Middlemarch (George Eliot, 1871)
Middlemarch was recently voted best British novel of all time. I’ve always figured that it was too heavy, with its 900 pages of English 1830s provincial life. Having no real prior experience of reading Victorian novels, I decided I must take up the challenge of this book.
Middlemarch is divided in eight books, and was published in installments, as was fashionable at the time. Many of the chapters begin with an epigraph or quotation, from the likes of Chaucer, Robert Burton and Dante. Reading a book written in the 1870s set in the 1830s is like being on a bridge back in time. I don’t usually veer outside of the 20th or 21st century in my reading, but for a historically minded reader like me, it was quite exhilarating (in its own little way).
I won’t bother going in to the plot that much, but the book is about young Dorothea Brooke, who marries an older scholar, in the hopes that it will provide her with intellectual stimulation. This turns out not to be the case, and the marriage is a failure. A lot of the events of the book revolve around the theme of disappointment. I could even guess that the title of the book is meant to recall middling living, and the acceptance of failure. It might also suggest the middle of England and the middle of life. It is quite a good title for the book. The idea of the book came to Eliot (whose real name was Mary Anne Evans, but as young readers might not realize she published under a male pseudonym due to prejudices in 19th century society) after having lived a number of years in the middle English town of Nuneaton in Coventry. In fact, the book is a quite astute sociological portrait of town life with the interactions of the bankers, the doctors, the lawyers and the farmers. The idea of a book as a portrait of a town was merged with another novel idea of Eliot’s, which is the story of Dorothea.
Reading the book gave me a deeper understanding of 19th century Britain. A linguistic note: a common expression in the book was “by Jove”, which I felt compelled to investigate the etymology of. Apparently Jove is connected to the PIE word for sky and God, that we recognize in words like Dieu and Jupiter. Jupiter is Jove-pater, i.e. sky-father. Fascinating stuff.
Kinship of all Species 