"Middlemarch" by George Eliot

This “great baggy monster” of life in Victorian England at a time of rapid change is regarded by many as a classic. But is it actually any good?

It is a big book, weighing in at over 300,000 words, one of the longest in English Literature. As E M Forster said, people tend to overvalue big books because they have to justify to themselves the time they have spent reading them. Nevertheless, it takes a great deal of stamina to write a book as long as this and that should be recognised when assessing it.

It is a tragicomedy (some happy endings, mostly sad ones) and it was written at a time when most English novels were addicted to ‘happy ever after’ which makes it, to some extent, innovative. But if you have four plots, surely some of them have to end badly.

Plot

A book this big needs four plots: spoiler alert!

1. Despite the warning of her friends and family (and the readers), vivacious Dorothea marries Mr Casaubon, a dried old stick of a scholar, because she thinks she can help him with his work and she has a taste for martyrdom. The marriage is a disaster ... and Byronic hero Will Ladislaw, full of youth and energy, is close at hand. Casaubon conveniently dies, leaving Dorothea rich, but a codicil to his will specifies that if Dorothea marries Will she will forfeit her inheritance. Will love triumph over money?
2. Clever doctor Tertius Lydgate, Dorothea’s thematic male twin, has revolutionary ideas for reforming Middlemarch’s medical services (hitherto reliant on quacks and snake oil salesmen). But he too makes a disastrous marriage, this time for love, to social climbing Rosamund Vincy; their combined extravagance forces them into debt from which even his use of the new-fangled stethoscope can’t rescue them.
3. One of the archetypal plots of Victorian fiction. Fred Vincy has dropped out of Uni. Despite the hopes of his middle-class family, he really doesn’t want to be a clergyman but a young man around town. His love of horses and fast friends gets him into debt early from which he is rescued by the family of his childhood sweetheart, Mary, who forfeit their savings and the education of one of their sons. Can Fred, disappointed in his expectations of an inheritance, turn himself around and become responsible enough for tweedy-knickers Mary to marry him.
4. Another standard plot, this time the ‘dark secrets come to light’. Nicholas Bulstrode the banker is the richest man in Middlemarch. Nevertheless he is a Christian, albeit of a narrow kind, and the driving force behind the new hospital, the foremost act of charity in the town. But will his mysterious past catch up with him? Of course it will, this is a Victorian melodrama (it doesn’t seem to fit with the other three)!

These four stories are interwoven and some of them share characters. Yet somehow the connections don’t seem to run deep. For example, the world of Celia and Sir James with their cronies the Cadwalladers never seem to interact with the world of the citizens of Middlemarch. Fred and Rosamund are brother and sister ... and yet they hardly ever meet let alone interact. The story starts with the Dorothea plot before hopping over to Fred Vincy who is then largely forgotten until near the end; the Bulstrode plot hardly gets into its stride until half the book is over.

It’s all soap opera. The fundamental rules seem to be:

• If you’re from outside Middlemarch (like Will Ladislaw, Tertius Lydgate and Nicholas Bulstrode) be prepared for a rocky ride.
• If you’re on the side of change (like Mr Casaubon, Mr Brooks, Dorothea’s uncle, Will, Lydgate, or Bulstrode) you will be frustrated. Despite the fact that the novel is set against a background of political reform and the arrival of the railways, ie a time of immense change in England when talented people from humble backgrounds were getting rich quickly.
• Not in Middlemarch. if you’re talented and your intentions are for the betterment of mankind, like Lydgate and Dorothea.
• Particularly if you want to change your social class (like Fred, Rosamund, Bulstrode, or Ladislaw). Forget it.
• Tradition and the past control the present. Inherited wealth, and therefore the whims of the dead, control the living. Manipulative Mr Featherstone makes his relatives dance because they expect a legacy. Casaubon’s codicil does its best to control Dorothea from the grave. But the happy characters, even Dorothea, are well-to-do and secure because they have inherited their wealth and status from their ancestors.

Rather than bleed into one another, the stories have mirrors and contrasts. For example:

• Dorothea and Lydgate are both people who have a mission to improve the world, Dorothea by being handmaiden to a great scholar and Lydgate through his medicine.
• The Dorothea story and the Lydgate story involve unhappy marriages, although for different reasons. Both Dorothea and Rosamund marry in an attempt to improve themselves although Rosamund hopes to do it socially through her husband’s aristocratic connections and Dorothea wants to hitch her wagon to an intellectual star. Casaubon (throughout, the men tend to be known by their surnames and the women by their first names) doesn’t have romantic feelings for Dorothea; Lydgate’s tragedy is that he is infatuated with Rosamund.
• In both the Dorothea story and the Fred and Mary story an old man tries to use his Will to exert his will after death; both are ultimately frustrated.
• Both the Fred and Mary story and the Lydgate story feature the consequences of getting into debt. Again there are differences. Fred swiftly resolves his problem thanks to the generosity of his friends (does he ever pay his benefactor back?); Lydgate the outsider is rebuffed at every turn and his final solution (borrowing from his wife’s uncle) leads to reputational catastrophe.

Themes:

The overall theme is that dreams are usually wrecked by reality. As The Guardian (18/3/2022) puts it: “Eliot did not avoid exploring the consequences of disappointment”. Did not avoid? Most of the characters end up disappointed:

• Dorothea wants to be a second Saint Theresa, doing good to others while at the same time advancing herself intellectually and spiritually; in the end she has to settle for doing as much as she can in the limited sphere allowed to her;
• Sir James Chettham wants to marry Dorothea because, compared to her sister Celia, Dorothea is “all respects the superior” but when rejected he settles for second-best;
• Mr Brooke wants to be a reform MP but his first attempt at public speaking ends disastrously; he is reduced to dilettantism;
• Mr Casaubon wants to write his magnum opus “The Key to All Mythologies” but ends up writing a few pamphlets;
• Rosamund Vincy marries Tertius Lydgate because he has aristocratic relations but she is disappointed in her attempts to social-climb; in the end she is disappointed by marriage: “Rosamond had a gleam of returning cheerfulness when the house was freed from the threatening figure, and when all the disagreeable creditors were paid. But she was not joyous: her married life had fulfilled none of her hopes” (B8 Ch75)
• Fred Vincy wants to be a young buck and ride and hunt and play billiards but, after having his expectations disappointed when he fails to inherit from Mr Featherstone, he has to settle for becoming a tenant farmer
• Tertius Lydgate dreams of being a great doctor, setting up a fever hospital and advancing the cause of medical science but he ends as a society quack having written a treatise on gout;
• Will Ladislaw wants to be a poet or an artist and becomes a journalist and an MP;
• The Reverend Camden Farebrother, Mr Nice Guy, a clergyman who isn’t really interested in religion but in doing good (and being a naturalist) loves Mary Garth but renounces her so Fred can woo and win her;
• Nicholas Bulstrode has high Christian ideals and principles but they founder on the reefs of his dodgy past

Strangely, Eliot waits until the Finale to be explicit about this theme, saying that “Some set out, like Crusaders of old, with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm and get broken by the way, wanting patience with each other and the world” as if this will apply to the stories of her characters after the novel has ended, rather than being an integral part of what happens during it.

