Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)

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."
  • 175 the "petty medium of middlemarch" compelling L to vote against his free choice
• 179 interesting about Ladislaw:

Why was he making any fuss about Mrs Casaubon? And yet he felt as if something had happened to him with regard to her. There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet."

• 181ff outrageously powerful about Dorothea's inner life in Rome after marriage
• 192 discussion about painting and D's difficulty understanding it mirroring the more highminded convo Ladislaw has with Neumann in the previous chapter

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
• 187 Powerful metaphors about Casaubon being lost in trivia, and again turning to D sorting his notes into volumes

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
• 192 the spatial metaphors Will uses for Casaubon's "mouldy futilities" mirroring those D uses in the previous chapter, windowless corridors

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
• 192 Narr (privileging D's voice) compared smiling Ladislaw to Ariel in Tempest