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Background

On 1 January 1869 George Eliot listed her tasks for the coming year in her journal. The list included "A Novel called Middlemarch", along with a number of poetry and other projects.^[5] Her last novel, Felix Holt, had been published more than two years earlier and had not sold well.^[6] Despite this, the projected new novel was to be set in the same pre-Reform Bill England as Felix Holt, and would again deal with the reform issue, although less centrally.

In its first conception, Middlemarch was a story involving an ambitious doctor, Lydgate, the Vincy family, and Mr. Featherstone. Progress on the novel was slow; by September only three chapters of the story had been completed. The main reason for this lack of development was the distraction caused by the illness of Lewes’s son Thornie, who was dying slowly of tuberculosis.^[7] Following his death on 19 October 1869, all work on the novel stopped. At this point it is uncertain whether Eliot intended to revive the original project; in November 1870, more than a year later, she began work on an entirely new story, "Miss Brooke", introducing Dorothea. Exactly when she started to combine this narrative with the earlier Lydgate-Vincy-Featherstone plot is unrecorded, but the process was certainly under way by March 1871.^[8]

As the scope of the novel grew, a decision was taken as to the form of its publication. In May 1871 Lewes asked publisher John Blackwood to bring the novel out in eight parts, at two-monthly intervals from December 1871. Blackwood agreed, and the eight books duly appeared throughout 1872, the last instalments appearing in successive months, November and December 1872.^[9]