The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

Middlemarch (1871-1872)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

Middlemarch was written by George Eliot (Silas Marner) and was published as a serial in 1871 and 1872 and as a novel in 1874. “Eliot,” the pseudonym of Mary Anne Evans (1819-1880), was regarded in her lifetime (especially after the death of Dickens and Thackeray) as perhaps the greatest living English novelist, and Middlemarch is usually seen as her supreme achievement.

Middlemarch is about the small provincial county of Middlemarch and of six people within it. Dorothea Brooke is an idealistic woman full of a yearning to help the less fortunate and to dedicate herself to some lifelong task. Her initial decision on how to achieve this is to marry Edward Casaubon, an aging, pedantic, emotionally stunted scholar who is obsessed with writing a masterwork, The Key to All Mythologies. She seeks fulfillment by serving her husband in writing this work, but he acts coldly toward her ambitions, and gradually their marriage becomes strained. She becomes friends with Casaubon’s cousin, Will Ladislaw, who Casaubon dislikes. Casaubon dies of poor health, but in his will he includes a codicil that if Dorothea ever marry Ladislaw she will lose Casaubon’s inheritance. Ladislaw and Dorothea are both attracted to each other and after various misunderstandings and distancings marry.

Tertius Lydgate is an idealistic doctor who moves to Middlemarch in order to carry out his ideas for medical research and reform. He meets and falls in love with Rosamond Vincy, the loveliest woman in Middlemarch, and she falls in love with her perception of him. But their marriage, too, goes bad, thanks to his profligacy with money and her monstrous narcissism, and they endure painful days together. Dorothea helps Lydgate pay off his debts, but Rosamond allows her idea of friendship with Ladislaw to become a fantasy of love, a fantasy he is forced to harshly dispel. Eventually the pair overcome their troubles as Rosamond wears Lydgate down, and their marriage ends unhappily.

The third couple is Rosamond’s brother, Fred, and Mary Garth. Fred is university educated but irresponsible and unwilling to enter service with the Church. He loves Mary, and she loves him, but he is too flighty and irresponsible for her to seriously consider marrying, and she tells him so. Worse, Fred is forced to turn to Mary’s father, Caleb, to pay off a serious debt, which darkens the Garths’ view of him and make them even more unwilling to have Fred marry Mary. Eventually, after much emotional and even spiritual struggle, Fred takes seriously to work, serving as an assistant to Caleb. He proves himself to all of the Garths, Mary included, and they become a happy couple and live happily ever after.

Middlemarch has been described by critics like Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language. Those are high words indeed, and it is hard for any novel to live up to them, but if any novel can, it is Middlemarch. The novel is a magnificent fictional achievement, one immediately acclaimed by Eliot’s contemporaries (though there were of course some critics who caviled at its minor flaws) as well as by later critics and readers. Middlemarch’s achievement is one of style, substance, and historical importance. If it cannot be said to have singlehandedly destroyed the Sensation Novel, its appearance at least had a great deal to do with the fall of the genre from its place of popular prominence, to be replaced by the realism which Middlemarch so splendidly represents.

Eliot was and is one of the most respected of the Victorian writers of the second half of the 19th century. (The venerable critic Harold Bloom goes so far as to call her one of the greatest Western writers of all time.) Her first three novels—Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Silas Marner (1861)—were regional novels. Her 1866 novel, Felix Holt, was a social novel in the mode of Middlemarch but was more overtly political. In all of these novels— published at the height of the Sensation Novel craze—Eliot wrote in the realist mode, emphasizing ordinary characters and commonplace events. Eliot did not entirely separate herself from the Sensation Novel—even in Middlemarch there are Sensation elements, such as blackmail and a hidden, scandalous past coming back to haunt the present—but she presented an alternative literary mode for readers to consume. William Thackeray died in 1863 and Charles Dickens died in 1870, and when Middlemarch began appearing, in 1871, the field was clear for a new Greatest Living English Writer, which status Eliot was duly awarded. Eliot’s influence, and the greatness of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda (1876), established and popularized the realist mode of novel-writing, replacing the Sensation Novel and lasting until the advent of Modernism early in the twentieth century.

