Historical background
When Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life was published in 1891, the U.K. was in a rapid process of industrialisation. The economy base was changing from agriculture and cottage industries to urban factory manufacture. The landowners who had held all the wealth were gradually being replaced by bankers like Bulstrode and manufacturers like Mr. Vincy, whose wealth took the form of money, not land. For the next generation it became important to have a profession in order to maintain a status in this fluctuating society, especially if they had no inheritance like Lydgate, Ladislaw and Fred Vincy, since their capital was their brains.
The 1830 July revolution in France and the overthrow of the king, Charles X, influenced risings in Belgium, Poland, Italy and Germany. The effect in the U.K. was the Reform Act of 1832. Middlemarch takes place between 1829 and 1832, during the struggle for political reform, which ended in the passage of the First Reform Bill in June 1832. Just as the middle class became economically powerful its interest in political power grew. Landowners had dominated Parliament through the system of 'rotten boroughs' whereby parliamentary seats were bought and sold among wealthy aristocrats. The cities were controlled by the middle class, but they were very much unrepresented in this arrangement. They launched a campaign to change the electoral system. The Reform Bill passed in the Commons, by one vote, yet the Lords threw the bill out. The Middlemarch narrative ends here, but a few weeks later the Bill passed, narrowly avoiding a rebellion.
Literary background
Middlemarch forms part of the mid-19th. century movement of realism. Balzac in France had previously written a history of his countrymen in La Comédie Humaine. Dumas, fils, had published his romantic novel La Dame aux Camélias in 1848. Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) is considered a criticism of romanticism in favour of realism, as it plots the tragic results in the life of the romantic protagonist.
Episodios nacionales by Pérez Galdós were a series of historical novels outlining the major events in Spanish history. The first novel, Trafalgar (1873), was based on eyewitness accounts of the battle, such as the cabin boy's, the main character of the novel, who had been on board the Santísima Trinidad ship at Trafalgar. Leopoldo Alas (Clarin) published socially critical pamphlets known as paliques (“chitchat”), and his masterpiece, La Regenta (1884–85), is often compared to Madame Bovary for its criticism of social mores in Oviedo.
In the U.S., realist writers included Samuel Clemens (the pen name of Mark Twain), who authored the picaresque novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and displayed realism in its colloquial American speech. US realist fiction includes Stephen Crane's battlefield novel, The Red Badge of Courage, set in the Civil War, which was published in 1895.
In the Bookclub session we will focus on the text.
Mind map of characters in Middlemarch:
