George Eliot Knew a Thing or Two About 21st-Century Politics She wrote ‘Middlemarch’ in 1872 and set it in the 1830s. It’s eerily familiar.By Allysia Finley
https://www.wsj.com/articles/george-eliot-knew-a-thing-or-two-about-21st-century-politics-1486426060
What can a Victorian-era novel depicting provincial English society teach us about modern politics? For starters, the more politics change, the more they stay the same.
“Middlemarch” unfolds against the backdrop of rapid industrialization and a rising middle class. At the time, only the landed aristocracy could vote. Due to urban migration—there was no redistricting to account for population shifts—cities were underrepresented. Meanwhile, the gentry controlled sparsely populated “rotten” boroughs whose voters were under their thumb.
In the novel, political agitators recruit the wealthy landlord Arthur Brooke to run for Parliament on a program of democratic reform. Eliot portrays Mr. Brooke as a frontman for the populist movement and observes that “the very men who profess to be for him would bring another member out of the bag at the right moment.”
Democratic activists choose him because he’s an empty vessel: “Mr. Brooke’s mind, if it had the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would let it drop, run away in search of it, and not easily come back again.” He’s flawed in other ways: Mr. Brooke’s opponents disparage him as “a damned bad landlord” who is “currying favor with a low set.” They make hay out of his poor treatment of tenants.
Mr. Brooke buys a newspaper, the Pioneer, and installs Will Ladislaw, a political activist, as editor to promote his campaign. Eliot describes the Pioneer as a “valuable property which did not pay.” Newspaper readership in those days was also segregated politically: “It’s no use your puffing Brooke as a reforming landlord, Ladislaw: they only pick the more holes in his coat in the [competing rag] ‘Trumpet,’ ” Tertius Lydgate tells his friend. Mr. Ladislaw retorts: “No matter; those who read the ‘Pioneer’ don’t read the ‘Trumpet’ . . . Do you suppose the public reads with a view to its own conversion?”
Dr. Lydgate is a young physician who aims to revolutionize the practice of medicine, which “chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs.” Doctors made their money by writing prescriptions, especially for opiates. Dr. Lydgate favors a holistic treatment-and-payment model over physicians “making out long bills for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.”
However, the doctor doubts whether laws promulgated by self-interested politicians will accomplish anything in the way of reform. “That is the way with you political writers,” Dr. Lydgate tells his friend, “crying up a measure as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a part of the very disease that wants curing. . . . You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus.”
Mr. Ladislaw acknowledges that politicians are self-serving and that Mr. Brooke is unreliable. “To coach Mr. Brooke and keep him steadily to the idea that he must pledge himself to vote for the actual Reform Bill instead of insisting on his independence and power of pulling up in time, was not an easy task,” he muses.
But, Mr. Ladislaw asks his friend, must democratic reformers wait to “find immaculate men to work with”? He scoffs at his own question: “Wait for wisdom and conscience in public agents—fiddlestick! The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims.”
Mr. Ladislaw asks his friend: “If there were one man who would carry you a medical reform and another who would oppose it, should you inquire which had the better motives or even the better brains?” Dr. Lydgate reluctantly admits that he would support a politician of dubious character who “has the sense and the resolution to do what I think ought to be done in the matters I know and care most about.”
By the standards of 2017, “Middlemarch” ends anticlimactically: Mr. Brooke withdraws from the parliamentary race after hecklers disrupt his desultory campaign speech. But Eliot shows that the political forces shaping today’s world aren’t new. Nor are the debates and dilemmas relating to democracy.
Ms. Finley is an editorial writer for the Journal.
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