I was twenty the first time I read Middlemarch and I couldn’t bear to reach the end. I read 700 pages in a growing hurry, then slowed to a snail’s pace and eked out the last hundred over an improbably long time. The pleasures of anticipation accounted for a good part of my sudden slowness. In that first reading love ruled, and when I was confident that Dorothea and Will would finally get it together – I was happy to watch this happy ending veer tantalisingly in and out of reach.

Eliot’s first readers couldn’t choose their pace through the novel as a whole. Published in eight parts beginning in December 1871, it provided ‘months of pausing and recurring literary excitement.’ wrote Sidney Colvin in the Fortnightly Review. Such a long drawn out experience of reading or viewing is unimaginable today, when we glut on box sets, or download Hilary Mantel in audio and print format in seconds. R. H. Hutton in The Spectator conjured a readership of one mind:

[W]e all grumble at Middlemarch; we all say that the action is too slow … but we all read it, and all feel that there is nothing to compare with it appearing at the present moment in the way of English Literature …

This same readership calculates nervously ‘whether the August number will come before the Autumn holidays.’ Though Victorian readers were used to consuming novels in serial form, either in magazines or as cheap autonomous part-works in short, monthly instalments, the first edition of Middlemarch was something of a publishing experiment: eight paperback books of between 174 and 212 pages at 5 shillings each, published to look ‘attractive but not bookstallish’ (George Lewes in a letter to the publisher John Blackwood).

Publishing then and now

Middlemarch came to publication as the unlikely convergence of a publisher, John Blackwood, eager to tempt a successful author back; a writer, Eliot, who had been struggling with one novel, begun another and then sought to combine the two; and her companion and quasi-agent, George Lewes, who wanted to create a capacious and profitable setting for what promised to be a long and demanding novel. All of them would have been eager to deal a blow to Mudie’s, the commercial library chain whose aggressive discounting swallowed so much potential publishing profit. Book publishing in the 1870s looked rather like it does today: fiercely competitive, and international in ambition and practice. Serial publication of Middlemarch began in the US in Harper’s Weekly in December 1871 and in Australia in February 1872. This was typical for popular novelists, as was speedy translation into European languages. Marketing and promotion were central processes and distributors held disproportionate power. One of Lewes’s aims in having Middlemarch published bimonthly was ‘to furnish the town with talk for some time … [to] keep up and swell the general interest.’ Both Eliot and Lewes had an astute understanding of the Victorian marketplace, playing publishers off against each other and ensuring that Eliot earned nearly £9,000 (roughly £400,000 in today’s money) from Middlemarch alone, between 1872 and 1879, on a 40% royalty deal. Publishing, then as now, was strongly shaped by other media, most obviously, drama, various types of newspaper and magazine writing, and a plethora of visual forms.

One marked difference was that new books were given a far greater time to prove their worth; another was the relatively weak status of intellectual property. Dickens’s works spawned numerous pirated offspring in book and theatrical form. Though Eliot did not approve theatrical adaptation of her work, dramatic versions of Silas Marner and Adam Bede circulated in her lifetime. In 1878, less than two years after the publication of Daniel Deronda, the spurious Gwendolen; or Reclaimed: A Sequel to Daniel Deronda by George Eliot was published in America. In Anna Clay Beecher’s virulently anti-semitic novel, Daniel’s new Bildung is to discover the degeneracy of the Jews and when Mirah conveniently dies, he returns to England and marries the blonde, Christian Gwendolen. ‘Spin-offs’ were not confined to print or drama. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White generated perfume, a waltz, and various bonnets. In the decades after her death, Eliot’s name was used to sell products including bicycles (the advertising came complete with quotations), and the new type of rail-accessible literary tourism. You could also buy George Eliot Real Mushroom Ketchup with an image of Eliot on the bottle. Lewes and Eliot would have been appalled by the sauce, but the values on which such items traded – quality, authenticity, reliability – were central to their careful development and management of the Eliot name. As novel publishing proliferated in terms of genre and readership, writing and publishing became practices of increasingly careful differentiation. Lewes wanted the cover of Middlemarch to appeal to the eye in ways that turned novel readers into novel buyers, but to be free from the taint of cheap popular fiction, the ‘yellowbacks’. A shade of green proposed by Blackwoods was returned as ‘too yellow.’ The green eventually agreed on, Simon Frost suggests in The Business of the Novel may well have had a particular association with Dickens, and certainly Dickens’s recent death in 1870 left gaps in the market for several kinds of author.

