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
• 410 striking that in the same chapter where D mentions Casaubon's new note organization system that Lydgate describes Ladislaw as "rather miscellaneous and bric a brac"
• 431ff Ladislaw and Brooke discussing Reform and their newspaper's response
• 466-7 Celia tells D about Casaubon's will, then her reaction
• 485 Mary: Fred would only become a clergyman to satisfy "imbecile gentility" -- one symphizes
• 510ff Will's and D's confrontation in the library
• 519 railroads coming, and inspiring suspicions
  • small industry after: manganese, mill, stone pits
• 523 directly narrated unrest against technological change to agrarian life: compare to Shirley and North and South
• 527-8 nice little homily about work from Caleb Garth
• 533 tension between vincy and Garth in the sense of where the business and clerk class fit in social hierarchy: again North and South is a useful intertext from a little later (in setting)
• 577-8 passage about memory as an open wound for Bulstrode
• 584 Bulstrode confesses to Will
• 666ff Bulstrode pays Lydgate's debt and then allows Raffles to be accidentally overdosed with opium
• 693 D "people glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbor": this is a moral imperative that echoes at least from Bleak House, when Esther eschews Jellyby and Pardiggle models for helping those nearest her, to Howards End, with its central concern with seeing the world steady or whole, coming down on the side of personal relations. But is this liberal Christian humanism scalable?
• 706-8 Mrs Bulstrode's plight delicately rendered, and their honest support for one another

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
• 446ff the Casaubons' books and notetaking before C dies -- rich
• 506 D rejects Casaubon's Synoptical Tabulation

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"
  • 441 shrinking from finding out an engraving is actually common like the utility of Ladislaw's passion for D
  • 514 related phenomenon: architectural metaphors for inner life
  • 692 farebrother to D: character isn't marble
• 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"
• 552 rosamund's epectarions about furniture after marriage, and Lydgate's subsequent debt
• 584ff Bulstrode's wealth (which could have been Ladislaw's if not for B's duplicitity) based on highly profitable pawnbroker

Shakespeare references

NB that there's an Eliot Ms notebook with quotations at the Folger:

Notebooks of George Eliot, labelled "Miscellaneous quotations" and "Interesting extracts" [manuscript], 1868 August-ca. 1870, ca. 1879.
Link

• 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
• 406 narr compared D to Imogen from Cymbeline, or at least her dress to one appropriate for an actress playing imogen
• 436 Ladislaw quotes song from Middleton's The Witch
• 545 epigram most of sonnet 93
• 565 epigram from Shallow in 2 Henry IV
• 628 epigram from Measure
• 673 another epigram from Measure