To kick off I loved this book. I have never read Middlemarch or any other text by George Eliot and I am not sure whether I ever will. But that is of no matter to me having read Rebecca’s book. The journey we are taken on is a personal one detailing the impact of multiple reads by the author at different times during the last 30 years and how her perceptions and perspectives on not only Eliot but the characters within the text have altered over that time. From a 17 year old A level student then through her twenties, thirties and forties, Rebecca has revisited Middlemarch and found that it has influenced her view and her own experiences as much as her experiences have impacted upon her interaction with the narrative. It has also motivated her to research and find out as much as possible about George Eliot’s life and what encouraged the moulding of the characters that have meant so much to Rebecca over this time. As a journalist she has had the tools and the opportunities to create one of the definitive contributions to understanding both Eliot and Middlemarch and she appears to have succeeded.
Aspects of my own childhood and youth were spent in the ‘presence’ of both Rebecca and Eliot. With the former I shared an infant class at Radipole School, near Weymouth, for three years and then a couple of hours in a history A level class in the sixth form of the local grammar school. She went on to Oxford and I eventually ended up at Warwick. The campus is on the periphery of Coventry, a town central to Eliot’s early development. But whilst Rebecca found her way to New York and Eliot to London I retreated, eventually, back to the south coast. To Radipole. Until I read The Road to Middlemarch I had no knowledge that Eliot and her partner George Lewes (philosopher and literary critic) had visited Weymouth (whilst writing Mill on the Floss) and more specifically my home village on Weymouth’s outskirts. They stayed in what is now the town centre (and probably was then) at 39 East Street (below).
Lewes wrote at the time ‘GE is in high spirits, having found a Mill and Millstream to his heart’s content”. Rebecca describes Radipole in that summer of 1859: ‘A stone bridge, a manor house, a few cottages, and a very old church, dating from the thirteenth century (below).’ The very same church that my grandparents, my parents and my wife and I were married, spanning across the twentieth and early part of the twenty first centuries.
In Radipole Eliot found, according to Rebecca, ‘the possibility of inspiration-the possibility of recovering in imagination the landscape of her youth, and transforming it in literature to become the landscape of Maggie Tulliver’s childhood’. I too am inspired in adulthood by the memories and experiences of a Radipole childhood. I spent a large part of my formative years staying there with my gran (especially after my granddad died when I was ten) and I bought my gran’s house in the late 1990’s as the sentimental attachment could lead to nowhere else. Like all life experiences we could all be minor or major characters in a book.
There are certain characters that Rebecca highlights from Middlemarch that stand out. There are those who crave to escape and those who want nothing else but to stay. For some this desire is acquired over time and for others it is a permanent feature. Rebecca herself discusses her desire to leave the salty outpost of the south coast of England to find a much more cosmopolitan existence. Wider knowledge and the broadening of the mind for some are of much greater importance than sentimentality and security associated with familiarity. Whereas Mary Garth and Fred Vincy stay put and marry; Dorothea Brooke, Will Ladislaw, Tertius Lydgate, and Rosamund Vincy eventually leave the province and move to London possibly being pursued by ghosts. I myself have stayed put, apart from a few minor excursions, and have occasionally contemplated ‘what if’. Many do and many don’t. As life progresses and relationships are formed and children are born any stray away from the trodden path would radically alter the present for good and bad. Dorothea marrying Edward Causobon and Tertius marrying Rosamund was to dramatically alter their future and filled their lives with regrets. Eliot is though portraying life in the empirical (is there any other way?) and any sense of normative reconfiguring is usually situated in the retrospective. It is though telling that Mary and Fred are said to enjoy a happy marriage with three children and aspirations attained whereas the ambitious or shallow nature of other characters leaves them with a varying sense of underachievement.
