Middlemarch originates in two unfinished pieces that Eliot worked on during 1869 and 1870: the novel "Middlemarch"[a] (which focused on the character of Lydgate) and the long story "Miss Brooke" (which focused on the character of Dorothea).[4] The former piece is first mentioned in her journal on 1 January 1869 as one of the tasks for the coming year. In August she began writing, but progress ceased in the following month amidst a lack of confidence in it and distraction by the illness of George Henry Lewes's son Thornie, who was dying of tuberculosis.[5] (Eliot had been living with Lewes since 1854.) After Thornie's death on 19 October 1869, all work on the novel stopped; it is uncertain whether Eliot intended at the time to revive it at a later date.[6]
In December she wrote of having begun another story, on a subject that she had considered "ever since I began to write fiction".[7] By the end of the month she had written 100 pages of this story and entitled it "Miss Brooke". Although a precise date is unknown, the process of incorporating material from "Middlemarch" into the story she had been working on was ongoing by March 1871.[8][4] While composing, Eliot compiled a notebook of hundreds of literary quotations, from poets, historians, playwrights, philosophers, and critics in eight different languages.[9]
By May 1871, the growing length of the novel had become a concern to Eliot, as it threatened to exceed the three-volume format that was then the norm in publishing.[10] The issue was compounded because Eliot's most recent novel, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) – also set in the same pre-Reform Bill England – had not sold well.[11] The publisher John Blackwood, who had made a loss on acquiring the English rights to that novel,[10] was approached by Lewes in his role as Eliot's literary agent. He suggested that the novel be brought out in eight two-monthly parts, borrowing the method used for Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables.[12] This was an alternative to the monthly issues that had been used for such longer works as Dickens's David Copperfield and Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and avoided Eliot's objections to slicing her novel into small parts.[13] Blackwood agreed, although he feared there would be "complaints of a want of the continuous interest in the story" due to the independence of each volume.[14] The eight books duly appeared during 1872, the last three instalments being issued monthly.[15]
With the deaths of Thackeray and Dickens in 1863 and 1870, respectively, Eliot became "recognised as the greatest living English novelist" at the time of the novel's final publication.[16]
