Finally Middlemarch #3

So already, there's a character in Middlemarch who, were he a real person, would really want me to think well of him. He'd want you to think well of him, too. In fact, in the novel, the good opinion of everyone is his major social objective. It's not that he lacks a sincere interest in goodness; it's that interest and commitment aren't the same thing. That distinction is especially problematic for a character who's bent on securing the good will of others even while he's harming them.

The character I'm talking about is Fred Vincy, whose "plan" to pay off a loan guaranteed by a good old friend has failed. Early in Chapter 23, George Eliot explains that Fred's confidence in the funds' materializing is based only on his sense of how the world--his world--does and should operate: 

When One Door Closes Another Opens**

"You will hardly demand that his confidence should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, we know, is something less coarse and materialistic: it is a comfortable disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater mystery of our high individual value in the universe, will bring about agreeable issues, such as are consistent with our good taste in costume, and our general preference for the best style of thing" (229*).

Addressing us--"You"--at the beginning of her sentence, Eliot invites us to join her in mocking Fred's vanity and sense of entitlement. It's inconceivable to Fred that his disagreeable troubles won't be displaced by "agreeable issues" because he's such an agreeable fellow, as anyone who'd taken note of his habiliments would immediately discern.

A Fashionable Man of Fred Vincy's Time***

The stock that Fred places in agreeableness, a social phenomenon because it always involves being agreeable to or with another, is no guarantee of virtue. Though his friend Caleb Garth, for example, enjoys the good opinion of many of his fellow townspeople, they do not seek him out socially: "in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner service," Eliot explains (232). Fred, who feels fully entitled to avoid the "unpleasant position" of "being looked down upon as wanting funds for small debts" by those with the approved furniture and dinner service, chooses to impose on "the poorest and the kindest" of his friends, Garth, to guarantee his loan.  

When the good fortune Fred expects fails to materialize, he chooses simply to default on his obligation to Garth rather than to put himself in the disagreeable position of asking the funds of either his father or his uncle, both men of greater means and less kindness. Fred's irresponsibility causes exceeding economic hardship for the Garth family: Garth's son Alfred's apprenticeship school tuition must be sacrificed, his daughter Mary's savings seriously depleted, and the family's plans for Christmas drastically scaled back.

To Fred's credit, he finally gets that he's causing harm--at least for a moment:

Parts of Two Juxtaposed Scott Ketcham Works

"Curiously enough, his pain in the affair beforehand had consisted almost entirely in the sense that he must seem dishonourable, and sink in the opinion of the Garths: he had not occupied himself with the inconvenience and possible injury that his breach might occasion them, for this exercise of the imagination on other people's needs is not common with hopeful young gentlemen. Indeed, we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong. But at this moment he suddenly saw himself as a pitiful rascal who was robbing two women of their savings" (248-9).

Principle divorced from compassion: though I know I've seen this in action, I've tended not to define the problem in this way. So-called principle that storms ahead righteously without regard for victimizing cause and effect--that was something I was more accustomed to recognizing and articulating to myself.

Unfortunately first lessons of cause and effect often don't undo a lifetime of entitlement and self-interest. When, in the next chapter, Fred traipses off to visit Mary Garth, whom he thinks about marrying, and proclaims that "'You can never forgive me," her retort makes clear what forgiveness lacks the power to do: "'What does it matter whether I forgive you? . . . Would that make it any better for my mother to lose the money she has been earning by lessons for four years, that she might send Alfred to Mr. Hamner's? Should you think all of that pleasant enough if I forgave you?'" (253).

When Fred continues to ask her to pity his misery--"'I am so miserable, Mary'"--she explains Fred to himself: "'But selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything else in the world: . . . They are always thinking of what they can get for themselves, and not of what other people may lose'" (254).

So why is Fred aggravating me so much? Frankly, because he is such a common character these days. I can think of so many stories I know--some mine, some others'--in which someone has really dropped the ball, bailed, or otherwise abandoned a friend or colleague who was depending on him/her--and then asked for that friend's or colleague's sympathy. If you're going to cancel out on someone for whose children you promised to babysit over the weekend, don't ask her to spend time comforting you when she could be looking for a babysitter to replace you!

