Solomon Featherstone

Solomon Peter Featherstone is a substantial figure in Middlemarch's social and civic hierarchy, a man whose fortune and position rest upon inherited land and long-established connections. He takes his role as a magistrate and gentleman of property with utmost seriousness, though his decisions tend toward the conservative and are frequently colored by his concern for maintaining the status quo and his own standing in society. He maintains strong opinions on matters of public concern and is not hesitant to voice them, often with the confident assumption that his view reflects the proper order of things. His interactions with others reveal a man invested in the preservation of traditional structures and wary of innovation or change that might disturb the social arrangement he has always known.