At the heart of Eliot’s writing we are told is the essence of morality. For the text to shape the reader there has to be as Eliot states the ‘creative projection by desire and need’. The characters are judged by the reader’s moral universe and where they perceive themselves to be situated within it. This may be simplistic and reductionist and this is not the place to debate the psychology of ethical application but it is worth noting as Rebecca does that Eliot did not hold back from positioning her characters in terms of moral philosophy. Eliot believed compassion and sympathy were worth salvaging from the Christianity that she rejected. As Rebecca points out ‘virtue was ethical practice not theoretical doctrine’. As a reader Eliot’s biography is critical. It is much less possible for the reader to complain of being manipulated if she/he is aware of the author’s position. As an avid reader of George Orwell the confusion appears when the reader appears unaware of where Orwell was (metaphysically) at the time of a specific aspect of writing. This is why the biography and the literary analysis are so important. Perhaps it is the individualistic and subjective consumption of novels that has led post modernists to argue that it is dead. Without knowing what the author intended does seem to add to the weight on its coffin. Rebecca’s book can help to buck that trend. It exposes both Eliot and a reader to our scrutiny and the juxtaposition of them both.
Rebecca devotes a number of pages describing the role of Alexander Main, a fan from Arbroath. He persuades Eliot to publish her ‘salient expressions of wisdom’ in a single volume which although it appeared a good idea at the time there is more of a suspicion that Eliot like many others later regretted. The pearls… within Eliot’s novels should, according to Rebecca, have remained within the context of the stories and not extrapolated in to a discrete text. Main himself, had reservations which is no more evident than his description of the awaiting masses as a ‘faithless and perverse generation in which the book would be ‘almost too good to bestow upon them’. This section of Rebecca’s book led me to consider how 150 years later little has changed. Whether it is the cynicism in which the human species holds other members or how superiority/inferiority complexes plague so many of us, the nineteenth and twenty first centuries are not so different.
My favourite part of the book was the last third. For those who have read Middlemarch this may not be the case. The last part not only held resonance to my own life history but I also consider it to be the most philosophical. On page 265 Rebecca highlights the following: ‘Eliot believed that growth depends upon complex connections and openness to others, and does not derive from a solitary swelling of the self. She became great because she recognized that she was small’. This is beautiful. It is empathetic. It truly reflects the nineteenth century application of ‘sympathy’. It denounces ego and suggests understanding through phenomenology and not a dictation by oppressive features. Rebecca mentions lectures on Foucault that she attended at Oxford, in the early part of the book, of which the application of post structural analysis would have been central but interestingly there is no mention of Barthes. Greater coverage of the ‘readerly, writerly’ would have been intriguing in a text of this nature and would have given us more of an insight as to how Rebecca connected with what she considered were Eliot’s intentions when writing Middlemarch. This is not to say that the author did not pursue this direction but that it could have been more central. One instance where this is apparent and very much welcomed however, is in the ‘Finale’.
In the early part of ‘Finale’ Rebecca describes the changes that Eliot made to a specific sentence that sought to help the reader to understand Dorothea’s effect on other characters. The original sentence (not used in the final text) identified from viewing the pre published manuscript reads ‘But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing life of the world is after all chiefly dependent on unhistoric acts and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is owing to many of those who sleep in unvisted tombs, having lived in hidden life nobly’. This takes me right to the heart of my own philosophy which in turn is directly inspired by the great Howard Zinn. The obsession with celebrity and deference by our mainstream media and too many modernist writers has left us marooned in the illusion of the lives of those too far remote. But Eliot by giving much greater acknowledgement to the hidden in the unpublished description then succumbs to the temptation of the status quo when she should have been braver. Her published version which can be found on p269 of Rebecca’s book should be examined and compared by each reader to enable them to make up their own minds. For this reader however, the final edit gives half of the acclaim to those in the shadows than it should have and undermines the reality of those whose significance demands much more respect. For me she got it right the first time and by lessening their role misses a wonderful opportunity that we can only repine.
So to the end. The most beautiful and profound part of the book for me is summed up by the following: ‘Setting aside our own causes, we might find ourselves in the path that can lead us out of resignation.’ What a wonderful morality in which to conclude a novel and guide the reader for their own life journey. Thank you Rebecca and thank you Mary Anne.
Jason Cridland
