Commentary 1: Scenes 1/1-1/6

It was the BBC’s Executive Producer, Michael Wearing, who suggested to Andrew Davies that his screenplay of Middlemarch might begin like a Western: ‘A man rides into town…’ The man is Tertius Lydgate, the idealistic and ambitious young doctor. As his stagecoach passes beside a newly-dug railway cutting where track is being laid he cries to a fellow passenger with triumphant expectation: ‘The future!’ The exclamation is doubly ironic. By the end of Episode 1, Lydgate will already be feeling thwarted by Middlemarch’s entrenched provincial loyalties. And, as television viewers of 1994, we are strangers being invited into a heritage England of 1829, before the first Reform Bill and the dawning of the modern industrial age, epitomised by the opening shot of sheep being driven along an untrammelled country lane.

Middlemarch the novel, of course, begins with the story of ‘Miss Brooke’ which follows a ‘Prelude’ in which the narrator establishes her guise as a historian with the deepest sympathy for the plight of woman. This is matched by a playful perspective of distanciation framed here in the example of St Theresa whose ‘passionate, ideal nature’ sought ‘some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self’(Prelude, pp.1-2). It is easy to read this, as many have, as prefiguring the story of the idealistic and devout Dorothea Brooke. Yet Eliot is surely embracing here not only womankind in general, but the struggles of noble idealism itself in a world without ‘coherent social faith and order’(Prelude, p.2). And it is this larger theme that the novel pursues from a wide variety of perspectives.

The director of the BBC’s Middlemarch, Anthony Page, indicated that ‘it was a deliberate choice of Andrew’s not to have any kind of voice over which you could have done. I mean you could have had a narration, because she does like to comment and to moralise, and I mean I can imagine an adaptation where you would do that … which would give it a very different, much more philosophical and literary feeling. This is much more direct and popular and modern’ (Page, 1993, pp. 60-1 and pp.66-7)

The choice to begin the adaptation with the Lydgate/Middlemarch story also reinforces the broader historical and sociological canvas that Eliot’s novel embraces, and reminds us, perhaps (pace Beaty, 1960), that in the sequence of composition it was this narrative that came to her first, and that Dorothea’s story was conceived of independently. The two parts were combined into a single novel during the writing process, the sequencing of which was also determined, to some extent, by the decision to publish in serialised form, in 8 bi-monthly parts, before the ending of the novel had been envisaged.

Andrew Davies’ opening follows Lydgate’s coach into town, arriving at The White Hart hotel in the bustling market square, serving to locate Middlemarch, and introduce us, en passant, to some of its local traders including Mawmsey, the grocer. The inn-keeper greets the newcomer as he steps down: ‘Is it Dr Lydgate? … I understand you’ve purchased Dr. Peacock’s practice?’ This is an embellishment of the original Shooting script (‘Dr. Lydgate! Welcome to Middlemarch!’), which reveals his arrival is already perceived as a form of takeover. This is then reinforced visually via a tracking shot that brings a refreshed Lydgate, tankard in hand and a touristic gleam in his eye, through the busy market to the pie stall, where the local fare on offer is juxtaposed in poetic montage with a specimen we next see Lydgate dissecting in his study – we will discover this later to be Lydgate’s quest to understand ‘primitive tissue’.

In the midst of this bravura opening sequence, where constant motion is underscored by the orchestration of rhythmic strings, Lydgate’s arrival in Middlemarch is counterbalanced with the introduction of the Brooke sisters, Dorothea and Celia, seen riding across open country with abandon. Eliot tells us early of Dorothea’s indulgent enjoyment of riding and the sexual attraction it provoked:

'Most men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback ... Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.' (Ch.1, p.11)

Andrew Davies’ stage directions precis this observation efficiently, and frame our heroine in close-up: ‘But the first thing we see is Dorothea’s face, rapt, intent, glowing, in a kind of quiet ecstasy as she canters along. Her lips are parted. We can hear her breathing. We are going to hear and see enough of her spirituality later on, for now let’s see a beautiful and passionate young woman.’

Our indulgence in this spirited but innocent scene of sisters at leisure is arrested by their short-cut return through woodland where they encounter a poor itinerant labouring family, with young children. Before we learn of Dorothea’s spirituality, we see not only her beauty and passion, but also her compassion and distress in encountering human misery. This will prove to be her more enduring and endearing quality. It is immediately reinforced by her declaration (back at the stables) to give up riding, and the introduction of their jovial but parsimonius uncle (Robert Hardy) explaining to his estate steward Roach why he won’t spend money on repairing broken fencing. As Andrew Davies notes in stage directions for Shooting script scene 1/7, ‘Brooke always favours the middle way even when, as in the present case, there isn't one’.

The discovery of Stamford, by location manager Sam Breckman, was a major breakthrough in the realisation of the town of Middlemarch. As Anthony Page observed: ‘there were big areas that weren’t spoiled so you could get long tracking shots – big areas that looked like a town lived in at that point, it was the only place we could find like that.’ (Page 1993, p.26).

Beaty. J. (1960) Middlemarch from Notebook to Novel: A study of George's Eliot's Creative Method, Greenwood

Page, A. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections, p.26, pp.60-1 and pp.66-7

Commentary 2: Scene 1/7

Scene 1/7 is the first to place Dorothea and Celia Brooke in the domestic environment of their own rooms at Tipton Grange. Its significance for Andrew Davies is apparent in correspondence early in the development of the script with the first producer attached to the project, David Snodin. In a letter of 10 July 1991, Davies is concerned that Snodin had wished to omit this scene because 'all it tells us is that Dorothea does not want to wear a cross as jewellery and that someone's coming to dinner’. In a fuller extract from this letter attached to the Shooting script, Davies offers four detailed reasons why this scene is crucial as exposition of the sisters' characters and attitudes in Episode 1, but his adaptive methods here are also worth exploring.

For instance, Davies expertly selects and applies verbatim phrases from Eliot’s dialogue and descriptions of the sisters' reactions in Chapter 1. He does so both in their speeches and in his stage directions. Celia's arguments in favour of them wearing the jewellery (not to would be lacking 'in respect to Mamma's memory' and 'surely... there are women in heaven now who wore jewels') are taken from just one paragraph on pp.14-15 of the novel. Davies, however, intersperses them throughout the scene to maintain the momentum of Celia's attempts at persuasion. In the Shooting script, too, Dorothea dismisses the thought of wearing a cross as a 'trinket' only to be suddenly taken, just as she is in Chapter 1 with the sheer beauty of the gems. She marvels ‘how deeply colours seem to ... penetrate one ... like scent. They look like fragments of heaven’. Yet by the Post-production script, Dorothea’s attitude to wearing the jewels in company has lost the more judgemental line developed from Eliot’s dialogue (‘Who knows to what level I may sink?’), instead retaining a more ambivalent and suggestive, ‘Perhaps I shall…’ In performance, Aubrey subtly conveys the way Dorothea is torn between physical feelings evoked by the gems and her urge to renounce worldly temptations.

The deliberate omission of elements from the novel is also a strategy Davies’ employs when adapting this scene. Hints at Dorothea's spiritual and puritanical principles are reined back by the screenwriter for his 1990s audience. For the benefit of the actor and director only, he notes in the stage direction, that Dorothea’s rejection of the jewels is 'not just Puritanical asceticism'. Dorothea's goodness is conveyed rather through her social conscience as embodied in her plans for the farmworkers' cottages, even if Celia's pragmatic 'Yes, very nice, but you know Uncle. They will never be built' sows the seeds for Episode 6's stark summation of Dorothea's idealism.

Davies uses the scene to reveal Dorothea’s and Celia’s differences as sensual young women. Celia, the younger teenager, is excited to wear the jewels at a dinner where they will have guests; she relishes the attention they will grant her and the timing of her request to Dorothea to look at the jewellery is no coincidence. At first Dorothea consciously rejects the jewels but then her senses take over as she studies them as Eliot notes 'under a current of feeling, as sudden as the gleam' (p.17) of the emeralds. The difference is that Davies focuses Dorothea’s reaction on the physical whereas Eliot blends this with the spiritual.

Both Davies' scripting and the decisions made later in the direction, lighting and editing of this scene enhance this early example of Dorothea’s thoughtful yet mercurial character. Time collapses in the screen version. As noted by Bazalgette and James (1994, p.12), the scene begins in daylight with Dorothea rationalising her plans but by the time she is handling the emeralds, only a few minutes later in real time, it is candlelight that illuminates them and in the process the potential for Dorothea’s emotional depth.

James, C. and Bazalgette, C. (1994) ‘Reading the Screen’ in Screening Middlemarch Education pack, BBC/BFI, p.12

Commentary 3: Scenes 1/19-1/20

This after dinner scene, focusing on the newly-made friends Lydgate and the Reverend Farebrother, displays many of Andrew Davies’ most productive adaptative techniques in a very short space. The first of these is the omission of characters that might initially seem superfluous to the drama, in this case, the total removal of Farebrother’s aunt and mother in the Shooting script. However, by the Post-production script they have reappeared at the start of the scene to hand over some glasses to ‘Camden dear’ and bid him goodnight. The familial endearments and the fact that, rather than a housemaid, these ladies provide the glasses is enough to indicate both the closeness of Farebrother’s dependants and their financial situation. Whether this re-inclusion was a script-editing decision or a directorial one is unknown, but the effect is to add depth to the depiction of Farebrother’s domestic situation and social position in Middlemarch, whilst representing minor characters who in the novel have spent some time getting the measure of Dr Lydgate over tea.

From here, Davies seeds the relationship between these two young intelligent men that will persist throughout his dramatization. First, he establishes the fact that they have a shared interest in science, though for Farebrother it is an absorbing hobby rather than a burning ambition for professional research and discovery as it is for Lydgate. In this respect, Davies closely follows Eliot’s Chapter 17, but from here he uses concision and integrates elements from other chapters in the novel to indicate how different Lydgate and Farebrother are in outlook and understanding. For instance, in the Shooting script Lydgate claims that ‘All of [his research] is possible here in Middlemarch’, later refined in the Post-production script to ‘in the country, you can follow your own course more easily. People let you alone. You can get on with your own life’. In this instance Davies is drawing from Lydgate’s earlier conversation in the novel with Bulstrode, when he states ‘Any valid professional aims may often find a freer, if not a richer field, in the provinces.’ (Ch.13, p.187). Most importantly, in doing this, Davies reveals that Lydgate has as yet no idea of the trammels that the Middlemarch social web will place on him both personally and in his research.

In response to this, Farebrother, who Alan Palmer argues ‘is not part of the Middlemarch mind’ (2005, p.166-7) issues a gentle warning to Lydgate that things are not as simple in the Middlemarch community as they might seem. This is the instigation of Farebrother’s role as Lydgate’s tactful guide to living in the town and this sense is enhanced by changes made between Shooting script and Post-production script. Scene 1/20 in the Shooting script takes place on the walk back to Lydgate’s from Farebrother’s – this is the moment when the reverend chooses to enlighten the doctor about the potential negative effect on his research plans of his voting choice for the chaplaincy. In the Post-production script scene 1/20 is subsumed into an extension of scene 1/19, so that the warning is delivered as part of their fireside chat. Farebrother’s empathy and understanding of how Middlemarch could work upon Lydgate is sensitively and intuitively delivered through the tone of Simon Chandler’s performance in this scene. This eloquently foreshadows Palmer’s view regarding how the relationship between these two characters unfolds in the novel when he asserts that:

the mutual ascription of motives and states of mind is far more successful in this case than between Lydgate and his wife. (2005, p.167)

This is voiced in the final lines of the scene where Farebrother insists that however his new friend may vote ‘I simply cannot afford to do without you, Lydgate’. While this might also be viewed as generous hyperbole on Farebrother’s part, these two definitely identify as kindred spirits.

Palmer A. (2005) ‘The Lydgate Storyworld’ in Narratology beyond Literary Criticism, ed. J. C. Meister, De Gruyter, pp.166-7

Commentary 4: Scene 1/21

In just two and a half minutes this scene introduces the television audience of Middlemarch to the Vincy family, framing Rosamond, as George Eliot does in Chapter 11, between her doting mother and her brother, Fred. Initially, Andrew Davies preserves from the novel two clear distinctions between Rosamond and Mrs Vincy in terms of manners – Rosamond cannot understand how any sophisticated home could stink of kippers this late in the day – and language, when she recommends that ‘the pick of’ is a phrase no woman of class would use. In the screen version, this distinction is perpetuated in the morning leisure activities the two women choose – Mrs Vincy is mending, while Rosamond is engaged in the more decorative occupation of painting.

When Fred arrives downstairs, he immediately provokes his sister by addressing her as ‘Rosie’ – a childish shortening of her name. This is firmly met with her correcting riposte: ‘Rosamond’. This first exchange is of Davies’ invention to show that their bantering relationship reflects nothing of a younger sister who looks up to her brother as initially is the case with Maggie and Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss or as nostalgically viewed in Eliot’s own recollections of her childhood with brother Isaac in her ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnet sequence of 1869. Rosamond is a young woman keen to have her views felt in the household. She follows her mother into the breakfast room to quiz Fred on his choice of a ‘grilled bone’ and in the rest of the scene Davies produces a pared down version of their longer banter from the novel. The crossfire of their quick exchanges is lightened in the screen version through the performances of Trevyn McDowell and Jonathan Firth. They are like modern teenagers arguing, but an affection underlies their verbal sparring. This is also conveyed in the slightly conspiratorial rolling of eyes they share as their mother insists that they must visit their Uncle Featherstone or they will never receive a legacy from him. The audience is also aware of more human contact between these three characters than in the scenes at Tipton. Furthermore, Mrs Vincy’s kiss on Fred’s cheek as he sits down to breakfast and hug for her daughter on her decision to ride to Stone Court, neither of which are given as stage directions, can also be viewed as a sign of parental indulgence that has led to these rather spoilt offspring.

Certainly the interchanges between brother and sister are more transactional in the novel with Rosamond calculating that she must pander to Fred by accompanying his ‘wheezy performance’ (Ch.11, p.154) on the flute for an hour in order that he will accompany her to Stone Court the following day.

The reworking of the location for this scene, which in the Shooting script takes place in the drawing room-cum-breakfast room at the Vincys’, was brought about by the production’s choice of a town house in Stamford which had two smaller reception rooms on its first floor. Lighting these rooms, and deciding on the camera positions, posed a challenge to experienced cinematographer, Brian Tufano. But the ‘bright high-key’ effect he creates of strong morning light pouring in to both rooms (in actuality from four powerful scissor lifts and scaffold-mounted lamps and two interior lamps bouncing light off polystyrene panels) also contributes to the characterisation of Fred and particularly Rosamond in this expositional scene. In addition, close-ups from different camera angles later allowed the director/editor choices in the cutting-room about character, point-of-view and emphasis. Once in the breakfast room, Rosamond is lit mostly from the side, enhancing both her head movements and facial expressions as she quick-wittedly delivers her lines. This lighting also successfully facilitates the transition between the two rooms that helps to give this scene its pace.

Another indication of how technical adaptive aspects of the production meld with the script to result in an overall look and produce an auto-suggestive effect on the audience is summed up by this comment from Tufano in the BBC Education pack video Screening Middlemarch:

One could say that the morning effect is in the eye of the beholder … what you do is create a bright high-key effect of bright sunlight … filtering into a room and the rest is conveyed by the fact that it was breakfast and that they talk about getting up at 10.30 in the morning and having a late start to the day.

