Class conflict in Middlemarch

As I noted in an earlier post, George Eliot rarely if ever ventures beyond the boundaries of her chose social class - the landed gentry and the rising merchant class of the English villages circa 1830 - in Middlemarch, and she's even aware of that limitation - she has one section in which she acknowledges that she is writing only about the well-to-do but suggests that her readers can imagine the lives of others (she calls the others "loobies," if I remember correctly) if we like - I'll have to re-read that section. She also makes the very trenchant observation that when a wealthy person steals something the courts will look on the matter as a case of kleptomania and everyone will feel sorry for the thief, but when a poor person steals something (like a loaf of bread that they need because they're starving), they'll be convicted and sentenced. I think both Marx and Freud made similar observations - and I think Eliot's passage was often cited in relation to various celebrity shoplifters in recent years who got off with a scolding. That said: Eliot does has one extraordinarily powerful chapter in which she breaks the mold and focuses on one of the poor farm laborers in the village of Middlemarch: Mr. Brooke gets word that one of his tenant's children has killed a little rabbit, and he pays a visit to the tenant farmer to "ask" him to discipline his child. Brooke, to this point, has been portrayed as a lovable, feckless, kind of stupid man who thinks he's smart and artistic, has dreams of "standing" for Parliament and somehow thinks of himself as a progressive, but as far as we can see he has no real values or ideals or even ideas. His aide Ladislaw tells Brooke he'll be vulnerable unless he does something to improve the conditions of his tenant farmers - and we gradually learn that Brooke is a tightwad (when it comes to spending on anything other than his own comfort). When Brooke visits the tenant, we see his character from a completely different point of view: this kindly, Austenian character who's been a bit of comic relief thus far, when seen from the point of view of the tenant, is a horrible and bullying overlord. The tenant farm is a shambles - and Eliot has a great passage in which she notes that a homestead like this is often depicted as a beautiful bit of the rural landscape but in fact is a horror to anyone living within; Brooke arrives and tells the tenant that he is hooding the boy and punishing him - but maybe only for a few hours! - and he expects the farmer to punish the boy - don't hit him, though! - when he's released to return home. The farmer, impoverished and drunk and irresponsible though he may be - give Brooke hell for this, and rightfully so, and Brooke sneaks off, mumbling some of his usual platitudes. This chapter opens up an entirely new dimension in Middlemarch - and shows that Eliot is one of the few writers who can turn a character inside out and who can appreciate and capture the class tensions within the society she has created, without being polemical or didactic.