dovegreyreader scribbles

Team Middlemarch...the journey ends.

Well this might just have been the longest team read of George Eliot's Middlemarch in recent history, and my thanks to you all for your forbearance with the brougham slowing to snail's pace this last month.

My thanks to to everyone who has read along and stayed on board, and to those who joined us along the way, and thank you too and for all your engaging and insightful comments. It has all made this, my third read of what I still consider to be a very great book indeed, a complete joy.

So, Book VIII Sunset and Sunrise...

Dodo finally came good for me, how could I ever have doubted that it might happen; that I would warm to her as she finds her own way, exercises her freedom of choice, makes and acts on her own decisions and with her destiny almost in reach. All this despite the efforts of those around her to stay in control of her life on her behalf (yes you Sir James Cheetham, and Mr Brook and even Celia) and Dorothea's own penchant for 'overestimating the good in others.'

I found so many aspects of this final book almost unbearably moving which came as another surprise, and one of the reasons I didn't want to rush this reading for the sake of it...

Dorothea's meeting with Rosamund... 

'Pride was broken down between these two...'

Dorothea's dark night of the soul...

'In the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim around her, she awoke - not with any amazed wondering where she was or what had happened, but with the clearest consciousness that she was looking into the eyes of sorrow.'

The drama of the Will Ladislaw situation...

'To a creature of Will's susceptible temperament - without any neutral region of indifference in his nature, ready to turn everything that befell him into the collisions of passionate drama.'

Mrs Bulstrode's wavering doubts swiftly followed by her whole-hearted for-better-for-worse support of her weeping, broken husband...

'She was silent for some time; and the tears fell one after the other, her chin trembling as she wiped them away. Bulstrode, sitting opposite her, ached at the sight of that grief-worn face.'

Mary and Fred's final resolution..

'Oh dear, because I have always loved him. I should never like scolding any one else quite so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.'

But above all Lydgate who remained high in the estimation stakes for me . The depths of courage required to face the music and lance (sorry, had to share it once it came into my head) the bubble of pride and then the subsequent ripple effect as the spiders caught mercilessly in George Eliot's intricate web shake and shudder the fabric of Middlemarch society just a little. Not quite enough to throw it off balance for too long because as we know well by now, Middlemarch has its tried and tested methods for dealing with such situations.

Some must be ostracised, others tolerated. sympathies apportioned out accordingly or withheld.

I particularly enjoyed George Eliot's Finale, her summing up and resume of what had happened and to whom. This was something that I couldn't recall at all from those readings of the book for study...too grateful to be nearing the final page probably.

I am delighted yet sad to be at the final page this time around too.

So pleased to have found the book had lived up to each and every one of my expectations, but also because it has given me so much more this time around and I know it is a book I will always return to.

Delighted to have read it on your company and can't wait to hear your final thoughts.

And a little sad that we have finished Team Middlemarch, and this great big chunkster of a book that has been sitting there in my reading vision for the last sixteen months or more ...thank you one and all.

 

 

Dear Team Middlemarch...

Can You Forgive Her?

Sorry, stirring in some Trollope there.

I think we had agreed that the final brougham halt for Team Middlemarch would be in the middle of March hadn't we??

Silly me, it's a bit of a whirlwind in progress here, so would you mind if we re-scheduled for Middleapril, and herewith follows a list of excuses...

1. It is the last few weeks before the final meeting of the Fiction Uncovered judges.

Sub-section excuse - I still have some reading to do before I can make my decisions.

2. Tinker's Cott is requiring my interior design and decorating skills.

Sub-section excuse - The carpets are ordered and I am now scouring every curtain fabric shop in existence for the 'perfect' material. I may have found it, though it is some years since I did this in quantity...who knew that curtain fabric can run to £50 a metre these days??

3. We are hoping the Tinker will be able to move into Tinker's Cott very very soon. He is coming over to view progress today and bringing us pasties for lunch (this much we have done in the last four weeks... floor tiles laid, fitted kitchen fitted, wall tiles chosen, appliances installed and working, cloakroom done, plumbing done, doors hung, decorating in progress. Downstairs almost finished. Work moves upstairs next week.)

Sub-section excuse -  But the curtains aren't made yet.

4. While all this is going on Nell still needs walking.

Sub-section excuse - At least four times a day.

5. Easter is approaching, and though I am lapsed C of E I do always try to create a sea of tranquillity in the run-up here, and I have some nice peaceful posts planned.

Sub-section excuse - That is the week I will probably settle down and read the final book which I really don't want to rush.

I could go on, but I am sure life is the same for everyone, so please can we reconvene for the final Team Middlemarch in Middleapril, in a few weeks time??

 

 

 

 

 

Team Middlemarch :: Book Seven ~ Two Temptations

Good morning Team Middlemarch and well, well, well...what turmoil. Our George is certainly saving the best until almost the last isn't she, and I wonder if, like me, you found this book, Two Temptations among the very best of the lot so far??

I was enthralled, and after a rather hectic week full of unexpected work-related events I wasn't quite sure where my brain was, and more importantly whether Middlemarch would be sufficient to hold it in one place for long enough. I needn't have worried.

I was engrossed as the Lydgate marriage started to unravel before my eyes with the debt, the potential loss of the home, and Rosamund's hitherto head-in-the-sand approach to the impending disaster now transformed into action on the begging letter front.

Poor Tertius, and actually poor Rosamund too, because finally I think I felt some sympathy for her...that moment when she declared that she wished she had died with the baby, and suddenly all that unsaid sadness peeked through for an instant. I suspect we underestimate the grief given that child mortality in the nineteenth century was so high, and thefore so much more likely, perhaps almost expected. 

I sometimes wonder how the Victorians approached all this, and thought it may have been an emotion perhaps out of the realms of George Eliot's ken or will to translate on to the page. I needed to know more and turned to my treasured volume Selections from George Eliot's Letters edited by Gordon S. Haight (published by Yale in 1985) and reading this letter of 1872  I think I do George a disservice..

'Gertrude and Charles are going to bring the Baby for us to kiss its little toes and worship, on Saturday week. I have a little comet's tail of its hair, and what is more precious, the frequent thought that its tiny life is a great comfort to the dear mother. We could not help being painfully anxious for the last week or two before the Baby came.'

Gertrude Lewes (daughter-in-law of George Henry Lewes) had suffered several miscarriages prior to Baby's birth, clearly George Eliot understood that sadness and anxiety.

Likewise I would have assumed our George had little experience of the psyche of the gambler, but somehow she has pinned down the folly of the addiction to perfection, and in some depth, in relation to both Fred Vincy as he tries to resist, and to Lydgate as he succumbs. The letters reveal more insights, this also from 1872... September, just a week before the final manuscript of Middlemarch was sent to the publishers...

'We arrived at Homburg on Saturday night and settled in these comfortable lodgings the next morning. The air, the waters, the plantations are all perfect - "only man is vile." I am not fond of denouncing my fellow-sinners, but gambling being a vice I have no mind to, it stirs my disgust even more than my pity. The sight of the dull faces bending around the gaming tables, the raking up of the money, and the flinging of the coins towards the winners by the hard-faced croupiers, the hateful, hideous women staring at the board like stupid monomaniacs - all this seems to me the most abject presentation of mortals grasping after something called a good that can be seen on the faces of this little earth. Burglary is heroic compared with it.... Hell is the only right name for such places.'

