The Draughtswoman of Middlemarch

Dorothea Brooke’s ‘favourite fad to draw plans’ is key to her characterisation in Chapter 1, when we meet her ‘bent on finishing a plan for some buildings’, a clutch of papers in hand.¹ When she returns home, her younger sister confronts her, and an afternoon of drawing has to be reluctantly given up: the time has come to divide the jewels left by their dead mother, and so Middlemarch famously begins. Not only are the plans used to characterise the young protagonist at the very opening of the novel, but they remain significant into her married life and beyond.

This article reimagines what these plans look like – taking into account the maps, ground plans, and elevations of contemporary reformist texts, as well as the graphic features of utopian discourse – in order to suggest a reading of Middlemarch that draws out the creative implications of planarity and traces a lively graphic peritext. In 2019, Elaine Freedgood’s Worlds Enough advised a return to the realist novel as it knew itself before later critics made it a ‘boundaried space’.² Freedgood’s interest in blurred boundaries brings her to epigraphs and bibliographic leads (the ‘library that lurks in the margins of the text’) and – finally, briefly – to the cartographic.³ To conclude her chapter on the ‘proliferation’, ‘triangulation’, and ‘projection of possible worlds’, Freedgood reaches for a cartographer in a realist novel and tentatively lands on Caleb Garth (in parenthesis).⁴ This article pushes Freedgood’s argument beyond its own bounds to consider Dorothea as a cartographer, casting new light on the protagonist’s desire to keep plans in suspension and their relation to Eliot’s own narrative planning.

The jewel scene provides a bijou exposé of the struggles that will underpin the novel – the frustrated aligning of thought and deed – and the currents of denial and yearning, privation and pleasure that course through its protagonist. But what of the papers that are unwillingly put aside when Celia confronts Dorothea, the papers that Dorothea, in fact, continues to doodle upon as her sister begins her entreaty, and that are picked up the minute the conversation is over? ‘Misplaced critical attention’ is to blame, says Barbara Leckie, for a lack of scholarship on these documents and on the activity which, in the context of women and work in Victorian Britain, comprises Dorothea’s occupation.⁵ But what exactly is this activity, and to what extent does the narrative care about it?

Having taken the emeralds despite herself, Dorothea ‘went on with her plan-drawing, questioning the purity of her own feeling and speech’ (p. 14). The possessive pronoun is significant: plan-drawing, it quietly implies, comprises an act of wilful self-characterisation. It delimits the plans’ scope from the outset, suggesting they are a private amusement of ambiguous consequence to anyone other than Dorothea. This description offers an early glimpse, therefore, of that marshy space between self-projection and actualisation which Middlemarch takes as its stage. In other words, ‘her plan-drawing’ dramatises the peculiarly materio-spatial metaphor of the Prelude, of the over-determined wish to partake in the ‘unfolding of far-resonant action’ (p. 3). As a gesture of conciliation following their argument about the jewels, Dorothea extends the plans to her sister: ‘Here, Kitty, come and look at my plan’ (p. 14). On one hand, this invitation merely establishes Dorothea’s spirit of forgiveness, her guileless ‘charm’ (p. 9); on the other, it points ahead to her greatest failing. With Celia beckoned over, the plans become a focal point around which two bodies are arranged, but they are central and interesting to only one of them (‘my plans’, says Dorothea). It will take a disastrous marriage for Dorothea to understand the existence of ‘equivalent centre[s] of self’ (p. 211) and to appreciate that Celia, like Casaubon, is at ‘the centre of [her] own world’ (p. 85). Looked at this way, Dorothea’s invitation to Celia contains the seeds of her own subjugation at the hands of Casaubon during his personal project, ‘The Key to all Mythologies’. Most crucially, Dorothea’s return to ‘plan-drawing’ does not symbolise a renunciation of the jewels, because she is now wearing them: ‘She took up her pencil without removing the jewels, and still looking at them’ (p. 14). The plans, therefore, do not merely bookend this scene but are fundamentally implicated in its moral tussle.

