Middlemarch

1872, 1964 Signet Classics edition
George Eliot
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
Original and purchase price unknown
Falling apart paperback
B+

The whole time I was reading Shirley, I kept thinking, "Middlemarch did this so much better."  By "this" I meant romance, friendship, family, community, and history of an era about 40 years previous to its time, including both the reaction of workers to the Industrial Revolution and the dilemma of young middle-class women.  Middlemarch is like a very intelligent soap opera, with its interwoven tales of the lives in a slightly pre-Victorian (1829 to 1832) mid-sized Midlands town.  After 800 pages, we know who many of the citizens are, what they think and feel, what they do for a living, who they love and hate, and in some cases what they eat and wear.

I described the two romances in Shirley as "icky."  I can't say that all of the four romances in Middlemarch are appealing, but they're much more complex and believable.  Eliot even musters sympathy for Mr. Casaubon, the dry-as-dust first husband of idealistic Dorothea.  The young widow goes on to fall in love with and marry Will Ladislaw, whom Frank Kermode in his afterword sees as a "failure" by the author.  I remember Kate Millett in Sexual Politics saying that Dorothea deserves a better fate than just being secretary to her husbands.  The thing is, Dorothea doesn't have a lot of options, and she doesn't have the right personality to change the world as she wishes.  She draws plans of housing for the poor, and yet she's never studied architecture.  I'm not crazy about Will either-- it always annoys the heck out of me that he does "Hello, I must be going" for two or three hundred pages-- but he probably is the best option in town, particularly since Dr. Lydgate is taken.

Almost as soon as Lydgate is introduced, he makes a disclaimer to the reader that beautiful but earnest Dorothea isn't his type.  He prefers and marries beautiful but shallow Rosamond.  Since they both have champagne taste on a beer income (or maybe cider?), they get into debt.  She only makes matters worse by trying to get help from the wrong people.  The narrator/Eliot doesn't have much sympathy for her, partly because she has a swan-like neck (more about this when I get up to Daniel Deronda), and even blames her for her miscarriage.  In the end, saintly Dorothea reconciles them, although they're never really a happy couple, as the "Finale" informs us.

On the other hand, Mary and Fred "may be seen in white-haired placidity," even now in 1872.  She's so plain that her mother-in-law Mrs. Vincy is relieved that only one of the three grandsons "favors the Garths."  Mary is also sharp-tongued, like her own mother, who ironically always speaks in favor of the submission of women to men, particularly husbands.  Mary's father though is the easiest-going man in the novel, except for maybe Mr. Cadwallader, the rector.  Even when Mr. Garth quits a job on moral grounds, he's incredibly nice about it.

He quits the job because of the great hypocrisy of Mr. Bulstrode.  In the thread about Bulstrode, and how it affects Lydgate, we see the effect of rumours in a town.  This isn't just the villagers chatting at the pub in Silas Marner.  This is gossip by everyone everywhere, and it can ruin lives.

As for the historical aspect of the novel, Eliot convincingly recreates the world of her preteens.  We see how common people reacted to the coming of the railway.  We see how the upper class reacted to reform.  And we see what law, medicine, and religion were like in rural England.  Amusingly, auctioneers apparently haven't changed in the past two centuries, since Trumbull's patter is instantly recognizable.

I'm also amused that, like Little Women, there's a Mr. Brooks/Brooke and a "Dodo."  While Mr. Brooks is a "poor" tutor turned hard-working businessman, Mr. Brooke is a talkative dilettante who thinks he's an intellectual and a wily politician.  "Dodo" is the name that Jo March's niece and nephew call her by, while here it's Celia's nickname for her sister Dorothea.  Does this imply that both Dodos are of extinct types?  Dorothea's nickname for Celia is "Kitty," which doesn't even come close, like Catherine sort of does.  I think it's more because of Celia's persona, since the narrator compares her to a kitten at one point and she has a "guttural" voice.

This being Signet Classics, there are of course typos, although not as bad as sometimes.  I did notice two instances where a line of text is out of place.