Other examples of this "please forgive and think well of me" mentality are also consequential when justice and equality are at stake (which is always). When the problem is institutional racism, sometimes I've heard people say things like,**** "So you want me to talk to other white people about white privilege? Even to old friends who've already told me they don't need to talk about racism because they've never thought or said or done anything racist? That would be too uncomfortable. Especially if we were at their vacation house. You understand, right? And you don't think I'm any less committed to racial justice, do you?"

At the June meeting of the poetry reading group that meets monthly at the public library in Scituate, we read "The Achill Woman" by Eavan Boland. The poem contains a simile/image that's stayed on my mind since the meeting: late in the afternoon, having set down the pail of water she's just hauled up a hill, a servant woman bends down to hands distinguished by their "cold rosiness," and "blew on them like broth." I can just see the curled fingers, the nearness of lips to hands, the warm breath in the air.

Standing on a hill on Achill Island*****

But people blow on broth to cool it, not to warm it--which suggests the narrator--or at least the narrator as she recalls her enthusiastic college-age self who saw this woman climb the hill and set down her load--isn't actually attuned to the servant woman's physical discomfort. The next part of the poem bears this out: the two "stayed putting time down/ until the evening turned cold without warning." Cold without warning for whom? The servant woman's hands were rosy with cold before the conversation began.

It's only the adult narrator who understands some of what her "raw from college" self "failed to comprehend" and was "oblivious to." That which feels spontaneous, mutual, and pleasurable to one person may feel civil and obligatory to another. The relative easiness of a seemingly "equal" back-and-forth between two people may mask differences in status and power that make "mutual" participation a required rather than voluntary act. 

While both Fred Vincy and Boland's adult narrator recognize how their self-involvement put others in difficult positions, there's virtually no similarity between Fred Vincy and the narrator's twenty-one-year-old self: while she's aflame with purpose fueled by literature, the warm fire, and the country evening, he's calculating how he might parlay his charms into a life filled with light duties, ample distractions, and plentiful invitations to gatherings of "society."

There are many Fred Vincys out there, and many of them don't have a Mary Garth to tell them off--and then to be kind to them. But kindness, while laudable and important, can be stupid. Watch out, Mary Garth!

* Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Edited by Rosemary Ashton, Penguin Books, 2003. 
** Nichols, C. (2014, July 15). When one door closes another opens [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.joi-ful.com/journal/2014/7/15/when-one-door-closes-another-opens [Note: Screen shot of the painting by Cathy Nichols on that page.]
*** Screen shot of http://www.fashion-era.com/english-costume/1820-1830-king-george-iv-hanover.htm:  Fashion Era King George IV - 1820-1830 by Dion Clayton Calthrop byBy Pauline Weston Thomas for Fashion-Era.com.
**** This is a fabricated example based on a number of things I've heard in multiple conversations.
***** Screen shot of photo on the beaut. web site, page entitled "Smithwick's New Year Celebration on Achill Island": http://wwnorton.tumblr.com/post/22494224617/the-achill-woman

Mapping Our Ways to Global Competence?

internet*

So already, I'm grappling with a global competence-related question, and I think you might be able to help me with it: what kinds of maps--that is, maps that make thinking visible--can help learners develop the dispositions of globally competent people?

Looking Ahead to August's Summer Institute
The reason for my question: I am part of the Harvard Global Studies Outreach Committee (GSOC) team planning an August summer institute for secondary school and community college educators called The Internet: Tangled Webs, Global Promises.  Our goal is twofold:

• to help participants deepen their understandings of the internet's current and potential roles in creating and solving global and local problems of injustice, inequity, and non-sustainability; and 
• to foster participants' global competence, or "the capacity and disposition to understand and act on issues of global significance" (xi).**

Our long-term hope is that the students of these educators will benefit from their teachers' summer learning.

The Challenge of Focusing on Cultivating Dispositions Vs. Skills and Knowledge
Frankly, I'm not so worried about whether participants will deepen their understandings of the internet: we have an impressive array of techniques--I'll talk about concept maps below-- that will surface and make visible their evolving content-related understandings. I am worried, though, that we may fall short of cultivating participants' sense of urgency and teaching confidence in relationship to global competence.