I saw that chapter in a completely new light and thought clever George.

But how easy it is to forget that life is going on elsewhere in Middlemarch too and I thought the Bulstrode gossip machine was a wonderful example of a knowable community at work. This slow and deliberate read has almost made me feel like a resident with so many return visits over the last fourteen months. But we almost live in one of those communities for real, and I expect many of you do too. Word can spread like wildfire and reputations left in tatters as a result. Many years ago a town luminary, who died some years ago, was accused of something very unsavoury which proved to be a joke started at a dinner party or something, but it soon gained momentum to the point where he was required to publicly defend himself and his honour. Interestingly, and despite his guilt, I felt for Bulstrode; put on the spot and hounded out, and then by stealth, did it dawn on you as it dawned on me...oops... Lydgate accepting the bale-out with such relief that he failed to consider the circumstances of the opium and the death and how it miught all look in the cold light of day.

Bulstrode's wherewithal to hasten Raffles's death I assumed to be the second temptation??

And as Bulstrode contemplated all that, seated in the wainscoted parlour, it occurred to me that I wasn't exactly 100% sure what 'wainscoting' was, so I went on a little foray to discover that I did know after all....panelling. But isn't it a lovely word.

Right, that's enough from me, over to you for your thoughts...

 

 

 

 

A quick reminder...

...the Team Middlemarch brougham will be stopping off this weekend to talk about Book Seven Two Temptations.

Team Middlemarch :: Book Six ~ The Widow and the Wife

Firstly we musy say a very Happy Birthday to George Eliot, born this day in 1819 and not looking a day older may I say.
Study guides to novels come and go and I have a cupboard full of them... essays, casenotes, analyses, theoretical interpretations the lot, and I had resolved, prior to this year-long read of Middlemarch that I was absolutely not going to read them. It would be a discipline because I love them for the extra dimensions they offer, and perhaps that would give depth to these posts beyond just my ramblings about this month's section. But this has been about me engaging with the book for pleasure, not for study, or for an exam.

And I was doing really well until these arrived on Saturday.

I will write more about the Connell Guides another day but I can't deny that my heart leapt at the thought of all that lovely reading with a very accessible and informative guide alongside. I know that might seem sad, but those years of study showed me how much there is to miss, and I just don't like missing it now, so when my eyes lit on Middlemarch by Josie Billington I am afraid my resolve dissolved. A 'little peek' turned into a 'full-on' read.

Truth be told I had been feeling a little jaded with this month's reading. I blame Emile Zola and Edith Wharton who have both been jostling for my attention and pushing poor old George out of the way. In the end I reluctantly set aside The Fortune of the Rougons (brilliant) and The House of Mirth (even more so) to spend some time with Dorothea... ho hum boring old Dorothea.

I really do have Josie Billington to thank for reviving my spirits and getting me here today with a renewed understanding of our Dodo.

The Connell Guide to George Eliot's Middlemarch asks seemingly simple questions that belie the depth of the answer that Josie Billington offers....

Why so many stories?

Why does the narrator have so much to say?

What does the novel have to say about marriage?

What are people looking for in Middlemarch?

Is Middlemarch a feminist novel?

Whilst Sebastian Faulks's cover quote suggests that this book would be invaluable for any student, I would argue that these are perfect little handbooks for any reader, student or otherwise (students get lectures after all, the rest of us may not) who wants to extract more from their reading of the book than a first read might reveal.

Reminding me in spades of George Eliot's skills as a writer came the question  'Is Dorothea Brooke idealised?' ...

'Dorothea, with whose viewpoint the reader sympathetically identifies without ever fully accepting or approving it...'

Yes, that's me.

George Eliot's big experiment, subsequently emulated by Henry James in The Portrait of  Lady, that narrative skill of hovering between first and third person in order to present a mixed reality one that...

'...lies elusively between the conventional categories of true and false and right and wrong.'

Josie Billington argues that this is most evident in Dorothea and in many ways helped to explain my swithering about and trying to decide what I 'really' make of her. One minute I find her crushingly boring, the next I warm to her, yet hitherto inexplicably.

George Eliot cleverly meant it to be like this for a reader I think. Any rush to judgement constantly checked and balanced by that mixed reality.

Plenty going on in Book IV The Widow and the Wife.. Will's prolonged departure which allows time for several more plot lines to shape up and be revealed, not least Will and Dorothea's feelings for each other, but also the Bulstrode scandal and his blackmail by Raffles, the progress of Mary and Fred's romance, the loss of Baby Lydgate and Family Lydgate's underlying money worries.

A wonderful juxtaposition I thought...Rosamund and Tertius on their beam ends thanks in part to his gambling and her fiscal mismanagement...

'Rosamund, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagent household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything...'

and deciding what will have to go, whilst the next chapter catalogues the success of Mr Larcher in selling the contents of a house because he has bought another mansion fully furnished and has far too much.

My recent read of The Missing Ink by Philip Hensher has me on a constant 'handwriting-in-fiction' alert, and so I wasn't going to miss Fred Vincy's woeful demonstration...

'...the vowels were all alike and the consonants only distinguishable as turning up or down, the strokes had a blotty solidity and the letters disdained to keep the line - in short, it was a manuscript of that venerable kind easy to interpret when you know beforehand what the writer means.'

or Caleb Garth's reaction to it...

'The deuce!' he exclaimed, snarlingly. ' To think that this is a country where a man's education may cost hundreds and hundreds, and it turns you out this!' Then in a more pathetic tone, puching up his spectacles and looking at the unfortunate scribe, 'The Lord have mercy on us, Fred, I can't put up with this!'

Remembering too how unexpectedly moved I had been to see George Eliot's entirely handwritten manuscript for Middlemarch in the British Library.

I have, thanks to Josie Billington, been considering anew the web of connections within the novel, and how, if you spend long enough in any community, those connections will start to be made.

I then for some reason recalled the stupid ball of string team building game we used to have to play at multi-agency child protection training years ago... all sitting in a circle and the policeman would keep hold of the end and throw  the ball to the social worker who kept hold too before throwing it to me, the health visitor who would throw it to the GP who would throw it right back at me, and so it went on. This presumably to demonstrate the tangled web of connections between us all whilst making a nice cat's cradle web in the process... but then I thought you could sit George Eliot's characters in that ball-of-string circle and likewise make a beautifully complex pattern that wouldn't seem quite so daft.

Currently I am feeling mostly warm towards our Dodo, proud of Will Ladislaw for taking the honourable stance, sad for Tertius, cross with Rosamund, strangely sorry for Bulstrode, still spitting feathers about Casaubon's codicil in the will, and loving Celia and the baby with its 'sacred ark otherwise known as a cradle'.

But given George Eliot's skill this might all turn on a sixpence in Book VII Two Temptations which we will gather here to discuss over the weekend of January 19th/20th , before our final Team Middlemarch discussion on Book VIII Sunset and Sunrise, very appropriately in the Middle of March 2013.

So over to you...

 

 

 

 

 

A quick reminder...

Team Middlemarch will be gathering here tomorrow, on George's umpteesomething birthday, to rummage through Book VI The Widow and the Wife.

