Divine Providence

Divine Providence in Middlemarch is less a clear account of divine intervention than a contested idea through which people try to make sense of consequences they fear and outcomes they desire. In Nicholas Bulstrode’s crisis, prayer and providential language do not dissolve self-interest: they give it a moral vocabulary, even as the narrative reveals the conflict between Bulstrode’s declared submission and his hope that John Raffles’s death will secure his escape.

Providence and the fear of disgrace

Bulstrode’s response to Raffles’s return is shaped by the threat that his past may become public. He tells his wife that he is caring for a man who might otherwise harm himself, hints at a family connection without stating a direct falsehood, and keeps other people from entering the room. His fear is not only of Raffles but of being overheard. This guarded handling of the truth establishes the moral situation in which his religious language operates: he is already managing what others may know while presenting his actions to himself as precautionary.

After Raffles has been difficult to control, Bulstrode resolves to resist further pressure. Yet returning home brings no confidence that the danger has passed. He imagines that his wife may harbor a suspicion of some discreditable secret, and the possibility of being seen through unsettles the authority and deference he has been accustomed to receive. He can describe disgrace as a divine chastisement or preparation, but he recoils from its imagined consequences and persuades himself that escaping dishonor might better serve divine glory. The reasoning turns submission into a means of avoiding the very judgment he claims to accept.

That fear leads him to prepare, conditionally, to leave Middlemarch. He considers transferring his management of the bank and withdrawing from other commercial affairs, while leaving open the possibility of returning if his fears prove groundless. A departure would be painful to his wife and costly to him; he also contemplates economizing on the hospital and hopes that Mrs. Casaubon will bear more of its expenses. Because he cannot easily explain a long absence to his wife, he delays final decisions. His preparations show how the anticipated exposure alters practical choices before any public disgrace has occurred.

Prayer and self-justification

Bulstrode’s prayers give a particular form to his struggle with responsibility. Before going to Raffles the next morning, he rises early and pleads over whether, in trying to avert the worst, he has been false or untruthful before God. He feels a strong aversion to direct lying, although his earlier wrongs have often been indirect. The narrative distinguishes conscious wrongdoing from the less examined steps by which a person pursues a chosen end: Bulstrode is troubled by the acts he can vividly recognize, while other means of achieving what he wants may escape the same scrutiny.

When Raffles falls ill at Stone Court, Bulstrode reads the circumstances as possible signs of rescue. Raffles has come there rather than elsewhere; Caleb Garth, rather than someone else, has heard him speak of the past; and now illness may limit the danger. Bulstrode treats these contingencies as an opening for secrecy and imagines that, if he is freed, his life will become more consecrated than before. He knows that he ought to submit to God’s will, but he continues to hope that this will includes the death of the man he fears.

The tension sharpens as Raffles’s condition worsens. Bulstrode sees that the man’s death would mean his own deliverance, then constructs a defense in which an outcome awarded by Providence would not be sinful to desire, provided he does not hasten it and follows the prescribed treatment. He even entertains uncertainty about whether the treatment may affect the result, but recognizes that desire can exploit uncertainty to make room for itself. He resolves to keep intention separate from desire and tells himself that he is obeying instructions. The distinction is morally unstable: the account emphasizes not simply what Bulstrode does, but how he tries to preserve a righteous account of his motives while longing for a particular outcome.

Secrecy as apparent relief

As Raffles becomes quieter, secrecy seems to Bulstrode like a form of mercy. While watching him fall silent, Bulstrode feels more at rest than he has for months, and his conscience is soothed by the thought that the past may remain concealed. He reviews in his pocket-book the arrangements he had begun making to leave Middlemarch and considers which to continue or reverse. Even in this moment of apparent relief, practical self-protection remains close: he still thinks about withdrawing from management and about reducing hospital expenses.

The quiet does not resolve the moral question. When Bulstrode considers Raffles’s approaching death, he remembers that the man’s life had once been useful to him and recognizes that his own earlier readiness to use Raffles now feeds his relief at the prospect of his death. The narrative then refuses easy certainty: no one can know whether Raffles’s death has been hastened, or what might have saved him. Providence cannot be invoked as a simple verdict that settles causation or responsibility. The unresolved question matters precisely because Bulstrode has tried to use the language of divine permission to make a desired outcome feel morally secure.

Narrative significance

The episodes present providential belief through a sustained contrast between formal submission and inward preference. Bulstrode repeatedly names divine will, punishment, rescue, and prayer, yet his attention returns to concealment, reputation, and the hoped-for death of Raffles. The conflict is not merely between belief and unbelief; it lies within belief itself, where the desire to be spared can masquerade as acceptance of judgment.

The narrative also makes prayer an uncertain form of self-knowledge. Bulstrode’s private words do not transparently reveal his motives, even to himself: he has not yet disentangled the promptings of the previous day. His explanations may be sincere in part and self-serving in part, while the consequences of his actions remain open to judgment. Divine Providence therefore functions less as a guaranteed explanation of events than as a test of how people interpret them—and of whether their interpretation exposes or conceals the desires they would rather not acknowledge.