The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
George Eliot · a novel in eight books · a Prelude, eighty-six chapters and a Finale · issued by Blackwood in eight parts, December 1871 to December 1872; scored on the text as revised for the one-volume edition of 1874 · read from knowledge; no text in hand, quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Novel of provincial life in four strands; marriage plot, novel of vocation and moral history of a town in one work
Mythos
Saint Theresa with no epic life to live; the Key to all Mythologies and the dead hand of the past; Ariadne abandoned in a labyrinth of learning; the web of other lives
Phase
From Miss Brooke’s marriage to a scholar, through two marriages, a will, a death at Stone Court and a banker’s exposure, to a dawn at a window and a Finale of quiet lives, from about 1829 to 1832
Presentation
Fiction; a Prelude, eighty-six chapters in eight titled Books and a Finale, every chapter under an epigraph, many in Eliot’s own unsigned verse; a narrator who moves from centre to centre and reasons in essays
Register
From Mr Brooke’s half-sentences, Mrs Cadwallader’s wit and the farce of the will to the analysis of a conscience and the moral height of the dawn
Scale
A town and its country houses, four households, two marriages anatomised, a bank, a hospital, the land and its tenants, an election in the year of the Reform Bill
Governing Proposition
A young woman of ardent nature marries a scholar at work on a key to all myths, a young doctor with a career in science marries a wife he never questions, a young man waits on an old man’s will, and a banker who funds the new hospital waits on his own past; one Midland town binds the four lives together in the years of the Reform Bill. The wager of the novel is that no life is self-made, that every other person is a centre of self as real as one’s own, and that a form which moves from centre to centre can show the web of other lives that makes and unmakes each of them, and the good that is done in acts history does not record.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens not in the town but with a saint. The Prelude sets Saint Theresa over the book, and then turns to the women who came after her with an ardour like hers and no form to spend it in: a “later-born Theresa” who finds “no epic life” (Prelude). The book that follows is the record of one such life, and of the failure of the archetype to find its form. Its first chapter brings the saint down to a girl in plain clothes: “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress” (ch. 1). The sentence is comic and exact at once, and it sets the manner of the whole: a narrator who can smile at a girl and take her seriously in the same clause.
Around that girl the novel builds a Prelude, eighty-six chapters in eight Books and a Finale. The Books are titled for phases: Miss Brooke; Old and Young; Waiting for Death; Three Love Problems; The Dead Hand; The Widow and the Wife; Two Temptations; Sunset and Sunrise. Every chapter stands under an epigraph, many of them Eliot’s own unsigned verses, the rest from Shakespeare, Chaucer, Bunyan, Dante, Goethe, Blake and others. Blackwood issued it in eight parts from December 1871 to December 1872, the first six at intervals of two months and the last two monthly, under a scheme devised with G. H. Lewes for this book, then in four volumes; the parts were planned to near-equal length. Eliot revised it for the one-volume edition of 1874, the text modern editions follow, and that is the work scored here.
The action runs from about 1829 to 1832: the debate on Catholic emancipation, the death of George IV, the cholera, the railway surveys and the Reform Bill, with the Finale reaching some years beyond. Four strands run through it. Dorothea Brooke marries the scholar Casaubon, at work on his “Key to all Mythologies”, and comes to know his cousin Will Ladislaw. Tertius Lydgate, a young doctor, marries Rosamond Vincy. Fred Vincy, with Mary Garth and her family, waits on Featherstone’s will. Bulstrode the banker waits on a past that comes back in the person of Raffles. The joins are Lydgate, doctor to all of them; Bulstrode, who funds the new hospital and is Rosamond’s uncle by marriage; and the talk of the town, which carries every life into every other.
Movement II
Dorothea marries Casaubon to serve a great work, and goes with him to Rome. In the Vatican the painter Naumann sees her standing beside the Ariadne (ch. 19), and the image holds: a bride abandoned in a labyrinth of learning. Dorothea weeps alone in Rome, and the narrator turns from her grief to “that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (ch. 20). The height of the book is reached here first, not in an event but in the narrator’s turn.
The next chapter gives the book’s disclosure its plainest words. “We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves” (ch. 21). Dorothea has taken Casaubon for the means of her own ardour; she begins to learn that he has “an equivalent centre of self” (ch. 21). The novel makes this the beginning of the moral life, and makes it hard. Dorothea learns it not from a teacher but from a marriage, and the lesson does not make the marriage better; it only makes her see it.
Then the book does what its own law requires. In its twenty-ninth chapter it stops and asks “but why always Dorothea?” and turns to Casaubon’s inner life and his dread. The free indirect style enters him as fully as it entered her, and it will enter Rosamond and Bulstrode in their turn, for as long as understanding takes. Casaubon dies in the summer-house, and the fifth Book is titled The Dead Hand: his codicil is the past gripping the living. The counter-myth of the dead origin answers the saint of the Prelude, and the widow begins again.
