Subtitled ´A Study of Provincial Life´, George Eliot s novel Middlemarch chronicles the titular nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of political and social change. Eliot explores the upheaval brought about by these transformations through their impact on the lives of a richly varied cast of characters, including the pious young Dorothea Brooke, her suitor the Reverend Edward Casaubon, the ambitious doctor Tertius Lydgate, and the mysterious schemer John Raffles.