Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In the English Midlands around 1829, Dorothea Brooke longs for a life large enough to match her moral imagination. She believes she has found it in the scholarly Reverend Edward Casaubon. At the same time, the gifted young doctor Tertius Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch determined to reform medicine, only to discover that a town's habits, friendships, debts and marriages can exert a force as real as any disease.

George Eliot called Middlemarch “A Study of Provincial Life.” The province is not merely a backdrop. It is a living web: landowners and tenants, bankers and tradespeople, reformers and conservatives, clergy, doctors, daughters and sons. A choice made in one drawing room changes a balance sheet, a hospital, a courtship or a reputation elsewhere. The novel asks us to see each life from within while never forgetting the consequences that spread beyond it.

Published in eight parts in 1871 and 1872, the story looks back to the years before the Great Reform Act of 1832, when political representation, medicine, transport and the old structures of the countryside were all beginning to shift. Yet its central pressures remain intimate: the difference between loving a person and loving an idea of them; the cost of pride; the slow education of sympathy; and the forms of useful work that ordinary life permits.

This illustrated edition begins with the people and places of Middlemarch without disclosing where their marriages, ambitions or inheritances will lead. Six visual movements unlock only after their portion of the story has been read. Begin with the Prelude's later-born Saint Theresa, then enter a town where no one sees the whole design — and every thread matters.