Subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, George Eliot's novel Middlemarch is a chronicle of the titular nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of political and social change. Eliot explores the upheaval and transformation brought about by these changes through their impact on the lives of a richly varied cast of characters that includes the pious young Dorothea Brooke, her suitor the Reverend Edward Casaubon, the ambitious doctor Tertius Lydgate, and the mysterious schemer John Raffles.