What our world leaders could learn from George Eliot's Middlemarch

I am finally drawing to a close with the largest novel I have read in decades. Nearly 700 pages. George Eliot’s Middlemarch is like a compendium of people who you see – before they do – what a wretched mistake they are about to make. How it will all end up, untangle itself, I have no idea. But by the time you read this I will have reached the end and will know the outcome.

Written in 1869-71, it is so full of sharp observations about human thinking and doing that in some ways it’s a clumsy book. It strays off and then comes back, but remains riveting.

Reading is supposed to be good for you. But reading Middlemarch depressed me while exciting me as the writing is so good and the constant appeals to thinking are so well crafted. But it is not ‘a guide to action’ as many books of the 19th century are. 

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Dickens seemed to always want to improve us with his writing. Great Expectations seemed, in a nutshell, to be about how calamitous snobbery is, and how ordinariness is a blessing in disguise with the world full of splendid people who do not have a pot to piss in. Oliver Twist seemed to be about the wretchedness of poverty and what you have to resort to if you are left without; A Christmas Carol that kindness among the wealthy can only enhance the unwealthy and make a good soul of a complete arsehole. Excuse my crudeness.

But George Eliot seems to show the well intentioned in Middlemarch as slightly deranged, lacking in foresight and judgement. The handsome Doctor Lydgate marries before he has established his medical practice and slips into debt and dishonour. Dorothea, the heroine of the book, is so good in the world but chooses to marry a vile man 25 years older than her who robs her almost of all her goodness; only for him to die and to leave a legacy of spite in his wake. She survives as good and useful but it was a close-run thing. 

What many of the characters suffer from, and the book shows so poignantly and brilliantly, is what I would call ‘the debris of history’. And that possibly, aside from the beautiful descriptive power, is the reason I have persevered with Middlemarch. It shows what I firmly believe is the problem of our inheritances from previous generations. How we may be almost in a war scenario, with Starmer beginning to sound more Churchillian by the hour; a war with Russia because of mistakes that were made earlier in time.

Ms Eliot cleverly sculpts together an elaborate book of bits of the recent and distant past tripping up the present. So she shows how the contemporary town of Middlemarch has all these grand players who are stymied or brought down by what happened in former times. 

All history appears to me as a series of roads taken that often lead to our perilous present. What if Britain and America had not conspired to overthrow the legally elected prime minister of Iran in 1953, and facilitated the predominance of the Shah; which led to the 1979 revolution and the arrival of the ayatollahs. 

What if at the fall of the Soviet Union the west had befriended Russia, the main conquerors of the war against Hitler, rather than see it as a new frontier for Wall Street-raiding parties. We could have helped Russia to its feet in the same way that the US helped restore Europe and Japan after the Second World War. Because the west did not help with the restoration of Russia, a belligerent nation arose. Humiliated, it sought to become a world power again. And now Starmer rattles sabres that are blunt – according to critics of the UK’s shrinking of its defences – at Russia as if the UK were once again that old imperial power that ruled the waves. 

The debris of history wherein unsolved problems of the past, and decisions taken in the past, come to limit our manoeuvrability in the present. The past always informing and distorting the present. When, you might ask, are we going to become free of the past so that we don’t have to face the threat of war in the present? Because our leaders chose to take us into destructive wars without getting us an exit out of the
damage they leave.

Can I suggest to world leaders that they make themselves a kind of ‘yellow box’ sort of thinking. Those boxes at junctions where you cannot drive into it if you can’t see an exit at the other side. Or what happens when a new drug is developed and it has to go through a rigorous screening so that you don’t get deathly side-effects. 

What Middlemarch demonstrated to me is how bovine and non-thinking the cleverest and most cultured among us can be. How human history is drenched in the mistakes of the past and many of them were avoidable. 

Could the Industrial Revolution have been run differently so it didn’t produce millions of degraded and mentally and physically harmed people? I know when I was born among the British proletariat they were wretched and broken, limited of body and mind and education. All created by a cross-generational apprenticeship of almost 200 years of despoliation and dehumanisation. 

What a greater world we would have if there were wiser minds with power that could have stopped the despoliation; in the African slave trade and the industrial slave trade of 250 years ago. 

Wishful thinking you might call it. But we have to develop better leadership in the world than simply those who, in a clod-hopping sort of way, lead us to the next threat to our life and limb.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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