Literature and the Matter of Fact

Abstract An ageing scholar takes his young bride, for their honeymoon, to Rome, a far cry from the English provincial town which gives its staunch name to George Eliot’s supreme novel: Middlemarch. For Dorothea Brooke, now inescapably Dorothea Casaubon, the disillusionment has already begun. Rome oppresses her, though not Rome alone. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magiclantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.