In Our Time - Middlemarch

Episode Date: April 19, 2018

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what Virginia Woolf called 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'. It was written by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Anne Evans (1819-80), published in 8 parts in 1871-72, and was originally two separate stories which became woven together. One, 'Middlemarch', focused on a doctor, Tertius Lydgate and the other, 'Miss Brooke', on Dorothea Brooke who became the central figure in the finished work. The events are set in a small town in the Midlands, surrounded by farmland, leading up to the Reform Act 1832, and the novel explores the potential to change in matters of religion, social status, marriage and politics, and is particularly concerned with the opportunities available to women to lead fulfilling lives. The image above shows Rufus Sewell and Juliet Aubrey in the BBC adaptation, from 1994With Rosemary Ashton Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College LondonKathryn Hughes Professor of Life Writing at the University of East AngliaAnd John Bowen Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of YorkProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, George Eliot's Middlemarch is, according to Virginia Woolf, one of the few English novels written for grown-up people. Published in 1871 and 2, when George Eliot was in early 50s,

the story is set 40 years earlier in the English Midlands of Elliot's childhood, before the coming of the railways and the Reform Act, a time when everyone was expected to know his or her place. The main characters, Dorothy O' Brook and Dr. Lydgate, struggle to break free from social constraints and their success or failure drives the story on. In particular, Elliot explores the options for young, intelligent, resourceful women who want to make their mark on life

but are expected to limit themselves to the comfort of their inevitable husbands, and there are more restraints on men than they like to think. With me to discuss middle marchal, Rosemary Ashton, Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London. Catherine Hughes, Professor of Life Writing at the University of East Anglia, and John Bowen, Professor of 19th century literature at the University of York. Rosemary Ashden. George Elliott was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans.

How well did she know the English Midlands? She knew the English Midlands very well indeed, because she was born just outside Naniton and lived in Naniton and Coventry, in nearby Coventry, until she was about 30 when she then set out for London to have a career. Most of her novels are set in, mainly in and around the Midlands, which she called that rich, fat country. But the Midlands that she grew up in, although rich and green, with hedgerows and orchards, which she loved, was also quite industrialised. She was born in 1819, so even then there was a colliery, quite near where she lived,

and the main road, the coaching road to London, ran alongside where she lived. So she wasn't entirely rural. Yes. And can you give us some idea of her background, her early education, that sort of thing? Yes. She was the third and youngest child of a land agent, Robert Evans, who was land agent to the big aristocratic family, the Nudigates, who lived in a rather fine Arbery Hall near Nun Eaton.

and Robert Evansy's job was to collect the rents from the tenants, the tenant farmers see that the land was kept up. He did a lot of measuring and surveying. He was a carpenter by trade. Really, he did a lot of the jobs that in the novel Middlemarch, Caleb Garth does. And that was Robert.

The mother, Christiana, is less well known to us. She died when Mary Ann was 16, and we know rather little about her. But Mary Ann's childhood was really a kind of farming, rural childhood. She went round with her father on the Poonian cart to visit the tenant farmers. So that's where she got her knowledge of farming and also of land measurement and all the things that she seems to know about in Middlemarch when she's writing in quite detail about people's jobs in the country.

Where did she get her knowledge of knowledge? A knowledge of knowledge. Good question. She got that. She went to girls' schools and was taught French and history and geography and music and painting, the usual things that are. Middle class, you might say middle class, she was really more of the sort of upper yeoman peasant class. Her father was at any rate. But she was a clever girl and she got the basic learning at school until she was 16 when her mother died and she came home to help at home to look after her father. but she also, because she was clever, started reading on her own

and she was rather a serious teenager. She was influenced by various teachers who had rather evangelical and rather prim beliefs. So what she later said she used to go about like an owl because she didn't want to dress up and so on. Excuse me, as I understand it, her father got her tutors and also the lady of the realm that lent her, I said she could use a great library in the great house.

That's right. Her father was quite enlightened, really. He let her have a tutor who taught her both Italian and German. And German was going to be important for her later as she's translated various works from German. And then also, yes, the lady Catherine, I think, Nudigate, the lady of the manner anyway, yes, let her use the library. So she read quite widely. Thank you very much.

Catherine Hughes, sorry, I want to ask you one more question. That's about her religion, because it was very important to her as a girl. Yes, it is. Her father's religion was just a kind of normal, upstanding church and state. He was a Tory and went to Church of England, didn't question his beliefs. He was quite comfortable in that way. And so that's what she was brought up in.

But some of her teachers at the girls' schools that she went to were more evangelical, either on the evangelical wing of the Church of England, or Baptist or Quaker or Unitarian. So she met a lot of people with differing beliefs. And she also read quite a lot of historical exegesis of the Bible, and she lost her faith. Lost her faith in the late teens. She was 21, in fact, when it finally happened.

Yes. And she decided one day that she wasn't going to go to church with her father. This caused ructions. He wouldn't speak to her, and she very nearly had to go off, horror of horrors. to Lemington Spa to be a governess. But her brother Isaac intervened

and she came back to live with her father and they decided that she would continue to go to church but she would not take communion and she could think what she liked. Not a bad compromise really, isn't it? It's quite decent. I suspect quite a lot of people would accept that compromise. Catherine Hughes,

how established was George Alley as a writer when she had Middlemarch in mind? Well, she starts thinking about it really 1868 and by that time she's preeminent. along with Dickens and Trollope. She's one of the triumvirate, the great... Why is that? Because, mainly because of the books

that she wrote much earlier in Nigeria. I know its books, but can you tell the listeners which books? I was going to say, Adam Veed, which is her first book. Milan the Floss, Silas Manor, the first three books are huge, popular and critical hits. And of course, they're set in the same location as Middlemarch, so they're Warwickshire, the Basin Memories of Her Childhood. They've been huge. They've been fantastic.