Eliot, G. (1869) ‘Brother and Sister’ Brother and Sister by George Eliot (online-literature.com)

James, C. and Bazalgette, C. (1994) ‘Page to Screen’ in Screening Middlemarch Education pack, BBC/BFI

Tufano, B. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections, p.xx

Commentary 5: Scene 1/27

Scene 1/27 portrays the introduction of Rosamond to Lydgate which takes place at Stone Court. It comes towards the end of a scene sequence which has focussed on the Vincys and their extended family. While Andrew Davies stays close to Eliot’s depiction of this first meeting, his script imbues it with greater ambivalence, foreshadowing the way the relationship will unfold.

For instance, at the opening of the scene, Lydgate enters while Rosamond sings and plays ‘Home Sweet Home’, at Featherstone’s request. He pauses just inside the door, immediately captivated at the sight and sound of her. The choice of song is also significant: Rosamond is the epitome of that ideal of Victorian womanhood, the Angel of the Hearth, at this moment. The first page of this scene is missing from the Shooting script which means we do not know exactly when Lydgate’s initial vision of Rosamond was decided upon. But we do know that in Chapter 16 of the novel, Lydgate comments to Rosamond that he did not hear her sing at Stonecourt. The interpolation of this moment is thus deliberate on Davies’ part.

The ‘love-at-first-sight’ encounter at Stonecourt causes Rosamond to reflect at the end of Chapter 12, and this idea of being immediately smitten is embedded in Davies’ stage directions for scene 1/27. For example, of Rosamond: ‘She manages to take his hand without actually replying: she's doing it all with her eyes’, and of Lydgate: ‘He says this without taking his eyes off hers.’ They are finding it hard to avert their gaze from one another.

The cinematography echoes Davies’ focus on the couple’s reactions to each other and captures the moment when Rosamond literally and metaphorically takes the whip-hand by deciding to keep this first encounter short. With her line ‘…where is my whip…Oh’ Davies reveals Rosamond’s artifice ̶ she is actively performing the role of a maiden in distress, whereas in the novel she goes to retrieve her riding whip and Lydgate leaps forward to hand it to her. Thus, Davies implies early on the manipulative aspect of Rosamond that Eliot takes much longer to lay out for her reader. As Daniel Karlin infers, Eliot’s use of prolepsis in the metaphor of the whip is that ‘power is to be an issue in Lydgate’s relations with Rosamond, and in handing her the whip he is making a rod for his own back’ (2000, p.29). Rosamond’s pre-planning is made apparent at the end of Chapter 12 where, the narrator confides that ‘ever since that [Lydgate’s] important arrival in Middlemarch, [Rosamond] had woven a little future, of which something like this scene was the necessary beginning’ (p.176).

Rosamond’s manipulative side was certainly on Trevyn McDowell’s mind as she developed the role. In her interview, she intimated she would have preferred Rosamond to have had an inferior singing voice to signal her imperfections or to have shown her removing hair pieces as she undressed for bed and so reveal that her physical perfection is not all natural. However, this was deemed a step too far in the depiction by Anthony Page, believing it important that the learnt graces and accomplishments Rosamond has in the novel should be preserved on screen.

Eliot does, however, show that Rosamond is taken by surprise at her natural reaction to Lydgate holding her gaze as he hands over the whip ‘Rosamond blushed deeply and felt a certain astonishment.’ And whereas previously she had planned her exit ‘After that, she was really anxious to go’ (Ch.12, p.176). It is this genuine attraction that McDowell and Hodge capture in their performances, enhanced by their television history in acting as a couple, for example as Amanda and Bobby in ITV’s London’s Burning (1988). The strength of the chemistry between herself and Lydgate is something that not even Rosamond has accounted for in her plans.

Karlin, D. (2000) ‘Having the Whip-Hand in Middlemarch’ in Rereading Victorian Fiction eds. A Jenkins and J John, Palgrave MacMillan, pp.29-43

Commentary 6: Scenes 1/37-1/40

Scenes 1/37-40 of Episode 1 are dedicated to Brooke’s concern at the prospect of an offer of marriage for his niece, Casaubon’s letter, Dorothea’s acceptance and Celia’s surprise at the news. This is a condensed version of affairs compared to the novel, not only in terms of the number of individual events shown on screen but the timescale of the betrothal.

The sequence begins in scene 1/37 with Brooke’s and Dorothea’s exchange conveyed by a series of shot-reverse-shot at medium to close-up distance. Such proximity allows the audience to see the nuances of Robert Hardy’s and Juliet Aubrey’s performances, while still capturing the way that the scene’s blocking echoes and amplifies their conversation. Throughout the scene, Brooke moves back and forth between his niece and the fireplace; he, for instance, surges in to persuade her that ‘a man likes to be master, you know’. Brooke’s circumlocutionary dialogue elicits not only humour but an even more devout expression of intent in his niece, however, and he retreats before Dorothea’s placid assurance that her husband should be ‘above me in judgement, experience, knowledge’. Ultimately, Brooke and Dorothea end the scene in the same frame but, like his novel counterpart who rues how a marriage to Casaubon might end, Hardy looks dismayed.

Davies features Casaubon’s missive, too. As soon as Dorothea receives the letter from her uncle, Patrick Malahide’s whispery voiceover summons a dissolve to Casaubon’s study. The camera tracks Casaubon as he walks across his room and tightens in medium close-up as he stands in contemplation. The layering of a slowly swelling instrumental soundtrack with Malahide’s delivery of the letter in voiceover, provides a genuine sense of emotion from this most unlikely of suitors. The subsequent dissolve between the fireplace in Casaubon’s library and Dorothea’s bedroom certainly seems to emphasise the connectedness of the two at this point. The dissolve merges their physical spaces momentarily until we see Dorothea who, now dressed for bed, has evidently been reading and thinking about Casaubon’s letter all day and night. Before we cut to 1/40, she cradles the letter to her breast. It is a gesture that speaks volumes. In comparison to Eliot’s Dorothea who consistently exhibits more extreme emotion, trembling and sobbing at Casaubon’s proposal and rewriting her acceptance letter three times, Aubrey is uncomplicatedly pleased. Her eyes, Davies writes at the end of this four-scene sequence, are ‘full of joyful certainty’. Importantly, Davies’ characterisation of Dorothea is only enhanced by the adaptation’s compression of the sequence, which serves to reinforce a lack of deliberation or time for doubts.

Davies similarly resists some of Eliot’s irony. He acknowledges in a stage direction in both versions of the script that Casaubon’s declaration is ‘not much of a love letter, but [Dorothea’s] imagination can fill out all its deficiencies’, echoing closely Eliot’s wry assertion that Dorothea’s ‘faith supplied all that Mr Casaubon’s words seemed to leave unsaid’. While Eliot also describes the letter’s ‘frigid rhetoric’ being as ‘sincere as the bark of a dog’ (Ch.5, p.72), however, the simultaneous guilelessness of Aubrey’s performance and her deep, mature voice, works to sell Dorothea’s curious attachment to a man twenty-seven years her senior.

Davies’ determination to present a somewhat plausible romance is evident in the Shooting script where Casaubon is figured in a quasi-Byronic manner. In 1/39, for instance, the adaptation tracks Casaubon’s across the library before the dissolve connects his space and Dorothea’s own. In Davies’ stage directions in the Shooting script, though, we leave the same scene with a somewhat ominous image of Casaubon’s ‘black silhouette in the window’. Similarly gothic framing is also employed on his arrival to Tipton in 1/42. Casaubon’s coach approaches ‘in time with the throbbing music’ and he is filmed in profile ‘with a rather frightening black hat on.’ When Casaubon greets Dorothea in the scene, the hauteur so mocked by Eliot becomes explicitly romantic. Casaubon extends his hand to Dorothea who runs down the stairs to him and he humbles himself to reassure his fiancé that he is ‘as young in experience’ as she is. Casaubon’s Byronic aspect is significantly reduced by the time of the Post-production script, though, and his courtship visit to Tipton is excised. Perhaps Patrick Malahide’s inherent cadaverousness supplied enough gothic drama so that the production could establish the novel’s unlikely romance by other means.

Indeed, while these scenes are significant for what they reveal about Davies’ efforts to adapt Casaubon and Dorothea, they also demonstrate how he characterises the relationship between the Brooke sisters. Davies contrasts a practical Dorothea against a frivolous Celia. In the Shooting script, for instance, Dorothea is described sat at her desk, working on her plans. This action is lost in the relocation of the scene to her bedroom and the newly awake Dorothea is only described having just ‘climbed out from underneath her bedclothes’. We see instead Celia brushing her hair in a way that reinforces Davies’ earlier framing of her vanity relative to Dorothea’s denial of self-indulgences. Eliot’s characterisation of Celia is markedly different, however. In the novel, she is the practical and down-to-earth one and Dorothea the romantic (albeit her emotion is directed towards spiritual and philanthropic matters). Tellingly, in the same scene in the novel, Celia is described making a toy for the curate’s children while Dorothea’s ‘usual diligent interest in some occupation’ is lost to a silent ‘reverie’ (Ch.5, p.69) as she stares out of the window with her ‘elbow on an open book’ (Ch.5, p.68).

By removing Celia’s unravelling of her sister’s secret engagement, Davies also minimises our sense of not only her shrewdness in marriage matters (her ‘marvellous quickness’ (Ch.5, p.67)) but the extent of her opposition to the match. In combination with the compression of events described above, the simplification of Celia’s character thus leaves the way free for Dorothea’s curious attachment to, in Celia’s words, this latest ‘ugly and learned’ (Ch.5, p.67) man. Indeed, the cracks in Dorothea and Casaubon’s relationship reveal themselves without either the narrator’s or Celia’s input. Davies instead chooses to use the proposal scenes to emphasise Dorothea’s determination to marry, despite the counsel of the two people to whom she is closest – her uncle and her younger sister.

Commentary 7: Scene 1/64

Scene 1/64 depicting Dorothea and Casaubon’s engagement celebration at Tipton Grange is the first in both the novel and in Andrew Davies’ adaptation to bring together residents of Middlemarch and the local landed gentry in a social setting. In Chapter 10, George Eliot’s narrator emphasises how unusual this was for the early 1830s, commenting on Brooke’s ‘miscellaneous invitations’ and that ‘before Reform had done its notable part, there was a clearer distinction of ranks and a dimmer distinction of parties’ (Ch.10, p.132).

In his adaptation of this event, Davies enlists Mrs Cadwallader – as he does in several other scenes – as a surrogate commentator on those around her. She begins by clearly expressing the narrator’s point above in her line ‘Brooke has invited half the town as well as half the country. What a to-do!’ She is critical of his political aspirations and her sensibilities are offended by him bringing Vincy, the ribbon maker, and his wife into her social milieu.

Davies goes further, appropriating some of Lady Chettam’s lines from the novel to Mrs Cadwallader, to focalise the scene through her, a fact that supports Sarah Cardwell’s view of his adaptive ‘preoccupation with strong female characters’ over weaker ones (2005, p.115). So, it is Mrs Cadwallader who introduces Lydgate into conversation as the ‘new sawbones’ rather than Lady Chettam. And Davies’ comic putdown that she ‘can remember when medical men knew their place and kept it. With the servants’ derives from Lady Chettam’s much less acidic view that she likes ‘a medical man more on a footing with the servants; they are often all the cleverer’ (Ch.10, p.136).

Davies expertly reframes time in this scene from the plot of the novel, staging it during the day and bringing male and female characters together in a pre-dinner reception rather than, as Eliot does, have them talk after dinner - the men still in the dining room and the women in the drawing room. The visual focus is on Dorothea and Casaubon meeting their guests with the camera roving over the Vincys and Bulstrode before espying Lydgate through a gap in the crowd when Mrs Cadwallader’s commentary turns to him. There is a strong sense of Cardwell’s argument that that the camera can itself take on the role of narrator in a televisual adaptation (2005, p.116), aligning with, but also ranging beyond Mrs Cadwallader’s gimlet eye.

By narrowing the thematic focus here to matters of social rank, Davies omits the more personally critical comments from the novel, for instance that Mrs Cadwallader and Lady Chettam make about Casaubon ‘drying up faster since the engagement’ (Ch.10, p.135). (This perhaps caters to a modern viewer’s incredulity that Dorothea can be attracted to Casaubon at all.) But this omission may also be due to Davies’ decision to make this a mixed-gender party. This would certainly support the choice made between the Shooting script and the Post-production script to cut the middle-aged bachelor Chichley’s comments to Standish in which he states his preference for young Rosamond Vincy’s ‘swan neck’ over Dorothea’s ‘uncommonly fine’ figure. Chichley’s entitled chauvinism may have been thinly tolerated in the dining room among male acquaintances but would not be here in mixed company. Indeed, in the novel, Eliot’s narrator has the last word on him, implying he is all talk. When Standish jokingly encourages him to court Rosamond, Chichley shakes his head unwilling ‘to incur the certainty of being accepted by the woman he would choose’ (Ch.10, p.133).

Scene 1/64 is therefore cleverly engineered by Davies’ script and the cinematography as a prelude to the following after dinner scene – purely of the screenwriter’s invention – where Brooke speaks obtusely of reform to the assembled representatives of his prospective constituency and almost forgets to toast the happy couple.

Cardwell, S. (2005) ‘Classic novel adaptations – voice and genre’ in Andrew Davies, The Television Series, MUP, pp.111-146

Commentary 8: Scene 1/74

‘“Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts, Breathing bad air, run risk of pestilence;”’ (Ch.18, p.269)

These first three lines of Eliot’s epigraph to Chapter 18 in the novel can be read as an ironic comment on Lydgate’s situation in this chapter. His heroic ambitions and lofty principles are threatened by the ‘meaner hopes’ of his Middlemarch brethren, over the election of a paid chaplain to the new fever hospital staff. The mention of ‘bad air’ and the ‘risk of pestilence’ invokes both the genuine environmental scourge of typhus which Lydgate’s new fever hospital is founded to tackle, and the virulence of petty politics which threatens to thwart his pioneering work.

At the start of this chapter, Lydgate finds himself in a frustrating quandary over his vested interests in supporting Bulstrode’s investment in the hospital (and his evangelical preference Mr Tyke) and his valued friendship with the idiosyncratic but genial rector of St Botolph’s, Reverend Farebrother. Lydgate has no personal interest (although some political advantage) in supporting Bulstrode’s preferred appointment. Nonetheless, his fondness for Farebrother, who has been doing the job unpaid and needs the money, is tempered by his dislike of the clergyman’s gaming, for Lydgate, ‘had an ideal of life which made this subservience of conduct to the gaining of small sums thoroughly hateful to him’ (Ch.18, p.272).

Eliot’s narrator thus underlines Lydgate’s hubris and sense of entitlement, which will ultimately provoke the crisis of his marriage: ‘he had no power of imagining the part which the want of money plays in determining the actions of men.’ Such ignorance, it is made clear, is born of moral superiority; the quotidian affairs of money and the parochialism of local politics, are to prove the ingredients of his downfall. On the day of the hospital board meeting, Lydgate has the first intimations of this claustrophobia, ‘feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity’ (Ch.18, p.274) and acknowledging surprise that at the ‘very outset’ of his project he found himself ‘in the grasp of petty alternatives, each of which was repugnant to him’ (Ch.18, p.275).

