Readers Group

'The readers group was established at the end of 2010 and at present has 10 members. We meet at Stonehouse on Thursday afternoons, more or less alternate Thursdays though we try to avoid the monthly U3a meeting and go on to the next available Thursday. We could do with one or two more members, but not too many.

If you would like to join us, contact John Peters on 01453 824459 or myrajohn@btinternet.com.'

The following are examples of the work done by members:

Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE         27 10 11

This was the final meeting of the group to consider our readings of The Return of the Native. Although we had agreed in advance to look at the end of the story and the death of Mrs Yeobright we spent some of the time looking back at our revised version of The Return of the Native and Religion (on the website) and finding how much we were in agreement with it. We did, however, agree, that despite all the church-going, especially by the ‘country people’, there is little sign that any of them believes in the nineteenth century Anglican version of Christianity, though they seem to have many beliefs and superstitions. This may express Hardys own attitude.

There was a lot of discussion about what was skilful in the climactic sections of the novel and what we thought was ‘oddly unskilful’. We know that the main character is the heath; and we know that for his plot Hardy had to use what in real life we would call coincidences: sometimes they fit in naturally, as with the worsening weather on 6 November in chapter viii of The Discovery, or the oppressive heat of Thursday 31 August, when Mrs Yeobright visits the cottage where Clym and Eustacia are living; but sometimes, for instance when Johnny Nunsuch appears, he seems to be simply the means of getting information to the characters, as a messenger. For example he is suddenly available to recite what Mrs Yeobright had said to him before he left her; Charley appears when it would not be appropriate for Johnny to be part of a grown-up story (though we agreed we liked Charley, a rather soft romantic character, more developed, who leaves the story with a lump of the dead Eustacias hair). And we also mentioned that Mrs Yeobright sacks Christian Cantle after his adventure with the guineas, but has to reinstate him for no other reasons than that Hardy would have had to introduce another character to replace him, and he is too much fun to waste!

We looked at the way the story is structured from the last day of August, when Mrs Yeobright goes to visit Clym and Eustacia and dies on her way back home, to Bonfire Night the same year, then the following night and the morning after that; and then on to the following year for what appears to be a postscript ending.

We have heard so much, in small details, of the weather on that hot Thursday as well as about Mrs Yeobrights  state of health (mostly in small, apparently insignificant asides) that we are prepared to agree with the doctor that it was fatigue and a pre-existing heart condition that killed her, though not until after we have enjoyed the bizarre snake-oil episode. We were interested to notice that the cup Johnny has filled with water is part of a set, a reconciliation present for Clym and Eustacia, though Hardy makes little of it, as he does with so many clues about what is going on.

We tried to look at the two almost alternative endings. In the first, Eustacia and Wildeve drown, while, by coincidence, Eustacia does not receive her letter from Clym; Clym appears to have drowned, too, but he revives, and says ‘she is the second woman I have killed this year’. Much later, he becomes the itinerant preacher on Rainbarrow: ‘a motionless figure standing on top of the tumulus… the first of a series of moral lectures… “ask on, my mother, for I will not say thee nay”’. Presumably we would not be supposed to know what has happened to other characters.

The Clym on Rainbarrow episode rounds the story off nicely, and clearly is commercial, especially as now-rich Thomasin has married not-poor, no-longer-red Diggory and settled the Wildeve fortune on the baby. However, we thought this might be a somewhat unskilful way of dealing with the characters. Again, we were not amazingly impressed by Hardys explanation in a footnote of his favoured ending.

Finally, we felt that we should note that, whatever Hardy thought of or intended to do with the character, Diggory Venn is the almost the first character we meet in the book; he appears as a character to do essential things at many crucial nodal points; he is probably the most visually memorable; and at the end he is still there, a prosperous farmer who has married the girl he was always in love with. We liked Diggory. He is the most sensible person in The Return of the Native.

Thomas Hardy 'The Return of the Native' and Religion

In the census of 1871, Hardy is registered as an 'architect's clerk'. Despite years of out-of hours study of the Classics, he had been unable to reach the standard required to pass the entrance examination for Cambridge University. This effectively barred him from achieving his ambition to take Holy Orders and become a country curate - poet. Yet, by the time of the publication of The Return of the Native in 1878, Hardy had become an agnostic and a successful novelist. Much much later, he received honorary fellowships from both Cambridge and Oxford Universities.

Reading through the text, searching for Biblical allusions, references to acts of faith, and so on, it is as if Hardy has removed entirely the Christian moral compass for the behaviour of his characters away, although he retains Biblical allusions in his prose. The opening chapter describing Egdon Heath is typical: there is no attribution for its creation to a purposeful God. Instead, Hardy assimilated his reading of seminal contemporary publications on geology, overturning the literal Biblical interpretations of the creation, into his realisation of the Heath as it simply exists, 'the great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim' and 'those surfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible by weather, nor so flat as to be 'the victims of floods and deposits'.

Having established his own 'godless' position as narrator, he describes the situation prevailing in country church-going by the rustics. Cantle hasn't attended Church for 'to-year' and, as winter is approaching, isn't expecting to go. Humphrey hasn't been for three years as he's so 'dead sleepy of a Sunday' and its too far to go. The Church is hardly persuasive either, for you've 'such a mortal poor chance' of getting to Heaven when so many do not. However, the words of the Bible carry superstitious power - Susan Nunsuch recites the Lord's Prayer backwards as she burns her wax effigy of Eustacia. As for Eustacia, herself, she 'hated' Sundays when all were at rest, and sang a psalm or read her Bible on weekdays (only) 'unopressed with a sense of doing her duty'. Christian Cantle - his name carefully chosen - is weak in mind and prey to irrational fears.

