Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) is a vivid portrayal of political ferment and corrupt electioneering in a small Midland borough at the time of the Reform Bill of 1832. Austere, idealistic, and passionate, Felix Holt is pitted against the self-satisfied local landowner Harold Transome, both politically and in his pursuit of Esther Lyon. At the heart of the novel is George Eliot’s conviction that 'men’s lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease’.