Although Andrew Davies reduces the number of board members considerably (Eliot has a biblical twelve around her table without Lydgate), his script adheres closely to Eliot’s own dramatically astute dialogue in scene 1/74, and the minor word changes between the Shooting script and the final production are inconsequential. The outcome is also the same: Tyke becomes chaplain and Lydgate is left disgruntled:

He was really uncertain whether Tyke were not the more suitable candidate, and yet his consciousness told him that if he had been quite free from indirect bias he should have voted for Mr Farebrother. The affair of the chaplaincy remained a sore point in his memory as a case in which this petty medium of Middlemarch had been too strong for him. (Ch.18, p.285)

Andrew Davies’ closing stage direction is more blunt: ‘He’s furious ̶ and now he’s not at all sure he’s voted the right way, even. Somehow, he’s been mugged'.

Perhaps the most significant difference in this scene between the Shooting script and the final production is its repositioning. The Shooting script retains the novel’s sequencing, leaving the newly-wed Mr and Mrs Casaubon to their continental honeymoon while focusing on the Lydgate-Vincy plot in Middlemarch across Chapters 11-18 (which corresponds to scenes 1/68-1/74). However, a decision was taken (possibly as late as the editing stage of post-production), to end Episode 1 with scene 1/74 and Lydgate’s humiliation, bringing the first half of the Rome scenes (1/75-1/83 covering the Casaubons’ first excursion to the gallery and Naumann and Ladislaw’s discovery) forward, and inserting them between 1/72 (Lydgate at his studies in his lodgings) and 1/74. This change serves two functions it seems. First, it reminds the viewer who might have settled in to life in Middlemarch that all this while the Casaubons are in Rome. Secondly, it book-ends neatly the first episode with Lydgate’s learning curve (from his triumphant ‘The Future!’ on arrival to ‘somehow, he’s been mugged’) and brings it to a more dramatic end.

Commentary 9: Scenes 1/83-1/84

The scenes filmed on location in Rome constituted the first stage of the 8-month Middlemarch shoot, commencing in January 1993. Filming in Rome was constrained both by problems with permissions and costs, according to Production Manager, Julie Edwards. As a consequence, some of the scenes written in the Shooting script (1/80-82) were cut. Scene 1/79 was also edited significantly. Originally, it saw the newly-wed Casaubons exiting ‘a beautiful church’ and Dorothea observing fervently that ‘the Christ-child was so very like a real baby’. Davies’ stage directions note: ‘A bit of biology operating there, not just art-appreciation. The happy baby, the young woman holding him, the young woman looking at the picture’. Such opportunities for visual symbolism, Davies records, were part of an effort to make Rome seem ‘shockingly Italian to them… all these classical sculptures’ (Davies 1993, p.108). In particular, he was keen ‘to see them going past all those great fountains with intertwined nymphs on fawns all glossy and gleaming… but we never quite got any of that fountain imagery’ (Davies 1993, p.109).

In the Post-production script some of what might have been lost in potent symbolism is made up for in terse dialogue which reinforces both Causabon’s efforts to indulge his young wife and their mutual boredom. The museums are altered – the Campidoglio becomes the Palazzo Doria Pamphili. And the moment at which Casaubon abandons her (for the Capitoline library and to the prurient gaze of artistic onlookers), is transformed from ‘some masterpiece’ to ‘a statue of Cupid and Venus’ which catches her eye while Casaubon extemporises upon a statue of the naked Apollo. In the scene as filmed, Juliet Aubrey actually wanders out of frame as he speaks. This is just one example of what Jakob Lothe identifies as ‘film’s capacity for ironic presentation’ (2006, p.189) which mimics authorial commentary by implicitly belitting Casaubon. Yet in the novel, Dorothea encounters these works alone or ‘with Tantripp and their experienced courier’ (Ch.19, p.295).

The short Chapter 19 sets the scene in Rome, foregrounds the importance of the burgeoning German Romanticism and its infusion of Rome’s classical iconography with the potency of personal epiphany, and stages Naumann and Ladislaw’s discovery of ‘a breathing, blooming girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish grey drapery’ (Ch.19, p. 288). In the adaptation she becomes, for Naumann, the Madonna, and is dressed appropriately in blue, with a distinct halo effect created by the lining of her hat brim. This is invention, but certainly a more obvious icon for a late twentieth-century audience. Whilst in the novel Naumann interprets her ‘as a sort of Christian Antigone’ (Ch.19, p.290) informed by the pagan associations of Ariadne/Cleopatra, the costume designer, Anushia Nieradzik, achieves in Aubrey’s hat something of ‘the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair’ (Ch.19, p.288).

The couple’s estrangement is described further in Chapter 20 when, two hours after being discovered by Naumann and Ladislaw, Dorothea is back at her apartment ‘sobbing bitterly’ (Ch.20, p.294). Exposure to the art treasures of Rome has had a profound effect: ‘Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense’ (Ch.20, pp.296-7). And, reflecting on her married state, she finds herself ‘in an interval when the very force of her nature heightened its confusion’ (Ch.20, p.298). Casaubon’s failed efforts to entertain his wife in Rome, their first argument about his work, and those events leading up to her discovery by Naumann and Ladislaw are then related by Eliot as a sort of narrative flashback to complete Chapter 20, which concludes:

She did not really see the streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw the statues: she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highroads; and feeling that the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as it had been (Ch.20, p. 311).

Davies, A. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections, UK, pp.25-6

Lothe. J. (2006) 'Narrative Vision in Middlemarch: the novel compared with the television adaptation' in Middlemarch in the BBC Twenty-First Century, ed. K Chase, OUP

Commentary 10: Scene 2/1

Originally conceived as the opening to Episode 2, scene 2/1 in the Post-production script - depicting the dedication of the new Fever Hospital – is positioned between the intense, early revelatory scenes of Dorothea and Casaubon’s honeymoon in Rome and those that follow the couple to Naumann’s studio. Had it remained the opening scene, 2/1 might have appeared as a none-too-subtle recap for the television audience of key figures and issues in bustling Middlemarch. Situated as it finally was, this scene presents the sunny optimism of a town that is expanding and looking to provide better amenities for its residents, as opposed to the darker preceding scenes of emotional repression and frustration in Rome.

Another of Davies’ pure inventions for the adaptation – this scene brings together several social strata from Town and Country. These range from the landed Lord and Lady Medlicote (only ever mentioned in passing in the novel) to Bulstrode the banker and financier of the hospital, Mr Vincy the ribbon manufacturer presiding as mayor, the Vincy ladies, Brooke and Dr Lydgate down to Farebrother (the rejected former chaplain) and the coarse lawyer and town clerk Hawley. Davies involves many of these in the dialogue to remind viewers of the context of social reform, Lydgate’s status as medical officer and Tyke’s chaplaincy at the new hospital. The mise-en-scène is carefully framed so that the crowd outside the Stamford residence used for this scene (Barn Hill House) appears larger than it was on the location set. Several carriages are drawn up front-right, and the left-hand side is taken up by the raised dias from which Vincy delivers his welcoming speech. Behind him, acting as a surtitle for the whole scene and a reminder of its location, is a banner-like backdrop on which Production designer, Gerry Scott produced lettering that reads ‘Middlemarch Fever Hospital’.

The pervading atmosphere at the start of the scene is aspirational. One camera shot with Lydgate in the foreground (‘prominent…handsome and confident’ SS p.2/1) and the Medlicotes standing above him (‘patrician and toffee nosed, SS p.2/1), frames them all looking up at Vincy. He basks in the honour of his mayoral duties, while Mrs Vincy observes with pride and, when he mentions Lydgate’s name, Rosamond thinks ‘my hero’. This atmosphere changes with the input of two hecklers: Brooke with his benign but amusingly persistent vocal support for reform and Hawley with his more aggravated grumblings about Tyke’s recent appointment as chaplain. The latter reminds the audience that although everything looks bright for Lydgate in this scene, at the end of Episode 1 he compromised his principles by voting for Tyke and siding with Bulstrode.

The number of interjections by Brooke increases between the Shooting script and the Post-production script showing his lack of delicacy - undermining Vincy’s authority over the dedication ceremony and reminding the viewer of his intentions to venture into local politics. While Brooke brings a comic element to the scene embarrassing himself by wittering away as Lady Medlicote goes to unveil the plaque, these interruptions also chime with Susie Conklin’s comment that Robert Hardy would often lobby both her or director Anthony Page for more lines with suggestions like ‘If I said such-and-such, just that line in the book where…” (Conklin 2022, p.13)

Scene 2/1 was shot on the morning of 6 July 1993, a sunny day that showed off the bright freshly cleaned façade of Barn Hill House, convincingly selling itself as a new-build Fever Hospital of 1830. This was part of the boon that Stamford proved to be as the location for Middlemarch. Anthony Page reveals that ‘once we’d found Stamford …everything else seemed to fall into place… there were big areas that weren’t spoiled… I mean big areas that looked like a town lived in at that point’ (Page 1993, pp.25-6). This authenticity not only contributes to the visual aesthetic of the whole production but also contrasts strongly with the purposely dowdy décor of some of the country house settings and the rather forbidding and cold antiquity of the honeymoon scenes in Rome which sit either side of this sunlit scene in Middlemarch.

The end of the Shooting script is trimmed from the Post-production script, losing the Brooke’s comment to Lydgate that the hospital is ‘the kind of thing’ his niece Dorothea ‘wants to see everywhere’, along with Lydgate being buttonholed and Bulstrode who asks him to ‘step this way for a moment’. This ending originally acted as a link to the wedding journey scenes in Rome that precede 2/1 in the onscreen version and so there is no need for the reminder for the audience of Dorothea and Casaubon.

Conklin, S. (2022) original interview conducted by Lucy Hobbs and Justin Smith via Zoom, 3 February 2022, for 'Transforming Middlemarch' project, De Montfort University Special Collections, UK, p.13

Page, A. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections, UK, pp.25-6

Commentary 11: Scenes 2/2-2/4

Episode 2 opens in Rome, with Ladislaw sketching outside the Casaubons' apartment, then the short, sad bedroom scene (previously scene 1/86) and the following morning’s argument (1/87). The visit of Ladislaw to Dorothea alone (2/4) and Casaubon’s subsequent jealous rebuke (2/8), are divided from the Naumann studio scenes by the Fever Hospital opening (2/1). This alteration in sequencing from the Shooting script does not require the viewer to recall the cause of Dorothea’s unhappiness from the previous episode. In fact, the short scene (2/3) of Dorothea sobbing on her bed, interrupted by Tantripp, the maid, presenting Ladislaw’s calling card, is omitted from the final production altogether. This is significant, since the corresponding Chapter 20 in the novel uses Dorothea’s solitary tears as a bridging device, whose cause is then explained as the argument with Casaubon, following which they go ahead with a planned visit the museum where Naumann and Ladislaw observe Dorothea – a scene which has been established first in Chapter 19. Chapter 21 begins by explaining ‘It was in that way Dorothea came to be sobbing as soon as she was securely alone’ (Ch.21, p.312). This passage of non-sequential narration, involving an effective ‘flashback’, not only interiorises Dorothea’s unhappiness, but structures her experience in Rome melodramatically, as a sort of emotional maelstrom in which cause and effect are in turmoil.

Andrew Davies reorders events: the argument takes place on the morning following their visit to the museum and is preceded by the invented night scenes (1/85-6). And he elides Dorothea’s private grief altogether. So when Ladislaw calls on her, the screenwriter originally suggested, ‘I think we might start with silence. He fancies her even more than when he first saw her, and is intrigued to see she’s been crying’ (Shooting script, 2/4). This echoes the novel precisely: ‘The signs of girlish sorrow in her face were only the more striking’ (Ch.21, p.313), but this was cut. Indeed, the Post-production script eschews fulsome stage directions and the exchanges are more matter-of-fact, suppressing the feelings of both characters. They are physically remote in the spacious apartment and Ladislaw remains standing despite Dorothea asking him to sit down. In the Shooting script they are both seated throughout this scene, implying greater intimacy. And although Ladislaw’s criticism of Casaubon pains her, it also convinces her. She ends: ‘Oh, how I wish I had learnt German when I was at Lausanne! Then I could have been of use! Oh, poor, poor Edward!’ In the novel Dorothea invites Ladislaw to dine with them; some of her responses to art are transposed to scene 2/11 (for example, ‘in Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures’ (Ch.21, p.317)); finally, Casaubon returns before Will’s departure. The clandestine, though more restrained, nature of their encounter is thus emphasised more strongly in the adaptation, and is reinforced by Casaubon’s clear disapproval at its discovery in scene 2/8: ‘You received him in my absence?’.

In between, the cause of his own pent-up frustration is revealed in scene 2/5. Here, as Jakob Lothe notes, Davies employs Dorothea’s voice-over as an antagonism which haunts the despondent Casaubon alone amidst his books in the Vatican library, serving to condemn his fruitless labours: ‘Because her voice is audible as voice-over only, it acquires a narrative authority comparable to that of the novel’s third-person narrator, Lothe suggests (2006, p.189). This is a significant change from the same scene in the Shooting script where a stage direction indicates, ‘we start hearing whispers in Latin and Hebrew and English and contemptuous German - not clear, overlapping, defying sense and pattern, and the paper [before him] blurs, and he claps his hands over his ears and hunches over his desk with his hands over his head as if protecting himself from a rain of blows’. This interior soundscape is one non-realist technique Davies originally intended using more widely (amongst Middlemarch gossipers for example), but which wasn’t adopted (see Davies 1993, pp.104-5).

Davies, A. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections, UK pp.104-5

Lothe. J. (2006) 'Narrative Vision in Middlemarch: the novel compared with the television adaptation' in Middlemarch in the BBC Twenty-First Century, ed. K Chase, OUP

Commentary 12: Scene 2/9-2/12

Chapter 22 of the novel begins ‘Will Ladislaw was delightfully agreeable at dinner the next day, and gave no opportunity for Mr Casaubon to show disapprobation’ (p.324). This not only reassures Dorothea, but encourages Casaubon to accept cordially his young cousin’s direct invitation to visit the artists’ studios, as ‘his labours in the Library would be suspended for a couple of days’ (p.325).

In scene 2/8, the discovery of Ladislaw’s visit in his absence adds jealousy to the self-doubts Casaubon has experienced at the library. Yet he acquiesces to Dorothea’s report of Will’s invitation to visit some of ‘the religious painters here’. There follows her entreaty for forgiveness (for their argument that morning), and his meagre repost: ‘who with repentance is not satisfied, is not of heaven nor earth.’ In such a short exchange this range of emotional colours requires dexterity from the actors since both characters are suffering inner turmoil. Recalling the significant omission of Dorothea’s tears from the final production, the scene’s concluding stage directions differ somewhat: ‘It's so much less than she hoped for, it's all she can do not to sob her heart out for the second time in a day’ (SS, p.2/14); ‘His uneasy little smile, he's terrified of intimacy. She is clearly upset’ (PP, p.2/14). Once more, Dorothea’s emotional temperature is dialled down in the drama as screened, while Casaubon is required to express much from very little. What we lose from the novel’s dinner scene is Ladislaw’s exploitation of the couple’s disharmony for his own desires.

>Casaubon’s austerity is punished with mockery, however, at Naumann’s studio. Dramatic irony is the order of the day, in novel and screenplay alike. Yet it is staged differently in each. The whole episode in the novel occupies Chapter 22 which comprises four scenes: Will dining at the Casaubons’ apartment, their both sitting for Naumann at his studio, Ladislaw and Naumann’s reflections on the day the same evening, and Ladislaw’s subsequent visit to Dorothea alone. Andrew Davies skilfully conflates these separate elements into a series of staged vignettes achieved through theatrical juxtaposition and cinematic elision.