Team Middlemarch :: Book Five - The Dead Hand

Well here we are again Team Middlemarch and what an odd...no, make that a very peculiar and discombobulating reading week or two I have had, so please forgive a slight digression whilst I give you some honest context.

Last week I interrupted all my reading in progress, including Barbara Kingsolver's new novel Flight Behaviour which has me rapt, along with my chapter every-so-often of Middlemarch, in order to settle down with the new and first novel for adults from J.K.Rowling, The Casual Vacancy.

No, I don't know why either, not when I am enjoying what I am already reading so much, but I had read that it was a reflection of the life and times of 21st century rural (West Country) England and so my mind made a little connective leap to George Eliot and Middlemarch. Well wouldn't it be interesting if J.K.Rowling had somehow pulled that one off I thought, what great comparisons we could draw, plus I had about eight hours on a train last Saturday so it was ripe for my Kindle, yes, I paid hard-earned money.

I really wish I had been the person who dubbed The Casual Vacancy "Mugglemarch".

I will write more about The Casual Vacancy when I have calmed down a bit, but suffice to say George Eliot it wasn't, well not for me anyway, even if both books do have a character called Fairbrother / Farebrother, and nor can I tell you when a book may have left me feeling more ...no I'll save all that for when I can be a bit more rational. I know some of you have loved it so I want to write sensibly rather than rant, and though I rarely write about books I haven't enjoyed I will be making an exception for The Casual Vacancy.

Anway with my reading energy sapped and depleted, coupled with the final countdown for the Kayaker's departure for two years in Australia this coming week, and I half-wondered whether I could even manage to pick up and finish The Dead Hand, Book V of Middlemarch in time for today.

But look, here I am, George Eliot saves the day and rapidly restores my reading mojo, though I may not have much in the realms of an original thought given that Mugglemarch has taken up so much of my thinking this week, please forgive the brevity. It is all yours in comments and I will look forward to your thoughts and some discussion there.

So one of the moments we had all been waiting for finally happens

'But the silence in her husband's ear was never more to be broken.'

and Casaubon is gone and with him went any sympathies I may have held for him. I can't remember that happening last time I read, and every step of the way I realise how unemotionally I engaged with Middlemarch when studying it, and how much I am relishing being able to do that now.

His jealousy of Dorothea and Ladislaw, and that final seemingly spiteful and controlling codicil in the will were all it took for me to cast him out of my affections... I blame JKR for this rather belligerent mindset. I am still a crosspatch 'tis true.

But the other marriage that is the focus of George Eliot's attentions is also steaming into choppy waters. Rosamond's insecurities becoming evident very early on in Book V...

'I shall be jealous when Tertius goes to Lowick,' said Rosamond, dimpling, and speaking with airy lightness. 'He will come back and think nothing of me.'

and Lydgate, who I am still rooting for, humours and pets his wife with affection and we learn that Rosamond 'was expecting to have a baby' which I didn't quite take to mean she is actaully expecting one yet. Thought heaven knows what Rosamond will make of the straightened circumstances that beckon, whilst her man is heading into some turbulent professional waters of his own. Poor Tertius, no aspect of his life is going well is it, but I am refusing to see him as the 'charlatan' or the 'emotional elephant' or the gambler and risk-taker that others may see, even though the evidence may be staring me in the face.

Isn't it amazing how a writer can have the power and a reader can furtively sneak it back.

If Middlemarch is a book about change on every front, and how it affects a community that a reader is coming to know quite well, then George Eliot is the mistress of the genre. I am even enjoying the political elements regarding the Reform Act, and poor Mr Brookes, I am afraid I laughed at the egg shower and his inept and shambolic speech. This may or may not have been appropriate but I felt George Eliot was giving permission, in the way that she does, and it all made me think yet again about the power of the writer and the control they can (or can't) exert over the mind and mood of a reader.

By this time I am cheering up a bit and noticing George's little nuances again...

Mr Farebrother's (another good guy) aunt as she makes 'tender little beaver-like noises' when she hears that her nephew has been granted the living of Lowick parish.

Caleb Garth ( a saint) and his 'peculiar' reluctance to listen to gossip for fear of hearing anything 'discreditable' about another man.

And then the arrival of Raffles, his presence set to ruffle Mr Bulstrode's feathers with some scandal from the past...

'This time Mr Raffles' slow wink and slight protusion of his tongue was worse than a nightmare, because it held the certitude that it was not a nightmare, but a waking misery. Mr Bulstrode felt a shuddering nausea...'

I am there and I am watching those slightest of facial expressions speak volumes of words.

And so I reach page 499 in my edition fully restored to my usual reading enthusiasm.

So how about you??

I am really looking forward to some insights and discussion in comments, and don't forget we reconvene for Book Six The Widow and The Wife on George Eliot's birthday, November 22nd

 

Team Middlemarch :: Book Four ~ Three Love Problems

'Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing? If it happens to have been set in stone, though it lie face downmost for ages on a forsaken beach, or 'rest quietly under the drums and tramplings of many conquests,' it may end by letting us into the secret of usurpations and other scandals gossiped about long empires ago : - this world being such a huge whispering gallery." 

No one could have been more surprised than me when, straight off the back of the excitement of that Olympic fortnight, I plunged headlong into Book Four of Middlemarch and found myself engrossed. Knowing where my attentions would lie this summer, and more importantly that my work-brain was going to take a complete rest, this had been one of the reasons I shied aways from tackling Proust this year... and with apologies to Erika:) But I had still worried that Middlemarch might be a chore, a bit tame after so much 21st century sporting action, when in fact it was quite a relief to wander calmly and quietly amongst the populace and the 'whispering gallery' that is this Study of Provinicial Life, and to catch up with happenings.

I don't know about you but I am finding this is all opening the door on a completely absorbing representation of early nineteenth century life, and how frequently I am struck by plus-ca-change thinking at the appearance of all those similar anxieties that still pervade our twenty-first century life. Money, possessions, property, insecurities and jealousies, machinations and plotting, futile attempts to control that which is out of our control, thwarted access to finance, the superficiality of physical beauty, those sudden and unexpected blessings and a quick guffaw at mention of WAG, in those days a jester and joker, when the connotations for us these days are associated with the pseudo-celeb status of the footballers' Wives And Girlfriends.

The Dorothea-Ladislaw-Casaubon situation fast becoming a bit of a triangle...Casaubon feeling seriously undermined and threatened by Will's presence in town; Dorothea, seemingly in all innocence very much attracted, whilst Will seems to be digging his heels in and refusing to bow to Casaubon's edict that the town really wasn't big enough for both of them.

The Garth family...oh the lovely Garths, can't you just tell how much George Eliot loves this family, always presenting them in such a favourable light with Caleb's deep-seated wisdom shining through alongside Mary's unshakeable moral values. And don't you just love the little exchanges...

'When Mr and Mrs Garth were sitting alone, Caleb said. Susan, guess what I'm thinking of.'
'The rotation of crops,' said Mrs Garth, smiling at him, above her knitting, 'or else the back-doors of the Tipton cottages.'
'No,' said Caleb gravely; 'I am thinking that I could do a great turn for Fred Vincy...' 

And that brings me neatly onto the Vincys. Fred perhaps being generously offered a lifeline of redemption and Rosamund now engaged to Lydgate by assumption rather than formal announcement.

'Young love-making - that gossamer web ! ...momentary touches of fingertips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors...'