What happens after that? She did become rich and famous. She became rich and famous. I was going to say really young. She wasn't young because she started late. But she became rich and famous as a fledgling author. In her 30s? Late, late 30s into her 40s.

Then what happens? I don't think she would have seen it like this, but I think we might see it looking back. It's a sort of mid-career slump because she starts to produce books that just don't do as well. They don't engage people. There's Romola, which is a very, very dense historical novel set in Renaissance Florence.

it's not an easy read and there's Felix Holt which is set in Warwickshire and concerns the reform bill but he's kind of a bit dead and a bit dry I remember buying readers when I was a kid saying oh it's a radical I'll ever go at that

yeah yeah so I think it's quite interesting because we tend to think of her career as being a sort of unbroken triumph you know she just hops from high point to high point but actually not so by the time she's sitting down to think about Middlemarch actually there's quite a lot at stake

Interestingly, she wasn't even sure she wanted to write a novel She thought she might want to write an epic poet on an epic poem on Tymolian who's a fourth century BC Greek statesman Instead of Middlemarch We are very lucky that she didn't escape Now as I understand it, Middlemarch started as possibly two books And then it ended up as Middlemarch Yeah, absolutely.

So what were the two books? Well, the first book that she starts is called Middlemarch And it's the bit, it's the town bit of Middlemarch So if we think of the vince's Featherstone, Bullstrand, the people that live in the town in the Middlemarch that we know. And she gets quite far with that and then runs into a buffer. You know, it's just not going anywhere. So she starts another book.

It's actually a short story called Miss Brooke. And that's about Dorothea. It's about the county. It's about the country people. That's that side of the book. So it's the Chetams, the Brooks, those people. Kassarbon and so forth. And then she runs into a slight problem with that.

And she has the brainwave as sort of smushing them together. she realizes actually these are two aspects of the same book, the same work of art. And she starts gradually to bring them together. She rewrites. She goes right back to the beginning. She puts Miss Brooke at the beginning. So if you think of Middle March, the first ten chapters are all about Dorothea and Gussarbon. And then in chapter 10, we switch over to Middle March when the middle marches, the men, the tradesmen, come to dinner with Mr. Brook.

So county and town come together. Once she started on this, Mojee, did she think I've got it? I don't think so. I don't think she was a sort of woman that ever thought, I've got it. No, I was very interested, how anxious she was and how much, because you think it's, this genius just flows on. No, no, no. She really wanted her husband to pat her on the back or pat her on the pen every day, didn't she?

Yeah, and actually, if you look at the manuscript. Oh, how wasn't the husband? Sorry. So in a partner. Although that's not the word she used. She would use husband, in fact. But certainly the man that she lived with to whom she wasn't married, George Henry Lewis. If you look at the manuscript,

there's a lot of rewriting. There's certain characters she had real struggles with Rosamond, interestingly, doesn't really come to life until quite far along in the writing process, which is strange because she seems such a fully, fully realised character. But she gets going and the book comes out

and is it... Well, let's, before we took the reception, John, John Bowen turned to you, can you just give listeners a skim through the main points of the book? Yes. So there are four main plot strands to the book. The first is Dorothy O'Bruck, in many ways, is the central character.

She's beautiful, she's an heiress, she's 18, she's full of intellect and spiritual energy. And she thinks she'll find an outlet for this in a marriage to a man called Kazobon, who's an elderly clergyman, and it's a disastrous marriage. And it's a hateful lack of sympathy between the two. Fortunately, he dies, and he has a... What spirit is he does?

But he leaves a clause in his wife. Will, saying that she won't inherit his wealth if she marries a man called Will Ladislaw, who's his second cousin, who's young and ardent and eager, and Dorothy loves him, and he loves her. And the whole later movement of the novel is they're coming together, and at the end, they marry and leave Middlemarch. That's the first. The second strand is another great idealist, Tertius Lydgate, who's a young doctor, comes to the town, full of energy, wants to transform it. He too makes a disastrous marriage to Rosamond Vinci. He wants to transform medicine. He's been at Edinburgh and Paris, and he wants to

to be a man who leaves the way, and particularly tissue. Absolutely. He both wants to do fundamental research into tissues and to build the new hospital. And again, a fatally bad marriage. Again, complete lack of sympathy. And he's destroyed, really, through debt and through gossip and moves out of Middle March with Rosamond, his wife at the end. The third and more positive one is Fred Vincere and Mary Gareth,

who've loved each other since childhood. He's a bit feckless. He hasn't finished his degree at Cambridge, but she stands by. him and they marry and they stay and they flourish in Middle March and the fourth one is the bullsroad the banker who has a finger in every pie in Middle March

and he has a deep dark past he does he's a murderer a fraud and he too moves away at the end there's a very moving scene with his wife so even he has a moment of sympathy when she

takes her jewels off and they don't speak to each other but then they move away and we know nothing of what happens to them afterwards. But these mesh together in Middlemarch. Why did she call, do you think she called it, why did she call the novel by the place name, Middlemarch? It's a really interesting choice because usually it's either abstract things like Sentence and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice or a name.

