Middlemarch

Mention of the Garth Family and Miss Garth

Lydgate mentions meeting Miss Garth at old Featherstone’s at Lowick. The Vicar confirms she is the Garths’ daughter and “an excellent girl.” Lydgate admits he has “hardly noticed” her, but the Vicar assures him she has taken notice of him—“she gauges everybody.” He prepared her for confirmation and she is a favorite of his. Lydgate expresses disinterest in learning more about the Garths.

Discussion of Bulstrode and Local Middlemarch Politics

The Vicar reveals Middlemarch has its “intrigues and parties”—he is a party man, as is Bulstrode. If Lydgate votes for him, he will offend Bulstrode. Lydgate asks what’s against Bulstrode, and the Vicar explains only that opposing him makes Bulstrode an enemy. Lydgate values Bulstrode’s good ideas about hospitals and large spending on public objects—he might help Lydgate implement his own ideas. Lydgate cites Voltaire on arsenic and incantations: he wants the man who will bring results and doesn’t care about his religious notions. The Vicar says Lydgate must not offend his “arsenic-man” but assures him he will not offend the Vicar, who does not translate his own convenience into others’ duties. The Vicar opposes Bulstrode’s set as “narrow ignorant” people who do more to make neighbors uncomfortable than better. Their system is “worldly-spiritual cliqueism” viewing others as “a doomed carcass” to nourish them for heaven. However, Bulstrode’s new hospital may not be bad, and wanting to oust the Vicar from the old one is merely “returning a compliment.” The Vicar acknowledges he is “not a model clergyman—only a decent makeshift.” Lydgate suspects this self-assessment may be accurate. Bulstrode’s stated reasons for superseding Farebrother—that he doesn’t teach Bulstrode’s “spiritual religion” opinions and has no time—are both true, but the Vicar could make time and would welcome the forty pounds. The Vicar only wants Lydgate to know that voting for Bulstrode need not mean cutting him—Lydgate is a “circumnavigator” who keeps up his belief in possibilities, and he asks Lydgate to tell him about Paris.

CHAPITRE XVIII.

This chapter focuses on the upcoming vote for the new Middlemarch Infirmary chaplaincy, a seemingly minor local decision that forces the newly settled physician Tertius Lydgate to confront conflicting personal loyalties and professional pressures, while also exposing the unspoken social, professional, and political tensions simmering beneath the town’s surface.

Lydgate’s Admiration for the Vicar

Lydgate’s regard for Mr. Farebrother, the Vicar of St. Botolph’s, deepens as their acquaintance grows, as Lydgate recognizes Farebrother’s unusual generosity in not pressuring him for support on the chaplaincy vote given Lydgate’s status as a newcomer focused on securing his own professional foothold. Lydgate admires Farebrother’s strong character: his devoted care for his dependent mother, aunt, and sister, his refusal to frame self-serving desires as noble motives, his engaging, unscripted preaching, and his warm, unpretentious temperament, leading him to actively seek Farebrother’s friendship.

The Approach of the Chaplaincy Vote

Weeks after an initial conversation about the open chaplaincy role, the vote gains practical stakes for Lydgate, who had initially assumed the matter would not require his input and planned to vote for the favored candidate Mr. Tyke without hesitation, as he had no personal investment in the outcome. When he learns the decision will be made at a Friday meeting of the infirmary’s board of directors and medical staff, he realizes he will be forced to take a side on the “trivial Middlemarch business” he had hoped to avoid entirely.

The Vicar’s Gaming

Lydgate weighs legitimate objections to Farebrother’s candidacy, chief among them the vicar’s habit of playing billiards for money, which Lydgate finds morally repugnant as a pursuit of small, ignoble financial gains. Though Farebrother argues that games sharpen English wit, Lydgate suspects the vicar only plays for the extra income, a suspicion confirmed by reports of Farebrother winning money at the town’s Green Dragon billiard room. As someone who has never had to scheme for small sums of money, Lydgate cannot reconcile this behavior with his own ideal of a life free from subservience to trivial financial gain, and struggles to justify supporting Farebrother despite his other virtues.