I have finished the book just a couple of hours ago and I just spent the last hour reading the reviews and commentary on goodreads. Some of the reviews here are extremely good and mirror my thoughts on the book and write them down more eloquently than I ever could, so I'm not going to put too much effort into writing this review. I should not exaggerate too much and go all "best book ever!!", but this is among the best books I have ever read and certainly unlike anything I have read in recent years. I suppose the closest to something like this I have read is Tolstoy's War & Peace, which I loved but read 5+ years ago. 
 I have read quite a few good books the last years, but it took this book to re-realize how important reading is and how people should continue reading books like Middlemarch rather than just the usual 'fun' internet and news articles. It is more than entertainment. It is all about creating empathy for the world and its inhabitants around you. It is all about understanding other poeple's motives and why they do what they do. George Eliot understood people and she is more insightful into what makes everyone tick than anything else I can remember reading. In Middlemarch you get to know a number of characters really-really well, you see them develop, you start looking at them in different ways, you understand why they perceive the other characters the way they do, why they clash, everything. It's brilliant. It turns the characters of recent and more than decent books I read into caricatures from a Hollywood action movie. 
 George Eliot also nails down some fundamental insights on human nature and life every now and then. I regret that the copy I read wasn't my own so I couldn't underline scribble down. I felt like quickly looking up one part on Mr Bulstrode that I remember: 
 The service he could do to the cause of religion had been through life the ground he alleged to himself for his choice of action: it had been the motive which he had poured out in his prayers. Who would use money and position better than he meant to use them? Who could surpass him in self-abhorrence and exaltation of God's cause? And to Mr. Bulstrode God's cause was something distinct from his own rectitude of conduct: it enforced a discrimination of God's enemies, who were to be used merely as instruments, and whom it would be as well if possible to keep out of money and consequent influence. Also, profitable investments in trades where the power of the prince of this world showed its most active devices, became sanctified by a right application of the profits in the hands of God's servant. 
 This implicit reasoning is essentially no more peculiar to evangelical belief than the use of wide phrases for narrow motives is peculiar to Englishmen. There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men. 
 But a man who believes in something else than his own greed, has necessarily a conscience or standard to which he more or less adapts himself. Bulstrode's standard had been his serviceableness to God's cause: "I am sinful and nought--a vessel to be consecrated by use--but use me!"--had been the mould into which he had constrained his immense need of being something important and predominating. And now had come a moment in which that mould seemed in danger of being broken and utterly cast away. 
 How's that as a statement with the 20th century in mind? This self-interest versus idealism is a recurrent theme throughout the book for some of the characters (Bulstrode, Lydgate, Mr Brooke to an extent). 
 Beautiful writing and use of language overall. 
 Minor criticism I would like to make though is one of class though. George Eliot obviously shows compassion towards the weak and an interest in political economy, but all the characters that are fleshed out are however middle and upper class. Whenever a peasant or a lower class gets involved in the story, their dialogue is written in an incorrect-English slang with sometimes almost a bit of a comic intention (Mr Brooke vs Mr Dagley with Fag the sheep-dog and the pitchfork-wielding anti-railtrack crew were all rather comical for instance). I am not saying that Eliot's treatment of the lower classes is wrong or anything, their speech at the time was probably quite different from the gentlemen and gentleladies at the time, but I would have loved to see Eliot writing out one of those characters to the extent of a Fred Vincy or a Nick Bulstrode.