Middlemarch [antikvár]

GENERAL INTRODUCTION Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that aU narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction. General Adviser Keith Carabine Rutherford Colkge University of Kent at Canterbury INTRODUCTION Among the most impressive achievements of Victorian literature is the large-scale social-anatomy novel, whose main features are a panoramic sweep, from the rich and patrician to the poor and obscure, a set of interwoven plots which connect a variety of socially diverse figures, a keen interest in the subtleties and shifting balances of class relations, a concern with social history, especially the collision between forces of change and of conservatism, and an omniscient narration which combines a critically evaluative overview with intensive focus on selected individual lives. Middlemarch is a distinguished instance in a group that includes Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Dickens's Bleak House, Mrs Gaskell's Wives and Daughters and Trollope's The Way We Live Now. Middlemarch was not initially so ambitious a conception as the work we now know. Early in 1869 George Eliot began a novel centring on the amval of an innovative young doctor in a provincial community in the Reform Bill era, but she progressed so slowly with it that six months