Perhaps it is the theme of disappointment to which Virginia Woolf was referring when she famously called Middlemarch "one of the few English novels written for grownup people", ushering in an elevation to the status of classic of a novel that had then been forgotten. Because ‘grownups’ is a word children use about adults and a distressing number of the novels written before Middlemarch had childish ‘happy ever after’ endings, at least for the heroes.

The second major theme of Middlemarch, and perhaps Eliot’s aim, is the secularisation of Christianity. Eliot herself had gone from the unthinking traditional Anglican Christianity of her childhood into a more evangelical militant Christianity during her teenage years and, following exposure to historical rationalisations of the life of Jesus, had lost her faith in early adulthood. Middlemarch seems to be her attempt to promote the idea that it is possible to live a good life without the baggage of a god, that we can have Christian ethics without Christianity. After all, Middlemarch is teeming with clergymen: Casaubon, Cadwallader, Farebrother, and Tyke to name only the main ones. But there are only two church services: Featherstone’s funeral, which is seen from outside the church, and the time when Ladislaw goes to church to ogle Dorothea. Even the priests aren’t very religious. Farebrother is much more interested in natural history (and playing whist for money) than religion, Cadwallader’s main interest is trout fishing; nevertheless, both are portrayed as good people. Casaubon is also a vicar although he pays a curate to do the actual work; his passion is his research into mythology. Bulstrode the banker has overtly religious beliefs which don’t stop him doing bad things although he is also the prime mover of charitable works in the village. Religion seems irrelevant.

I think nowadays (and perhaps one of the reasons for this is the influence of Middlemarch) we are so accepting of the idea that a clergyman should be an amateur social worker that we forget that one of the traditional historical functions of the priest has been to say prayers and thus act as a sort of intermediary between god and man (in this sense Casaubon is more of a Christian than any of the other characters). What Eliot is doing is to secularise Christian virtues. For example, when Dorothea improves the cottages she is performing secular charity which has a lasting effect whereas Bulstrode’s funding of the fever hospital, which is done from overtly Christian motives, comes to an end when he is forced out of town. Farebrother performs an act of Christian renunciation when he gives up his hopes of marrying Mary Garth in order to press Fred Vincy’s claims (and this after Mary had told Fred that she wouldn’t marry him if he became a clergyman). One of the key moments in the book is when Dorothea performs a key act of forgiveness, surrendering her hope of Will Ladislaw while still trying to help Lydgate and Rosamund.

Of course, the person who does most good is the doomed Dr Lydgate. Lydgate does nothing wrong. His hasty marriage is one in which he loves “not wisely but too well” in Othello’s words. His reputational disgrace comes when he innocently accepts a loan from his wife’s uncle which is then interpreted as hush money to conceal any wrongdoing that Bulstrode might have engaged in. Is he meant to represent a secular Christ? He’s a healer, his time in Middlemarch is about as long as Christ’s ministry, and he is effectively crucified on the cross of public opinion.

The third theme is nostalgia for the good old days. The novel is called Middlemarch and the ‘middle’ seems to refer to middle England and the middle class and being middle of the road, all fundamentally conservative values. The ‘march’ might indicate the march of progress (Caleb Garth defends the railway to some rural yokels) or a boundary land as in ‘the marches’. But despite this, the final message of Middlemarch is that all these new-fangled ideas like stethoscopes and cholera hospitals and railways and political reform, progressive though they seem to be on the surface, will be broken on the reef that is the cosy rural idyll of English country life, complete with lords of the manor, peasants and irrelevant priests. It’s very much a novel of nostalgia which is perhaps why Virginia Woolf, innately Tory and a ferocious snob, loved it.

Style

Eliot shows her Victorian conventionality in the use of an intrusive authorial voice, addressing the reader direct, a device enabled by using a third person omniscient perspective (in the past tense). This can get preachy at times, for example in Adam Bede and Silas Marner but an undated un-bylined pull-out feature from the Times newspaper in my possession suggests that “Eliot’s voice inhabits a precarious space between characters rather than operating too knowingly from on top or outside of them.”

This is true to some extent. One of my favourite moments comes from Book 3 Chapter 29 when, after multiple chapters seeing the Dorothea-Casaubon relationship from Dorothea’s perspective, Eliot suddenly asks “but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?” Suddenly, for a few long paragraphs, we look through Casaubon’s eyes: Mr. Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us.” She points out that he has done nothing wrong, apart from being old and physically unattractive. He follows the rules of society; he doesn’t seduce Dorothea, he woos her; he endows her with his worldly goods. He wasn’t romantically in love with her but nor was she with him. Her expectations of happiness have been disappointed but so are his. The reader tends to think of Casaubon as a villain and certainly the codicil to the will is a mean-spirited trick but I think in Eliot’s eyes he is a primarily tragic figure whose life, in the end, amounts to nothing. She sympathises again with Nicholas Bulstrode who does a bad thing from entirely understandable motives. It is the ability of the author to cherish even her villains that elevates Eliot (a little way) above the routine of Victorian fiction.

But this also demonstrates that intrusive authorial voice. Eliot repeatedly violates the ‘show don’t tell’ edict, especially when we reach key moments such as the crisis in chapters 80 and 81.

Characters
Major characters

Dorothea Brooke
Dorothea, whose name means ‘gift of God’, is explicitly set up in the Prelude as a latter-day Saint Theresa of Avila although I would suggest she is more like Lady Bountiful with a martyr complex.

She is intelligent: “She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense.” (B1 Ch1) Unfortunately “she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom.” (B1 Ch1) (Sometimes I think Eliot's narration needs a spoiler alert.)

She repeatedly misunderstands the intentions of others: she believes Sir James is wooing Celia when he fancies her, she misunderstands the nature of first husband Casaubon entirely and a large portion of the end of the book is involved in her and Will misreading one another.

Even after her disastrous marriage has ended, Dorothea seems to have learned nothing. She simply doesn’t listen to other people. She’s like that parody of Rudyard Kipling’s famous lines: ‘If you can keep your head when all about you’ Are losing theirs ... you may well have misjudged the situation’. When there is a question as to whether Lydgate was complicit in the death of Raffles, Dorothea consults Rev Farebrother but she refuses to pay attention to his advice, preferring her own gut instinct (on one reading she is an intensely stereotyped female, repeatedly allowing her emotions get in the way of her reason): “She disliked this cautious weighing of consequences, instead of an ardent faith in efforts of justice and mercy, which would conquer by their emotional force.” (B8 Ch72)

The St Theresa bit returns in Ch 80 when, having surprised Ladislaw and Rosamond holding hands, she realises that she loved Will and gives into anger against him and then cries herself to sleep and, waking up, realises that she should show charity towards Rosamund and is reconciled to her grief: “She said to her own irremediable grief, that it should make her more helpful, instead of driving her back from effort.” (B8 Ch 80)

Reverend Edward Casaubon
For many people, Casaubon is the villain of the piece, because he is the unsuitable husband that Dorothea marries first. But he doesn’t rape her or seduce her; he is exactly as advertised and if she regrets the marriage afterwards, so does he (he believed that love would grow). Eliot , at least, is clear that he is to be pitied. “Mr. Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us” (Ch 29)

His tragedy is that he yearns to create a great work of scholarship and he isn’t clever enough (specifically, he doesn’t read German and it is the German scholars who have made all the great advances in his field, work which, if he had known of it, would have told him that his endeavours would be for nothing). What’s worse, other people expect the scholarship from him. We are introduced to him through his reputation locally as “a man of profound learning, understood for many years to be engaged on a great work concerning religious history; also as a man of wealth enough to give lustre to his piety” (B1, Ch1) His magnum opus hopes to prove “that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed.” (B1 Ch3)

And he feels the burden of these expectations: “Mr. Casaubon was nervously conscious that he was expected to manifest a powerful mind.” (Ch 29) Even his surname promises great things. Isaac Casaubon (1559 - 1614) was an important theological scholar and philologist who, as a Huguenot, was twice forced to flee his native France (at one stage he became a prebendary in Canterbury Cathedral where there is still a weekly Huguenot service). He is best known for his work on the Corpus Hermeticum which he dated to AD 200 - 400, conclusively debunking the myth that it had been written by Moses. However, his masterwork was an edition of Polybius, a Roman historian who wrote a universal history around Rome, and this was left unfinished at his death.

