My Life in Middlemarch (7 page)

His resolution to remain a single man is thwarted, in Book Two of
Middlemarch,
by the force of Rosamond Vincy’s wish to make a husband of him. Lydgate, an exotic stranger, strikes Rosamond as much more sophisticated and interesting than the prosperous young men of Middlemarch by whom she has already been courted, and even before they have been introduced Lydgate doesn’t really stand a chance. He intends to be only an infrequent visitor at the Vincy home, where, in his lofty estimation, “the provision for passing the time without any labour of intelligence, might make the house beguiling to people who had no particular use for their odd hours.” Lydgate plans to make better use of his odd hours, until Rosamond begins to exercise her charms upon him. (“Do you care about dancing at all? I am not quite sure whether clever men ever dance?” “I would dance with you, if you would allow me.”)

Rosamond believes that they are as good as engaged, and Eliot conveys the irresistible force of her conviction in a remarkable metaphor. “Circumstances were almost sure to be on the side of Rosamond’s idea, which had a shaping activity and looked
through watchful blue eyes, whereas Lydgate’s lay blind and unconcerned as a jelly-fish which gets melted without knowing it,” she writes. When Lydgate’s clumsy attempt to extricate himself ends up bringing tears to those blue eyes, his intentions to remain unattached are shattered. “That moment of naturalness was the crystallizing feather-touch: it shook flirtation into love.” Eliot’s delineation of the growing attachment between Lydgate and Rosamond is delicious if more than slightly horrifying to read. Rosamond is an eminently recognizable type, the fatally nubile pretty girl whose charms have never failed her, while Lydgate, who is clever about most things, is cloddishly dense about women. Watching them make their way toward marriage—she concertedly, he obliviously—has an appalling satisfaction for connoisseurs of romantic plots.

But it is another, much earlier, passion in Lydgate’s life that makes him most compelling to me. Lydgate was a bright child—“it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid”—and, one wet day during a school vacation, hunting to find a book he hadn’t yet read, he stumbled across an encyclopedia in his family’s library. He opened the first volume to see an entry for “Anatomy,” and his life was changed in an instant. He had found his vocation.

George Eliot gives a marvelous description of the dawning of an intellectual passion. “Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love,” she writes, in a direct address to the reader. It’s a powerful
evocation of the promise that learning can hold for a reader, and of the thrill of realizing what it might be to have an intellectually creative life—of the realization that one might find one’s destiny in books.

And one need not have discovered one’s precise vocation at an early age, as Lydgate did, to know something of the experience of developing a germinal passion by browsing in a library. Intellectual passion—a love for that “which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires”—is rarely accorded the attention that romantic love commands, as Eliot points out; but the reader whom Eliot addresses will likely recognize this other, overlooked passion, because the chances are that he or she has felt it, too. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life when I was in my teens; but the solitary lunchtime hours I spent in my school library, looking at art books or reading literature, were both a discovery in their own right, and a taste of the pleasures of study and thought.

In this passage about intellectual passion, Eliot steps into the story to speak directly to the reader. (Or, as literary critics have pointed out, the contrived persona of a narrator steps into the story to speak directly to the reader.) This was a technique that Eliot used with some frequency, and one of the most celebrated examples of this kind of interjection appears toward the end of Book Two of
Middlemarch,
when the reader is reintroduced to Dorothea Brooke, now Dorothea Casaubon, on her honeymoon in Rome. Dorothea is alone in her boudoir, and is weeping. But, Eliot asks with a note of irony, is an extravagance of emotion so very unusual in a new bride? “That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the
coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it,” she writes. “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

This kind of editorializing can strike today’s reader as awkward and off-putting. We’re wiser now, we think, than to believe in the authoritative inclusiveness of the first person plural; feminist or Marxist or post-colonial literary theory has made us conscious of perspectives that have been excluded by, or don’t care to be encompassed by, its embrace. We may even be writing from one of those perspectives ourselves. (I humbly submit: when I write “we,” I mean by it “I, and hopefully you.”) The explicit intrusion of a narrator’s voice in Eliot’s fiction can strike the contemporary ear as old-fashioned. Today’s realist novelists don’t tend to step onto their pages, formally addressing the reader like a lawyer making a case before a courtroom.

Some contemporary critics of Eliot weren’t particularly enamored of the technique, either—so much so that Leslie Stephen, writing in the
Cornhill Magazine
immediately after Eliot’s death, felt a need to defend the practice. Stephen argued that it was one of the ways in which Eliot, the most intellectual of authors, sought to include in her fiction the ideas and convictions that were crucially important to her. “We are indeed told dogmatically that a novelist should never indulge in little asides to the reader. Why not?” he wrote. “A child, it is true, dislikes to have the illusion broken, and is angry if you try to persuade him that Giant Despair was not a real personage like his favorite Blunderbore. But the attempt
to produce such illusions is really unworthy of work intended for full-grown readers.” In a foreshadowing of the formula his daughter Virginia Woolf would later use, Stephen suggests that Eliot’s use of the magisterial authorial interjection is one of the things that make her novels suitable for grown-up people.

It’s one of the techniques she feels most at home using. “You are like a great giant walking about among us and fixing every one you meet upon your canvas,” John Blackwood, her publisher, remarked with approval after he’d read the manuscript of the second volume of
Middlemarch.
Blackwood’s use of the first person plural isn’t a slip. He means to include readers of Eliot’s books among the diminutive characters whom George Eliot fixes on her canvas—the ones who gossip about Lydgate’s unconventional unwillingness to dispense medicines, or about his bizarre request to conduct a postmortem on a patient, or about his unseemly closeness to Bulstrode. Bulstrode’s ultimate downfall levels Lydgate, too, after the doctor accepts a loan that, when the fact of it emerges publicly, is taken by onlookers to be a bribe—and which may, indeed, hamper Lydgate’s ability to judge Bulstrode’s actions objectively. By directly addressing us, Eliot draws us deeper inside her panorama. She makes Middlemarchers of us all.

