Middlemarch

Mr. Brooke’s Tangential Financial Remarks

Mr. Brooke, who had been nodding in a nap, awakens and contributes tangentially to the conversation. He warns against letting ideas run away and warns against hurrying to put money into schemes. He mentions being out of pocket from Garth’s repairs and draining, and notes that Sir James is spending a fortune on oak fences around his demesne—sidestepping the emotional core of the discussion entirely.

Dorothea and Celia’s Library Conversation

After submitting uneasily to the discouragement, Dorothea goes with Celia into the library. Celia advises her to listen to James, warning she will get into a scrape as she always does. She suggests the good of having a brother instead of a husband is that a brother lets you have your plans while preventing you from being taken in. Dorothea responds angrily that she only wants not to have her feelings checked at every turn, bursting into tears. The sisters discuss the tension between duty and personal desire, with Celia noting the contradiction in Dorothea’s former submission to Casaubon compared to her resistance to James. The chapter ends with the sisters laughing together as Celia explains she would not give up to James when she knew he was wrong.

CHAPITRE LXXIII.

Following his encounter with Bulstrode at the meeting, Lydgate rides three miles out of Middlemarch to escape the violent unreasonableness that has seized him, feeling that everything in the town has conspired to blight his honorable ambition and damage his reputation irreparably. He reviews the evidence of Bulstrode’s suspicious behavior regarding Raffles and debates whether to publicly vindicate himself, but concludes that circumstances would always outweigh his testimony and that exposing Bulstrode might prove unjust despite his own tainted association with the man. Lydgate resolves to remain defiantly in Middlemarch rather than retreat before calumny, determined not to abandon Bulstrode even though the association has proven fatal to him, though he dreads returning home to face Rosamond and the scandal that will soon envelop them both.

Riding Out of Reach

After allaying Mrs. Bulstrode’s anxiety about her husband’s faintness at the meeting, Lydgate rides three miles out of town to escape the overwhelming turmoil of his thoughts. He feels himself becoming violent and unreasonable, consumed by the pain of a devastating revelation. Ready to curse the day he ever came to Middlemarch, he views everything that has happened to him as merely a preparation for this hateful fatality. His marriage to Rosamond seems an unmitigated calamity, and he fears that seeing her before venting his rage might cause him to behave unwarrantably toward her. The passage describes how even the highest qualities in a person can cast a deterring shadow during moments of crisis, leaving only a dread of offending against one’s better nature rather than actual tenderness guiding one’s actions.

A Blight on Ambition

Lydgate’s honorable ambition has been thoroughly blighted by the events surrounding Bulstrode and the death of Raffles. He recognizes that even people with vulgar standards would now regard his reputation as irrevocably damaged. The suffering he experiences arises from having fallen from the serene activity of intellectual life into an absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances. His mind fixates on how everything was supposed to turn out differently, and how others have thrust themselves into his life and thwarted his purposes. In his view, he is the sufferer while others have been the agents who injured his lot.

The Problem of Self-Vindication

Lydgate faces an impossible dilemma regarding self-vindication. Having witnessed the meeting where Bulstrode was in dread of scandalous disclosures from Raffles, he can now construct the probabilities of the case—he understands that Bulstrode may have wanted to bind him through obligation and may have tampered with the patient or disobeyed his orders. Yet he recognizes that the world believes Bulstrode somehow poisoned the man and that Lydgate either winked at the crime or helped perpetrate it. The cruel reality is that even if he made a public statement of all facts, who would be convinced? His own testimony on his own behalf would be seen as the part of a fool, and the circumstances would always be stronger than his assertions. Coming forward would also require declarations about Bulstrode that might darken suspicions against him further.