It's Emma or Tom Jones or something. I think the middle matters because it's in the middle of England. It's the middle decades and it's about the middle classes mainly. And March is good because it's both a place, like the marches of Wales or something, but also a movement onwards. And the novel is full of the tension between being in a place

and wanting to move on. But also the subtitle matters. She calls it a study of provincial life. Why is she a study? Well, it's interesting. It's both a study like an artist might do a study, but also a serious sociological... I don't suppose you'd like that, but...

But also, of course, a serious sociological study and she's very interested in contemporary sociology and contemporary psychology. So it's a brave title, I think. not initially an attractive one, but it absolutely captures the great ambition of the book. And when it came out, Rose Machen, well, let's just stay with Middlemarch for a second.

How evocative would that be to the readers in 1871 when it came out, given that it was set in, let's say, 1830? So we're 40 years on, which happens quite often with novels, doesn't it? People set things 40 years on, and either a play for it. Never mind. How would that resonate with the readers that she, then picked up in scores

with this book. Well, that's an interesting question. I suppose I mean, as Catherine's already said, she was well known for novels about the Midlands. And in particular her first full novel, Adam Bede, was very much set in the same surroundings and

with the same sort of social set. Although in Middlemarch, what she's doing is extending the social set from the working class, the rural poor, to the middle class, to the almost aristocracy. the gentry really around about the Brooks, the Cadwallader's and the Chetham's other characters in that strand of the novel. So I think people would have thought, well, it's another novel by George Elliott, let's see what it's like.

Whether they would have got all the references that we've now just looked at, I don't know, not until they'd read it. They would once they've read it, I think. The idea of middleness is very important. Middle England, yes. But also, a lot of the people in it are of middling class, and she's very, interested in that class. That was the class, after all, in the time in which it was set, which is 1829, specifically to 1832 and the passing of the First Reform Act. That was a time when the middle classes were being enfranchised. And an awful lot had flowed over those decades.

I mean, Industrial England really gained, with the railways, just gained steam. And how did people read the novel, were they nostalgic for it? Can you just give us some idea, oh, this is about us? What's going on? well, responses to the novel were almost entirely, at least the written ones, the published ones, the critiques, were almost entirely positive. And there were things they didn't like about the novel, like Will Ladislaw, for example.

And some of them didn't like her scientific metaphors. We're talking a moment ago about a study of provincial life. Partly, the narrator comes on as a kind of scientist with the microscope. And some readers didn't like that. But they did like the portrait of country life, really. amongst a set of families, who's going to marry whom, the kind of rather more conventional things in 19th century novels, which had been going at least since Jane Austen.

And they liked that. And they looked for that, I think, in Middlemarch, as they would do in any other novel. How did they take a multiple and sometimes recondite references? I mean, they always have to look up in the back as I often did. Well, of course, they didn't have edited volumes and penguin volumes with notes at the end. Did that ask the vicar?

What did they do you? I suppose, I mean, George Lerner, she, there are learned references, it's true. I think, but you don't need them really, in a way. You don't need to know exactly

where they come from. And she is fairly explanatory too. She does, and she's also sometimes humorous. So when she's being, or when the narrator or one of the characters is being rather learned and recondite, she can actually sometimes make them rather amusing.

It's very nice like stepping to us, to take them across them, I just wondered. Do you want to say something, then I'm coming to? It's also lots of the novel is full of historical references that pin it down to a particular place and time. And in a way, for lots of Victorians, it would have been their childhood or their adolescence. And so I think it's a novel about the creation of the world

that they saw around them when the railways are coming, when the Reform Act is being passed, just before Victoria is on the throne. And Victorian is quite a good. She and Victoria were born at a roundabout the same. Catherine, does reform define the characters in Middlemarche to any extent, the idea of reform?

I think it's absolutely central. Everybody, or at least all the main characters, want to change something profoundly. They want to change the world around them. And what the book does so brilliantly is watch them do that and watch their eye. idolism sort of knock up against reality,

realizing that actually there are things that you really, really can't do. So Dorothea, for instance, wants to actually completely revolutionise. And that's really not too strong a word, the relationship between the gentry and their tenants. She wants to design cottages. This is a woman obsessed with designing model cottages. She's never got architecture plans off her lap. She wants to have a completely different relationship.

She wants to socially engineer what that. what that might be like. Of course, what she realizes is that as a woman, she's got a very, very limited scope. She's a clever woman. But as, as the narrator says, you know, she's had a sort of toy box education. She hasn't actually got the grounding that she needs, which leaves her then so vulnerable to these kind of idealistic kind of, you know, sweeps of imagination. There's also her uncle, the charming but just awful, Mr. Brook, who is the local, one of the local squires, who decides, he's about 60. He decides he's going to go in for reform. Being the worst landlord in the district. The worst landlord in the district. So he thinks I'm on the side of progress. I'm the sort of chap that does progress. I like that idea. I'm going to report myself to start with the kids.

But what he doesn't understand. No, he doesn't say that. What he doesn't understand is that you are, if you're going to be that sort of landlord, you need to mend gates, you need to give rent rebates. You need to actually be very, very actively engaged in the way that Dorothea is, his niece is. But she doesn't have that kind of cultural capital that allows her to put these things into action.

