George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, is widely regarded as one of the finest novels in the English language. Virginia Woolf famously called it ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’ (1919). More recently, A. S. Byatt has argued for its status as ‘the greatest English novel’ (2007). One of the things that makes Middlemarch exceptional is its extraordinary marriage between the historically major and the notionally minor: the novel deals in equal measure with politically momentous events, complex philosophical ideas and the prosaic struggles of daily life. But running through its intersecting plotlines and intricate web of themes, Middlemarch makes an unswerving and extended argument for sympathy.
Writing in 1857, Eliot suggested that ‘our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathise with individual suffering and individual joy’ (quoted in Albrecht 2020, p. 10). This ethical position might have been influenced by the period she spent in the mid-1850s translating Spinoza’s Ethics. The translation, however, was not published in her lifetime, and Eliot went on to pursue fiction rather than philosophy as a means of stimulating ‘moral progress’. In 1859, she outlined something like an artistic credo: ‘The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves’ (quoted in Albrecht 2020, pp. 8–9). The structure of Middlemarch, as well as its memorably mobile narrative voice, embodies this ethical artistic approach.
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