Critical Overview

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Middlemarch appeared in eight books or volumes between December 1871 and December 1872. In 2000, W. W. Norton published a second edition of its Norton Critical Edition of the novel.

In her journal for January 1, 1873, Eliot reported on the initial response to Middlemarch: "No former book of mine has been received with more enthusiasm." Indeed, the Saturday Review, for December 7, 1872, stated: "as a didactic novel it has scarcely been equaled." It also pointed out: "The quarrel with humanity in Middlemarch is its selfishness." By contrast to this widespread human failing, it stated that "Dorothea is so noble and striking a character—her charm grow[s] upon us as the story advances." Once the complete novel had been published, Sidney Colvin, writing for Fortnightly Review on January 19, 1873, called Middlemarch "the chief English book of the immediate present" and "the ripest" of all Eliot's novels to date. Colvin further stated that the novel shows a "powerful knowledge of human nature" and demonstrates its author's "studies in science and physiology."

Henry James agreed and disagreed. In his March 1873 review, which appeared originally in Galaxy, James argued that the characterization was uneven. He acknowledged that Mr. Brooke, along with the Garth and Farebrother families, among others, were deftly handled, but James found the portrait of Will Ladislaw to be "a failure." James also wrote that the subject of the novel as defined by "the eloquent preface" is "a young girl framed for a larger moral life," yet after Casaubon dies, the entire plot having to do with Dorothea centers on whether she will marry Ladislaw. Thus, in James's view, the high ideal of taking action to improve the world dissipates disappointingly in a somewhat conventional marriage plot.

Regarding the Norton Critical Edition 2000 second edition of Middlemarch, the Contemporary Review praised its "wealth of additional material" but singled out as "[p]erhaps most valuable" the explanatory notes that allow a reader to understand many references in the text itself.

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