“Middleness” in Middlemarch

Abstract

This essay is a meditation on the binary title of Middlemarch, and in particular on the first of the two semantic elements that comprise it. I coin the term “middleness” to describe the human state in the book, as it is explored “in the middest” both of time and space, and examine it along three axes, one temporal—to do with the consciousness of living in the middle of history—and two spatial. The first of these latter is horizontal, with reflections on the nature of the setting in the very centre of England, Loamshire or Warwickshire, and the psycho-geographical effects of this setting upon the characters in the novel; and the second is vertical, with reflections on the focus of persons standing essentially in the middle of the social hierarchy. I attempt to uncover discrimination between those characters who manage to achieve a chosen and considered position in relation to “middleness”—that is to say mediocritas in its Horatian sense—and those who are merely “mediocre” in its modern sense.