Dorothea’s earlier reluctance to stop plan-drawing now starts to look like deferred engagement with her conscience, as does the eagerness with which she resumes planning when the question of the jewels’ grubby provenance occurs to her (‘Yet what miserable men find such things’, p. 14); the plans offer all too ready relief when she entreats Celia to look at them; and they acquire a sensual life as she delights in her sketching hand. By reframing the opening scene, we begin to see how ‘plan-drawing’ might intersect with some of the novel’s biggest themes. Leckie sees Middlemarch’s attitude towards plan-drawing as ambivalence: taking the opening jewel scene for illustration, she argues that ‘the narrative quickly dispatches it to the side-lines’.⁶ The fact that Dorothea continues to make ‘tiny side-plans on a margin’ (p. 11) as Celia displays the jewels means, for Leckie, that they are ‘doubly marginalised: by Celia’s interruption and by the displaced, marginal drawings’.⁷ In this reading, the fact that Dorothea finds a surface on which to keep drawing is not a positive action, but proof that the activity is ‘relegated, literally, to marginal status’.⁸ Instead, I propose that we recognise the fact that the plans are expressly not dropped as significant. Indeed, as marks are arranged around the notebook’s text, the narrator draws attention to their ‘literalness’, to their presence on the page.

But what actually are these plans? We know that they are pencil-drawn, and we know that, over the course of the novel, they will variously attempt to redesign labourers’ cottages (p. 29), reconstitute the arrangement of the estate (pp. 31–32), and improve the drainage and organise the construction of future villages (p. 550). The viability of the latter is tested by an empirical survey whose conclusions (‘the conclusions I come to about some land’, p. 682) then inform Dorothea’s involvement in the construction of the new cholera hospital, her endorsement of ‘keeping up the present plans [concerning the hospital]’ (pp. 735, 764), and her dismissal of Lydgate’s spatial compromise to ‘let the new Hospital be joined with the old Infirmary’ (p. 767). We also know – given Dorothea ‘took to drawing plans’ (p. 80) precisely because she does not, by her own admittance, ‘see the beauty of … pictures’ (p. 79) – that these drawings are expressly not pictorial in an illustrative sense. Beyond this, to understand what is meant by ‘planning’, we must consider the graphic output of those mid-century sanitarians upon whom Dorothea styles herself.

In what I believe to be a ‘misplaced’ emphasis of her own, Leckie concentrates on built architecture; Dorothea’s plans, for Leckie, consist principally of room sketches.⁹ This emphasis has much to do with how Leckie positions her 2018 Open Houses, as a response to those who have ‘overlook[ed] or sidestep[ped] the house’.¹⁰ But in the mid-nineteenth-century commentaries that she references, interiors and the inter-organisation of cottages – that is, projected housing systems – go hand-in-hand. Indeed, Open Houses infers precisely this point when conceding, of the Scottish doctor and sanitarian Hector Gavin, that

[his] interest in drainage and sanitation is inseparable from his attention to houses; and that in addition to the fold-out maps, Gavin also includes a foldout woodcut illustrating the cross section of a lodging house, both of which force the reader actively to engage with the text (to unfold it, to position one’s body and the text itself in a manner that best facilitates viewing.¹¹

Like Gavin, the Victorian physician H. W. Acland relied on a variety of graphic techniques to help visualise the ravages of cholera and to suggest a way out of the epidemic. His 1856 Memoir on the Cholera at Oxford in the Year 1854 opens with a coloured, double-page map of Oxford with a larger scale vignette of the locality of New Hinksey to the left-hand side.¹² Facing p. 21, there is a coloured sketch-map of ‘The Places and the Order in which the First Thirty Cases of Cholera Appeared’; facing p. 46, a rudimentary line-map of the ‘District Round Oxford’ up to Buckingham; on p. 81, a black-and-white bird’s-eye view of Gas Street with a cross-section of its cottages; throughout are tables of data arranged on a street-by-street basis.¹³ Acland’s plans are expressive of the importance given by sanitarians to the graphic as a way of critically envisioning improvement, and are by no means limited to house interiors. Lexically, we only have to look at Acland’s description of the Gas Street plate to understand ‘plans’ as an umbrella term: ‘Opposite is a plan of these tenements … There is an open street in front; a passage at the side: a yard thirty-five feet long behind: there was a privy behind not specially foul; a pump removed twenty feet from it’.¹⁴ If ‘plans’ for mid-century sanitarians meant ground-plans as well as cottage cross-sections, in the absence of authorial clarification, this article proposes that they do for Dorothea, too – that Dorothea, with her paper and pencil always to hand, is as much a draughtsman as Caleb Garth the surveyor, with his map-cluttered desk (p. 399) and role ‘measur[ing]…space at his command’ (p. 233).