To begin with, the understanding between Ladislaw and Naumann is altered slightly. In the novel Naumann is a precocious and manipulative flatterer who easily gains the confidence of the Casaubons, much to Ladislaw’s indignance: ‘All this was impudence and desecration, and he repented that he had brought her’ (Ch.22, p.331). The narrator confides: ‘I will not dwell on Naumann's jokes at the expense of Mr Casaubon that evening, or on his dithyrambs about Dorothea's charm, in all which Will joined, but with a difference… Will got exasperated at his presumption: there was grossness in his choice of the most ordinary words, and what business had he to talk of her lips? She was not a woman to be spoken of as other women were’ (Ch.22, p.332). Yet Andrew Davies grants Ladislaw greater agency in this elaborate charade: Naumann ‘catches the eye of Ladislaw, who has arranged all this to his own satisfaction’ (SS, p.2/16). And he reduces Will’s thinly-veiled adoration of Dorothea, into something more like cool detachment. Indeed, it is Ladislaw who, while Naumann detains Casaubon to sit for him, engineers Dorothea’s removal to the balcony where he can talk to her alone.

The focus thence moves back and forth between the artist’s studio interior and the balcony in Chekovian manner, scene 2/11 being split in two in the Post-production script. Will and Dorothea talk more about the art of Rome (lifted from Chapter 21), she seeks his opinion on the cameos bought for Celia, and she reconfirms her anxiety about Will’s critique of her husband’s work (taken from Will’s second visit to Dorothea’s apartment in the final scene of Chapter 22). What these exchanges achieve in economy and compression, they lose in feeling with regard to Dorothea’s palpable distress as her faith in her husband begins to falter, and to Ladislaw’s romantic frustration (trying to win her affection by attacking Casaubon).

Finally, while in the novel both Dorothea and Casaubon agree to sit for Naumann openly – she as St. Clara ̶ the screenplay pulls off a beautiful visual joke which only film can achieve. For while sketching Casaubon’s head for St. Thomas Aquinas – posing with a skull - Naumann is also capturing Dorothea’s portrait unawares. As Lothe notes, ‘This exposure of Casaubon’s ignorance is an illustrative example of film’s capacity for ironic presentation: left in the dark by Naumann, whose real interest is in Dorothea, Casaubon fails to see that while being sketched he is actually being mocked. Responding to a significant feature of the literary text, the adaptation elegantly displays the contrast between seeing in a purely literal sense and seeing what is going on in a much larger sense. Casaubon fails on both counts’ (2006, p.189). And this is a fitting substitute for Eliot’s sardonic narration.

Lothe, J. (2006) 'Narrative Vision in Middlemarch: the novel compared with the television adaptation' in Middlemarch in the BBC Twenty-First Century, ed. K Chase, OUP

Commentary 13: Scenes 2/20-21A and 2/37

A pair of scenes in the first half of Episode 2, exemplify several of Andrew Davies’ core adaptive techniques with extraordinary economy. Both focalise Mary Garth whom the audience first meets in scene 1/27 at Stone Court and whose measured affection for Fred Vincy is revealed there. But in scenes 2/20-21A and scene 2/37, Davies depicts visits from the rival suitors for Mary’s hand – Fred Vincy and Rev Farebrother. These parallel scenes both take place in the hallway at Stone Court as Mary snatches time with each of them between caring for old Peter Featherstone.

Davies takes two incidents from Chapter 25 of the novel and conflates them to make scenes 2/20-21A where Mary ruefully counts out the money she must sacrifice from her savings to pay the balance of Fred’s debt, which her father has underwritten and Fred has failed to repay, and then upbraids him about his unthinking behaviour. In the novel Fred visits to confess his shame to Mary about this conduct and afterwards Caleb Garth arrives to collect the money for the debt.

By contrast scene 2/37, where Farebrother visits Mary ostensibly to let her know that Fred is now recovering from typhoid, is entirely of Davies’ invention. In Chapter 31, Fred instead goes to stay at Stone Court to recuperate from his illness, accompanied by Mrs Vincy who wishes to avoid Mary and Fred spending too much time together unchaperoned.

The fact that both scenes take place in a liminal location at Stone Court (Hall, SS, p.2/36; ‘Stairs/hall’, SS, p.2/60) is the screenwriter’s means of showing that Mary’s role is rather unusual in the household, being neither a servant nor a family member. So, if she has spare time, she sits in the hallway, primed to be at Featherstone’s beck and call. In the novel Fred finds her reading in the ‘wainscoted parlour’ (Ch.25, p.254). In the adaptation, at the end of their talk, Featherstone shouts for her to come upstairs, wondering ‘What the devil are you at, girl?’ Similarly at the start of scene 2/37, Mary is hurrying downstairs with a tray from Featherstone’s chamber and can only stop to speak with Farebrother because the old man has refused to see the reverend. Production manager Julie Edwards’ interview reveals that the location for Stone Court (Stragglethorpe Hall, 12 miles south of Lincoln) was a private residence and so only a reception room (‘The parlour, a big room with a low ceiling, dim because of the small windows’, SS, p.1/46) and a bedroom (‘Featherstone’s bedroom’, SS, p.1/89 et alia) would have been available for shooting (Edwards 2022, p.21). It is unlikely then that Mary could have been visited in the kitchen for example, or that there was a ‘wainscoted’ parlour. This hallway is also a public space where it would have been more conventionally acceptable in a Victorian setting for Mary to pass the time with a visiting bachelor.

In fact, Mary’s conversations with both Fred and Farebrother concern highly personal matters. Fred is at pains to gain Mary’s assurance that she does not hate him for placing her family under financial pressure. Mary’s balanced response, that on the one hand she ‘could never hate’ him, but on the other his behaviour means she could never respect him and she can never marry a man she does not respect, supports A G Bradley’s assertion that the Garth family lie at the moral centre of the narrative, representing Eliot’s ‘locus for values’ (1975, p.49) in the novel. Mary, unlike all the other the youthful protagonists, has received solid, responsible and sustained parenting and this is reflected in her own attitudes. In his interview for the Screening Middlemarch study pack, Davies admits that the character of Mary ‘always rather got up my nose’ (Davies 1993, p.117) and he found ‘writing’ her a challenge. In shaping her dialogue, he attempted to create ‘a kind of subtext’ running beneath her statements to Fred that ‘I won’t speak to you, I won’t see you, I won’t marry you until you reform’, that said plaintively but ‘I love you, I love you’. He was only sure that this had worked when he witnessed Rachel Power’s sincere interpretation of the part which meant ‘you don’t think she’s all goody, goody, you just think… what a lovely person, I hope it all goes right for her’ (Davies 1993, p.118).

The empathy for Mary that grows in the audience matches her sympathy for both Fred and for Farebrother. In scene 2/37, Davies makes her quick to reassure the reverend with ‘You know I have’ when he asks if she has time to spare him. Power’s Mary is also more knowing than Davies’ final stage direction assumes. This maintains of Farebrother’s arch comment that he bests Fred in every game ‘Except one, perhaps’ and that Mary does not think of him as a suitor ‘so that he can make a remark like that without her getting it’ (SS, p.2/61). Yet Power’s wistful and sympathetic direct gaze begs to differ. It leaves the audience wondering if Camden Farebrother might yet have chance with her, and demonstrates that her shrewd understanding of Fred’s errant nature extends to her mature responses to other men.

Mary’s theme music is also representative of her identity. As composer Chris Gunning explains: a ‘recorder plays the tune’ poignantly ‘accompanied by a little string orchestra’ that speaks of a pastoral tradition and of honesty (Gunning 1993, p.19). In terms of the architecture of the episode, Davies brackets this pair of scenes around some significant plot lines, including the Casaubons’ return from Rome, and scene 2/21A heralding the onset of Fred’s illness (depicted onscreen by his pale and perspiring face) while scene 2/37 brings Mary news of his recovery. The bookending effect of these two hallway scenes is successful in introducing the lengthy negotiation that will take place over Mary’s hand, and their almost identical staging invites the viewer to compare and contrast her options.

Bradley, A. G. (1975) ‘Family as Pastoral: The Garths in Middlemarch’ in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 6:4, pp.41-51, University of Calgary

Davies, A. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections, p.118

Edwards, J. (2022) unpublished interview transcript, Papers of AHRC project: Transforming Middlemarch, De Montfort University, Special Collections UK, (D/104), p.21

Gunning, C. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections, p.19

Commentary 14: Scene 2/45

Scene 2/45 of Episode 2 depicts a meeting between Bulstrode and Lydgate outside the hospital. Walking through the streets of Middlemarch, Bulstrode questions the doctor’s intentions towards his niece, Rosamond. When Lydgate professes surprise at the question and answers nothing more than a ‘pleasant acquaintanceship’, Bulstrode advises him to moderate his attentions so that Rosamond’s other suitors have a chance of winning her affection.

This exchange is noteworthy because, although the scene is an invention of Davies’, it clearly coalesces existing strands within the novel including the gossip circulating about Lydgate and Rosamond, Mrs Bulstrode’s opposition to the union and Mr Bulstrode and Lydgate’s own murky relationship. Indeed, Bulstrode’s remarks echo closely that of his wife’s in the novel when she reminds Lydgate that his presence in Rosamond’s life ‘militate very much against a girl’s making a desirable settlement in life and prevent her from accepting offers even if they are made’ (Ch.31, p.39). In the novel as in the television series, Lydgate is annoyed (‘fuming’ (Ch.31, p. 40)) by the Bulstrodes’ comments but Davies’ swap of Harriet for Nicholas lends the exchange a distinctly different tenor. While for Davies, Harriet is ‘kindly but inexorable’, her husband is repeatedly described as ‘sinister’ (2/44) and the tones of their dialogue with Lydgate are appropriately distinct. Although Mrs Bulstrode’s actions in the novel, which have an ‘unmistakable purpose of warning, if not of rebuke’ (Ch.31, p.39), seem intended to protect her niece, there is a deliberately ominous note to Mr Bulstrode’s cautions in the television series.

The question remains, then, why attribute Harriet Bulstrode’s interventions to her husband when her opposition to the union is already apparent in 2/44 in counselling Rosamond that she is in ‘no position to marry a poor man’? Adaptive economy may be one answer. A conversation between Mr Bulstrode and Lydgate could require less narrative contrivance because it can be occasioned by their joint venture: the hospital. The ‘walk-and-talk’ structure also offers an exterior sequence which breaks up a run of indoor scenes and reinforces the sense of place. By comparison, in the novel Lydgate and Mrs Bulstrode talk at a party and Episode 2 already depicts one such social gathering.

But more than this, it is expedient to maintain Mr Bulstrode’s narrative importance at this relatively early point in the series. Doing so helps seed his later downfall, while still conveying a sense of the couple’s connection to the rest of Middlemarch; a connection that is, of course, placed under great strain by the novel’s end and eventually broken. Davies’ edits between the Shooting script and the Post-production script certainly demonstrate the importance of framing this moment to serve both Bulstrode’s character arc and Lydgate’s. The Post-production script cuts the conversation to end on Bulstrode’s unsettling comment that he hoped Lydgate would ‘avoid a painful misunderstanding’ rather than the Shooting script’s more convivial, ‘Thank you, Dr. Lydgate. I am grateful to you’.

Davies’ adaptation emphasises the unsavoury nature of Bulstrode’s relationship with Lydgate, via a Chorus-like group of gossips who gather in the background during the climax of the scene. Their scrutiny combines palpably with Bulstrode’s menacing reminder that Lydgate is obligated to him (‘I have already been of some assistance to you?’). Douglas Hodge looks intensely discomfited and Peter Jeffrey, as appropriately and quietly sinister as Davies imagined.

The novel, of course, makes it similarly clear that Lydgate attracts speculation. The narrator wryly informs us that it is no more possible to find ‘social isolation’ in Middlemarch ‘than elsewhere’ and Lydgate’s ‘agreeable holiday freedom’ (Ch.31, p.32) inevitably falters against the community’s effective gossip networks. Eliot’s expansive writing allows her to move from individual to individual so that we gain new angles on the Bulstrodes and Lydgate in turn and steadily realises the way his flirtation has been promulgated through ‘innuendo’ (Ch.31, p.40) by characters like Mrs Plymdale or Mr Farebrother. Davies encountered difficulties adapting this fairly ephemeral quality of the novel, however. He explained that while he employed some non-realist devices like voiceovers for memories, he was not supported in developing more ‘stylistic’ concepts like an embodied sense of gossip as a Chorus of ‘overlapping voices’ that created a ‘sense of […] malevolent deadening’ (Davies 1993, p.104). For Davies, gossip is inherently malevolent; the examples he offers of the kind of murmurings one would hear include ‘nothing came of him’; ‘stuck up’ and a threatening, ‘bring em down to our level’ (Davies 1993 p.105).

The series’ depiction of Middlemarch as a town of swirling gossip is perhaps less stylistically radical than Davies might have hoped, but arguably no less pervasive within the realist terms set by the novel and echoed in the adaptation. The gossiping women who stand between Lydgate and Bulstrode, for example, are an effective visual metaphor for the way both men are hostage to the court of public opinion in Middlemarch. Davies’ shift from wife to husband therefore foreshadows the cost of Lydgate’s entanglement with both the Vincys and the Bulstrodes, at a moment when — ironically — he disavows the possibility of marriage. By creating a new and, importantly, public opportunity for gossip, Davies simultaneously makes Rosamond’s and Lydgate’s eventual union even more inexplicable, and he ensures that the audience are increasingly aware of the stakes of joining this family.

Davies, A. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections, pp.104-5

Commentary 15: Scenes 2/48-2/51

The sequence of scenes at Lowick (scenes 2/46-2/51), following the Casaubons’ return from Rome which culminate in Rev Casaubon’s first seizure, are a model of Andrew Davies’ adaptive economy and concision. Whilst the key scenes - the couple’s argument occasioned by the receipt of Ladislaw’s letters and the seizure itself (scenes 2/49-2/51) - are themselves dramatised in dialogue in the novel, much of the rest of what Davies animates here is filleted from longer descriptive passages in the source. And there is another significance difference. In the novel Celia and Chettam are frequent visitors and are on hand shortly after Casaubon’s collapse; in Davies’ script Dorothea is isolated and deals with the incident alone.

This commentary will commence with scene 2/48 as Dorothea descends the main wooden staircase at Lowick, her leaden footsteps sounding on the bare boards. The stairway is illuminated by shafts of light through the windows above, suggesting the bright world outside this sombre, panelled interior. She is descending from the light to the shadowy hallway beneath. She pauses at the stairs’ turn and looks apprehensively towards the library door. At the bottom she pauses again, looking down to check the copywork she is about to present for her husband’s judgement. Her chestnut brown dress causes her figure to be absorbed visually into the wood-panelled background; her face alone is illuminated. The end of scene 2/48 cuts to Casaubon in his study, books and papers on the desk before him, looking sideways down and left towards the camera at an open letter at the bottom of the frame. The stage directions indicate only that he is ‘deep in thought’. But to this Patrick Malahide adds two significant further gestures in the seven-second shot before we cut back to Dorothea’s apprehensive approach to the library door: ‘It's an effort to make herself turn the handle and go in.’ He looks up and towards the light source (we assume the window), raises his right hand to his temple and a pained expression furrows his brow, as if he cannot face the challenge the light brings from the outside world.

