“Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are”

“Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are” is a couplet that gives moral form to Middlemarch’s recurring vision of the past as a force still at work in the present. It joins action to identity: earlier choices do not merely precede a person but help make the person who must answer for them now.

Form and Meaning

The expression is cast as two balanced clauses. The first imagines deeds as travelers, continuing alongside their maker across distance and time; the second turns from actions to the self, declaring that what someone has been shapes what that person is. The movement from “deeds” to “what we have been” links outward conduct with inward character, while the repeated “us” and “we” gives the claim a communal reach rather than limiting it to one individual.

Narrative Placement

The couplet appears at the opening of Chapter LXX, immediately before the account of Nicholas Bulstrode examining John Raffles’s pockets after Lydgate has left Stone Court. Bulstrode is searching for evidence that Raffles has concealed where he has been. Among the papers he finds are several bills, including a crumpled receipt dated that morning for three days at an inn in Bilkley, where a horse-fair was being held; Bilkley lies at least forty miles from Middlemarch. The receipt contradicts Raffles’s claim that he came directly from Liverpool because he was ill and penniless.

Moral and Dramatic Force

Placed beside this search, the couplet turns a concrete scrap of paper into a figure for the return of the past. Raffles’s movements leave material traces, and Bulstrode’s own earlier actions likewise remain consequential rather than safely buried. The chapter’s epigraph does not disclose every detail of what those actions were; instead, it gives the coming scrutiny a broader moral frame, in which the present is shaped by what has gone before. The distance in the image is therefore no guarantee of escape: what is past can arrive again as evidence, recognition, or consequence.