Temptation

Temptation in Middlemarch is a pressure that gathers before a decisive act, fed by need, old habits, and the wish to avoid responsibility. The novel traces it through gambling, romantic rivalry, and the temptation to let another person’s death become a private deliverance. These episodes distinguish the impulse from the choice: people may recognize a danger, resist it, or still act while telling themselves that their motives remain good.

Temptation and the possibility of choice

The chapter epigraph frames the subject as a distinction between being tempted and falling. That distinction matters because temptation is not treated as proof that a person has already chosen badly. Instead, the narrative follows the interval in which desire presses against judgment, and in which a person’s account of their own motives can either restrain or enable action.

The pressure is often circumstantial. Financial trouble makes an easy gain newly attractive to Lydgate; for Fred, the familiar pleasures of the billiard-room revive alongside an effort to become responsible; for Farebrother, love for Mary Garth makes withholding a warning seem personally advantageous. In each case, temptation offers a shortcut or a private benefit, but threatens a relationship or duty the character has reason to value.

Lydgate: the appeal of easy money

Lydgate has previously regarded gambling as distasteful, watching it in Paris as though it were a disease. He has likewise felt contempt for the excitement produced by drinking. What he once imagined as worthwhile success required difficult, deliberate effort directed toward a beneficial result, not the sudden thrill of winning other people’s money. His financial strain nevertheless alters the terms of the temptation: gambling begins to look like a way to obtain money without asking anyone for help and without incurring a personal obligation.

At the Green Dragon, Lydgate initially has a practical reason to stop. He is seeking Mr. Bambridge, who has promised to find a buyer for his remaining good horse; selling it and substituting a cheap hack might bring in about twenty pounds to meet pressing expenses. While waiting, Lydgate plays billiards. His strong play and confidence lead him to bet on himself, and the prospect of doubling the money he expects from the horse draws him further in. His thoughts reach beyond the room to gambling on a larger scale in Brassing, where one successful risk might seem to buy relief from his daily demands.

The episode turns on how quickly an imagined escape can become a plausible next step. Lydgate is not initially seeking the pleasure of gambling for its own sake: he is drawn by the possibility of securing needed money without a request or obligation. Yet the scene shows that his former repugnance is not an absolute safeguard. Under enough pressure, the prospect of winning begins to outweigh the principles by which he had defined himself.

He ends the evening having lost. The next day he must pay four or five pounds more than his winnings, and the memory of behaving like the men he had judged leaves him disgusted with himself. He recognizes that a change of setting—from a billiard-room to a gambling-house—could have magnified the danger. Although reason checks his desire to gamble again, the episode does not erase the underlying attraction: given assurance of winning what he needs, he admits he would have preferred gambling to the alternative he is beginning to face, asking Nicholas Bulstrode for help.

Fred Vincy and Farebrother: temptation tested by relationship

Fred’s return to the billiard-room runs alongside his attempt to live differently. He has taken work with Caleb Garth and is trying to save the eighty pounds Garth has offered him, in part to repay money he had taken from Mrs. Garth when her family especially needed it. He also plans to set aside thirty pounds for her from his half-year’s salary. But on his fifth recent visit to the billiard-room, he carries in his mind ten pounds he hopes to keep from that salary, and considers risking some of it if a favorable bet arises. He means to keep within limits, yet recognizes the pull of an old habit: playing may bring betting, drinking, and another uncomfortable morning.

Seeing Lydgate betting unsettles Fred. Fred had thought of his brother-in-law as self-possessed and superior, and he is startled to see him excited at the table. The sight checks Fred’s own inclination to join in. The reversal is revealing: a man who has often been treated as careless becomes, in this moment, the observer who sees another’s conduct as unfitting. The encounter gives Fred a reason to pause before the familiar pattern carries him further.

Farebrother’s temptation is different: he considers allowing Fred to fail because Fred’s happiness with Mary stands in the way of his own hopes. When he hears that Fred has returned to the billiard-table, Farebrother is tempted to keep silent and watch him descend into betting, lose Garth’s patience, and damage the opportunity he has worked to secure. He can tell himself that he deserves satisfaction too, after years of going without it, and that Fred’s possible failure might give him an advantage.

Instead, Farebrother explains this selfish impulse to Fred and warns him. He makes no pretense that he felt no temptation to remain silent; he chooses to act on his earlier, better intention and to protect Fred’s chance of making a life with Mary. His honesty makes the warning an act of friendship rather than a claim to moral superiority. The episode presents resisting temptation not as an absence of self-interest but as a decision not to let self-interest govern what one does for another person.

Bulstrode: desire hidden within duty

Bulstrode’s temptation unfolds during John Raffles’s illness, where a duty of care meets a deeply personal wish for the patient’s death. While Raffles is ill, Bulstrode follows Lydgate’s medical orders, although Raffles repeatedly asks for brandy and fears that he is being starved in revenge. Bulstrode’s thoughts repeatedly turn toward the possibility that Raffles will die and thereby end the threat of disgrace. He tries to separate that desire from his stated intention to obey the doctor.

The narrative makes the tension between intention and desire explicit. Bulstrode tells himself that if death comes under prescribed treatment, and he does not hasten it, then he is not responsible for wishing it were the outcome. He invokes uncertainty about medical effects and the possibility that treatment itself might hasten death, while recognizing that such doubts can give desire room to operate. He does obey Lydgate’s directions; the moral pressure lies in the way he imagines and justifies the result he wants.

When Raffles remains alive, Bulstrode’s wish for release continues to trouble him. He hopes that the threat hanging over him might end through Raffles’s death, yet does not simply announce that wish as his intention. The distinction he tries to preserve—between wishing for an outcome and acting to bring it about—becomes the measure of his self-deception as well as his restraint.

A small practical decision gives this conflict particular weight. Mrs. Abel worries that Raffles may die without sufficient support and says that, in earlier nursing, she had given a patient port wine and brandy. When she suggests using her household rum, Bulstrode gives her the key to his wine-cooler and tells her there is plenty of brandy. The gesture shows him authorizing a measure of care rather than withholding it, even as his private thoughts remain fixed on the possibility of Raffles’s death. The episode keeps both facts in view: Bulstrode follows directions and permits help, while desire continues to shape the meaning he gives to events.

The recurring moral pattern

Across these episodes, temptation rarely arrives as a plainly named wish to do evil. It presents itself as relief: money without asking, pleasure without consequence, romantic satisfaction at another person’s expense, or freedom from a threat that seems to have become unbearable. Its influence is visible in the gap between what characters say they intend and the possibilities their imaginations keep returning to.

The contrasts prevent a simple division between the virtuous and the weak. Lydgate’s confidence in his own principles does not stop financial pressure from drawing him toward the betting table. Fred’s wish to repay the Garths coexists with the temptation to risk part of his salary. Farebrother admits a self-serving impulse but chooses to warn Fred, while Bulstrode’s conduct toward Raffles combines compliance with care and a persistent hope for release. In this pattern, moral choice takes shape through small actions and the reasoning that surrounds them. The novel’s emphasis is not that temptation predetermines failure, but that good intentions must contend with desires that can disguise themselves as necessity, fairness, or duty.