Middlemarch by George Eliot is often considered an example of literary realism, a nineteenth century literary and artistic movement that strove to portray ordinary daily life as it actually happens, eschewing the wild improbabilities and exotic settings of the Gothic and its successor the sensation novel. Unlike the romantic windswept heath of Wuthering Heights or the scenic but menacing castles and convents of Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho or The Italian, Middlemarch is set in an ordinary provincial town, of precisely the sort in which many readers would have lived.
The very title of the book suggests its realistic heritage. It is named after a fictitious town, Middlemarch, located in England's midlands. The very word "middle" suggests its ordinary nature as a provincial town, located in the center of England and average in its people and politics. Although Dorothea Brooke is the protagonist of the novel, the title indicates that this is more than just a story about Dorothea marrying the wrong man and then the right man. The story of the individual for Eliot, as for other realistic novelists, does not exist in isolation but shows the way the individual is formed by and connected to a complex fabric of social reality. Eliot shows Dorothea realizing this in the following passage:
On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving—perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance.
The particular elements that awaken this perception in Dorothea, are, like the town of Middlemarch, ordinary people going about their daily business.
Another factor that makes Middlemarch a realistic novel is that it incorporates many subplots that cover a variety of social classes. While the Brooke family are the local gentry, well off and influential, two other major romance plots include Fred Vincy and Mary Garth and Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy. As we explore the lives of middle class professionals as well as the gentry, we are presented with many details about their ordinary lives, including the professions of banking and medicine.
Also, another realistic feature is that considerable space is devoted in the novel to the tensions leading up to the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, which made England significantly more democratic by a form of redistricting that aligned parliamentary districts with population and extended the franchise to a wider group of men. Eliot uses both extended narration in the form of free indirect discourse and dialogue to give us a sense of the debates over Reform.
A final realistic feature of the novel is that it does not focus just on people who are extraordinary in their external accomplishments, but also deals with the issue of how people move from dreams of greatness in their youth to ordinary middle age; Eliot announces her intention to explore this little discussed element of our common experience realistically in the following passage:
For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness ...
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