Encouraged by Lewes, Eliot had begun to publish fiction in 1857. Middlemarch, the sixth of her seven novels, is often considered her masterpiece because of its scope, variety, and the brilliance of its psychological analysis of provincial English life.
The Industrial Revolution and rise of the middle class. The nineteenth century saw the growth of the British middle class. It emerged as a direct result of the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain roughly between the 1760s-80s and concluded with the building of the railways and the advent of heavy industry in the 1840s. During this period, England’s economy changed from one that was agrarian-based and handicraft-oriented, in which workers bought raw materials and produced goods at home in their cottages (“cottage industries”), to one dominated by urban, machine- driven manufacture (the “factory system”). As more factories appeared, two classes of workers began to emerge—the working class whose members produced the goods, and the group that political economist Karl Marx would later describe as “capitalists,” because they possessed the money or capital to buy the machines and buildings.
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