traced from their beginnings, gradually combining into a drama which gathers
intense human and moral interest. Themes emerge naturally out of believable fami-
lies and marriages, and final outcomes do not depend upon gratuitous interventions
from melodrama or authorial providence.Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is
set,like Felix Holt, in a Midlands manufacturing town towards 1832. It shows the
attrition of ideals by experience. The young, unworldly and ardent Dorothea
Brooke, against the advice of her uncle, sister and gentry connections, accepts the
Reverend Dr Isaac Casaubon, a dry middle-aged scholar, aspiring to serve him in his
life’s task, a ‘Key to All Mythologies’. Discovering that her husband is petty and that
he is secretly unsure of his great work, and will never complete it, she pities and cares
for him. He dies suddenly, leaving a will which shows his true meanness. The intel-
ligent Dr Tertius Lydgate, a medical pioneer, has been trapped into marrying the
town beauty, Rosamund Vincy, a manufacturer’s daughter hoping to rise out of
Middlemarch. She is not interested in his research but in the distinction of his social
origins. Rosamund has a beautiful neck, good manners, a strong will, a small mind
and a smaller heart. Established Middlemarch doctors make sure that Lydgate’s new
ideas do not prosper; the young couple come close to giving up the fine house he has
imprudently bought her – but are rescued by a loan. Lydgate, like Dorothea, is loyal
to a selfish spouse.
Casaubon’s lively young cousin, Will Ladislaw, a friend of Lydgate, admires
Dorothea, who is innocently friendly towards him. In his will, Casaubon forbids
Dorothea to marry Ladislaw on pain of losing her inheritance. Fred, the immature
brother of Rosamund, loves Mary Garth, daughter of a land agent, Caleb. The
Garths’ home has the love and integrity George Eliot valued from her childhood.
Mary is too sincerely religious to allow Fred to become a clergyman, a genteel profes-
sion,and Fre d joins Caleb to learn the land agent’s trade. Mrs Vincy’s sister is
married to the banker Bulstrode, a Calvinist hypocrite, who before coming to
Middlemarch and marrying Harriet Vincy, had made his pile by pawnbroking and
receipt of stolen goods in London, marrying the boss’s widow and defrauding her
gr andson, lost and supposed dead, but still alive. This turns out to be Will Ladislaw.
Bulstrode is blackmailed by Raffles, a reprobate, whom he allows to die by silently
varying Dr Lydgate’s instructions. But Raffles had talked, and Lydgate has innocently
accepted a loan from Bulstrode. When this reaches the gossips of Middlemarch, the
doctor is ruined along with the banker. Mrs Bulstrode stands by her husband. These
lives are baffled, but Dorothea gives up Casaubon’s money to marry Ladislaw.
We learn in a diminishing Finale that Fred and Mary marry and are good and
happy and live to be old if not rich. ‘Lydgate’s hair never became white’: he takes a
fashionable London practice which thrives, but ‘he always regarded himself as a fail-
ure’. Dying at fifty, he leaves Rosamund rich. She marries an elderly physician,
re garding her happiness as ‘a reward’. ‘But it would be unjust not to tell, that she
never uttered a word in depreciation of Dorothea, keeping in religious remembrance
the generosity which had come to her aid in the sharpest crisis of her life.’ Will
becomes a Liberal MP for Middlemarch, and Dorothea a wife, mother and minor
benefactress – one who performs the ‘little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of
kindness and of love’ which Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey calls ‘that best portion of
a good man’s life’. Dorothea is a good woman who lived in a society which did not
allow her to make the great contribution her nature sought, a point made in the
Prelude to Middlemarch with a comparison to the career of St Theresa of Avila, and
repeated in the Finale:304 10 · FICTION