But Eliot does something in addition with those moments of authorial interjection. She insists that the reader look at the characters in the book from her own elevated viewpoint. We are granted a wider perspective, and a greater insight, than is available to their neighbors down in the world of Middlemarch. By showing us the way each character is bound within his or her own narrow viewpoint, while providing us with a broader view, she nurtures what Virginia Woolf described as “the melancholy
virtue of tolerance.” “If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” Eliot once wrote. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to
imagine
and to
feel
the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.”

And this is one way in which
Middlemarch
is a book about young people for older people. This is one reason why Woolf’s epigrammatic observation rings true. When I read of the boy Lydgate in his father’s library, taking up a book and being seized by a passion, or I glimpse the newlywed Dorothea, distraught in her Roman boudoir, unable to name the deficit she feels or to identify the nature of her disappointment, I am able not only to imagine their vivid, solipsistic experience but also to see them from Eliot’s authorial perspective of heightened, mature sympathy. In viewing them I am invited to shed my wadded layers of stupidity, and to listen for the sound of growing grass.

M
Y
train rumbled into Coventry, and after I left the station I set off toward the city center. I could see from my map that there was a park, Greyfriars Green, through which I needed to pass, but to reach it I had to navigate a tangle of roads and pedestrian walkways under and alongside a busy highway that encircles the city. This ring road was built in the 1960s according to the latest urban planning principles, as was much of the contemporary city center. Coventry has a very old foundation—it is thought to have been the site of a Roman settlement, and then a Saxon nunnery, centuries before its most celebrated resident, Lady Godiva, endowed
a monastery there in 1043. In the first decades of the twentieth century it became an important center of car and then airplane manufacture, which explains why, on the night of November 14, 1940, German air forces unleashed an incendiary bombardment upon it. More than five hundred people were killed and much of the city center was destroyed, including the fourteenth-century cathedral, which was reduced to a charred shell.

I’m old enough for this piece of history not to feel altogether distant. I grew up in the 1970s hearing stories of the Blitz in London. My parents, who were eight and nine when the war began, both lived in a West London suburb. My mother’s father worked as a panel-beater at a local automobile factory; as a boy he had been granted a scholarship to a grammar school, but his own father had recently died, and at fourteen he had to leave school and learn a trade. During the war, he made tail fins for Spitfire planes. They lived in a terraced house, where my grandfather installed an Anderson shelter, made from corrugated metal, in the front room, displacing the walnut-veneered cocktail cabinet that was among his most prized possessions. He built a brick wall inches from the bay window to protect the shelter against a blast, and moved the furniture out of the bedroom above. My mother was the eldest of three children, and she and her siblings used to sleep in bunk beds in the shelter, while my grandparents slept on a narrow mattress on the floor outside. It was a small house, and surrendering two rooms must have made it feel even smaller. Anti-aircraft guns were stationed in the streets at night, making a terrifying noise. During the safer daytimes my mother and the other neighborhood kids ran in the streets outside, playing a fantasy game they called “being evacuated to America.”

My father’s father, who worked as a commercial artist on Fleet Street, spent the nights of the Blitz as a fire-watcher at the Evening Standard building on Shoe Lane, and whenever I see the famous photograph of the dome of St. Paul’s rising above the smoky devastation of the City, I imagine him on a roof nearby, in heroic pose like a figure from a Stalinist propaganda poster, holding a bucket. He belonged to a different generation from my maternal grandparents. Born in 1888, at the end of the Victorian era, he was old enough to have enlisted in the infantry in the First World War in 1915, and lucky enough to have seen the war’s end, by which time he had been commissioned in the field as an officer. When I was young my father would sometimes bring out a precious relic: a yellowed map that my grandfather had carried in his pack, denoting the landscape of France cut through by the Somme. My grandfather was gregarious and charming, given to wearing a suit of green tweed, brightly colored shirts, suede shoes. He was unafraid of the grand gesture. My father contracted measles at the age of four, and because there was a new baby at home he was sent to an isolation hospital for almost three months, his parents forbidden to visit. My grandfather went to the hospital anyway, and gained access to the ward by putting on a white coat and impersonating a doctor. He died of tuberculosis when my father, brokenhearted, was seventeen. I’ve spent forty years wishing I could have met him.

I found my way through the maze of footpaths and walked across Greyfriars Green. George Eliot and her widowed father moved to Coventry in 1841, when she was twenty-one; she would live there until his death, eight years later. Her brother Isaac had recently married, and Griff House was ceded to him and the new family that he was expected soon to produce. Father and daughter
moved to Bird Grove, a large semidetached house in Foleshill, then an affluent district a mile north of the city center. Coventry was chosen over the countryside because if a husband was to be found for Mary Ann that was where he might most likely be encountered. She hated being nudged out of her home, not least because of the crude dynamics of the matrimonial marketplace upon which she, a complicated commodity, was being floated. “It is like dying to one stage of existence,” she wrote to a friend.

Inasmuch as any place served as an inspiration for the town of Middlemarch, Coventry was it. Like the Coventry circa 1830, Middlemarch is a prosperous provincial town with a thriving textile industry: Ned Plymdale, one of the would-be suitors of Rosamond Vincy, is the son of a textile manufacturer. Will Ladislaw attends a “meeting about the Mechanics’ Institute,” a center of learning for workingmen like the Coventry Mechanics Institution, which opened in 1828. Caleb Garth and Fred Vincy encounter surveyors measuring the land around Middlemarch for the coming railway; Coventry’s railway station, part of the London to Birmingham line, opened in 1838.