By 1871, when Middlemarch was first published, ‘George Eliot’ was a highly successful brand on a slightly shaky track: the sales figures for her two most recent novels, Romola and Felix Holt, had been disappointing. Critical reaction had been mixed. A reviewer of Romola, set in the 15^th century Florence of Savonarola, complained pettishly that ‘[i]t is not a bit like Adam Bede.’ For Eliot was above all the ‘author of Adam Bede’ and whilst many authors and artists have felt trapped to repetition or perversity by critical or popular success, Eliot and Lewes made ‘the author of Adam Bede’ – a continuing big seller in the Blackwood’s catalogue –  a key part of Middlemarch. Frost mentions the trees – ‘young, mature and felled’ – in the foreground of the cover vignette of Middlemarch. The overall effect of the cover, as he says, is English bucolic but it is worth recalling just how full of wood Adam Bede is. The trees and wood on the first edition of Middlemarch promise a distinctive ‘George Eliot experience’, one satisfied inside by Caleb Garth, a good man in the tradition of Adam Bede himself. Vulnerable at the novel’s start, by the end his values have been planted at Stone Court where his daughter and son-in-law now live. ‘The Bedesman’ is only one of the novels in Middlemarch, though, and not all of them have happy endings. Must Middlemarch ‘leave us sad and hungry?’ asked Colvin.

Eliot is ‘a painter of human character,’ Hutton insisted, praising the novel’s comic characters. ‘Something of the cruelty of vivisection is natural in Thackeray’s style, and very unnatural in George Eliot’s.’  Sharply gendered of course but ‘unnatural’ is also a ‘brand criticism’ and perhaps Hutton should have thought about the novel’s subtitle more carefully: ‘A Study of Provincial Life.’ The study, with its numerous human categories, is crucially critical and satirical. From the very beginning, ‘Middlemarch’ is also the zone of the limited, the imitative, the frustrated, where local pride conflicts with nose-hard-against-the-window envy of the metropolis. We can well guess what will happen to Lydgate’s ambition to be a great scientist and his wish to stand aloof from small-town tyrants. ‘People in the provinces . . . know no difference between “Newby” and “Blackwoods” and can’t see the moral impossibility of the sequel being mine,’ wrote Eliot when she heard about an advertisement for an opportunistic Adam Bede, Junior: A Sequel – the same Eliot who changed her name from the homely, diminutive Mary Ann to Marian when she left Nuneaton and Coventry for London.  Middlemarch incorporates many novels offering different, often discrepant, pleasures.

Its current status as classic, with connotations of something fixed or unmoving, make a look at its original publishing and reading context well worth the effort. The first edition of Middlemarch, with its superior green and George Eliot stamp, was also interleaved with adverts for chocolate, candles, perfumes, jewellery, medicines and single volume editions of Eliot’s works. A spin-off publication, Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings by George Eliot (1872), by a fan, Alexander Main, was produced with Eliot and Lewes’s encouragement, Main’s Sayings, offered a compact George Eliot experience – Lewes stressed the need for it to be pocket-size, a George Eliot you could take anywhere. Combining the homilistic, lapidary forms that Eliot specialised in, which could sound rather cryptic out of context (‘nettle seed needs no digging’), and memorable ‘scenes’ excerpted into dramatic form, Eliot was reportedly delighted with the result.

Novels within the novel

Perhaps because Middlemarch is such an undisputed ‘classic’, it is easy to forget how elastic novelistic narrative and style were during this period. The novel had a loose shape, the stories and tellings within it were usually lightly combined and could be unpicked and recombined with relative ease. Dickens is the master of this, but Middlemarch has its own less extreme version. Middlemarch began as two novels which were combined by Eliot to form one; but in the writing, it seems, the number of novels proliferates (F. R. Leavis’s plan to cut Gwendolen Harleth from Daniel Deronda seems quite unremarkable in this context). To read Middlemarch is to travel between stories. One of its pleasures lies in tracing the very fine, delicate links between them: Dorothea’s hand lies behind the rehabilitation of Caleb Garth, the Adam Bede ending is an effect of her diffused goodness. But, as various critics have pointed out, the novel is also out to disrupt our attention. Stories, like thoughts and feelings, move in and out of reach, leaving us in suspense. Near the end of Book One, Dorothea retires to dress and the reader follows as she starts to wonders about her coming marriage. But at the dinner that follows, Dorothea has become ‘Miss Brooke’, someone, or rather a woman, for the men present to assess and admire – literally a character in another story. ‘Dorothea’ remains tantalisingly inaccessible till we see her crying on her Roman honeymoon.

