Middlemarch Themes

George Eliot’s Middlemarch is set in a fictional Midlands town in the early nineteenth century, an environment in which typical gender roles are very are strictly enforced. While men are also expected to live up to gendered ideals, Middlemarch mostly focuses on the way that such expectations are particularly restrictive and suffocating for women. This is explored most notably through the novel’s central character, Dorothea Brooke, who dreams of a grand, intense, and meaningful…

The experience that unites all the characters in Middlemarch is disappointment. In the novel, disappointment is something that happens on both a broad scale (when one’s lifelong dreams and ambitions do not come to pass) and on a more minor, everyday level. Indeed, at one point the narrator observes: “We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time.” This quotation indicates that disappointment is both a universal experience (it applies to…

Middlemarch is set during a highly tumultuous time in English history, when dramatic developments in politics, science, and industrialization were having a major impact on the country. In the novel, “reform” has both a specific meaning and a more general one: specifically, it refers to the push for parliamentary reform that centered around the Reform Act of 1832. “Reform” also refers to more general changes in the novel, such as Lydgate’s passion for medical reform…

Both money and the lack of it cause many problems for the characters in Middlemarch. Some characters are obsessed with money, whereas others spurn it. The novel strongly indicates that it is better not to obsess over money and to focus on other forms of fulfilment. At the same time, it also becomes clear that it is impossible not to care about money at all. Not only is having some amount of money necessary…