Middlemarch has often been compared with Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Similarly epic in scope, Middlemarch is broad rather than deep, creating an entire world in the county of Middlemarch and its inhabitants. Middlemarch is as ambitious as War and Peace, encompassing not only the ordinary doings and romances of the inhabitants but also topics as various as the Reform Act of 1832 (which changed the electoral system in England), spirituality, sex, corruption, the railway, the clergy, the electoral process, the medical profession, and the world of provincial England forty years before the novel was written. But where War and Peace is about the sweep of history, Middlemarch is an incisive portrayal of individual characters and their place in society as well as the relationship of those individuals to their groups and to society as a whole. Eliot is comparable to Balzac (Father Goriot) in her examination of the relationship between individuals and the “wider historical scene” and is comparable to Thackeray (Vanity Fair) in her close observation of “society in depth.”

To compare her to those other writers, however, is to do her a disservice, as it somehow implies she was laboring under their influence and that Middlemarch would not have been written without them. Middlemarch is rather the exemplar of the realist movement, working roughly in the same mode as Balzac, Dickens, and Thackeray, but evolved beyond them. Middlemarch is more panoramic in scope than Balzac, lacks the sentimentality, coincidences, and eccentrics of Dickens, and was written with far more empathy than Thackeray. Middlemarch’s attention to human psychology, to both the actions as well as the thoughts and feelings of its characters, were unique to that point in English literary history, and created a new model for the novel.

Too, Middlemarch is supremely orderly, and the product of enormous narrative control. Fate and destiny, for Eliot, are the products of behavior, and the events of the novel spring entirely from each character’s behavior. Although Eliot’s narrator—which, though distinctive in voice, she was always at pains to stress was not Eliot herself, but a separate character—often interjects itself into the text, both as philosopher and as commentator on the characters, the reader never gets the sense that the narrator or Eliot is controlling what the characters do. Instead, what controls them is their own behavior and the consequences of that behavior. In this, too, Middlemarch is an advance over Dickens et al.: contrary to their plots, which often showed the influence of the author’s hand, Middlemarch is entirely the result of characters’ behavior.

Lest you think that Middlemarch is somehow a joyless clockwork machine, let me say that it is in many ways an exhilarating read. Eliot writes beautifully, albeit at length—Middlemarch is an expansive book in many ways, physical length not least among them—and in a style that is light but not quite at the level of lightness of the 1880s and 1890s. Her narration includes substantial genuine wit—the book is endlessly quotable. Much of Middlemarch is concerned with serious matters, from the dissolution of marriages to the mean pettiness of provincial English ways, but there are numerous light moments as well, and enjoyable, well- meaning characters to accompany the deeply flawed Bulstrodes and the odious Rosamond Vincys. Middlemarch is, along with everything else, a comedy of manners, and Eliot does not stint on the comic elements.

Too, Eliot is famously sympathetic to her characters. Her approach to characterization is delve deep enough into each character’s interstices that the reader understands why they act the way they do at all times—and in the words attributed to the French writer Mme. de Stael, “to understand all is to forgive all.” Eliot is generous with her characters. With one exception—John Raffles, the emotionally and verbally sadistic predator who brings ruin to Mr. Bulstrode, the banker and uncle of Fred and Rosamond Vincy—there are no villains in Middlemarch, and no heroes, just individuals, and even those like Rosamond and Casaubon whose behavior hurts others are shown to be acting out of understandable and even relatable motives.

As several critics have pointed out—Rebecca Mead and Adele Waldman among them—one of the brilliant aspects of Middlemarch is that it means something different to each reader based on their age. The younger reader is likely to identify with Dorothea, whose struggles to find romantic and spiritual fulfillment will be recognizable to the young. An older reader, conversely, is likely to look at Tertius Lydgate and empathize with his failing marriage or his attempts to achieve something greater than himself via his research and professional work. (As critic Robin Gilmour wrote, “there is perhaps nothing in Victorian fiction—or English fiction for that matter—to match the slow deterioration of Lydgates’ marriage under the pressure of debt and the growing sense of incompatibility between two people.”¹ ) And an elderly reader will undoubtedly see something in Mr. Bulstrode, whose lifetime of good works (in his own eyes) is ruined by John Raffles, or Casaubon, or in the waspish Peter Featherstone. Like a cut jewel, Middlemarch has many facets for its viewers to enjoy.

