What do we live for, if it is not to…

The words are Dorothea’s, in chapter 72 of Middlemarch. The town is buzzing with scandal: the banker Bulstrode is suspected of hastening the death of a man who knew his shameful past, and the young doctor Lydgate, who had just received money from him, is suspected too. Dorothea tells the cautious Mr Farebrother that “people are almost always better than their neighbours think they are.” Two days later, at dinner with her uncle and the Chettams, she returns to the subject: Lydgate’s friends must want to clear him.

The question follows, with a personal reason: she cannot be indifferent to a man who “advised me in my trouble, and attended me in my illness.” Sir James Chettam fears some new illusion “almost as bad as marrying Casaubon”. But Dorothea will help Lydgate herself.

George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, published Middlemarch in eight parts in 1871 and 1872. Dorothea’s question anticipates the novel’s famous close, which honours the “unhistoric acts” of those who live faithfully a hidden life.

Middlemarch, Chapter 72 (Dorothea), 1872

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work