Casaubon may be a dry-as-dust scholar who is unable to see the potential in Dorothea but he’s not a bad old stick. Okay, he gets most of his parish work done by employing a curate but, unlike Dorothea’s uncle, he is a benevolent Lord of the manor, looking after ‘his’ villagers. Okay, he doesn’t actually like Will Ladislaw but he makes him a handsome allowance. He leaves all his property to Dorothea in his Will. The only out and out bad thing that Casaubon does is to get so jealous that he adds a codicil stipulating that if Dorothea remarries young Ladislaw she will forfeit the inheritance (it’s one of the great unsolved mysteries of the novel that no-one tells us where the estate will go to if not Dorothea - Ladislaw perhaps as the only known relative?)

But these minor flaws (and the fact that he has “two white moles with hairs on them?”; Ch 2) are enough to damn him in the eyes of many readers. But not Eliot.

Will Ladislaw
Ladislaw is the Byronic hero, with good looks, charm and intelligence. He’s a butterfly, attractive but flitting here and there with no staying power. He tries poetry, painting, journalism, politics ... Despite his radical credentials he is embarrassed to discover that his mother was the daughter of a pawnbroker.

He plays a major role in the plot, being Dorothea’s forbidden love interest as well as Bulstrode’s guilty secret but his character is nebulous and Protean.

Nicholas Bulstrode
The other villain, Bulstrode the banker features in the melodramatic fourth plot as the man “of dimly known origin” (B1 Ch11) whose past hides a guilty secret which will inevitably return to haunt him, the puritanically religious financier who will inevitably be exposed as a hypocrite.

And yet he is a force for good. He’s a philanthropist who funds and organises the fever hospital. He’s not a crook, he’s not a swindler. In much of Victorian fiction, banks fail but Bulstroder’s stays solvent even after he is disgraced.

But despite marrying Harriet Vincy, one of the prime families in town, he’s an outsider and Middlemarch will never tolerate outsiders, particularly ones who try to change things, even those who do good works.

Bulstrode Whitelocke was a prominent member of the Commonwealth government during the Interregnum and so would have been a puritan to some extent although he seems also to have been pro-royalist

Tertius Lydgate
The new young surgeon “one of the Lydgates of Northumberland, really well connected.” (B1 Ch10), is poor but ambitious to make his name and reputation and not just because of the ensuing financial benefit. He dreams of medical research. He longs to revolutionise medical practice in Middlemarch.

His fatal flaw? He falls in love. As a young man in Paris he fell in love with a wide-eyed actress who murdered her husband on stage. After she was acquitted she fled Paris. Lydgate tracked her down and she confessed that she had intended to kill her husband because he bored her. This was the end of Lydgate’s (platonic?) passion. This is a back story that promises the same 'secret from the past that haunts the present' possibilities as the Bulstrode plot, especially when, in chapter 17, Farebrother remarks to Lydgate that he is a correspondent of Lydgate's old Paris flat-mate. Yet Eliot never allows this plot to develop. Did she forget it?

Despite his emotional scars from France, when Lydgate encounters Rosamund Vincy, he falls deeply in love. It is for and because of her that he gets into debt but he never blames her, only himself. Even when sharp words pass between them, and he can be sarcastic and horrid, he always repents “observing to himself that he was rather a blundering husband.” (B8 Ch 81) Even when he faces reputational and financial ruin he rejects Dorothea’s suggestion that he stays and fights, even though that is what he himself wants, because Rosamund wants to run away: “It is impossible for me now to do anything—to take any step without considering my wife’s happiness. The thing that I might like to do if I were alone, is become impossible to me. I can’t see her miserable.” (B8 Ch 76)

His is the saddest story in the book.

Rosamond Vincy
The spoilt daughter of the mayor, Rosamond has been educated at a posh girls’ school and, as a result, is dissatisfied with being the daughter of a manufacturer and the granddaughter of an innkeeper. She aspires to nobility and sees Lydgate as her passport into the aristocracy.

Does she love him? It seems doubtful. By the end his anger and his “perverse way of looking at things” has led her to “a secret repulsion, which made her receive all his tenderness as a poor substitute for the happiness he had failed to give her.” (B8 Ch 75)

Rosamond is driven by her own desires and these blind her to the needs of others. In this inability to empathise, she is the opposite of Dorothea.

Eliot presents this as a skill she lacks because she has never used it: “she had been little used to imagining other people’s states of mind except as a material cut into shape by her own wishes” (B8 Ch 81). It means that for Rosamond the only good husband is a tamed husband and if he must be broken and yoked to achieve domestication, then that is a price she will pay.

She has plaited blonde hair. The name, Rosamund, is German. Originally it derived from ‘hros-mond’ or ‘horse protector’. But ‘rosa munda’ is Latin for ‘pure rose’ and ‘rosa mundi’ is Latin for ‘rose of the world’. Rosamund Clifford who died c1176 was the long-time mistress of Henry II.

In the end, despite finding that her marriage will not deliver what she hoped it would, she can console herself with the fact that “Nevertheless she had mastered him.” (B7 Ch65) Is this Eliot the feminist, for whom a husband must be broken like a horse. It reminded me of Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, a Byronic bad boy who must be literally crippled, burned and blinded, before Jane will agree to marry him. Mary Garth attempts the same with Fred Vincy. And the tradition continues with E M Forster’s Howards End where the happy ending only comes about because Mr Wilcox, hardly Byronic but nevertheless a man, is emotionally devastated by the imprisonment of his son.

Fred Vincy
For a character around whom one of the stories is written, Fred is very stereotypical. Like his sister (but much less selfish), Fred has been brought up as a young buck. He has been sent to university (to become a clergyman) and has dropped out. He plays billiards at the Green Dragon, rides and hunts and spends more than his allowance; he is in debt but expects something to turn up, primarily in the shape of inheriting Peter Featherstone’s estate: “When Fred got into debt, it always seemed to him highly probable that something or other—he did not necessarily conceive what—would come to pass enabling him to pay in due time.” (B2 Ch14)

But he is fundamentally a good egg who longs to marry his childhood sweetheart. This is a character found time and again in English literature of the period.

Mary Garth
Another stock character, the poor but clever girl who is a centre of goodness. She and Fred are sweethearts but she won’t marry him until he reforms himself (another woman who only wants a tamed husband).

Revd Camden Farebrother
A vicar and a ‘naturalist’ whose sermons are free of doctrine.

He’s a poor parson who, at the start of the book, plays whist and billiards for money to supplement his meagre income.

