In chapter 8, Mr Tulliver and Mr Deane discuss the Duke of Wellington and his 'conduct in the Catholic Question', a conversation that could only take place after 1828, when Wellington became Prime Minister and supported a bill for Catholic Emancipation). (In chapter 3, the character Mr Riley is described as an 'auctioneer and appraiser thirty years ago', placing the opening events of the novel in approximately 1829, thirty years before the novel's composition in 1859. The novel begins in the late 1820s or early 1830s – several historical references place the events in the book after the Napoleonic Wars but before the Reform Act of 1832. Both the rivers and the village are fictional.

The mill is at the junction of the River Floss and the more minor River Ripple, near the village of St Ogg's in Lincolnshire, England. Spanning a period of 10 to 15 years, the novel details the lives of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, siblings who grow up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss. Ogg's: 'one of those old, old towns which impress one as a continuation and outgrowth of nature, as much as the nests of the bower-birds or the winding galleries of the white ants a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legions turned their backs on it from the camp on the hillside, and the long-haired sea-kings came up the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the land.'

Plaque in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, noting it as the model for St.

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