The Cost of Political Ambition — Middlemarch

Sir James Chettam lunches alone with the Cadwalladers because he cannot speak freely before Celia. The subject is Brooke's purchase of the Pioneer and his political ambitions. Mrs. Cadwallader calls it frightful: buying whistles and blowing them in everybody's hearing. The Rector reports the Trumpet's attack on a landlord not a hundred miles from Middlemarch who receives his own rents and makes no returns. Sir James has inquired into Middlemarch politics and hopes Ladislaw, who is against Brooke standing, may turn him from nomination. Yet Will troubles him too: a relation entertained at the Hall now appears as editor of the Pioneer, a quill-driving alien in local gossip. Mrs. Cadwallader calls Will a dangerous young sprig, a sort of Byronic hero. Sir James wishes Brooke would take Caleb Garth back; everything has gone wrong since Garth was dismissed twelve years ago.

Brooke arrives shuffling and cheerful, asking what they think of things going on a little fast. Cadwallader reads the Trumpet aloud: a reformer of the constitution while every interest he is immediately responsible for goes to decay; a philanthropist who cannot bear one rogue hanged but does not mind five honest tenants half-starved; a man who roars himself red at rotten boroughs and does not mind rotten gates on every field. Brooke colors, smiles nervously, and tries to take the satire well: it should be true up to a certain point. Sir James presses him about Dagley's gate. Brooke deflects to Chettam's fancy farming. Mrs. Cadwallader tries to frighten Brooke away from election expense; Cadwallader tries to frighten him into estate repairs and Garth. Brooke rises nettled, insisting he has his own ideas and takes his stand on them, then remembers a forgotten packet and hurries away.

After he goes, Cadwallader says the Pioneer and Ladislaw signify two straws compared with Tipton parishioners being comfortable. Mrs. Cadwallader replies they should have proved Brooke loses money by bad management instead of putting him on horseback in politics. The chapter exposes reformist talk colliding with landlord neglect just as public scrutiny arrives.