It is not difficult (for George Eliot or Andrew Davies) to portray Casaubon’s faults; it is much more difficult to elicit our sympathy for him. That series of Malahide’s mute expressions of introspection and anxiety must work to convey Casaubon’s entire, troubled emotional state as effectively as the previous scene between Dorothea and Tantripp has done for his young wife. Director, Anthony Page conveyed in interview something of the challenges the production encountered in respect of Casaubon’s inner life:

he was someone who wanted to believe and wanted other people to believe that he was a genius and as soon as he let someone into his life that saw that he wasn’t his whole support mechanism crumbles because he can’t really kid himself any longer and in some ways she kills him. … We did have to in the scenes, the scripting and the acting adjust continually to try and find a way to express that (Page 1993, p.65).

Casaubon’s unease on this occasion has both general and particular causes. Generally, as Page describes, he has realised that acquiring a helpmate in marriage to achieve his scholarly ambitions has backfired, and his wife’s interfering presence has become a constant reminder of his own intellectual bankruptcy. This situation is compounded by his inability to accommodate any of the other, more conventional pleasures of married life. Specifically, his disturbance is figured in the spectre of Will Ladislaw, whose letter announcing his intention to return to Middlemarch revives his jealousy (from Rome) of this young man’s sway over his wife’s affections, and the effect he has had already in undermining Dorothea’s belief in her husband’s academic enterprise.

The scene begins from Casaubon’s perspective with Dorothea venturing a series of proposals with the intention of pleasing her husband: returning the finished copying, offering to read to him, proposing a walk or a drive, suggesting she helps by copying selected passages from his notebooks, enquiring if he has received feedback on his article on the Etruscan mysteries. These ventures, of Andrew Davies’ invention, are each rebuffed brusquely as she moves behind him and we progress to a reverse shot of Casaubon (still seated) from his left and Dorothea standing behind him at her desk. At this point he holds out (without looking at her) the letter to her from Will Ladislaw. The stage directions indicate: ‘He holds it as if it's full of germs. But she doesn't notice, getting a letter is a rare event, she's quite excited’ (PP, p.2/53). She takes the letter eagerly and sits at her own desk to read; they are seated, tellingly, back-to-back.

The exchange which ensues is taken almost verbatim from the novel – Casaubon’s bitter insistence upon protection ‘from guests whose desultory vivacity makes their presence a fatigue!!’ and Dorothea’s rapier retorts: ‘Edward, why do you think I should wish for anything that would annoy you? When have I ever consulted my own pleasure before yours?’ These are framed in intercut eyeline-matched medium close-ups of their direct engagement in ferocious battle. For the first time, Dorothea gives as good as she gets. Yet the dramatisation preserves sympathy for Dorothea, by removing the boldest charge from her speech: ‘You speak to me as if I were something you had to contend against’ (Ch.29, p.16). In the adaptation this is as self-evident, dramatically, as it is true. The effect on Casaubon, in both cases, is shock which he barely contains. Significantly, Davies indicates, ‘Only his trembling hands give him away’ (PP 2/54).

Whilst in the novel Dorothea remains in the library, in the dramatisation she withdraws in high dudgeon.‘As she is about to go upstairs, we hear a crash, as of a chair falling over. She turns and runs back to the library’ (PP, p.2/55). Here the musical score intervenes melodramatically: heavy, pulsing bass strings with sweeping cellos striding up and down minor arpeggios. As composer Chris Gunning remarked, ‘from episode two onwards, when you see his uncertainty for instance in the library, that’s where the really dark colours start up [and] the musical colours become darker and darker as he becomes more and more doom-laden’ (Gunning 1993, p.8). scene 2/51 as shot suggests some different ways were tried in rehearsal of presenting Dorothea’s ministrations to her husband, prone against the library steps. Dorothea’s line from the Shooting script ‘Edward, what is it my love?’ is cut. Then after ‘Lean on me, dear’, she was originally required to take ‘his not inconsiderable weight, gets his arm over her shoulder, and half drags, half carries him to a couch’. Onscreen this was jettisoned in favour of her feverish fingers (trembling hands again) fumbling to loosen his neckerchief, accompanied by some ad lib enquiries as to his state. Another significant line of Davies’ original dialogue is cut: ‘Oh, Edward, I'm sorry.’ Whilst her feelings of guilt emerge from subsequent scenes, it was surely right to remove from this one such an immediate and blunt admission of responsibility.

Gunning, C. (1993), unpublished interview for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections, p.8

Page, A. (1993), unpublished interview for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections, p.65

Commentary 16: Scene 2/71

Scene 2/71 forms the climax of Episode 2. After Lydgate attends to the failing Featherstone at Stone Court, he agrees to return home for Mrs Vincy in order to fetch her husband. Forgetting that Mr Vincy is at the factory, his arrival at the Vincy home is announced to a confused and upset Rosamond. Moved by her tears, Lydgate embraces Rosamond, kisses her face and admits that he cares for her ‘more than anyone’ before declaring, ‘I want you to be my wife.’ The episode fades to black.

Although the proposal closes the second episode of the series, it was not always so. The Shooting script reveals that original plans for the adaptation gave Brooke the last words. The earlier iteration of the episode ends instead with Brooke’s invitation to Ladislaw, delivered partly in voiceover, as he drafts his letter and ‘scribbles his final salutation and signature in high spirits’ (SS 2/73). Intriguingly, these earlier plans for the episode would have neatly bookended what — by the time of the Post-production script — becomes an opening focus in this episode on Dorothea and Casaubon’s already failing marriage on their honeymoon in Rome. Indeed, as early as 2/8 Davies’ stage directions note that Casaubon feels ‘jealous and threatened’ by his young cousin and Brooke’s letter sets in place a sequence of events that ends with the devastating proscription in Casaubon’s will. However, while the love triangle between Casaubon, Dorothea and Ladislaw is thus clearly important to Davies, his annotations on Shooting script page 2/54, reveal his greater determination (‘I am sure’) to end the episode on Rosamond and Lydgate’s proposal. Interestingly, a similar change occurred in the development of Episode 1 (see Commentary 8 . It, too, was originally going to end with a focus on Casaubon’s and Dorothea’s relationship but this was changed to Lydgate’s vote for Tyke and his first humiliation by the Middlemarchers. This tendency perhaps indicates the more readily relatable quality of Lydgate and Rosamond for Davies. Davies utilises these two characters — and their relationship with one another — to generate the kind of dramatic moments needed to encourage viewership across multiple episodes and, having achieved this, Dorothea’s story then gains more precedence in the adaptation’s later ordering of endings.

Certainly, Davies’ annotations on Shooting script page 2/54 are a snapshot of what was clearly an ongoing conversation between him, his script editor and the series’ producers. On the same page as the opening of Brooke’s and Dorothea’s conversation, Davies offers another reading of the scene which — he hopes — will allow him to omit the longer letter-writing scene. ‘How about this?’ Davies queries emphatically in capital letters. Seemingly, Davies got his way. Not only does Brooke’s invitation fall much earlier in the episode and receive less screen time, but the ending becomes more exclusively preoccupied with Lydgate and Rosamond. But if Davies’ influence can be felt here in terms of the sequencing of events, it is worth using this occasion to reflect also on the adaptive agency of the actors.

As director Anthony Page explains, film acting relies on an actors’ instinct to pursue what feels right ‘inside you’ in the moment (BBC). For the proposal scene, this was shaped by the familiarity and ‘depth’ (McGowan 2022, p.4) between Douglas Hodge and Trevyn McDowell who had already been married on screen twice before Middlemarch. Hodge confirms productiveness of their reunion, noting that their ‘comfort’ with one another worked as a ‘shorthand’ and a quicker route to discovering things about the scene' (Hodge quoted in Page 1993, p.41). Indeed, their familiarity with one another was aided by the shooting schedule: Hodge and McDowell performed the proposal on location in Stamford in July 1993 after a number of marriage scenes were shot in the Ealing studios at the start of 1993 and viewers can sense an echo of this ‘poignancy’ (McGowan 2022, p.5) in their performances. The result was a shared understanding between Hodge and McDowell that the scene should feel spontaneous and ‘out of the blue’ yet in character after two episodes’ worth of build-up (Hodge quoted in Page 1993, p.35). Blocking within the scene helps deliver the actors’ reading. Hodge shares that while he found the proposal quite stationary in the novel, he wanted the scene to be ‘energised’ by the physical distance between the two of them and their effort to overcome it (Hodge quoted in Page 1993, p.33). As 2/71 begins, Rosamond and Lydgate both occupy the outer edges of the drawing room, visibly awkward with one another’s presence; indeed, when moved to tears, Rosamond turns away from the camera and from Lydgate and when he moves towards her, she pulls away further to stand by the fireplace.

A similar hesitance exists within the novel. Lydgate is frozen by ‘embarrassment’ and rather than speaking to Rosamond with his characteristic ‘playfulness’, he sits away from her, unable to speak (Ch.31, p.43). It is not until she drops her chainwork, and he retrieves it, that there is détente: Lydgate rises and suddenly close to her face realises that she is no longer under ‘perfect management of self-contented grace’ but ‘helpless quivering’ (Ch.31, p.43). From this point onwards, Lydgate can ‘now sit near [Rosamond] and speak less incompletely’ and their newfound physical proximity echoes his realisation that she has raised in him a ‘passionate love’ (Ch.31, p.44). The matter is a fait accompli; within half an hour he leaves the house ‘an engaged man’ (Ch.31, p.44).

Although perhaps more dynamic than in the novel, proximity marks the ‘release’ point in Hodge’s and McDowell’s performance, too. As Rosamond sobs that she is ‘so unhappy’, Lydgate ‘takes her lovely face between his great big strong tender hands’ (2/71) and embraces her. Between kisses Rosamond gets Lydgate to confirm that ‘More than anyone’ he cares for her and wishes to marry her. Davies’ stage directions note wryly, ‘He’s more or less got to propose now, after all this kissing’ (2/71) and there is indeed a similarly foregone quality to the scene’s ending. With its sweeping music driving the episode to its close and a fade to black, the audience is carried away by the romance of it all. Composer Chris Gunning explains that the scene’s opening, sombre melody in D minor repeats, becoming more optimistic and shifting to a major key as Rosamond and Lydgate reconcile. Gunning continues that the key change allows the final scene to transition to the title music ‘without too many bumps’ but importantly, it also leaves the viewer with the impression that ‘everything is absolutely wonderful in the world’ (Gunning 1993). Indeed, the conflict which Anthony Page notes between Lydgate’s ‘compassionate’ and physical attraction to Rosamond and ‘wanting to keep independent and work on his ideals’ is, for the moment, resolved or perhaps… ignored (Page 1993, p.30).

Gunning, C. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections

McGowan, T. (2022) original interview conducted by Justin Smith and Lucy Hobbs 29 June 2022, for 'Transforming Middlemarch' project, De Montfort University Special Collections, UK pp.4-5

Page, A. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections

Commentary 17: Scenes 3/10-3/11

Episode 3 begins on the night of Peter Featherstone’s death and the drama that unfolds when Mary Garth, his only attendant, refuses to burn his second will, at his behest. There is further evidence of the violent treatment that Mary receives at Featherstone’s hands as he launches his stick at her in frustration. This start is significantly different from the Shooting script where the arrival of the Waules’ carriages at Stone Court signals his decline (Sc 3/5) and Andrew Davies’ handwritten annotations to p.3/6 indicate that he would prefer to begin with scene 3/1 – Ladislaw being greeted by Brooke on his return to Middlemarch accompanied by ‘bright, lively, challenging Ladislaw music’. The way these ideas eventually coalesced in the onscreen version to offer an episode bookended by pivotal deaths (Featherstone’s and Casaubon’s) in the dual inheritance plots of Middlemarch represents one of the most intriguing of all the structural adaptations in the dramatisation. Although there is no way of knowing for sure if the ‘Scene 3/1’ that Davies refers to is a proposed reinstatement of one of the ‘cut’ scenes noted at the top of SS p.3/6, from an earlier iteration of the script, the fact that he names it 3/1 does lead to that speculation. Starting with the Waules was clearly not viewed as a strong enough narrative hook into Episode 3 either and so scenes 3/5-7 – where the Waules argue and are dismissed from the ailing Featherstone’s bedside were taken back to the latter stages of the Episode 2 Post-production script. There these scenes help to chart Featherstone’s more gradual decline.

Featherstone, the novel’s narrator reveals, has been planning the ‘programme of his funeral’ (Ch.32, p.56) for years and is keen to disappoint his relations after his death – ‘chuckling over the vexations he could inflict’ on them (Ch.34, p77). As Noa Reich argues, he is a ‘manipulative testator with expectant heirs’ (2021, p.1) who lives to ‘assimilate relationships to an economic structure of outlays and payoffs’ (2021, p.5). This has worked so far with the Waules and with Fred Vincy, but close to his death in Chapter 33, Featherstone has not reckoned on the morally unshakeable Mary Garth. When she refuses to destroy the will, he utters in disbelief: ‘Shan’t I do as I like at the last? I made two wills on purpose’ (p.68). Mary is not tempted to take his banknotes and coins as he bids her or to do anything that will lay her ‘open to suspicion’ (p.68). Featherstone’s tears that follow this refusal are omitted by Davies from the Shooting script but he does include Featherstone’s wish to ‘do as I like with my own money’. He has planned everything down this last act without allowing that infirmity – his ‘livid stagnant presence’ (Ch 34, p.77) might prevent him from carrying it out. This is a key point in Eliot’s innovation of the Victorian inheritance plot, in that with Stone Court going to Rigg, Featherstone believes he is passing his property to ‘a posthumous extension of himself’ (Reich, 2021, p.10), thus preserving the natural order ‘to the perpetual… disappointment of other survivors’ (Ch.53, p.376). In fact, Rigg immediately sells the property and it is only restored to owners of whom Featherstone would have eventually approved when Fred and Mary pay their way to owning it. Eliot plots it so that Fred only ‘inherits’ Stone Court when he earns it by his own merit. And he has Mary’s actions at Featherstone’s deathbed to thank for this.

With the editing out of the line ‘Shan’t I do as I like…?’ between the Shooting script and the Post-production script, an important link to Eliot’s inheritance plot is lost in the dramatisation, but the way the scene is shot serves to bring out this interpretation visually instead. When Mary (Rachel Power) discovers Featherstone (Michael Hordern) has died overnight, she glances stonily at his banknotes and gold coins which are shown in close-up. Featherstone’s hand still lies upon them but this means nothing now. When the camera returns to Power, her look softens as she pities the man for whom control over money and therefore his relations was everything. If the crumpled bed clothes look convincing for a deathbed scene, it is because Horden, himself rather infirm during the filming, actually both performed and actually slept in this bed at Stragglethorpe Hall during the shoot, according to Production manager Julie Edwards (Edwards 2022, p.21). Performance, mise-en-scène and visual cues given by the camerawork speak louder than any dialogue at this point.

In the novel, Shooting script and Post-production script time passes rather differently around the moment of Featherstone’s death. In Chapter 33, after Mary’s refusal to comply with him, she sits back in her chair but does not doze off. She listens until she ‘thought he was dropping off to sleep’ but then on approaching the bed finds his face ‘looks strangely motionless’. Andrew Davies adapts this so that responsibility for knowing when Featherstone expires is removed from Mary. She is asleep when it happens and it is daylight before she wakes and opens the curtains to find him dead. (This pattern recurs at the end of Episode 3 when Dorothea refuses to answer Casaubon’s will-related demand in the night and when woken by Trantripp in the early morning, finds her husband dead in in the garden at Lowick.) In the onscreen version an establishing shot of Stone Court in the early morning light is inserted before scene 3/11 to emphasise the passing of several hours before Mary makes her discovery. In the dramatisation, she takes time to look upon Featherstone, take his hand and bid him a forgiving farewell. In the novel, Mary spares less time: ‘she rang to the bell and rang it energetically. In a very little while there was no longer any doubt that Peter Featherstone was dead’ (Ch.33, p.72).