On some level I understand why global competence takes a back seat: many institute participants are hamstrung by required curricula that are exclusively skills- and information-centered, while others are still expected to write and meet daily "know and be able to do" learning objectives. So their "accountability focus" is often not on global competence. Virtually all of these teachers value deep conceptual understandings and understand how seldom they can develop in one day. In addition, they often truly worry about the future of their students as inheritors of the world's complicated problems. Still, they feel most obligated to make clear to both students and administrators what skills are being introduced, practiced, and/or assessed for mastery on a given class day. And when time is short, global competence becomes a lesser goal.

So is there a way to have summer institute participants map their way into a greater sense of urgency about global competence as a teaching priority? And into a place of greater confidence in their abilities to help their students develop it while they're learning required skills and content? Participants really like and value the global thinking routines they experience at our summer institutes. Could some kind of map make visible the links among thoughts generated by both concept mapping and these routines?  

Concept Mapping's Benefits and Limitations:
Last year's summer institute participants mapped their conceptual understandings of urbanization and cities on their first day in Cambridge. And just two weeks ago, the ten Globalizing the Classroom Fellows who were wrapping up their fellowship year created new conceptual maps using the Generate, Sort, Connect, Elaborate (GSCE) thinking routine, one of the many thinking routines developed in conjunction with Project Zero's Visible Thinking initiative. 

I found GSCE to be a very satisfying way of generating a concept map. And I was pleased--and relieved-- that the Fellows welcomed the opportunity to map urbanization again. Afterwards, I reasoned that the concept at the center of the map could be a skill or competence that the daily objectives specified students would be developing--such as "revising writing," "reading a historical text written in another century," or "evaluating the reliability of an online source."

But global competence is not just about content understanding, methodologies, and skills. Concept maps make it just a little too easy to keep important global issues at arm's length. Global competence requires the desire and capacity, at the right moment, to move beyond analysis to individual or collective action, even in very small ways.

Cultivating Thinking and Global Competence Dispositions Through Mapping
So what are the best kinds of maps for helping learners develop thinking dispositions, especially the global thinking dispositions*** at the core of the global competence framework? Or are there such maps? And what are thinking dispositions anyway? The Project Zero Visible Thinking web site explains them best: "To put it all together, we say that really good thinking involves abilities, attitudes, and alertness, all three at once. Technically this is called a dispositional view of thinking. Visible Thinking is designed to foster all three."****


Mind Mapping and Heart Mapping
As I first tried to answer my own question, I thought about two other kinds of mapping techniques I'd seen matter immensely to people, one courtesy of the professional development I'd had in conjunction with Nancie Atwell's In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning, and the other as a result of multiple trainings I'd had as a classroom teacher and student advisor. These were heart mapping***** and mind mapping.****** What's important about both is that they permit people to see themselves. 

Heart maps, part of my Atwell training, allow young people--actually people of all ages--to articulate what they care about. They invite storytelling and writing about how the various elements of the map came to take their places of primary emotional importance. Mind maps, like the one you're seeing with "2017" in the middle, also tell us what we care about, but in the context of galvanizing us to start doing what we believe is important and to start becoming the persons we want to be in any number of realms in our lives.

In other words, both kinds of maps make visible people's attitudes and values, even their visions of the kinds of world they want to live in. In terms of thinking dispositions, they reveal people's attitudes. But they don't link those attitudes to those people's abilities or their alertness to opportunities to use those abilities. Still, the "I" and potentially the "we" are present in these maps, whereas they're generally absent in concept maps. Alertness and attitudes can't be discussed without reference to whose alertness and whose attitudes.

The Making Meaning Thinking Routine
Which brings me to another Project Zero thinking routine that I found in a tweet from Ron Ritchhart's more than a year ago: the "Making Meaning" thinking routine. The adjacent picture and the one that follows below were posted on Twitter, the first by Ron and the second by someone offering an example of her own experience using the routine with students.

What I love about this routine is that it invites all kinds of subjective and "objective" responses from participants, actively asks people to build on the responses of others, and encourages questions. I used it myself in a professional development session with last year's Globalizing the Classroom Fellows: two small groups made meaning of "global citizenship" while two others made meaning of "global competence'" because the two terms are so often used loosely and interchangeably. The discussion that followed was fascinating, a real foray into the very different things we meant by terms we believed we were using in common ways.

