Bulstrode, Mr. Nicholas

Banker in Middlemarch; a man whose marked piety covers a dishonourable past. "He had a pale blonde skin, thin grey besprinkled brown hair, light-grey eyes, and a large forehead. Loud men called his subdued tone an undertone, and sometimes implied that it was inconsistent with openness... Mr. Bulstrode had also a deferential bending attitude in listening and an apparently fixed attentiveness in his eyes which made those persons who thought themselves worth hearing infer that he was seeking the utmost improvement from their discourse." "Strange, piteous conflict in the soul of this unhappy man, who had longed for years to be better than he was--who had taken his selfish passions into discipline and clad them in severe robes, so that he had walked with them as a devout choir." He had been connected with a London pawnshop, which dealt with thieves, had married his employer's rich widow, after concealing from her the fact that her daughter, Will Ladislaw's mother, for whom she was searching, was alive, had inherited her money on her death, and settled in Middlemarch. Here he married Mr. Vincy's sister, and made a place for himself as a prosperous man interested in philanthropy. When Raffles, who knows of his early life, appears in Middlemarch, Mr. Bulstrode bribes him to keep silent. He treis to atone for his action about his first wife's daughter by offerin gmoney to her son, Will Ladislaw, when he learns of the relationship, only to have his offer refused. During Raffles' last illness Mr. Bulstrode knowingly allows Dr. Lydgate's orders to be disobeyed, and Raffles dies, but Mr. Bulstrode's secret has become known, and he leaves Middlemarch a disgraced man, involving Lydgate, who had accepted a loan from him, in his disgrace.

<em>Middlemarch</em>

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