Edwards, J. (2022) original interview conducted by Justin Smith and Lucy Hobbs, 1 April 2022, for 'Transforming Middlemarch' project, (D/104), De Montfort University Special Collections, UK, p.21

Reich N. (2021) ‘Victorian Inheritance, Speculation, and Middlemarch’s “Dead Hand”’ in Law & Literature, Vol. 34, Issue 2, pp.1-19

Commentary 18: Scene 3/25

The wedding of Rosamond and Lydgate (scene 3/25) is another tour-de-force ensemble scene of Andrew Davies’ invention, succinctly delivered in just 1 minute and 45 seconds. In parallel to scene 1/64, which charts the reaction of several social strata to Dorothea’s engagement to Casaubon, this scene depicts the reaction of Lydgate’s marriage to Rosamond from several lower social strata. Notably, Eliot does not directly depict either of the weddings of her protagonists. Her interest is not in the ‘show’ of a wedding itself but more importantly, as Cara Weber maintains, in opposing ‘the moments of contact in courtship - "brief entrances and exits"- to the "continuity of married companionship [Ch.20]”’ (Weber 2012, p.500). However, for the screenwriter of a heritage costume drama, a wedding is a visual gift and, Davies appreciates, part of the narrative attraction for his audience. Davies utilises this wedding scene both to achieve a visual treat and to bring together elements of the town’s commentary on the event which Eliot provides as part of her portrayal of the Middlemarch web that closes more rapidly around Lydgate from this moment onwards.

The pealing of joyful church bells provides an audio transition between the romantic kiss exchanged between the impetuously engaged Rosamond and Lydgate at the end of scene 3/24 and the shots of them as newly marrieds, emerging with their guests into the sunlit churchyard. The overhead shot of this scene and Farebrother’s ‘Congratulations!’ to the happy couple perfectly depicts Davies’ wish in the Shooting script stage directions that it would be 'nice to have the wedding at the central church in town (possibly Farebrother's church, St. Boltoph's) with a large crowd of SPECTATORS watching and commenting' (SS 3/25, p.37). The Production schedule indicates the scene was shot on 2nd August 1993, in high summer, and that the location was St George’s Church in the very heart of Stamford, with its neatly walled churchyard. The wall works as a visual symbol in the blocking of the scene distinguishing between invited guests (inside) and those townsfolk who are bystanders.

From the happy couple, the camera cuts to Mrs Dollop and Mrs Flett standing outside the wall. In the Shooting script, it is Mrs Flett who expresses intense suspicion of Lydgate for having been found ready to cut up Mrs Goby shortly after her demise. This speech is reallocated to Mrs Dollop in the Post-production script, probably to reflect the fact that later in the novel it is she who shares this opinion with her customers at The Tankard. As landlady of this ‘spit and sawdust’ inn in Middlemarch, ‘her opinion was a bulwark’ (Ch.45, p.256). The role of Mrs Flett (a Davies-invented character) in 3/25 is as foil for Mrs Dollop, responding to her, ‘handsome is as handsome does’; time, these two believe, will tell just how ‘handsome’ Lydgate and Rosamond turn out to be.

The Middlemarch suspicion of ‘otherness’ continues strongly through the remainder of this scene. Back inside the churchyard, the camera follows Mrs Vincy as she ad libs a line inviting Bulstrode to congratulate his niece. The camera comes to rest however on his wife and Mrs Plymdale to eavesdrop on their reactions (derived from Ch.31, p.34). Davies extracts the dialogue from Eliot, including Mrs Plymdale’s view that her ‘Ned’ could better ‘keep such a wife’. Her dislike of ‘strangers’ like Lydgate is met with Mrs Bulstrode’s bible teaching that ‘we are told to entertain strangers, are we not?’, and references to ‘Abraham and Moses’. Just how closely Davies followed the novel is demonstrated by the loss from the Post-production script of Mrs Bulstrode’s line in the Shooting script contradicting her friend ‘Selina’ (Mrs Plymdale) about welcoming strangers. Selina’s response, that she was not talking ‘in a religious sense, Harriet’ (PP 3/25, p.3/28), is retained however.

To break up the town’s commentary on the wedding, the scene shifts to Brooke and Ladislaw as they leave through the church gate. The focus of the Middlemarch rumour machine thus moves to them, as they greet Hawley and Standish standing just beyond the gate. Although Hawley begins by commenting that Vincy will have had to ‘dig deep in his pocket for this palaver’ (SS 3/25, p.38), the two lawyers move swiftly on to criticise Brooke snidely for his political ambitions. This conversation is extracted by Davies from Chapter 37, where it takes place in Hawley’s office with Mr Hackbutt (a minor character who does not appear in the dramatisation). There Brooke’s new editor is described by Hackbutt as reputedly being a ‘very brilliant young fellow’; here, in the Post-production script, Hawley disparagingly terms Ladislaw ‘a loose fish’ (a rascal who has thrown off moral restraint) who is mostly likely to end up ‘murdering a wench’ (Ch.37, p.129). In the novel Hackbutt refers to Ladislaw as being of ‘foreign extraction’, whereas Hawley demeans him as ‘some sort of foreigner’ in the Shooting script, with the same prejudice that Mrs Dollop and Mrs Plymdale expressed seconds before about Lydgate. Davies displays the parochial attitudes of the middle and lower classes towards outsiders and new ideas with swingeing clarity and sharp comparisons in this scene.

As if immediately to emphasise this, the lawyers’ conversation is interrupted as the camera switches to the smiling Ladislaw and Brooke bidding goodbye as they get into Brooke’s carriage. Ladislaw’s distinctive hat – that of the Polish emigré – offers a strong visual reminder that he is indeed not from the environs of Middlemarch, just as much as Brooke’s top hat marks him out as being from the lower English aristocracy. They, like Lydgate, may be naively unaware that they have been the subjects of a verbal assassination on such a joyful occasion but Davies’ audience certainly is.

Weber, C. (2012) ‘"The Continuity of Married Companionship": Marriage, Sympathy, and the Self in Middlemarch’ in Nineteenth Century Literature, Vol. 66, Issue 4, pp.494-530

Commentary 19: Scene 3/32

Subsequent to their first meetings in Rome, there are four scenes in the adaptation in which Dorothea is alone with Ladislaw before their ultimate union is confirmed in scene 6/84. Two of these (3/32 and 4/43) feature Ladislaw visiting Dorothea at home at Lowick, the first of which announces his determination to stay in Middlemarch (‘for the time being, I think. There is work for me to do here.’) and the second his intention to leave: (‘I intend to go to London and study for the Bar’). In neat symmetry, the second and fourth occasions (3/49 and 5/31) take place at Tipton when Dorothea discovers Will there (apparently by chance).

Despite their repetitive scenario, these scenes are important dramatic staging posts in the unfolding melodrama of their thwarted relationship. On each occasion, neither is able to declare their feelings for the other openly and, paradoxically it seems, this becomes increasingly more difficult. For this reason, as much depends on what they don’t say to one another (and what the actors, lighting, mise-en-scène and music convey non-verbally), as the lines they speak. From a performance perspective this challenge - to deliver in the correct emotional calibration the rising temperature of their feelings for one another – was made more difficult by a shooting schedule that required Juliet Aubrey and Rufus Sewell to stage these scenes in reverse order. According to the Production schedule, scene 3/32 was filmed on the very last day of shooting (at Brymton d’Evercy near Yeovil in Somerset), on Thursday 26th August 1993, months after the (later) Tipton Grange scene which was shot in Spring 1993 at Culverthorpe Hall, Lincolnshire. This discontinuity, as director Anthony Page admitted in interview, was far from ideal and had implications for the actors in this case:

There are several scenes … I wish we’d shot after scenes that had come before. Strangely enough more actually with Dorothea and Ladislaw than with the Lydgates. Because a scene we shot right at the end of filming, they got very friendly and relaxed with each other in a way that’s obviously very important to the relationship and other scenes we’d shot earlier didn’t have that feeling of relaxation that they discovered, they were much more kind of formal with each other and I mean you know it’s always better to shoot in sequence if you can. (Page 1993, p.39)

Page is contrasting here Aubrey and Sewell’s chemistry between scenes 3/32 and 5/31. This is borne out in close analysis of their performances.

In scene 3/31 of the Shooting script Andrew Davies stages a formal introduction which is missing from the novel and the Post-production script alike. But in both versions of the script there is a hiatus which enables us to ‘drop in’ on a conversation already begun. This is entirely in keeping with the novel’s past-continuous tense: ‘In another minute he was in the library, and Dorothea was meeting him with her sweet unconstrained smile’ (p.135). The Shooting script covers this with a brief scene (3/30) looking through the rain-drenched windows to where ‘we can dimly see the distorted shapes of Ladislaw and Dorothea inside, on the window seat in the library’ (SS, p.3/46). This eavesdropping on their intimacy, like the rain itself, didn’t make the final cut. Similarly, the implication that, ‘They’ve been talking for a while’ and ‘the atmosphere is quite intimate’ is not how the scene starts in the dramatisation. Rather, they begin the scene standing, Dorothea drawing Ladislaw towards the window from which the library’s habitually studied gloom is bathed in warm sunlight. We are attracted both by the freedom of her movements within her husband’s strict domain, tidying sheaves of papers on each desk, and the ease of their reunion.

A hand-written note by Davies on the Shooting script suggests that there was some debate about whether their dialogue should be picked up first with Dorothea or Will. It is Will in the Shooting script, but on screen it is Dorothea: ‘I am so glad to see you’. In the novel we’re told that she ‘uttered these common words with the simple sincerity of an unhappy child, visited at school’ (Ch.37, pp.135-6). In the dramatization she is more self-possessed, less sad. But for Eliot, as for Davies ultimately, it is important that Will’s line (‘I really came for the chance of seeing you alone’) is a response to hers, for he found himself ‘mysteriously forced to be just as simple as she was’ (p.136).

The preliminary exchanges continue with Will’s chiding that ‘you spend all your days, shut up in doors, with these?’ as ‘he picks up one of the notebooks, grimaces and replaces it’. Dorothea’s lighter response – ‘Not all my days. Not all the hours in any day. And I am happy to be here’ - signals, Davies’ script annotation tells us, a ‘change of energy and humour here. Not too saintly’ (SS, p.3/47). That spirit of greater levity and the self-consciousness it reveals, sets the tone on both sides for what follows; these changes enable their gentle sparring to retain a lightness of touch, and some affectionate self-deprecation.

Across this dialogue the action moves. The camera draws away from the medium close-ups that framed them in the cluttered library as Dorothea advances into the foreground space of the adjoining sitting-room which is flooded with sunlight, Ladislaw following after. Her command of the space pushes back the camera as she moves towards us. They sit now, opposite one another, on two silver-upholstered chesterfield settees. In the novel it is a ‘dark ottoman’ and there they take their seats much sooner in the conversation, Eliot tells us precisely, ‘at two yards' distance’ (p.136). She follows this with the beautiful line: ‘Each looked at the other as if they had been two flowers which had opened then and there.’ Interestingly, both scripts assume they are seated without directing exactly when. There are two parts to the conversation which ensues.

First, there is Will’s revelation that he acted as Casaubon’s secretary, unsuccessfully, for a while. This enables Dorothea’s playful responses: ‘I should not have thought that post would have suited you’, and ‘Perhaps you were not a steady enough worker.’ This provokes Will’s criticism of Casaubon’s intolerance and insecurity (‘I am afraid he dislikes me because I too often ventured to disagree with him’), and Dorothea’s defensive reminder of her husband’s patronage: ‘And yet he overcame his dislike of you as far as his actions were concerned’. This dialogue seems to repeat a formula from Rome, in which Will fails to disguise his criticism of Casaubon and upsets Dorothea in the process. But here the tone, if not the substance, is markedly different. The narrative observes that ‘Dorothea was strangely quiet—not immediately indignant, as she had been on a like occasion in Rome’ (p.139). Indeed, the contrast is profound in performance – a playful banter that gives way to greater intimacy.

The scene then enters a new phase in which Will recalls his family’s plight and shares childhood memories of his father and their poverty. But the hinge to this story is a disputed line from the novel: ‘It was an abominable thing that my Grandmother should have been disinherited’ (p.140). In the Shooting script Davies suggests ‘cut this?’. But in a story of 19th Century wealth and poverty where inheritance is such a dominant factor in the circumstances of so many characters, it was surely important to retain Will’s sense of cruel injustice (and its intimations of racial as well as social prejudice). Davies had second thoughts. A further annotated comment reads ‘SORRY. The “abominable” line can’t be cut. But if it could be done in a way that brought them together rather than draw them apart’ (SS, p.3/48). So the line wasn’t cut, but deftly nuanced in the dramatization to allow Will’s softening acknowledgement of Casaubon’s own sense of duty: ‘He understood what an abominable thing it was for my Grandmother to be disinherited, merely for falling in love with a poor man!’ That subtle change softens Dorothea’s response and intimate enquiry: ‘I wonder how she bore the change from wealth to poverty. Do you know much about her?’ And Will’s answer begins with the simplicity of his romantic spirit (‘Well, she married for love. That's all.’) as a direct counterpoint to Dorothea’s own situation.

Hereafter, gentle, stirring strings accompany Will’s sentimental family story, itself leavened with self-deprecation: ‘You see I come from rebellious blood on both sides’. In the Shooting script this is the end of Will’s story and the stage directions continue: ‘She's been looking very serious and intent. Now she smiles too.’ However, in the Post-production script more of Will’s testimony about his father from the novel is retained, almost verbatim: ‘I remember him playing the violin - and I remember his slow walk and I remember his long thin hands. And I remember once he'd been lying in bed for a long time - I think he was very ill - and all I could think of was how hungry I was and how I only had a little piece of bread.’’ Rufus Sewell conveys all this pathos in his beautifully measured, rather childlike delivery, as if fragments of memory are returning piecemeal. His gaze drifts to the ceiling, and down and away from her briefly. And the speech is accompanied tellingly with nervous physical twitches, as he fingers the studs on the arm of the chesterfield and picks at specks on his clothing.

Yet, as Ladislaw’s story wins Dorothea’s approval of his intention to remain in Middlemarch, she remembers herself suddenly, and her husband. But Will won’t be detained and is keen ‘to use my body’ – a line of Davies’ invention - though the five-mile walk with the sun ‘on the wet grass’ is from the novel. The Lawrentian symbolism is potent, nonetheless. The stage directions give the subtext: ‘She smiles again. She would never allow herself to think how his youth and virility contrasts with Casaubon, but that is what she is responding to. He comes towards her. There's a lot of going on beneath the conscious level.’ Here, more than anywhere else the production, Aubrey and Sewell’s chemistry conveys this palpably.

Page, A. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections

Commentary 20: Scene 3/41

Will Ladislaw’s decision to remain in Middlemarch, inspired as much by Dorothea’s encouragement (in scene 3/32) as by her uncle’s offer of employment at The Pioneer newspaper, has the indirect effect of advancing still further the rift in the Casaubons’ precarious marriage and the decline in Casaubon’s fragile health. At least three aspects of the adaptation process are significant in the transformation of these events: plot reordering, Dorothea’s character development, and the mise-en-scène of the bedroom scene at the heart of a broken relationship.

