Dorothea’s impetuous generosity, which would have leaped at once to the vindication of Lydgate from the suspicion of having accepted money as a bribe, underwent a melancholy check when she came to consider all the circumstances of the case by the light of Mr. Farebrother’s experience.
“It is a delicate matter to touch,” he said. “How can we begin to inquire into it? It must be either publicly by setting the magistrate and coroner to work, or privately by questioning Lydgate. As to the first proceeding there is no solid ground to go upon, else Hawley would have adopted it; and as to opening the subject with Lydgate, I confess I should shrink from it. He would probably take it as a deadly insult. I have more than once experienced the difficulty of speaking to him on personal matters. And — one should know the truth about his conduct beforehand, to feel very confident of a good result.”
“I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are,” said Dorothea. Some of her intensest experience in the last two years had set her mind strongly in opposition to any unfavorable construction of others; and for the first time she felt rather discontented with Mr. Farebrother. She disliked this cautious weighing of consequences, instead of an ardent faith in efforts of justice and mercy, which would conquer by their emotional force.
As Dorothea goes on to say, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?” In fact Lydgate, though guilty of many things, just the kinds of things that everyone else in Middlemarch is guilty of, is innocent of what he is suspected of doing. But he cannot prove it, and in Middlemarch one is always guilty except when proved innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt.
So much of our attention in this book goes to its flawed but lovable chief characters that readers tend to neglect Eliot’s slashing portrait of Middlemarch society as a whole: the town’s people are malicious gossips at best, vicious destroyers of reputations at worst. Even the eminently decent Farebrother turns to “this cautious weighing of consequences” in preference to defending those that Middlemarch has canceled. (He knows the rule: Defend the canceled, get canceled yourself.) By the end of the book, all of the major characters have left Middlemarch, even Fred and Mary, who live well outside of town at Stone Court. It is the nature of Middlemarch to drive all the interesting people away.