5 - The afterlife of a masterpiece

Summary

Middlemarch, we know, is a novel acutely conscious of the problem of reputation. From Rosamond's habit of always considering the “audience in her own consciousness” to Casaubon's desperate worry over the reception of his magnum opus, from Dorothea's sad submission to the unflattering views of “common eyes” to Bulstrode's humiliation before the townspeople, from Lydgate's quickly rising reputation to its sudden spirit-killing fall, the novel is preoccupied with the awful powers of repute. In a significant sense already considered, the novel is about the force of public opinion. All the principal characters in the work must come to recognize the frightening strength of this social god.

The scandal of her “marriage” to Lewes would have been enough to make George Eliot sensitive to the issue, but as Alexander Welsh (1985) has convincingly shown, the concern with reputation – and especially the fear of blackmail which recurs in George Eliot's fiction – can be linked to the development of a society organized around the exchange of information, a society which produces more opinions much as it produces more goods. No doubt both her private life and the changing public world led George Eliot to think hard about the stresses of reputation; it is clear that even in the throes of her great fame, she wondered about the effect of her novels on that great hazy amorphous entity, the Popular Mind.