Victorian lit 3

         Over 200 pages into Middlemarch and my now 21^st century brain simply does not have the patience.  Maybe patience isn’t even the right word.  Maybe I should just say it was boring.

         Reading Middlemarch I’d be enjoying it for a while.  As many as 10 continuous pages I’d really be entertained, and then along would come 10 pages of filler, village politics and philosophies on the life of a country doctor.  This broke my stream of reading and deflated my suspension of disbelief.  I found myself skimming past a paragraph or two, then three or four.  Then I skipped two pages; well, it looked really uninteresting.  When I found myself wanting to skip five or six pages, I took pause.  That’s just way beyond.

         Either you read a book or you don’t read it.  It doesn’t seem to me that there’s so many points in between.  What am I going to say? “Middlemarch?  I’ve skimmed it.” Should I force myself to keep reading just so I can say I read it and be true to my word?  What’s the point?  It’s better to just cut my losses and move on.  And my only feeling upon doing this is one of relief.

         The question presents itself to me: as time passes has the Victorian novel lost its relevance?  Psychologically speaking people have changed so much since the 1870s.  Middlemarch is more valid now as a historical marker, revealing how different things were then.  Human experience may be universal across time and space, but the delivery method has changed so completely that 19^th century literature is now archaic and, yes, less pertinent than it was.