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How did George Eliot use social history as the background of Middlemarch?
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George Eliot used social history in Middlemarch by setting it during the Reform movement of 1829-1832, reflecting on political and social changes. The novel addresses the rise of the middle class, the decline of landowner authority, and the limited impact of reform on women's rights, as seen through Dorothea's character. Eliot also explores themes like industrialization, marriage, and individual roles in society, using historical context to enrich character development and engage readers.
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life was published by the English author George Eliot during 1871–1872. Since the novel is set in the period from 1829–32, during the height of the Reform movement, it is a historical novel, in which the author in late middle age looks back on the period in which she was a teenager.
There were actually three separate Reform Bills: those of 1832, 1867, and 1884, of which the first was the most important and usually the referent of the phrase "the Reform Bill." These bills reformed the British political system by making it slightly more democratic, eliminating "rotten and pocket boroughs" and widening the franchise to men with incomes of at least ten pounds per year. The subsequent Reform bills widened the franchise to the vast majority of men, although women had to wait until 1918 to vote.
Eliot's novel explores the rise of...
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the middle class and the slight decline of the authority of wealthy landowners in rural England. Her novel details important elements of how people negotiated the boundaries of the gentry and professional classes, where the changing structures of class and wealth were most apparent. Eliot also, in the character of Dorothea, explores how Reform, while changing the political landscape for men, barely touched women. The Married Women's Property Act of 1870 was being debated just as Eliot wrote the novel, and Dorothea's plight is in many ways an argument for its passage.
Because of societal expectations for and expectations on women, Mary Anne Evans wrote under the pen name George Eliot. "Middlemarch" has all the elements of epic historical fiction: many characters and intertwined plot lines, all set against the background of England in the early 1830's. Evans/Eliot explores the ideas of social and political reform, the development of railroads, the rising middle class, the role of marriage in society (and the role of women in marriage) as well as the broader idea of an individual's role in society and what that meant as British society became more industrialized. The Reform Bill of 1832, England's answer to revolutions in America and France, and the spreading of the idea of an individual's role and right in government, is featured, as well as working conditions of the increasing number of people working in the new factories, and scientific and medical advances of the time. As with the best historical fiction, Evans/Eliot created a narrative that allows the reader to become engaged with fictitious characters that he/she (the reader) comes to care about, and learn a great deal of history in the process.