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Bert Hornback

George Eliot

Middlemarch Kindle Edition

by George Eliot (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Vast and crowded, rich in irony and suspense, Middlemarch is richer still in character, with two of the era's most enduring characters, Dorothea Brooke, trapped in a loveless marriage, and Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor.

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829 pages
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March 7, 2021
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Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

WHO that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa,' has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand - in - hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide - eyed and helpless - looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child - pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many - volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her. Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self - despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago was certainly not the last of her kind. 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. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later - born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardour alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favourite love - stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart -beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long recognisable deed.

From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Inside Flap

One of the most accomplished and prominent novels of the Victorian era, Middlemarch is an unsurpassed portrait of nineteenth-century English provincial life. Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces resistance from the society she inhabits. In this epic in a small landscape, Eliot's large cast of precisely delineated characters and the rich tapestry of their stories result in a wise, compassionate, and astute vision of human nature. As Virginia Woolf declared, George Eliot "was one of the first English novelists to discover that men and women think as well as feel, and the discovery was of great artistic moment."

From the Trade Paperback edition.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Library Journal

Though not out of print, this popular title is being added to the venerable "Modern Library" line to coincide with a PBS Masterpiece Theatre miniseries. Along with the full text, this edition includes an introduction by A.S. Byatt. All that for $15 makes this a bargain.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

Born Mary Anne Evans, novelist George Eliot (1819–1880) was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for their realism and psychological insight. Middlemarch is her masterpiece.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From AudioFile

Dorothea Brooke, a young woman of impeccable character, marries the embittered Mr. Casaubon, who almost immediately dies. Eliot takes the reader through a labyrinth of nineteenth-century morals and conventions as Dorothea searches for fulfillment and happiness. Walter's delicious, upper-crust English accent and understated English inflections immerse the listener in a little-known world of hedgerows and manners. This reading would have been a complete success had the narrator only taken more care with the timing surrounding omitted sections of the abridged text. She races ahead without pause, often confounding the listener, who finds the action has suddenly moved to the next county--or country--without warning. A worthy, though flawed, presentation. R.B.F. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Publisher

Founded in 1906 by J.M. Dent, the Everyman Library has always tried to make the best books ever written available to the greatest number of people at the lowest possible price. Unique editorial features that help Everyman Paperback Classics stand out from the crowd include: a leading scholar or literary critic's introduction to the text, a biography of the author, a chronology of her or his life and times, a historical selection of criticism, and a concise plot summary. All books published since 1993 have also been completely restyled: all type has been reset, to offer a clarity and ease of reading unique among editions of the classics; a vibrant, full-color cover design now complements these great texts with beautiful contemporary works of art. But the best feature must be Everyman's uniquely low price. Each Everyman title offers these extensive materials at a price that competes with the most inexpensive editions on the market-but Everyman Paperbacks have durable binding, quality paper, and the highest editorial and scholarly standards. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot.

-- "V. S. Pritchett" --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Back Cover

In a panoramic sweep of the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, George Eliot explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature: Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but naive; Rosamund Vincy, beautiful and egoistic; Edward Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar; Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally flawed physician; the passionate artist, Will Ladislaw; and Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, childhood sweethearts whose charming courtship is one of the many humorous elements in the novel's comic vein. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

"Broadview Press and editor Gregory Maertz have produced a text whose rich but judicious contextual annotation, notably highlighting Eliot's deep immersion in German culture, makes this a crucial edition of what is arguably the greatest Victorian novel of them all." (Michael McKeon )

"Gregory Maertz's fine new edition of Middlemarch allows readers to consider the novel in relation to a range of documents—reviews and other writings by George Eliot, contemporary reviews of the novel, and contextual material. This additional material both enriches our reading of the novel and its concerns and expands our knowledge of the period." (Mark Turner ) --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

“Middlemarch shows us the contours and indeed the very language of the characters’ inner lives.”

―Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

"No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative [...] I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot [...] No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully." - V. S. Pritchett "The 10 Greatest Books of All Time" - BBC's The Big Read --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08Y96LM7Q
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 7, 2021
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1223 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 829 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #516,866 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #12,807 in Literary Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #33,479 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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4.4 6,788 ratings

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Bert Hornback
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George Eliot
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Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880; alternatively "Mary Anne" or "Marian"), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.
She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. She also wished to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years.
Her 1872 work Middlemarch has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Swiss artist Alexandre-Louis-François d'Albert-Durade (1804-86) [Public Domain], via English Wikipedia.
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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

6,788 global ratings

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1 star		4%

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Garrett Zecker

Beautiful novel, transitional and true

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 17, 2014

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Middlemarch is a gigantic, cat-crushing, end of the old guard and into the industrial revolution romance filled with incredible three-dimensional characters and a sprawling identity of a town, its politics, money, romances, and lives. Eliot’s book is incredibly precise - which in my opinion is somewhat long winded at times - but authentic to the bone.

I finally decided to read the novel after two little coincidences finally led me to its door. First, I read Mead’s My Life In Middlemarch over the summer and felt like it was a beautiful musing on a general love of reading in addition to Eliot’s body of work. I was at a wedding halfway through the book, and one of the events was at an avid reader’s house where he offered the opportunity to climb through a mountain of books he was going to donate. I found some real gems, and as luck would have it, a copy of Middlemarch. Shortly after Mead’s book was finished, I began Eliot’s. My prior experience with the author is sparse and lacks cohesion, and there is little I remember from my undergraduate and secondary school reading (even though I know I had read her work), but Silas Marner was always the clear favorite prior to this undertaking.

Middlemarch is a beautiful novel, and perhaps the most notable elements of it is the reality with which the characters, their concerns, and the overall atmosphere of life in this English country town is so vibrant and true. The characters are sublime in their humanness, and the lack of gimmick and easily reliable tropes of novels of the era is as refreshing as it is accurate to real life. The novel is a gorgeous portrayal of the transitional period in world history in many ways - when alchemy gave way to the scientific method, when medicine was treatment and not drugs, when politics was a matter of voting and public opinion and not inheritance, when women became emancipated from the constraints of love and marriage, when industry and new thought replaced old money and leisurely lives of waste, and when religion began to slip away into an enlightened skepticism. In many ways, the book is about a community in transition, growing through these major world changes along with understanding the impact on the minds and existence of so many different types of people.

In the book there are many characters, and having a little community tree with their relationships at hand might be more helpful than trying to keep them all straight as I did (I found myself confused with Ladislaw and Lydgate at times, and usually was reminded once they opened their mouth which they were). Each character’s voice and presence is brilliantly crafted, however, and the attention Eliot paid to ensuring that education, culture, and origins was apparent in their dialogue and dialects. I think the volume of characters speaks to the realism that she was intending in the novel - and much like the in-between chapters in Mariner - she is attempting to show a wholeness to reality in the book and capture the essence of it as realistically as possible. This is not as sprawling as Dr. Zhivago with hundreds of characters, many of whom are not important, but rather many characters who are all important, none more important than another.

This shouldn’t matter to modern audiences - reality in great literary writing of our time. But perhaps what makes this so unusual is the fact that this is an incredibly contemporary novel of today that was written in the Victorian era. A new mold was broken with Middlemarch - one that recognized that there need not be a direct arc or a single character or a plot trope or archetype that singly arches over the entirety of a novel. This is a period of time in the real lives of incredibly real fictitious characters - a reality that is painstakingly and beautifully constructed in the fibers of Eliots Victorian community. In a commercial sense, the book would be very unsatisfying to a commercial audience, but this is a portrait of marriage, progress, and money as the world changes around the characters, and it is a history that was likely to have been lost in many of the period’s literary and journalistic sources. She captures the community with the vision that it was an important time - and people were unsure whether the past dictated where this new world was headed. If there is any undercurrent in the novel, perhaps it is the opening and closing chapters that recognize a striking relationship to many of the people in the novel. As it winds down to its simplest relationships, so are we reminded of those the novel opened with, and as we opened the undertaking with a breath in with simplicity and a social care-free attitude toward some beautifully ignorant and simple characters, so we exhale at the end in the complexity of those who we thought so simple and free of burden as their eyes have been opened and souls chained down in the social meaning of the choices they have made.

