Who would get to vote, and who would take care of poor people, and healthcare, and minimum wages – everyone had some pet reform project they wanted to bring before Parliament. Reform was a big deal in 19th-century England. This was a great move by Lewes – Middlemarch sold like crazy, and confirmed Eliot's reputation as the greatest living English novelist.īut why was Middlemarch so popular? Well, it was socially and politically relevant when it first came out: it was published in 1870-71, just four years after the 2nd Reform Bill was passed in Parliament. So Lewes arranged to have it printed in eight installments over the course of sixteen months to get people hooked on the story, and then to print it altogether in four volumes. But Middlemarch was too big to fit into three volumes, and publishing it a chapter or two at a time would take forever. For most of the 19th-century, novels were published in one of two ways – either broken into installments of one or two chapters to be printed in a magazine (like Charles Dickens's novels), or published in 3-volume hardbacks (called triple deckers). The length of the novel actually forced Eliot's agent (and long-time lover), George Henry Lewes, to invent a new way to publish it. That's a lot of pages, but then, Eliot had a lot to say.
And we do mean huge: the edition we're using (the 1994 Penguin edition, edited by Rosemary Ashton) is 838 pages long.
It is, in other words, a huge and wide-ranging novel.
But it's also a novel about love and marriage. If we had to sum up Middlemarch in just a few words, we might say that it's a novel about social and political reform. So now you know, and can laugh up your sleeve at folks who say, "Oh, you're reading Middlemarch by George Eliot? I just loooove his novels." Her real name was Marian (or Mary Ann – she spelled it both ways) Evans. Don't let the name fool you – it was just a pen name, because she didn't think that female novelists were taken seriously as artists. And before we go any further, we should let you know that Eliot was a woman. George Eliot was an English novelist writing in the mid-19th century.
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