The object of this course will be to read George Eliot's Middlemarch first for the pleasure of the text and then as a key Victorian document, indeed as a culmination or, at the very least, as a key component, of numerous debates, impulses, urges in the period between its putative date (1829-32) and the date of its writing and publication forty years later (1870-73). Eliot's novel is thus-and very self-consciously-a summary of high Victorianism and the ambience that immediately preceded it. Calculate the birth and life expectancy of most of its major characters, and you have the entire 19th century down to the moment of publication. Thus in addition to Eliot's text we will engage in our own summary study of the period through the prose and poetry that seem to feed it: from Carlyle's Past and Present to Tennyson's In Memoriam, to Arnold's essays and poems, Mill's Liberty and The Subjection of Women along with painting, architecture and journalism belonging both to the period of Eliot's investigation-the early 1830s-and of her composition-the early 1870s. Short essays, seminar reports and one longer essay.