A BBC dramatisation 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 (Douglas Hodge), who arrives at Middlemarch hospital full of idealism and determined to do good works; Dorothea Brooke (Juliet Aubrey), who becomes attracted to the scholarly Edward Casaubon (Patrick Malahide) and then finds herself trapped in an ill-fated marriage; and Will Ladislaw (Rufus Sewell), a young lad who awakens Dorothea's repressed passion and thereby changes the course of her life.