He lives in an old parsonage surrounded by old furniture with his mother, Mrs Farebrother, his mother’s sister Miss Noble, and his own (older) sister Miss Winifred Farebrother.

But his main role is as the wise sage who gives both Fred and Dorothea good advice. He also performs a Christian act of renunciation when he pleads with Mary Garth on behalf of Fred despite fancying her himself.

Minor characters
Celia Brooke
Did Eliot model Dorothea and Celia after the sisters Elinor and Marianne in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility? Celia is the ‘sensibility’ of the pair. She’s more physically attractive than Dorothea, perhaps because she isn’t so puritanical about self-adornment, enjoying pretty jewellery and dresses. She’s also far more perceptive about people and their motivations. She marries the spurned Sir James and becomes a doting mother of their son and heir but more or less fades out of the book until very close to the end.

Sir James Chettham
At the start of the book he is suitor to Dorothea. He’s in love with her mind, despite her repeatedly blanking him. He then marries Celia. Primarily a comic creation, he is a fundamentally nice bloke. He’s both self-aware - “He was made of excellent human dough, and had the rare merit of knowing that his talents, even if let loose, would not set the smallest stream in the county on fire.” (B1 Ch2) - and pragmatic, allowing himself to be swayed by opinion: “I know when I like people. But about other matters, do you know, I have often a difficulty in deciding. One hears very sensible things said on opposite sides.” (B1 Ch3)

Rev and Mrs Cadwallader
He is delightfully tolerant and easy-going; a passionate angler.

She is free-spoken and a skinflint who married beneath herself.

Mr Brooke
Uncle and guardian of Dorothea and Celia.

Essentially there to add comedy. He likes name-dropping ... or perhaps he is just well-connected. In his first paragraph of recorded speech he mentions having met Sir Humphrey Davy and William Wordsworth. Later during the same evening he mentions knowing Wilberforce.

Fundamentally good at heart, he has a passionate but temporary interest in more or less everything, complacently excusing his dilettantism:

• “I went into science a great deal myself at one time; but I saw it would not do. It leads to everything; you can let nothing alone.” (B1 Ch2)
• “The fact is, human reason may carry you a little too far—over the hedge, in fact. It carried me a good way at one time; but I saw it would not do.” (B1 Ch2)

As Revd Cadwallader says: “Brooke is a very good fellow, but pulpy; he will run into any mould, but he won’t keep shape.” (B1 Ch8)

He’ll never stand in the way of Dorothea despite the fact that he disapproves of both her marriages (both of which he helped to bring about by entertaining the men in his house).

He stands for parliament as a Reform candidate despite the fact that he is the worst landlord in the district, never meaning fences or gates or improving the cottages of ‘his’ villagers.

Peter Featherstone
A rich landowner who lives in Stone Court. He is old and ill and grumpy and everyone is jostling around to gain his fortune because, despite marrying twice, he has been childless.

Caleb Garth
Father of Mary.

A surveyor, valuer, and agent who then became a builder but the building business failed; following a period of living ‘narrowly’ he has managed to pay back his creditors. Later he is employed to manage Sir James Chettam’s estate and that of Mr Brookes but he declines the opportunity to manage Stone Court on behalf of Mr Bulstrode because he has become aware of a stain on Bulstrode’s character and he is too self-righteous to sully his hands.

A source of integrity, honesty and good sense. Rather too goody goody.

Supposedly based on Eliot’s own father.

Mrs Harriet Bulstrode
Rosamund’s aunt. She only really comes into her own when Bulstrode’s reputation is destroyed by scandal. She decides to support him, another exemplar of selfless love and a stark contrast to Rosamund. However, she determinedly doesn’t ask him if he did that of which he is being accused and he doesn’t volunteer any information.

Mr Raffles
Pivotal to the Bulstrode plot and yet never more than a stock bad ‘un. He knew Bulstrode years ago and therefore knows his secrets. They reconnect because Raffles is now the stepfather to Joshua Rigg who has inherited Stone Court and sells it to Bulstrode. Raffles sees his chance to blackmail Bulstrode. But he spends the money of drink and dissipation and becomes ill at Stone Court putting himself at the mercy of his victim ...

Walk-on parts
Mrs Fitchett
Lodge-keeper to Mr Brooke’s estate. Keeper of chickens.

Mr Standish
“Mr. Standish, the old lawyer, who had been so long concerned with the landed gentry that he had become landed himself” (B1 Ch10)

The dowager Lady Chettham
“who attributed her own remarkable health to home-made bitters united with constant medical attendance” (B1 Ch10)

Mr Vincy
“The mayor, a florid man, who would have served for a study of flesh in striking contrast with the Franciscan tints of Mr. Bulstrode” (B1 Ch10)

Mrs Vincy
An innkeeper’s daughter, a loving and easy-going mother.

The Featherstone family:

• Brother Solomon: rich: “a large-cheeked man, nearly seventy, with small furtive eyes” (32)
• Sister Jane Waule: a rich widow with a 23 year old son, John. Keen to get her hands of Mr F’s fortune, she tries to poison hgis mind against Fred.
• Brother Jonah: poor: the wit of the family; has come down in the world, supports himself through a business which is not disreputable but of which he doesn’t boast; often to be found in the Green Dragon
• Sister Martha Cranch: poor, living in the Chalky Flats, wheezy, with a son, Tom, a squinting idiot

Mr Simmons
Farm-bailiff for Stone Court

Mr Tyke
A Rev whose sermons are all doctrine, Mr Bulstode’s favourite for the hospital chaplaincy

Miss Noble
She steals sugar lumps from the tea table so later she can distribute them to the children of her poor friends.

Medical men

• Dr Sprague is the senior physician of the town. Considered to have most ‘weight’ of all the physicians. He’s been in Middlemarch for 30 years, since he wrote a treatise on Meningitis. Self-satisfied.
• Dr Minchin is the doctor consider to have most ‘penetration’. A religious man, related to a bishop; he sometimes stays at the palace.
• Mr Wrench
• Mr Toller

Townsfolk

• Mr Powderell, 
• Mr Hackbutt, 
• Mr Frank Hawley 
• Mr Larcher
• Reverend Edward Thesiger, rector of St. Peter’s

Adolf Naumann
Painter friend of Will Ladislaw in Rome

Mrs Garth
She had been a teacher before her marriage. She still teaches for money but at the moment she only has Fanny Hackbutt, besides her own kids (Ben and Letty). She is saving to send Alfred to proper school.

Mr Horrock & Mr Bambridge
Horse-riding friends of Fred’s

Mrs Selina Plymdale
“a round-eyed sharp little woman, like a tamed falcon.” (31)
Mother of Ned, whom Rosamund has refused

Mr. Borthrop Trumbull
Bachelor, 35, auctioneer of land and cattle, second cousin to Peter Featherstone who has done a lot of business with PF and perhaps fancies inheriting PF’s money through the stratagem of marrying Mary Garth.

Josh Rigg
The frog-faced mourner at Peter Featherstone’s funeral. Turns out he is Featherstone’s bastard son ... and Featherstone leaves him the house and a lot of the land providing he changes his name to Featherstone. Which he does. And then sells the estate to Bulstrode and bows out of the picture.

Mrs. Dollop
The landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane.

