... dimensions of the physician Tertius Lydgate’s professional ambition and the social challenges it posed. It is not hard to see what upset the critics. In chapter 15, where Lydgate is intro- duced, the following words appear in quick succession over the course of only a few pages: oxy-hydrogen (178...

... for the putatively dysphoric trans self ( 726 ). 20 This is the flaw Lydgate learns early in his marriage to Rosamond: “It was as if a fracture in delicate crystal had begun, and he was afraid of any movement that might make it fatal” (652). His fear of “movement” is a fear of the inherent dynamism...

.... Wolff. New York: Free Press, 1950 . The Sociology of the Novel: George Eliot’s Strangers Gage McWeeny Certainly nothing at present could seem much less important to Lydgate than the turn of Miss Brooke’s mind, or to Miss Brooke than the qualities...

... division of intellectual labor will only produce their own keys to all mythologies (Poovey 6-14; Carroll). But even as readers absorb the history of Lydgate's intellectual development in chapters 15 and 16, for example, the suggestion is made that insight itself, rather than the objects glimpsed...

... Eliot describes the ambitious scientific goals of Tertius Lydgate as an attempt to transform the features of the set of all medical practitioners in England. The narrator plants the seed of a possibility that Lydgate may be excep- tional, and that he could perhaps make a remarkable contribution...

... aspirations after beauty and Lydgate's floating thoughts struggle against their ethical agendas. This sensation may be true to the characters, but it creates a bind for the author, who must wonder how she can represent characters precisely when what they are feeling is inchoate (129). It is never clear...

... someone (indeed, many) like her before” (31). Meanwhile, Sir James Chet- tam’s “most important feature is his similarity to others” (31), and Tertius Lydgate dem- onstrates how even his “superior self is an effect of the nineteenth-century’s statistical context” insofar as “the self he wishes to claim...

... place not just when the egoist faces a psychological crisis, but when available social forms prove unable to ac- commodate some intensely felt interpersonal need (e.g. Lydgate's need to prove himself innocent before his wife, or Hetty's need to confess). Sympathy thus re- leases the subject both...

... it ultimately escapes Casaubon, it becomes evident not only in characters who emerge into a fragile ethical and affective balance by the end—Dorothea and Ladislaw, as well as Rosamond and Lydgate, if only for a time—but also in the narrative approach itself: working constantly to elicit the reader’s...

... seem to lend him support. Before portraying Tertius Lydgate, chapter 15 starts with a metaliterary reflection on digressions in novels. Looking with irony and indulgence at the long, sometimes pompous, digressions upon which the narrator of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones —a self-proclaimed “historia[n...

... intractable problem. Middlemarch may weave together a large cast in a fixed setting, but it's the irreplaceable particularity of Dorothea Brooke, Will Ladislaw, and Tertius Lydgate that drives the novel's plots forward. On the outskirts of town, however, in the Garth house, we can see Eliot reshaping...

... glimpsing a character's inner life, we see Lydgate's medical ambi- tions, his "plan of his future," how he "dream[s] of himself as a discoverer," and his "reveries" about the "primitive tissue" (Middlemarch 178, 175, 305); Casaubon's dreams of a Latin dedication not addressed to Carp; and Gwendolen...