Lydgate willingly ensnared in something ' which had stolen upon him'  and now in haste to tie the knot only leaves Rosamund six weeks to get her trousseau prepared and her hankies embroidered.

I am as interested, on this read of the novel, to notice what George Eliot chooses not to write about as much as what she does, because how studiously she avoided mentioning the wedding. Surely fodder for a great long chapter or two (thinking how Flaubert went to town at Emma Bovary's do) but perhaps an emotional step too far for our George to contemplate given her own presenting situation??

Yet plenty of focus earlier on the reading of Peter Featherstone's will as the 'Christian Carnivora' gather for the post-funereal pickings, jealousies and rivalries nakedly exposed at the prospect of money.

I would almost pay money to read those absent wedding chapters given how much I am tuning into George Eliot's veiled sarcasm when it comes to the ongoing descriptions of beauty, mostly Rosamund's, and all made so saccharine and shallow. I can only begin to imagine how that wedding banquet might have evolved at the tip of George's pen.

'Lydgate...had found it delightful to be listened to by a creature who would bring him the sweet furtherance of satisfying affection - beauty - repose - such help as our thoughts get from the summer sky and the flower-fringed meadows.'

It's very pass-me-the-bucket and surely George knows it.

One more thing, did anyone else notice the vicar's shrugs??

I loved those too... tiny details that George Eliot invested with so much meaning.

So over to you...anyone still in the running with Middlemarch??

And for those who are still in the brougham, we are a little behind with our schedule and I wonder if you would mind if we stayed that way rather than rushed?? I am enjoying this far too much to rush it.

We could reconvene the weekend of 6th October for Book Five The Dead Hand ??

Then George Eliot's birthday, 22nd November for Book Six The Widow and the Wife

Saving the final two books for early in 2013, in fact, let's finish in the Middle of March.

 

 

Dear Team Middlemarch...

On bended knee here... the brougham finds itself mired in a little metaphorical mud.

The combination of unexpected kitten, an excess of Wimbledon and my Port Eliot reading and stitching preparations have not been conducive to settling down calmly with George Eliot and I see no window to do so on the visible horizon.

So would you mind very much if we postponed next weekend's Middlemarch discussion about Book IV Three Love Problems until after Port Eliot and after the Olympics??

I would rather do this properly than rush, so my suggestion is that we re-convene over the weekend of August 25th-26th, and I'm hoping that is alright with you all.

 

Team Middlemarch :: Book Three ~ Waiting for Death

Greetings Team Middlemarch and no one could be more suprised than the Dowager and I that this reading like a Victorian is proving such an effective way to approach a novel.

I thought I might be desperate to carry on with the next book and yet... though I couldn't stop myself reading the first few pages of Book Four just in case the mystery of the Featherstone will should be speedily revealed (it wasn't) I didn't find it hard to close the book and think about what I has just read.

If you are still there I am wondering how you are finding this restrained reading ??

I strolled into Waiting for Death and the messy life of Fred Vincy and liked him a lot for all his lack of common sense and financial acumen. I learned a great deal more about the Garth family and I liked them too and I followed the progress of Tertius Lydgate as he is slowly being drawn into Rosamund's forget-me-not eyed clutches. As I recall Middlemarch is often likened to a web and here's one very pretty, demure amd dimpled spider busy tatting a web of her own in which to lure her prey... sorry am I being a bit mean to Rosamund there...what do you think?? 

I consistently felt that George Eliot was living up to her proposal... a Study of Provincial Life this most certainly is.

Forgive me because I am also still paying keen attention to our Tertius this time round, and all enhanced by a read of a fascinating book entitled The Malvern Water Cure by John Harcup. I am indebted to Dr Harcup for a copy of his book which he sent after we had met at the recent West Country Writer's Association Annual Congress. It is a fascinating history of something I didn't know I was interested in until I read it and realised how well it informs my reading of Middlemarch.

John was a GP in Malvern for many years and has written this history of the town's water cure which became highly fashionable in the mid-nineteenth century, but it also confirms the paucity of effective treatments that doctors had at their disposal for the treatment of day to day ills. Much faith was placed in taking the waters and the regime in Malvern, to which many luminaries of the day including Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale succumbed, involved a great deal more than drinking the stuff. Daily sitz
baths, a form of wet wrapping and the dreaded douche treatment, which seems akin to being cold water pressure-washed from a great height, were the order of the day along with a strict diet. Given the Victorian propensity for over indulgence it is little suprise that effective relief from associated ills quickly became apparent, and with it much faith in taking the waters.

And George Eliot writing about the 1830s from her 1870s vantage point seems to be writing not only on the cusp of historical change with the Reform Act looming, but on the cusp of medical progress too, and working hard to incorporate the new. While Drs Wrench and Sprague flounder on, good old Tertius, an alumni of the newest medical training, trounces them all with his spot-on diagnosis of Fred Vincy's typhoid. Perhaps too he becomes the very first doctor in literature to wield a stethescope, whilst his keeness for microscopic study can only bode well for the future of medicine.

But then what a nice surprise..

'Mr and Mrs Casaubon, returning from their wedding journey, arrived at Lowick Manor in the middle of January...' 

Yes I had quite forgotten them, and how wonderfully George Eliot engineers her scene lest we have forgotten. This won't be beautiful snow that lay on the ground...no indeed, this will be a 'dun and motionless sky' with low-hanging clouds, and everything seems to have shrunk and reduced, acquiring a ghostly tinge and with the fire in the grate doing it's best to brighten proceedings. Dorothea makes her entrance and thankfully still has that glow about her, though how long for will be anyone's guess.

Our Tertius to the rescue again when Casaubon has his funny turn on the library steps and now a chance for Dorothea to become even more of a martyr a la Saint Theresa of the Prologue, and as I am writing this I am thinking that George Eliot does not favour her women in this reader's eyes, only Mary Garth seems to be emerging with any modicum of my respect so far.

But the humour continues too and I'm not sure if I was supposed to laugh at Mr Featherstone's demise but I did, with the descent of the vultures who turned his final days into a social gathering,

'Oh my dear, you must do things handsomely where there's last illness and property. God knows, I don't grudge them every ham in the house - only save the best for the funeral. Have some stuffed veal always, and a fine cheese in cut. You muSt expect to keep open house in these last illnesses...'

As if any excuse for a bit of a party.

So our party continues...is anyone still on board the brougham and if so how's the journey with you??

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Book IV Three Love Problems will plop through our virtual Victorian letterboxes on June 1st but we will reconvene a little earlier in July as we all have to be at Port Eliot Festival on the weekend of July 21st/22nd, and then I hate to tell you but this will not be an Olympic-free zone so I will be glued to that the week after. So back here on the weekend of July 14th, for Team Middlemarch, it's in my diary.

 

 

 

Team Middlemarch :: Book Two ~ Old and Young

It will be Lady Day tomorrow.

The Annunciation, nine months before the Feast of the Nativity and liturgical in origin, but I always think of it as a wonderfully rural sort of day too for the fact that it is still, by tradition, the day when farm rents may be paid, and I have no doubt the population of Middlemarch might have been aware of it too. Because whilst there is no doubt this is a town, it is a town surrounded by countryside as George Eliot was keen to demonstrate towards the end of Book One Miss Brooke...