Just one Christmas is celebrated in the course of the drama, not by attending Church (Hardy brusquely dismisses the possibility of bringing young lovers together in Church - Eustacia rates her odds at 10 to 1 of seeing Clym in the congregation), but through Mrs Yeobright's Christmas Eve party to welcome Clym home - an affair where the mummers play and Christianity is pitted against Islam in theatrical role-play. And Susan Nunsuch is obliged to 'walt for weeks' for her chance to sit by Eustacia in Church and prick her deep in the arm with a long stocking needle. By drawing blood she expects to put an end to the 'bewitching' of her child. This pagan outrage, happening in Church during a Sunday service, tends to negate the image of the Church as powerful in protecting from, and safe sanctuary against, such threats.

Hardy read Darwin's 'Origin of the Species' (published in 1859), causing him to move further towards agnosticism and uses it in an altercation between Eustacia and Clym. Clym declares 'There is no use in hating people - if you hate anything, you should hate what produced them,' to which Eustacia replies, 'Do you mean Nature? I hate her already...'. In further words between the couple, Clym declares, 'Now don't you suppose that I cannot rebel, in high Promethean fashion, against the gods and fate as well as you.' (Prometheus angers the Greek God Zeus and, is punished eternally for it). Though Hardy ameliorates Clym's position towards the end of the tale, as his vocation of iterant preacher demands, he remains cautious, carefully commenting that his [Clym's) discourses were 'never dogmatic' and that some complained of his want of 'theological doctrine'.

For Mrs Yeobright, Eustacia and Wildeve, there are none of the conventional C19 deathbed glimpses of heaven, heavenly angels or reunion with loved ones. Mrs Yeobright, who is modelled upon Hardy's mother (to whom he was very close) Is, however, given a lovely last sight of nature, as a heron passes overhead, 'dripping wet from some pool in the valleys, and as he flew the edges and linings of his wings, his thighs, and his breast were so caught by the bright sunbeams that he appeared as if formed of burnished silver. Up in the zenith where he was seemed a free and happy place, away from all contact with the earthly ball to which she was pinioned.' This is the nearest Hardy approaches to release of the spirit, or a vision of Heaven.

'The Return of the Native' at first appears to be a traditional Victorian drama albeit his heroine is on the 'wild side', set in an exceptionally well-described rural landscape, but encapsulated within it is Hardy's rejection of the Church as the moral compass for human behaviour. Hardy never revitalised his Christian beliefs, and later his scathing criticism of the established Church in 'Jude the Obscure' (1895) brought forth a veritable fire-storm of criticism against him. Even Hardy's friend, the literary critic Edmund Gosse asked in his review, 'What has Providence done to Mr Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?'

12th September & 13th October 2011

Hard Times
by Dickens

Book lll

Gradgrind, with growing awareness that he has never invited confidences from louisa declares, 'I only entreat you to believe, my favourite child, that [ have meant to do right: And her reply, 'I never blamed you, and I never shall:

Gradgrind, 'Some persons hold...that there is a wisdom of the Head, and that there is a wisdom of the Heart. I have not supposed so..: and '...1 have a misgiving that some change may have been slowly working about me in this house, by mere love and gratitude: that what the Head had left undone and could not do, the Heart may have been doing silently: And of louisa, 1 doubt whether I have been quite right in the manner of her education:

In the recriminations following louisa's return to the Gradgrind household, Bounderby gives her until noon the following day to return to him, declaring, 'Highly connected females have been astonished to see the way in which your daughter has conducted herself, and to witness her insensibility [lack of emotion/indifference]. They wonder how I have suffered it.

Having been jealous of Sissy's easy affection with louisa's sister Jane, louisa relaxes then bonds with Sissy. They have a mutual understanding in the culpability of Tom regarding the bank robbery and work together to achieve exile rather than imprisonment for him. louisa never relinquishes her loyalty and compassion for him.

Louisa is a redeemed person '...grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent or pretty fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of infancy will wither up, the sturdiest of manhood will be morally stark dead, and the plainest national prosperity figures can show, will be Writing on the Wall..: [portent of doom/misfortune].

Dickens' case is that emotional intelligence should be developed, but is ignored in education based on fact. Yet Dickens does not give us any insight as to how emotional education should be brought into the curriculum. His model for goodness is Sissy. Sissy's innate goodness originates in the circus, and survives life in the Gradgrind household; she fails to learn facts at school, and remains in the servant class. This is the traditional Victorian model of womanhood: intellectually inferior and morally superior. The disappointment is that Dickens does not create a young male character, challenging the likes of Bounderby, Gradgrind and Harthouse: a person with the potential to become one of those great polymaths of the Victorian age. But crucially Dickens does not argue well his own cause: to learn emotional wisdom through great literature.

Linda Carter 14/6/11

Dickens and Morality in Hard Times, Book the Second

Charles Dickens was in many ways a very conventional person who held the most ordinary opinions about society. He liked big abstractions, such as the nation, the army and the navy; he was rather fond of the Christian religion, as he understood it. He liked rich people if they were kind, and poor people if they were deferential. Although he has often been described as a reformer, there are hardly any reforms which have anything to do with him. He did write about social abuses, but usually about things that had disappeared by his time.

On the other hand he was able to use his special genius to recreate only slightly out of date pictures of life, which his readers might not have been aware were out of date, and to use them to make them feel strongly about the lives of his characters.

