Ideas - George Eliot's invaluable lessons on how we treat others

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

Virginia Woolf called George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch “one of the few English books written for grownups.” It’s a book full of characters asking: is it a good thing to live a life of duty, or is it ridiculous? Even after 150 years since the book was published, it provides up-to-date lessons in how to live a modern life. *This is part one or two-part series. It originally aired on April 6, 2022.

This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God and in the face of this congregation. Consider the happy ending you find in old books. A Jane Austen novel usually ends with a wedding. To join together this man and this woman. Or in pride and prejudice, two weddings. And this man and this woman. Happily ever after, and ever after.

That's standard fair for the Victorian novel. Always better times ahead. But what to make of another novel of the 19th century? An 800-page monster that starts with a courtship and a wedding and then watches it all unravel from there? I first read Middlemarch as an undergraduate. It was a gift from my mother. Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch the first book for grown-up people.

First of all, it's a novel that does not have one major character. It has several. I didn't love it at first, which is funny, because I love it so much now. It's really committed to the idea that every one of those characters potentially could be the central character. Middlemarch, a study of provincial life by George Elliott, was published in eight installments in 1871 and 1872, 150 years ago this year. It's set in a fictional English town called Middlemarch,

a stand-in for the real town of Coventry, where George Elliott had lived as a teenager. The primary driver of her characters is this kind of ambition to change the world in some way. The book has a series of metaphors that reverberate with this idea that we consider ourselves

to be the center of our own universe. You know, what is it? Like we mortals, men and women devour many disappointment between breakfast and supper. And when we do that, we're doomed to failure and unhappiness. Yes, there are weddings.

Ah, I quite forgot. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the toast. The happy couple. But the heart of the book is what happens after the wedding, real life, or experiments in life, as George Elliott called the stories wound together in Middlemarch. And what George Eliot does is she gives us a very bad marriage from the very beginning of the book. This is the first of a two-part series we're calling Love and Consequences, George Elliott's Middle March,

a book that excavates happiness and unhappiness. a realist novel that could help us confront reality 150 years after it was written. This series is presented by Tom Jokinen. Let's see, Elliot. Google says Elliot Page, Elliot Ness. Elliot Spitzer, Governor resigns in disgrace. Here we go, George Elliott.

Desert Island Books. This one is in Volt. or what is it about Middlemarch by so-and-so? Good question. What is it about Middlemarch? Over here, YouTube and TikTok, hashtag Middlemarch. Here's a surprise. The book bloggers.

It's trending. Okay. This is wild. Hope this is working. You see, if I can adjust this mic. I don't know if Middlemarch is going to have to have a happy. ending. Middlemarch, a study of provincial life. There is something sad and unfulfilled, as I will say a million times. Spot on, Emily. As some of you may know, Middlemarch was the

top book on my Victober TBR, and I just finished it 24 hours ago, so I'm coming in hot. I hereby renounce Middlemarch. I cannot believe that I got through four years of an English major. And no one thought to tell me that George Elliott was a woman? George Eliot was, of course, the pen name of Marianne Evans. She borrowed the name from her common-law husband, George Henry Lewis. Explain the plot of your favorite story with the beginning and end, but use long story short for all the important stuff. A very strong-willed girl marries a rich old man so she can leave her hometown.

Long story short, she ends up marrying his cousin once he died. When George Lewis dies, she marries a man named John Cross, 20 years her junior. On her honeymoon in Venice, her new husband jumps out of a hotel window into the canal. Nobody knows why. Happy Victober guys. Read Middlemarch. Have a great time. Let me know what you think. And see you soon. The characters in Middlemarch are layered. They're both right and wrong at the same time. It's been described as a book of advanced conflict, and yet it's never been made into a feature movie.

There seems to be so much that is trivial about our life. There is this, a BBC television series from 1994. My education has been so imperfect. But with that one, most of Elliot's roughest and most interesting edges are smoothed down with soft lenses and a piling on of plot exposition through dialogue. to be wonderful to be engaged in some great work as you are. It is a great challenge to bring together all that major disciplines, theology, philosophy, cosmology, springs from the same ultimate source.

