The action of Middlemarch takes place "between September 1829 and May 1832", or 40 years before its publication in 1871–1872,[2] a gap not so pronounced for it to be regularly labelled as a historical novel. By comparison, Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) – often seen as the first major historical novel – takes place some 60 years before it appears.[2] Eliot had previously written a more obviously historical novel, Romola (1862–1863), set in 15th-century Florence. The critics Kathleen Blake and Michael York Mason argue that there has been insufficient attention given to Middlemarch "as a historical novel that evokes the past in relation to the present".[20]
The critic Rosemary Ashton notes that the lack of attention to this side of the novel may indicate its merits: "Middlemarch is that very rare thing, a successful historical novel. In fact, it is so successful that we scarcely think of it in terms of that subgenre of fiction."[2] For its contemporary readers, the present "was the passage of the Second Reform Act in 1867";[21] the agitation for the Reform Act of 1832 and its turbulent passage through the two Houses of Parliament, which provide the structure of the novel, would have been seen as the past.[20]
Though rarely categorised as a historical novel, Middlemarch's attention to historical detail has been noticed; in an 1873 review, Henry James recognised that Eliot's "purpose was to be a generous rural historian".[22] Elsewhere, Eliot has been seen to adopt "the role of imaginative historian, even scientific investigator in Middlemarch and her narrator as conscious "of the historiographical questions involved in writing a social and political history of provincial life". This critic compares the novel to "a work of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus", who is often described as "The Father of History".[2]
