Subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, George Eliot's novel Middlemarch is a chronicle of the titular
nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of political and social
change. Eliot explores the upheaval and transformation brought about by
these changes through their impact on the lives of a richly varied cast of
characters that includes the pious young Dorothea Brooke, her suitor the
Reverend Edward Casaubon, the ambitious doctor Tertius Lydgate, and the
mysterious schemer John Raffles.