Just as today, the novel formed part of a multimedia culture, incorporating all manner of types of communication. When Adam Bede works on the coffin his father has abandoned, ‘his mind seemed as passive as a spectator at a diorama’ – not a simile Adam could have understood, given his rural, 18^th century world.  New media technologies and communications proliferated through the nineteenth century – shorthand, stenograph, telegraph, a plethora of optical inventions. Lewes and Eliot themselves attended a demonstration of a proto-telephone.  These, and established media forms such as drama and journalism – are all metabolised by the 19^th century novel. Many of the comic social scenes at which Eliot excels are cartoon-like in their sharp contrasts: the fading patriarch Featherstone on his deathbed in one room, still armed with a golden cane, whilst the parlour of Stone Court teems with would-be beneficiaries, speculating increasingly freely about outcomes; Mr Brooke’s visit to one of his dismal and unimproved farms, Freeman’s End, where he is berated by his tenant, Dagley and the two men’s dogs face each other off far more cautiously. Whilst Dickens became expert at verbally representing the photographic image, Eliot specialised in novelistic representations of the painterly. Take the family portrait of the Garths under an old apple tree: ‘[Fred] found the family group, dogs and cats included, under the great apple tree in the orchard.’ Jim is reading aloud from the ‘beloved’ Scott while his sister Letty watches him; another brother, Christie, lies by his mother’s feet with his hat over his eyes. Yet another brother plays at archery – the novel is Ivanhoe. The descriptive form is realist with its attention to the particular, the seemingly arbitrary detail – the ‘coral heap’ of cherries on the tea-table, the ‘grizzled’ Newfoundland dog – but in domestic genre painting, details become values: the healthy outside, the ease of family affections, the bounty of nature and labour – these are Garth values, above all father Caleb’s.

Middlemarch in a listening culture

In ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, Eliot mocked the various ‘species’ of women’s novel – ‘mind-and-millinery’, ‘white neck-cloth’ (evangelical), ‘modern-antique’ (historical-romantic) – each with its pattern-book plot and fixed-phrase diction. Being a Lady was something Eliot went to great lengths to avoid. Prescription writing inevitably attracts literary criticism, yet most genres are highly versatile – sets of possibilities, inflections – with little or nothing in common with recipe writing. Eliot’s fiction, like so many of her contemporaries, lives off numerous genres, literary and popular: Gothic , Bildungsroman, Sensation Fiction,  melodrama, tragedy, romance, folk and fairy tale. In Adam Bede, a dashing young gentleman seduces a beautiful milkmaid, Hetty. Hetty has a baby who dies and she is tried and sentenced for murder. The death penalty is breathlessly commuted only on the morning she is due to hang. This is the melodrama through which the real heroine, the preacher Dinah, and the steadfast hero-with-a-temper, Adam, must morally grow. In Silas Marner, the semi-outcast weaver’s gold is stolen and replaced by a golden-haired baby – one of many brushes with the folk or fairyish in Eliot’s novels. In Felix Holt, set during the election after the 1832 Reform Act, the political rivalry between the ‘working man’ Felix Holt and the aristocrat, Harold Transome, is shadowed by a creaking Gothic inheritance plot but one that is central to the novel’s revelations and resolution. Esther Lyon turns out to be the true heir of Transome Court and she rejects her inheritance, including Harold, for Felix.