And then you've got Tertia Sliggate, who in a sense comes into the novel, not just advocating change, but being changed. You know, everything about him seems like he's going to be on the side of the angels. He's going to push things through. He's very, as you said,

he's very well qualified in the new ways of doing medicine, France and Scotland. You know, he absolutely absorbed all the latest learning. He wants to actually reform the way medicine is done, make it into a proper, proper profession

rather than a slightly kind of nefarious thing where doctors flog medicines that their patients don't really need in order to get a better ink. He wants to make it a proper profession. That's all admirable. But of course, what he doesn't really understand is that his life has changed as well. He's the younger son of a gentry,

so he's the nephew of a baronet. He can't live like a gentleman anymore. Now he's a professional man and a man in a slightly kind of emerging profession. He's got to cut his coat to suit his cloth. He doesn't get that. So there's a sense in which he can reform.

other people, he can reform a profession, he can't actually look inwards. John, John Bowen, why does Dorothea Brooke make what proves to be disastrous matters? Every reader must be saying, just don't do that. There can't be a reader

who's ever ready to say you're doing the wrong thing, Dorothea, but she does it despite all of us. Yes, Barbara Borishing says it's like a child dancing into a quicksand on a summer morning. And that's what it's like, really. And it's awful to watch it happening. But tell people, can you give them the outline?

Yeah, so she meets an elderly clergyman. Elderly, 43, that's a bit of a word. He's 46. Oh, 46. I count him 46. One of you say it's 403. He has elderly demeter. An ageing clergy.

Who's working on a great project called the Key to All Mythology. So he's someone else, a bit like Lydgate, who wants to find a fundamental structure underneath everything. But it's a disastrous project. and he gets completely caught up in the details, and he'll never finish it. But Dorothy Thea sees him as a great soul, and that she can both educate herself, she can learn Greek and Hebrew, helping him, but also to make this great achievement into the world.

So this sort of rather dim clerical figure, who nobody else finds attractive at all, she sees the possibility of doing a great work in the world and of educating herself. And it turns out, of course, to be fatal to her. It's a disastrous marriage. there's no sympathy. But that's why she wants,

that's what she sees in him, that she can be like, he's like Milton or Locke or one of these great historic figures she believes. We know he isn't. Yes. And he has no sympathy in the community either, does it? He's well off and so on,

but he doesn't seem to do much bickering stuff. But he does look out his tenants in a way that Mr. Brook, Dorothy's. And so there's nothing there for Dorothy to do. But no, he's a dried up whole story. Decorant. Yeah. Sorry, you've both got your hands up.

Well, on that last point, he has a curate who lives in the vicarage and does most of the sermonising. And he himself, Mr. Brooke thinks he might become a bishop one day. And he, of course, is pursuing his research. He's in the Grand House, Loaic Manor. So he's, actually, that's quite interesting because it relates also to the fact that George Elliot often has, she needs to have clergyman in her novels. if she's looking at a country, town and villages and so on in the 1830s, she has to have clergymen, but she does not put them in the pulpit.

She doesn't have them sermonising because she herself had become humanist in her beliefs, and her belief was that if a clergyman had a role, the role was to help people not to preach to them. That was a bit of radical at the time, wasn't it? It was quite radical, yes. I just wanted to say that, of course, the reason Kosovovone is in such dire straits is made quite explicit. It's because he doesn't read German.

So he's not up to date with the cutting-edge scholarship that would say, actually, your project is completely bogus. So there's a sense of a man who's completely cut off from reform, from intellectual life. And what happens is you end up stultified. You end up, as Mrs. Cowellner says, a bladder for peace to rattle in. But to go back to John for a moment,

the consequences of that marriage are quite soon disastrous. And there's the icy honeymoon in Rome. Yes, that honeymoon in Rome is, I think one of the greatest scenes in the novel in which Dorothea, with her toy box education, suddenly encounters all these fragments from the past, full of fragments of knowledge and desire that she can't simply understand at all.

And because Obam can't help her at all to through all that. And she has a great crisis there, and that's when she sees Will, who is working with an artist there in Rome. And suddenly there's a moment of kind of... She feels Rome like an electric shock, it says. at the same time meeting that that terrible shock of disordering

her consciousness is this moment of sympathy with Will and from that that starts to build the relationship in which gradually she comes to realise that she loves him and he loves her and that it's suddenly a kind of life and energy it is a long time coming I mean we're way down the years and the book Rosemary Ashbyrashon

Tertius Lydgate he's almost the balancing figure with Dorothea Let's leave it at that. We'll move on, yes. But what is, what obstacles are there in the way? It's been mentioned, mentioned, but could you develop it? What obstacles are there in the way to his success? The success of what he wants to do.

Yes. Well, as has just been mentioned, instead of studying at Oxford or Cambridge, which were the only two English universities until University College itself in London opened in 1828, so too late to be a feature in this novel. He didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge, where medics studied anatomy theoretically,

but they didn't actually have teaching hospitals. Whereas in Edinburgh, you had teaching hospitals associated with the university. And in Paris, there was the new stethoscope, which had been devised, only invented a few years before. And so Lydgate makes the choice to go and learn medicine where people are actually progressing. And so he comes back to Britain, and he thinks he wants to go to a bustling Midlands town,

where he can be of use. He can help the poor. He can set up a fever hospital because cholera is on the horizon again. And he wants to do proper doctoring rather than the kind of rather sort of elite doctoring that the physicians do, which is actually just to look at people