Movement III
Lydgate comes to the town with a career in science before him: the new hospital, the stethoscope, the fevers of the town, and a search for the primitive tissue that would be the web of the body as the town is the web of lives. The narrator pauses on him, with “so much to do in unravelling certain human lots” (ch. 15), and names at once what will undo him: his “spots of commonness” (ch. 15). He is a divided man, and the book does not let his gifts excuse his commonness. His ambition is real, and so is the corruption of the profession around him.
He marries Rosamond Vincy as Dorothea married Casaubon, each taking the other for an idea. The marriage is disclosed through money and furniture, through debt and the bailiff in the house, and through a wife he never questioned. The child is lost when Rosamond falls from a horse. The narrator has an image for what is wrong here, and for her own method: the pier-glass and its “concentric circles” (ch. 27), the book’s theory of its own vision, in which each person mistakes their own centre for the world’s. Rosamond is the purest case, and the book enters her too, so that the reader is left to ask whether she is its villain or its most consistent self.
Beside Lydgate’s fall runs Fred Vincy’s rise, and the two are measures of each other: Fred, who waited on a will, is redeemed by work and learns a trade; Lydgate, who had a vocation, falls by debt. The Finale gives Lydgate his end. He becomes a fashionable physician and dies at fifty, and he has a name for his wife: “his basil plant” (Finale), a plant that flourished on a murdered man’s brains. One phrase carries the whole marriage. The tragedy of ambition is complete, and it is told in a clause.
Movement IV
At Stone Court Featherstone is dying, and his kin gather. The comedy of greed, the funeral and the farce at the reading of his will (Book III) are told at more length than the comedy needs, and they seem a subplot. They are a mechanism. Featherstone made two wills, and what they set moving brings Raffles to Stone Court. Mr Brooke meanwhile makes his candidacy, with the Pioneer behind it, and is pelted at the hustings, his own words echoed back at him by a puppet (Book V), and is saved by his own vagueness. Caleb Garth goes about his business on the land, and the railway surveyors come into the fields (ch. 56).
Bulstrode is the banker, an Evangelical whose faith has absorbed his past by turning his own interest into Providence. The book anatomises that conscience more exactly than the English novel had done: not a hypocrite, but a man who believes what he needs to believe. Raffles reads the paper Bulstrode wrapped his flask in, and the past comes back by that accident of paper. The book places its joins where they bear weight, and this one bears the whole of the last two Books.
Raffles comes to Stone Court, and Lydgate is called there. On the night Raffles dies, Bulstrode sits at the bedside holding the key to the cellar, and lets the brandy reach him (ch. 70). It is the dreadful height of the book, quiet and complete. The exposure that follows breaks Lydgate and calls Dorothea out of her grief. Bulstrode is disgraced, and his wife Harriet puts off her ornaments and goes down to him (ch. 74). The scene is among the heights of the book, and it belongs to a figure on its margin.
Movement V
Bulstrode’s exposure calls Dorothea out of her grief, and there follows her night of anguish. At dawn she goes to the window and sees herself as “a part of that involuntary, palpitating life” (ch. 80). The heroine who wanted an epic life finds, at the moment she has most reason to withdraw into her own grief, that she is one centre among many, and that the others have claims. It is the disclosure of the twenty-first chapter, learned now in the body.
The next day she goes back to Rosamond (ch. 81), and the rival is lifted out of herself for once. The scene answers James’s charge that the book is “an indifferent whole”: Featherstone’s will brought Raffles, Raffles brought down Bulstrode, Bulstrode’s fall took Lydgate, and Lydgate’s disgrace brings Dorothea to Rosamond. The strands meet in one room. Then the Finale gives Dorothea a second marriage, to Ladislaw, and an unnamed life. Ladislaw is the book’s weakest figure, drawn from outside and too fondly, and the reward is thin; the Finale’s point is that the reward is small.
The last sentence returns to the Prelude. The later-born Theresa has had no epic life, and her ardour has gone into “unhistoric acts”; the book closes on those acts and on “unvisited tombs” (Finale). Whether the quiet is consolation or indictment, the novel does not say, and a century and a half of reading has not settled it. The saint of the Prelude has found no epic, only a town, a marriage and some neighbours. The book’s claim is that this was not nothing, and that the novel is the form in which it can be seen.
