Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)
From Commonplace Book
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"
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 inspiration
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"
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
