Daunted by the immense size of one of his favorite novels, “Middlemarch: A Study in Provincial Life,” Hillsdale alumnus Chris McCaffery ’16 decided to compile his own edition, breaking the 800-page book into eight short volumes.
McCaffery first encountered “Middlemarch” as a student in associate professor of English Dwight Lindley’s Victorian and Modern British Literature class. Starting in May 2020, he divided the novel into its original eight-part structure, recreating the 19th-century reading experience. After almost a year of work, McCaffery’s “Middlemarch” became available on Amazon for $5 per volume in March.
“It’s certainly been my experience that there are a lot of really wonderful classic novels that are very intimidating to a lot of people because they are so long,” McCaffery said. “Providing them in sort of bite-sized pieces makes them more accessible.”
“Middlemarch,” written by Mary Ann Evans under the pseudonym George Eliot, tells the story of the townspeople of Middlemarch, a fictional English town, particularly a young woman named Dorothea Brooke.
“The novel follows how the characters’ specific personalities, foibles, virtues, and vices interact to create the story of their lives,” McCaffery said.
Lindley said the novel vividly depicts modern man’s desire for a great life.
“What Eliot is really interested in in the novel is how we all live isolated in our own little worlds in the modern world,” Lindley said. “We don’t have a shared religion and culture that really makes large-scale awesome actions possible. How do you lead an epic life in that world?”
The eight-volume edition began as a quarantine project for McCaffery. He used scans of the novel’s first edition from the New York Public Library’s website, and created the layout by following Eliot’s original organization. It took him only a few days, and once the text was ready, he divided it into its eight parts and started formatting.
Each green paperback volume is between 100 and 150 pages long. A painting of a provincial town is revealed on the spines of the volumes when they are lined up on the shelf.
McCaffery attributed many of his editing and layout skills to Hillsdale’s Dow Journalism Program. In his time at the college, he served as assistant news editor for The Collegian as well as a columnist and the editor-in-chief of The Hillsdale Forum.
“I learned to pay very careful attention to punctuation and formatting, and to go over texts very closely and make sure that everything’s right,” McCaffery said. “There was obviously a massive amount of this involved with this project.”
Miller said he was pleased to see McCaffery’s success.
“Chris was a smart, hardworking student who was involved in journalism,” Miller said. “It has been great to see him take an enterprising idea in publishing and give new life to classic work.”
McCaffery has sold about 200 individual volumes. Now, he is teaming up with another Hillsdale alumnus, Evan Gage ’14, to publish illustrated editions of “Moby Dick,” by Herman Melville. He said he hopes his work will allow more people to engage with books that are notoriously difficult to read.
“That’s really what I want, to make reading these truthfully really fun and really beautiful novels much more accessible to people,” McCaffery said, “and much less like a really difficult chore to get through.”