In Middlemarch, much of the action is provided by the struggle between characters over what type of novel they’re living in. Dorothea believes she’s the heroine of a religious narrative; her husband tries to cast her in a novel of adultery. Newly arrived in Middlemarch, Lydgate thinks he’s the hero in a story of scientific discovery, but Rosamond is waiting, determined that he will be the suitable stranger in her romance – bad news for Lydgate. Characters are often wrong about themselves and others and this is often where Eliot’s realism emerges: a more dependable and truthful alternative when other forms of representation falter in their ability to make sense of the world. Popular genres aren’t shown the door however; often they’re recast for different ends. Eliot can conjure any number of forms of Gothic disturbance. When Lydgate tries to moderate his wife’s brittle solipsism, we, as readers, are privy to his increasingly unhappy thinking, but Rosamond remains obscure, a set of opaque gestures: turning to look at a vase, or patting her perfect hair, even her tears are an accessory. At such points, Rosamond’s actions seem strangely out of synch, uncanny: as with a doll that isn’t quite working properly.

‘I have been struck,’ wrote Antonia White, ‘by finding the same thought within a few days in two very different places – in George Eliot and in an American magazine. That is the idea of a person’s horror at a crime coming not from the crime but from the fact that they have committed it.’ Eliot is especially fascinated by those whose fingerprints are found on the gun, even if, especially if, they didn’t pull the trigger. In Middlemarch, Bulstrode’s not-quite murder of the blackmailer Raffles is sensation fiction territory, where the excitable audience’s speculations exceed the evil of the act itself.  Dorothea and Ladislaw are somehow tainted by Casaubon’s will with its intimations of their illicit desire. In Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen marries Grandcourt knowing he has thrown over his mistress and children for her – and thus becomes implicated in a moral bigamy. Fascination with this kind of taint plays out in Eliot’s relation to the circulation of her own fiction, her own highly ambivalent relationship to the novel as commodity form. On the one hand, the opportunity to influence readers was a real ‘good’. By August 1874, the novel had been published in parts, four volume sets and reprints, in a cheap six shilling one volume edition, even in three volume form. The cheap edition was the great success with 10,000 copies sold in 1874 alone. ‘The sale of Middlemarch is wonderful out of all whooping,’ she wrote to her publisher John Blackwood in August 1874. Clearly the original could vouch to some extent for the novel’s diffusion into less salubrious forms. Yet at the same time she worried about dirty fingerprints. There were disadvantages to being so easily accessible. She and Lewes were unhappy about Alexander Main’s second portable Eliot project, The George Eliot Birthday Book, which dispensed the same wisdom as the Sayings in a diary. Eliot didn’t like the form, birthday books were ‘puffing, gaudy, clap-trappy’; the extravagant binding was ‘adapted to the bookseller mind and the minds of those who buy birthday books,’ wrote Lewes. ‘We have to think of the colonial class,’ Blackwood replied briskly, and the book went ahead in its original vulgar form.

This deep ambivalence about commodity circulation take a distinctive form in Middlemarch, where the ideal form of communication is a Wordsworthian form of spontaneous speech, the exact opposite of mechanical, anonymous print. Will and Dorothea intermittently achieve a spontaneous authenticity derived from their mutual sympathy:

   ‘”I am indebted to the rain then. I am so glad to see you.” Dorothea uttered these common words with the simple sincerity of an unhappy child visited at school. “I really came for the chance of seeing you alone,” said Will, mysteriously forced to be just as simple as she was.’

These dialogues are a touchstone. Casaubon calls himself a ‘fastidious’ listener, but he can never hear Dorothea when she speaks because to his anxious, resentful ears, she is the clamour of criticism, a ‘spy’. Yet this is the voice Will compares to an Aeolian harp; the more neutral Caleb Garth tells his wife that Dorothea has ‘a voice like music…’ Dorothea’s voice is compared with the alluring musical performances of Rosamond. But Rosamond’s playing, like Madame Merle’s in The Portrait of a Lady, is not to be trusted. Sound matters, voice matters. Yet this in itself is not anti-novelistic. After all, reading aloud, learning by heart and recitation were key aspects of quotidian literate culture. Books were written and published to be read aloud, semi-performed, shared sociably, discussed in situ, as well as consumed privately.  Eliot’s lapidary tendencies and her extraordinary attention to the inflections of speech, like Dickens’s attention to idiolect, or the dramatic ‘scenes’ in so many novels of the period, are all aspects of a culture habituated to listening keenly to what was spoken and read: a novelistic culture.

This piece was originally written (but not published), as a review of The Business of the Novel: Economics, Aesthetics and the Case of Middlemarch by Simon R. Frost, Pickering and Chatto, 254pp., £60.00, January 2012, 978 1 84893 1947. Much of the detail about the original publication comes from this book.

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