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.