Mrs Mawmsey
The grocer. She likes strengthening medicine, especially the pink (not the brown)

Mr Keck
The editor of the ‘Trumpet’, the rival paper to Brooke’s ‘Pioneer’ edited by Will Ladislaw.

Selected Quotes

• “Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind.” (Prelude) Wiktionary defines “oary” as ‘shaped like an oar’
• “Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.” (B1 Ch1)
• “Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.” (B1 Ch1)
• “She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony.” (B1 Ch1) Foreshadowing! Richard Hooker (1554 - 1600) (born in Heavitree, Exeter - where Thomas Bodley was also born - and educated at Exeter Grammar) was a theologian who originated the Anglican ‘middle way’ between Puritanism and Roman Catholicism. According to his somewhat gossipy biographer, Izaak Walton, Hooker’s wife Jean, the daughter of a man who became Master of the Merchant Taylors’ guild, was a bit of a trial: Hooker is likened to long-suffering Job. This comparison not only suggests that Dorothea is attracted to theologians but also hints at the fact that her marriage will not be a happy one.
• “The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent:... a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither” (B1 Ch3)
• “It would be my duty to study that I might help him the better in his great works. There would be nothing trivial about our lives. Every-day things with us would mean the greatest things.” (B1 Ch3)
• “In short, woman was a problem which ... could be hardly less complicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid.” (B1, Ch4)
• “It seemed probable that all learned men had a sort of schoolmaster’s view of young people.” (B1 Ch5)
• “the corrosiveness of Celia’s pretty carnally minded prose” (B1 Ch5)
• “She says, he is a great soul.—A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in!” (B1 Ch6)
• “Young people should think of their families in marrying. I set a bad example—married a poor clergyman, and made myself a pitiable object among the De Bracys—obliged to get my coals by stratagem, and pray to heaven for my salad oil.” (B1 Ch6)
• “These charitable people never know vinegar from wine till they have swallowed it and got the colic.” (B1 Ch6)
• “she believed as unquestionably in birth and no-birth as she did in game and vermin.” (B1 Ch6)
• “He determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was. As in droughty regions baptism by immersion could only be performed symbolically, Mr. Casaubon found that sprinkling was the utmost approach to a plunge which his stream would afford him; and he concluded that the poets had much exaggerated the force of masculine passion.” (B1 Ch7)
• “To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.” (B1 Ch7)
• “He dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains” (B1 Ch8)
• "the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.” (B1 Ch9)
• “It was a new opening to Celia’s imagination, that he came of a family who had all been young in their time.” (B1 Ch9)
• “when a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.” (B1 Ch11)
• “Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.” (B1 Ch11)
• “Old provincial society had its share of ... its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment ...” (B1 Ch11) Following on from the previous quote, here we are explicitly foreshadowing (prophesying?) Lydgate’s fate.
• “Settlers, too, came from distant counties, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an offensive advantage in cunning.” (B1 Ch11)
• “Brothers are so unpleasant.” (B1 Ch11)
• “To point out other people’s errors was a duty that Mr. Bulstrode rarely shrank from” (B2 Ch13)
• “It was a principle with Mr. Bulstrode to gain as much power as possible, that he might use it for the glory of God. He went through a great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust his motives, and make clear to himself what God’s glory required.” (B2 Ch 16)
• “one’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.” (B2 Ch16)
• “legal training only makes a man more incompetent in questions that require knowledge of another kind. People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice. No man can judge what is good evidence on any particular subject, unless he knows that subject well. A lawyer is no better than an old woman at a post-mortem examination. How is he to know the action of a poison? You might as well say that scanning verse will teach you to scan the potato crops.” (B2 Ch 16)
• “Rosamund ... never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness.” (B2 Ch16)
• “One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!” (B2 Ch 17)
• “The weight of unintelligible Rome ... Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence” (B2 Ch20)
• “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” (B2 Ch20)
• “ her view of Mr. Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden dream.” (B2 Ch20)
• “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” (B2 Ch 20)
• “the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither” (B2 Ch20)
• “Instead of getting a soft fence against the cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life, had he only given it a more substantial presence?” (B2 Ch20)
• “Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.” (B2 Ch21)
• “When a youthful nobleman steals jewellery we call the act kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of his being sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy who had stolen turnips.” (B3 Ch23)
• “The wariest men are apt to be dulled by routine, and on worried mornings will sometimes go through their business with the zest of the daily bell-ringer.” (B4 Ch 26)
• “Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection.” (B4 Ch27)
• “To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed.” (B4 Ch27)
• “Solomon’s Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes.” (B4 Ch31)
• “Probabilities are as various as the faces to be seen at will in fretwork or paper-hangings: every form is there, from Jupiter to Judy, if you only look with creative inclination.” (B4 Ch32)
• “they themselves had been disappointed in times past by codicils and marriages for spite on the part of ungrateful elderly gentlemen” (B4 Ch32): The relatives gathering like vultures at Peter Featherstone’s bedside discuss wills and this foreshadows Casaubon’s elderly, scarcely gentlemanly, spiteful codicil to his will.
• “I know the sort ... He’ll begin with flourishing about the Rights of Man and end with murdering a wench.” (B4 Ch 37) A new take on the slippery slope fallacy.
• “Mr. Casaubon does not like any one to overlook his work and know thoroughly what he is doing. He is too doubtful—too uncertain of himself. I may not be good for much, but he dislikes me because I disagree with him.” (B4 Ch37)
• “However slight the terrestrial intercourse between Dante and Beatrice or Petrarch and Laura” (B4 Ch37) This is in the context of Will Ladislaw and Dorothea. Since Dante and Beatrice and Petrarch and Laura were famous pairs of lovers, it suggests that Will fancies Dorothea something rotten.
• “Our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.” (B4 Ch37)
• “When the commonplace “We must all die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die—and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel” (B4 Ch42)
• “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” (B5 Ch 44)
• “That is the common order of things: the little waves make the large ones and are of the same pattern.” (B5 Ch46)
• “All alike were as flat as tunes beaten on wood” (B5 Ch 48)
• “She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was.” (B5 Ch48)
• “If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.” (B6 Ch55)
• “A mansion near Riverston already furnished in high style by an illustrious Spa physician—furnished indeed with such large framefuls of expensive flesh-painting in the dining-room, that Mrs. Larcher was nervous until reassured by finding the subjects to be Scriptural.” (B6 Ch60
• “a breed very much in need of crossing” (B6 Ch60)
• “character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.” (B8 Ch 72)
• “In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that the town held a bad opinion of her husband. No feminine intimate might carry her friendship so far as to make a plain statement to the wife of the unpleasant fact known or believed about her husband; but when a woman with her thoughts much at leisure got them suddenly employed on something grievously disadvantageous to her neighbors, various moral impulses were called into play which tended to stimulate utterance. Candor was one. To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion. Then, again, there was the love of truth—a wide phrase, but meaning in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife look happier than her husband’s character warranted, or manifest too much satisfaction in her lot—the poor thing should have some hint given her that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger than all, there was the regard for a friend’s moral improvement, sometimes called her soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer. On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbor unhappy for her good.” (B8 Ch74)
• “There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies on the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by unloving proximity.” (B8 Ch74)
• “he had almost learned the lesson that he must bend himself to her nature, and that because she came short in her sympathy, he must give the more.” (B8 Ch75)
• “On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.” (B8 Ch80)
• “Rosamond, wrapping her soft shawl around her as she walked towards Dorothea, was inwardly wrapping her soul in cold reserve. Had Mrs. Casaubon come to say anything to her about Will? If so, it was a liberty that Rosamond resented; and she prepared herself to meet every word with polite impassibility.” (B8 Ch 81)
• “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved some one else better than—than those we were married to, it would be no use ... marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear—but it murders our marriage—and then the marriage stays with us like a murder—and everything else is gone. "(B8 Ch 81)
• “Lydgate had accepted his narrowed lot with sad resignation. He had chosen this fragile creature, and had taken the burthen of her life upon his arms. He must walk as he could, carrying that burthen pitifully.” (B8 Ch 81)
• “See how dark the clouds have become, and how the trees are tossed,” (B8 Ch 83) Pathetic fallacy!
• “It’s the way to make any trumpery tempting, to ticket it at a high price in that way.” (B8 Ch84)
• “In this way it was made clear that Middlemarch had never been deceived, and that there was no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since it was always done by somebody else.” (Finale). Is this Eliot slyly referring to her own pseudonymity and the fact that she had to claim authorship once people started saying that her work was penned by other people?
• “He once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man’s brains.” (Finale) Isabella and the pot of basil was a story from Boccaccio's Decameron retold by John Keats in 1818 and painted by Holman Hunt in 1868, just before Middlemarch was written.

