Finding Middlemarch: Provincial Life in Coventry 1830-1880

Middlemarch is a novel crammed with characters blighted by a narrowness of vision — from the myopic Dorothea who ‘always see what nobody else sees’ but ‘never see what is quite plain’ to Dr Lydgate, blinded by ambition to the ‘hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions’.

Ego, George Eliot infers, can act as a ‘tiny speck very close to our vision’ that blots ‘out the glory of the world’. for there is ‘no speck so troublesome as self’.

In collaboration with Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery, Nuneaton Library, Coventry Archives and the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, this exhibition, curated by Dr Rosalind White (Royal Holloway, University of London) spotlights various ‘micro-stories’ from the archives that serve to illuminate Middlemarch to a modern audience blinkered by twenty-first-century sensibilities.