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Mentioned humorously when discussing young Oppenheimer's unusual interests at summer camp - he was 'completely obsessed with George Eliot' and 'really into Middlemarch' as a teenager.

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Tom reads a passage from Middlemarch describing Victorian attitudes toward railways, noting it was 'first published in 1870, but looking back 30 or 40 years earlier to the arrival of the railways in Middle England.'

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Mentioned as example of high-status novel set around time of author's birth that counts as historical