To summarise: Middlemarch is an enormous book which is entertaining enough in its way but I am not convinced that it has anything remarkable - aside from its length - to hallmark it as a classic.

April 2025; 838 pages

First published in 1871 - 1872

I read the Project Gutenberg version.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers" by Darren Freebury-Jones

 An attempt to portray Shakespeare as a dramatist developing his craft by learning from, collaborating with, and sometimes borrowing from other dramatists of his time.

The title refers to the 'Upstart Crow' gibe by Robert Greene in which someone called 'Shake-scene' is described as "an upstart crow beautified with our feathers". 

There sometimes seems to be a belief that Shakespeare was a genius so unique that he, unlike every other great writer, never had to learn from others. This does a disservice to other great playwrights of the time who have been so overshadowed that they stand in danger of being forgotten. Maybe, it is conceded, Christopher Marlowe wrote some interesting stuff as Shakespeare was just getting going perhaps Ben Jonson penned some amusing plays. But Shakespeare ...

There is no doubt that Shakespeare was a box office draw and he is one of the very few writers of the time who escaped an early death in poverty. But he was not the only writer of best-sellers. The crowds flocked to see not only Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus but also Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy and Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. This book even suggests that Shakespeare wrote The Contention between York and Lancaster’ and ‘The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York’ (now known as Henry VI parts 2 and 3) in response to the smash hit 'Harey the vi' and that later. when his company got its hands on the rights for that play, he revised it, adding a few scenes, and presented it as the first part of his Henry VI trilogy.

This book uses textual similarities to establish whether and to what extent Shakespeare was influenced by earlier writers. It suggests that his bombastic characters such as Don Armado in Love's Labour's Lost and Falstaff in Henry IV (1 and 2) and Merry Wives were inspired by the style in which John Lyly wrote his best-selling prose romances 'Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit' (1578) and 'Euphues and His England' (1580). There are echoes of Marlowe's 'The Jew of Malta' and 'Edward II' in Shakespeare's Shylock and Richard II. George Peele worked with Shakespeare on Titus Andronicus and John Fletcher on Henry VIII (All if True) and The Two Noble Gentlemen. 

But the biggest influence may be that of Thomas Kyd. Hamlet contains a number of echoes of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, including a ghost, a character called Horatio, and a play within a play. Kyd might also have been the author of King Leir, the original for Shakespeare's Lear, and for an ur-Hamlet which has now been lost. 

The arguments that Freebury-Jones use make extensive use of similar words and phrases that occur in different plays, the suggestion being that Shakespeare the actor remembered these when writing. I didn't find this evidence especially convincing. More interesting was the percentages of things such as 'feminine' endings (iambic pentameter lines that have an extra, eleventh, syllable added, as in "To be or not to be, that is the question"): Shakespeare's used a far higher percentage of such lines than most dramatists of the time, especially Marlowe. Other stylistic differences included the percentage of lines that rhyme and the amount of 'end-stopping' (rather than enjambment). 

I would have liked to learn more about these but this information wasn't presented in a consistent way which made it hard for a general reader like myself to decide whether the case had been made for influence, or collaboration, or sole authorship. 

It was a fascinating introduction to a group of playwrights whose work deserves better recognition. I have seen and enjoyed both The Spanish Tragedy and Thomas Middleton's The Changeling but there are lots of other plays that need performing.

April 2025; 205 pages

Published by Manchester University Press in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Rooms of One's Own" by Adrian Mourby

Mourby travels the world, visiting fifty "places that made literary history."

I don't understand the urge behind literary pilgrimage. My mother loved visiting houses where her favourite authors lived and claimed to have bought from a junk shop a chair in which Jane Austen had sat but I never saw anything magical in that relic. Even supposing Jane's bottom had been supported by that seat - so what? I always felt that I could get closer to the author by reading her books.

Mourby admits in his Introduction that while "for some of the authors in this book, sitting in the right room was all-important" and that the locations he visited sometimes made it into the works, "over the last few years I've visited rooms ... that seem to bear no relationship to the author or the work produced there." Which made me wonder why I was bothering to read the book at all.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed it. Mourby has a light, witty style and there are many little facts and anecdotes, sometimes about his experiences (“The bar proudly proclaims ‘Buy One Beer, Get One Beer’ which struck me as the least you can reasonably expect.” Hotel Continental Saigon - Graham Greene), sometimes about the buildings (“Brown’s Hotel ... [has] been open since 1837, when over the period of the year Lord Byron's former butler, James Brown, bought up four London townhouses in Dover Street to create a gentleman's hotel.” Browns Hotel, Rudyard Kipling.) and sometimes about the authors (“A hotel legend runs that in March 1953 Kerouac met his friend Gore Vidal at the Chelsea, both intent on meeting up with the poet Dylan Thomas, newly arrived from Wales. Failing to find Thomas, the two men got very drunk and ended up spending a passionate night together.” Hotel Chelsea, New York - Dylan Thomas)

An easy read ... and one of those books you can dip into for ten minutes at a time.

And there are amusing little facts, such as that round the corner from Proust’s childhood home was a church where the resident organist was Faure or that the Stalinist era redecoration of the Astoria hotel included “bound fasces - a common 1930s symbol - carved around the bedroom doors.” (St Petersburg - Mikhail Bulgakov)

One niggle. The book incorrectly categorises Edgar Wallace “among the American literary greats"; he might have died in Hollywood while working on King Kong but he was born in Greenwich, England and only moved to the USA when he was 56.

Personally, my most important criterion for a room in which to write is peace and quiet and preferably a blank wall to stare at.

