Critical reception

Abstract

Middlemarch was recognised as a distinguished novel by contemporary reviewers, but there were some who still considered that the earlier novels were superior. Adam Bede was a particular favourite, the reviewer in The Times and the much longer notice in the Quarterly Review agreeing that Middlemarch was inferior in the ‘liveliness, variety and picturesquness of its great predecessor’. The first reviewers, of course, considered the novel as a serial, and were in fact writing about the effect – and sometimes the completeness – of each part as it came out. Reviewers in the Athenaeum and the Spectator considered that although it appeared as a serial, Middlemarch was in fact completed before it began to be published. As we have seen from Section 1.4 of this commentary this was not true, for Book viii was not completed until the second week in September 1872, before the last three books of the novel were published.