Andrew Davies’ Shooting script follows Eliot’s narrative quite closely. After Will’s departure from Dorothea, her husband returns from the Archdeacon’s breakfast where Dr Spanning has heaped praise on his ‘late tractate on the Egyptian Mysteries’ (Ch.37, p.145). Dorothea innocently reports Ladislaw’s visit and his newfound employment and naively suggests that Will sought Casaubon’s opinion on the matter. Coldly dismissed by her husband, the subject is dropped. But, next morning, it provokes a letter from Casaubon to Ladislaw criticising his social impropriety in accepting the position and forbidding him from ‘from further reception at my house’ (p.148).

In the first alteration from the novel, the Shooting script presents this letter as a voice-over segue into an invented scene at The Pioneer offices, where its scornful recipient pens an immediate, vitriolic reply, which in turn segues back as a voice-over to Casaubon reading it at his desk the same night: ‘He is coldly furious’ the stage direction states (SS, p.3/59). There follows a bedroom scene (3/41) which sees Casaubon’s jealous fury provoked by Dorothea’s suggestion that they should support Will financially in order to liberate him from the necessity of labour. Chapter 37 of the novel continues: ‘It is not right that he should be in the dependence of poverty while we are rich’ (p.153). Casaubon rebukes his wife roundly: ‘It is not for you to interfere between me and Mr Ladislaw, and still less to encourage communications from him to you which constitute a criticism on my procedure’ (p.154). ‘Poor Dorothea, shrouded in darkness’ (p.154), is both frightened by her husband’s anger and fearful of its toll upon his health: ‘But nothing else happened, except that they both remained a long while sleepless, without speaking again’ (p.155).

Next morning, in the novel, Ladislaw’s reply arrives on Casaubon’s desk, adding insult to injury: ‘Poor Mr Casaubon felt (and must not we, being impartial, feel with him a little?) that no man had juster cause for disgust and suspicion than he’ (p.156). In the Shooting script, this epistolary response has already served to enflame Casaubon’s night-time anger. It is replaced with a short morning scene (3/42) in which Casaubon summons Pratt to request Mr Standish (his lawyer) make preparations to amend his will. This scene does not appear in the Post-production script, for good reason. It would have undermined the dramatic revelation of Casaubon’s legacy which in the final production hinges - symbolically if not realistically - upon the Shylockian bond of blind obedience to his will that he tries to secure from Dorothea, the night before his death (3/79)). Instead, the on-screen version defers the exchange of letters between Casaubon and Ladislaw until the morning after the bedroom row. In this way, Casaubon’s banishment of Ladislaw becomes a reaction not just to the news of his return to Middlemarch, but moreover to his wife’s entreaties on his behalf, which, as the novel describes, betray ‘a disposition to regard Will Ladislaw favourably and be influenced by what he said’ (p.157).

The second aspect of transformation, therefore, concerns Dorothea herself. It is important that Davies’ adaptation implicates Dorothea (as well as Ladislaw) in Casaubon’s revenge. This is because Chapter 37 in the novel devotes a long passage between her report of Will’s visit and the bedtime dispute to her motivations which, although influenced by Ladislaw’s winning hard-luck story, are presented by Eliot as ‘her blindness’: an over-zealous pursuit of justice. For as Casaubon puts pen to paper, ‘Meanwhile Dorothea's mind was innocently at work towards the further embitterment of her husband’ (p.148). Her thoughts are preoccupied, in her private boudoir, by moral principles of duty: ‘Was inheritance a question of liking or of responsibility?’ She arrives at this conclusion:

It was true, she said to herself, that Mr Casaubon had a debt to the Ladislaws — that he had to pay back what the Ladislaws had been wronged of. And now she began to think of her husband's will, which had been made at the time of their marriage, leaving the bulk of his property to her, with proviso in case of her having children. That ought to be altered; and no time ought to be lost. (p.150)

According to Noa Reich (2021, p.12), ‘This passage translates the complexities of inheritance into a deceptively simple question that seems to pit liberal, individual freedom against status expectations.’ And ‘the novel invites us to view Dorothea’s seeming idiosyncrasy as indicative of a broader, historical tension’ (2021, p.13). Crucially, it is Dorothea who first raises the issue of her husband’s will. And it is Dorothea’s obsession with doing what is morally right that blinds her to the wrong (in status terms) she is doing her husband in the process. This lays bare the flaw in her nature: how Dorothea mistakes spiritual devotion (to Casaubon) for love and love (for Ladislaw) for social justice. It is the task of Davies and of Aubrey to convey the results of this devastating combination of moral certitude and emotional immaturity in scene 3/41.

Fortunately, in television drama, there are additional resources which aid the writer and the actor in conveying meaning. Indeed, in deconstructing the mise-en-scène of this particular scene, the adaptation’s patterns of dynamic repetition offer a diachronic montage of all the Casaubons’ ‘bedroom scenes’. It is interesting to note that there are four (all of Davies’ invention) which calibrate the declining fortunes of the Casaubon marriage. Although they span three episodes and, apparently, two different locations, close observation suggests that they were all shot in the same space, probably consecutively. The final Production schedules confirm that none were filmed at Lowick (Brympton d’Evercy). 1/86, set in Rome, is the only one in which the couple are depicted in bed together, and confirms that the marriage remains unconsummated; 2/52 sees the bed-ridden Casaubon recovering from his heart-attack; 3/41 has Dorothea sitting beside the bed advocating passionately for Will Ladislaw’s provision, causing her husband to rise again and respond across the bed before blowing out the candle; in 3/81 Dorothea is in bed and it is Casaubon in the chair with a candle demanding her compliance with his last wishes. Again, they take sides, across the divide.

Candlelight frames each speaker in a pool of intensity, not in a gothic, or film noir manner, but naturalistically. There is a dramatic contrast between the warmth of candlelight and their frosty relations, a candle’s flickering impermanence, and the decisiveness of the one who extinguishes the flame, bringing everything to an end. These are the nocturnal charades that constitute the most intimate scenes of their marriage. In the morning there are cold, grey ashes in the hearth. All the contrasting Lydgate bedroom scenes (beginning with 4/11) come after the death of Casaubon, though they too chart a (very different) sequence of declining relations.

Reich N. (2021) ‘Victorian Inheritance, Speculation, and Middlemarch’s “Dead Hand”’ in Law & Literature, Vol. 34, Issue 2, pp.1-19

200. Commentary 21: Scenes 3/43-3/44

There are but two prominent nuclear families in Middlemarch, and both are situated in the new, aspirational artisan/manufacturing class: the Garths and the Vincys. It is not insignificant that amongst the main characters, the idealists Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate are both orphans who have been raised by wealthy guardian uncles. Both Fred Vincy and Will Ladislaw are in different ways listless and feckless, struggling to find their aim in life; both are also disinherited. Whilst Dorothea’s constant anxiety about her inheritance and her motivation to do some good in the world is because she has ‘always had too much of everything’, Lydgate has turned his back on his own noble family and reaps the financial consequences as a result of his stubborn idealism. As Phoebe Poon argues, ‘Eliot transformed the inheritance plot from a well-worn convention of material reward for heroic conduct into a powerful vehicle of critique against anachronistic customs of inheritance and succession’ (Poon, 2013: p.50). The newly-married Lydgates’ visit to his family home at Quallingham is a very different honeymoon from the Casaubons’, but in the brief scenes (3/43 and 44) which are of Andrew Davies’ own invention, the viewer also discovers the terms of their mismatch away from home.

Interestingly, not only does this incident not appear in the novel, it doesn’t appear in Andrew Davies’ Shooting script either. They are almost certainly the cut scenes noted at the bottom of page 3/63. Throughout the novel, in which Quallingham is referenced seventeen times, the family seat becomes an imaginary symbol of the Lydgates’ disintegrating marriage, representing to Rosamond the wealth, social elevation and escape from Middlemarch which she dreams their wedlock might deliver (and later the source of their financial rescue), and for Lydgate a reminder of his hubristic independence from material indolence and security, which comes to haunt him in their hour of need. Their honeymoon tour is reported by the narrator only in the context of Captain Lydgate’s subsequent flirtatious visit to Middlemarch: ‘Lydgate inwardly cursed his own folly that he had drawn down this visit by consenting to go to his uncle's on the wedding-tour, and he made himself rather disagreeable to Rosamond by saying so in private. For to Rosamond this visit was a source of unprecedented but gracefully concealed exultation’ (Ch.58, p.73).

In the adaptation Quallingham is represented as a real place: Grimsthorpe Castle, near Bourne in Lincolnshire. That the Quallingham scene was excised from the Shooting script indicates that this was considered an optional extra, depending on budgetary contingencies. Script editor Susie Conklin reports: ‘Because Quallingham was a one-off location and an expensive one at that, it was an obvious one to go, especially as it wasn’t essential to the story.’ However, ‘Gerry [Scott, Production designer] found rooms at Grimsthorpe that didn’t need a lot of set decorating. And, because it was very close to our production base in Stamford, it suddenly became viable again’ (Conklin email correspondence, 2022) Grimsthorpe’s unadulterated splendour was ideal for a television audience; the arrival by coach up a gravel drive to a palatial country residence has become a standard visual entrée into heritage drama. Provincial Rosamond is certainly seduced by its grandeur as she and Lydgate make their approach in an open carriage through the static wide-angled establishing shot: ‘Tertius! You never told me how beautiful Quallingham was...’. This dialogue is recorded as voice-over (though this is unspecified in the script), which reinforces its narrational perspective that the viewer is invited to share. It makes a visual juxtapostion with lowering Lowick and, by implication, between the two central marriages: one fecund, the other barren. Serial television drama is motivated by dynamic contrasts. But its stately iconography aside, the Quallingham visit is intended, with Davies’ customary economy, to convey at least four pieces of information to the viewer.

First, Rosamond and Lydgate are besotted with one another: ‘The wedding night had been no disappointment, we may infer. The lineaments of gratified desire are much in evidence, and LYDGATE's mood of lazy sensuality is evident in the next scene’, according to Davies’ concluding stage direction in scene 3/43 (PP, p.3/46). We cut to a medium close-up looking up at a ceiling painting in the State Dining Room: ‘The Arts and the Sciences’ (1725-30) by the Venetian Francesco Sleter (1685–1775) – a classical depiction of semi-naked cherubic figures suspended in the celestial firmament - part of Sir John Vanbrugh’s remodelling of Grimsthorpe, overseen by Nicholas Hawksmoor after Vanbrugh’s death. Secondly, Rosamond’s sexual attraction for her husband (and his ‘bore’ of a cousin) is matched only by her doe-eyed infatuation with the lineaments of aristocratic wealth: ‘I think it is the loveliest place I have ever been in... Oh, if I were ever to live here... I think I should die from happiness!’ (p.3/47). This betrays her material and social aspirations beyond the confines of Middlemarch and her concomitant naivety: ‘Pretty little thing TERTIUS has got himself, but obviously a complete idiot’ surmises Lydgate’s guardian uncle Sir Godwin over dinner, in Davies’ stage direction (p.3/48). You can take the girl out of Middlemarch, but… The party of four is seated on Regency gilded chairs around an opulent dining table, attended by bewigged footmen. The table is lusciously lit at dessert time with a dish of poached pears in red wine very much in the foreground before a voluptuously adorned Rosamond.

Thirdly, the encounter reminds the viewer that beyond Middlemarch much of England’s male landed gentry (like Chettam) live untroubled by social change and disinterested in professional life. In this way, these brief scenes also stand in for Eliot’s historical perspective. As Sir Godwin observes, ‘quizzically’: ‘Country sawbones in a manufacturing town? Odd sort of profession for a gentleman. Hm?’ (p.3/48). Rosamond expresses interests in London or Bath (Davies channelling Regency Austen). To this, Lydgate responds with ‘lazy superiority’ on the opportunity ‘to make the town and hospital a model in medical care that the whole of Europe might envy’ (p.3/48), which underlines both his ambition and his hubris. Fourthly, in the service of plot development, the ogling epicurean Captain Lydgate secures himself an invitation for a return visit which will later demonstrate Rosamond’s susceptibility to flattery, her boredom with Lydgate’s practice, and her own hubristic riding accident that leads to a miscarriage. This is yet another moment (like Tyke’s election to the chaplaincy and Lydgate’s precipitous proposal) which leaves Lydgate upstaged by circumstance; once again the penultimate shot lingers on the face of one who looks ‘as if he has been mugged’; the last is of a triumphant Rosamond in full bloom. As in Austen, travel is a perilous pursuit for romantics. We cut to afternoon tea at Freshitt – a bit of a come-down.

Poon, P. (2013), ‘From Status to Contract: Inheritance and Succession in George Eliot's Late Fiction’ in Sydney Studies, The University of Sydney Library, pp.50-80

Conklin, S. (2022), email correspondence with Justin Smith, 16th November

205. Commentary 22: Scenes 3/50-3/51

Scenes 3/50-51 depict Brooke’s visit to see his tenants, the Dagleys, accompanied by his niece. On the way to the cottage, the two converse. While Dorothea argues for ‘proper professional management’ of the estate, Brooke insists that he is ‘treasured’ by his tenants. Robert Hardy delivers Brooke’s assurances with a characteristic blend of geniality and pomposity that renders his repeated claims that he is an ‘easy, uncommonly easy [landlord]’ hollow, however. And on arrival at Dagley’s cottage we meet Brooke’s tenant (Andrew Tiernan) ‘in a horrible temper and drunk enough not to give a damn what he says’ (Post-production script 3/51). When Brooke informs Dagley that he should reprimand his son for poaching, Dagley becomes outraged and bullishly ignores his wife’s (Jane Hollowood) efforts to calm him. ‘Worst landlord in the county!’ Dagley exclaims before threatening Brooke that the imminent Reform Bill will send him and his like ‘scuttling’ (PP 3/51). Brooke attempts to talk over the other man before nervously deciding ‘you’re drunk [….], we’ll talk another time, you know, another time,’ and he quickly returns to Dorothea (PP 3/51).

While we see an establishing shot of the dilapidated property on Brooke’s arrival and then again on his exit, Eliot affords the state of the Dagley homestead a considerable amount of description in the novel. The narrator notes wryly that an artistic tradition which ‘makes other people’s hardships picturesque’ would have delighted here in the juxtaposition of luxuriant jasmine boughs and colourful hollyhocks with ‘grey worm-eaten shutters’, ‘pauper labourers’ and an overall impression of the ‘sad lack of farming capital’ (Ch.39, p.182-3). The novel holds Brooke at least partially responsible for the Dagleys’ poverty and repeatedly makes the point that he has failed to bear the weight of his duty. It is ‘astonishing’ how rarely one’s conscience is twinged by ‘those who never complain or have nobody to complain for them’, the narrator muses sardonically before confirming: ‘Dagley’s homestead never before looked so dismal to Mr Brooke as it did to-day’ (Ch.39, p.182).

Regarded in this light, Dagley’s outburst feels fairly warranted and while he clearly loses his temper, the scene is narrated relatively even-handedly in the novel. Brooke approaches his tenant with an affected bonhomie, addressing him patronisingly as ‘my good fellow’ and speaking ‘confidentially but not judiciously’ (Ch.39, p.186). Tellingly, for all of its acknowledgement of Dagley’s failure to moderate his drinking, the chapter ends on a sombre and sympathetic tone. We are left with the mordant observation that Dagley’s cottage, Freeman’s End, must have been named ‘by way of sarcasm’ for there was no ‘earthly “beyond” open to him’ and his family (Ch.39, p.189).