I enjoyed Middlemarch a great deal, although I may not ever pick it up to read in its entirety again. It is definitely an intellectual commitment that requires a great deal of stamina and patience to get through. For me, it took me a little over one month to complete (although I was reading some other material at the same time). I have very few complaints about the book - and perhaps my only consistent gripe might be the inconsistent chapter opening excerpts that seem to come from sources liberal in both time and geography. To me, it only rarely added to the work and did not seem to have a linear connection among them (even though they did to the text). I also felt a little frustrated at times that Eliot went from gorgeous prose in some of the longer portions of exposition to glossing over major details in others, and there was inconsistency with that as well. Besides that, I was entranced with the wit, accuracy, and attention paid to making the most visionary and realistic novel - in a time and place where such a novel was rarely written and had never existed prior.

This edition had some illustrations, and the formatting was clean and easy to read on my Kindle Paperwhite.

19 people found this helpful

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DAVID DENNINGTON

A GREAT CLASSIC

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 21, 2018

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George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ is an epic tale about people, mostly middle and upper class, set in rural England during the 1800’s. The characters are complicated and evolving and, like the town, fictitious.

Eliot, tells the story from many points of view, allowing her to get inside many heads. In doing so, she proves herself to be not only a wonderful storyteller, but a gifted psychologist with an understanding of both sexes.

The main character, Dorothea, is outspoken, strong-willed and trusting, but on a path she has set to becoming molded and compliant. She marries an older man of the church, a supposed great scholar, a man of superior intellect she looks up to, but who reveals himself to be controlling. His pomposity camouflages self-doubt and insecurity. Through Eliot’s insightful character studies, we feel for these characters, sympathizing with their imperfections; Casaubon a jealous old fraud, helpless and insecure; she, young, strong, faithful, more clever than he. Eliot brings us the inner workings of Casaubon’s mind and his torments, not only that he might not finish his life’s written work, but maybe after his death, Dorothea might marry the man he despises, a man who is young, dynamic and good looking. He has observed a growing attraction between them, and this for him is intolerable. While Casaubon smolders, he thinks that even after premature death, if it should occur, he will find a way of controlling her, and punishing her.

‘There was no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous and lovely a young lady as he could have obtained for a wife; but the young lady turned out to be something more troublesome than he had conceived. She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts—was accompanied with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as a part of things in general…Poor Mr. Casaubon! This suffering was the harder to bear because it seemed like a betrayal: the young creature who had worshipped him with perfect trust had quickly turned into the critical wife; a remark from her which he had not in any way anticipated was an assertion of conscious superiority; her gentle answers had an irritating cautiousness in them; and when she acquiesced it was a self-approved effort of forbearance.’

Casaubon ponders his own mortality:

‘To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons.’

Characters develop beautifully – their arcs moving throughout the book. I especially like the beautiful Rosemond and Dr. Tersia Lydgate, a good-looking, young surgeon, a couple that fall blindly in love. What could possibly go wrong? Their love will see them through won’t it! But then again character flaws, come into play causing readers to become more curious and invested.

‘Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing…But Rosamond had registered every look and word, and estimated them as the opening incidents of a preconceived romance—incidents which gather value from the foreseen development … 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 heartbeat, 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.’

Other figures are complicated and conflicted too, adding to the richness and suspense. This is not chick lit. It’s the work of genius. The plot is intricate, weaving, twisting and turning in unexpected directions. How could life in rural, Victorian England be so complicated! But like Forster’s ‘Howards End’, Austin’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’, Hardy’s ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, life can be a challenge! And no, it’s not fair.

The actions of the characters revolve around love mostly, as well as ambition, deceit, greed, possessiveness, selfishness, fall from grace, and of course, money and death. Eliot peels back their skins and lays her characters bare, showing their inner weaknesses, their hopes and desires. At times, she pops in and talks to us directly, which I found antiquated, but nice.

There are gems throughout Eliot’s writing, providing insight and worldly knowledge about life—a treat for authors. I often found myself thinking of situations in these modern times and saw similarities. Not much has changed and probably never will—given the nature of man.

Through her descriptive prose, one gets the feel of the country, the rural, provincial way of life, life on the land and horses, cattle and corn. One can vividly imagine, the wrath and dissatisfaction among the locals at the coming of the railways, as land was commandeered all over the countryside for construction.

