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
• 235 Interesting little passage as Caleb Garth muses on the network of labor "by which the social body is fed, clothed, and housed"
• 257 "the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman's world, where everything was done for her and none asked for her aid" -- makes me think of Lady d in Bleak House (1853)
• 263 wonderful sympathy and pity for Casaubon
• 307ff Ch 34 interesting: the narrative creating space to introduce the different character groups to themselves around Featherstone's funeral
• 392 again the didactic, analytical opportunity sympathy for Casaubon affords the narrator

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
• 195-6 Ladislaw pretty simply annihilates Casaubon's project: he's not aware of German philiogy
  • again on 207-8
• 209 the poems "are wanted to complete the poet" - very felski or latour - poems are non human actors!
• 218 Mrs Vincy comparing herself to Mrs Garth: the epistemology of class, of what a gentle woman needs to know, tied to knowledge of school textbooks and trade knowledge of their materials. Super interesting.
• 230 Mrs Garth's grammar lesson whilst rolling pastry
• 253 "He [Plymdale] had brought the last Keepsake [annual], the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress at that time"
  • ff a nice little discussion of 1820s popular print: Countess of Blessington, Letitia Eliz Landon, Scott
• 293 "I am a great bookman myself," returned Mr Trumbull, "I have no less than two hundred volumes in calf, and I flatter myself that they are well selected."
• 314ff Featherstone's will
• 336 Brooke buys the local newspaper the Pioneer and installs pro-Reform Ladislaw as editor (B compares L to Shelley)
  • 347 D refers to it as "conduct[ing] the paper" -- perhaps then Dickensms use of that in the header for Household Words isn't uncommon?
  • 355 Chettam and Cadwalladers complaining abt newspapers fighting

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
• 198 passage about solidity of objects and feeling
• 248 parable about scratching glass
• 251 rosamund fantasizing about furniture immediately after the narrator says she doesn't bother distinguishing flirtation from love
• 393 Casaubon's suspicion and jealousy of Ladislaw and Dorothea "constantly at their weaving work"

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
• 197 Casaubon uses some Two Gentlemen against D
• 199 Ladislaw sketching Marlowe's Tamburlaine
• 226 epigram from Sonnet 34 ln 11-12
• 243 epigram from Troilus and Cressida
• 249 quoting from sonnet 22
• 265 quote from Macbeth
• 284 epigram from tempest
• 294 epigram from 2 Henry VI for Ch when Featherstone dies
• 321 epigram from Samuel daniel Tragedy of Philotas
• 386 epigram Twelfth night rain it raineth every day
• 390 epigram from henry viii