My Life in Middlemarch

by Rebecca Mead

  The phrase she coined has become the one that is most often used to sum Middlemarch up once and for all, but Woolf’s assessment of the novel was more qualified than is usually acknowledged. In the essay, she begins by describing the accomplishment of the early works, Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, which seem drawn from Eliot’s own rural experience and are peopled with characters so true to life that readers forget they are fictional. “We move among them, now bored, now sympathetic, but always with that unquestioning acceptance of all that they say and do, which we accord to the great originals only,” Woolf writes. “We scarcely wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.”

  It is in contrast with this sure-handedness that Woolf makes reference to Middlemarch. Here is her full characterization: “It is not that her power diminishes [after the early novels], for, to our thinking, it is at its highest in the mature Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

  “With all its imperfections.” What are these imperfections? Woolf gives few specifics, though she cites Eliot’s unwillingness to let one sentence stand for many and contrasts it with the delicacy shown by Jane Austen in Emma. (“ ‘Whom are you going to dance with?’ asked Mr. Knightley, at the Westons’ ball. ‘With you, if you will ask me,’ said Emma; and she has said enough,” Woolf writes. “Mrs. Casaubon would have talked for an hour and we should have looked out of the window.”) She says that Eliot—the granddaughter of a carpenter, as she reminds us—is out of her depth when it comes to the depiction of higher social strata, and resorts to stock images of claret and velvet carpets. Eliot’s hold on dialogue is often slack. Occasionally, she lacks taste. She suffers from “an elderly dread of fatigue from the effort of emotional concentration.”

  According to Woolf, though, these failings are more than compensated for by the pitiful truth that is revealed in Dorothea’s thwarted aspirations. “The ancient consciousness of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages dumb, seems in [Eliot’s heroines] to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand for something—they scarcely know what—for something that is perhaps incompatible with the facts of human existence,” Woolf writes. This melancholy acknowledgment of limitation makes the book distinctively appropriate for “grown-up people,” those who are old enough to appreciate the artistic representation of failure rather than success.

  But what an interesting choice of phrase it is. “Grown-up people” is a juvenile expression. It’s what children call adults, or how adults refer to themselves when talking to children. (“A merry day for the children, who ran and shouted to see if they could top the wind with their voices; and the grown-up people, too, were in good spirits, inclined to believe in yet finer days when the wind had fallen,” Eliot writes in Adam Bede.) It’s not how adults usually speak of themselves, at least not without irony. “Grown-up people” is an expression from the nursery.

  In Woolf’s case, this was a nursery on the third floor of a house on Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, where she grew up amid social privilege and intellectual sophistication. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, who had attended Eliot’s Sunday salon at the Priory. Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, had been a celebrated beauty since childhood and served as a model for Edward Burne-Jones, the Pre-Raphaelite painter, among other artists of the moment. The Stephen children’s quarters lay above rooms filled with books and hung with art, frequented by cultured people who had an easy familiarity with claret and velvet carpets.

  Downstairs, a small sunroom adjacent to the large double drawing room had been ceded to the younger generation. “From this room too we could spy on the grown-ups,” Vanessa Bell, Woolf’s older sister, once recalled. In this hideaway with a view over the garden Vanessa would paint while Virginia read aloud from the Victorian novelists. “I can still hear much of George Eliot & Thackeray in her voice,” Vanessa wrote. Middlemarch may be a book for grown-up people, but it is also a book for precocious girls like the Stephen sisters; and to my mind, Woolf’s use of this formulation has a touch of archness about it, a slight affectation of youthful arrogance. Woolf was thirty-seven when she wrote her Eliot essay and didn’t any longer think of herself as young, but she certainly thought of herself as doing something new in fiction. She had published her first novel, The Voyage Out, four years earlier; her second, Night and Day, appeared in October 1919. In the essay Woolf expresses her admiration and respect for George Eliot—“We must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose” is its swelling conclusion. But at the same time she positions herself as the clever child, watching quietly from the neighboring room, ready to supersede her distinguished but fatigued elder.

  Or perhaps I impute a youthful arrogance to Woolf because I remember what it was to be a young person chafing to compete with her professional elders, instead of being, as I was, subservient to them. In my first job, as a fact-checker at a weekly magazine, I worked with four other checkers, all of us in our early twenties. Our department amounted to a very small pen hemmed in by filing cabinets stuffed with old proofs and bookcases lined with reference books. This was well before the Internet, and we spent long hours on the phone to sources, or visiting libraries to find articles on microfilm. Our desks were jammed close together, piled high with newspapers and marked-up manuscripts of stories that it was our job to make sure were free of errors.

  It was a demanding and stressful occupation. We were blamed if an article was published with a mistake, but, it seemed, rarely thanked when we prevented it. Often we would be there until late at night, long after more senior editorial staff had gone home, and we’d order dinner on expenses from the Italian restaurant across the street and make jokes at the expense of certain writers we worked with. How lazy they were, we’d complain; how badly they wrote. In truth, I was learning a lot from doing this work: seeing how to build a story, discovering where to find a fact. But still, I was eager for my chance to show how I could do it better.