Reading this, for me, was time well spent.

41 people found this helpful

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Andrew Billek

The best edition of this novel.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 6, 2023

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If you wandered onto this page it could be because you're looking for the ideal copy of Middlemarch to buy. Well, you found it - The Everyman's Library Classics edition. Middlemarch, the novel, needs no comment from me: it is regarded by all as a major Victorian era classic. But not everyone knows how good the editions created by the Everyman Library are. Amazon often lumps revues from different publishers into a revue of one specific edition. Consequently, potential purchasers get the wrong idea. This edition is the one to get. Let's face it, this is a long novel and you'll spend some time with it. You don't want it to fall apart. And you don't want small print or a glued binding that will crack. Also you get creamy colored pages that are kind on the eyes. If your taste tends toward literary fiction there are a lot more splendidly bound editions with uniform spines and maroon cloth covers that would look impressive on your shelves. Go ahead! Show off how sophisticated you are, to yourself, if no one else.

7 people found this helpful

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久保真

Young Women Pursuing the Good Life

Reviewed in Japan 🇯🇵 on February 1, 2022

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A young woman is going to have a good life.
It's the kind of story that makes you want to read more about how this woman lives her life.

22 people found this helpful

P. G. Harris

A glorious masterpiece

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 16, 2023

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Make no mistake, Middlemarch is a book I found, at times quite challenging. It is a book written for a different age and a different mode of reading. It is a book written for people with more time on their hands, and fewer demands on that time. It is a book originally published in eight instalments over the course of a year, not necessarily devoured in less than an eighth of that time on a Kindle. George Elliot often writes in long, elliptical sentences whose meaning only becomes clear the second time through. In short, it is a book which takes a heck of a lot of reading.

And yet, and yet.

I think something else in my personal top ten favourite novels is going to have to give way to Middlemarch. It is an absolutely glorious novel which repays the dedication it demands of the reader with a rich, profound, deeply moving, tale of life in a provincial English town in the pre-Victorian era.

There are many intermingled plot strands, but the basic structure of Middlemarch is built around four sub-plots. Primary amongst these is that of the young, fervently religious Dorothea Brooke and, initially her choice of husband between the older, austere clergyman, Casaubon, and the rich, younger but more trivial Sir James Cheetham. Lydgate is an ambitious young doctor with dreams of undertaking medical research alongside establishing a rational, scientific practice. Fred Vincy is a feckless young man, devoted to his sensible, grounded childhood sweetheart, Mary. The spider at the centre of the Middlemarch web is Bulstrode, a wealthy businessman with an unknown past who controls much of the financial life of the town.

The true glory of Middlemarch is that it was written in the 1860s, but the characters are instantly recognisable and utterly credible and its themes are incredibly relevant and contemporary. This is a world where the railways are the new technology and the Reform Bill is the great political upheaval, but in describing people’s reactions to them, the author could be talking about HS2 or indeed 5G and any number of current pieces of legislation. This relevance goes further, extending to Twitter - small town gossip might be slower, but the malicious consequences of ill-informed capricious public opinion are identical. It is equally easy to find parallels for fake news and for the prosperity theology of the evangelical US, with a notable self righteous character seeing his wealth as a godly reward.

Elliot is a supremely humane writer, her characters are not paragons, they are normal flawed people, jealous, prone to moodiness, not always acting for the best. The perfect illustration of this is Casaubon. His influence on the other characters is not benign, and yet he is ultimately a figure of tragedy rather than villainy. He is a man lacking in emotional intelligence who makes bad decisions on the basis of societal pressure, while at the same time he is realising that his life’s work is turning to dust. Or there is a troubled young married couple who behave dreadfully towards each other, and yet Elliot creates an empathy for and an understanding of them and their motives. And again, Lydgate is pompous arrogant but also one can understand his desire to better the human condition, and feels sympathetic when he is brought low by Gove-ian anti-intellectual, populist attitudes.

On an emotional level, Elliot is a writer of extraordinary power. Nothing shows this more than some of the scenes involving Dorothea where, beneath the buttoned up pre Victorian exterior, sexual tension and desire burn incandescently.

