Is Fred really at all likable? We're assured that he grows.
Do Rosamund or Casubon have the capacity for compassion?
Is Sir James expressing true compassion for Dorothea when he insists that someone do something to stop her marriage to Casaubon?
What does Lydgate really feel for Rosamund? Lydgate doesn't think much of Dorothea at first.
Nice comment--"Kind of in love with the narrator . . . All the characters are flawed, but we are all flawed"
Like Rebecca Mead, I'm finding Mr. Casaubon more sympathetic on this reading than when I was younger. If you reflect that he's simply a blocked writer, some of his mean actions seem more understandable. For instance, when he orders Will out of the county because a relative who's a journalist detracts from his dignity as a scholar. The real problem is, Will is publishing and Casaubon is not. If he was bringing out Volume IX of the Key to All Mythologies and receiving acclaim, he wouldn't care what Will was doing. Or take his request to Dorothea to dedicate herself to his work after his death. It's because he feels so bad about devoting his life to the Key and not completing it, and no scholar cares enough about it to take over for him. As Eliot herself says, "I feel very sorry for him."
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