George Eliot published Middlemarch in installments between 1871 and 1872. The novel follows two main plots in the fictional Midlands town of Middlemarch: Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic young woman who marries the elderly scholar Edward Casaubon, hoping for a life of useful knowledge; and Tertius Lydgate, a progressive young doctor whose scientific ambitions are gradually compromised by his marriage to Rosamond Vincy, a woman of social vanity and inflexible self-regard. The two plots are connected through Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's young cousin; through the banker Bulstrode's secret past; and through the web of financial and romantic relationships that ties the town together.
Eliot's famous Prelude compares Dorothea to Saint Theresa, whose "unhistoric acts" account for much of what makes ordinary life possible, a formulation that sets up the novel's central interest in what constitutes meaningful action under conditions of limited possibility. Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies, the life work that Dorothea hopes to assist, is built carefully to be exactly as outdated and wrongheaded as Casaubon's work would have been at that period, given what German scholars had already accomplished. Lydgate's trajectory, his scientific idealism eroded by debt, by Rosamond's persistent social ambitions, and by his own susceptibility to the beauty that produced those ambitions, is Eliot's most direct account of how capable people fail.
The final pages, where Eliot describes what Dorothea's life amounted to and why her goodness mostly went unrecognized, are among the most honestly sad and most clearly argued conclusions in the tradition. Eliot's capacity to hold together an enormous cast of characters, multiple interconnecting plots, sustained intellectual argument about politics and science and religion, and the emotional life of individual characters in specific difficult circumstances is what has made Middlemarch the work most consistently named as the greatest English novel.
The novel's enduring readability owes much to the precision of its construction, the economy of means by which it achieves its effects, and the care with which the author builds a world that is internally coherent enough to generate genuine surprise at the moments of revelation. These are qualities that no amount of time diminishes, and they are why the book continues to find new readers across generations.
Charles Dickens walked up to 20 miles a night through London streets gathering material for his novels.
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