven threads of a piece of intricately patterned fabric or the neural networks of the human body than a spider’s web.
• Read more:
  Radicalism, feminism and family puzzles: why Wilkie Collins is so much more than a mystery writer

Inconvenient indefiniteness

• It may be hard for us to hear these echoes, but it would have been impossible for 19th century readers not to do so.
• Eliot had read Darwin’s The Origin of the Species when it first appeared in late 1859.
• The fictional design of Middlemarch reveals the absence of one absolute authority or single interpretation of the origin or meaning of life.
• This leads her to become ensnared in a marriage to Casaubon, who reveals himself to be a controlling jealous pedant.
• Read more:
  Guide to the classics: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South – class warfare, 'shoppy people' and radical love

Unlit transparency

• Each remembered thing in the room was disenchanted, was deadened as an unlit transparency …
  The ideas and hopes which were living in her mind when she first saw this room nearly three months before were present now only as memories: she judged them as we judge transient and departed things.
• Each remembered thing in the room was disenchanted, was deadened as an unlit transparency … Recalling both the pier glass and “the roar on the other side of silence”, the arresting metaphor of a microscope’s “unlit transparency” registers a profound shift in Dorothea’s point of view.
• It also serves a structural purpose, prompting the reader to recall another character synonymous with microscopes and disastrous marital choices, Dr Tertius Lydgate.
• When Eliot began writing Middlemarch, she was planning to write two novels about two distinct webs of characters.
• Lydgate is a young ambitious doctor recently arrived in Middlemarch, having completed his medical studies in London, Edinburgh and Paris.

Microscopic portrayal

• Eliot’s microscopic portrayal of the various ecosystems that surround Lydgate and Dorothea exemplifies another striking feature of the 19th-century realist novel: the tension between an intensive focus on the inner-life of a few privileged individuals and a democratising emphasis on the equal value of all characters.
• The realist novel is infused with the sense that any character is a potential hero, but simultaneously enchanted with the individual, defined through his or her interior consciousness.
• The cast of potential main characters in Middlemarch is extensive and richly drawn.
• Critics have long remarked that Eliot failed to draw a convincing portrait of Will Ladislaw as a deserving lover of Dorothea.