Captain's Log: Middlemarch

A 19th century serialized novel... say no more

Trying to write in praise of Middlemarch is like standing under the ceiling of Sistine chapel and doing anything other than just looking at it. It’s so purely great that I almost want to end it right here: just look at it! Just read the book!

But trudge on we must, and on we will go. Middlemarch is a staggering achievement, a whole world put under a microscope and perfectly realized. The novel, released serially in eight parts over 1871 and 1872, follows the lives and loves of the denizens of Middlemarch, an appropriately named small provincial town smack dab in the middle of England. Set in the 1830s, the book examines the premodern world on the precipice of change; democratic reform is coming, industrialization is coming, but it hasn’t quite gotten to Middlemarch yet, and it’s clear that most of the town doesn’t want it to ever come, much to the chagrin to the younger and more ambitious generation coming up to adulthood. Will they inherit the same world of their parents, or make a new one for themselves?¹

The most distinctive thing about Middlemarch – and the thing I think I will miss most, unless I somehow find it again in another book – is the narrative voice of the book. It’s never justifying itself, never makes pains to explain its presence in the novel, never is anything besides an unnamed presence telling you the story, a presence who has not only total omniscience but their own moral judgement alongside a very particular sense of humor; the voice is some kind of mix of Emerson’s transparent eyeball and the neighborhood’s most reprobate gossip.