Multiple Meanings of "Making Meaning"?
I like to think that "Making Meaning" could mean making not just consensual, working-definition meaning, but also personal meaning, and therefore assigning relevance and significance. Check out the adjacent example of making meaning of "gossip." Yes, it's important for there to be some collective understanding of what gossip is, especially if it's having both positive and negative (especially negative) effects on a school community or other organization. But once individuals arrive at their personal definitions that have taken into account others' perspectives, there's the potential for a "what next" step that has a great deal to do with alertness and attitude, those two qualities essential to global competence and good thinking generally.

If a mapping activity is going to help students to cultivate global thinking dispositions, then it needs guidelines that

• encourage students to represent individual and collective emotion as well as information and understanding;
• solicit global and local instances and examples; and
• provide some specific guidance for reflective annotations, or what the GSCE thinking routine might call elaborations.

Linking Thinking Language and Making Meaning
I've always believed students need direct instruction in the language that can help them express the relationships between/among ideas they care about--and also metacognitive opportunities to encourage their alertness to when they might use that language. That's why I was excited to read an article in the October 2012 Atlantic about a Staten Island High School that committed to the explicit teaching of thinking language. Not only did students' reading and writing abilities improve, but their attitudes toward reading, writing, and learning became more positive.

New Dorp High School has me thinking that students might annotate and elaborate global competence-enhancing thinking maps with statements created by filling in the blanks in sentence stems. Here are some of those sentence stems that include language that relates ideas:

Because _____, ______.
Because I/we _____. ______.
Because I/we ______. ______.
Because ______, I/we noticed ______.
Because ______, I/we could/should ______.
If _____, then ______.
If I/we _____, then _____.
If _____, then I/we _____.
If ____, we could/should/might ______.
I noticed _____; moreover, _____.
I could _____; in addition, _____.
Since _____, ______.
Since _____, I/we _______. 
_______; similarly, ______.
Whereas _____, I/we _____.

I know I've listed far too many possibilities of what these sentence stems might be--probably no more than five would best--but these are my first attempts at thinking about how some of the thinking and mapping routines and activities currently in use could be slightly altered to foster the alertness and attitudes that global competence requires. What do you think, and what would you suggest--especially in terms of map directions and sentence stems?

Thanks so much for reading, and I sure would like to hear from you about anything this question and post bring to mind.

* Screen shot of image found on this web page: Navarria, G. (2016). How the internet was born: From the ARPANET to the internet. The Conversation. Retrieved June 15, 2018, from http://theconversation.com/how-the-internet-was-born-from-the-arpanet-to-the-internet-68072 
** Mansilla, Veronica Boix., and Anthony Jackson. Educating for Global Competence: Preparing Our Youth to Engage the World. New York, NY: Asia Society, 2011. Print.
*** Screen shot of graphic on p. 13 of the following online publication: Colvin, R. L., & Edwards, V. (2017, November). Teaching for global competence in a rapidly changing world [Scholarly project]. In Asia Society/Center for Global Education and OECD. Retrieved June 15, 2018, from teaching-for-global-competence-in-a-rapidly-changing-world-edu.pdf [Note: Veronica Boix-Mansilla is a major contributor to OECD global competence framework.
**** Visible thinking in action. (n.d.). Retrieved June 15, 2018, from http://www.visiblethinkingpz.org/VisibleThinking_html_files/01_VisibleThinkingInAction/01a_VTInAction.html [Note: Though I can't find verification of this on the site, I am sure that Ron Ritchhart, Shari Tishman, and David Perkins are among the sources of the content found on this site.]
***** Screen shot of Georgia Heard Heart Map in Hamilton, Mrs. (2012). Writing in Cafe 1123 [Web log post]. Retrieved June 15, 2018, from http://cafe1123.blogspot.com/p/writing-in-cafe-1123.html  
****** Screen shot of this page: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/21/former-google-career-coach-shares-a-useful-visual-trick.html 

Finally Middlemarch #2

A Scott Ketcham Drawing

So already, the honeymoon's over. No, I'm not talking about my romance with reading Middlemarch, which is alive and well; I'm talking about Dorothea Brooke's recognition that Mr. Casaubon, her new husband, is not the man she imagined him to be. And the reality of this is dawning fast: they're still on their honeymoon.