'... almost all meadows and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty, and to spread out coral fruit for the birds. Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood... these are the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls.'

Now a confirmed advocate of this method I truly am discovering Middlemarch anew with the instalment reading, by far the best way to read it in the midst of a busy life and to the point where I feel boringly evangelical about it all whenever I meet a Middlemarch refusnik. Read like a Victorian, a hundred pages seems the perfect length for me to feel sufficiently engrossed yet not overwhelmed.

I was browsing some old newspaper cuttings recently, Hermione Lee talking two years ago about the biography she is writing on the life of Penelope Fitzgerald. Unlimited access to Penelope Fitzgerald's personal and much annotated library is yielding unexpected riches. Teaching texts from the years when the family fell on hard times and Penelope taught English literature...

'written in a battered old Signet paperback of Middlemarch, she marks, as she often does, details of when and why the book was bought....

"1982. Most reluctantly bought when Nancy told me I'd got to teach George Eliot, whereas she'd previously said T.S.Eliot. 1995. Why on earth was I reluctant?"

By my calculations, a woman I revere for her extensive literary intellect and understanding of the human condition didn't read Middlemarch until she was in her late 60s. And I start to wonder whether an increasingly meaningful appreciation of a book like this does come with age. Instead of having it thrust under our noses as young under- graduates how much better perhaps to have it waved in front of us at a time when many of us need our specs on to even catch the title.

I am bringing something very different to this read ten years on from my first and I suspect it takes maturity to note, as Penelope Fitzgerald did in her marginalia of a chapter in Middlemarch, and given her preference for 'fictional treatments of restraint, emotions trammelled down...'

'a delicate chapter, low-keyed emotions but minutely traced.'

Now of course I absolutely want to know which chapter that might be, and each one I read I then reflect on those words and try to decide.

In fact plenty of chapters seem to fit, especially in Old and Young.

George Eliot seems in complete control of all this doesn't she??

I am feeling that I am in a very safe pair of authorial hands and in a way that I often don't feel with Charles Dickens...dare I say it. Dickens's need to pad out to his word count often feels apparent to me; George Eliot must have been under similar constraints yet I have no sense of the superfluous. Granted there are times when I have to read a page over several times to plumb the depths of her intellect, but when I get there I marvel.

Quietly assertive with her reader as she starts to describe her characters, and should the name Bulstrode be suggesting a rather stocky, rubicund balding chap think again...

'Do not imagine his sickly aspect to have been of the yellow, black-haired sort; he had a pale blond skin, thin grey-besprinkled brown hair, light grey eyes, and a large forehead...'

That's us told then.

But slowly the town of Middlemarch is being populated. More new faces slip in from the wings alongside those I have already met. I am learning other facets of their characters, and I am starting to make my assessments and my judgements...

Fred Vincy creeps up a little in my estimation (Penelope annotates him as "poor Fred" ) while Mary Garth warms my heart with her down-to-earthness..

Then there is Rosamund ...eeeek, I am not feeling the love,

'Her garment seemingly made out of the faintest blue sky, herself so immaculately blond, as if the petals of some gignatic flower had just opened and disclosed her...'

Can't you just imagine George having fun with this, writing that with tongue-in-cheek and then reading it to...er George, and the pair of them guffawing together.

And Lydgate, well what do we make of our friend Tertius I wonder??

I am sure I have read somewhere that Dr Lydgate may have been literature's very first General Practitioner, which sends me scurrying to an invaluable book that has been on my shelf for years Medicine and Literature, The Doctor's Companion to the Classics by John Salinsky..

'Our boy is very confident and very ambitious. He means to make a name for himself as a medical scientist but he also wants to shine the bright clear light of evidence-based medicine on the dubious clinical practices of the older Middlemarch doctors...not suprisingly, their reaction to Dr Lydgate is like that of your average Primary Care Group members when the clinical governance person sends round a circular : sceptical, derisory or downright hostile. As you can see the medical scene hasn't changed much in 170 years.'

Poor Tertius, shocks in store for him indeed and his 'spots of commoness' will out, but I feel his heart is in the right place and I think George Eliot wants us to feel that too. He is fallible which I like... he can put his size twelves in it good and proper, and in the most hapless of ways, yet we are reassured  that he is 'morally lovable' should we be in any doubt. It is likely to be agony to watch given there is much 'bigwggism and obstructive trickery' to come, and because Rosamund has the good but impecunious doctor in her sights, and in the words of John Salinsky...

'Rosamund is not the sort of girl who can be trusted to be sensible with a credit card...'

We have had that most famous of lines about the roar on the other side of silence, but best of all I think I liked this...

'They found Naumann painting industriously, but no model was present; his pictures were advantageously arranged, and his own plain vivacious person set off by a dove-coloured blouse and a maroon velvet cap...'

Must have.

Now over to you.

... and for those who like to plan ahead we will re-convene here to talk about Book Three Waiting for Death (which should plop through your imaginary Victorian letterbox on April 1st)  on the weekend of May 19th/20th 2012.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Team Middlemarch - Book One ~ Miss Brooke

'Things which have a constant relation to the same thing have a constant relation to each other'

Herbert Spencer thanked George Eliot for that phrase, describing her as '...the most admirable woman, mentally I have ever met.' Which seems like a bit of a back-handed compliment that obviously does not take looks into account. They were rumoured to be engaged apparently and George Eliot's letters to Spencer, only made public in 1985, reveal a woman 'passionately and self-abasingly attached, begging for crumbs of attention if not love.' This according to A.S. Byatt in a piece about George Eliot. Spencer spurned her affections and made no secret of the fact that this was because she was ugly, and it is to her credit that George Eliot remained on good terms with Spencer when this became apparent. Me...I'd have done damage, but I thought it might be something to keep in mind as I read Miss Brooke with its accounts various of women various.

So the Brougham is in the coach house, the horses are blanketed and stabled, the groom has nipped off to do whatever grooms do and it's time for us to take tea and talk about our first instalment of Middlemarch, Miss Brooke.

How are you all doing Middlemarchers??

As on previous team reads I will offer a few reading moments that have chimed with me and be warned it won't be a deep and meaningful resume, and I usually let my thoughts jump all over the place so there will be plenty I miss, but hopefully all enough to trigger your own thoughts about favourite moments and wider thoughts too. I tend to jot down a few as I read to start the ball rolling  and please do add your own in comments here, so that we can have an ongoing natter, and not only today but perhaps bookmark the Team Middlemarch link and come back to this post until the next one arrives (schedule at the end)

I've had a lovely time since the arrival of Book One, primarily because in the past I have only ever read Middlemarch with a view to having to write an essay on it and then sit an exam, but with all that consigned to the mud at the bottom of the pond what has risen to the surface as I read Miss Brooke is how funny and dry is George Eliot's humour. Small unobtrusive moments I know I never spotted during those intense and pressured reads ten years ago, this is subtle humour unlike Dickens who, dare I suggest and by comparison, does a lot of look-at-me arm waving to draw attention to his funny moments, and then eggs the comedy pudding to the limits, and how much I am enjoying getting to know the community that is Middlemarch and in this very different frame of mind.

