ABSTRACT
In matter and manner, George Eliot's Middlemarch reflects and enacts that modernizing process which changed Europe from the end of the eighteenth century almost out of recognition. The obvious matter of the novel is social change. Its major characters are actively involved in that change as doctors, scientists, political reformers, manufacturers and bankers. The aim of the protagonists — Lydgate, Dorothea and Ladislaw in particular — is not merely a functional and quantitative one, namely increased efficiency of production and organization, but a combination of scientific and social improvement. It is this endeavour which links them, as I have tried to show elsewhere, with the Utopian projects of the nineteenth century and their complete or partial failures. The characteristic occidental conjunction of rational research, economic and technological application explodes holistic, static, circular concepts of order, thereby unleashing a feverish dynamism totally unknown in the nineteenth century outside Europe — with the exception of the United States. The secularization of Christianity and the increasingly rapid division of labour produces the endlessly complex 'web' of modern society which looks towards the future and uses its newly awakened sense of history for purposes of self-definition. For where everything seems to flow and to float, where time rules triumphant, memory is called upon to describe the river of change and to account for the emergence of the disturbing here and now.
