Professor Gail Marshall (University of Reading)
Reading Matters: Middlemarch
The material book
I am exceptionally lucky to have on my shelves a first edition of Middlemarch, the very generous gift of a very kind friend.
A label pasted into the book shows it to have been owned by Augusta Carington.
She was born in 1841and her family had their main residence at Wycombe Abbey and other properties in Buckinghamshire and Berkeley Square. She was presented at court, and mingled with royals at balls and garden parties. In 1864, she married Lt Col Campbell Scott of Blythswood House, Renfrewshire, and moved to Scotland, where she was active in health and nursing charities and in the Conservative Primrose League. She seems to have moved to Middlesex after her husband’s death in 1908, and when she died in 1922, her body was taken back to Scotland for burial. Her coffin was covered with a plaid worn by her husband in the Crimean War nearly 70 years earlier.
And it’s her books that are now on my shelf, making me wonder just how those volumes made their way from a bookseller in Westminster to a mansion in Renfrewshire to an Oxfam bookshop in East Anglia to my small terraced house in West Harrow.
It’s quite a journey and exemplifies the meaningful connections across both time, space, and class that reading powerfully enables. It would be nearly forty years before Forster wrote ‘Only connect’, in Howard’s End (1910), but that surely is one of the messages of Middlemarch too, the story of this particular edition of it, and of books and the act of reading.
My reading experience
Books connect us to each other, across time and space, but they also grow with us, and connect us to different versions of ourselves across time if we stick with them and give them the chance to. One reason why Middlemarch persists is because Eliot pays such close attention to all her characters, and we can find ourselves spending more mental time with and paying more attention to different characters each time we read – maybe because we recognise them differently, or perhaps a single sentence might alert us to them in ways not noticed before. For example, whereas a younger me somewhat impatiently dismissed Sir James Chettam as a foolish aristocrat and failed lover of Dorothea, an older me is more ready to appreciate the complicated balancing of modesty and complacency in his depiction, and the real selflessness of which he’s capable. Eliot describes him as:
having the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers. (ch. 6)
Middlemarch is a great novel about love, but it’s a greater novel in its insistence on the importance of paying minute attention to all around us, to knowing and recognising everyone’s story, what makes them – and us – who we are. As Eliot famously writes in chapter 21:
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: 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 Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength 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.
Over the years, I’m not sure whether Middlemarch has shaped me, or whether I go back to it because it increasingly chimes with my strong sense of how we need to live, to be with one another – it’s probably a bit of both. But I’m also propelled towards Middlemarch, and indeed the rest of Eliot’s work, because of the recognition that literature can connect us with each other, whether through shared reading, through developing the capacity for close connection that paying attention whilst reading necessarily enables, or through sharing a book with a multiplicity of other readers across the centuries.