Special emphasis must be placed on the word "imagined." The Casaubon whom Dorothea believed she was marrying was her own invention, the product of her vibrant imagination and her desire to lead a life of moral purpose. Knowing that Casaubon was dedicated to a long-term scholarly project, she invented the rest of his life, its meaning, and her future noble role in it. 

It's almost painful for me to read this part of the book because I so easily recognize the tendencies of my younger self in Dorothea. I too had a talent for "improving" the men I wanted to love and be loved by. And while I was eager to avoid some of the traditional marital narratives--the women's movement was relatively young--I was very (too) good at making up non-traditional happily-ever-after stories. The truth is, any narrative we make up without involving the people whom we want to be part of it is usually doomed.

It was a good thing I didn't get married when I was in my twenties because I would have been divorced by the time I was thirty-two. I even imagined the way I would have left one very wrong man whom I foolishly imagined was very right for me: during the fourth quarter of the Superbowl (which I hate), after putting copious amounts of lasagna, salad, and garlic bread out on the buffet table for him and his friends (whom I hated), I would have walked out of my own house and into the cold January night with one loud hallelujah.

Let's not even talk about my thirties. 

By the time I got married in my late forties, I'd finally learned not to ignore what was troubling and true. I didn't believe that marriage would make my life "come together" (though it did in some ways). Scott and I went out for a long while before we got married, so neither of us discovered on our honeymoon that we'd married someone heart-breakingly different from the person we thought we'd married.

But wait--this is supposed to be a blog post about Middlemarch--and it still is because of the way George Eliot captures the heartbreak of Dorothea, all the more poignant because of her simultaneous commitment to making her new life work and being in touch with her true feelings. Dorothea's walking at the edge of a precipice here: she's seriously considering settling for the grimmest kind of self-erasing half-life because the emotional and spiritual distance between her and her husband is so vast. Unless, of course, she's wrong about how great that distance is.

It's Chapter 20 that spells out the nature of the trouble and the conflict Dorothea feels. As the chapter begins, because Dorothea had "no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state even to herself," the first voice of pain she hears is " a self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty" (192). She has been in Rome for five weeks, and the city and its omnipresent antiquities oppress rather than inspire her, probably in part because she's seeing them on her own while Casaubon works.

Scott Ketcham Sculpture

As Dorothea wrestles with her dissatisfaction, its sources and solutions, Eliot philosophizes about the difficult transition from courtship to marriage: "The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same" (195).

Different perceptions are to be expected from the new perspective of dailiness and will require adjustment no doubt. For those who have put their beloveds on pedestals, the differences may be even more pronounced--and disappointing. 

But it's not just this transition that's a problem: Dorothea has come to suspect that "the large vistas and wide fresh air she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither" (195). As Eliot explains, "There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature that that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy" (197). Sometimes Dorothea experiences "inward fits of anger or repulsion" rather than depression (196). How can a basically passionate, willing person possibly be satisfied with someone whose thoughts and feelings had "long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge"--especially when they give rise to feelings of disgust, which tend to lead to physical withdrawal (196)?

Still, Eliot doesn't despise Casaubon, even though he's a dull conversationalist and an even duller husband. Like some wise, charitable god who understands human tendencies, limitations, and possibilites, she offers the following:

"We are all born in moral stupidity, . . . : Dorothea had  early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his sense and wisdom, than to conceive . . . that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference" (211).

I was so busy disliking Casaubon and feeling for Dorothea that I hadn't thought about his perspective. In general, great works of fiction help us understand others' perspectives. In real life, it can harder to know when it's best to try hard to understand another's perspective and when it's best to walk away as fast and far as possible.

Thus far, I've encountered a form of the word "stupid" twice in Middlemarch. So far, it seems consequences of stupidity depend on the amount of pride and the type of action that accompany it. I'm wondering if some kinds of Middlemarch stupidity are more natural and therefore acceptable than others--and whether such distinctions even matter. Meanwhile, Will Ladislaw's and Dorothea's conversations about art are fascinating to me: after all, the man I married when I finally figured it out is an artist.

