“How important are politics to characters’ relationships in ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot and ‘The Masters’ by C.P. Snow?”

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“How important are politics to characters’ relationships in ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot and ‘The Masters’ by C.P. Snow?” by Richard Ward

When choosing two books for my Wide Reading assignment I was conscious of two things.  Firstly, that I wished to stretch myself in regards to the reading, analysing and writing elements of the work and secondly that I needed a specific question to keep a tight focus and structure to the essay.  With a book as large and with such a complex structure as ‘Middlemarch’, it would have been quite easy to drift off-task and away from the question; a specific question was of the greatest importance.

Breaking down my question, I shall briefly define the key words in the sentence.  By politics I do not mean to take the party politics of Jago and Casaubon, juxtapose them and put them into historical context.  I mean politics in the true sense of the word, that is the manipulation of power between people, and how that affects the relationships of the characters.  This does not mean that I will neglect politics on a wider scale, indeed that was my initial idea; I will place things in the wider political context in a separate section.

I had originally intended to read ‘Homage to Catalonia’ by George Orwell alongside ‘Middlemarch’ on the grounds that I enjoy Orwell very much and that it was a book with a strong political stance to it, which I thought would go well with ‘Middlemarch’.  According to a literary guide ‘Middlemarch’ was one of the first political novels.  However, I soon realised that ‘Homage to Catalonia’ might be a poor choice as it would be more of an account of the Spanish Civil War than a novel with a political element to it.  Presumably Orwell would be writing from a very left-wing point of view and this would not necessarily complement a study of ‘Middlemarch’.  Indeed, the only points where the two could be drawn together (apart from the fact that they both have political elements) would be their respective differences.  On the advice of my History teacher, I read ‘The Masters’ by C.P. Snow, which has a political element to it but on a more intimate basis, within a Cambridge college.  It almost goes without saying that I was relieved that ‘The Masters’ was not another 900-page tome of a work, and I am grateful to Snow for that.

 To introduce the two books and place them in the context of my question, I have briefly outlined the plots and themes that run through the respective books.

        George Eliot was over 50 when she wrote ‘Middlemarch’.  Thus the story is not so much a ‘study of provincial life’, to quote the back cover, but a reflection on provincial life which conveniently exemplifies a wider analysis of contemporary society.         Middlemarch is a provincial town in Loamshire, and the story is set in 1832, in the months before, during and after the Great Reform Act of 1832.  The book is tainted with doomed romance, although this is partly rectified at the end with the proposed marriage of Dorothea and Will Ladislaw.  

Within ‘Middlemarch’ there are multiple plots that far extend beyond the boundaries of what can be tackled in this Wide Reading assignment and so I will mention them only briefly.  ‘Middlemarch’ is not one story, it is a collection of six novels and there are four major ideas that run throughout the book.  The love affairs of Dorothea and Edward Casaubon, of Rosamond Vincy and Tertius Lydgate and of Mary Garth and Fred Vincy run alongside the political story of Bulstrode.  The romances are on the most part unhappy. The Casaubons’ marriage is ruined by Casaubon’s never-ending research and intellectual studies.  The Vincy / Lydgate relationship bears the brunt of the difficulties of Lydgate’s professional career.  The relationship between Fred and Mary has a somewhat more successful ending:

        “…these two made no such failure, but achieved a solid mutual happiness.”

        p.890

Their rumoured collaboration on their respective literary produce probably added to a bond that could never realistically occurred between Casaubon and Dorothea, no matter how virtuous her initial efforts were.

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        ‘Middlemarch’ is not a charming book, yet it remains popular on several grounds.  Not least of which is its length.  It is not an inconsiderable read, and it cannot be taken lightly if someone has actually bothered to wade through the eight hundred and ninety-nine pages and a half of nineteenth century narrative for the killer last paragraph.  I won’t reproduce it here for fear of destroying part of its significance within the book, indeed its impact is so great at the end of the book that it would be almost defiling to copy it here.  ‘Middlemarch’ is a book ...

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