  “ABOUT his ordinary bearing there was a certain fling, a fearless expectation of success, a confidence in his own powers and integrity much fortified by contempt for petty obstacles or seductions of which he had no experience,” Eliot writes of Dr. Tertius Lydgate in the opening chapter of Book Two of Middlemarch, “Old and Young,” which was published in February 1872, three months after the first installment had appeared. Readers of the first volume, including the reviewer for the Athenaeum, predicted that “the tale is to centre around a woman’s life.” But they were in error. While Middlemarch opens with its focus upon the inward struggles of Dorothea Brooke as she becomes Dorothea Casaubon, it soon expands beyond her. Dorothea is only one element within a much wider social panorama.

  Lydgate, at twenty-seven, is fresh from his medical studies in London, Edinburgh, and Paris, and determined to make the provincial town of Middlemarch the crucible of his own scientific advances. He holds this ambition notwithstanding the already established medical practices of Messrs. Wrench and Toller and Drs. Minchin and Sprague, who hitherto have tended to the health of the community without resort to suspicious modern methods. (Eliot’s thumbnail sketch of Mr. Wrench is evidence of her ability to let one sentence stand for many if she wants to: “Mr. Wrench was a small, neat, bilious man, with a well-dressed wig: he had a laborious practice, an irascible temper, a lymphatic wife, and seven children.” You could learn more about how to write from a description like that—its compression, its rhythm—than in a year’s worth of classes.)

  Lydgate brims with self-assured ambition and focus, determined to be above the petty politicking of his elders. A new hospital is opening in Middlemarch, underwritten by Nicholas Bulstrode, the rich, pious banker, and Lydgate hopes that the establishment of a medical school will one day follow. In this anticipated center of scientific enterprise he aspires to identify the “primitive tissue”—the foundational building b
lock of life. He is convinced, Eliot writes, “that the medical profession as it might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good.” He seems to have found what Dorothea seeks—a cause and a passion to which to devote his life.

  Unlike Dorothea, Lydgate has a history, some of it quite vivid, and several pages are devoted to his backstory. While in Paris, Lydgate became infatuated from afar with an actress who was married to a fellow actor; during a performance she stabbed her husband to death, apparently by accident. Lydgate rushed to the stage to tend to her, and an acquaintance began. When she upped and left Paris he traced her to Lyon, and rushed there with a proposal of marriage. She told him that the stabbing was no accident: her husband bored her, and she decided to dispatch him. “You are a good young man. But I do not like husbands. I will never have another,” she informed the stunned Lydgate, who quickly fled back to his galvanic experiments upon frogs and rabbits, resolved to take a “strictly scientific view of woman,” with ideas of marriage postponed until an indefinite future.

  His resolution to remain a single man is thwarted, in Book Two of Middlemarch, by the force of Rosamond Vincy’s wish to make a husband of him. Lydgate, an exotic stranger, strikes Rosamond as much more sophisticated and interesting than the prosperous young men of Middlemarch by whom she has already been courted, and even before they have been introduced Lydgate doesn’t really stand a chance. He intends to be only an infrequent visitor at the Vincy home, where, in his lofty estimation, “the provision for passing the time without any labour of intelligence, might make the house beguiling to people who had no particular use for their odd hours.” Lydgate plans to make better use of his odd hours, until Rosamond begins to exercise her charms upon him. (“Do you care about dancing at all? I am not quite sure whether clever men ever dance?” “I would dance with you, if you would allow me.”)

  Rosamond believes that they are as good as engaged, and Eliot conveys the irresistible force of her conviction in a remarkable metaphor. “Circumstances were almost sure to be on the side of Rosamond’s idea, which had a shaping activity and looked through watchful blue eyes, whereas Lydgate’s lay blind and unconcerned as a jelly-fish which gets melted without knowing it,” she writes. When Lydgate’s clumsy attempt to extricate himself ends up bringing tears to those blue eyes, his intentions to remain unattached are shattered. “That moment of naturalness was the crystallizing feather-touch: it shook flirtation into love.” Eliot’s delineation of the growing attachment between Lydgate and Rosamond is delicious if more than slightly horrifying to read. Rosamond is an eminently recognizable type, the fatally nubile pretty girl whose charms have never failed her, while Lydgate, who is clever about most things, is cloddishly dense about women. Watching them make their way toward marriage—she concertedly, he obliviously—has an appalling satisfaction for connoisseurs of romantic plots.

  But it is another, much earlier, passion in Lydgate’s life that makes him most compelling to me. Lydgate was a bright child—“it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid”—and, one wet day during a school vacation, hunting to find a book he hadn’t yet read, he stumbled across an encyclopedia in his family’s library. He opened the first volume to see an entry for “Anatomy,” and his life was changed in an instant. He had found his vocation.

