Excerpt: He had gained an excellent practice, alternating, according to the season, between London and a Continental bathing-place; having written a treatise on Gout, a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side. His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do.

Question: To what extent is a utopian ambition portrayed to be a corrosive force within the world of Middlemarch

Of the six characters whose matrimonial lives we follow into the finale, Dorothea and Lydgate are alone united by how they had previously harboured certain utopian passions. At the start of the novel, where Dorothea aims to live up to the precedents set by the holy figures, a cause of significant internal conflict within her at the start of the novel, and to do what she can to alleviate material suffering, Lydgate seeks to advance medical knowledge and to contribute to medicine in ways that would advance the common good of society. By the finale however, when both have given up on their initial ambitions, it is Lydgate who experiences the internal conflicts of the sort that Dorothea used to. For one, he has convinced himself that the strides he has made towards the realisation of his goal are either of no significance or that they are insufficient due to a lack of altruism behind them.

The manner in which the narrator contextualises Lydgate’s accomplishments too adds to their denigration. Gout itself is presented not as a disease or as a painful affliction for it is not framed in terms of the suffering it induces but in terms of wealth and assets. Lydgate’s association with London and the Continental bathing place are thus framed as incriminating and his intentions too are thus reduced to simply accruing more wealth. After all, Gout is a disease that afflicts only the rich, ‘a disease which has a good deal of wealth on its side’. Lydgate’s desire to better understand it so that the suffering it may lead to could be minimised is simply Lydgate wanting to develop a skill that would let him benefit of paying patients. Lydgate’s time at Middlemarch, and his struggles against its web, have ground down his ability to put his faith in his own goodness for he has internalised the insidious gossip of him placing money over the life of a patient that was once deployed to wound him.