After introducing the character of Lydgate, the narrator describes the people of Middlemarch’s reaction to him, using a personification in the process:
Not only young virgins of that town, but gray-bearded men also, were often in haste to conjecture how a new acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes, contented with very vague knowledge as to the way in which life had been shaping him for that instrumentality. Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably.
By suggesting that Middlemarch the town is capable of “swallowing […] and assimilating” a person, Eliot encourages readers to imagine Middlemarch as a greedy, human-like form. This figurative language effectively communicates the greediness of the people in the town—they are uninterested in Lydgate as a person but are instead focused on how he “might be wrought into their purposes,” or used for personal gain.
This passage also comes after the narrator establishes Lydgate’s lofty goals of medical reform in Middlemarch (via his work at the New Hospital). Thus, the town’s response to him—wanting to use and consume him rather than listen to or learn from him—also hints at their resistance to any kind of reform. The conservative townspeople are happy with how things are and want to “assimilate” Lydgate into their way of living rather than be open to any of his ideas.
On their honeymoon, Dorothea and Casaubon get into an argument and Eliot uses a simile to capture its intensity:
This speech was delivered with an energy and readiness quite unusual with Mr. Casaubon. It was not indeed entirely an improvisation, but had taken shape in inward colloquy, and rushed out like the round grains from a fruit when sudden heat cracks it. Dorothea was not only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.
Comparing Casaubon’s tirade to the rushing out of “round grains from a fruit when sudden heat cracks it” communicates the heat (or anger) that is “cracking” Casaubon’s composure.
There is also a personification in this passage that the narrator names as such—Dorothea, in Casaubon’s eyes, is nothing more than “that shallow world” that surrounds his brilliance. This is entirely Casaubon’s projection—he believes Dorothea to be judging him when, in reality, she supports his work more than anyone else in the novel.
In this moment, Casaubon channels his frustration about not fulfilling his ambitious dreams—in other words, not finishing his manuscript The Key to All Mythologies—into criticizing and belittling his wife. This is one of the moments that Eliot highlights the inevitable bitterness that comes from not achieving one’s goals.