  George Eliot gives a marvelous description of the dawning of an intellectual passion. “Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love,” she writes, in a direct address to the reader. It’s a powerful evocation of the promise that learning can hold for a reader, and of the thrill of realizing what it might be to have an intellectually creative life—of the realization that one might find one’s destiny in books.

  And one need not have discovered one’s precise vocation at an early age, as Lydgate did, to know something of the experience of developing a germinal passion by browsing in a library. Intellectual passion—a love for that “which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires”—is rarely accorded the attention that romantic love commands, as Eliot points out; but the reader whom Eliot addresses will likely recognize this other, overlooked passion, because the chances are that he or she has felt it, too. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life when I was in my teens; but the solitary lunchtime hours I spent in my school library, looking at art books or reading literature, were both a discovery in their own right, and a taste of the pleasures of study and thought.

  In this passage about intellectual passion, Eliot steps into the story to speak directly to the reader. (Or, as literary critics have pointed out, the contrived persona of a narrator steps into the story to speak directly to the reader.) This was a technique that Eliot used with some frequency, and one of the most celebrated examples of this kind of interjection appears toward the end of Book Two of Middlemarch, when the reader is reintroduced to Dorothea Brooke, now Dorothea Casaubon, on her honeymoon in Rome. Dorothea is alone in her boudoir, and is weeping. But, Eliot asks with a note of irony, is an extravagance of emotion so very unusual in a new bride? “That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it,” she writes. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

  This kind of editorializing can strike today’s reader as awkward and off-putting. We’re wiser now, we think, than to believe in the authoritative inclusiveness of the first person plural; feminist or Marxist or post-colonial literary theory has made us conscious of perspectives that have been excluded by, or don’t care to be encompassed by, its embrace. We may even be writing from one of those perspectives ourselves. (I humbly submit: when I write “we,” I mean by it “I, and hopefully you.”) The explicit intrusion of a narrator’s voice in Eliot’s fiction can strike the contemporary ear as old-fashioned. Today’s realist novelists don’t tend to step onto their pages, formally addressing the reader like a lawyer making a case before a courtroom.

  Some contemporary critics of Eliot weren’t particularly enamored of the technique, either—so much so that Leslie Stephen, writing in the Cornhill Magazine immediately after Eliot’s death, felt a need to defend the practice. Stephen argued that it was one of the ways in which Eliot, the most intellectual of authors, sought to include in her fiction the ideas and convictions that were crucially important to her. “We are indeed told dogmatically that a novelist should never indulge in little asides to the reader. Why not?” he wrote. “A child, it is true, dislikes to have the illusion broken, and is angry if you try to persuade him that Giant Despair was not a real personage like his favorite Blunderbore. But the attempt to produce such illusions is really unworthy of work intended for full-grown readers.” In a foreshadowing of the formula his daughter Virginia Woolf would later use, Stephen suggests that Eliot’s use of the magisterial authorial interjection is one of the things that make her novels suitable for grown-up people.

  It’s one of the techniques she feels most at home using. “You are like a great giant walking about among us and fixing every one you meet upon your canvas,” John Blackwood, her publisher, remarked with approval after he’d read the manuscript of the second volume of Middlemarch. Blackwood’s use of the first person plural isn’t a slip. He means to include readers of Eliot’s books among the diminutive characters whom George Eliot fixes on her canvas—the ones who gossip about Lydgate’s unconventional unwillingness to dispense medicines,
or about his bizarre request to conduct a postmortem on a patient, or about his unseemly closeness to Bulstrode. Bulstrode’s ultimate downfall levels Lydgate, too, after the doctor accepts a loan that, when the fact of it emerges publicly, is taken by onlookers to be a bribe—and which may, indeed, hamper Lydgate’s ability to judge Bulstrode’s actions objectively. By directly addressing us, Eliot draws us deeper inside her panorama. She makes Middlemarchers of us all.

  But Eliot does something in addition with those moments of authorial interjection. She insists that the reader look at the characters in the book from her own elevated viewpoint. We are granted a wider perspective, and a greater insight, than is available to their neighbors down in the world of Middlemarch. By showing us the way each character is bound within his or her own narrow viewpoint, while providing us with a broader view, she nurtures what Virginia Woolf described as “the melancholy virtue of tolerance.” “If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” Eliot once wrote. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.”

  And this is one way in which Middlemarch is a book about young people for older people. This is one reason why Woolf’s epigrammatic observation rings true. When I read of the boy Lydgate in his father’s library, taking up a book and being seized by a passion, or I glimpse the newlywed Dorothea, distraught in her Roman boudoir, unable to name the deficit she feels or to identify the nature of her disappointment, I am able not only to imagine their vivid, solipsistic experience but also to see them from Eliot’s authorial perspective of heightened, mature sympathy. In viewing them I am invited to shed my wadded layers of stupidity, and to listen for the sound of growing grass.