Subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, George Eliot's novel Middlemarch is a chronicle of the titularnineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of political and socialchange. Eliot explores the upheaval and transformation brought about bythese changes through their impact on the lives of a richly varied cast ofcharacters that includes the pious young Dorothea Brooke, her suitor theReverend Edward Casaubon, the ambitious doctor Tertius Lydgate, and themysterious schemer John Raffles.