It was 19th century when the middle-class people in England witnessed a surge as a direct outcome of

Industrial Revolution which roughly began around 1760-80. During this period, the middle-class people
were successful to accumulate a hugh chunk of wealth and power at the expense of the landed
aristocracy and its agricultural concerns.

The increasing importance of middle-class is elucidated by a concern in Middlemarch when many of the
characters took it as a place of vocation. The setting of the novel is Middlemarch, a fictional town of
Midland, in 1829-1832.

From the subtitle of the novel, it becomes clear that Middlemarch reflects life of ordinary people and
there will be no place for grand adventures of King and Princes. Middlemarch represents the spirit of
nineteenth century England through the unknown, historically unremarkable common people. It
represents the consciousness of 19th century English people through common and unremarkable
people.

It small community of Middlemarch that is thrown into the relief against the background of larger social
transformations, rather than in opposite direction.

“Middlemarch the psychology tends more clearly towards an intuitive idea of mind and consciousness.”

With a rise of social mobility, there is no single dominant religious order. Evangelical Protestants,
Catholics, and Anglicans breeds side by side. It is because of this, conflicts due to religion abound in the
novel, particularly those centering on the rise of Evangelical Protestantism, a primarily middle-class
religion that created heated doctrinal controversy. Middlemarch uses realism to throw light on historical
events - The 1832 Reform Act, setting up of early railways in England, and the accession of King William
IV. Eliot began writing the two pieces that formed the novel in 1869–1870 and completed it in 1871.

The readers of the novel are astonished due to novel's amazingly complex social world. There are many
instances in the novel, when Eliot uses the metaphor 'web' to denote town's social relations. She
artistically and intricately weaves a web of characters and throws light on their social relationships. In
the novel, There is no single dominating design to triumph the world-view and to organise the life. There
are many characters in thr novel, who subscribes to the world view and there are some characters who
are looking to find a world view in order to organize their lives. The narrative is variably considered to
consist of three or four plots with unequal emphasis. The most important aspect of the novel is that
there is no dominating or influential person in Middlemarch. Middlemarch social relations are indeed
like a web, but the web has no center. Each character in the novel occupies a point of the web
influencing and in return getting influenced by other points. A plenty of vigorous and admirable effort
from Eliot is involved in the novel to represent this web in great detail that makes novel epic in length
and scope.