NovelVictorian · 1871Study guide · no full textDemanding

Middlemarch

Eliot follows four marriages through a provincial town and refuses to give anyone a villain. The famous image of the pier glass — a candle reflected in a scratched mirror — is the novel's method: every character sees the same world distorted by their own self.

Ambition Marriage Class Identity

Study guide

This work is still in copyright, so there is no full text on the page. What you get instead: the context, the cast, the ideas and the themes — enough to read it well, and to know exactly what to watch for in the first thirty pages.

The cast, in the Character Atlas →Literary devices →Where it sits in time →

Go deeper

Ambition — how other works handle it →Identity — how other works handle it →Class — how other works handle it →

The castFull atlas →

Dorothea Brooke

Orphan with ideals and a small income

Middlemarch · George Eliot

Wants: To do something large with her life, through someone she believes is large.
Undone by: She confuses intellectual seriousness with moral worth.

Tertius Lydgate

New doctor with a reform plan

Middlemarch · George Eliot

Wants: To make medicine scientific, in a town that prefers the old ways.
Undone by: He cannot resist small comforts, and small comforts become large debts.

Rosamond Vincy

Mayor's daughter, trained to be attractive

Middlemarch · George Eliot

Wants: The best available marriage, and a life arranged like a drawing room.
Undone by: She treats other people's decisions as weather to be managed.

Now read the first page with all of this in mind.

The notes here are the map; the book is the journey.

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