Other selected quotes:

• “Christ Church, one of the largest of Oxford's colleges ... was built by Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s chief minister at the time when he was trying to arrange the king's divorce from his first queen, Catherine. Initially known as Cardinal College, it was renamed King Henry VIII’s College after 1529 when Wolsey fell disastrously from favour. Finally in 1546 it was refounded by Henry as Christ Church.” (Christ Church - Lewis Carroll)
• “Hauteville House ... is an insight into the mind of Victor Hugo. Walking through it is like coming face to face with the man himself: full of energy and ideas, brilliant, florid and off the scale egocentric.” (Hauteville house, Guernsey - Victor Hugo)
• It was in Les Deux Magots cafe in Paris that “Sartre discussed resistance to the German occupation with his mistress Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, concluding eventually that it was better to write than fight.” (Les Deux Magots, Jean-Paul Sartre)
• “Lindy’s was the Broadway deli where - allegedly - the line ‘Waiter, there's a fly in my soup’ received its first witty riposte.” (Buckingham Hotel New York - Damon Runyon).
• “On the door was a maitre d’ known as Saint Peter who determined who was allowed to enter.” (Buckingham Hotel New York - Damon Runyon.)
• “The Pollard Memorial Library where Jack - playing hooky from school - determined to read every book in stock.” (Lowell, Massachusetts - Jack Kerouac)
• “‘I'm only a beer teetotaller,’ Shaw once remarked. ‘Not a champagne teetotaller’.” (Cathay Hotel Shanghai - George Bernard Shaw)
• “Nice has nothing to do with creativity.” (Wordsworth)
• “Wordsworth is probably the last literary great I’d invite to a dinner party. According to many accounts, he would dominate the conversation and talk entirely about himself. ... At least Byron would have made everyone laugh, albeit while trying to seduce my wife.” (Wordsworth)
• “Tess of the d’Urbervilles is almost sadistic in the way that Thomas Hardy makes sure that anything that can go wrong for his heroine does.” (Hardy)
• “We expect writers to be good at their craft and we like them to be inspired by their surroundings, but we can't expect to be honest as well.” (Oriental Hotel, Bangkok - Somerset Maugham)

April 2025; 238 pages

Published in 2017 by Icon books

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Copenhagen" by Michael Frayn

Why did Werner Heisenberg visit Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941? This three-hander play, first performed at the National Theatre in London, England in 1981, explores this meeting.

It was, of course, the height of the Second World War and both Nazi Germany and the Allies were trying to develop the Atom bomb. Heisenberg was working on nuclear fission in Germany, Bohr, with a mixed Jewish ancestry, was living in Denmark under Nazi occupation (he escaped to Sweden later in the war). Did Heisenberg ask Bohr whether it would be morally wrong for a physicist to create a bomb? When, later, he asked Speer for money to pursue his research he,  possibly deliberately, asked for less than he would need. 

The meeting was complicated by the fact that Bohr, one of the father's of the quantum atom, had been Heisenberg's mentor in the 1920s when quantum physics was experiencing revolutionary new ideas almost monthly. This was the period when Heisenberg, seeking solitude on a rocky island in Heligoland, invented the matrix-maths solution to quantum mechanics which would later be superseded by Schrodinger's wave mechanics. It was also when Heisenberg announced his Uncertainty Principle and when they together created the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics.

The play mostly explores the relationships between the two men, and Bohr's wife Margarethe. Inevitably it involves some quantum physics. I used to teach Physics and I have always struggled to understand quantum mechanics (as did most of the scientists of the time, one of the reasons why the Copenhagen Interpretation was needed to explain what the mathematics and experiments 'meant'). So this play was always going to be difficult. There were times when it managed slightly over-simplified but nevertheless very clear explanations and there were times, for example when mentioning Complementarity, when it seemed to duck the issue entirely.

Here is my understanding of Complementarity. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (better called his Indeterminacy Principle) is a mathematically proved conclusion that some system's (for example an electron) have paired properties (for an electron, its position is paired with its momentum) which are linked in that the more precisely you measure one of these properties the less precisely you are able to measure the other. In the play, Heisenberg explains it thus: “You can never know everything about the whereabouts of a particle, or anything else ... because we can't observe it without introducing some new element into the situation, an atom of water vapour for it to hit, or a piece of light - things which have an energy of their own, and which therefore have an effect on what they hit.” (Heisenberg, Act 2) But the principle is more fundamental, it isn't simply an experimental error that could somehow be circumvented but a property of nature. Nevertheless, the Uncertainty Principle is one aspect of Complementarity. Another is the fact that an electron can behave both as a wave or as a particle ('wave-particle duality') and which behaviour it adopts appears to be determined by the way it is being observed. Thus Complementarity seems to be the idea that there are two versions of truth and both are true although neither can be true at the same time.

Selected quotes:

• “If you don't know how things are today you certainly can't know how they're going to be tomorrow.” (Heisenberg, Act 2)
• “If it's Heisenberg at the centre of the universe, then the one bit of the universe that he can't see is Heisenberg.” (Margarethe, Act 2)
• “If you are doing something you have to concentrate on you can't also be thinking about doing it, and if you’re thinking about doing it then you can't actually be doing it.” (Margarethe, Act 2)

March 2025; 96 pages

Published by Methuen Drama in 1998

I saw this play at the Grove Theatre in Eastbourne on Wednesday 9th April 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead

This sometimes harrowing expose of cruelty and abuse in a Florida reform school won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Elwood Curtis is a conscientious and intelligent young man. He studies hard at school and works hard at his part-time job. But he is black and this is Florida in the early 1960s. He is arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and sent to the Nickel Academy, a reform school. He has to learn how to survive in a brutal environment where the rules are made by the abusers. 

We also meet Elwood Curtis as an older man. He has survived Nickel and now lives in New York. Journalists have exposing the truth about what happened at Nickel.

And there is a twist.

Irony is deeply embedded in this beautifully written and compelling read, from the merely comic “Cherry, a mulatto who took up boxing as a matter of pedagogy, to teach others how not to speak about his white mother.” (Ch 9) to the deeply political: the house where the boys are beaten nearly to death is called the "White House"; what is outside the jail is called the "free world" in the way that the USA calls itself the 'leader of the free world' although even outside the jail the black boys, poor and persecuted, have very little freedom.

An tender and angry portrait of “the infinite brotherhood of broken boys.” (Ch 15)

Selected quotes:

• “He’d outgrown his shirt and the pressure against the buttons made him look upholstered.” (Ch 4)
• “He was familiar with Elwood's ‘situation’ - his intonation swaddled the word in euphemism.” (Ch 4)
• “Stuffing dribbled from the couches and armchairs in the recreation room.” (Ch 4)
• “The first thing Elwood noticed was the notch in the boy's left ear, like on an alley cat that had been in scrapes.” (Ch 5): Elwood’s first view of Turner.
• “He had the screwed-down smile of the rickety-toothed.” (Ch 5)
• “Horror comics, he’d noticed, delivered two kinds of punishment - completely undeserved, and sinister justice for the wicked.” (Ch 7)
• “Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.” (Ch 8)
• “The boy struggled over two plus three, like he didn't know how many damned fingers he had on his hand.” (Ch 9)
• “Out in the Free World to make your zig zag way.” (Ch 11)
• “The White House got a new coat. No one saw who did it. One day it was its dingy self, the next it made the sun vibrate on eyeballs.” (Ch 14)
• “Mr Betts paid on time, in cash, off the books. Didn’t matter what his name was or where he’d come from.” (Ch 15)
• “The worst thing that ever happened to Elwood happened every day: He woke in that room.” (Ch 16)
• “The world had whispered its rule to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead to deliverance, fight and things will change.” (Ch 16)
• “Elwood’s arms went wide’ hands out, as if testing the solidity pf the walls of a long corridor, one he had travelled through for a long time and which possessed no visible terminus.” (Ch 16)
• “She took his head into her lap as he wept, running her thumb over that stray-cat notch in his ear. The scar she never noticed but was right in front of her.” (Epilogue)

March 2025; 208 pages
First published in the UK by Fleet in 2019
My paperback edition issued in 2020.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Dead Simple" by Peter James

 A crime thriller packed with action.

