Chapter 6 - Middlemarch, High Realism, and the Victorian Everyday

Summary

This chapter situates George Eliot’s ground-breaking realist novel, Middlemarch, in the context of a longer tradition of provincial fiction. By the time Eliot published Middlemarch, fiction that put small-town life at its centre had developed from the early nineteenth-century ‘sketch’ or ‘tale’ to the chronicle novels of Trollope and Oliphant in the 1850s and 1860s. This chapter argues that Middlemarch is a deliberate provocation regarding the cultural and aesthetic value attributed to the common, the middling, and the local in the 1870s as London exerted ever-clearer centralizing force on culture and education. Middlemarch expands the small forms of provincial fiction through expansive patterning and repetition of everyday plots and locales. This establishes a type of ethical realism in which the fact of frequency does not mean the common is dismissed, but rather is revalued in the narrative as commonality: a ground for collective identity.