Middlemarch by george eliot
He then worked in a bindery in Whitechapel with William Coward, continuing on his own after 1880.
From 1868 through 1879, bookbinder Samuel Tout (1841-1902) operated in Nassau Street in Soho, London. Her biographer Kathryn Hughes calls her the 'last Victorian' because she thought it possible to face the crises of her time without 'shattering in shards'" (Orlando). Her writing evinces a strong belief in progress, which for her meant the gradual improvement of the world through difficult, often imperceptible human effort, sometimes characterised as meliorism.
One of the major novelists of the 19th century and a leading practitioner of fictional realism, George Eliot (1819-1880) was "the most extensively anthologized novelist among her contemporaries. A handsomely bound library set comprising all of Eliot's novels, two short stories, one poetry collection, one volume of her posthumously collected essays, and the three-volume biography by her husband J.