This is the first of a long series of novels starring Roy Grace, a police officer based on the south coast of England. It's fast-paced (the chapters average five pages) and I read it very quickly because I wanted to finish so I suppose you could say it was a page-turner but I skim read because I wasn't very interested.

There were a number of things that disappointed me:

• I like murder mysteries. There was very little mystery. This was mostly because the narrative head-hops between the points of view of many of the characters so we quickly learn whodunnit.
• Except for the character introduced in a major twist about two-thirds of the way through the novel. To introduce such an important character so late without any foreshadowing seemed to me to break the rules of the genre. It felt like a diabolus ex machina.
• Some reviewers have described it as a police procedural but routine forensic work seems to be jettisoned in favour of action sequences: no-one followed up the soil analysis, nobody bothered to enquire about the land owned by the missing person's property development company. The investigating officer seemed more interested in psychics than science. 
• I didn't feel that a single character had depth. I didn't care about any of them which was perhaps just as well given how many ended up dead. 
• The hero's back story and physical attributes were given in a chunk near the end of chapter three. This felt like I was reading the author's notes but it wasn't quite so clunky as when he did the same thing for the villain near the end of the book.
• Given that it head-hops between multiple points of view, the reader very quickly learns who are the baddies - except for the extra villain brought in by the major twist at about the two-thirds mark - so there is very little mystery about these murders and almost no element of whodunnit. Instead it relies on shocking and sensational writing and short chapters. 
• There was also a significant amount of casual misogyny designed, presumably, to appeal to a mostly male readership. I understand that Roy Grace has been celibate for none years since his wife left him and must be feeling sexually frustrated: given that he seems to remember his wife purely for her bodily attributes I can understand why she went. We meet him in chapter 3 when he is driving to meet a woman he has hooked up with over the internet: "Her picture was hot! Amber hair, seriously pretty face, tight blouse showing a weapons-grade bust, sitting on the edge of a bed with a miniskirt pulled high enough to show she was wearing lace-topped hold-ups and might not be wearing knickers." The next paragraph made me laugh aloud, when Grace's interior monologue described himself as "an old-fashioned romantic". What a bizarre and ridiculous juxtaposition. 
• The misogyny even enters the similes: "A one-armed bandit at the far end of the room winked and blinked away forlornly like an old tart in a windswept alley." (Ch 73) I'm not sure that works for me on any level.

This tasted like fast-food: rapidly assembled, predictable, unsubtle and easy to consume. I prefer to eat more interesting meals carefully cooked to have depth and complexity.

Selected quotes:

• "Misty rain was falling from a sky the colour of a fogged negative." (Ch 1)
• "Good sex is one per cent of a relationship; bad sex is ninety-nine per cent." (Ch 68)

March 2025; 457 pages

Published in 2005 by Macmillan.

My Pan paperback was issued in 2019.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

This novel by the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature won the 1989 Booker and adapted into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, nominated for eight Oscars including best picture.

It is written in the form of reminiscences by a butler, Mr Stevens, who used to work for Lord Darlington at Darlington Hall. As he remembers his life as a servant and his tangential observations of secret negotiations between the British and Nazi German governments, the reader realises the sacrifices he has made in order to serve and the minimal reward he has gained. 

He is seeking to define what makes a great butler. He never claims that he himself is a great butler but his long service at the top of his profession suggests he might have been, although service has cost him and now he is beginning to make mistakes as age and exhaustion catch up with him. Given that his savings are small and that his home has always been in the great houses of his employers, one fears for his future if he ever has to retire. 

In order to serve his employers he has repressed all sense of personality and personal relationships, to the extent of missing the death of his own father upstairs because he had duties downstairs and, for the same reason but on another occasion, failing to condole with a bereaved colleague. He could come across as pyschopathically cold and unemotional but one senses that he has feelings, he just suppresses them.

The style is as a diary written a few days before and during a road trip that he makes to see an old colleague; therefore in the first person and incorporating both present and past tense. We learn both the details of the road trip (visiting beauty spots, drinking tea, running out of fuel etc) and his memories. It doesn't quite ring true because many of the conversations are reported verbatim, even those from many years before. Although he is prepared to lie to people he meets, and there is one occasion when he corrects something he said earlier, the narration seems fairly reliable - it is nothing like the frequently self-contradictory and self-serving narration of, for example, The Good Solider by Ford Madox Ford.

It wasn't difficult to read, although the narrator, Stevens, is somewhat long-winded and formal, and although his anecdotes sometimes ramble. It wasn't exactly a page-turner but I was never bored. It managed to make me feel gently sorry for the opportunities this dry old stick had missed and the sense that his life had been wasted in serving outdated employers in a vanishing world.

Selected quotes:

• "The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost ... They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstances tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of 'dignity'." (Day One - Evening: last page)
• "I would myself much prefer to wait on just one diner, even if he were a total stranger. It is when there are two diners present, even when one of them is one's own employer, that one finds it most difficult to achieve that balance between attentiveness and the illusion of absence that is essential to good waiting." (Day Two - Morning)
• "We were ... an idealistic generation for whom the question was not simply one of how well one practised one's skills, but to what end one did so; each of us harboured the desire to make our own small contribution to the creation of a better world." (Day Two - Afternoon)
• "One has had the privilege of practising one's profession at the very fulcrum of great affairs." (Day Three - Morning)
• "There is, after all, a real limit to how much ordinary people can learn and know, and to demand that each and every one of them contribute 'strong opinions' to the great debates of the nation cannot, surely, be wise." (Day Three - Evening)
• "His lordship ... chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. ... I trusted in his lordship's wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?" (Day Six - Evening)
• "The evening's the best part of the day. You've dome your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it." (Day Six - Evening)
• "Surely it is enough that the likes of you and me at least try to make a small contribution count for something true and worthy." (Day Six - Evening)

I suppose that the book resonated with me because I have retired after 33 years working as a public servant, a school teacher in state comprehensive schools. All those years and what for? Very few of the kids I taught ever made it through to become outstanding exponents of what I taught, Physics, though one or two have made a name in other fields. The obvious successes are balanced by those who ended up committing suicide, or in prison. Probably my influence helped shape lives in some small ways but it is almost impossible to discern, and if it had not been for my guidance and support they would have found other hands to help them, or they would have succeeded by themselves. So I do wonder whether it was worth while and whether I could not have had a more fulfilling and successful life if I had taken another path. Now I am trying to write novels and they are heroically unsuccessful: self-published and rarely purchased. I fear dying with regrets. I think I know how Stevens must feel.

Other books by Sir Kazuo Ishiguro reviewed in thius blog include:

• The Buried Giant
• The Unconsoled
• Never Let Me Go
• Klara and the Sun
• When We Were Orphans

March 2025; 258 pages

Published by Faber and Faber in 1989

My paperback edition was issued in 2011.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God