The final thing to bring out is that Middlemarch is a surprisingly funny book. It is not a comic novel per se, but it is littered with little blink and you miss them phrases where Elliot skewers the motives and pretensions of her characters. A description of Dorothea going out into the town wanting to do good for some unfortunate, bur being frustrated by lack of opportunity is capped by the glorious phrase “nobody’s pig had died”.

Having mentioned Dickens, I would say that Middlemarch is up there with the best of his work, and surpasses the majority. Where George Elliot wins out is in her realism and the believability of her characters, there are no cartoonish caricatures here.

5 people found this helpful

Larissa

Chegou em perfeito estado

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on September 23, 2020

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A edição é linda! Capa maravilhosa, chegou em perfeito estado e bem embalado. Folhas amareladas e me parecem ser daquelas q não oxidam. Tamanho de fonte confortável, o que é bem importante pq o livro é longo. Quanto ao conteúdo, não tenho como fazer resenha pois ainda não terminei de ler.

11 people found this helpful

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Cliente Amazon

Livro mal cuidado

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on February 16, 2022

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A minha avaliação não é para a edição do livro, adoro a Penguin. O fato é que livro chegou sem nenhuma embalagem plástica, solto na caixa, com uma orelha na capa e com algumas sujidades.

O livro parece ser novo, a sujeira e a orelha na capa devem refletir a falta de cuidado na hora da embalagem e da entrega.

8 people found this helpful

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Tom Gray

Society

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 15, 2018

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<blockquote>
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.
</blockquote>
.

These lines were taken from Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Witten In A Country Churchyard’. They are, I think, a good summary of the theme of ‘Middlemarch’. “Middlemarch’ is a novel without a hero. It is a novel about society and specifically how society shapes the live s of the people who inhabit it

<blockquote>
But we insignificant
people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many
Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that
of the Dorothea whose story we know.
</blockquote>

If Gray saw that many flowers blush unseen, George Eliot went beyond that and in ‘Middlemarch’ examined how this is so. Dorothea and Lydgate are the flowers that blush unseen in ‘Middlemarch’. Each has capabilities beyond that which they were able to demonstrate in that early 19th century British society. Each had ability but were not able to prosper but for different reasons.

<blockquote>
5 A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it.
6 And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture.
7 And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it.
8 And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold. And when he had said these things, he cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
</blockquote>

These lines from the Gospel of Luke Chapter 8 pertain to something different that ‘Middlemarch’ but they do illustrate the different effects of society on people. Dorothea was the woman who fell upon a rock. She was born into a society which had not place for a woman of independent capability. She did not rebel against this. She accepted it. She accepted that the role of women was to be subservient to the men in her life. Experience, in her life with her husband Casaubon, left her with a deep dissatisfaction with this. She could not function in this way but there was no way in that British society of the early 19th century win which her capabilities could flourish. Instead she worked in the ways that were open to her and in those small ways did the good in the world that was her ambition. Eliot describes this as:

<blockquote>
Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally
beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse
struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which
great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the
aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so
strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A
new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual
life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in
daring all for the sake of a brother's burial: the medium in which
their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant
people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many
Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that
of the Dorothea whose story we know.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were
not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus
broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on
the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was
incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly
dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you
and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived
faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.</blockquote>

Dorothea lived in society that was indifferent to her abilities. Lydgate experienced the hostility that is aimed at those who actively try to change society. He was the one who fell among thorns. The thorns were those in society who were challenged economically and intellectually with the new medial ways that he was trying to introduce. Like thorns that chole out other growth, these people actively resisted these threats to the established order. They actively constructed a crime which they ascribed to Lydgate and forced him out of the area with it. They took his connection with Bulstrode’s ignominy and extended it to him. His crime was suited to their purposes and so they wove it out of the traces of evidence that they found.

‘Middlemarch’ is a novel of anthropology, of ethnography. It is an examination of society and the people in it. ‘Middlemarch’ is a novel about Dorothea and Lydgate. It is also a novel about Celia, Rosamond, Caleb, Peter, Will and all of the rest. Each in their own way lived in this society were affected by it and by living their lives perpetuated it. This is ‘Middelmarch’.

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