But it's fine binge-watching, maybe over a cup of tea. There are at least 60 characters who appear by name in Middlemarch, and one unnamed character, a farmer who Dorothea sees from her window one day. Dr. Lydgate. It's Vinci. I fear you must find us awfully dull in Middlemarch. So where to start? Well, Middlemarch is the story of a community,

the web of all of these different people and relationships and events. And there's all of these different plots. But what seems to really interest Elliot is how the plots intersect with each other. My name is Laura Gerke, and I am a PhD student in English at the University of Washington in Seattle. I'm Rebecca Mead. I'm a staff writer at The New Yorker, and I'm the author of my life in Middlemarch. Tell me about reading it for the first time. What were the circumstances and what was your experience? I was 17 years old the first time I read Middlemarch. I grew up in a provincial town in England and wanted to go away to college, and I read it then, and I was completely seized by it and loved it. I'm Nicholas Dames, and I'm a professor of English and comparative literature.

at Columbia University in New York City. I was 21 years old, and I'll confess it really was, I mean, maybe disappointing is not quite the right word, but it sort of passed me by. I mean, I finished it, but it passed me by without leaving any tremendous impression on me in some weird way.

It was as if I'd almost forgotten what had happened a month after finishing it. I'd heard Miss Vincey was a musician. I confess I hadn't expected she would be quite so talented. Best in Middlemarch, I'll be bound. Middlemarch is not a very high standard, Uncle. It seemed like a little bit of a trudge. How do you arrange your documents?

Pigeon holes, partly. Ah, pigeonhills will not do. I never know whether a paper is in A or Z. I wish you would let me sort your papers for you, Uncle. I would letter them all. And then make a list of subjects under each letter. The first time I read it, I was in my late teens. And so Middlemarch in my late teens was very much focused around

the story of Dorothea and her ardent longing for a glorious, ambitious life that meant something. And if I say in my turn that I have longed for some great purpose in my life which would give it shape and meaning, you do not find such an aspiration ridiculous. Surprising perhaps in what's so young, but not ridiculous. No. I'm Fenula Dilan and I'm Professor of 19th century literature at University College Dublin, Ireland.

Well, well, he's not such a bad fellow, after all. The circumstances had to do with the fact I have a grand aunt who was a nun in Wales. He used to pilfer books out of the libraries from me there when they were finished with them. And she sent me Mill on the Floss when I was 14, George Elliott's 1816 novel. It has a terrible ending, as I'm sure you know, Maggie, the heroine, drowns in a flood in the river. And so I was set up for disappointment with George Eliot from a very. very early age, that what you're getting with her is not what you expect of 19th century novels in the Jane Austen style with their happy endings and their resolved marriages

and they're coming together of everything towards a kind of a comfortable economic and emotional end. Friends, a few brief words on this happy occasion. I met together to celebrate the betrothal of my dear niece, Dorothea, to my good and learned friend, the Reverend Edward, Casabon and to share that happiness. The book has a series of metaphors that reverberate with this idea that we consider ourselves to be the center of our own universe, and when we do that, we're doomed to failure and unhappiness. So much of what the novel is about is failure of one's initial projects or hopes for oneself,

and then this sort of aftermath of that failure, which is what do you do next? And I was still very much in the stage where I was still very attached to my projects and was much more interested in novels that are a little bit more, either heroic or tragic about those initial plans for oneself. You know, and Middle March is neither heroic nor tragic, in a way. It really charts this kind of middle course. I'm compiling a key to all mythologies, Ms. Brooke. I'm seeking to elucidate those elements which underpin every system of belief known to man.

It's not perhaps a subject of great interest to young ladies. I read it fairly young, I guess, in my late teens. And when I first encountered it, I suppose I saw it very much as Dorothea's story. But I think it's a book I've come back to throughout my whole life every four or five years, just to throw myself back into it. And every time I see it from a different point of view or I see a different character in it whose version of the story I feel in a really different way, I think. To me, that seems like a wonderful endeavor.

Well, you're very kind, Miss Brock. I'm much encouraged. I'm Ruth Livesey, and I'm head of the English Department at Royal Holloway University of London in the UK. A couple of the relationships, like between Dorothy and Will and Fred and Mary. If you won't give me any encouragement, I shall just get worse. I won't give you any encouragement. There's so much going on.

It would be a disgrace if I accepted a man who got into debt and wouldn't work. You know, my relationship to this novel and to the Victorian novel in particular is a little bit belated because I always felt myself a little bit intimidated by Elliot and so I read it for the first time maybe in my early 20s and then kept coming back to the novel

and every reading experience is a different one. My name is Ranjani Chatterjee and I'm affiliate assistant professor at Concordia University in Montreal and I'm the editor of a forthcoming edition of the Norton Critical Middle March. Each of us knows that we must die. But when we must grasp it as a certainty,

even the most devout must feel a certain terror. Yes, I'm sure you're right. First of all, it's a novel that does not have one major character. It has several. It's really committed to the idea that every one of those characters potentially could be the central character, where we're constantly being asked not to oversimpathize with one figure, but to spread our sympathies around or just have a capaciousness of imagination that would say to us, what if we saw this from this other person's point of view? So as an 18-year-old, you're with Dorothea and Lydgett, and you think that that's where the story is