Gender plays a part here, thinking back to Mr Tulliver’s repeated insistence that a proper masculine education ‘included the drawing out of plans and maps’ in The Mill on the Floss and to misogynist Bartle Massey’s lessons on ‘mapping and mensuration’ under the ‘old map of England’ in Adam Bede.¹⁵ In Middlemarch, Lowick’s ‘curious old maps and bird's-eye views on the walls of the corridor’ (p. 74), initially so appealing to Dorothea, stand in contrast to the décor of the room above, with its diminutive, effeminate furnishings. Lowick is big but we walk through few of its rooms: as far as the narrative is interested, downstairs comprises the library with its ‘cabinet of maps’ (p. 806), accessed by the dismal corridor, and upstairs the ‘blue-green world’ (p. 75, p. 273, p. 276, p. 371, and p. 538) of the boudoir. David Trotter calls this arrangement a ‘grid’, using the term ‘mapping’ figuratively in reference to Robert Kerr’s architecture, even though Kerr also recommends literal maps in The Gentleman’s House: ‘a superior house’ will have ‘space for a few maps on the wall’.¹⁶ The maps of the Black Sea shore and Levantine coast in Casaubon’s library in reference to their materio-representational counterparts upstairs (the miniatures, tapestry, and duodecimo volumes in calf) suggest various and tantalising investments in spatial reasoning that ramify outward through the novel.¹⁷

After the jewel scene, the next explicit engagement with plans occurs in Chapter 3, when Dorothea refers to ‘the plans for cottages in Loudon’s book’ (p. 31), by which she means J. C. Loudon’s 1833 An Encyclopædia – a volume so popular, according to Loudon’s biographer, that ‘“Let’s look it up in Loudon” were familiar words’.¹⁸ ‘Will you show me your plan?’ asks James Chettham. ‘Yes, certainly,’ replies Dorothea:

I have been examining all the plans for cottages in Loudon’s book, and picked out what seem the best things. Oh what a happiness it would be to set the pattern about here! I think instead of Lazarus at the gate, we should put the pigsty cottages outside the park-gate (pp. 31–32).

Loudon’s Encyclopædia did not put political pressure on landlords; it was a manual that aimed to encourage tenants ‘to improve [their] condition’ and ‘to teach them what to wish for’, and used a double-page map of an idealised estate to promote this sense of aspiration.¹⁹ Having just exclaimed ‘I think we deserve to be beaten out of our beautiful houses … – all of us who let tenants live in such sties’ (p. 31), it is Dorothea who reads Loudon’s claim that ‘[t]he necessaries, and even comforts of life, are contained in a small compass, and are within the reach of a far greater portion of mankind than is generally imagined’ and lays responsibility literally at the landlord’s door.²⁰ Instead of the libertarian view encoded in Loudon, suggesting the compassable area is pre-existing and close at hand, Dorothea sees that the space must be drawn, designed in such a way that it focuses attention and mobilises action.