* Eliot, G. (2003). Middlemarch (R. Ashton, Ed.). London: Penguin Books.

Finally Middlemarch #1

So already, finally I'm reading Middlemarch by George Eliot. I was supposed to read it during the spring of my senior year of college and I didn't: one of the few times I, who generally did college by the book literally and figuratively, didn't do my homework. I did, however, read the Monarch Notes about the novel, including the sample essay questions one might expect to see on an exam and the sample answers that might be given to them. How fortunate was I that one of those sample questions appeared almost verbatim on the senior hourly exam. There was no doubt in my mind that I would have done worse on the exam had I actually read the novel, brainstormed questions I might be asked about it, and then framed responses to them. So much for what assessments really assess.

Where I Didn't Read Middlemarch

Of course, my pretense of having read Middlemarch meant I missed out on the real reading thing. But frankly, I wonder if I would have missed out on it even if I had read the book in 1977. Some conditions are more conducive to novel-reading than others; some circumstances ease our entrance into fictional worlds, foster our immersion in them and prevent us from holding them at arm's length. 

There's such a big difference between "getting through the assigned reading" and "reading a novel." I got through Howard's End under college duress; however, I didn't really encounter it until I reread it in 2013. Had I initially read it more sincerely, it's possible I would have appreciated Forster's novel as a person in her early twenties. But I also believe the 58-year-old woman who read it in 2013, the person who had been thinking about empire, voting rights, estuaries, and the Boston Marathon bombings, was poised for a real encounter with that novel. In fact, I needed such an encounter.

I'm on page 178 of the Penguin Classics edition** of Middlemarch that you see to your right, the back cover of which features Virginia Woolf's assessment of the novel as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Thus far, it's a novel about many varieties of foolishness, vanity, and generally good intentions. Already, many characters are busily developing triumphant story lines for their own lives. In the most foolish cases, this often involves casting relatively unsuspecting other characters in major roles for which they aren't nearly as suited as the story line developers imagine them to be. Oh, the positive and negative power of fantasy when it's fueled by a momentary inkling of a superior destiny!

But it's not this "shake-your-head at people's foibles" humor that has me writing today; it's the lines that have made me laugh out loud--often while I've been reading on the subway. I share three of them here, with this context: a handsome, eligible, innovative physician new to Middlemarch, Tertius Lydgate, must make the social rounds so he can eventually make the medical rounds.

• Early on, Eliot's narrator explains that Lydgate has an essential trait for anyone seeking to build a medical practice in Middlemarch: "Mr. Lydgate had the medical accomplishment of looking perfectly grave whatever nonsense was talked to him,  . . .." (92). Many professions require this same skill; I think I mastered it myself during those years that I was perpetually attending required meetings as an educator.
• When Lydgate makes the acquaintance of Mr. Farebrother at the Vincy family home, the professional cleric/amateur naturalist explains his enthusiasm for having Lydgate visit him: "'We collectors [of beetles and other specimens] feel an interest in every new man till he has seen all we have to show him'" (162). But enough about my collection of specimens: what do you think of my collection of specimens?
• At that same Vincy family gathering, Rosamund Vincy predicts that Lydgate will find Middlemarch society lacking: "'You will not like us at Middlemarch, I feel sure,' . . . 'We are very stupid, and you have been used to something quite different'"--to which Lydgate replies, '"But I have noticed that one always believes one's own town to be more stupid than any other'" (162). Was he giving her his "perfectly grave" look as he affirmed and softened her strategically self-deprecating pronouncement? 

A residential street in Cambridge 02138

Maybe England is and was different from the USA in terms of genteel communities' willingness to characterize themselves as "stupid." Clearly, Lydgate had no experience with those Greater Boston neighborhoods and towns where degrees from prestigious colleges and graduate schools proliferate and even the suggestion of being stupid would trigger collective and individual despair.  

Before I get back to reading Middlemarch, I have a request for Middlemarch readers past and present: if there were lines that made you laugh out loud, would you please share them? Thanks so much!

* Screen shot of image on following web page: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22844540757&searchurl=pics%3Don%26sortby%3D17%26tn%3Dmiddlemarch&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp5-_-title24
**  Eliot, G. (2003). Middlemarch (R. Ashton, Ed.). London: Penguin Books.