At the end of Book the First, Tom is delighted by Louisa and her marriage to Bounderby. We think he is not as nice as he was when he was a small boy looking at Slearys horse-riding through the fence, and we are expected to recognise that, like Louisas absurd attitude to marriage, he is the result of a perverted education – not Lancasterian, because that is for the poor, such as Bitzer, but a more refined, more cruel version which contains no story and no ‘fancy’ and is restricted in every way without having positive rules to live by. The title of Book the First, Sowing, would be immediately recognised by a mid-nineteenth century readership as the beginning of a moral story.

Now we are set up for the symbolic Reaping offered in Book the Second, which begins on ‘a sunny midsummer day’ which Dickens immediately qualifies with ‘There was such a thing sometimes, even in Coketown’. I think this is a genuine reaction by Dickens to his experiences in the few northern industrial towns he had visited – he felt sorry for people who had to live there, and he wanted to show it. His concern is shown in the following two pages of description which lead to Mrs Sparsit via ‘a Coketowner… terrified the Home Secretary’ and vignettes: ‘Stokers emerged… frying in oil… atmosphere of the Fairy palaces was like the breath of the simoon…’. And Bitzer reappears, right on cue, as he working class version of Tom Gradgrind. Mrs Sparsit has a utilitarian view of Bitzer, even as a co-conspirator, ‘general spy and informer’ because of the social gulf between them. Bitzer is as happy as he can be about their relationship, as he makes money out of it without actually working for it, just as the bank makes money for Mr Bounderby.

Their first conversations are about workers and employers unions and the ‘improvident’ poor. Then Mr Harthouse arrives and makes unpleasant comments on the people of Coketown, including some of the principal characters. We do not like him any more than we like Mrs Sparsit or Bitzer or even Mr Bounderby, and assume that he is going to be a new villain – an amoral man, who gambles with his own life and the lives of others, although ‘the chances are against the players’, as Bitzer tells Mrs Sparsit after Harthouse has ‘bowed himself out’.

Nothing is clear yet in the first couple of chapters, but an atmosphere has grown, we see that things may not be as they seem, and the story has taken a new direction.

Maybe what Dickens is on about is indeed appearances and how easy it is to take things as they appear. We know that he must, like us, have a sort of personal moral guide that sorts things out for him: what do things look like? what is really going on? and what should be going on? If we want to follow him we have to take his characters and events on trust. Can we laugh along with the House of Commons or are we prepared to be scandalised?

Is Louisa scandalised by Mr Harthouse? Or is she simply witty and cynical? We shall have to wait and see. Mr Harthouse does not know what to think about her, either, but he would like to play a game of seducer and cuckolder with the Bounderbys if he does not satisfy himself in destroying the morale of ‘the Hands’.

He finds a willing victim in Tom: ‘something so very agreeable in being so intimate with such a waistcoat’. At the end of Chapter III, which begins by Tom being declared a hypocrite by the author, Dickens suggests that Tom ‘might have gone down to the ill-smelling river… and have curtained his head for ever with its filthy waters’. I think this is the only example in Dickens of his wishing suicide on a young character: it is a remarkable way of aligning the reader with the sympathies of the author. The whole chapter repays very careful reading.

For Dickens, morality is always personal. The next character to manifest himself in the book is Slackbridge, wholly invented by Dickens with some background from his report on the Preston lock-out. Slackbridge could not exist without his chorus of ‘Hands’. As there appears to be no dispute, this episode must be Dickens showing us badness so that he can show us Stephen Blackpool as a highly moral person, ‘goodness’, in contrast to the deluded others: ‘there was a propriety, not to say dignity, in these words…’. However, Stephen is such a silly man that, even though Dickens almost forces us to feel sorry for him, we cannot admire him. He is simply a victim, and whatever happens to him as a victim simply reflects badly on his workmates, on trades unions, on Harthouse and on Bounderby.

Stephen must be meant to be a moral character; he is much more complex than this short description allows; but as an example of morality he is little more than a dummy.

John Peters

Middlemarch
by George Eliot

Sympathies – some comments from others

1 Perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was very far from remarkable… Mrs Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery and murder… you can easily find reading more to your taste, since I learn from the newspapers that many remarkable novels, full of striking situations, thrilling incidents, and eloquent writing, have appeared only within the last season.

George Eliot, Amos Barton, chapter 5, in Scenes of Clerical Life

2 Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch 'one of the few English books written for grown-up people'. Anti-romantic, yet intensely passionate, it is one of the greatest novels of all.

2a ‘There are, believe it,’ she tells us, ‘passions of the mind.’ One of the reasons I loved her work when I met it was that she both showedpeople thinking intensely - as well as feeling - and knew and understood herself what they were thinking about.

2b It began, as works of art often do, with an unexpected connection. Eliot was writing a story called Miss Brooke, and she began work on a story of a scientifically ambitious young doctor in a provincial town, and suddenly saw that these two were parts of the same whole. Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate could be called the hero and heroine of the work, though they do not meet until the end of the first part of the book, and one of the powers of Eliot's writing is that a large number of her other characters, for a time, or briefly, are the heroes of their stories and the centres of their worlds.

AS Byatt

3 ‘Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

Some thoughts on Lydgate Gerry Lander

In Book 8 Lydgate encounters more disappointments and we can see the symptoms of his eventual fate - his later life with Rosamond being sown here. I refer particularly to his inability to tell her of his troubles - the one person - Eliot seems to be suggesting - who could give him understanding and support.