going, as did George Elliott's original readers as they waited for the next installment. And she takes you on another journey. My thanks once again, sir, a most delightful occasion in every way. Well, you know, Casabon, I'm very fond of my niece. It's fonder than I can say. And the second thing I think that Mark said out is that each of these characters, they're not dominated by the question of who they're going to marry, who they've fallen in love with, or even an attempt to sort of rise in class. Even that's not at the center of their lives. For most of the characters here, what's at the center of their lives is something like

an idea they have about not just how they want to lead their lives, but how they think they will make the world better. Sometimes they're political, sometimes they're scientific, sometimes they're scholarly, but they're committed to a set of ideas. And then they have to kind of live out the collision that happens when they try to bring that idea out in the world. What are the, one of the limitations of your ability to do that. You know, these characters have not just an inner life that's full of, you know, desire, but an inner life that's full of thinking. Many men would call Middlemarch a backwater.

It's ideal for my purposes. And then living through what is almost inevitably going to be the complete or partial failure of the ability to change the world in the way you thought you would. I believe you'd like to make Middlemarch a model for all England to follow. That's exactly what I want to do. I think why the book continues to be renewed for people at different stages in their life is that her focalising lens, whether it's on Dorothea's ardor in your teens

or on failing marriages in your 30s and 40s, rise out of the text for you as a reader. They rise out of the novel for you as a reader because, as Rebecca Miedas put it, the novel is reading you as much as you are reading the novel. What I mean is that it's a book that you can go back to, and every time you go back to it, it will have something new to say to you. her life was just now full of hope and action she was not only thinking of her plans but getting down books from the library and reading many things hastily all the while being visited with a conscientious questioning whether she were not exulting these poor doings with that self-satisfaction which was the last doom of ignorance and folly

There seems to be so much that is trivial about our lives here. And I'm so very ignorant. My education has been so imperfect. There's so much to do. So much to learn. You're truly interested in scholarship, then? Oh, yes. I think it could be boiled down to something like four plots

that start as relatively separate. strands and then kind of knit themselves together. All of them set in and around a bustling but still fairly small agricultural town in the very middle of England. Those four plots are first a young woman named Dorothea Brooke who lives with her uncle, who is her guardian. She wants to make the lives of the people who live in Middle March better. She wants to do good in the world. Very young, beautiful in a kind of inwardly directed or intense way, who, I think is interested in something we might now call like social justice. She wants to change the world and particularly ameliorate the conditions of the tenants

of her uncle's estate. It's terrible the way we live in ease while we let our tenants rot in pig size. We deserve to be beaten out of our beautiful houses with a scourge of small cords. You think that? Yes, I do. You have your own opinion about everything, Miss Brooke. Do you know, I envy you. that. But she thinks her route to doing good may be through marrying this man who has a much

larger stage upon which to act than she does. So you have the story of Dorothea, young, idealistic, passionate, rich Dorothea, who seemingly throws herself away on a marriage to the old clergyman and scholar Mr. Casabon. And she is about to make, when the novel starts, is just about to make a kind of disastrous marriage, but one that she enters into with a lot of idealism to a much older clergyman and scholar. I am very grateful to Mr. Casabon. If he makes me an offer, I shall accept him. Casabon, ah.

Well, he's a... But you know, he's over 5 and 40 in his health's not strong. Marriage can be a noose, my dear. And you're fond of your own opinion. Uncle, I don't want a husband of my own age. He should be above me in judgment, an experience, knowledge. And I know I must expect trials. Casabon, I mean, presents to her as a kind of escape from the narrowness of her upper-class law.

He's a genteel clergyman, but also primarily a scholar. He thinks of himself as a scholar, that is. He's writing this book called The Key Tall Mythologies. May I know what it is, Mr. Casabon? I'm compiling a key. to all mythologies, Miss Brock. I'm seeking to elucidate those elements which underpin every system of belief known to man.

To me, that seems like a wonderful endeavour. Well, you're very kind, Miss Brock. I'm much encouraged. Mr. Casabon is a man who's completely ancient, i.e. over 40 at the beginning of this novel, and has lived a single life up until that point in time. His real interests are academic, even though he's a vicar, a rector of a parish, and has quite big responsibilities.

He's a comparative mythologist, I guess we would now say. He's interested in discovering this sort of set of er myths that all cultures have derived their myths from. And he really wants success in publishing his great book and has spent a lifetime accumulating notebook after notebook of notes and writing small pieces, but he can never get around to finishing his great book, researching the history of myth and trying to find one story that underlies it all, his key to all mythologies. Sothe now, do you know Sothe at all, Casabon?

