Includes bibliographical references (pages 901-902)

Middlemarch is a town on the rise. With its old country gentry, middle class, and tradesmen, it is ever growing and changing with the times, circa 1830. Vast and crowded, rich in irony and suspense, the novel Middlemarch is richer still in psychological insight. One of the best-loved works of the nineteenth century, it introduces two of the era's most enduring characters--Dorothea Brooke, a passionately idealistic woman, and Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor--and explores the complex social relationships in a town that moves and breathes with a life of its own