Introduction

Subtitled 'A Study of Provincial Life', the novel portrays the many lives of Middlemarch, an imagined town in the English Midlands, around 1830. The ardent, idealistic Dorothea Brooke longs to do some great good for humanity and marries the elderly scholar Casaubon, believing she can help him complete a great work, only to find after the wedding that his research is worthless and her spirit confined by his cold, suspicious nature. Parallel to hers runs the story of the young doctor Lydgate, who means to reform medicine but, married to the beautiful, vain Rosamond, falls into debt and sees his ideals slowly worn away. Around them are a banker's hypocrisy, a squire's will, electoral reform and the coming of the railway. Virginia Woolf called it 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'. Its last sentence says that the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.