Dear earnest Dorothea, no time for 'guimp and drapery' and not to be found stitching a sampler but head down over some architectural designs for worker's cottages, whilst sister Celia is far more focused on dishing out Mama's jewellery. I never drive past these old cottages in Tavistock (built for the workers by the Duke of Bedford in 1850) without thinking of Dorothea, she would have been as thrilled with these, as I am with my little ceramic tile depicting them.

I love Celia this time around, especially that moment when she hurls the 'light javelin' of disparagement about Mr Casaubon's noisy soup-eating in Dorothea's direction, having already said that she can't bear his moles with hairs. Dorothea's feelings meanwhile 'gathered to an avalanche.'

And Mr Casaubon, that 'ghost of an ancient' with the 'smile like pale wintery sunshine', whose entreaties of love in Dorothea's direction resemble the 'cawing of an amorous rook.'

I was constantly smiling at George's (I'm sticking with George) humour... what about that hilarious moment when Sir James Chettham, courting Dorothea's attentions, arrives with a lap-dog 'one of nature's most naive toys' under his arm. Clearly meant as a gift for Dorothea but consigned to the groom when Dorothea professes to hate them

'I am so glad I know that you do not like them...here John, take this dog, will you...'

And Mrs Cadwallader and the matriarches of the community discussing their medical symptoms and offering their scathing verdict on the engagement...

'Really, by the side of Sir James he looks like a death's head skinned over for the occasion. Mark my words: in a year from this time that girl will hate him...'

And so the scene is set. George Eliot has started to populate her community. Rosamund Vincy and her mirror, Tertius Lydgate and his ideals, Mary Garth and Mr Featherstone and his money, Fred Vincy and his debts and the community elders, Bulstrode et al with their opinions and their resistance to change.

As a nod to serious comment I had treated myself to a read of A.S.Byatt's essay in her collection Passions of the Mind entitled George Eliot: A Celebration and to remind myself why I chose this book when everyone else might more appropriately be reading Charles Dickens in this bicentenary year. A.S.Byatt outlines her own encounters with Middlemarch...

'I taught it with a passion because it I perceived it was about the growth, use and inevitable failure and frustration of all human energy - a lesson one is not interested in at eleven, or eighteen, but at twenty-six with two small children, it seems crucial. George Eliot's people were appallingly ambitious and greedy - not always for political, or even exclusively sexual power...they were ambitious to use their minds to the full. to discover something, to live on a scale where their life felt valuable from moment to moment...'

A.S.Byatt goes on to argue with admiration and respect for George Eliot...

'She had no real heir as a 'novelist of ideas' in England...her heirs are abroad, Proust in France, Mann in Germany. Which brings me to another reason for loving her: she was European, her roots were Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac...not just Jane Austen. She opened gates which are still open.'

It is evident as I am reading A.S.Byatt's novels, and as she herself admits, that she has imbibed those lessons about populating a novel with a wide variety of interrelated people,

'whose processes of thought, developments of consciousness, biological anxieties, sense of their past and future can be made most scrupulously available to readers...'

to say nothing of the technicalities and scope offered by George Eliot's speciality, the intervention of the authorial voice, all things I am noticing whilst marvelling at the serendipitous way all these reading planets have aligned.

But that's for another day, now it's over to you Team Middlemarch, settle down and make yourselves comfy and do converse in comments while I hand around the napkins, the dainty china and the comestibles, today a receipt from Mrs Beeton's for Honey Cake.

If you are reading to the nineteenth century schedule we start Part Two Old and Young on February 1st

Next Brougham halt :: W/E of March 24th-25th

 

 

 

Team Middlemarch... On your marks...

It's Team Middlemarch day at last.

Miss Brooke, the first of eight serialised parts of Middlemarch was published on December 1st 1871 and so we are on the starting line, the Brougham (pronounced Broom or Browam apparently ) is laden with warm blankets for the knees, and baskets of food and drink are loaded up.

Now those of a nervous disposition had better look away now because what follows next equals book crime and desecration of the first order, and I may be arrested before the day is out. I will expect opprobium to be heaped on me from all corners of the globe.... so I'm going to run away until tomorrow and hope you've all forgotten about it by then.

A home really only needs so many copies of Middlemarch, six feels like plenty to me, so I sacrificed an old paperback edition for an experiment and sent it into Bookhound for surgery...

'Can you saw this up into the eight individual books for me?' I asked..

There was no pre-op preparation, no time to change my mind or seize the book back, Middlemarch was whisked off for dissection. And there followed some interesting noises off stage as the deed was done. I paced around outside, unable to watch whilst imagining eight hundred loose pages emerging from this chunkster of a book rather than a nice set of octuplets, even though this was all for your benefit and mine ... but perhaps don't try this at home unless you are made of stern stuff .

But isn't it also often the case that it is the sheer size of a book that can feel so daunting??

The Victorians had no idea it would be quite this big surely, they just had a nice little edition to read every two months, so when I saw our 'Study of Provincial Life' reduced to its eighths,

 I was really pleasantly surprised and encouraged by the comparison.

You've already glimpsed it, but I was even more delighted when Miss Brooke emerged from the recovery room post- reduction surgery, pocket-sized, light as a feather and clad in her original livery.
Clever Bookhound.

So where were we... oh yes... get set...GO, or should that be a quick click of the tongue and 'Walk on' to our horses.

And the winners are...

We fired up good old Colossus at Bletchley Park especially for our draw this evening, I feel sure George Eliot would have loved all this...

Research Randomizer Results cut and pasted from the site at 6.58pm GMT

1 Set of 6 Unique Numbers Per Set
Range: From 1 to 84 -- Sorted from Least to Greatest

5, 11, 23, 28, 36, 57

5  - Marion Webb

11 - Amy C

23 - Mystica ( woo hoo, you have the luck of the Irish with these draws Mystica!)

28 - Kate

36 - Virginia

57 - Becky

Congratulations, check it's really you and pristine and perfectly lovely gorgeous new copies of Middlemarch will be winging their way to the lucky winners as soon as you send your address to me at dovegreyreader at gmail dot com and if you could mark it TEAM MIDDLEMARCH that would help a lot.

 

Happy Birthday George and welcome to Team Middlemarch

Mary Ann Evans aka George Eliot, one hundred and ninety-two today, and to celebrate this seems like a good day to launch our year-long read of Middlemarch, because if this had been 1871 it would have only been eight more sleeps until the first part, Miss Brooke, is published.

I have been indulging in some minor preparations which included stumbling across a really excellent essay by Zadie Smith entitled 'Middlemarch and Everybody' in her collection Changing My Mind. Zadie Smith's assertion that the book 'gets better as you age' is a theory I am keen to test out. It is about ten years since I first read it which feels like ageing enough, but I'm also wondering whether it was because that first read came later in my life that the book made such an impression on me. And thanks to Zadie Smith for reminding me that George Eliot was fifty when she wrote it and

'can look upon her young self with satirical good humour and clinical self-knowledge.'

Because that's something that gets easier with age too.

I have also been re-visiting my copy of The Journals of George Eliot to track the progress of Middlemarch, both the writing of and especially the publishing schedule and thinking through until our read ends on the anniversary of her death, December 22nd 2012 (deo volente etc)

1869...

Jan 1st - A bright frosty morning! And we are both well. The servants are going to have their little treat, and we are going to see Mr. and Mrs. Burne Jones and carry a book for their little boy. I have set myself many tasks for the year - I wonder how many will be accomplished? A Novel called Middlemarch, a long poem on Timoleon, and several minor poems.

