Rereading Middlemarch, Twenty Years Later
The first time I read Middlemarch I was nineteen and rooting for Dorothea with the uncomplicated loyalty you give a friend who is clearly making a terrible decision. I wanted her to see through Casaubon by chapter five. I wanted Lydgate to marry anyone but Rosamond. I wanted, in short, a different book.
Two decades on, I still want some of those things, but I notice the novel never asks me to. Eliot is patient in a way I was not. She lets people be wrong for a long time and doesn't punish them for it so much as let the consequences arrive at their natural speed, which is to say slowly, and then all at once.
The quiet characters
This time the person I kept thinking about was Mr. Farebrother: the vicar with the beetle collection, the card winnings and the habit of giving away the thing he wants most. On first reading he barely registered. Now he feels like the moral centre of the town, mostly because he never claims to be.
There is a line near the end about the growing good of the world depending partly on unhistoric acts. I underlined it at nineteen because it sounded wise. I underlined it again this month because I finally believed it.
Should you reread it?
If you read it young, yes. If you have never read it, I'd suggest a slow pace, a chapter or two a night, and a pencil. It is a long book that rewards you for not hurrying, which feels like a rare thing to say about anything these days.