Free My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

affluent district a mile north of the city center. Coventry was chosen over the countryside because if a husband was to be found for Mary Ann that was where he might most likely be encountered. She hated being nudged out of her home, not least because of the crude dynamics of the matrimonial marketplace upon which she, a complicated commodity, was being floated. “It is like dying to one stage of existence,” she wrote to a friend.
    Inasmuch as any place served as an inspiration for the town of Middlemarch, Coventry was it. Like the Coventry circa 1830, Middlemarch is a prosperous provincial town with a thriving textile industry: Ned Plymdale, one of the would-be suitors of Rosamond Vincy, is the son of a textile manufacturer. Will Ladislaw attends a “meeting about the Mechanics’ Institute,” a center of learning for workingmen like the Coventry Mechanics Institution, which opened in 1828. Caleb Garth and Fred Vincy encounter surveyors measuring the land around Middlemarch for the coming railway; Coventry’s railway station, part of the London to Birmingham line, opened in 1838.
    When Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch a new hospital has just been built; in Coventry, the pressing need for a new medical institution led in 1831 to the establishment of two of them. There was the Self-Supporting Dispensary, the users of which secured access to its services by means of a small weekly subscription, and the General Dispensary, which supplied medical services to the poor and relied upon charitable donations for its operating costs. The Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital, a larger institution, was founded in 1838, just before George Eliot moved to the city. It was located in “a building of considerable extent with an enclosedgarden,” writes Benjamin Poole, who published a history of the city in 1847—perhaps like the “laurel-planted plots” of the New Hospital in
Middlemarch.
    But if Middlemarch has a canal, or a ruined monastery, or an imposing fifteenth-century guildhall, as Coventry did during the reign of George IV, we do not hear about them. George Eliot does not map Middlemarch onto the physical contours of Coventry. In fact, the novel offers little physical description of the town of Middlemarch at all. We see the balcony of an inn, the White Hart, from which Mr. Brooke launches and simultaneously aborts his career as a political candidate, “which looked out advantageously at an angle of the market-place, commanding a large area in front and two converging streets.” We know that the Vincys’ dining room looks beyond iron palisading onto “that highly respectable street called Lowick Gate.” We know something of the Green Dragon inn, with its billiard room and its archway giving on to the High Street; and we see a public house presided over by Mrs. Dollop, the Tankard in Slaughter Lane, where Lydgate’s reputation is murdered by gossip. But a reader is left with very little sense of what the streets and buildings of Middlemarch look like, or how one location lies in relation to another.
    This lack of physical description doesn’t feel like a deficit, though. What Eliot most seeks to convey is Middlemarch as a state of mind—as the condition of consummate ordinariness, of absolutely middling Englishness. In her original plan for the novel, which she conceived in the first few months of 1869, it was to begin not with a woman named Dorothea Brooke, but deep within the town of Middlemarch, populated by Lydgate and the Vincys and other characters. “I am delighted to hear of a Novel ofEnglish Life having taken such warm possession of you,” Blackwood wrote to her that February. She replied, “The various elements of the story have been soliciting my mind for years—asking for a complete embodiment.” It was not until toward the end of 1870 that she began writing “Miss Brooke,” and she only thought of knitting the two stories together in the beginning of 1871.
    A clue as to what she means Middlemarch to