Themes and issues

Abstract

The fictional content of Middlemarch set against the historical reality of given time; the events which influence the characters of the novel occur within a chronology which runs from September 1829 until May 1832. In a fine article, first published in the first issue of Victorian Studies (‘History by Indirection: the era of reform in Middlemarch’), Jerome Beaty has demonstrated the ‘pervasiveness’ of George Eliot’s historical details and how she has managed ‘to keep them, numerous as they are, from obtruding upon the fiction’.