and diagnose them but not do any more. Isn't it also a bit unrealistic of him? He is a bit unrealistic, yes. We delve into his background. I mean, George Elliott goes back into his background and shows that he... Well, she shows rather movingly how he came to his vocation

as a schoolboy on vacation, on holiday, reading in the library and opening an encyclopedia and opening the page for valves, the valves of the heart. And because he knows from his Latin that Valve are folding doors, he sort of gets a picture

of how his body works. And she says, I mean, she's very funny about this as well as being very serious about him finding the passion of a vocation. She says, oh, for all he knew up to that point, his brains could lie and bags at his temples. But now he's got the passion

and the imaginative passion. So she's really showing Lydgate as a kind of creative figure in a sense, you know, as someone who's imaginative and exploratory and wants to move on and do great things. Catherine, Catherine Hughes, the show she's being mentioned and the clergy cluttered the book.

What reality have they? What real force do they have? Well, I think Roses is absolutely right. In Middle March. Yeah, in Middle March. What happens is that we don't see much vicaring. There's really two church services, I think. There's a funeral, which is actually just about people gossiping and gauping at the mourners. And there's a church service where Will turns up,

because he wants to have a look at Dorothea, who he's got a crush on. So in other words, the church is not central in that way. For Elliot, I mean, Elliot is the great humanist, along with so many other intellectuals of that time, she'd lost her faith. But she's sort of founded again by working, translating Feuerbach, great German theologian, who'd written the essence of Christianity. He suggests that, you know, if you want to find God, you have to find God in other people, in yourself and in other people. And what Elliot's doing, I think, in the novel, is showing people trying to bungle their way towards that, without the help of an actual God's divine presence. What they're trying to do is find some kind of divine meaning and spark

in their relationships with other people. And of course, that's really hard to do because other people are very, very annoying. It's very, very hard to feel good about other people all the time. And that's what we see. So we have Fairbrother, who's the vicar. He's not a very good vicar, but he's a fantastic man. He's a very good whist player. He's very good at collecting insects.

He's a great natural historian. And he's a great kind man. And that's the kind of model that I think she's looking for. John. Yes, and what he does, of course, is he sacrifices the woman he loves, really. He helps someone else. Fred Vinci, marry Mary Garth. And so it's a kind of Christian renunciation,

but done in an completely secular way. And that's often the pattern in the book that she'll take Christian ideas and then see the way that they work in human and material and everyday ways. And Fairbrother encapsulates that. What measures of success do you see in the main relationships in the book?

Or failure, I think it's a better word to use. Well, there are two absolutely disastrous marriages. And I think the most chilling bit in the book, I think, is the marriage of Rosman Vincy, to Lydgate. There are two people utterly preoccupied with each other and almost no sympathy between them.

And I think that, you know... George Mund is taught to be in Rital Munch, very beautiful, had a lady's education, I think she's too small for her great talents and allure and sees Lidgates, an upper-class chap

with just the person to lift her out of this morass of Middlemash. Yes, she's a perfect kind of commodified woman of the period. and has also the most ruthless egotism, I think. The whole world, anything that in the world that doesn't suit her is an annoyance. And she believes that the world should simply accommodate itself to her desires. And that's a disastrous marriage.

And she has no sympathy with Lydgates' idealism. She's a very realistically material person. So those are the disastrous marriages. And the good one, I think, is the one between Mary Garth and Fred Vinci who've been childhood sweethearts. Given the times and given what was happening, and given the sensuous nature of some of the book,

how did she say, and given her own sexual interest, how did she say about putting that side of the story into the book? Some people see it as a very intellectual novel, I think, but one thing that she's very interested in is showing the very close relationship between intellectual and sensory and sensual and bodily life. So the descriptions of the meetings, say, between Will and Dorothea are very, very embodied, I think.

I think often the characters, the young lovers in the book, are often described a bit like children too, so that Dorothea is often quite like a child, and Will has a particular sympathy with children. And it's also true that Fred and Mary fell in love as children. So some people have seen that as a lack of erotic passion in the book, but I think it's often seen in this kind of, trembling bodilyness

that often irrigates the great scenes of passion in the book. In fact, just to add to that, the tragedy of the relationship between Lydgate and Rosamond is that they are sexually and physically attracted to one another.

They can't stop, especially he can't stop stroking her hair and doing her plaits. In the meantime, though, they cannot agree on anything. And George Eliot talks about them, missing one another's mental track. Every time he says something,

she takes it some way and she closes off discussion. And Lydgate, your sympathies are with Lidgate, who is really stymied at every point, checkmated, as is said. And he has to wear the yoke, another of George Eliot's metaphors, to describe the misery of this marriage, which Henry James said he thought the scenes between Rosamond and Lidgate were the most intelligent thing in English fiction. I think he's right.

And another important key factor in the relationship there, As elsewhere in the book, it's one of the strata, the ghost trata, the ghost of the books is debt. And they haven't got enough money and Littgay and Rosamund and he starts to, and it gets in the way in a very big way. Yes, it does. It spoil. The marriage is sport largely because they get into debt, but they get into debt also because they don't talk to one another

and don't agree with one another. And they're both to blame to some extent for that. Rosamond because of her ears and graces and assuming that if Lidgerton, doesn't earn enough money as a doctor. Well, he can tap his rich baronet uncle or his useless captain cousin. But you see, Ligate doesn't want to do that. He wants to be an independent man.

But then he too has been brought up, knowing that there always be nice glass, crystal glass on the table. And he hasn't thought about how he's going to arrange a household. Actually, of course, he falls into the engagement by mistake in the first place. He's flirting. He's attracted to Rosamond. and people start to talk. This is where Middlemarch, the place comes into it,

the social gossip. People are talking about this. Are you engaged? Her aunt comes and says to her husband, why are you acting as if you're engaged to Dr. Lydgate? And of course, this is awful. And then Lydgate is warned and stays away. Then he turns up and then they kiss.

And it goes on like this. And it's really quite romantic but also useless. I mean, they just can't manage money. But money is rather important in other ways too in middlemarch. I mean, Georgia is almost like, Balzac. All her characters either suffer because they don't have any money or but perversely Dorothea suffers because she's got too much and nobody

lets her do what she wants with it. Catherine, can you just briefly give us a portrait of Will Lyd's Law and why he is important? Do you know, I wish I could give you a portrait. Oh well, shall we move on? The problem is, I think, I mean this is not a new thought other people have thought it, but he's very, very difficult to pin down. Can you just play?

Who's your... He is? Give us some basics, please. He is. Cossobon's second cousin, or possibly I think first cousin once removed. He is a young protege

of Cossobon and then of Mr. Brooke. And through those relationships, he meets Dorothea Brooke. And while they are obviously subtly attracted to each other while Dorothy is still married to the terrible 47-year-old

Kosovon, once she's free, And because someone does a very wicked thing. He says she mustn't marry Will, and he leaves a will to that effect. But once that's overturned, they come together. And I think the problem is, it just, he never seems more than a plot device. He's described endlessly. He's got a sort of bironic swagger to him.

He's likened to Shelley and to Byron. He's often referred to as a sort of patch of light as if he's aerial. He ends up as an MP. Sorry? He ends up as an MP. Yes, that's at the end of the book. At one point, I think, George Elliot says he bounded across the park like spring incarnate. I don't, was he a bunny?

Did he have green hair? I mean, I've seen spring bound. Never mind. It's really, really, really hard to understand what he is. Can we move to another plot, a cheerful plot in the book, which is Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, a childhood lovers. Can I go back to you, John, for a second, and then come back. they're very attractive both of them aren't even though Fred's this sort of feckless gambler

he doesn't want to be a clergyman and he can't be, he's failed his exams in Cambridge which is attractive in itself and then he does, when he sells a horse you know he sets off to have to sell the horse and you're just waiting for something terrible to help him to the horse and of course something terrible does happen to the horse that he buys and so on there are a good leavening in the book those two

Yes, they're so interesting. And there are the two main families in the book, the Vincis and the Garth's, and you see the whole world that they come from. And Mary Garth, I think, is probably, in some ways, the most attractive character in the book. She's not physically good-looking, but she's witty and she's educated,

and she always has a kind of good humour about her. So there's one point where George Enoch says she liked her thoughts, and there's a sense that she has a kind of contentment with her own intellectual activity. Her mother had been a teacher, she herself is going to be a teacher at one point in the book. And she sticks with Fred,

even though he runs up a debt himself and then gets the family into debt, so he does some very bad things. But she's faithful to him. And in a way, she is one of those women who sacrifices things in order to make a man better that you get in lots of Victorian fiction. She said it makes him sacrifice himself too.

She's tough on him, isn't she? Absolutely. And that I think is where Georgia really makes it distinctive, I think. and they stay on in Middle Marks in the end and they bring out its best qualities. Can I bring up something which might be controversial in this comment? Very sorry about this resume. I was talking to somebody last night who reads the book every year

and he's always moved by the end of the book and he's a very good reader. I'm an embarrassing by mentioning his name. But as we all know, the end of the book, Dorothy has effect, was incalculably diffusive for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on our understanding on unhistoric acts

and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been. It's half owing to the number who lived faithfully, a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs. It's a wonderful thought, and this chap said, yes, and I think you're very moved by it. I'd like to ask you, do you think that's true?

You mean what she's actually saying there in the finale? Well, I think that if you look back through the novel, she has demonstrated it to be true, at least in Dorothea's gaze, because we haven't talked about this. It's at such a complex novel. But at some point, a very important point, Dorothea, despite being sexually jealous and anxious herself about her feelings for Will Ladislo and so on. This is after the death

of Mr. Kosobon, the inconvenient Mr. Kosobon. Despite feeling sexually jealous of Rosamond and thinking that Rosamond and Will are having an affair and so on and so on, she makes a kind of a sort of strong sacrifice. She has a night of weeping and not sleeping and then she gets up in the morning, sees the sunrise, sees a family. It's rather, it's kind of, He's a young family going off to start their day's work in the fields. And she thinks, this story, i.e. her own unhappiness about what Will is doing, possibly doing with Rosamond, is not mine alone. There are other people here. I know that the Rosamond and Lydgate family marriage is an unhappy one.

And she goes to see Rosamond. It's a big moment late on in the novel. And she goes to see Rosamond to try to make amends, to try and explain to Rosamond that Lydgate, although to some extent, disgraced, because of debts and money and suspicions over somebody's death, you know, that she should stick by him. And so that, I think, is her major act in the novel, which then justifies that business of, you know, incalculably diffusive effect on people. I'm not going to bang on about it, but I think we better move on then, really?

Unless somebody's got anything. No, let's move on. It just strikes me as a wonderful statement. And then I thought, well, is it true? And my mind. I mean, it's true. Some of the time, you approved it. It's true in the book.

You proved you. on about that, John. I think incalculably matters. I think it's a moment when the novelist renounces a kind of control and she says, we don't know, we can't calculate this. We can't calculate virtue in the world and it allows the novel to end on that

note, I think. And also, in fact, she says, doesn't she, that a lot of people, gossipy people said, what a shame Dorothea ended up in such a sort of narrow way? But then the narrator asks, but what could she have done in that? What sphere was open to her, the whole

point about the book and we open with this idea is that there's not much for women to do. This is not an epic age. Dorothea does what she can and she does the best she can and that's good enough. Is that why you want to leave it with Dorothea then? Because I

you sort of dismiss Will. Lots of you know, I'm told in these notes, lots of academics, lots of women academics, they might be, am I treading underground? Where's the, I can feel the glass cutting under my feet and saying, Dorothy sort of threw herself away on this worthless shop.

I don't think he's worthless. I think he's rather attractive in a lot of words. Really? I mean, David Cecil said, the great David Cecil, mid-20th century critics, said he was a schoolgirl's idea of what a, you know, nice hero should be. I mean, David Cecil was charming and he wants a wonderful book. We don't have to take him as a sort of word of God, do we? Just try to build up a case. I mean, I'm not the only one.

I think what a lot of people expected at the time, because the novel came out in parts and the critic, were agoged to see what was going to happen. And of course, since George Ehrlich's two major centres of consciousness, as she calls them, are Dorothea and Lydgate. And once Cossopone's gone, the idea then is, oh, these two, and there's trouble in the Lidgate marriage, these two will come together,

and people are disappointed that she didn't end up marrying Lidgade. And of course, in a sense, she could have been then a very helpful doctor's wife. Instead, she becomes a helpful wife to Will Ladis Lowe, who, after the end of the novel, becomes an ardent, radical MP. We don't see him. problem. Final word, John.

Yes, I mean, I think I find Will a rather moving figure. I think he the novel is very interesting the performance of gender, I think, and it both wants to resist lots of the normal ways that people act out there being a

woman or being a man, and I think Will is someone who resists lots of the stereotypes about being a man in the 19th century. Well, thank you very much. It was a terrific rump. Thank all of your Rosary and Catherine Hughes and John Byrne. Next week, it's particle physics. We'll be discussing the proton. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time

podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Now, what did we not say that we should urgently have said? Did you think, can we go back to that end thing? Because I just queried it. I knew, I mean, I would like to believe in it.

Yes. You know, those little lines of unremembered love at that as well. Yes. And of course, Wordsworth is in her mind a lot of the time. Early on, she says something about hard, she more on less quotes hard task to analyse a soul from the prelude and that's what she's

interested in doing and she sees the difficulties of life and she sees the disappointments I mean I think the ending is kind of it's her idea of mellurism which is between optimism and pessimism as a philosophy of life and she wants to be her novel to be realistic

I think that's why she resisted bringing Dorothy and Lydgate together it would have been too romantically apt and therefore not not gritty realism that she goes for, but it is a thought through realism. She sees that people are disappointed in life. One thing you could say is that this is a novel

that couldn't imagine George Elliot herself being in it. So clearly she wasn't trapped. She's exactly the same generation as it were as Dorothea. But she strove to be this much bigger figure than Dorothea was at the end. But it would be almost impossible to imagine her writing a novel in which there was a figure like herself in it, I think. But of course in Daniel Duranda, her next novel,

she does then try and think of the female artist, Al Carizi, who's a very different kind of figure. So I think that in one way there is a realism. The whole novel is about tempering people's ideals with the realities of the world. But it's also true that George Ehrlich herself radically broke from that. I don't know why we missed it out in my fault,

but we never sort of pointed out to people who didn't know that she lived with a man who was married with children. And we should have pointed that out. And she just got on with it, didn't she? Yes, well she did, but of course she suffered. She's social, you know, what's the word? I mean, also, I think it's exactly, of course, what John said, which makes her, made her so difficult in the say in the 1970s,

when you heard the new wave of feminist criticism, scholarship, Anglo-American scholarship, it's very difficult to feel warm towards, because here's a woman who seemed to have a blessed, charmed, liberated life. And she wouldn't allow, you know, Georgia, you know, it had had everything and she wouldn't allow it to her, the characters in her novels. And so there was a sort of feeling of what's going on here. It's a sort of exceptionalism that's slightly unattractive. She didn't have everything because, you know, she suffered from losing her family.

Her beloved older brother didn't speak to her again until she married fairly late in life, a man 20 years younger than herself. And then Isaac wrote her the little note saying congratulations on being married, whereas, you know, he'd broken off relations when she had set up with her. Lewis, who was, of course, the real love of her life, aren't how great, help me? But you can see, for feminist, can't you, Chris, in the 70s, when everybody's re-

re-kind of cooperating the Brontas and even Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson, all those people. You can see, Elliot, it just sticks out as not being part of the gang, really, of oppressed women. Except that more than anybody else, she analyzes the difficulties. Look at Maggie and Maggie Tulliver in Milne and the Floss. She analyses

the difficulties that young women have, and in a sense, she's more realistic. I think she's more realistic. I don't think it's so much that she doesn't want her female characters to have what she had. I think she sees that she was rather unusual in what she gained, but she also knows what she lost. And I think she does want to actually make it. It is a kind of feminist point to say,

what could Dorothea do with all this money that she can't actually do anything useful with? One thing I think we haven't talked about is how beautifully it's written. We were talking about it. And that it's both extraordinarily self-conscious about its realism, and it's always drawing attention to how strange language is, how strange interpretation is, how many different possibilities of interpretation are opened all the time.

