The aim had in view in Middlemarch is to illustrate the impotence of modern life so far as it relates in moral heroism and spiritual attainment.  High and noble action is hindered and baulked by the social conditions in the midst of which we live; and those who would live grandly and purely, and in a supreme unselfishness devote themselves to the world, find that their efforts are in vain.  Dorothea has longings after a life of love and service; she would live for high purposes and give herself for others’ good.  Her hopes end in disaster almost; and she is cramped and baulked on every side.  Lydgate would devote himself to science, to patient investigations for the sake of alleviating human misery and disease.  His social environment cripples him, and his life comes to nothing compared with what he had aimed at, and what he was capable of attaining.  Dorothea is presented as capable of becoming a saint, being of an ardent, heroic nature, a woman who yearned after some lofty conception of the world that was to be made, not merely poetry, but an actual fact about her; who was “enamoured of intensity and greatness,” and “likely to seek martyrdom.”  The difficulties which most beset such a nature are presented in the very first chapter, where these saintly tendencies are considered as probable obstacles to her making a good marriage.

A young lady of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly, as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles—­who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books!  Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with political economy, and the keeping of saddle-horses; a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship.

The social life of Tipton really had no room for such a woman, could not employ her rare gifts, knew not what to make of her yearnings and her charity.  And Tipton is the world and modern life, which spurns the heroic, has no place for the poetry of existence, can make nothing of yearnings and longings for high heroism.  Because the social order into which she was born could not use her gifts, because the vision of life in her soul was other and higher than that which society had marked out for such as she, her life was wasted in an unhappy marriage.  In an earlier age she would have become a St. Theresa, for society then had a place for such souls.  Now she bows in reverence to a man of learning, dreams great things of tender service to him; but this proves not to be the place in which she belongs.  In the last paragraphs of the book the author gives her own account of Dorothea’s failure to reach the good she sought.