Act III · The Twelve
Length is not a cost; the question is what could go, and the four strands cannot. Lydgate’s marriage is the measure of Dorothea’s, since each marries an idea of the other; Fred’s redemption by work is the measure of Lydgate’s fall by debt; and Bulstrode’s exposure breaks Lydgate and calls Dorothea out of her grief. Featherstone’s two wills, which seem a comic subplot of greedy kin, bring Raffles to Stone Court and so bring down the bank. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, level with The Archetypal Deep, is slack of about a twentieth: the Featherstone relatives and the funeral told at more length than the comedy needs, Mr Brooke’s candidacy and the Pioneer, the Garths’ goodness said more than once, and commentary where a scene has done its work.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: every person is “an equivalent centre of self” (ch. 21), and the moral life begins in seeing it; lives are made and unmade less by their choices than by the web of other lives they are bound into; and the ardent will is spent, mostly, in “unhistoric acts” (Finale). The book shows it before it says it. Dorothea learns Casaubon’s centre of self the hard way: “We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves” (ch. 21). Lydgate’s “spots of commonness” (ch. 15) are disclosed through money, furniture and a wife he never questioned, and Bulstrode’s faith, which turns his own interest into Providence, is the most exact anatomy of conscience in the English novel. Held off the top because Ladislaw, the reward, is less disclosed than the rest.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The register is plain and the height is moral, and it comes often. The ceiling: Dorothea weeping alone in Rome, and the narrator’s turn to “that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (ch. 20); her night of anguish and the dawn at the window, where she sees herself as “a part of that involuntary, palpitating life” (ch. 80); her visit to Rosamond the next day (ch. 81), where the rival is lifted out of herself for once; Harriet Bulstrode putting off her ornaments and going down to her disgraced husband (ch. 74); the Finale’s last sentence. The dreadful: Casaubon dead in the summer-house, and the night Bulstrode lets the brandy reach Raffles (ch. 70). Held below the top because the ground between the heights is comic, analytic or social, and the book chooses that.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth built in part, and built against itself. The Prelude sets Saint Theresa over the book, and Dorothea is a “later-born Theresa” who finds “no epic life” (Prelude): the archetype of the saint bears weight because the novel is the record of its failure to find a form. Casaubon’s “Key to all Mythologies” is the counter-myth, the dead search for the one origin of all myths, and the title of Book V, The Dead Hand, makes his codicil the past gripping the living. In the Vatican the painter Naumann sees Dorothea beside the Ariadne (ch. 19), the bride abandoned in a labyrinth of learning. The web is the governing image, and Lydgate’s search for the primitive tissue is its scientific twin. Held a tenth above the gate because the realist surface keeps these patterns as analogy, and the novel distrusts myth on principle.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the English multi-plot novel of Dickens and Thackeray, and Eliot’s own provincial realism in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. The swerve is a novel with no single centre, which stops in its twenty-ninth chapter to ask “but why always Dorothea?” and turns to Casaubon’s inner life; a narrator who reasons as a scientist does, with the microscope and the pier-glass and its “concentric circles” (ch. 27) for instruments; a heroine whose great nature ends in a second marriage and an unnamed life; a man of science who ends a fashionable physician and dies at fifty. The stake was real: a heroine given no vocation and a Finale that refuses the reward the form promised, issued in a scheme of parts that Blackwood and G. H. Lewes devised for this book. Held below the top because the form bent is still the form, and the break with it was not made.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The web is the argument. Told as Dorothea’s story alone, Middlemarch is a novel of a wrong marriage set right; told as Lydgate’s, a tragedy of ambition. Only the four strands, laid against one another and joined by a town, know what the book knows: that no life is self-made, and that the shape of one is the pressure of the others on it. The narrator who moves from centre to centre, with “so much to do in unravelling certain human lots” (ch. 15), is the instrument of the book’s justice, as the free indirect style is: Casaubon, Rosamond and Bulstrode are each entered for as long as understanding takes. The eight Books, each titled for a phase, give the whole its seasons. Held off the top where the commentary explains what the form has already shown.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence over promise: a century and a half of reading that has not exhausted it. Henry James, reviewing it in 1873, called it “a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole”, and the argument over that judgment has run since. Virginia Woolf in 1919 called it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”; F. R. Leavis made it the centre of The Great Tradition (1948); J. Hillis Miller read its optics and its signs; Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983) read its science; Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014) read it as a life’s companion. The questions hold open: whether the Finale’s quiet is consolation or indictment, whether Ladislaw is a failure of art or a deliberate lightness, whether Rosamond is the villain or the most consistent self in the book. Held a step below the top because its questions are asked in the open, by a narrator who answers many.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The field is the English novel of the nineteenth century, and the novel in English after it. The force: the book set the measure of psychological realism in English, a whole community shown through several consciousnesses at once by a narrator able to think in essays without leaving the scene, with a moral seriousness the English novel had not claimed so fully; and it widened what the realist novel could think about, science, vocation and marriage as mutual ignorance. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: James, who resisted it, wrote The Portrait of a Lady in its shadow; Woolf and Leavis named it the mature English novel; its narrator’s manner runs through later English and American realism to the present. Held below 9.0 by the width of the reach, since it redirected the novel in English more than the European novel, and its force is the perfection of a form more than a new one.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric over a century and a half. The form is whole: the text survives entire, revised by its author for the edition of 1874, with nothing lost and no question of transmission. Presence is continuous: in print since 1872, taught in schools and universities throughout the English-speaking world, translated into the major European languages and beyond, and adapted for BBC television in 1968 and again in Andrew Davies’s serial of 1994. Its surfaces, the Reform Bill and the medical politics of 1830, were history already when it was written, and they do not date it. It falls short of the widest presence because its reading outside English is narrower than that of the Russian and French novels of its decades: it is read most where English is read.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium is near complete. The construction times four strands of very different matter to one another across three years and places the joins where they bear weight: Raffles reading the paper Bulstrode wrapped his flask in; Lydgate called to Stone Court on the night Raffles dies. The sentence is periodic and exact, capable of comedy and of analysis in one clause, as in the first sentence of the first chapter, “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress” (ch. 1). One image carries a whole marriage: Lydgate’s name for Rosamond, “his basil plant” (Finale), a plant that flourished on a murdered man’s brains. Mr Brooke’s half-sentences, Mrs Cadwallader’s wit and Mary Garth’s dryness are each a voice. Charged: Ladislaw, drawn from outside and too fondly; commentary that says once more what the scene said; and the epigraphs in Eliot’s own verse, the weakest writing in the book.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Mr Brooke at the hustings, pelted, his own words echoed back at him by a puppet (Book V), and Bulstrode at the bedside, holding the key to the cellar and the brandy (ch. 70). One law governs both: each person mistakes their own centre for the world’s, and is answered by the web of other lives. Brooke is saved by his own vagueness; Bulstrode is destroyed by the past his faith absorbed, Lydgate by what he never looked at; Dorothea is saved by what she learns to see. The range is wide and held: farce at the reading of Featherstone’s will, scholarship in the Lowick library, science in Lydgate’s lodging, the dawn at the window. Charged: Ladislaw’s history, Casaubon’s cousin and Bulstrode’s money, works by a coincidence the book elsewhere does not need, and the Garths are shielded from the law the others obey.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Held, not listed, by a town. Consciousness: Dorothea’s ardour, Casaubon’s dread, Lydgate’s self-division, Bulstrode’s double life, Rosamond’s will. The family: four households, two marriages anatomised, a child lost when Rosamond falls from a horse. Labour: Caleb Garth’s business, the land and its tenants, the railway surveyors in the fields (ch. 56), Fred learning a trade. Science and medicine: fever, the new hospital, the stethoscope, the profession’s corruption. Money: banking, debt, inheritance, the bailiff in the house. The state and history: the Reform Bill, the election, Catholic emancipation, the cholera. The sacred: Bulstrode’s Evangelical faith, Farebrother’s tolerant Anglicanism, Dorothea’s faith without dogma. Art and learning: Rome, Naumann, the Key. Held below the top because the poor are glimpsed rather than held, at Dagley’s farm and among the labourers, and the nation is a rumour from London.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment at 9.5, then The Living Form, The Bottomless Well, The Made and The Encompassed at 9.3. A disclosure that every person is an equivalent centre of self, shown through four lives before it is said; a form in which the web is the argument; a century and a half of argument it has not exhausted; a construction that times four strands to one another across three years; and a town that holds consciousness, labour, money, science, faith and the Reform Bill at once.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6. The first is held by slack of about a twentieth: the Featherstone kin and funeral, Mr Brooke’s candidacy and the Pioneer, and commentary where a scene has done its work. The second is held by a realism that keeps its Theresa, its Key and its Ariadne as analogy, a tenth above the Epochal Gate. Next above them, The Swerve at 8.7, because the form bent is still the form.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.5, The Imperishable at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.3. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of George Eliot’s Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, scored as the complete novel in the text Eliot revised for the one-volume edition of 1874, which modern editions follow: a Prelude, eighty-six chapters in eight Books, and a Finale. It was first issued by William Blackwood and Sons in eight parts from December 1871 to December 1872, then in four volumes; the differences between that text and the text of 1874 are small, and none is scored. The work is in English, so no translation is in question. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file; the novel is quoted only where its words are certain, briefly, and cited by chapter only where the chapter is certain. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the length of the novel in words, the particular revisions made for the edition of 1874, the history of its composition from two separate projects, and a critics’ poll of recent years. Citations are by chapter: ch. 21 is chapter 21.