WRITING|CREATIVE WRITING|ESSAY

On Life’s Supporting Characters

Where would we be without them?

Can you see her? She’s at the very back Photo by Antenna on Unsplash

Many years ago I revisited George Eliot’s Middlemarch, as you do when studying a famous text in university leaves you feeling as if something is missing. This was a door-stopper of a book which I bought for a song at a car boot sale.

I found the novel more interesting second time around and at times very, very funny, in that peculiar way in which some Victorian novels are. There was a passage, though, which, after reading and re-reading provided me with one of those “moments” when different elements with no apparent relation to each other seem to gel together all of a sudden.

The passage was about Mr Lydgate, the surgeon, and his thoughts on the kind of life famous people might have led before they’d become renowned. It went thus:

“Most of us, indeed, know little of the great originators until they have been lifted up among the constellations and already rule our fates. But that Herschel, for example, who ‘broke the barriers of the heavens’ — did he not once play a provincial church-organ, and give music lessons to stumbling pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the earth among neighbours who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments than of anything which was…