P796.7 How would Rosamond take it all? Here was another weight of chain to drag and poor Lydgate (that adjective again!) was in a bad mood to bear her dumb mastery" He is so in thrall to this dumb mastery that her sobs and weeping - after Dorothea's second visit - in which she allows him to comfort her gives him some false reassurance things may be well. We see her power over him as she tells him to push back the lock of his hair.

Yet he comes over as a person who is developing a moral sense and an empathy for others even when this feeling is inimical to his own best interests.

So he refrains from speaking out about the Raffles affair so as not to point the picture at Bulstrode and so gossiping Middlemarch make him guilty. Rosamond, his wife, he protects even in his conversation with Dorothea and in no way blames her. She has "her reward" For what? when he dies early having moved to London to please her. I wonder who arranged that handsome Insurance policy? Lots of irony here!

I see Dorothea's role as his champion here as linked with the preface and the reference to St Theresa and the final words of the book "Her full nature ...spent itself in channels which had no great name on earth. But the effect of her being on those around her" was incalculably diffusive… to end of book.

It is D.B. who restores so much for Lydgate so that he is able to live some of his life — even though he knows how far he has failed his ideal and that his fair Rosamond is his Basil Plant which eats a ma's brains. I find the sentence p820 "... he gave himself up for the first time in his life to the exquisite sense of leaning entirely on a generous sympathy, without any check of proud reserve" I recall that he had no sympathetic parents in his early life.

In DB Lydgate discovers that a woman can be a true friend on an equal footing. He never expects or attempts to treat Rosamond as such. I wonder if Eliot's message is something about the need to develop equality on all levels between the genders?

Middlemarch book VIII

72/73. Dorothea wants to help Lydgate, but is dissuaded by James and Celia, and Farebrother. Meanwhile Lydgate is working himself into a rage and cursing the day he came to Middlemarch. His marriage is a disaster; he has a bad conscience over Raffles.

74. The emphasis shifts to Mrs Bulstrode (poor Harriet). A group of gossips thinks she should separate from her husband. But they said nothing to her. She became aware that there was something she did not know. Lydgate would not say anything; everyone was evasive. She was eventually forced to go to her brother, and he told her all that had happened. At home she faced her husband, and he asked her did she know the story, and she admitted that she had been told. They sat without speaking - "His confusion was silent" and "she could not ask how much was slander and false suspicion.

75. Rosamund was a little more cheerful once the house has been freed from creditors. But she considered the harsh words her husband had spoken to her. Also, she was upset by Will's decision to leave Middlemarch. We are treated to her understandings and misunderstandings. She sent out some, invitations to a small party. All were refused. She consults her parents and hears of the Bulstrode affair. She is desperate to leave Middlemarch.

76. Lydgate tells Dorothea the whole story (is she the last to know?). She still wants the hospital, but he refuses to be involved - no longer trusts himself. She explains that she has more than enough money, and wants to use it to make other people's lives better. Because of Rosemary he has to say no to involvement (he must do as other men do). He accepts her offer to talk to Rosamund. Finally Dorothea gives Lydgate a cheque for £1000, with which to repay Bulstrode.

77/78. There follows a description of what Dorothea and Will think about each other. Dorothea goes to see Rosemary, but finds Will there and assumes they have a relationship. She leaves rapidly. But Will has actually rejected Rosamund ("don't touch me") and makes plain his love for Dorothea. Shocked by this situation she persuades him to run after Dorothea.

79. When Lydgate arrives home he finds his wife sad.
Will arrives and is told of the scandal, and contemplates his future. He does not mention his refusal of help from Bulstrode.

90. Dorothea thinks of Will, and sobs, and admits to herself her love for him. Whispered cries and moans take up the night. In morning she wakes up still on the floor. She remembers the scene between Rosemary and Will, which she had briefly witnessed. She contemplates what to do.
First decision - she puts on her new dress.

81. Second decision - she goes to see Rosamund, as she had promised to do. Lydgate is there, and tells her of his consent to the hospital, and goes out. The two women then spent a long session together. Dorothea speaks well of Lydgate. Gradually they confide, and the true relationship between Will and Rosamund becomes clear.

82. After much hesitation Will returns to Middlemarch. He finds a change of atmosphere. We are told his thoughts.

83. The love scene. Miss Noble acts as a go between to bring Will into the presence of Dorothea. Emotion overcomes all difficulties. Finally they kiss.

84. Will and Dorothea are engaged to be married. This upsets the family, especially James (though he is uncomfortable about the reason). They all agree that it is a 'wrong' action. But most will ultimately support the couple. 85/86. Mrs Bulstrode gets an offer from her husband - by way of retribution - that Fred may live at Stone Court. Caleb checks Fred's commitment to Mary, and then tells the family,

Finale. The Victorian public required to know of a novel what happened later. George Eliot concentrates on her favourites, the Vincys, They are very successful and happy. Dorothea reduces to a wife and mother. There is some reconciliation with her family though her marriage was considered a mistake. But, says the author, what else could she have done?

Keith

MIDDLEMARCH – George Eliot explores marriages that start with high expectations and unexpected outcomes

The model Victorian marriage in which the husband is intellectually superior but morally inferior to his wife is turned on its head in Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’. Writing at the height of the Victorian Era in 1875, she sets her story around 1830, amongst middle class people in a Midland town. We spent time exploring her meticulously paced revelations about three couples whose characters create widely differing scenarios for their relationships.

Edward Casaubon, ageing, spare, pale and scholarly, courts and marries Dorothea Brooke, young, wealthy, beautiful and religious. He has wealth enough to give lustre to his piety, whilst she approaches marriage as if it would be a glorious piety to endure. This spiritual unity is to centre on his great academic work, a synthesis of the world’s mythologies, Dorothea serving as his secretary to help his failing sight. This unconsummated marriage rapidly disintegrates into misery, as Casaubon fears that Dorothea judges his work and shuts her out of his life, whilst Dorothea’s affection for him slides from love to pity. The untimely death of Casaubon releases Dorothea but casts a long shadow over future events.

Tertius Lydgate, an aspiring and reforming young doctor, drifts into love with the beautiful, self-conscious and selfish Rosamond. This marriage has all the hallmarks of the typical Victorian marriage but its outcome rapidly takes us away from convention. They lack the money to match their lifestyle, and headstrong Rosamond defies her husband, even to the point of riding whilst pregnant, causing her to miscarry. Lydgate becomes mired in rumours of scandal, his financial situation remains precarious, and eventually Rosamond, the dominant partner, has her own way: they move to London where opportunities for financial success come their way, but Lydgate’s high ideals never resurface.

Set against these two marriages: the one spiritual and the other of passion, Eliot has an endearing third couple, Fred Vincey and Mary Garth. Fred, at the age of six, thought Mary was the nicest girl in the world and wedded her with a brass ring. This relationship never pales, but Eliot holds them at a distance from each other in adult life because Fred, though highly educated, has no independent means or profession. Clever Mary understands Fred’s good but somewhat feckless disposition. Her father, Caleb Garth, comes to their rescue, providing Fred with the skills of an estate manager and a good position comes his way. Combined with Mary’s cleverness, Fred and Mary achieve a solid mutual happiness, placing friendship – the middle way between spirituality and passion – as the key to a happy marriage. This formula for a happy marriage has never gone out of fashion and makes Middlemarch an exceptionally good read.

Linda Carter, June 2011

Middlemarch 3rd meeting, 17 February 2011

Nodal points in Book 3, Waiting for Death (all page references to the Penguin edition)

In Chapter 23 we learn abut Freds debt and the family relationships between the Vincys, Featherstones and Garths; The Vincys secretly regarded [Fred] as Mr Featherstones heir. The episode with the horse swap is amusing but most of this chapter is merely plotting.

So is Chapter 24, though it gives us the relationship of Caleb Garth to his notion of business and shows the effects of Freds debt on the Garth family.

Chapter 25 is about Fred and Mary and to some extent about Mr Featherstone, but there are several lines of story which will lead to some of the major points of change: Fred excuses himself on the grounds that he had a cold; Caleb speaks to Mary about ‘young folks may get fond of each other before they know what life is… it soon turns into working day, my dear’ p 291. This of course anticipates the Lydgate and Rosamund story.

Chapter 26 is about Freds illness: Fred did not go to Stone Court the next day… ‘I feel very ill: I think you must send for Wrench’ and Rosamund ‘Mamma! There is doctor Lydgate… they say he cures everyone…’ Lydgate is convinced the illness is typhoid and sends a prescription to the druggist (a) interfering with Wrenchs practice and (b) giving the whole town an example of not making up the medicine himself and (c) getting the entrée to the Vincy house: ‘You must come again…’ and Mr Vincy was angry with Dr Wrench… ‘I shall drink brandy’ and on p296: However, Lydgate was installed as medical attendant on the Vincys. The chapter ends with the natural son of Bulstrodes comic relief.

Chapter 27 This chapter begins with the set piece metaphor, which George Eliot calls a parable, about the scratched mirror: the egoism of any person now absent… Rosamund had a Providence of her own who kindly made her more charming than other girls… therefore Rosamund… refused to leave papa and mamma. This is one of the most interesting and important chapters for me as George Eliot is speaking with two voices at once: she is the critical narrator and at the same time the inner voice of Rosamund. The text concentrates entirely on Rosamund here, and so we are forced to be thinking about Rosamund and what the author has said about her, and how it fits into our idea of George Eliots world.

On p298 we switch over, probably still in our Rosamund mode, to Mrs Vincy, who is our new focus: all the deepest fibres of the mothers memory were stirred… the babe whom she had loved, with a love new to her, before he was born… but this stream of consciousness, filtered through the authors calm language, runs out in face of the need for incident and direct speech: ‘Oh, take a bit of jelly, my dear’ p299. We have come from analysis to activity.

Meanwhile, pp299-302, there is a long, complex story of Lydgate and Rosamund drawing together, but so far no ‘romance’. On page 300: Rosamund, for her part, had never enjoyed the days so much in her life before… a handsome house in Lowick Gate… imagined the drawing room… Lydgate seemed to her almost perfect; and on p 301 the writer addresses the reader: Do you imagine her… ruminations… her mamma? On the contrary… She had no wicked plots… In fact they flirted.

On p302 Lydgate upsets Ned Plymdale over The Keepsake – the episode is quite a complicated way of attaching the readers idea of Lydgate to that of Rosamund, while closing other doors to Lydgate in the provincial society of Middlemarch.

P304 To Rosamund it seemed as if she and Lydgate were as good as engaged and on p305 That they were… had long been in her mind. But Lydgate had the counter idea…a mere negative… Then there is the metaphor of blue eyes and a jellyfish. This seems to be George Eliots summary of the case, after she has changed the readers viewpoint several times and inspected the various attitudes of the characters.

The last paragraph of Chapter 27 is inspired, rapid, concentrated plotting:

1 the hospital, Bulstrode and the medical feud;

2 Lydgates researches – his fair unknown;

3 Narrative: Lydgate overtook Rosamund… protected her from a passing drove;

4 More narrative, but indicating a change of direction in the story: Lydgate was called to Lowick Manor.

Chapter 28 begins a little earlier in narrative time than the end of chapter 27: Mr and Mrs Casaubon… arrived at Lowick from their wedding journey to Rome. The time of year is January.