By bringing the cottages in from the peripheries, Dorothea envisions the estate’s redesign, her desire ‘to set the pattern about here’ (pp. 31–32) indicative of an approach to cottage reform founded in the visual and material. It is a dynamic vision at odds in its materiality with her husband’s, for whom the abstract space of historical reconstruction is worthier: ‘he did not care about building cottages, and diverted the talk to the extremely narrow accommodation which was to be had in the dwellings of the ancient Egyptians, as if to check a too high standard’ (p. 33). There is in this preference of Casaubon’s a certain aestheticism; the spatial strictures of ‘narrow’ pose an intellectual challenge to the disciplined mind (emphasised by that grammatical corner, ‘which was to be had’), whereas applicability, the desire ‘to set the pattern’, represents, for Dorothea’s husband, an arrogant undisciplining. ‘Care’ and enjoyment (‘diverted the talk’) butt against one another; Casaubon is not interested in moving physical parameters and the social care thus enacted, but in a game played in manipulating the edges of the hypothesis. The fact it is an encyclopaedia that inspires Dorothea should also not be overlooked; an intertextual – and inter-graphic – system that points endlessly across its diverse fields, it is a form that encourages rangy reading.²¹ Crucially, Dorothea’s emphasis on replicable ‘pattern’ conjures planarity – the underpinning arrangement of line and space on a two-dimensional plane – and not the dimensions of fully conceived dwellings, and it is across the planar that contemporary debates about abstraction and materiality came into contact.

The prioritising of ‘pattern’ and ‘plan’ is political; it takes a stance on the ‘national disgrace’ of working-class living arrangements by positively contributing to an environment where ‘much paper and print [had] been expended’ on ‘the preparation of plans and working-drawings’.²² ‘Patterns’ and ‘plans’ connote a stripped-back visual language that confronts the excesses of the picturesque – a dynamic implied in Dorothea’s eschewal of ‘pictures’ and explored more acutely in Chapter 39’s description of the Dagley family home at Freeman’s End. Here, the narrative flatly refuses to enter the cottage and instead indulges in a detailed description of its façade:

two of the chimneys were choked with ivy, the large porch was blocked up with bundles of sticks, and half the windows were closed with grey worm-eaten shutters about which the jasmine-boughs grew in wild luxuriance (p. 394).

A short extract from a much longer description, the Dagley home is a parody of the picturesque, calling forth Ruskin’s critique of this ‘most suspicious and questionable’ schools of art – ‘a delight in ruin’ that collides with ‘poverty, and darkness, and guilt’.²³ The cottage exposés of the mid-nineteenth century also invoked the picturesque to elaborate the problem: ‘Labourer’s Homes’ (Quarterly Review, 1860), for instance, starts by describing a landscape where ‘there is scarce a cottage … which a poet might not be happy to live in’, before zooming closer to see the ‘sottish, unhealthy, and untidy’ reality, and finally providing a series of ameliorative cottage plans.²⁴ Simply by preferring plans to pictures, Dorothea has taken a political position on the cottage issue; like the Ruskin of Modern Painters, she mocks the idea that a dilapidated cottage might stand as the national motif.²⁵ Dagley Cottage, therefore, intervenes in an aesthetic argument that was intrinsic to the graphic projections produced by the sanitary movement. Returning to Acland – a friend of Ruskin – and to his description of the houses on his Gas Street plan, we find a strikingly novelistic justification for their design: ‘They are described thus particularly because they are not especially bad: an over-coloured picture of wretchedness destroys the purpose of him who draws it’.²⁶ Middlingness (‘not especially bad’) becomes the descriptive ideal, a position that disguises and preserves authorial intent. Without colour, depth, and texture, the graphic is poised to make its point – its monotone, delineative properties activate affect beyond immediate representation. There are various Dagley cottages, then: the picturesque description provided by the narrative, which, in its wormy luxuriance, recognises both a better and a worse reality; Dorothea’s implied two-dimensional plan, which lays out better ventilation, access to light, and drainage; and all of Dorothea’s subsequent plans, because it is Dagley Cottage that motivates her decision to effect reform. In the almost forgotten folds of Middlemarch’s narrative space, tucked down Freeman’s End and only mentioned in Chapter 39, the cottage façade points in various directions.

