George Eliot's Middlemarch - 'Old and Young' (Lecture Two) (Patreon)

Let's continue our journey into George Eliot's Middlemarch with a deep-reading of the second book, 'Old and Young.'

We're getting to know Tertius Lydgate, catching up with Dorothea and Casaubon during their honeymoon, and meeting the characters that comprise the web of our provincial town.

As these Middlemarch lectures are long (this one being ~2 hours), please do take advantage of the timestamps below to pace your listening and reading.

The first half of our lecture is concerned with Lydgate being ahead of his time. We're discussing medical reform, public health during the 19th Century, the cholera pandemic, bloodletting, eradicating smallpox, and much more.

The second half of our lecture takes us into the company of Dorothea, Casaubon, and Will Ladislaw. We're discussing artistic reform, Realism, Romanticism, and forming a marriage based on idealisation.

Listening Programme:

• Chopin: Etude Op 25 No 1 (with Aeolian harp) 
• Haydn - The Mermaid's Song (English Canzonette)  
• Mozart - Voi che sapete (The Marriage of Figaro) 
• Mozart - Batti, batti, o bel Masetto (Don Giovanni) 
• Black Eyed Susan and Sweet William 

Lecture Timestamps:

• 0:00 Old & Young hits the bookstores
• 2:00 thematic divisions in book two
• 2:50 how Eliot came to write Middlemarch
• 8:00 George Eliot’s thirst for scientific knowledge
• 9:30 Bichatian tissue theory
• 11:28 how Eliot couldn’t “leave anything out”
• 13:00 why Middlemarch is a perfect novel
• 14:00 meeting Tertius Lydgate
• 18:00 the problem with being ahead of one’s time
• 19:20 the medical practices of the time
• 22:00 19th Century public health issues
• 24:00 the linking of health and social reform
• 25:25 the Apothecaries Act of 1815
• 26:30 the history of doctors in literature
• 27:58 Bulstrode, Lydgate, and Vincy
• 32:30 the first chapter George Eliot wrote
• 34:22 Featherstone, Fred, and Mary
• 37:00 the Eliotic “fellow-feeling”
• 38:57 “contemptible auxiliaries”
• 44:10 learning more about Lydgate
• 45:10 George Eliot as “belated historian”
• 50:00 Lydgate’s “moment of vocation”
• 54:00 the balance between form and beauty
• 58:00 the dark territories of Pathology
• 1:03:00 the unfolding of character
• 1:05:00 private discourse as public dissent
• 1:08:00 medically vs legally trained coroners
• 1:11:00 Rosamond as musical interlude
• 1:14:00 understanding others by their relation to us
• 1:16:00 Lydgate, Farebrother, and the deciding vote
• 1:19:00 reuniting with Dorothea and Casaubon
• 1:20:00 why the Dorothea chapters are my favourite
• 1:22:00 George Eliot the art and music connoisseur
• 1:24:00 was the Victorian era an “unpoetical” age?
• 1:26:00 Realism and artistic reform
• 1:28:00 mirrors, lamps, & fountains in Romantic poetry
• 1:33:00 a bird’s eye view of our emerging consciousness
• 1:37:00 Will Ladislaw and Naumann
• 1:41:00 Dorothea and Casaubon’s honeymoon
• 1:43:00 the problem with their marriage
• 1:54:00 The Key to All Mythologies
• 1:55:00 “you are a poem”
• 1:57:00 Waiting for Death (Book Three)

Here is the content to date for our Middlemarch reading journey:

• How to Read George Eliot's Middlemarch
• A Serial Reading Guide for George Eliot's Middlemarch
• Middlemarch and the Rise of the Reading Public
• George Eliot's Middlemarch - 'Miss Brooke' (Lecture One)
• Middlemarch Serial Reading Check-in Questions (Books 1-2)

Questions to Consider:

1) George Eliot wrote that she saw her writing as 'simply a set of experiments in life.' What do you think these experiments revealed to us?

2) Are you more drawn to the Lydgate or Dorothea storyline? Do you linger longer over the passages detailing medical or artistic reform? If you have a preference, why?

3) For serial readers: where do you anticipate the story is heading? What do you look forward to reading more about in book three? For those of you with advanced reading copies: which passages have been the most enjoyable for you to revisit? 

Happy Middlemarching, folks!