Lydgate and Bulstrode

There is, I read, a 'George Eliot Hospital Trust' in Nuneaton that wishes, under the new National Health Service 'reforms', to tender for a 'strategic partner' in order to secure its future.

I wonder whether they have read Eliot's Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life where an idealistic medical man also found the need to tender for a strategic partner. it did not end happily.

A man after my own heart

'Sendak is in search of what he calls a "yummy death". William Blake set the standard, jumping up from his death bed at the last minute to start singing. "A happy death," says Sendak. "It can be done." He lifts his eyebrows to two peaks. "If you're William Blake and totally crazy."'

'On the day of his death, Blake worked relentlessly on his Dante series. Eventually, it is reported, he ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her, Blake is said to have cried, "Stay Kate! Keep just as you are – I will draw your portrait – for you have ever been an angel to me." Having completed this portrait (now lost), Blake laid down his tools and began to sing hymns and verses. At six that evening, after promising his wife that he would be with her always, Blake died. Gilchrist reports that a female lodger in the same house, present at his expiration, said, "I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel."

George Richmond gives the following account of Blake's death in a letter to Samuel Palmer:

"He died ... in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ — Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten'd and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven."'

'He loves Middlemarch, although "Daniel Deronda, oy gevalt! She put aside her hard hat and was determined to be sweet and understanding. That won't get you anywhere, honey."'

Passionate souls

It is, I suppose, one of life’s cruelties – and the fate of many passionate souls – that one can plunge oneself wholeheartedly into some aspect of the world and end up feeling increasingly excluded. Internet living disrupts that pattern, placing us at the centre of whatever little world we choose, and it serves to show us at what cost we medicate the conditions of our existence. And George Eliot’s Casaubon demonstrated that the avoidance of passion is no recipe for happiness either.

Sympathy and scruple

"To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul. Mr Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic; it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying. His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known: it was that proud, narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough for transformation into sympathy, and quivers threadlike in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity. And Mr Casaubon had many scruples ..."
George Eliot Middlemarch