I’m near the end of this novel.
A few weeks ago, I saw the BBC miniseries.
I’m struck by the shunning delivered to one of the major characters in the novel when it is discovered that he came by his money dishonorably.
The moral standards and preoccupations displayed in this Christian 19th Century novel put much of the Orthodox Judaism I know today to shame.
There’s far less moral flexibility and the turning of a blind eye towards wrongdoing in Middlemarch than in Pico-Robertson.
It’s enough to make me believe in the decline of the generations (that every generation since Mount Sinai is less upright).
Last April I determined to read Middlemarch upon learning that it was a preoccupation of scholar Stephen Steinlight.
He told me then: “I