I have a present little leisure for modern literature. I live too much with the dead, perhaps. Casabon's engaged upon a great work, you know. Isn't that so, Casabon? I believe I am, yes. Perhaps too great a work for the mind of one man to compass. That's what she wants. she wants. He knows Greek. He's a real scholar. She's not had a chance to do that and feel

she has a capacity to do it. But the only way she can get near it is through being the help meet of a great man. So she tells Kazabon he's a great man and can she come and sit at his feet and help him complete his great work. And he, of course, decides this is now time for him to get married, finally in his 40s, to this beautiful young woman who's not yet even turned 20. And that's why Dorothy is a natural candidate for him. She is very idealistic and she seems very willing to invest that idealism in his work. The problem is, of course, that she's also extremely intelligent. So shortly after getting to know him, shortly after their marriage gets underway, she already is beginning to detect the real limits to what he's devoted his

life to and to his real limits. The second he notices that, the second he notices that his wife sees his limitations, he can only resent her. And he's been working on this book for years and years and years. But that project has a ton of limitations to it. He simply doesn't know enough to write a book like this. This book is like dead on arrival. And he's aware of it just enough to want to repress that knowledge. But when he's looking for a wife, he's looking for someone and

other words, who's going to naively think that this project is the greatest thing ever, who's going to protect him a little bit, that is, from the knowledge that actually this book is already a failure, even though it's not even done yet. There is Dorothea, who is full of intellectual zeal and ideals, but what choices does she have as a woman in the period in which she's born there at the early 19th century? The choice she has really is who does she marry? and she makes one of the worst choices one could possibly make in that decision and experiences the worst honeymoon in the whole history of literature as far as I'm concerned

and realizes she's made a terrible mistake. He is not a brilliant man and he is not a generous man and he's not a man who's able to take her into his life and share his life. So she very quickly is disillusioned and extremely disappointed and she's stuck. And so she starts to feel like she's wasted. her life by tying herself to somebody who's wasting his life. You have shown me these notebooks. You have often spoken about them.

You've often said that they need to be condensed. But I have never heard you speak of the writing that is to be published. I only begged you to let me be of some good to you. She keeps on saying, well, when are you going to publish your book? When are you going to get any nearer finishing something and actually seeing it to press? And for him, this is a confrontation of his worst fears. suddenly he's got a critic at home there on the half, asking him why he's not met his deadlines.

My love, I think you may rely upon me to know the times and the seasons, the different stages of a work which is not to be measured by the superficial judgment of ignorant onlookers. The judgment was a bit of a simple. It had been easy for me to gain some temporary effect, but it is ever the trial of the scrupulous explorer

to be saluted by the impatient scorn of chatterers who attempt only the smallest achievement, but being indeed equipped for no other. My judgment was a very superficial one, Edward. What else could it be? When have I ever consulted my own pleasure before yours? Dorothy, are you hasty? No, it is you who are hasty in your false suppositions about my feelings.

Well, let us say no more upon this subject. I have neither the leisure nor the energy for this kind of debate. The wonderful thing that George Elliott does in this novel, is that she undermines or subverts really the conventions of the marriage plot, which had become indeed very conventional in the 19th century. And what George Eliot does is she gives us a very bad marriage from the very beginning of the book. You're listening to the first of a two-part series called Love and Consequences, George Eliot's Middlemarch, by Conduct.

contributor Tom Jokinen. Ideas is heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. You can also find ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyed. Ah, here he comes, and at last, the man of the moment. Dr. Lydgate, this is my niece, Miss Rosamund, Vinci. How do you do, Miss Vincy? Dorothy's story dominates the novel Middlemarch,

but there are so many other strands in the web. The co-star, if you will, is the young doctor with big ideas, and, like Dorothea, bad instincts. when it comes to marriage. The same time you have the story of Dr. Lydgate, who is like Dorothea, idealistic and young and plans to change the world through his medical reforms, and he moves into town and has all of these grand plans. Dr. Littgate, will you do me the great favor of walking across to the bank with me?

The plans for the new hospital are ready for your inspection. Are they good? Good. Of course. Excuse us. The second plot is about a young doctor who enters town at around the same time. And this young Dr. Lydgate is from outside of town, but has chosen this town called Middlemarch as a place where he thinks he's going to change how modern medicine works. And then he marries Rosamund Vincey, who's beautiful and well-behaved and ladylike, and he thinks she's the perfect adornment for his life. Dr. Lidgate.

