Hutton in The Spectator conjured a readership of one mind:Į all grumble at Middlemarch we all say that the action is too slow … but we all read it, and all feel that there is nothing to compare with it appearing at the present moment in the way of English Literature … Such a long drawn out experience of reading or viewing is unimaginable today, when we glut on box sets, or download Hilary Mantel in audio and print format in seconds.
Published in eight parts beginning in December 1871, it provided ‘months of pausing and recurring literary excitement.’ wrote Sidney Colvin in the Fortnightly Review. In that first reading love ruled, and when I was confident that Dorothea and Will would finally get it together – I was happy to watch this happy ending veer tantalisingly in and out of reach.Įliot’s first readers couldn’t choose their pace through the novel as a whole. The pleasures of anticipation accounted for a good part of my sudden slowness. I read 700 pages in a growing hurry, then slowed to a snail’s pace and eked out the last hundred over an improbably long time. I was twenty the first time I read Middlemarch and I couldn’t bear to reach the end.
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