Middlemarch

The honeymoon is in Rome. Mr Casaubon spends his days in the Vatican library among his notes, and Dorothea wanders alone through a city crammed with ruins, saints and marble bodies she has no way to understand. Five weeks into her stay, a German painter called Naumann spots her standing beside the reclining statue of Ariadne in the Vatican and begs to paint her. Two hours later she is sobbing in her rooms on the Via Sistina, and can’t say exactly why.

The truth is dawning on her. Her husband’s great mind has no doors that open; when she asks gently when he will begin to write his book, he answers with wounded coldness, because she has touched the fear he lives with. Will Ladislaw makes the fear plain. Will is Casaubon’s young cousin, the grandson of an aunt who was cut off for marrying a penniless Polish refugee, and Casaubon pays for his upkeep out of a stiff sense of duty. Will is bright, restless, a dabbler in painting and poetry, and he is instantly indignant on Dorothea’s behalf. He tells her that the German scholars have already done what Casaubon is attempting: if Mr Casaubon read German, he would save himself a great deal of trouble. Dorothea is hurt for her husband. Instead of turning against him, she begins, painfully, to pity him, and to understand that he has a centre of self as real as hers.

Meanwhile a new doctor has arrived in Middlemarch. Tertius Lydgate is twenty-seven, well-born, trained in London, Edinburgh and Paris, and full of plans. He means to do good small work for Middlemarch and great work for the world: to reform country medicine (he refuses to make money by dispensing drugs, which offends the town’s chemists and older doctors) and to discover the primitive tissue from which all the body’s structures grow. He has already had one lesson in his own blindness. In Paris he fell for an actress, Madame Laure, who stabbed her husband on stage in what everyone took for an accident; when Lydgate proposed, she told him calmly that she had meant to do it. He has decided women are a pleasant distraction, nothing more.

To get his new fever hospital, Lydgate allies himself with its chief backer, Nicholas Bulstrode, the town’s banker: rich, pale, Evangelical, and widely disliked for his habit of improving other people. Lydgate’s first test comes at once. The hospital needs a chaplain, and the candidates are the Reverend Camden Farebrother, the vicar of St Botolph’s, warm, witty and poor, who plays cards for money to make ends meet, and Mr Tyke, Bulstrode’s man. Lydgate likes Farebrother far better, but his vote decides it for Tyke, and he despises himself a little for it.

At the mayor’s house he meets Rosamond Vincy, the prettiest girl in Middlemarch, the flower of Mrs Lemon’s school, polished to a high shine. Rosamond has decided that a well-connected stranger is just the husband to lift her above the town. Lydgate means only to flirt. When gossip makes him stay away, he calls on an errand; she drops her chain-work, her eyes fill, and in that one unguarded moment he is engaged.

Rosamond’s brother Fred is a charming, idle young man who has failed his university exam and doesn’t want to be the clergyman his father intends. Fred lives on expectations. Old Peter Featherstone of Stone Court, rich, sick and spiteful, is his uncle by marriage, and the whole town assumes the land will go to Fred. Featherstone’s greedy relatives circle the house like crows. His housekeeper and nurse is Mary Garth: plain, witty, sharp-eyed and completely honest. Fred has loved her since they were children, and she has told him she will never marry an idle man.

Fred has run up a debt of a hundred and sixty pounds, and Mary’s father, Caleb Garth, has kindly signed the bill as security. Fred means to repay it, tries to turn a hundred pounds into more by trading horses, and ends up with a vicious animal and very little cash. The Garths, who are not rich, pay with savings Mrs Garth had put by for their son Alfred’s apprenticeship, and with Mary’s own. Fred is ashamed for the first time in his life, and falls ill with a fever. Lydgate takes over the case from the family doctor, saves him, and spends a great deal of time in the Vincy drawing room.

One night, near three in the morning, Featherstone wakes and asks Mary to burn one of his two wills, offering her money from his strong-box. She refuses to touch his papers without a witness. By dawn he is dead, his right hand clasping his keys and his left on a heap of notes and gold. At the reading, the earlier will gives Fred ten thousand pounds; the later one takes it back and leaves Stone Court to a frog-faced stranger, Joshua Rigg, Featherstone’s illegitimate son. Mary realizes that if she had obeyed, Fred would have had his fortune.

At Lowick, Dorothea learns how lonely a marriage can be. Will Ladislaw has come to the neighbourhood, where Mr Brooke hires him to edit his newspaper, the Pioneer, and Casaubon is jealous of every visit. After a quarrel over Will, Casaubon collapses in the library. Lydgate tells him the truth: fatty degeneration of the heart; he might die suddenly, or live for years. Casaubon walks alone in the Yew-tree Walk to absorb it. Dorothea waits for him in anger and then in pity, and when he finally comes in, she takes his arm.

