Middlemarch

Lydgate Announces House Advertising Plan

On New Year’s Day morning, Lydgate decides he must gradually accustom Rosamond to the idea of leaving their Lowick Gate house. Over breakfast he announces his intention to see Trumbull and place advertisements in the “Pioneer” and “Trumpet,” reasoning that country families often need larger homes without knowing where to find them.

Rosamond Admits to Revoking Sale Order

Knowing the inevitable moment has come, Rosamond calmly admits that she already told Trumbull to cease inquiries, citing the Plymdale lease and her strong objection to the sale as her reasons. Lydgate, who had just been tenderly fastening her plaits moments before, stares in mute astonishment, his shock confused rather than distinctly angry.

Marital Conflict Over Finances and House

A bitter exchange follows. Lydgate accuses Rosamond of secretly contradicting his orders and treating him as a fool; Rosamond replies with cold, correct composure that she had a perfect right to speak on a matter concerning her equally. She argues that advertising would be degrading, warns him not to disregard her opinion as he complains she disregards his, and—citing the high position everyone ascribed to him at their marriage—implies she was deluded by a false vision of happiness. Lydgate, torn between anger and dread of her elusive obstinacy, finally requests only that she defer any further visit to Trumbull for a few weeks, then departs impatiently.

Rosamond’s Marriage Dissatisfaction

Rosamond reflects that Lydgate finds her painful proposals insufficient yet displays an unpleasant temper besides. Convinced she has acted rightly, she catalogs his offenses. For months she has associated him with disappointment: the airy ideal she loved has dissolved into daily, alienating realities—his scientific preoccupations, his peculiar views, the social disadvantage of his position, and the revelation of Dover’s debt. The marriage has freed her from her father’s house but withheld the happiness she had hoped for, and she secretly nurses the expectation that an invitation to Quallingham and a removal from Middlemarch would restore her contentment.

CHAPTER LXIV.

The chapter opens on New Year’s Day with Lydgate and Rosamond at her father’s home, where Rosamond maintains a mildly neutral demeanor toward Lydgate in response to his ill-tempered behavior at breakfast. Lydgate carries a deeper burden from an ongoing inward conflict of which that morning’s scene was only one of many episodes. His flushed, cynical performance with Mr. Farebrother—pretending that all ways of obtaining money are essentially alike and that chance renders genuine choice a fool’s illusion—reveals a wavering resolve and a numbed response to the old stimuli of his youthful enthusiasm.

New Year’s Day Dinner at Rosamond’s Father’s Home

The chapter opens on New Year’s Day with Lydgate and Rosamond dining at her father’s home. Rosamond regards Lydgate with mild neutrality, a quiet acknowledgment of his ill-tempered behavior at breakfast, while Lydgate is weighed down by a much deeper internal struggle of which that breakfast scene was merely one of many occasions. His earlier effort to present a cynical front to Mr. Farebrother—suggesting that all means of obtaining money are fundamentally the same and that chance reduces deliberate choice to a fool’s illusion—emerges as a symptom of his faltering resolve and a dulled response to the idealism that once animated him.

Lydgate’s Dilemma Over Bride Street Life With Rosamond

Lydgate perceives even more sharply than Rosamond does the bleakness of settling her into the modest house on Bride Street, where she would be surrounded by meager furnishings and inner discontent. A life of financial privation has become increasingly incompatible with life alongside Rosamond, the two images growing more irreconcilable as the prospect of scarcity has made itself plain. Even if his determinations could force those images together, the practical preparations for such a difficult transition are nowhere visibly within his grasp. Though he refrained from giving Rosamond the promise she sought, he does not return to Trumbull, leaving the difficult move uninitiated.

Lydgate’s Reluctant Consideration of Seeking Financial Aid From Sir Godwin

Turning from the unworkable alternative of Bride Street, Lydgate begins to contemplate a swift journey north to visit his uncle, Sir Godwin. Once he had believed nothing would drive him to petition a relative for money, but he had not then faced the full force of still less palatable options. A letter, he recognizes, cannot reliably convey the necessary explanation or test the strength of family obligation; only a face-to-face meeting, however distasteful, would allow him to lay out his situation thoroughly. Yet the moment he frames this step as the easiest course, a wave of anger rises against himself—the realization that he, who had long resolved to hold himself apart from such degrading calculations and self-interested bargaining with men whose aims were not his own, has fallen not merely to their level but to the level of actively soliciting them.