Middlemarch

Middlemarch

by

George Eliot

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Book 1, Chapter 1 Quotes

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

Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 4 Quotes

“It is very hard: it is your favourite fad to draw plans.”

“Fad to draw plans! Do you think I only care about my fellow creatures’ houses in that childish way? I may well make mistakes. How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?”

Related Characters: Dorothea Brooke (speaker), Celia Brooke (speaker)
Related Symbols: Cottages
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 6 Quotes

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. A town where such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy, which could not be taken account of in a well-bred scheme of the universe.

Related Characters: Mrs. Elinor Cadwallader
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Page Number: 60
Explanation and Analysis:

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, 'Oh, nothing!' Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others.

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Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 13 Quotes

‘The standard of that profession is low in Middlemarch, my dear sir,’ said the banker. ‘I mean in knowledge and skill; not in social status, for our medical men are most of them connected with respectable townspeople here. My own imperfect health has induced me to give some attention to those palliative resources which the divine mercy has placed within our reach. I have consulted eminent men in the metropolis, and I am painfully aware of the backwardness under which medical treatment labours in our provincial districts.’

Related Characters: Mr. Nicholas Bulstrode (speaker), Tertius Lydgate
Related Symbols: New Hospital
Page Number: 125
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 16 Quotes

Of course, he had a profession and was clever, as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate was his good birth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch admirers, and presented marriage as a Prospect of rising in rank and getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which she would have nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last associate with relatives quite equal to the county people who looked down on the Middlemarchers. It was part of Rosamond's cleverness to discern very subtly the faintest aroma of rank.

Related Characters: Tertius Lydgate, Rosamond Vincy
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Page Number: 166
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 17 Quotes

When I was young, Mr Lydgate, there never was any question about right and wrong. We knew our catechism, and that was enough; we learned our creed and our duty. Every respectable Church person had the same opinions. But, now if you speak out of the Prayer-book itself, you are liable to be contradicted.'

Related Characters: Mrs. Farebrother (speaker), Tertius Lydgate
Page Number: 169-179
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 20 Quotes

The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose name you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.

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Page Number: 195
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 4, Chapter 37 Quotes

The doubt hinted by Mr. Vincy whether it were only the general election or the end of the world that was coming on, now that George the Fourth was dead, Parliament dissolved, Wellington and Peel generally depreciated and the new King apologetic, was a feeble type of the uncertainties in provincial opinion at that time.

Related Characters: Mr. Walter Vincy
Page Number: 357
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 4, Chapter 40 Quotes

In watching effects, if only of an electric battery, it is often necessary to change our place and examine a particular mixture or group at some distance from the point where the movement we are interested in was set up. The group I am moving towards is at Caleb Garth’s breakfast-table in the large parlour where the maps and desk were: father, mother, and five of the children.

Related Characters: Mr. Caleb Garth, Mrs. Garth
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Page Number: 399
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 4, Chapter 42 Quotes

Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have absorbed and dried him, was really no security against wounds, least of all against those which came from Dorothea. And he had begun now to frame possibilities for the future which were somehow more embittering to him than anything his mind had dwelt on before.

Related Characters: Dorothea Brooke, Rev. Edward Casaubon
Related Symbols: The Key to All Mythologies
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Page Number: 418
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 5, Chapter 44 Quotes

The immediate motive to the opposition, however, is the fact that Bulstrode has put the medical direction into my hands. Of course I am glad of that. It gives me an opportunity of doing some good work - and I am aware that I have to justify his choice of me. But the consequence is, that the whole profession in Middlemarch have set themselves tooth and nail against the Hospital, and not only refuse to co-operate themselves, but try to blacken the whole affair and hinder subscriptions.

Related Characters: Tertius Lydgate (speaker), Mr. Nicholas Bulstrode
Related Symbols: New Hospital
Page Number: 439
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 5, Chapter 48 Quotes

And here Dorothea's pity turned from her own future to her husband's past - nay, to his present hard struggle with a lot which had grown out of that past the lonely labour, the ambition breathing hardly under the pressure of self-distrust; the goal receding, and the heavier limbs; and now at last the sword visibly trembling above him! And had she not wished to marry him that she might help him in his life's labour? - But she had thought the work was to be something greater, which she could serve in devoutly for its own sake. Was it right, even to soothe his grief - would it be possible, even if she promised - to work as in a treadmill fruitlessly?

Related Characters: Dorothea Brooke, Rev. Edward Casaubon
Related Symbols: The Key to All Mythologies
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Page Number: 479
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 5, Chapter 53 Quotes

He had a very distinct and intense vision of his chief good, the vigorous greed which he had inherited having taken a special form by dint of circumstance: and his chief good was to be a money-changer… The one joy after which his soul thirsted was to have a money-changer's shop on a much-frequented quay, to have locks all round him of which he held the keys, and to look sublimely cool as he handled the breeding coins of all nations, while helpless Cupidity looked at him enviously from the other side of an iron lattice. The strength of that passion had been a power enabling him to master all the knowledge necessary to gratify it.

Related Characters: Joshua Rigg
Page Number: 520
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 6, Chapter 54 Quotes

“I never felt it a misfortune to have nothing till now,” he said. “But poverty may be as bad as leprosy, if it divides us from what we most care for.”

Related Characters: Will Ladislaw (speaker), Dorothea Brooke
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 544
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 6, Chapter 56 Quotes

In the hundred to which Middlemarch belonged railways were as exciting a topic as the Reform Bill or the imminent horrors of Cholera, and those who held the most decided views on the subject were women and landholders. Women both old and young regarded travelling by steam as presumptuous and dangerous, and argued against it by saying that nothing should induce them to get into a railway carriage.

Related Symbols: Railway
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Page Number: 553
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 7, Chapter 64 Quotes

His troubles will perhaps appear miserably sordid, and beneath the attention of lofty persons who can know nothing of debt except on a magnificent scale. Doubtless they were sordid; and for the majority, who are not lofty, there is no escape from sordidness but by being free from money-craving, with all its base hopes and temptations, its watching for death, its hinted requests, its horsedealer's desire to make bad work pass for good, its seeking for function which ought to be another's, its compulsion often to long for Luck in the shape of a wide calamity.

Related Characters: Tertius Lydgate
Page Number: 648
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Mr. Nicholas Bulstrode, Tertius Lydgate
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Page Number: 719-720
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Book 8, Chapter 72 Quotes

“And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.”

Dorothea laughed and forgot her tears.

“Well, I mean about babies and those things,” explained Celia. “I should not give up to James when I knew he was wrong, as you used to do to Mr Casaubon.”

Related Characters: Dorothea Brooke (speaker), Celia Brooke (speaker), Sir James Chettam, Rev. Edward Casaubon
Page Number: 736
Explanation and Analysis:
Finale Quotes

Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother. But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought rather to have done - not even Sir James Chettam, who went no further than the negative prescription that she ought not to have married Will Ladislaw.

Related Characters: Dorothea Brooke, Sir James Chettam, Will Ladislaw
Page Number: 836
Explanation and Analysis:
No matches.