Middlemarch is famously curious about its own space: its self-awareness as a ‘web’ (most explicitly in Chapter 15), its dramatisation of surface prospecting in Chapter 56, the ‘dirt-enamelled map of the county’ (p. 236) on its pub walls – to name but a few. This self-referentiality is, of course, part of Middlemarch’s realist strategy, but I am interested in how the lines of reference which crisscross its narrative terrain have a peculiarly graphic quality, almost caricatured by Casaubon’s ‘Key’ and the hyper-indexical deathbed work on its ‘table of contents’ (p. 476). The various implied Dagley Cottages comprise such graphic indexing, but whole scenes also happen in the index. In Chapter 9, for example, Dorothea and her uncle discuss the possibility of visiting a village in greater Middlemarch as inspiration for future projects:

‘And you would like to see the church, you know,’ said Mr Brooke… ‘And the village. It all lies in a nut-shell. By the way, it will suit you, Dorothea; for the cottages are like a row of alms-houses – little gardens, gillyflowers.’ (p. 76)

It is a suggestion to which Dorothea replies enthusiastically:

‘Yes, please … I should like to see all that.’ She had got nothing from [Casaubon] more graphic about the Lowick cottages than that they were ‘not bad.’ (p. 76)

And yet the reader gets nothing ‘more graphic’ either: on the walk to the so-called ‘nut shell’ village (p. 77), Mr Tucker supplies the party with an account of ‘well off’ villagers, which stands in place of a description of the village itself, and the party return to Lowick never having visited. The gillyflowers remain an imaginative proposition and, as such, they recall Loudon’s idea of the ‘Beau Ideal’ – the idea of perfect arrangement, the idea of utopia. It is there in the ‘nut shell’ shape – of complexities condensed into one globed system – and in the equally apportioned ‘row’ of houses and gardens, but it comes to the fore in Dorothea’s plan to found ‘a little colony’ (p. 550).

The ‘Beau Ideal’ of the Encyclopædia is a reworking of Loudon’s earlier writings on the ‘Beau Ideal’ town – originally an 1829 essay introducing a ‘systematic plan’ for an ideal London ‘that became a theoretical model … measurable on the course of town planning theory and practice for the remainder of the nineteenth century’, illustrated by his ‘New Map Environs of London’, which zones the city into concentric bands of light and shade.²⁷ Loudon’s ‘Beau Ideal’ town has had an active afterlife, repurposed by planners beyond its original London parameters.²⁸ In 1854, Charlotte and Robert Pemberton published their version of Loudon’s Beau Ideal for New Zealand, the similarly circular and banded ‘Ground Plan of the Model Town for the Happy Colony’.²⁹ The 1854 design (with its oddly Georgian colour scheme of light green and resin red) was enthusiastically received at the time by British socialists, before enjoying a second wind in the twentieth century when it paved the way for Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities.³⁰ A utopian tract that is arranged around a map, the uncomfortable idea of the Victorian ‘happy colony’ has roots, therefore, in mid-nineteenth-century cartography. As the pale-green lollipop topiary of the Pemberton map suggests, with its total disregard for New Zealand’s climate (or, indeed, communities and culture), this is very much a paper template – that is, a template that assures, in what we might call its ‘surficiality’, that it will rarely be exactly converted to the ground, that it has an aesthetic and imaginative life distinct from the structure it precedes. The way Dorothea takes her rural Midlands plans to industrial Yorkshire to see if she can ‘buy land … and found a village which should be a school of industry’ (p. 765) is redolent of the template map’s blind belief in its ability to be transferred to any environment, not to mention the fact that the term ‘schools of industry’ was also inscribed on the Pembertons’ 1854 plan. Moreover, the conceptual and geographical stretch involved in transferring a plan for one locale to another far away speaks directly back to that concomitant yearning for and implausibility of ‘unfolding of far-resonant action’ described in the Prelude. Middlemarch, it seems, is subtly interrogating the process of transfer.