August 5th ...This morning I finished the first chapter of Middlemarch. I am reading Renouard's History of Medicine.

August 29th...at p40 of Middlemarch

Sep 1st - I mediated characters and conditions for Middlemarch which stands still in the beginning of Chapter III

Sep 11th - I do not feel very confident that I can make anything satisfactory of Middlemarch. I have need to remember that other things which have been accomplished by me, were begun under the same cloud.

Sep 22nd - We went down to Watford for a change.

Progress is slow, and having seen the original hand-written manuscript  in the British Library that is not in the least surprising. Family bereavement and 'a swamp of illness' intervene but insufficient to stifle some socialising and travel, and all the while Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes remain blissfully happy and fulfilled in their life together.

Eventually Miss Brooke, the first of eight parts of Middlemarch is published on December 1st 1871 at a cost of 5/- and is 'excellently well received', and the second, Old and Young, will follow on February Ist 1872. Incidentally this eight-part serialisation was all about the publisher's attempt to break the monopoly and control of the libraries, and I'm not sure how accurate it is but a bit of research suggests that 5/- in 1871 may have been the equivalent of about £18 in today's money. George Eliot negotiated 40% on each copy sold, Blackwood printed 6000 and it was a sell out each month. I'll leave you to do the homework but it sounds like a lottery-sized amount to me.

So the approximate plan is (though of course not compulsory) to start reading Miss Brooke one hundred and forty years later on December 1st 2011, and not to read Old and Young until its 'arrival' on February 1st 2012. I will doubtless publish some interim posts between now and then because I can see I'm not the only one with the George Eliot bug, but with the focus for our first main discussion happening here in comments on Sunday January 22nd 2012

I'm planning to stay with the reading schedule (I'm half-tempted to dissect one of my copies and hide the rest) because I am interested to see how well-imprinted Miss Brooke becomes on my comparitively over-full twenty-first century mind, and how eager am I to 'receive' the next part. I might even read it several times as I feel sure the Victorians would have done, and doubtless they would have read it aloud too. There are frequent mentions in George Eliot's journals of her and George Henry Lewes settling down for an evening of reading aloud or having friends round to do likewise.

May 29th 1870 - Mr Spencer, Mrs Burne Jones and Mr Crompton came. I read aloud No.3 of "Edwin Drood".

I shall be using a mixture of real (Oxford World Classics) and digital copies depending on whether I happen to be travelling in the brougham or not, and my thanks to Diane who very kindly extracted me from the muddle I had got myself into with my Kindle, because having downloaded twelve different free sample copies I then had no idea which was which. The file Diane has compiled about available digital editions is over here >>>>> under Team Middlemarch so any Kindlers amongst you may find it helpful as some editions have indexes and some don't.

For ease of finding, all relevant posts on here will be tagged under the Team Middlemarch heading so one click will bring them all up together.

So is everyone ready??

If anyone else has being doing any pre-reading please do share in comments.

Oh and I almost forgot, scroll down for gifts.

 

Prize draw copies of Middlemarch

A copy of Middlemarch in the delicious new Oxford World Classics edition for six lucky Team Middlemarchers.

The cover illustration is one I'm going to be very happy to have around the house for the next year, a detail from Lady in Grey 1859, by Daniel Macnee.

This draw is open worldwide so add your name in comments if you're planning to join the shared read and fancy starting the year with a pristine new copy, and we'll draw the winners very soon.

Letters to Vicky

What a fine time I have been having this weekend reading Letters to Vicky which, since finishing Helen Rappaport's book Magnificent Obsession, now makes for even more interesting reading.  In fact it's quite easy to see how all things Victorian can become an obsession as I shelve most of the 20th and 21st century in order to continue my stately progress through Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens - A Life, and George Eliot's letters and journals to get in the mood for Team Middlemarch which will be rolling into town tomorrow (and with gifts).

I am very fortunate to have been sent the Folio Society edition of Letters to Vicky, Queen Victoria's correspondence between 1858 and 1901 to her eldest daughter Victoria, Empress of Germany. I could never afford these editions in the past because there was membership and the minimum number of purchases involved, but the rules are changing and Folio Society books can now be bought individually. Introductions are now written by authors as diverse as Carol Ann Duffy and David Vann, and there is now a newly opened Folio Society 'Reading Room' in Bloomsbury...wish I'd known that last week.

Talking about the beauty of a book compared to a Kindle as we were, and really this is like comparing a Reliant Robin (with apologies to all three-wheeler devotees) to a Rolls Royce. These are books you want to have as special gifts and to hold and read and to see on the shelf, and though I used to find them a bit elaborate and unnecessary... what's wrong with my well-worn paperback after all, it hasn't stopped me picking up quite a few Folio Society editions second-hand down the years and I still do (a lot of Trollopes for a start and some Virginia Woolf) I have to admit that I treasure them, and if I had my time over I think I would have made more of an investment in them for children and Godchildren.

But Letters to Vicky now has heightened resonance since I have been furnished with the detail. I knew snippets but I'll own up to getting in a bit of a muddle previously with all the children and the sequence of births, marriages and deaths.

I now have a much fuller picture so I read of Victoria's unconcerned mentions to Vicky of Albert's failing health with interest...

February 16th 1861

'Poor dear Papa has been suffering badly with toothache since three days...it comes from inflammation at the root of the tooth...I hope however it is a little better today, but dear Papa never allows he is any better or will try to get over it, but makes such a miserable face that people always think he's very ill. It's quite the contrary with me always; I can do anything before others and never show it, so people never believe I am ill or even suffer.'

Perhaps Victoria may have lived to regret expressing such confidence in her own fortitude which, when put to the ultimate test of grief, crumbled so spectacularly. And poor Albert, his gravestone inscription really should have read 'Told you I was ill.'

November 30th 1861 (remembering Albert will die two weeks later)

I can begin by saying that dear Papa is in reality much better - only so much reduced and as usual desponding as men really only are - when unwell..

Also evident, and something Helen delineated so clearly in her book, is Victoria's unshifting faith in the 'admirable' Dr Jenner. Interestingly a trust that seems to have been unshaken by Albert's death given that some years later he remains in attendance and continues to reassure with

'no cause of alarm but anxiety'.

as the Prince of Wales writhes on his bed in the agonies of typhoid fever and something excruciatingly painful in progress with his leg. And who sees nothing unfavourable in the symptoms of Alice's diphtheria just two days before her death.

Whilst after the death of Victoria's beloved John Brown...

'On Tuesday we were so much happier about him and Sir William Jenner who knew him well and is never over-sanguine or ever misleads you told me that evening at 10 o'clock I need not be so much alarmed, that his pulse was better and he took plenty of nourishment and the eruption had not spread! An hour after, all was over in his sleep!'

Perhaps the good doctor's role was to sooth and contain anxiety in a fragile monarch, nothing more and with little expectation of happy outcomes. It will certainly be interesting to reflect more on that role in the nineteenth century given that doctors had so little at their disposal in terms of effective treatments, and to follow  Dr Lydgate's progress in Middlemarch as one of the first general practitioners to feature in English literature. I have been reading George Eliot's journals too. There's another one who was a martyr to an unpredictable and painfully bilious digestive system... enough to make me wonder, from reading the symptoms she describes, whether she may have had gallstones. It would certainly explain the prolonged episodes of debilitating pain and sickness that delayed the writing of Middlemarch.

