Eliot, George: Felix Holt, v.1, 24 March 2008.
 

Felix Holt: the Radical.
A novel, first published in 1866.

The story takes place against the background of the 1832 Reform Act and is set in a small midlands town. Harold Transome, a rich landowner has returned after a 15-year absence and decides to stand as a radical candidate in the forthcoming elections, to the consternation of his Tory family and neighbours.
Meanwhile Felix Holt, an idealistic young man is a genuine radical—not an opportunist like Transome. Both become involved with Esther, the local dissenting minister’s daughter.

In many ways, the plot is rather like Disraeli’s ‘Sybil: or The two Nations’. (Already uploaded.)
The novel also explores the idea of fatherhood: two of the characters turn out to have a paternity different from what they expect. (And one small boy may yet have revelations about his mother.) Fathers tend to be missing, dead, decrepit or devious. This causes havoc with both emotions and inheritance laws.

Source
There are only two sources for this novel on the web. One is from Princeton University at http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/eliot/holt/
The other is Manybooks.net.
Both are unsatisfactory. The Princeton version has no paragraph breaks and contains a lot of scanning errors. The Manybooks version does have paragraph breaks (mostly) but has the same scanning errors.
I’ve spent a day and a half cleaning up the text and checking against my paper copy. I have proofread, added curly quotes and a TOC.

Thank you for a great looking copy of her work.


Don