It's Vincy. I fear you must find us awfully dull in Middlemarch. When I think of how we must seem, one looked at through your eyes, I think we must seem. very stupid. You've lived embarrassed. I've only been once to London. Just a raw country girl, you see. You call yourself a raw country girl? Oh, well I pass at Middlemarch, but I'm really afraid of you. Well, I've made up my mind to take Middlemarch as it comes. I'm sure you have nothing to feel. But then it turns out that she has different kinds of ambitions than he does, and her ambitions involve a high place in society,

and putting on a show with a beautiful house and carriage and clothes. I would like us to remove to London, or perhaps to bar. Middle March has more interest to me. We have the opportunity to make the town and its hospital, a model in medical care that the whole of Europe might envy. And they end up in debt, and this interferes with his plans for his medical reforms. And these might seem like completely separate stories,

except that it's also Dr. Lydgate, who is caring for Mr. Cossabon. Mr. Cazabon? Dr. Lidgett. not implied to me that my symptoms are those of a fatal disease, but where it's so, such knowledge would be very useful to me. Mr. Casabon. With diseases of the heart, it is particularly difficult to predict with certainty. You may live a comfortable life for another 15 years, but it is my duty to tell you that death is often sudden. And so he's the one who ends up advising Dorothea about what she should do.

Each of us knows that we must die, but when we must grasp it as a certainty, even the most devout must feel a certain terror. Yes, I'm sure you're right. And it's Dorothea who ends up helping Rosamond in the time when Rosamond needs help. I have spoken to Sir James Chatham and Mr. Brooke. They all believe in your husband. That will cheer you, will it not? That will give you courage?

I did not think that he would be so kind. And then Rosamond ends up telling Dorothea what's happening with Ladislaw because he's Mr. Kasabon's relative and also kind of friends with Rosamond. He told me that he loved another woman and could never respond to me. He said yesterday that no other woman existed for him beside you. The third plot is the town mayor in his family. He has a son named Fred, Fred Vincy. I've always been a huge Fred Vincy fan.

Who's smart, but not particularly reliable and contracts debts that he can't pay off and is potentially because of those debts going to lose out on the opportunity of marrying his childhood sweetheart. And what about Fred? What is it about Fred that appeals to you? Well, I think he makes such terrible decisions all the time, but at the same time, he cares so deeply about Mary. We'll never be good for anything, Mary, unless I know you love me.

My father says an idle man not to exist, much less be married. He's a bit of a cad, not because he actually disregards the feelings of others, just because he has no idea how his actions affect anyone. I'm. Toast, potted beef. Is there nothing else for breakfast, Pritchard? Should you like eggs, sir? Eggs? No, bring me a grilled bone. Yes, sir. Daily, Fred, I don't see why brothers have to be so disagreeable.

Disagreable is a word that describes your feelings, Rosie, not my actions. I think it describes the smell of a grilled bird. Not at all. He gets to grow up over the course of the book, and I just found him charming. Rebecca Shopta in New York. She wrote and filmed a web series of Middlemarch for YouTube in 2017. But we're not done yet with the thicket of characters in the book. Mr. Paul Strode.

Ah. Good day to you, Mr. Fairbrunner. And then lastly, you have the town banker. The banker, Mr. Ballstrode. Very, very strenuous evangelical figure. He thinks he's left his rather unsavory pass behind him. thinks he's going to use his authority in the town to become an instrument of God's will. But his past comes back to life in the form of a drunken menace called Raffles

who comes and finds him and blackmails him. What do you want? Just to see you, Nick, oh boy. Talk about the good old times and share a little in your good fortune. Why did you return from America? You were paid inadequate son to remain there. It didn't suit me to remain there, Nick. And as the novel progresses, you discover.

some things about his past that indicate that there's a kind of constitutive hypocrisy to this person and to how he thinks of himself as an instrument of God's will. Wake up, sir. You'll be silent, sir, and hear what I have to say. My carriage will be here in ten minutes at seven o'clock, and I shall conduct you as far as illesly myself. I will furnish you with a reasonable sum, but if you present yourself here, here again. If you return

to Middlemarch, if you use your tongue against me, you will have to live on such fruits as your malice can bring me. I know the worst you can do against me and I shall brave it if you dare to thrust yourself on me again. Now get up, sir, and do as I order you, or I shall send for the constable

to take you off my premises. Oh. quite clear how he made his money that enabled him to become this very influential banker. And it turns out only when he starts becoming blackmailed by a sort of, you know, low-level criminal figure from his past, turns out that we learned that Bullsdard made his money through what's essentially an act of fraud. And it does become a kind of question to what extent he's going to go to be able to keep that a secret. And to what extent he excuses himself for it. He's done a kind of bit of divine money laundering because by putting this money

to good uses, to charitable uses, to religious uses, he's excused the crime with which it all started. And Caleb Garth ends up working for Sir James Chedham, who was previously along with Dorothea. Engaged. To Casabon. God, it's horrible. It's very vexing, James. You've seen the man, mother. What business has a shriveled old bachelor like that to marry a young girl. He has one foot in the grave. He means to take it out again, I suppose. So all of the stories intersect, and that is really what Middlemarch is about. There's several layers and complex plots that unfold themselves.