‘There is no plan without utopia’, states Lefebvre.³¹ Maps and the visualisation of ideal futurity have a long, intertwined history, characterised by More’s ‘Utopia’. In their 2016 book on future knowledges, Buhler and Willer assert that all conceptions of the future rely on media, which statement literary historian Anders Engberg-Pederson enlarges, seeing ‘the map as a tool for the management of contingent futures, of tightening the link between spatial organization and projected events’.³² ‘Utopia’ is not a word used in Middlemarch. It was, however, in the ‘Quarry’ – Eliot’s planner for the novel. As she was working out character trajectories, Eliot wrote the strangely directive ‘Go to Utopia’ beside Will Ladislaw’s name, before changing the note to ‘new interest in plans of colonisation’.³³ In the historical context of utopian ‘happy colonies’, Will’s ‘new interest in plans of colonisation’ is not so far from ‘Go to Utopia’ as it may first appear. Notably, this sense of a sketchy note-to-self continues into the novel’s finished treatment of Will, with his ‘disinterested attention to an intended settlement on a new plan in the Far West’ (p. 801) and the absurdly supplementary ‘need for funds in order to carry out a good design [which] had set him on debating with himself whether it would not be a laudable use to make of his claim on Bulstrode’ (p. 801). Both Dorothea’s planned colony and Will’s ‘design’ endorse Imperialism’s spatial violence and its enforced rearrangement of existing geographies – but we never see that endpoint. Instead, the narrative is more interested in drawing connections between planned intervention, financial investment, and design, with Bulstrode’s ‘I will draw a cheque’ (p. 707) harking back to Dorothea’s ‘I will draw plenty of plans’ (p. 29). In other words, the narrative attenuates and dramatises the attempted ‘tightening’ of ‘the link between spatial organization and projected events’.³⁴

While Knoepflmacher called the original ‘Go to Utopia’ notation a ‘laconic gloss’, suggesting Eliot was never invested in the idea, Mark Allison has built an entire thesis around it, finding like-for-like parallels between Dorothea’s plans and Robert Owens’s plan for a socialist community, and between Dorothea’s intended use of Casaubon’s inheritance to found the ‘colony’ and Owen’s reliance on wealthy philanthropists.³⁵ An inevitable effect of rigid historicity is the conclusion that Eliot’s narratives ‘illustrate the practical limitations of utopian aspiration’.³⁶ Heather Miner concludes thus in her study on Chartists Fergus O’Connor and Ernest Jones, whose ultimate failure ‘made it impossible’, according to Miner, ‘for Dorothea’s cottages to be endorsed by Eliot as the appropriate loci for architectural reform’.³⁷ Always at hand for these kinds of readings is Eliot’s famed via media: when the parallels veer off, it is thanks to gutless meliorism.

However, by yoking ‘utopianism’ to failed past projects these readings miss the energy and the intent behind plan-drawing captured by Lefebvre – of striving towards possibility, of a continual ‘struggling forth into clearness’ (p. 192) – which is not only more relevant for Middlemarch, but also summons a much more critical exploration of the ethics of intervention. From her early desire for ‘some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there’ (p. 8) to the later ‘I have delightful plans. I should like to take a great deal of land, and drain it’ (p. 550), Dorothea’s person and feelings are front and centre. If there is no plan without utopia, then the reverse is also true for Dorothea: ‘Then you will be happy, if you have a plan, Dodo?’ says Celia (p. 550) – a question answered in Chapter 3 when Dorothea devised her ‘pattern’ and settled into ‘the best temper’ (p. 32). Crucially, the ‘nut-shell village’ non-scene ends with Dorothea frustrated: her intervention is not needed; the villagers are ‘well off’. But how does this cynicism tally with Dorothea’s ability to read Loudon for the greater social good, to re-map the estate in such a way that proves she has seen to the heart of the cottage injustice? The answer is that it does not: the plans capture the coexistence of striving and deferring, of being ‘ardently active’ and avoidantly compensatory – and they do so without ever resolving the muddy motivations for intervention.

