When capturing Mrs. Cadwallader’s opinions on the “vulgar rich”—or people who recently made money through commerce rather than inheriting it from aristocratic relatives—the narrator uses a pair of hyperboles:
She would never have disowned any one on the ground of poverty […] But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred: they had probably made all their money out of high retail prices, and Mrs Cadwallader detested high prices for everything that was not paid in kind at the Rectory: such people were no part of God's design in making the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears.
In believing that the “vulgar rich” were “no part of God’s design” and their accent was “an affliction to [Mrs. Cadwallader’s] ears,” the narrator exaggerates in order to capture the intensity of Mrs. Cadwallader’s class-based prejudice. While at first it seems like Mrs. Cadwallader is being progressive in not judging people “on the ground of poverty,” these hyperboles make it clear that she is, in fact, still judging people unfairly based on their class position, or at least based on the fact that they are challenging the rigid social hierarchy to which she is accustomed.
As Dorothea’s two love interests, Casaubon and Will act as foils for each other. Will is young, romantic, and idealistic—like Dorothea, he cares about progressive politics and wants to make a difference in the world. Casaubon, on the other hand, is old, stuck in his ways, and focused on his esoteric book—The Key to All Mythologies—that, ultimately, he is unable to finish before his death.
Like Dorothea, Will is external-facing—he wants to engage deeply with the world—while Casaubon is internal-facing—focusing on his studies and quite literally going to and from the library every day during their honeymoon in Rome. Will reflects on this quality of Casaubon’s after running into Dorothea in Rome, highlighting the differences between the two men:
[T]he idea of this dried-up pedant, this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor's back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole)—this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust: he was divided between the impulse to laugh aloud and the equally unseasonable impulse to burst into scornful invective.
Will’s description of Casaubon as a “dried-up pedant […] groping after his mouldy futilites” who fills him with disgust highlights all that Will does not want to be. Additionally, Will’s impulse to use hyperbole in his characterization of Casaubon (as the narrator notes) also captures something important about Will’s character as opposed to Casaubon’s—he has a certain intensity and vitality that Casaubon does not.
When describing the town’s reaction to the news that Raffles died on Bulstrode’s watch (and that Bulstrode had paid Dr. Lydgate a thousand pounds right around that time), the narrator uses hyperbole and verbal irony:
The business was felt to be so public and important that it required dinners to feed it, and many invitations were just then issued and accepted on the strength of this scandal concerning Bulstrode and Lydgate; wives, widows, and single ladies took their work and went out to tea oftener than usual; and all public conviviality, from the Green Dragon to Dollop's, gathered a zest which could not be won from the question whether the Lords would throw out the Reform Bill.
By writing that the gossip was so “important that it required dinners to feed it” and that the news was more exciting than the Reform Bill, Eliot is clearly exaggerating—gossip does not “require” people to have dinners to discuss it and the political implications of Reform Bill are certainly more important to the townspeople than idle chatter (as has been clear over the course of the novel).
The tongue-in-cheek tone is also clearly ironic—the narrator believes that the townspeople are overreacting. This is one of the many examples of the people of Middlemarch caring more about gossip than about the well-being of the members of their community.
In the moments after Dorothea walks in on Will and Rosamond holding hands—and misinterprets this behavior, believing the two of them must be having an affair—the narrator uses a sequence of hyperboles to capture Rosamond’s distress:
And so they remained for many minutes, opposite each other, far apart, in silence; Will's face still possessed by a mute rage, and Rosamond's by a mute misery. The poor thing had no force to fling out any passion in return; the terrible collapse of the illusion towards which all her hope had been strained was a stroke which had too thoroughly shaken her: her little world was in ruins, and she felt herself tottering in the midst as a lonely bewildered consciousness.
Language like “the terrible collapse of the illusion towards which all her hope had been strained,” “her little world was in ruins,” and “a lonely bewildered consciousness” is extreme, and therefore hyperbolic. It’s unlikely that her friendship with Will was the only thing keeping Rosamond’s inner world from collapsing—more likely, Rosamond is overreacting the way that she does in many other scenes, centering her own experience rather than caring about the effects this interaction had on Will and Dorothea. This moment shows the ways that Rosamond can be greedy for attention in the same way she is greedy for wealth and social status.