The first paragraph on p306 is entirely stream of consciousness: Dorothea is thinking and the author is quite concealed; the second paragraph is different, clearly the author describing Dorothea; the third paragraph briefly continues the narrative. The style in that and the next several paragraphs is unusual: George Eliot emphasises verbid constructions, especially the tenses, or the absence of tenses, eg

Mr Casaubon, who had risen early, was…

Celia would come

There would be wedding visits

Then four lines without a tense at all; then

The duties… contemplated… seemed to be… heights where she expected to walk… had become difficult to see… repose had been shaken… and alarmed…

When would the days begin…

As she had preconceived them… duty would present itself… and give a new meaning…

The next paragraph directs us to the present of the story: meanwhile there was the snow.

Now we are back in the stream of consciousness, but as we have seen before, it is mediated by the authors language and control: so that (still p307) what Dorothea is thinking about her useless life comes out as What shall I do? Whatever you please… the gentlewomans oppressive liberty… full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment… and her thought conflate with the authors description of the narrowed landscape… the never-read books… and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight.

P308 has a long paragraph that moves from an image of Dorothea who felt nothing but the dreary oppression… group of miniatures… aunt Julia… she felt herself smiling... ‘Oh it was cruel to speak so! How sad – how dreadful!’ There is a very deep ambiguity in the exclamation and its relation to what has gone before.

Then the narrative continues: She rose quickly… p309 Celia coming up…they both cried a little in a furtive manner… Mr Brooke…’ who of course blunders entirely with his congratulations and brings us down to earth. He is so wrong headed we feel we ought to laugh.

P310 in the midst of the chat we overhear Dorothea thinking: No one would ever know what she thought of a wedding journey to Rome.

The end of the chapter has Celia engaged to Sir James and Celias metaphor of Mr Casaubons learning as a kind of damp.

Chapter 29

One morning, some time after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea… this is not even a minor sentence. It is an adverbid phrase from the beginning of a sentence which George Eliot is reluctant to complete. She has more important matters to talk to us about: Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? Then comes a very long paragraph about Mr Casaubon, partly from his own point of view and partly from that of the omniscient narrator; on p313 are two more paragraphs; the first begins And when he had seen Dorothea… and concludes and Mr Casaubon believed that his happiness was going to begin. The second of the two gets deep into Mr Casaubons mind: He had not had much foretaste of happiness… capable of a severe self-restraint… a man of honour according to the code… unimpeachable by any recognized opinion. Then there is a long section (pp313-314) relating to his Parerga and the Key to all Mythologies; it includes the sentence For my part I am very sorry for him. (p314) and finishes with the striking image of the Greek mask.

On p315 he is reflecting on his new Parergon and on his colleagues, Pike, Tench and Carp (presumably metaphorical names!).

The next paragraph begins an active narrative: Thus Mr Casaubon was in one of his busiest epochs, and as I began to say… picking up from the first words of the chapter… Dorothea joined him.

Then there is the story of the two letters from Ladislaw (p316) when Dorothea tells herself that Mr Casaubon seemed to be stupidly undiscerning and hideously unjust, while he thinks this woman was too young to be on the formidable side of wifehood.

On the next page, 317, while he is writing and ignoring Dorothea, she heard the loud bang.

Sir James, who is visiting with Celia, calls for Lydgate, and the two stories are once again running on the same narrative time.

The death that occurs is the one that has been anticipated – at the end of Book Three Peter Featherstone dies with his right hand clasping the keys, and his left hand lying on the heap of gold and notes.

The Background to Religion depicted in Middlemarch

Shock waves were felt throughout the country when the 1851 census revealed that over two and a quarter million people did not attend any place of worship. In 1849 Edward Miall had published "The British Churches in relation to the British People" which voiced some severe criticisms of the Church of England. He asked "What is there here to interest the humbler classes?" His conclusion was that there was nothing they could understand because the discourses were aimed at people with enough education to appreciate them and that the British class system was to blame. "On the continent the most magnificent architecture does not deter the humblest worshipper but here we carry our class distinction into the house of God. The poor man is made to feel poor, the rich reminded that he is rich in the great majority of our churches and chapels" In book five Will Ladislaw pays an impulsive visit to Lowick church where the allocation of pews was clearly described. "And included in the congregation were three generations of decent cottagers who came from year to year with a sense of debt to their betters. Children regarded Mr Casaubon, who mounted the highest box, as chief of all betters and the one most awful if offended. Cottagers were wise to keep on the right side of their incumbent who could cut off the payment of poor relief to anyone showing disrespect — he had literally the power of life and death over the poor in his parish. According to this report a caste system existed in this country which was reflected in church services.

Also according to Miall "There lies at the bottom of society, especially in the towns, a thick sediment of physical destitution and drunkenness occupying dank cellars and filthy garrets" We get a distant glimpse of this world when Raffles appears on the scene and Bulstrode's hypocrisy reaches its lowest point. Miall later asserts that although the character of many priests is exemplary three-quarters allied themselves with the aristocracy and that their benefice ensures them, in most cases a certain and not uncommonly an ample, income. Mr Casaubon, Mr Caddwallader and to a degree Mr Farebrother mix on equal terms with the gantry; Casaubon was in fact a wealthy Squarson who could delegate duties in order to pursue his obscure studies.

