AQA (A) Literature: ‘Victorian literature’
George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch: A Study in Provincial Life was published in 1871–72. Set in the years leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832, the ideas that shape it were conceived in the 1850s and 1860s. In many ways Middlemarch is a historical novel and George Eliot its historian, an ‘omniscient’ presence throughout. Yet in the opening to Chapter 15 of the novel, she rejects the convention of the all-seeing and allknowing (his)story-teller. The ‘GREAT historian’ referred to here is Henry Fielding, whose god-like controlling status in his History of Tom Jones allows a privileged overview of events and knowledge of his characters. But, says Eliot, ‘We belated historians must not linger after his example.’ Life was far more complex in 1872 than it was for the author of Tom Jones in 1749.
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