My allegiances to particular characters are the degree to which I feel like I'm similar to or can understand a character. It'll switch over the course of the book. But really, we follow the story of Ligate and Dorothea through from beginning to some sort of ending as they move into middle age. All those things are separate. And yet, over the course of the novel, they all begin to have kind of mutual implications with each other. They can't avoid becoming entangled in each other's plots. And so in a sense, the novel is the story of that entanglement, how all these things can never remain separate. And all of these projects, particularly something like Lydgate's project to renovate medicine,

Bolstrowd's project to lead a kind of religious awakening, Dorothea's project, to change the relation between landlords and tenants. in this town and maybe by extension, England at large, all of those are going to be doomed to failure. And a whole set of subsidiary projects with subsidiary characters, all of those are going to come unraveled. And the question after the middle of the novel is, all right, what next? Let's talk about her Elliott's story a little bit because I want to see where this comes from. I mean, this kind of sophisticated complex thinking about relationships and how people get along with or don't get along or misunderstand each other. What do we know about her story?

She was the third child, and the youngest child of a man named Robert Evans, who was a land agent for a wealthy family in the area, roughly speaking, of Coventry. Her mother had died when she was 16, so she's, you know, her sort of late adolescence and early adulthood is spent living just with her father. Her father was in a somewhat conventional but very serious way, quite religious. George Elliott grew up a Christian, but she lost her faith later in her life when she came to analyze and think hard intellectually about what was being demanded of her to believe the miracles of Christianity. The key moment that people always turn to in her early biography is the fact that at 21, she announces that she is going to give up religion. She's no longer a Christian,

despite the fact that she'd actually really followed her father in her adolescence by being a quite enthusiastic and proto-evangelical believer. But she has this massive, not just change of heart, but change of mind. I mean, it's an intellectual conversion for her. And her father was devastated by this. It led to a real rift with her father. She rejected the kind of supernatural claims of Orthodox Christianity. But I do think that she saw value in the community.

that religion brought and in the moral impulse that it gives people. You know, I think that's always such a fascinating thing to me. The willpower must have taken, not just to break away from a particular kind of community, but to break away from her only parent. And as a young woman, at that point, no way to earn money for herself, no means of independent subsistence. you know, the courage of that intellectual conviction, and knowing full well that the problems it was going to cause her were not actually in the long run going to be solvable.

But also, I think, just the very decision she made to leave her hometown and to leave the surroundings of her youth and move to London without a real sense of what she was going to be able to do and very quickly make a success for herself as an editor in one of the major, intellectual periodicals at the time. That's a tremendous courage. So tell me a bit about that, the grown-up George Eliot. Yeah. I mean, I think that the primary fact about the grown-up George Elliott that colored the vast majority of her adult life is that she was in her early 30s. She meets, by that point, somewhat well-known public intellectual figure named G.H. Lewis, and they began living together, despite the fact that Lewis was still married. Lewis was in what

we would now call a kind of open marriage with his wife. He and his wife, though, lived apart. They had three children that they raised separately, but somehow in tandem. His wife, in fact, was already living with another man, with the artist Lee Hunt, and had had already four children with his other man. Elliot decides that she and Louis fall in love and decide to live together essentially as husband and wife. And that really heterodox living arrangement meant that she was a pariah. it cut her off from so much society, this decision. I'm paying a lot of attention to the fact that she did get away, that Middle March is set in a version of Coventry,

as I say, in the early part of the 19th century, a town that she lived close to and then lived in, just at some of the periods where some of the great structural transformations, the coming of the railways, great political reforms that we see staged in the novel were happening. But despite herself coming from a much more kind of lowly social background than the characters in the novel in many ways. She did have access to education and opportunities

meant she left for London and had a career as a journalist and made choices that seem almost unthinkable in the world of the novel. You know and I know that a great change is sweeping this country and not before time. Now, as never before,

we have the chance to free ourselves from the crushing yoke of the past, I am not by bloody revolution or by civil war, but peacefully by humane reform. Is that not good news? Undoubtedly, the richness of quotations and epigraphs and philosophical thinking that underlie Middle March were shaped by her decades reviewing the latest works,

reading Darwin, exploring with George Henry Lewis, natural history and the sciences on the coasts and helping him with his work there, reading in the emergent science of psychology as well as philosophy. These are all things that are threaded through Middle March. And I suppose when we think of this period in the 19th century, it's important to remember that they weren't really distinct academic disciplines in the way we'd think about them now, that George Henry Lewis was a journalist, but he also was sort of an early psychologist and a natural historian,

and Elliot herself wrote across many fields. So we can think of this period as a kind of pre-disciplinary era in which the novel is doing work that might later be associated with philosophy or psychology and equally psychological writers are using bits of fiction to explore the science of the mind. So there's a much more fluid interchange between disciplines that are now kept in different ologies and those of us in English department separate from everyone. So it's a very rich and informative space for thinking in this period. Cazabon's engaged upon a great work, you know.

Isn't that so, Casabon? I believe I am, yes. Perhaps too great a work for the mind of one man to compass. May I know what it is, Mr. Cazabon? I'm compiling a key to all mythologies, Miss Brock. Here's something. George Eliot prefigures novelists like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, the big book writers that followed, not just because of the size of the work, but this idea of a world run by complex systems

that no one can control. But there's always one guy, almost always a guy, who claims to have the key to make it all so simple. The characters in what you would call a systems novel like Middlemarch understand they're part of a way. world that's too big and complex for them to understand, and that there's not much one person can do, unless you happen to have all the answers, like Mr. Casabon. I'm seeking to elucidate those elements which underpin every system of belief known to man. What do you think George Elliott is getting at in making the project the key to all mythologies? What is it about that idea that is impossible? The key to all mythology

would suggest that there is one origin story, that there is one story that should unite us all and that we all come from a single place and that all stories can be traced back to us to a single source. All knowages can be singular in some sense. And that is really antithetical to how George Eliot thinks philosophically. You know, she herself read so widely in the ideas of the age, as you know. And for her, we're all inevitably plural

and we're stronger for having many, many influences, many voices that lead into our understanding of the world. It is a great challenge to bring together all the major disciplines, theology, philosophy, cosmology, to show how every faith springs from the same ultimate source. You know, she keeps on saying, well, when are you going to publish your book? This book is like dead on arrival. Here's where it gets challenging reading Middlemarch with a modern outlook, or even at the time it was published in the 1870s.

Casabon is trying hard, and he believes in his work, but as his nephew Will Ladislaw points out, he's behind the times. His ideas are dated, and he's paid no attention to the German scholars who are doing the cutting-edge research on the Bible in history. He doesn't know it, but Darwin and Theosophy are coming soon and both connect the human story to science away from the old Christian myths. Casabon's project, the key to all mythologies,

is in its way trying to prove the sun orbits the earth. What is revealed is, I don't even want to say coldness, there's something about Kasabin that's just so intensely throttled emotionally because he's so over-invested in a sense of his own dignity. And that sense of his own dignity is so fragile. And that really is something to be pitied because what it means is the minute he begins to live intimately with anybody else,

that sense of his own dignity is going to be shattered. So hang on. What we're getting from George Elliott here is an emotional curveball, the idea of pity. The possibility that there's actually something more to Cassable, and his being just a gas bag. You know, Mr. Cazen

must have had a mother who loved him at some point. You know, this is always the frame that she has. We must find something lovable in our neighbours. I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding, being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble. For these two will get faded and will know the older and more eating griefs

which we are helping to neglect. So this is the beginning of Chapter 29, and this is just after the worst, honeymoon and the whole of literary history, as I like to think of it, the dreadful honeymoon in Rome that stays with Dorothea afterwards, like, she said like a kind of sense of disease across the retina. And there's been a huge momentum building up where we just are realizing the kind of awfulness of this marriage and we're very much in Dorothea's point of view. But then Chapter 29 does this amazing handbrake turn.

Mr. Casabon had an intense consciousness within him and was spiritually a hungered like the rest of us. He had done nothing exceptional in marrying, nothing but what society sanctions, and considers an occasion for wreaths and bouquets. He had always intended to acquit himself by marriage and the sense that he was fast leaving the years behind him that the world was getting dimmer and that he felt lonely was a reason for him to be losing no more time. And so on, you know, we had this long passage of what his expectations were for marriage,

that he thought it was going to be great, that he'd been led into thinking that this was, you know, know, who's going to marry this beautiful blooming young moon, who'd seem to sit at his feet and fill him with a sense of how great he was. And suddenly she's transformed into this critic who seems to externalize all his worst insecurities. She's almost scolding the reader over their complacency and going along with this story of Casabon as a fool. So what do you make of that passage? It's a really interesting kind of breaking of the wall in a way. One thing you can make of it is, first of all, that, you know, your main relationship when you read Middle March is actually

