Eliot is no Zola: social class in Middlemarch

Not really "fair" to criticize a novel for what it isn't, but let's note for the record that George Elliot's Middlemarch appears to be a novel that encompasses the entire scope of English provincial society circa 1830 but in fact the social classes of the novel are narrowly circumscribed - including only the the shopkeepers and bankers and small landholders who run the village of Middlemarch and, at the upper end, the landed gentry and the well-to-do petit nobility: though Dorothea is seemingly committed to improving the lives and lot of the farm workers and the working people of her village - through her admirable scheme to build better "cottages" for them, and Lydgate has put aside a potentially much more lucrative career in medicine in London to serve the people of Middlemarch (while advancing his research through a new hospital), Eliot never shows us the people who are in need other than through the eyes and perceptions of the landowners and the wealthy. She is no Zola, in other words. In Book 3, we get a glimpse of the class biases in the society of Middlemarch, as the Garth children crudely mock the way the laborers on their little farm talk - and Mrs Garth stresses that they will need to get a good education so that they don't speak like the laborers. The drama of Book 3 involves Fred Vincy, the narcissistic son of the mayor-elect, who gets Mr Garth to co-sign a loan and then blows almost all the money through drinking and gambling and through a terrible horse-trade - he's self-centered and naive, and rather than propose or think of any serious way in which he can repay the debt, he just shows up contrite and penitent at the Garths' and makes the problem theirs: they don't have a lot of money, it's clear, and now they will have to dig into their shallow savings to pay the debt that they didn't truly incur. So Eliot is very sharp and cutting about the irresponsibility of some of the landed gentry who live better than those around them not through their hard work or their merits but just because of the capital they have accumulated through social rank and expectations; but that is not to say that she examines all of society - she doesn't. The issues she examines are unique to that rising class - not the truly wealthy, who can and do afford all sorts of idiotic and selfish extravagance - but not those who have to labor for a meager living day by day with no hope of prosperity. We'll see how the novel develops, but thus far it's a novel of a single social class in crisis, not about the whole scope of society.