A BBC dramatization of George Eliot's classic novel about the lives and loves of a group of people living on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution in a small town named Middlemarch. These include young Doctor Lydgate, who arrives at Middlemarch hospital full of idealism and determined to do good works; Dorothea Brooke, who becomes attracted to the scholarly Edward Casaubon and then finds herself trapped in an ill-fated marriage; and Will Ladislaw, a young lad who awakens Dorothea's repressed passion and thereby changes the course of her life.