Maggie Tulliver Dorlcote Mill on the Floss
Book 1
The book begins at a watermill where the Tulliver children run half-wild by the water, Maggie clever and headstrong, Tom sturdy and proud. The mill is home, livelihood and identity, the thing their father will ruin himself in a lawsuit to keep. Everything the story loses and grieves for is rooted in this riverside ground.
Book 1, ch. 1
inspired by Dorlcote Mill and the river Floss are inventions; Eliot drew the country from the Trent around Gainsborough, which she visited. There is no single documented mill; the pin sites the Tullivers' watermill on the riverside just south of the town, on the tidal Trent that stands in for the Floss.
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Tom Tulliver St Ogg's, drawn from Gainsborough
Book 1
The market town of St Ogg's, with its wharves and old timbered hall, is the social world the Tullivers live within and answer to. Its gossip, its respectable families and its rigid sense of what a woman may do press on Maggie all her life. Eliot built the town, legend and all, out of the real Gainsborough on the Trent.
Book 1, ch. 12
inspired by St Ogg's is a fictional town; scholars identify Gainsborough as its principal model. The pin sits at Gainsborough Old Hall, the surviving medieval hall that anchors the old town centre Eliot reworked into St Ogg's.
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