Exploring George Eliot’s Inspirations: Lydgate and Birt Davies

On re-reading George Eliot’s enthralling masterpiece, Middlemarch, I was struck by several parallels between her description of Dr Lydgate’s efforts to modernise medical care in the fictional Midlands town of Middlemarch with those of real-life Dr Birt Davies in Birmingham.

^{George Eliot by François D’Albert Durade, National Portrait Gallery, public domain}

The two doctors

Eliot’s young doctor, Tertius Lydgate, arrived in the silk-manufacturing town of Middlemarch in 1829, shortly after John Birt Davies settled in Birmingham, which was then just another smallish manufacturing town. Both were new settlers and both had received their training at the most advanced medical schools and hospitals – Lydgate in Paris and Birt Davies in Edinburgh. They shared a progressive outlook, a commitment to a scientific and patient-centred approach and a determination to treat the poor and rich equally. And both were critical of the old-fashioned, unscientific ideas of their peers.  

Clashes with colleagues

Early in their careers, both Lydgate and Birt Davies played key roles in establishing fever hospitals, much needed as cholera and other infectious diseases were sweeping the country at the time. Both men succeeded in establishing facilities with isolation wards where fever patients could be treated effectively and safely. But in both cases these successes led to major clashes with unsupportive medical colleagues.

Both the fictional doctor and the real-life one got involved in local politics. In Lydgate’s case this led to public denigration when he fell into debt, underscoring his dependence on the wealthy and corrupt banker, Nicholas Bulstrode. Meanwhile, Birt Davies’s involvement in the campaign for electoral and medical reform thwarted his professional ambitions when several attempts to join Birmingham’s General Hospital were blocked by his fellow doctors and political opponents.

Following these tribulations, the careers of the two men diverged. Lydgate left Middlemarch a disappointed man with a sense of failure for a conventional but more lucrative career in London, while Birt Davies became Birmingham’s first, and most hard-working, borough coroner.

Connections or coincidences?

Are these just coincidences, or might George Eliot have used Birt Davies as a model for Lydgate? This notion is not as far-fetched as it might seem. It’s known that Birt Davies’s son, a young and brilliant surgeon named John Redfern Davies, worked with Dorothy Pattison (Sister Dora), a pioneering nurse in Walsall Cottage Hospital who became a local heroine. They fell in love and were engaged to marry, until she broke off the engagement due to religious scruples – he was an atheist – and her determination to devote herself to her work.

George Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) was friendly with Sister Dora’s family through Dora’s brother, Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, whose much younger wife was her close friend. Eliot is said to have based the character of Dorothea Brooke, heroine of Middlemarch, on Sister Dora, and Mark may have been the model for Dorothea’s pedantic husband, Edward Casaubon [Jo Manton: Sister Dora, the life of Dorothy Pattison, Appendix B. Methuen, 1971]. Yet, no literary expert seems to have noticed the similarities between Eliot’s fictional creation, Tertius Lydgate, and John Birt Davies, the father of Dora’s lover. Come on George Eliot devotees – it’s time to subject the connection to proper investigation!

For more information on the life of Birt Davies, see Probing Deaths, Saving Lives.