Casaubon then asks for something terrible: a promise that if he dies, she will carry out his wishes, without saying what they are. She knows it means spending her life sorting his notes for a book that will never matter. She asks for a night to think. In the morning she goes out to the summer-house at the end of the walk with her answer, which is yes, and finds him dead.

His will holds a last cruelty. A codicil says Dorothea will lose his property if she marries Will Ladislaw. Until that moment Dorothea had never thought of Will as a possible husband. Now the whole county is gossiping about it, and so, in spite of herself, is she. Will, who learns of it, is too proud to let anyone think he is after her money. Their meetings become a series of stiff, aching goodbyes.

The novel runs through the years of the first Reform Bill, when Britain argued over who should get the vote, and Middlemarch is full of change: railways, cholera scares, new medicine, new money. Mr Brooke, egged on by Will, stands for Parliament as a Reformer. At the hustings his speech dissolves into his usual rambling, a voice in the crowd echoes every phrase like a Punch-and-Judy puppet, an effigy of him appears, and the eggs fly. Before long he is off on his travels, cured, everyone hopes, of Parliamentary fever.

Fred, meanwhile, finds his feet. He gets his degree but can’t face the Church, and Mary says plainly that she won’t marry him as a clergyman. One day he sees labourers with hay-forks going after a team of railway surveyors, rides in to defend them, and ends up helping Caleb Garth, who takes him on as his assistant. Caleb is the novel’s quiet hero: a land agent who treats honest work almost as a religion and cannot bear a job badly done. Farebrother, who loves Mary himself, warns Fred off the billiard-room at the Green Dragon and speaks up for him to her. It is one of the most generous things anyone does in the book.

The Lydgates’ marriage runs aground on money. Lydgate furnished the house and bought the silver without counting, his practice is small because the town distrusts his new methods, and within a year he owes about a thousand pounds, with a silversmith holding a claim on the furniture. Rosamond expected elegance and gets bills. She is never rude, never loud, and never moves. When Lydgate forbids her to ride while she is pregnant, she rides anyway with his cousin, Captain Lydgate; the horse takes fright and she loses the baby. When he arranges to let the house to young Ned Plymdale, she quietly tells the agent to stop. When he refuses to beg from his rich uncle, Sir Godwin, she writes to him herself, and Sir Godwin answers Lydgate with a stinging letter about wives who wheedle.

Lydgate’s research gathers dust. He finds himself tending a marriage that must be, as Eliot puts it, an effort to go on loving without caring too much about being loved. In desperation he asks Bulstrode for a loan. Bulstrode advises him to go bankrupt.

Bulstrode has bought Stone Court from Rigg, and one day a loud, swaggering, hard-drinking man called John Raffles turns up there. He is Rigg’s stepfather, and he has found a scrap of paper with Bulstrode’s name on it, folded to wedge his brandy flask in its case. Raffles knows Bulstrode’s past.

As a young man, Bulstrode was the trusted clerk of a London pawnbroker, Mr Dunkirk, whose magnificent profits came partly from receiving stolen goods. When Dunkirk died, Bulstrode married the widow. Her daughter Sarah had run away from home, and Mrs Dunkirk longed to find her before leaving her fortune to anyone else. Raffles found her; Bulstrode paid him to keep quiet; the widow died, and the money became Bulstrode’s. He has spent the decades since telling himself that God meant it for him, since he would use it for God’s work. The lost daughter, Sarah Dunkirk, was Will Ladislaw’s mother.

Bulstrode tries to make amends privately by offering Will five hundred pounds a year. Will refuses with contempt: he will not take money with that history, and he is proud that his own name, at least, is clean. Then Raffles comes back, ill. Caleb Garth finds him on the road, takes him to Stone Court, hears his rambling story, and gives up all his work for Bulstrode without telling a soul why.

Bulstrode calls in Lydgate, who orders no alcohol and small doses of opium, up to a firm limit. The same evening, Bulstrode tells Lydgate he has reconsidered, and gives him the thousand pounds. That night Bulstrode leaves out the instruction about when to stop the opium. Later, when the housekeeper begs for brandy for the shivering patient, he hands a key round the door: the key of the wine-cooler. By morning Raffles is dead. Lydgate has doubts and swallows them.

