Difference between revisions of "Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)"

Revision as of 13:51, 24 September 2017

General

• set 1829-32, pre Reform Act
• 9 Eliot tweaking lazy physiognomy description in saying that Celia looks more worldly-wise than D
• 26-7 D's wonderful reverie leading to "I should see how it was possible to lead a grand life here -- now -- in England"
• 40-1 subverting(?) or altering anyway the marriage plot which puts marriage of main character at end; a genre signal: not classical comedy or romance
• 92 “Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays” — Fred Vincy was on to something!
• 132 "that tempting range of relevancies called the universe"
• 169 Lydgate "feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity."

Theme tracking

Reading/writing

• 18 D offering to organize her uncle's papers and indirectly Casaubon's, like a secretary
  • i bet secretarial manuals would be a good source for practical information organization
• 23 contrast between Casaubon's reading notebooks and "the shallows of ladies'-school literature"
• 36 Casaubon "a little buried in books," but D sticks up for him
• 65 Casaubon's blood "all semicolons and parentheses" under a microscope, jokes Mrs Cadwallder
• 103 bindings at Stone Court "the scanty bookshelves, of which the chief glories in dark calf were Josephus, Culpepper, Klopstock's Messiah, and several volumes of the Gentleman's Magazine."
• 115 epigram about classing men and classing books by binding or author as insufficient(?), "tell me how you class your wealth of books, / the drifted relics of all time."
• 134 Lydgate and books and vocation ("intellectual passion") - again here a Cylopedia article about the anatomy of the heart
• 158 Lydgate associates bachelorhood (perhaps clergy specific) with collections of books and natural objects when he meets Farebrother

Materiality

• 8 interesting (and useful for me) that the gendered question of idealism vs materialism is pitched in Dorothea as between books and fabric

She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in guimp [fabric trimmings] and artificial protrusions of drapery.

• 20 Celia "notions and scruples were like spilt needles"
• 23 again this pattern of very tangible figures for the world of ideas: "he thinks a whole world of which my thought is but a poor twopenny mirror"
• 160ff Farebother's entomological collection

Shakespeare references

• 7 epigram to ch 1 from Beaumont and Fletcher, which she almost certainly knew from Dyce's eds
• 62 Chettam compared D to Desdemona (Othello) in having the "perversity... not [to have] affected a proposed match that was clearly suitable"
• 87 epigram from jonson every man in his humour
• 129 Mary uses juliet/Romeo and Ophelia/hamlet as examples of lovers in teasing Fred