Middlemarch. Chapter 1

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Introduction

Middlemarch, written by George Eliot, is one of the greatest novels of the 19th century and a profound exploration of human character, society, and moral aspirations.

In this first part, including the Preface and Chapter 1, we are introduced to the world of Middlemarch, a provincial town where ideals, ambitions, and personal struggles begin to unfold. The foundations of the narrative are established, offering the reader a glimpse into the complexity of the characters and their inner lives.

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Author’s Note

This text is part of an ongoing project to bring classic literature to a wider audience through accessible audiobook recordings and written formats.

With this work, I aim to share the richness of great literary works and make them available across different platforms and languages.

— Javier Tavera Mas

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Preface & Chapter 1

PRELUDE.

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious

mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least

briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the

thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still

smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they

toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with

human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in

the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-

pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an

epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests

of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from

within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never

justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous

consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious

order.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the

last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic

life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a

life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the

meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and

sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to

shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes

their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born

Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform

the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated

between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one

was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient

indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women:

if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count

three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific

certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are

really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women’s

coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. 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. Here and there is born a Saint

Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an

unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of

centring in some long-recognizable deed.

BOOK I.

MISS BROOKE.

CHAPTER I.

Since I can do no good because a woman,

Reach constantly at something that is near it.

—The Maid’s Tragedy: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by

poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves

not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian

painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more

dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her

the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder

poets,—in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being

remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-

sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close

observers that her dress differed from her sister’s, and had a shade of coquetry in its

arrangements; for Miss Brooke’s plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in

most of which her sister shared. The pride of being ladies had something to do with

it: the Brooke connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably

“good:” if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any

yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers—anything lower than an admiral or a

clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman who

served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all

political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate. Young women of

such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly

larger than a parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster’s

daughter. Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in

dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was required for

expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have been enough to

account for plain dress, quite apart from religious feeling; but in Miss Brooke’s

case, religion alone would have determined it; and Celia mildly acquiesced in all

her sister’s sentiments, only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to

accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation. Dorothea knew many

passages of Pascal’s Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart; and to her the destinies

of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine

fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a

spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and

artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature

after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of

Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and

greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects;

likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur martyrdom after

all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character

of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being

decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection.

With all this, she, the elder of the sisters, was not yet twenty, and they had both

been educated, since they were about twelve years old and had lost their parents, on

plans at once narrow and promiscuous, first in an English family and afterwards in

a Swiss family at Lausanne, their bachelor uncle and guardian trying in this way to

remedy the disadvantages of their orphaned condition.

It was hardly a year since they had come to live at Tipton Grange with their

uncle, a man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions, and

uncertain vote. He had travelled in his younger years, and was held in this part of

the county to have contracted a too rambling habit of mind. Mr. Brooke’s

conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather: it was only safe to say that

he would act with benevolent intentions, and that he would spend as little money as

possible in carrying them out. For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose

some hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax about all his own interests

except the retention of his snuff-box, concerning which he was watchful,

suspicious, and greedy of clutch.

In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in abeyance;

but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults and virtues, turning

sometimes into impatience of her uncle’s talk or his way of “letting things be” on

his estate, and making her long all the more for the time when she would be of age

and have some command of money for generous schemes. She was regarded as an

heiress; for not only had the sisters seven hundred a-year each from their parents,

but if Dorothea married and had a son, that son would inherit Mr. Brooke’s estate,

presumably worth about three thousand a-year—a rental which seemed wealth to

provincial families, still discussing Mr. Peel’s late conduct on the Catholic

question, innocent of future gold-fields, and of that gorgeous plutocracy which has

so nobly exalted the necessities of genteel life.

And how should Dorothea not marry?—a girl so handsome and with such

prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her insistence on

regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to hesitate

before he made her an offer, or even might lead her at last to refuse all offers. A

young lady of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by

the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the

time of the Apostles—who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting

up at night to read old theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine

morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would

interfere with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would

naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship. Women were

expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic

life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did,

so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottagers, was

generally in favor of Celia, as being so amiable and innocent-looking, while Miss

Brooke’s large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual and striking. Poor

Dorothea! compared with her, the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and

worldly-wise; so much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which

make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it.

