| George Eliot’s Middlemarch, deemed by many the finest English-language novel of the nineteenth century, is rooted in a particular time and place. The time is the late 1820s and early 1830s and the place England—a country going through a profound change. Superstition was giving way to science, quackery to scientific medicine, stagecoaches to railroads, cottage industries and hand implements to factories and machinery, and the nation was still consumed with the controversies attendant on the First Reform Bill, finally enacted in 1832. The changes and societal shifts seemed epochal and transformational to the people of the time about which Eliot was writing (forty years later)—as indeed they were. The novel would lack much of its resonance if it were set in quieter, more settled times. The rub is, of course, to find any such times. The American and French Revolutions had taken place a scant fifty years before the events of Middlemarch—and they were epochal, the best of times and the worst of times. The European revolutions of 1848 lay between the times in which Middlemarch is set and the writing of the book, and they were seen as transforming the Continent. The First World War broke out thirty-four years after George Eliot died. It was called “the war to end all wars” and is seen by many as the defining line between the Victorian age and modern times. I could go on with a familiar litany of political, military, and social defining moments— the “quiet bland” Eisenhower 1950s were, after all, the time of the “red scare,” the stirrings of the civil rights movement, and the very real fears of nuclear war that still haunt most who were children then. At the time of writing the United States and the world are still reeling from the awful events of September 11, 2001—“a day in which the whole world changed,” we are told constantly. |