According to Thomas Mann's "Report on the Religious Census" in 1851 another cause of the alienation of the poor from places of worship was the lack of sympathy exhibited by many professed Christians for the alleviation of their social hardships and burdens. \Mr Brooke complained of the expanse involved in improving the cottages on his estate and providing fences to protect their crops from the ravages of cattle. He felt the latter to be an unnecessary luxury for the poor.

We see in the rivalry for the hospital chaplaincy a mild version of the bitter divisions within the church. Mr Hawley declared that "Methodistical religion is bad for the spirit" when discussing the relative merits of the candidates. "Damn their divisions" was the response Politics were evidently a more important factor than the relative merits of the candidate

The desire of the Vincy family to make a clergyman and gentleman of Fred illustrates another criticism of Miall's concerning the type of entrants so often attracted to the church. "The establishment south of the Tweed had its prizes to attract and its honours to distribute amongst the sons of our nobility and gentry. Theo]logy is the last thing to which their attention is directed. Spiritual religion, in any sense worthy of the name, is almost the only influence with which they never come into contact. Oxford and Cambridge are notorious as centres of abandoned profligacy. From these schools of corruption go year after year the legally authorised expositors of Christianity, for the most part imbued to the core with worldliness." Mary Garth was indeed wise when she refused to marry Fred if he became one of the latter. He might have become like Mr. Tucker, described as "One of the inferior clergy, old and musty" Class distinction was evidently as strong among the clergy as in any other walk of life.

The Bulstrode Story

Mr Bulstrode is introduced to us quietly at Mr Brookes second dinner party. In a response to a comment by Mr Standish we are told ‘Mr Bulstrode, the banker … that gentleman disliked coarseness and profanity.’ There is nothing wrong with the attitude; but George Eliot chooses to make it a negative statement. His views are enlarged: ‘coquetry… to the devil’. He makes a few other comments: ‘Medical knowledge is at a low ebb..’ and George Eliot says ‘Mr Bulstrode had rather a sickly aspect…’ and later, comparing him with Walter Vincy, the mayor of Middlemarch, mentions his ‘Franciscan traits’.

The rest of Middlemarch society thinks he is ‘a man not born in the town and of dimly known origins’.

Peter Featherstone, speaking to Fred Vincy, calls him a ‘fine, religious, charitable uncle’.

During the subsequent business interview between Walter Vincy and Mr Bulstrode, Ch 13, (when Mr Bulstrode tries to persuade Mr Vincy that a sandwich for lunch is more healthy than having three cooked meals a day) George Eliot pause the action to give us a long, detailed description: ‘Do not imagine his sickly aspect to have been of the yellow, black-haired sort: he had a pale blond skin, thin grey-besprinkled brown hair, light-grey eyes, and a large forehead. Loud men called his subdued tone an undertone… inconsistent with openness’. The description goes beyond physical appearance to suggest a mutual hostility. She continues by giving a hostile view of him as Pharisee and Evangelical.

We were not sure if Mr Bulstrode would be a major character until chapter 53, when he meets Mr Rafferty for the first time in many years. The meeting comes shortly after Mr Bulstrode buys Stone Court from Mr Rigg Featherstone ‘as a retreat… until it should be conducive to the divine glory… throwing more conspicuously on the side of Gospel truth the weight of local landed proprietorship... occasions of purchase’. That is enough for us – we have decided by now that George Eliot is not on the side of Bulstrode, and that Bulstrode is to be taken from now on as a hypocrite, though maybe an unconscious one. Two pages later we hear ‘This was not what Mr Bulstrode said to any man for the sake of deceiving him: it was what he said to himself…’

On the next page Mr Bulstrode is remembering ‘when he was a young man and used to go out preaching beyond Highbury’.

But the real Bulstrode story comes in chapter 60, inthe next book, when Raffles appears again and the back story is revealed.

At the end of August there is going to be an auction at The Larches, London Road, near The Shrubs, where the Bulstrodes live. Bulstrode, ‘now one of the proprietors of the Pioneer’ visits Will Ladislaw, who is still nominally the editor of the paper, to ask him to value, apparently to bid for, a religious painting by ‘Guydo’; Will obtains the painting for £10.

Raffles, who has appeared at the auction where Will Ladislaw finds himself, speaks to Will and establishes who he is and who his mother was: Sarah Dunkirk. Raffles is described as ‘a florid stranger… a new companion’ for Bambridge, wearing ‘a suit of black, rather shabby at the edges’.

In Chapter 61, Raffles calls on Bulstrode, who tells Mrs Bulstrode that Raffles is ‘an unfortunate, dissolute wretch’.

The next day Raffles visits Bulstrode at the Bank and Mr Bulstrode goes home with a headache. The second page of the chapter begins to tell us what Mrs Bulstrode knew about her husbands career. Which is not much. The most important feature of his life, for Mrs Bulstrode, is that he married her, Harriet Vincy, after his first wife had died. The first Mrs Bulstrode had been a Dissenter, while the Vincys were all staunchly C of E, and so at this time was Mr Bulstrode, of the extreme Evangelical wing. She knew that he had worked in a bank, had been in another business where he had made a great deal of money, that he had wanted to be a preacher and that he was still interested in ‘missionary and philanthropic efforts… She believed in him as an excellent man whose piety carried a peculiar eminence… raising her own position’.