Yet those who approached Dorothea, though prejudiced against her by this

alarming hearsay, found that she had a charm unaccountably reconcilable with it.

Most men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback. She loved the fresh

air and the various aspects of the country, and when her eyes and cheeks glowed

with mingled pleasure she looked very little like a devotee. Riding was an

indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that

she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing

it.

She was open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring; indeed, it was pretty to

see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia with attractions altogether

superior to her own, and if any gentleman appeared to come to the Grange from

some other motive than that of seeing Mr. Brooke, she concluded that he must be in

love with Celia: Sir James Chettam, for example, whom she constantly considered

from Celia’s point of view, inwardly debating whether it would be good for Celia to

accept him. That he should be regarded as a suitor to herself would have seemed to

her a ridiculous irrelevance. Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of

life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. 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; or John Milton when his blindness had

come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been

glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said “Exactly” to

her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty,—how could he affect her as a

lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of

father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.

These peculiarities of Dorothea’s character caused Mr. Brooke to be all the more

blamed in neighboring families for not securing some middle-aged lady as guide

and companion to his nieces. But he himself dreaded so much the sort of superior

woman likely to be available for such a position, that he allowed himself to be

dissuaded by Dorothea’s objections, and was in this case brave enough to defy the

world—that is to say, Mrs. Cadwallader the Rector’s wife, and the small group of

gentry with whom he visited in the northeast corner of Loamshire. So Miss Brooke

presided in her uncle’s household, and did not at all dislike her new authority, with

the homage that belonged to it.

Sir James Chettam was going to dine at the Grange to-day with another

gentleman whom the girls had never seen, and about whom Dorothea felt some

venerating expectation. This was the Reverend Edward Casaubon, noted in the

county 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, and having views of his own which were to be more clearly

ascertained on the publication of his book. His very name carried an impressiveness

hardly to be measured without a precise chronology of scholarship.

Early in the day Dorothea had returned from the infant school which she had set

going in the village, and was taking her usual place in the pretty sitting-room which

divided the bedrooms of the sisters, bent on finishing a plan for some buildings (a

kind of work which she delighted in), when Celia, who had been watching her with

a hesitating desire to propose something, said—

“Dorothea, dear, if you don’t mind—if you are not very busy—suppose we

looked at mamma’s jewels to-day, and divided them? It is exactly six months to-

day since uncle gave them to you, and you have not looked at them yet.”

Celia’s face had the shadow of a pouting expression in it, the full presence of the

pout being kept back by an habitual awe of Dorothea and principle; two associated

facts which might show a mysterious electricity if you touched them incautiously.

To her relief, Dorothea’s eyes were full of laughter as she looked up.

“What a wonderful little almanac you are, Celia! Is it six calendar or six lunar

months?”

“It is the last day of September now, and it was the first of April when uncle gave

them to you. You know, he said that he had forgotten them till then. I believe you

have never thought of them since you locked them up in the cabinet here.”

“Well, dear, we should never wear them, you know.” Dorothea spoke in a full

cordial tone, half caressing, half explanatory. She had her pencil in her hand, and

was making tiny side-plans on a margin.

Celia colored, and looked very grave. “I think, dear, we are wanting in respect to

mamma’s memory, to put them by and take no notice of them. And,” she added,

after hesitating a little, with a rising sob of mortification, “necklaces are quite usual

now; and Madame Poincon, who was stricter in some things even than you are,

used to wear ornaments. And Christians generally—surely there are women in

heaven now who wore jewels.” Celia was conscious of some mental strength when

she really applied herself to argument.

“You would like to wear them?” exclaimed Dorothea, an air of astonished

discovery animating her whole person with a dramatic action which she had caught

from that very Madame Poincon who wore the ornaments. “Of course, then, let us

have them out. Why did you not tell me before? But the keys, the keys!” She

pressed her hands against the sides of her head and seemed to despair of her

memory.

“They are here,” said Celia, with whom this explanation had been long meditated

and prearranged.

“Pray open the large drawer of the cabinet and get out the jewel-box.”

