A fascinating post by Scott Johnson at Powerline which he titles, Notes on Middlemarch and in which he discusses what a trial it had been for him to read the book which he has just finished. I therefore wrote him the following:

Dear Scott

I enjoyed your reflections on Middlemarch which is one of my favourite novels of all time, but I think I had a particular reason for the pleasure it gave me, since I identified, sadly, with Dorothea’s first husband, William Casaubon. I think of myself almost perfectly portrayed as that ponderous pedant, writing some weighty but unreadable exegesis into various historical episodes of interest to no one else. I wasn’t actually depressed by his fate, but I did find it instructive. We are what we are, and the book did help me embrace my own nature.

As it happens, I was reading the book at the same time as I was driving our year-seven son to school of a morning, and each day I would tell him where I was up to and what was going on in the plot. You can thus see how like Casaubon I must be, if that is the nature of my conversation with a twelve year old. But the reason I mention it is because he told his English teacher that he had read Middlemarch to which she replied, to this twelve year old, that she could not understand why he had read it, and that she had been forced to read it at university and she had hated it, the most awful book she had ever read. I have always thought of that as the single worst example of bad teaching I have ever come across.

Kind regards

BTW it is ranked as the seventh greatest novel written in English and I completely agree. Unlike Scott, I was just driven along by the plot, but then again, I find John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy more intrinsically interesting than any economics book I come across today.