Thomas Jones
speaker
142 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 2 Aug
Thomas Jones’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Hello and welcome to episode three of The Man Behind the Curtain, a close reading series from the London Review of Books.
I'm Thomas Jones, a senior editor at the LRB, and for this series I'm joined by the novelist and artist Tom McCarthy to explore some of the mechanisms and systems underlying a series of novels from Don Quixote to Gravity's Rainbow.
and the ways that the novel emerges as a form when those mechanisms begin to poke through in your words and expose themselves to scrutiny by the novel itself.
I hope I've got it right this time.
That's a very good summary.
It's really good to be talking to you again.
Today, we're talking about Middlemarch by George Eliot.
Last year, in another Close Readings series, we did an episode on The Middle and the Floss, and I joked...
although it wasn't entirely a joke, that the reason we weren't talking about Middlemarch was that we only had an hour and ten minutes.
I think we were likely to go over that today, so we had better press on.
So Middlemarch, it's subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, often reckoned to be George Eliot's masterpiece and a regular at the top of lists of the greatest novels of all time, whatever that's supposed to mean.
I don't imagine you pay much attention to those lists, Tom.
There we go.
So it was published in serial form in 1871 to 1872, but it's set 40 years earlier in the years leading up to the Reform Act of 1832, which extended the franchise to every male householder who paid an annual rent of £10 or more.
And that political upheaval is a crucial part of the novel, as are other changes, revolutionary, radical changes, the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, the building of the railways, the first cholera case in England, developments in medical, scientific, philosophical, feminist thought.
Middlemarch is the name of a fictional town in the English Midlands, often said to be based on Coventry.
But I mean, that doesn't necessarily matter very much.
And there are, I suppose, three main strands of plot to remind people of.
First, we have the story of Dorothea Brooke.
An idealistic, intellectually, religiously passionate young woman, an orphan, who, with her sister Celia, lives with her uncle, Mr. Brooke, who's an aspiring politician, a neighbouring landowner, Sir James Chetton, wants to marry her.
Showing 1–20 of 142 · page 1 of 8
Next →