The casket was soon open before them, and the various jewels spread out,

making a bright parterre on the table. It was no great collection, but a few of the

ornaments were really of remarkable beauty, the finest that was obvious at first

being a necklace of purple amethysts set in exquisite gold work, and a pearl cross

with five brilliants in it. Dorothea immediately took up the necklace and fastened it

round her sister’s neck, where it fitted almost as closely as a bracelet; but the circle

suited the Henrietta-Maria style of Celia’s head and neck, and she could see that it

did, in the pier-glass opposite.

“There, Celia! you can wear that with your Indian muslin. But this cross you

must wear with your dark dresses.”

Celia was trying not to smile with pleasure. “O Dodo, you must keep the cross

yourself.”

“No, no, dear, no,” said Dorothea, putting up her hand with careless deprecation.

“Yes, indeed you must; it would suit you—in your black dress, now,” said Celia,

insistingly. “You might wear that.”

“Not for the world, not for the world. A cross is the last thing I would wear as a

trinket.” Dorothea shuddered slightly.

“Then you will think it wicked in me to wear it,” said Celia, uneasily.

“No, dear, no,” said Dorothea, stroking her sister’s cheek. “Souls have

complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.”

“But you might like to keep it for mamma’s sake.”

“No, I have other things of mamma’s—her sandal-wood box which I am so fond

of—plenty of things. In fact, they are all yours, dear. We need discuss them no

longer. There—take away your property.”

Celia felt a little hurt. There was a strong assumption of superiority in this

Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond flesh of an unenthusiastic sister

than a Puritanic persecution.

“But how can I wear ornaments if you, who are the elder sister, will never wear

them?”

“Nay, Celia, that is too much to ask, that I should wear trinkets to keep you in

countenance. If I were to put on such a necklace as that, I should feel as if I had

been pirouetting. The world would go round with me, and I should not know how

to walk.”

Celia had unclasped the necklace and drawn it off. “It would be a little tight for

your neck; something to lie down and hang would suit you better,” she said, with

some satisfaction. The complete unfitness of the necklace from all points of view

for Dorothea, made Celia happier in taking it. She was opening some ring-boxes,

which disclosed a fine emerald with diamonds, and just then the sun passing

beyond a cloud sent a bright gleam over the table.

“How very beautiful these gems are!” said Dorothea, under a new current of

feeling, as sudden as the gleam. “It is strange how deeply colors seem to penetrate

one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems

in the Revelation of St. John. They look like fragments of heaven. I think that

emerald is more beautiful than any of them.”

“And there is a bracelet to match it,” said Celia. “We did not notice this at first.”

“They are lovely,” said Dorothea, slipping the ring and bracelet on her finely

turned finger and wrist, and holding them towards the window on a level with her

eyes. All the while her thought was trying to justify her delight in the colors by

merging them in her mystic religious joy.

“You would like those, Dorothea,” said Celia, rather falteringly, beginning to

think with wonder that her sister showed some weakness, and also that emeralds

would suit her own complexion even better than purple amethysts. “You must keep

that ring and bracelet—if nothing else. But see, these agates are very pretty and

quiet.”

“Yes! I will keep these—this ring and bracelet,” said Dorothea. Then, letting her

hand fall on the table, she said in another tone—“Yet what miserable men find such

things, and work at them, and sell them!” She paused again, and Celia 

thought that

her sister was going to renounce the ornaments, as in consistency she ought to do.

“Yes, dear, I will keep these,” said Dorothea, decidedly. “But take all the rest

away, and the casket.”

She took up her pencil without removing the jewels, and still looking at them.

She thought of often having them by her, to feed her eye at these little fountains of

pure color.

“Shall you wear them in company?” said Celia, who was watching her with real

curiosity as to what she would do.

Dorothea glanced quickly at her sister. Across all her imaginative adornment of

those whom she loved, there darted now and then a keen discernment, which was

not without a scorching quality. If Miss Brooke ever attained perfect meekness, it

would not be for lack of inward fire.

“Perhaps,” she said, rather haughtily. “I cannot tell to what level I may sink.”

Celia blushed, and was unhappy: she saw that she had offended her sister, and

dared not say even anything pretty about the gift of the ornaments which she put

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