Middlemarch Summary: Plot, Characters and Themes in George Eliot's Study of Provincial Life
What Middlemarch is about
Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, is a novel by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. It was published in eight paper-bound instalments between December 1871 and December 1872, with a four-volume book version appearing alongside them. The first volume is dated 1871 and the other three are dated 1872.
The setting is Middlemarch, a fictional town in the English Midlands, between 1829 and 1832. These were years of unsettled national feeling. The Reform Act of 1832 was approaching, the first railways were being built, and King William IV came to the throne. Eliot works all of this into the book in a realist mode, but her real subject is smaller and closer: what happens to ambitious people in a settled community that does not want to change.
There is no single plot. Four main story strands run alongside each other and keep crossing. Dorothea Brooke, a wealthy and intensely religious young woman, looks for a life of purpose and believes she has found it in marriage to an elderly scholar. Tertius Lydgate, a young doctor newly arrived in town, wants to reform medical practice through science and sanitation. Fred Vincy, the mayor's feckless son, is in love with Mary Garth and waiting on an inheritance he has not earned. The banker Nicholas Bulstrode, pious and powerful, has a past he has worked hard to bury. Comic elements run through all of it.
The main characters
Dorothea Brooke lives with her sister Celia under the guardianship of their uncle, Mr Brooke. She is admired by the baronet Sir James Chettam but marries instead the much older clergyman Edward Casaubon, hoping to devote herself to his research. On their honeymoon in Rome she begins to see how sterile the marriage is, and she befriends Casaubon's disinherited cousin, Will Ladislaw. Casaubon grows jealous, and his insecurity sharpens as his health fails.
Tertius Lydgate arrives with genuine talent and genuine ideals. Bulstrode funds a new hospital for him. Lydgate's dedication earns respect, but his marriage to Rosamond Vincy, beautiful and vain, pulls him into debt he cannot control. Money steadily eats away at his professional independence.
Fred Vincy relies on the expectation of inheriting from his rich uncle, Peter Featherstone. Mary Garth, who keeps house for Featherstone, is practical and principled and refuses Fred while he stays irresponsible. Fred's debts drag her father, Caleb Garth, into financial loss. The Rev. Farebrother is one of the book's quieter figures, kind, clear-sighted, and in love with Mary himself.
Nicholas Bulstrode holds the town's money and a great deal of its moral authority. The arrival of John Raffles threatens both.
The themes
Eliot's stated subjects include the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism, self-interest, religion, hypocrisy, political reform and education. Marriage is treated as a practical institution as much as a romantic one. Dorothea and Lydgate both marry badly, and both do so for reasons that seemed sensible at the time. Eliot is interested in how a wrong choice narrows a life by degrees rather than all at once.
Ambition is the other great thread. Dorothea wants to do good on a large scale and finds no public role open to a woman of her class. Lydgate wants to change medicine and is defeated by domestic expense and local gossip. Fred wants nothing much at all, which turns out to be its own kind of problem. Running underneath is money: inheritance, debt, patronage and the way a reputation can be bought or lost.
How it ends (spoilers)
Casaubon dies after trying to bind Dorothea to his wishes, and his will contains a clause disinheriting her if she marries Ladislaw. The gossip that follows poisons their situation. Raffles exposes Bulstrode's dishonest youth, including the concealment of Ladislaw's mother, the rightful heir to a fortune. Bulstrode hastens Raffles's death and is disgraced. Lydgate, who has just accepted Bulstrode's money, is assumed complicit. Dorothea defends him, but public opinion drives him and Rosamond out of town and his reforming plans collapse.
Fred redeems himself by training as a land agent under Caleb Garth, helped by Farebrother, who suppresses his own feelings for Mary. Fred and Mary marry. Dorothea gives up Casaubon's fortune to marry Ladislaw. A brief Finale follows the characters forward. Fred and Mary are content. Lydgate has a conventional successful practice and dies at fifty; Rosamond remarries a wealthy physician. Dorothea and Ladislaw raise two children, and she gives herself to reformist causes.
Why it still matters
Early reviews were mixed. Seventy years on, the verdict had turned, and Middlemarch was regarded as Eliot's best work and one of the great English novels. It holds up because it refuses easy outcomes. Most of its people get a narrower life than they hoped for, and Eliot treats that compromise with seriousness rather than scorn. If you want a long nineteenth-century novel about what ordinary ambition costs, this is the central one.
