Bildungsromans

Middlemarch

Eliot, George

Middlemarch is George Eliot’s sweeping 1871–1872 Victorian novel set in the fictional rural Midlands town of Middlemarch between 1829 and 1832, weaving the interconnected personal, social, and political lives of the town’s diverse residents, led by idealistic young Dorothea Brooke, to explore the constraints of gender and class, the tension between individual ambition and social convention, and the slow, uneven pace of moral and political progress in pre-Victorian England.

History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Fielding, Henry

Published in 1749, Henry Fielding's "The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling" is a picaresque comic novel chronicling the adventures of an orphaned youth raised by Squire Allworthy, whose romantic pursuit of Sophia Western leads to his banishment, misadventures across Britain, and ultimate revelations about his true parentage.