If there is a difference between ‘map’ and ‘plan’, it is less a visual one, as evidenced in the language of the sanitarians above (and, indeed, the Ordnance Survey, whose output was known as ‘plans’), than one of intent. Immediately prompting Dorothea’s famous preference for ‘ardent action’ is a scene with a map: ‘Dorothea was seated in her boudoir with a map of the land attached to the manor and other papers before her, which were to help her in making an exact statement for herself’ (p. 540). This map is frustrating to Dorothea because it is not future-oriented; it is an ex post facto consolidation of her property. Likewise, Dorothea’s death-in-life existence was foretold by the chilling remark that ‘Casaubon had thought of annexing happiness’ in a ‘mental estate mapped out a quarter of a century before’ (p. 280). Conversely, the hospital is always described in the language of ‘plans’, which – even at the novel’s end, once characters have died or moved away or started spending themselves in channels – remain ‘new’ and on the drawing board. Chapter 44 does not find Dorothea and Lydgate simply walking around the hospital but ‘walking round the laurel-planted plots of the New Hospital’ (p. 438) – a sense of the plan haunting the demarcated grounds. Likewise, in the preceding chapter, the narrator conjured the hospital through entry points and empty zones, describing how ‘the carriage stopped at the gate of the Hospital. She was soon walking round the grass plots with Lydgate’ (p. 434). Trying to convince Lydgate to stay, Dorothea again refers to the hospital ‘plan’: ‘“Suppose”, said Dorothea, meditatively – “suppose we kept on the Hospital according to the present plan”’ (p. 764). Similarly, Bulstrode has several ‘wishes’ for the hospital (‘he wished to buy some land in the neighbourhood of Middlemarch, and therefore he wished to get considerable contributions towards maintaining the Hospital’, p. 453) and articulates ‘his plan of management’ in the historical future: ‘The Hospital was to be reserved for fever in all its forms; Lydgate was to be chief medical superintendent …; and the general management was to be lodged exclusively in the hands of five directors’ (p. 453). Considered thus, Dorothea’s statement, ‘I have never carried out any plan yet’, is less a marker of defeat than another way of maintaining the design stage (p. 820). And it is also what makes her, and not Garth, who can confidently expect a ‘plan you must follow’ (p. 764), the mapping protagonist.³⁸ For all Mikhail Bakhtin’s interest in the realist novel and ‘time-space’, he never stresses quite how eloquently spatial plans express ‘the historical future’ of a social world.³⁹ As a constructed building, the hospital is a detail in the novel’s material world; as a plan, it is affectively mobile beyond narrative time, drawing out the ethical precarity that is so central to Eliot’s literary approach.

Maps and plans abound in this novel. Tucked in drawers and pinned on walls, they are part of the world’s furnishings – their fantastically troublesome pretence at mimesis the surest way of triggering Jameson’s ‘wobbles’ (‘when we attempt to hold the phenomenon of realism firmly in our mind’s eye [i]t is as though the object of our meditation began to wobble’⁴⁰) – and they rouse the novel’s narratable content, with the viability of Dorothea’s plans for the Yorkshire village, itself a minor narrative thread, spelling the degree to which she is ultimately involved in the hospital. But let us return, in closing, to the sketch-maps that crawl up the sides of Dorothea’s notebooks in Chapter 1. For these marginal drafts of projected sanitary infrastructures have their counterpart in the Quarry – the formal arrangements that provided the structural undergirding of the fictional world Dorothea inhabits.

In the Quarry, beneath lists of Middlemarch infirmary directors, their occupations and their votes for Chaplain all in a loose tabular arrangement, there is a sketch-map.⁴¹ It is a small and basic line-map in black ink, showing the distance between the four fictional parishes.⁴² At the top of the page, above the table of infirmary directors, is an extract transcribed from a letter by Mrs Congreve about Coventry Hospital.⁴³ On one page, then, are three graphic forms, and, unlike Genette who identifies ‘reciprocal ignorance’ between the plot ‘sketches’ and ‘daily notes’ in Kafka’s notebooks, I believe a sense of ‘reciprocity’ can be read here and comes to bear in the novel’s overall texture.⁴⁴ Eliot’s narrative ethics famously interrogate the position of background and foreground (‘scenes which make vital changes in our neighbours’ lot are but the background of our own’, p. 326) – and, by extension, margins and centres – and here in the Quarry we appreciate the extent to which this is a graphic question. In The One vs the Many, Alex Woloch described how Dorothea exemplifies ‘the dynamics of the protagonist’s space in Victorian literature’⁴⁵; what has been overlooked, however, is the graphic peritext that suggests the protagonist herself is the one drawing that space. Readings that disavow the graphic and resign Dorothea’s plans to historicist anecdote therefore deny the possible formal implications of the protagonist mapping Middlemarch. Freedgood’s advice to consider the ‘library that lurks in the margins of the text’ has surprising results for Middlemarch, then.⁴⁶ Dorothea’s persistent plan-making rouses those margins into text.

Footnotes