The Queen is not averse to the writing of George Eliot either ..

November 17th 1860

'I have finished The Mill on the Floss and I must say it made a deep impression on me. The writing and the descriptions of feelings is wonderful and painful! Poor Maggie! Why must they be drowned, but poor Philip Wakem I pity the most of all! Stephen did behave very ill, Tom had much good but was very hard.'

And throughout the letters, mother and daughter discuss their reading.  Vicky is riveted by The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins to the point where 'I can hardly get away from it.' Victoria reads Jane Eyre aloud to Albert, she mentions that Elizabeth Browning's poem Aurora Leigh whilst at times seems 'dreadfully coarse', yet still finds it 'an incredible book for a lady to have written.'

Vicky replies three days later...

'I have read Aurora Leigh and dislike it extremely...I think it thoroughly without taste and poetry. The feeling is very crude and does not touch me - in fact I put it down with disgust.'

The Queen is right back at her with

I think you judge Aurora Leigh too severely; that is I mean you have overlooked the decided genius and some most beautiful passages...

And mention of a book that has intrigued me...

February 17th 1886

'I send you two books which I think you will find interesting and very powerfully written. The author (whose real name I do not know) is only 21 - and I must say I think the writing worthy of George Eliot and Currer Bell. Donovan should be read first. I have not yet read We Two but Beatrice has and many others and men of intellect who are immensely struck by it...'

It transpires the writer is Edna Lyall, the pseudonym of Ada Ellen Bayley (1857-1903)...does anyone know her??

I certainly don't and the books seem to have vanished without trace, though I see there is a Kindle edition and a free download here.

And all mixed in with the politics of the time, and of course Vicky well-placed to keep her mother informed about the wider European picture, are fascinating details about the search for a bride for the errant Bertie, Prince of Wales. Defects as various as strange manners, loud laughs, a bad figure in a low gown, broad square shoulders, foolish and frivolous parents rule countless victims out of the running, and one can only wonder whether letters from our own Queen might reveal anything similar should they ever see the light of day....though I'm not sure who she'd write too, and perhaps she does e mails anyway.

So a real gold mine of a book that has kept me deeply rooted in the nineteenth century all weekend.

Right... is everyone ready... let's bring on Team Middlemarch tomorrow.

 

 

Home again...

...and lots to tell you including the low-down on this,

and how I came by a bottle of Laureate's Choice, Carol Ann Duffy's sherry butt stipend,and which is now gracing my Bookroom.

But it's all about books and I was very excited to find a pile waiting for me when I arrived home including this which I have been waiting for with much antsinthepantsation and will be making a start this very evening...

Magnificent Obsession by Helen Rappaport to be published next week. I'm going back to London for a whistle-stop and to hear Helen talking about this book at the V&A on November 15th...unmissable.

Charles Dickens A Life by Claire Tomalin. I saw Claire Tomalin interviewed a few weeks ago and she said quite clearly this will be her last biography, but both these books seem like perfect scene-setting for our forthcoming year of Middlemarch and George Eliot so I'm going to dive in.

Someone mentioned George Eliot's birth and death dates as November 22nd and December 22nd respectively... so shall we kick off on November 22nd as a start date for beginning the first instalment of our shared read of Middlemarch and we could aim to end the book on December 22nd 2012.

Our 2012 Big Read ...Team???

I had a post ready to go live on Team Proust and the suggestion that we read In Search of Lost Time as our shared read, starting in January 2012...

I had pictures of madeleines and recipes all lined up, nearly bought the madeleine tins to make some in

But...

I have been harbouring doubts and several of you have also kindly e mailed with reservations about the viability of Proust on a monthly reading schedule, and a bit of me is also hesitant for several other reasons.

Firstly Port Eliot Festival and London 2012 are going to consume much of my summer with reading and watching next year, so tackling something so unknown, staying the course cheerfully and keeping everyone enthused and on board may be a tall order.

Secondly, and though this really shouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but why are the writers of these chunksters invariably rather unpleasant people??

James Joyce wasn't that nice to his wife and family, Tolstoy it could be argued considerably worse but all surmountable in the face of such good reading, and so I settled down to read a little background about Proust's life. Now I'm sure In Search of Lost Time is brilliant, essential reading that I would probably enjoy once I got past the first forty pages which apparently focus on a  young Marcel lying in bed waiting for his mother to come and kiss him goodnight.

But I'm afraid I wish I hadn't read about him masturbating in front of a cage of rats intent on eating each other alive.

Or the shuffling around in the coat in a drug-fuelled haze.

Tolstoy and James Joyce probably did the same or worse every week too, who knows, but I didn't know that about them then, but I do know it about Proust now ...too much information and somehow I can't undo that knowing, each time I pick the book up...well all I can see is...er, the rats.

So moving swiftly on what to do.

It was a lovely meet up with Carol, who comments here, passing through on her return from a holiday in Cornwall, and we sat and used up all available oxygen in Jericho's and then ambled through Launceston on a sweltering late-September afternoon. The conversation turned to the next Big Team Read and Carol made an impassioned plea for a particular book.

In fact it was like someone definitively switching of a flickering and uncertain lightbulb and switching on a bright and dazzling one, and I drove home full of the enthusiasm I had felt for both Ulysses and War and Peace, which is something I absolutely need in order to commit to a project like this on here.

So with Carol's suggestion growing on me by the day here's why I think it would work...

• We have given over two years to books by the boys, it's the girls' turn.

• The book was originally published as a serial in eight books of about 100 pages each which suits our approach perfectly, we could follow that exact 1871- 1872 publication schedule 140 years later and see how it felt to be a Victorian reader waiting for the next episode. Dec - Feb - April - June - August - October - November - December. So we could start our read in December.

• I've read this book twice already, for study, but had always promised myself that I would read it again one day purely for pleasure.

• When I did read it I absolutely loved it on both occasions and studying it was a joy....the thought of reading it again really does gladden my heart.

• This joy would definitely see me through start to finish and perhaps we could make the whole thing more collaborative??

• Perhaps some of you who decide to join in could facilitate the debate on here by writing the occasional blog post about whatever you like in connection with the book, and which I can use for those months when I'm in the dovegreyreader tent, or watching Britain win seven medals.

• In fact I think that's a really good idea, much better than me blabbering on all the time.

• To my knowledge there is no record of this author sitting and 'communing' with er ... rats etc.

• Though she did lead an interesting literary and personal life so there will be much to explore about that if we so wish.

• The book has been a BBC series so there's a lovely watchable DVD version, all 375 minutes of it currently selling for £5.49

• The book is available to download free for Kindle.

• If you are all thinking what a stupid dingbat I am being about Proust and the rats, and none of you want to join in with anything else, then Carol and I have agreed that we'll just do it on our own here anyway....and talk to each other in comments like two billy no mates.

So what do you think??

Are enough of you convinced??

Because if you're not quite, perhaps it might help to know that Virginia Woolf thought this "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."

Emily Dickinson adored it whilst A.S.Byatt considers it to be ' one of the greatest novels of all.'

 

Oh yes the book, I almost forgot though I'm sure plenty of you wll have guessed already...

 

...Middlemarch by George Eliot