This month's literary knitter is a minor character, but one who has a rather nice description. Mrs Taff appears in a scene where the people of Middlemarch are discussing the newly arrived doctor, Mr Tertius Lydgate.
Many people believed
that Lydgate's coming to the town at all was really due to Bulstrode;
and Mrs. Taft, who was always counting stitches and gathered her
information in misleading fragments caught between the rows of her
knitting, had got it into her head that Mr. Lydgate was a natural son
of Bulstrode's, a fact which seemed to justify her suspicions of
evangelical laymen.
She one day communicated this piece of knowledge to Mrs. Farebrother,
who did not fail to tell her son of it, observing—
"I should not be surprised at anything in Bulstrode, but I should be
sorry to think it of Mr. Lydgate."
"Why, mother," said Mr. Farebrother, after an explosive laugh, "you
know very well that Lydgate is of a good family in the North. He never
heard of Bulstrode before he came here."
"That is satisfactory so far as Mr. Lydgate is concerned, Camden," said
the old lady, with an air of precision.—"But as to Bulstrode—the
report may be true of some other son."
I love the idea of Mrs Taff tangling up her gossip and her knitting, and her logic that just because Mr Lydgate isn't Mr Bulstrode's illegitimate son, it doesn't mean he doesn't have one.
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| Dr and Mrs Lydgate from the BBC series |
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