middlemarch (eliot)

Here is my earliest memory of Middlemarch. I was about 17. At boarding school. My parents owned a flat in a Georgian house which was within walking distance of the school. They didn’t live there. They lived in the Ruhr Valley. In my final year at school, I would spend a lot of time at the house. Mostly in the middle of the night, when I and a few friends would sneak out of the confines of school. We would sit around in he living room with its plush gold coloured carpet and heavy curtains. It was not a place of great partying. It was a place to escape from the school, feel independent. Hang out. I remember a boy called Frank Skelton, (his real name was Mark), an idiosyncratic individual with a curious worldview, who was always reading Middlemarch. He could never read more than five pages without it sending him to sleep. He would, I imagine, doze on the carpet, the penguin classic version open at the page he had reached. If our final school year had lasted another ten years I suppose he might have got to the end. 

I don’t remember reading the novel myself. I might have done. There was one passage, which is the passage where Ladislaw is lying on the carpet in front of the fire in Lydgate and Rosemary’s parlour, which I recognised with an absolute clarity. But it might have been that Frank had reached this page and read it to us, as we lay on the carpet, just as the Victorian Ladislaw did. The simple pleasures of life. 

“He was given to stretch himself at full length on the rug while he talked, and was apt to be discovered in this attitude by occasional callers for whom such an irregularity was likely to confirm the notions of his dangerously mixed blood and general laxity.”

I also remembered, as I made my way through Eliot’s epic during the Pandemic, that it reminded me of reading War and Peace, which I did whilst travelling across Latin America, on trains and buses in Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, finishing it around the time of the Uruguayan election in 2004.. Great books deserve a great backdrop. Middlemarch is undoubtably a great book, although I can understand some of the critical ambivalence that it provoked before it gained the unimpeachable place in the cannon that it now enjoys. There are elements of Middlemarch that feel like a high-end telenovela. It’s quietly turbulent, with cliffhanger chapter endings. The characters are mostly middle or upper class, struggling with what we might now call “first world” problems. Broken hearts, failed marriages, frustrated dreams of glory. Yet perhaps it is the very normality of these problems which lends the novel its glory. The worthy, headstrong Dorothea is a template for a new kind of woman, a gateway to feminism. Ladislaw and Lydgate, the two principle male characters, struggle with the ethical dimension of ‘money/ status’ versus ‘honour’.

In addition to which, it’s intriguing to see that Eliot is looking back thirty years, when she wrote this, to a time of great turbulence. “In the hundred to which Middlemarch belonged railways were as exciting a topic as the Reform Bill or the imminent horrors of Cholera, and those who held the most decided views on the subject were women and landholders.” Substitute the Reform Bill for Brexit and Cholera for C-19, railways for modern tech, and you have a world which, although two hundred years away, almost seems as though it could be talking about contemporary Britain. The world of the shires has changed less than we might have imagined. Eliot’s  nuanced understanding of psychology, which feels way ahead of its time, only goes to illustrate that psychology has been doing nothing except playing catch-up. People have always been fucked up, confused, uncertain in the face of a changing world. The fact that Freud & co invented a science to study this doesn’t mean that they invented the problems they sought to address. 

Eliot creates a fictional world wherein these issues are laid bare. Coupled with passages of writing which take the breath away. Her chapters stick to a rigid formula of dialogue and description, both psychological and natural. If one of the aims of writing is to remind us that the heartbeat of a human being has not altered in thousands of years, and those things which affect that heartbeat haven’t either, Middlemarch is a wonderful example of the novel’s capacity to remind of this fact, to permit us to dwell in a society which is so very distant to our own and so very close at the same time.