But Raffles had talked while drinking at a horse fair, and the story reaches Middlemarch. At a public meeting about sanitary measures against the cholera, the townsmen rise one after another and ask Bulstrode to withdraw. He tries to stand, and collapses. Lydgate, as his doctor, gives him his arm and leads him out, and in that moment sees how it looks: the town knows about the loan, and believes it was a bribe.

Bulstrode’s wife Harriet, Mr Vincy’s sister, a cheerful, rather vain woman, hears the story from her brother. She takes off her ornaments, puts on a plain black gown, brushes her hair down flat and goes to her husband. Look up, Nicholas, she says. She asks no questions. They will leave Middlemarch together.

Lydgate is ruined by association. Only Dorothea, who trusted him when Casaubon was dying, believes he did nothing wrong. What do we live for, she asks her family, if not to make life less difficult to each other? She sends him a cheque for a thousand pounds so he can repay Bulstrode, and promises to visit Rosamond.

Dorothea goes to the Lydgates’ house and walks in on Will with Rosamond, who has been crying, her hands in his. Dorothea leaves at once with perfect politeness. Will turns on Rosamond in a fury that terrifies her, telling her there is no other woman for him beside Dorothea.

That night Dorothea lies on the floor of her room and grieves for the love she had not admitted. At dawn she opens the curtains and sees a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby walking along the road, and feels that she is part of that great, working, enduring world, not a spectator of it. She goes back to Rosamond, to help. Her trust breaks Rosamond’s shell, and Rosamond does the one generous thing of her life: she tells Dorothea that Will loves only her.

Will comes to Lowick to say goodbye. A storm breaks; lightning shows them each other’s faces; and Dorothea, sobbing, says she cannot bear it. She doesn’t mind about poverty, she has seven hundred a year of her own, and she will learn what everything costs. She gives up Casaubon’s fortune and marries him.

The Finale tells us what came after. Fred and Mary marry and settle at Stone Court; when Fred writes a book on green crops, the town credits Mary, and when Mary writes one for her boys from Plutarch, it credits Fred. Lydgate leaves for London, writes a treatise on gout, makes money, calls Rosamond his basil plant, a flower that thrived on a murdered man’s brains, and dies at fifty. Will becomes a Reform MP; Dorothea is a wife and mother, and Middlemarch decides she cannot have been a nice woman. Her full nature, Eliot says, ran into channels with no great name, but her effect on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.

Rosamond’s brother Fred is a charming idler who expects to inherit Stone Court from old Featherstone and who loves Mary Garth, a plain, witty, honest girl who won’t have him while he is idle. Fred’s debt costs Mary’s family their savings. On his last night, Featherstone asks Mary to burn one of his wills; she refuses, and the surviving will leaves everything to a stranger, Featherstone’s illegitimate son.

Casaubon, sick at heart and jealous of Will, demands Dorothea’s promise to carry on his work after his death. She goes out to give it and finds him dead. His will strips her of his property if she marries Will, which sets the whole county gossiping and makes her realize what she feels. Fred, ashamed, turns his back on the Church, since Mary won’t marry a clergyman, and goes to work for her father, Caleb Garth, a land agent who treats honest work almost as a religion. Lydgate and Rosamond, meanwhile, sink into debt over a house and silver they can’t afford. She defies him sweetly at every turn: she rides against his wishes and loses their baby, and writes behind his back to his rich uncle. He begs Bulstrode for help and is told to go bankrupt.

A drunken blackmailer, Raffles, arrives knowing Bulstrode’s past: his fortune came from a pawnbroker who dealt in stolen goods, and from hiding the lost heir, who turns out to be Will Ladislaw’s mother. When Raffles falls ill, Bulstrode calls in Lydgate, suddenly lends him the thousand pounds he needs, and then lets the housekeeper give the patient brandy and too much opium. Raffles dies. Caleb Garth, who has heard Raffles’s story, quietly stops working for Bulstrode. The story gets out anyway; Bulstrode is shamed at a public meeting, and Lydgate, who took his money, is ruined with him. Bulstrode’s wife puts on a plain dress and stands by him.

Only Dorothea believes in Lydgate. Visiting Rosamond to help, she finds Will holding Rosamond’s hands, spends a night in anguish, and goes back anyway. Moved by her kindness, Rosamond tells her that Will loves only her. In a thunderstorm Dorothea and Will at last speak; she gives up Casaubon’s fortune to marry him. Fred, trained by Mary’s father, becomes a good farmer and marries Mary. Lydgate leaves, grows rich treating gout, and dies at fifty feeling he has failed. Dorothea never becomes a Saint Theresa, but Eliot ends by saying that the good of the world depends partly on quiet lives like hers.