And also it's just full of quotable moments and very funny moments and extraordinary subtle depictions of the processes and changes of consciousness. So I'd like to register that too. Yes, and it's done through a series of extended metaphors. I mean, we talked to, she herself, as narrator, talks about this particular web of interactions and movements that she's looking at. and society is a web. And then Lydgate, she talks about Lydgate getting caught,

the hampering thread-like pressures of the social, petty, politic politics of the town. So that's the web again. And then again, Rosamond, when she falls in love with Lidgate, because she's really only been waiting for a handsome outsider to come in so that she can fall in love with him. She starts spinning the gossamer web of romance. And then there's the yoke, which they all put on their shoulders

when they marry wrongly. And that runs through it. So there are quite a few rather striking and well-used metaphors which glue the thing together. Henry James said that it was a novel of Treasure House of Details, but an indifferent hole. But he's wrong because actually she works very well at both integrating all the different themes and the plots, all the four plots and so on.

She moves between them. She does the weaving, really, extremely well, and she does it partly by means of metaphors which continue through. Henry James could be relied upon to say something ever so slightly snide about George Elliot. That was his main job in life at this point. Well, he's an up-and-coming novelist. She's the great bad mother that he's got to kind of overcome at some point. He thinks she's terrific.

He thinks she's fantastic, but he also doesn't want her to be quite that great. He tries to get in with her. He sort of doesn't he? He makes a couple of aborted visits. She's a bit of a stalker, really. He makes a couple of aborted visits to her house. So he always has these things he says. He's got a abortive, but it doesn't sound to mean like a stalker.

No, they're not a portive visit. He visits a couple of times with various Americans who are friendly, who always visit. George E. She has a salon on a Sunday afternoon or whatever. But, well, he arrives at a time when Lewis's son, Thorny. He has just come back from Natal with tuberculosis of the spine, and he's writhing in agony on the floor.

And actually, Henry James is rather disgraceful, in the way he describes this rather gleefully to his parents back home in Boston. You know, oh, I arrived and I met the great George Elliot, do-da-do, and oh, her stepson was rising in agony on the floor. Lewis was going out to get morphine. Meanwhile, me, me, me, me, yes. The other person who says something very mean about it is Friedrich Nietzsche, of course, who says, you know, they've got rid of the Christian God, and so they have to cling ever more tightly to Christian morality. And that, in a way, takes you right into the centre of the kind of moral issues of the book, and part of George Ours' Homewell, kind of ethical and religious journey.

Has you got beyond criticism now in the universities? Not really. There are people who find, oddly enough, we don't, but they find her dry or difficult. I mean, even Virginia Woolf, who was responsible for her population, a popularity rising again in a centenary article in the TLS in 1919. She praises George Elliott, you mentioned at the beginning,

but she also says she murdered the English language some of the time. And it's true, you have to see that some of the, her sentences and paragraphs are quite heavy, unnecessarily so sometimes. Yes, they are. It's heavy lifting getting through some of those. Some of it, yes. You look down the page, the worst, Paul, stop. Ford and other great modernists described it, actually, some of his, he couldn't bear it. He just gave him a headache. He had to have a lie down after reading Elliot. And I think Yates said her style was scrof, something like a scrofieler or something like some very unattractive, unpleasant.

So the fall from Grace is very, very quick. I mean, she dies in 80. doesn't she, 1980? And the fall from great, by the 1890s, people are saying really mean things. But she's on, she's up there, and you think she's sort of cemented in glory now? I think she is. Sorry, I was just going to see you read in Sunday supplements. I mean, a couple of years ago in the Sunday Times, Thomas Caneli, you know, was asked his favorite book, what's the greatest novel, Middle March.

Nobody has ever outthought and outwritten her on human relationships. Well, I'll buy that. that too. I mean, I think, you know, and actually D.H. Lawrence, so fairly early in her resurgence, as it were, said she was the first novelist to put all the action inside.

And that's another thing we might have perhaps said a bit more about how the narrator smoothly, seamlessly goes in and out of people's minds, their motivations, their feelings. And so she's partly looking at them from outside and she's ironic. She's, you know, she's

showing us the mistakes that they're making, particularly Dorothea, of course, and Lydgate, but she's also in their minds, and she can move in a paragraph from, you know, the chorus of Middle March, what Middlemarch thinks about Mr. Cossobon, let's say, into what Mr. Cossoban himself is thinking, and then back out again into a sort of rather general view about, you know, his inwardness and his difficulties.

I think the producer is waiting patiently outside to make an offer. To your coffee. Coffee, please. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon. in Tillotson. Hello, I'm May Martin from Grownup Land, the podcast where each week Bisha K. Ali and Ned Cedric and I untangle the adult world's most complex issues with the help of programs that you can hear on BBC Radio 4. Yeah, we only really deal with the big stuff. How close do we have to be for you to get a friendship tattoo with me? I could do it for you.

I've done it with a needle and a big pen. Wait, a needle and a bit... Were you in prison? No, I was at a dinner party and things got out of hand. I mean, that is an out of hand, dinner. When a dinner party gets out of hand for me, we crack into their parents' port. That's grown-up land and you can find it wherever you found this.