“How can we live and think that any one has trouble – piercing trouble – and we could help them, and never try?”Įliot’s humanism tends to inspire awe in her readers. “Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not?” says Dorothea. It has a strong whiff of moral self-improvement. There’s only one thing worse than posting about the fact that you’re reading Middlemarch – and that’s posting about the fact that you’re re-reading Middlemarch. For this social-realist novel occasions the worst kind of virtue signalling: literary virtue signalling. She might start drafting sanctimonious subtweets, Instagramming melancholy passages from the book, perhaps even referring to herself in the third person. Only, the reader is then apt to find the experience of stepping from a Warwickshire market town in 1831 to the timelines of 2021 a bit like being poisoned after a cleanse. It would be a little basic to say that it is the antithesis of Twitter – but it might make a person resolved to be a little more patient, a little more able to entertain our witless century with the equanimity of its high-minded young heroine Dorothea Brooke. It is, as Virginia Woolf famously (and gratifyingly) claimed, “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”.
In the 150 years since George Eliot’s great humanist novel was published, readers have been professing that it has made them more sympathetic, less judgemental, more enlarged as a person. Reading Middlemarch can be dangerous in the age of social media.
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