For these past few months , in the evenings after work and on major parts of the weekends, i have been traveling to 19th century England , to the provincial town of Middlemarch , by the enchanting words of George Eliot. I severely miss these trips now that i have finished reading this book .
I wish i could say that I thoroughly enjoyed it from the very beginning. Far from it. The narrative was at first so ridiculously hard to follow, with sentences beginning at the top of a kindle page and seeming to end only at the corner of the next. The characters seemed ordinary and boring or "provincial", to borrow the more sophisticated word from the subtitle of the book - a study of provincial life.
Romance as always has the quality to propel the most ordinary of stories forward. And in this epic we read about as many as three of them. The many small stories in this book are set in the times of the rich landed gentry who seemed to do absolutely no work other than inherit land from their fathers. They extracted handsome incomes by collecting rent from the tenant farmers who worked on their land and by taking a major portion of the profit from the sale of the farm's produce. And in all the time that is left to them, they tried to find sources of amusement, primary of which was to attend social gatherings where the men played cards and the women sat around and gossiped. It seemed necessary for these gentle folk to get a decent education mainly to sound profound in the conversations at such gatherings. And perhaps to attract a person of the opposite gender of an equally high standing in the society so that a marriage would result in a growth of the association with high 'connections'. The working class families are generally looked down upon and it was considered shameful to have an ancestor or a living relative who had to work for a living.
In such a setting we are introduced to Dorothea Brooke, an orphan who along with her sister, lives with her uncle. She is the main character in this book and from what I have read on Wikipedia, George Eliot was considering naming the book 'Miss Brooke'. Dorothea is unconventional by most standards of this society. She finds no pleasure in things most young ladies her age enjoy. She does not care for new and fashionable dresses and thinks of bright and beautiful jewelry as indecencies . Yet she condones these petty fancies in her sister Celia and the two share a sisterly bond despite being entirely different from each other. Dorothea is deeply religious and believes in a higher purpose for life, beyond taking pleasure in superficial mundanities . Whereas Celia thinks that having too many " scruples and notions " prevents one from doing anything at all. The more beautiful of the two, Dorothea is oblivious to the advances of a rich, young gentleman and speaks to him earnestly about her plans to improve the lives of the laborers in her uncle's farm about whose living conditions her uncle finds it hardly worth worrying about.
More in contrast to Dorothea than her sister is Rosamund Vincy, daughter of the town’s mayor, the most beautiful woman in the town with the prettiest of manners. She doesn’t know of any young man she’s met who hadn’t immediately fallen in love with her and finds the men of Middlemarch truly dull and vulgar in their baseness. She is not used to having any of her wishes unfulfilled and could not care less for things such as the economy and managing money. She seems to want to show the people of Middlemarch, all her neighbors and acquaintances that she’s far superior to any of them and is confident that she would at last be relieved from the tedium of dull company by a successful marriage.This is not to say that Rosamund is the an antagonist in this story. The author takes us through her life in such a way that the reader completely understands some of Rosamund's irrationality.
Then we have Mary Garth who is virtuous without effort. She is raised by honest and hardworking parents and is not particularly good looking. She is the sort of person who is always in the shadow of a prettier woman . She cannot afford the luxury of an idle life and takes up a job as the helping hand for her ailing uncle, to help her parents to send her younger brothers to school. Her rich uncle treats her as nothing more than a maid and even though he has no children of his own and nothing left in the world to care for, he does not offer to help Mary’s family, who in turn are far too righteous to think that they deserve any help only by right of being related to him.
The book tells the story of these women, the lives they lead and the choices they make. Thrown in the society of these dissimilar ladies are, Mr Casaubon, an erudite aging clergyman whose book on the key to all mythologies has been a work in progress for as long as he can remember , Dr Lydgate, a young and passionate medical practitioner who hopes to discover the next big thing in medicine, Fred Vincy, an idler who is hopeful of inheriting a large estate by the death of his uncle, Will Ladislaw, who is slightly outlandish, is very intelligent but is in no hurry to find a steady profession, Mr Farebrother, a well-liked parson who has an interest in entomology and wishes he had chosen a different profession.
The story of Middlemarch touches upon the introduction of the Reform Bill in the British parliament that sought to make drastic changes in its electoral system and the laying of the first railway lines in the country. Both are opposed by the general public and one realizes that regardless of which century of humans are under consideration , their first instinct on something new and unfamiliar is to think it hostile.
My favorite take away from this book , apart from the enjoyable time spent with it, is this line that highlights the importance of the ordinary:
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts. Things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
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