This online exhibition, curated by Dr Rosalind White (Royal Holloway, University of London) opens out the history of nineteenth-century Coventry through the lens of George Eliot’s Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871). A meticulous evocation of ‘the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions’, Eliot’s Middlemarch follows the interweaving fortunes, foibles and frailties of the inhabitants of a small Midlands town in the early 1830s. In collaboration with Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery, Nuneaton Library, Coventry Archives and the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, our objective is to ‘find’ the story of Middlemarch in the records of the various individuals and institutions that served as Eliot’s inspiration.
About the Project
About The ‘Finding Middlemarch’ Project:
The exhibition is a part of #FindingMiddlemarch — an overarching project funded by the Arts Humanities Research Council and led by Professor Ruth Livesey and Professor Redell Olsen (Royal Holloway, University of London). The project reimagines George Eliot’s radical artistic vision of ‘provincial life’ in the Midlands through various creative collaborations with diverse communities across Coventry.
1 Historicising the Recent Past
Historicising the Recent Past
Take a step back in time to the Coventry of Eliot’s childhood, explore the creation of Middlemarch from mind to manuscript, and learn how George Eliot quarried detail from recent memory. Exhibits include William Henry Brooke’s watercolour album of Coventry (1819) and John Astley’s Memorandum Book of Occurrences at Nuneaton (1810-1845), a priceless fragment of Nuneaton history rescued from a butchers shop in 1878.
2 The Ribbon Trade
The Ribbon Trade
How did Eliot weave the silk ribbon weaving industry into the plot of her novel and what can we learn about the manufacturing families of Middlemarch? Exhibits include a microscope manufactured by artisan weaver, Joseph Gutteridge (1816-1899) and the Coventry Town Ribbon (1851), a favourite of Queen Victoria.
3 Money in Middlemarch
Money in Middlemarch
What role does money and gambling play in the novel’s plot and how did games of chance permeate provincial society? Exhibits include William Powell Frith’s elaborate rebuke of lady luck — The Salon d’Or, Homburg (1871) and a map demonstrating the many of spirit merchants, beer houses and drinkeries active in Victorian Coventry.
4 Medical Reform
Medical Reform & the Distrust of Doctors
What kind of medical research did Eliot undertake for Middlemarch and how did she utilise her knowledge of the future to position Lydgate as a forward-thinking and progressive physician? Exhibits include the kind of domestic medicine chest that would have accompanied a doctor in the 1830s and a caricature of the questionable remedies that sprang up in the course of the cholera epidemic.
Who informed Eliot’s characterisation of Middlemarch clergymen and why did the parson-naturalist often view scientific employment as an extension of his parochial duty? Exhibits include the Bree family Lepidoptera collection — disguised as different volumes of British Entomology c. 1833-1842 and discovered in a locked-up garage in Coventry in 2003.
7 Women’s Work
A Window into Women’s Lives
What kind of work was open to or expected of women in a Warwickshire provincial town? Moreover, in what ways was a wife expected to take on the professional identity of her husband? Exhibits include a doll’s cloak (thought to have been made by George Eliot and her schoolfellows) and a portable stationery cabinet, used by Eliot for letter writing.
Historicising the Past
Historicising the Past
Take a step back in time to the Coventry of Eliot’s childhood, explore the creation of Middlemarch from mind to manuscript, and learn how George Eliot quarried detail from recent memory.
The Ribbon Trade
THE RIBBON TRADE
How did Eliot weave the silk ribbon weaving industry into the plot of her novel and what can we learn about the manufacturing families of Middlemarch?
Money in Middlemarch
Money in Middlemarch
What role does money and gambling play in the novel’s plot and how did games of chance permeate provincial society?
Medical Reform
Medical Reform & the Distrust of Doctors
What kind of medical research did Eliot undertake for Middlemarch and how did she utilise her knowledge of the future to position Lydgate as a forward-thinking and progressive physician?
Parsons & The Clergy
Provincial Piety & the Parson Naturalist
Who informed Eliot’s characterisation of Middlemarch clergymen and why did the parson-naturalist often view scientific employment as an extension of his parochial duty?
What kind of work was open to or expected of women in a Warwickshire provincial town? Moreover, in what ways was a wife expected to take on the professional identity of her husband?
About the Project
Get involved in #FindingMiddlemarch
Can you take a picture of modern Coventry that corresponds with a painting from the past? Locations still to capture include: Bablake Hospital, Old Golden Cross Inn, (corner of Pepper Lane), Gateway of the Old White Horse Inn (Bayley Lane), Greyfriars Hospital, and the Old Black Bull Inn (Smithford Street).
Visit our Google Map to find an approximate location of the artist’s vantage point… You can post your photo under the hashtag #FindingMiddlemarch on Twitter or by submit your image by email to [email protected]
1819
2019
The posterior gate of Whitefriars Monastery, Coventry – c. 1819, by William Henry Brooke, and c. 2019 via Wikimedia Commons.
TGMM
We were delighted to work with Dash Arts on The Great Middlemarch Mystery in April 2022. Part-immersive theatre experience and part-mystery game, this multi-location production put a modern twist on George Eliot’s Middlemarch and its story of the hopes, dreams, disappointments and scandals lived out within a Midlands town. The play was researched and co-developed by Professor Livesey, adapted and directed by Josephine Burton, and produced by Dash Arts.
“Immersive ingenuity… that stretches the vocabulary of the stage. Suddenly theatre is firing on its newest cylinders.” – SUSANNAH CLAPP, THE OBSERVER
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UP
Another strand of the project, Uncertain Promises: The Unofficial George Eliot Countryside, an exhibition by contemporary artist Paul Smith, opened in February 2022. Smith’s new paintings come from his time exploring George Eliot’s legacy in Nuneaton, as part of the writer’s bicentenary, and reflects her understanding of modern English life as being illustrated by the psychology of its marginalia. A conversation between the artist and Professor Livesey is available here.
Paul Smith, Heavens Gate, 76 x 101cm, Oil on Canvas, 2020
Paul Smith, Ah Ah, 92 x 122cm, oil on canvas, 2020
Paul Smith, Wheat and Tares, 76x101cm, oil on canvas, 2021
Paul Smith, Coton Lawn, Oil on Canvas, 100x120cm, 2021
Paul Smith, Coton Lawn, Oil on Canvas, 100x120cm, 2021
About the Project
‘Of That Roar Which Is…’
The ‘Finding Middlemarch’ project culminates in the experimental short film, ‘Of that Roar Which Is…’, directed by Professor Redell Olsen (Royal Holloway, University of London). In dialogue with Livesey, the film uses Olsen’s own poetic and filmic language to respond to Eliot’s art of attention to life forms that might otherwise go unnoticed. Building on Olsen’s previous creative reinterpretations of museum collections and reputation for research-led film-making, the new film will be shown at partner museums.
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