Raffles was going to go away again, but might return. Bulstrode was not in fear of legal punishment but of being exposed on account of ‘certain facts of his past life…’ Bulstode recalls all he can remember of his past that Raffles can bring up in gossip against him. There is a long metaphor about seeing a room mirrored in a window, and the way Bulstrode is remembering what may be brought up against him: ‘a young bankers clerk… fluent in speech… member of a Calvinistic dissenting church… Brother Bulstrode… the happiest time of his life’. Then we hear that he had been an orphan, educated at a charity school; he had been invited to Mr Dunkirks house; he left the bank to work for Mr Dunkirk. He found that Mr Dunkirk, ‘the richest man in the congregation’, was not only a pawnbroker with upmarket and down market shops, but was also a receiver of stolen goods. Mr Bulstrode had prayed about the morality of his new job until he decided god was happy about it: ‘Thou knowest how loosely my soul sits from these things… metaphors… were not wanting’. Years later, in 1832, Bulstrode does not know what to do.

Then there is the story of Sarah Dunkirk, who defied her parents and ran away. Mr Bulstrode married Mrs Dunkirk, a simple, pious woman, and incidentally the business, by pretending that Sarah could not be found. Presumably it was Raffles who had found Sarah, now Sarah Ladislaw, and helped Bulstrode to suppress the news. Now Bulstrode managed to break up the facts ‘into little sequences, each justified as it came by reasonings which seemed to prove it righteous’.

‘Death came again, to widen his path, by taking away his wife’. Now he was rich and independent, took all the capital out of the business, moved to Middlemarch, a place where nobody knew him, and set up as the banker of manufacturing industry; he married the sister of one of his clients, who by the time our story begins was Mayor of Middlemarch, while Bulstrode was setting up a philanthropic hospital with evangelical overtones: ‘the service he could do to the cause of religion had been through life the ground he alleged to himself for his choice of action… a discrimination of gods enemies… to keep out of money and consequent influence’.

After Raffles has driven away in the coach going to Brassing, Mr Bulstrode sends a message to Will asking him to visit The Shrubs. This is the when Mr Bulstrode offers Will restitution and Will refuses it: ‘Bulstrode shrank’. When Will points out that he knows what Bulstrodes business had been (because his mother had refused to be part of it) ‘Bulstrode reddened with irrepressible anger… when Will was gone he suffered a violent reaction, and wept like a woman’.

Chapter 67 tells the story of Lydgates application for a loan. Bulstrode, totally self centred, tells Lydgate what he intends to do about the hospital, how it is going to be funded, how ill he is etc etc; when Lydgate gets round to asking for a loan (though not until he has noted to himself Bulstrodes ‘broken metaphor and bad logic of the bankers religion’) Bulstrode says ‘you should simply become a bankrupt’.

Chapter 68 Raffles returns; it is Christmas eve; at six on Christmas morning Bulstrode is on his knees praying, ‘pleading his motives… shrank from a direct lie’. He wakes Raffles, who is having a bad dream and seems unwell, and tells him that he will pay blackmail, but if Raffles appears again, or misbehaves now, ‘I will send for a policemen to take you off my premises’. Bulstrode drove Raffles to the coach and cheered him up by giving him an instalment of £100. It was for Bulstrode ‘a dreary beginning of the Christmas day’.

‘He was conscious that there was a deposit of uneasy presentiment in his wifes mind…’.

Chapter 69 Caleb comes to tell Bulstrode that Mr Raffles is ill at Stone Court; Bulstrode sends for Dr Lydgate; Caleb has heard what Raffles has to say and although he will not repeat it he resigns his position with Bulstrode: ‘Put your business in some other hands than mine… I am ready to believe better when better is proved’.

Chapter 70 Bulstrode goes through Raffles pockets and works out that he has been nowhere nearer Middlemarch than Bilkley, 40 miles away. He is relieved. Meanwhile ‘he could not but see the death of Raffles and see in it his own deliverance’. Bulstrode does not follow Dr Lydgates instructions and allows Mrs Abel, the housekeeper, to give raffles a large amount of brandy and opium. Bulstrode gets out of bed at about six and does some more praying. George Eliot comments on his ‘private prayer’. He removes the evidence from Raffles bedroom. Raffles dies. Dr Lydgate feels that it would be rude to ask if his instructions had been faithfully carried out.

Ch 71 begins as a slightly humorous ‘here in the pub’ story, until Mr Bambridge begins to tell the story about Bulstrode that he had learned from Raffles, and learns from Mr Hopkins that Raffles is dead and buried: ‘it was what Bulstrode had dreaded the betrayal of – and hoped to have buried for ever with the corpse of Raffles… that haunting ghost of his earlier life…’ all this while Mr Bulstrode is riding past the pub. Then there is ‘a necessary “putting two and two together”’. Lydgate comes into the story; the gossip spreads, especially in The Tankard; Mr Bulstrode goes to the Sanitary Meeting; Mr Hawley, with ‘curtness and self-possession…’ asks him to resign. Mr Bulstrode ‘since the first mention of his name, had been going through a crisis… a failure… that God disowned him before men… the agony of terror that fails to kill…’ Bulstrode begins to defend himself, but Mr Thesiger says he should ‘quit the room, and avoid further hindrance to business’.

Ch 85 (Book 8) continues the story. There is the quotation from Pilgrims Progress, applied to Mr Bulstrodes state of mind: ‘a man who cannot call himself a martyr… for not being the man he professed to be…’ and later: ‘this was the consciousness that Bulstrode was withering under… concealment had been the habit of his life, and the impulse to confession had no power against the dread of a deeper humiliation… he felt a deep distress at the sight of her suffering.’

The interest moves away from Bulstrode as soon as he has made the financial and business arrangements that leave Mrs Bulstrode as the owner of Stone Court, Caleb as the manager, and Fred as the farmer, and leaves the Bulstrode family to retire somewhere where nobody knows them. The interest now centres on Dorothea and Will.