Some modern readers—and freshmen—will undoubtedly hold Middlemarch’s length against it. Some critics have. But Eliot’s attempt to encompass the entirety of life in Middlemarch county, from the lowest farm- worker to the richest man in the county, and to address the topics listed above, and to juggle multiple plotlines and resolve them all, could only be achieved at length—at Middlemarch’s length. Readers who quail at reading something so long should instead look at the novel in musical terms. If most novels are pop hits of varying lengths, Middlemarch is a full- length symphony, and to give yourself up to it is to yield yourself into the hands of a master. Such an experience is rare, and to be treasured.

Naturally, not every critic has been unremittingly positive about the novel. Some contemporary critics assailed what critic Daniel Burt calls “the perceived chilly behaviorism and analytical dissection”²—an odd charge to lodge against a novel noted for its compassionate treatment of even the most unlikable of characters. Henry James, among others, found Will Ladislaw too slight a character, or too improbable, or simply too thinly sketched. (A charge which is ultimately a matter of opinion.) Another critic alleges that the novel’s chief flaw is the “day-dreaming self-indulgence of her idealizing portrait of yearning spirituality”³ in the person of Dorothea—again, a matter of opinion. (This writer didn’t find it idealized, only an attempt to understand and appreciate it. Idealization would imply that Eliot was not critical, in her own subtle way, of Dorothea’s yearning—something not borne out by the novel.) Eliot’s unusual narrative voice, which not only narrates the novel but provides a running commentary on plot and characters, has been called “narrative bullying”—a peculiar criticism, to say the least. Harold Bloom strangely (and erroneously) says “Eliot was not a great stylist, and was far more immersed in philosophical than in narrative tradition” and charges her with “frequent clumsiness in authorial asides” and “hesitations in storytelling.”⁴ 

And so on. These criticisms are generally minor in scale and minor in conception, and are easily dismissed. As Daniel Burt wrote, “Middlemarch remains, like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, an exemplary novel because it both risked and achieved so much in pursuit of a comprehensive vision of human nature and experience.”⁵ 

The last words here are left to Harold Bloom, who wrote “the novel compels aesthetic awe in me, if only because it alone, among novels, raises moral reflection to the level of high art,” and to Henry James, who wrote of Middlemarch that it is “a very splendid performance. It sets a limit, we think, to the development of the old fashioned English novel. Its diffuseness, on which we have touched, makes it too copious a dose of pure fiction. If we write novels so, how shall we write History? But it is nevertheless a contribution of the first importance to the rich imaginative department of our literature.”⁶ 

Recommended Edition

Eliot, George. Middlemarch (Penguin Classics, 2003).

For Further Research

Bloom, Harold. “Bloom on Middlemarch.” George Eliot’s Middlemarch (Chelsea House, 1987).

Burt, Daniel S. “Middlemarch.” The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novels of All Time (Checkmark Books, 2010).

Byatt, A.S. “Rereading: Middlemarch by George Eliot.” http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/aug/04/fiction.asbyatt.

“George Eliot’s Middlemarch.” http://victorianweb.org/authors/eliot/middlemarch/middlemarchov.html.

James, Henry. “Henry James on Middlemarch.” http://www.complete review.com/quarterly/vol3/issue2/jameshmm.htm.

McCrum, Robert. “The 100 Best Novels: No. 21—Middlemarch.” http://www.the guardian.com/books/2014/feb/10/100bestnovelsmiddlemarchgeorgeeliot.

Mead, Rebecca. My Life in Middlemarch (Crown, 2014).

Waldman, Adele. “A Year in Reading.” http://www.themillions.com/2013/12/ayearinreadingadellewaldman.html.

¹ Gilmour, Robin, "The Novel in the Age of Equipoise," in Harold Bloom, ed., The Victorian Novel. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004, 140. 

² Burt, Daniel S. “Middlemarch.” In The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novels of All Time. New York, NY: Checkmark Books, 2010, 34. 

³ Drabble, Margaret, "Introduction," in Middlemarch. New York, NY: 1985, xvi. 

⁴ Bloom, Harold, "Introduction," in Harold Bloom, ed., The Victorian Novel. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004, 30. 

⁵ Burt, "Middlemarch," 361. 

⁶ Qtd. in Rodesnky, Lisa, "Introduction", in Lisa Rodensky, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, vii.