with the narrative voice more than any of the characters themselves because that narrative voice is always guiding you, stopping you in your tracks, explaining. I think there's a funny trick with that moment, though, because although she's inviting you to feel pity for him, it's not that anything you've already thought about him, though, is wrong. And for me, that passage is, I mean, it's very well known, but it still is just worth reinforcing how she's, the narrator there,

is deliberately pushing back at everything we think we're going to get from a novel in this period in particular, the focus on the story of the development of a beautiful young woman and her marriage choices. And it's saying, no, no, I'm not going to let you have this. You know, there are other points of view in this story that are worthwhile seeing and experiencing. And, you know, up until this point, we've been so lulled into seeing Mr. Casabon as being, you know, this slightly repellent, egotistical man who's got nothing to offer her. And suddenly we see his kind of inner insecurities and his own sort of shivering small life. And we're forced, as readers, I think very much against everything we've been told, everything we want to believe, to feel some sympathy with him.

And this is so often the case with Elliot that we are forced in a really deliberate and explicit way to sympathize with those who are alien or other. So you have to kind of juggle two things in thinking about somebody like Kazabon. Yeah, feel sorry for him. Understand the ways in which his inability to think about anybody else but himself is actually a symptom of a really deeply shattered sense of his own self. But this does not make him someone you should at all admire. And it doesn't actually change the things that were said about him in the very first chapters of the novel by other characters who aren't sympathetic to him, but are also in their own way kind of right about him. There's a very poignant way in which all these kinds of flippant jokes and judgments about Casabon in the first chapters by people who are just not at all sympathetic to him and are bewildered by Dorothea's choice to marry him are still kind of right, are still kind of valid. In Elliott, it's like there's not one place where you can sit and say, all right, this is what is the right way to see this character.

You have to occupy multiple places at once. we're asked to score in Casabon and at the same time to feel sorry for him. And this is how George Elliott moves from social critique to art. Casabon is a blowhard, but he's also a study in failure, and that's something we can all relate to.

So to see the world even a bit through his eyes, we might even begin to feel sympathy for him. When I was a young person reading the novel, it's very easy to think, oh, dried up stick of an old man. But once you get to his age, which is in his 40s, you are a lot more sympathetic, I think, or you should be, to the tragedy of a person not becoming everything that they hoped that they might be. That's a terrible thing. And that's so much the theme of Middlemarch. My life, Dr. Lidgett, derives a possible importance through my work, a key to all mythologies, at present uncompleted.

It is, I believe, all that I would be remembered for, and were it necessary, I would wish to leave it behind me in such a state that it might be committed to the press by others. From the book again, chapter 27, the narrator speaks directly to the reader. Think about this, she says. An eminent philosopher who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pierglass or surface of polished steel, made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely scratched in all directions. But place now against it a lighted candle.

As a centre of illumination and low, the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles around that little sun. It is only the candle which produces the flattering illusion. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person. This idea that, you know, the random scratchings on a mirror when a candle is brought too close to those scratchings take shape in a particular way because of where the candle is spreading its flame and it's illuminating a particular pattern. You move the candle, a different set of scratches are illuminated. This idea that the world is enormously complex and there's so much going on and we can't know all of it. She's trying to suggest that there are all these

other scratches, which maybe connects to her doctrine of sympathy, that you can't know what's going on all the other people's lives. You can't know their thoughts or feelings or motives or the things that have happened to them. And so you just have to extend sympathy. The way in which we're living at the moment seems to be that everybody thinks their candle is only illuminating their own set of scratches into a pattern. What we need to do is step back and look at a wider perspective and put a wider light on that pear glass and see the randomness of those scratches that are there. And it is only our ego that is helping to make sense of them that my view and my echo chamber on my social media feed or my television news stream are

acting like a coherent flame telling me that all of my beliefs are making sense. But when you widen that flame, when you widen that illuminating light, you begin to see, actually, it's random scratches everywhere. Some people find that as a consoling metaphor for we can continue to find coherence if we set up our own stories. I love the chaos of it that she's actually implying that we are, and this is the extreme view on a rock spinning in the middle of a vacuum. You know, that is the kind of perspective that she's pushing us towards. She has that kind of wider view. So all we can do is attempt humane connection with individuals beside us.

Fully understanding their perspective is not ours. They deserve sympathy too, or maybe they don't deserve it, but it's noble to give it, whether they deserve it or not. This was the first of a two-part series called Love and Consequences, George Elliott's Middlemarch, by contributor Tom Jokinen. Readings by Morva Bowman. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval.

Nikola Luxchich is the senior producer. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayed. c.ca slash podcasts.