Of course, as adaptor, Davies has to wrestle with how to convey Eliot’s elusive narrative or, rather, how much to convey. The Shooting script, for instance, gives a fuller sense of the Dagleys’ deprivation with Davies’ description of a garden gate ‘hanging precariously on its hinges’ supplemented by Dagley attempting to fix a broken window-shutter. He curses at the shutter and only when Brooke addresses him — ‘Ah, Dagley, my good fellow! — does he slam the shutter with a ‘last savage bang’, turn and address his landlord (Shooting script 3/51).

By the Post-production script and the eventual episode, these details have been minimised and as mentioned above, we only see two glimpses of the full cottage. The exchange begins quickly and via shot-reverse shot filmed in medium close-up. The only exception to this is a cut to Dagley’s children peering out of a window when Dagley cries out that he and his family will ‘rot in the ground that we can’t find the money to buy’ (PP 3/51). Instead, mise-en-scène, costuming and make-up contribute evocatively to our understanding of the disparity between landlord and tenants; the Dagleys, dirty with torn clothing, are framed by the oppressive darkness of the cottage behind them, while Brooke, smartly and fashionably dressed, is well-lit and surrounded by countryside.

The scene is thus an important reminder of the inequality within Middlemarch (and Brooke’s part therein) as well as the hopes of the 1832 Reform Act for tenant farmers like Dagley. In being adapted, however, its presence and impact seems to diminish: first in the transition from the novel to the Shooting script and then again from the Shooting script to the Post-production script. Although this may be the inevitable result of adaptive economy, it may be helpful to read the scene in light of the one which immediately preceded it. The visit falls just after Dorothea’s and Ladislaw’s conversation where she claims she has no longings beyond a wish she ‘hadn’t so much more than my share, without really doing anything for others’ (SS 3/49). Ladislaw’s retort that —unlike her — he doesn’t feel ‘bound’ to submit to what he does not like clearly unsettles Dorothea, as the camera lingers on Juliet Aubrey’s expression of anguish. Indeed, Davies’ stage direction notes that ‘something disturbs her’ and it is on this uneasy note that the scene segues to Brooke’s and Dorothea’s journey to the Dagleys'.

3/50 begins in a different tenor to the novel, therefore, but one which helps to accommodate the shifting emphasis of the Dagley scene onto Dorothea as well as Brooke and Dagley. In the novel, Dorothea’s wish for less privilege is part of a much more whimsical and playful conversation and Ladislaw’s retort that he doesn’t feel similarly ‘bound’ is met with a smile (Ch.39, p.180) rather than distress. Later on, however, Dorothea isn’t given the chance to advance her argument for better management (‘Mr Brooke, not being taken unawares, got the talk under his own control’ (Ch.39, p.181)). By comparison, Davies’ Dorothea is simultaneously confused by her exchange with Ladislaw yet able to help persuade her uncle so that she is vindicated on his return from the Dagleys when he agrees that Garth might make the best Estate manager. In this moment, Dorothea is proven right and confirmed for us is the ‘somewhat naïve’ but still ‘laudable’ quality of her idealism (Lothe, p.183). Although 3/50-51 still centre on Brooke’s fractious encounter with his tenants, his attitude is thus implicitly contrasted against Dorothea’s ambition to help the poor. As theatre historian Janette Dillon reminds us, being the last one to speak in a scene is a ‘powerful position’ because it ‘encourages the audience to see the action through the eyes of that closing perspective.’ It is significant, therefore, that despite Dagley’s inclusion in the adaptation (and the same cannot be said of other lower-class characters in the novel), the scene closes not on his precarious existence, but on Dorothea’s hopes.

Lothe, J. (2006), 'Narrative Vision in Middlemarch', Middlemarch in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Karen Chase, Oxford University Press, pp.177-99

Dillon, J. (2012), Shakespeare and the Staging of English History, Oxford: Oxford University Press

210. Commentary 23: Scenes 3/79-3/84

Scenes 3/79 through to 3/84 close Episode 3 on an uncertain note with the sudden discovery of Casaubon’s body following immediately after a pivotal chapter in his and Dorothea’s relationship. Only a couple of scenes prior to this, Casaubon had relented and enlisted Dorothea’s help in marking up his notebooks. But while Dorothea had hoped to assist her husband in this way ever since the start of their marriage, it now feels as though he has delivered what Davies calls ‘a life sentence’ (3/76). Davies observes darkly of the scene’s ending, ‘The task seems Herculean, hopeless’ (3/76), echoing Dorothea’s account of the futility of Casaubon’s intellectual labour (and her own part therein) as ‘a treadmill’ (Ch. 48, p.313). Tension is thus high when Casaubon asks Dorothea if she will carry out his wishes on the event of his death: ‘whether you will avoid doing what I should deprecate, and do what I should desire’ (PP 3/79). Uncertain of how to respond to a request she does not understand, Dorothea pleads for more time before answering and Casaubon agrees. Anguished, Dorothea wrestles with the matter but is resolved in her mind the following morning. She heads to the Yew Tree Walk to meet Casaubon, apparently writing in the garden, but she discovers him dead, slumped over his desk.

In the adaptation, it is left ambiguous and all the more menacing what Casaubon will require of his wife after his death (disinheritance should she marry Will and a requirement to complete The Key To All Mythologies). As Phoebe Poon writes, the theme of inheritance is a recurrent ‘point of stress’ in Eliot’s novels for its ability to animate tensions between the individual and the family (p.50). Davies thus provides a good amount of direction for Casaubon, writing that ‘He’s very intense. His eyes are staring’ (3/79). But while we are meant to recognise the ‘deep-eyed inner fire’ which first attracted Dorothea, Davies notes that it is now a ‘pale fire, a sick one’ (3/79). He continues even more ominously, ‘it’s a hand reaching out to control her from the grave’ (3/79). The only explicit guide to Dorothea’s delivery by comparison is the simple description: ‘She hesitates’ (3/79). Juliet Aubrey’s response is perhaps appropriately vague in her shocked expression then, maintaining focus on Patrick Malahide’s fevered intensity.

The novel, however, anticipates something of the nature of Casaubon’s request, if only by establishing that Dorothea incorrectly assumes what she is being asked to do. The narrator confides in us that Dorothea had ‘no presentiment that the power which her husband wished to establish over her future action had relation to anything else than his work’ (Ch.48, pp.311-2). The sheer extent of her mental anguish over the difference between ‘devotion to the living and that indefinite promise of devotion to dead’ (Ch.48, p.314) thus proves darkly ironic on two accounts: the first, that Dorothea fails to foresee the actual restriction Casaubon will place on her and indeed, that he does so as a jealous riposte to her suggestion he favours Ladislaw in his will. The second, that because of his untimely death Dorothea does not even deliver ‘her answer’ (Ch.48, p.318).

In an episode which opens with another death and uncertain inheritance (Featherstone’s) it seems likely then that Davies left Casaubon’s dying wish deliberately unspecified (or even hinted at) in order to postpone the surprise codicil in his will. The bookending of the episode in this way contributes to one of the more striking structural adaptations in Davies’ dramatisation: its organisation on an episodic level. Crucially, by postponing the revelation of Casaubon’s ‘abuse of testamentary power’ (Poon, p.66), the episode also draws out the emotional resonance and narrative impact of what is, in many ways, one of the more challenging aspects of adapting Middlemarch: rendering Casaubon and Dorothea’s curious relationship in a way which is credible and potentially moving.

Tellingly, tracing this sequence’s development from the novel through Shooting script and into Post-production script reveals other strategies to emphasise the suddenness of Casaubon’s death in spite of his clearly failing health. In both versions of the script, Davies’ stage directions code Casaubon’s illness. He is described as ‘feverishly agitated’ in the Shooting script’s version of 3/76; at night, he makes such a ‘sudden groaning sound’ that it wakes Dorothea (SS 3/79 and PP 3/79) and later, he sleeps ‘breathing heavily’ (SS 3/80 and PP 3/80). Yet evidently, the production refrained from some of these choices. Malahide looks ashen but sits upright and with focused attention on Dorothea when making his request. In this regard, the episode follows the novel’s cue which makes no reference to Casaubon’s physical state at this crucial moment.

Indeed, the novel throws the reader something of a red herring with a reminder of Lydgate’s diagnosis and forcing Dorothea to reckon with the possibility of 15 more years married to her husband. It also draws out even further the reader’s realisation that Casaubon has indeed died. There is an additional library conversation between husband and wife, Dorothea’s preparations for the morning and a fleeting insight into Pratt, the butler. Both novel and the television series build suspense in their own way, however. In combination with the events described above, the novel does this by prevarication: we are made aware of quite how reluctantly Dorothea agrees to meet Casaubon and deliver her answer (‘she was fettered’ (Ch.48, p.317), for instance). Ironic foreshadowing also toys with our expectations. Frustrated by her love for the ‘gentle creature for whom she felt unable to do anything more’, Tantripp notes sourly that she wishes ‘every book in that library was built into a caticom’ for Casaubon (Ch.48, p.316).

By comparison, the adaptation moves more decisively towards its climax in its depiction of that morning’s events. We have a much clearer dramatic line from waking, through to (resigned) resolution and confrontation. Also excised is Pratt who the Shooting script depicts in conversation with Tantripp in 3/83 as Dorothea hurries to the gardens. And when we reach the tragic discovery of Casaubon’s body, Davies writing is evocative but perfunctory. There is an intriguing slip in Davies’ adaptive authority voice when he notes, ‘[Casaubon’s] dead. I think she knows’ (PP 3/84) and the ending of the episode seems to rest in this uncertain melancholic register. Just as Davies clearly wrestles with how to adapt this unconventional couple for screen, the episode itself seems to want its audience to feel ambivalently about Casaubon’s passing.

Key to this is Christopher Gunning’s orchestration for this sequence. Gunning explains that Casaubon makes an ‘impossible’ demand on Dorothea, throwing her into a state of ‘deep anxiety’, but by the following morning, she has reached a point of ‘resolution’), and all of this is expressed musically. Gunning’s soundtrack for Dorothea’s late-night deliberations, for instance, is led by the keening melancholy of a cor anglais. The solo is accompanied by strings whose rapidly ascending and descending arpeggios and sustained tremolo ratchet up the scene’s intensity. These ‘dark anxious chords’ (Gunning interview, 4) continue, albeit more quietly, into the following scene but when Dorothea seemingly makes up her mind in the garden, the music, too, resolves itself. Two solos — clarinet and then cello — with ascending melodies accompany Dorothea to Casaubon’s side and when she crouches by him, long-held notes draw out the hopefulness of this moment musically. As Gunning reveals, the ‘whole idea was not to give the game away that he’d died. [….] You think he’s asleep, that’s all’(4). Thus, when Casaubon’s death is revealed, the soundtrack stops entirely, leaving only Dorothea’s speech and the background noises of the garden. It is only when Aubrey delivers her final line (‘Wake, dear. I am here now’ (PP 3/84)), that the music returns. And it does so with a gentle crescendo that resolves — somewhat uncomfortably — Gunning’s earlier ‘anxious’ strings into an eventual unison. Like Dorothea, the viewer is left unsure of what Casaubon’s death means.

Gunning, C. (1993) Unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections

Poon, P. (2013), ‘From Status to Contract: Inheritance and Succession in George Eliot’s Late Fiction’, Sydney Studies in English, Vol. 38, pp.50-80

215. Commentary 24: Scene 4/1

Andrew Davies comments 'At one time I had a disagreement with Louis Marks and Susie Chapman about the construction of Episodes 4 and 5, and I did two completely different versions of Episodes 4 and 5, constructed in completely different ways in order to demonstrate to them that their idea was not as good as my idea.' (Davies, 1993, p.91).

This disruption is not, however, present in the opening scenes of Episode 4 where there is less reordering of material across episode boundaries than is in evidence in earlier episodes, with scenes 4/1-4 remaining in sequence at the start of both scripts. Scene 4/1 where is a Davies-imagined scene of political agitation in Middlemarch market square which sets up viewers for the subsequent scene (4/2) at The Pioneer office Ladislaw and Brooke where discuss the most pragmatic ways to advance reform.

This opening scene centres around Tonks, an itinerant agitator for reform, addressing lower class townsfolk on the need for expansion of ‘the vote’ so that they can put men from their own ranks in parliament. It is set in March 1831 only 15 months before the Reform Act of 1832 came into force. In the Shooting script Davies foregrounds Ladislaw as one of the crowd attempts to button hole him to listen to the agitator’s speech. But by the Post-production script, Tonks is heard first, to help give the viewer their bearings, and then Sparks – clearly a character from the lower classes, invites Ladislaw to stop. Sparks’ comment ‘just the man’ (4/1) suggests that the charismatic Ladislaw is now known and liked by the lower ranks of Middlemarch as well as the middle-class and the landed folk of the surrounding countryside. Significantly, however, although Ladislaw greets people on his way across the market square, he does not stop. While he has a job to get to, viewers learn later in scene 4/2 and in his debate with Lydgate in scene 4/20, that he does not sanction more radical moves to gain the vote as the best way forward. In the novel, where he and Brooke discuss reform, Ladislaw warns against ‘revolutionist’ policies (Ch.60, p.344) and his action in eschewing the agitator in 4/1 support this in Davies’ adaptation. John Sutherland suggests that Ladislaw may in part have been modelled on Eliot’s view of the young Disraeli who had views in common with Will on more moderate political reform in the lead-up to the Second Reform Bill of the 1860s.

Sparks recurs later in Episode 4 in the Hustings scene (according to the Production schedule shot the day before 4/1 on 4 August 1994). There he is the character who asks Dagley if Brooke is a manufacturer and is thence drawn into heckling Brooke’s misjudged address to the crowd. He is representative of the politically curious unenfranchised man in an industrialising town, who is attracted to Ladislaw’s views but whom Brooke fails to engage.

The irony, Carolyn Steedman asserts, is that it is to Lydgate’s class (the £10 householders), not to Sparks', that political agitation during the 1820s gave the vote, through the resulting 1832 Reform Act. Eliot accurately represents in scene 4/23 the fact that ‘Freemen’ of trade such as Mawmsey already possessed the vote in Coventry prior to 1832 but many people of profession and the new industries did not (Steedman 2001, p.539).

The focus in scene 4/1 switches half-way to the fears of reform among the conservative professional classes. Hawley derides the words of Tonks as ‘Seditious poppycock’ SS. 4/2), thus allowing him more ammunition to wind up the crowd with ‘the tide is turning’ and soon all ‘fine Tory gentlemen’ will ‘be swept away on it’ (SS 4/2). The agitator’s effective metaphor may come easily to Davies but in interview he reveals that he turned often for historical context to producer, Louis Marks:'He was a historian and I relied on him quite a lot to tell me what the Reform Bill was about. I would ask him "Do we need this? Is it important? What’s it about?" and he’d tell me. I was lucky to have a producer who was so well read academically' (Davies 2022, pp.6-7)

Louis Marks was determined on reproducing a fine level of historical accuracy, so ‘conscious’ was he ‘of the reality of this world’ down to the ‘minutest detail of the things that were being offered for sale on market stalls…’ (Marks 1993, p.118) also evidenced in scene 4/1. Through this he hoped to convey the essence of the novel which importantly to him ‘is the best portrayal of England and Englishness… in any of the works that I know’ (Marks 1993, p.159).

Davies concludes this scene of serious historical content on a characteristic lighter note, perhaps reflecting another aspect of ‘Englishness’ – mild francophobia. After Hawley’s claim of sedition, he goes on to assert that Tonks is ‘talking revolution’. While Wrench claims it ‘would never happen in England’ where he assumes political moderation and orderly reform will always prevail, he expresses his disdain that it has happened in France with the dismissive ‘Well, France…’ (PP 4/4) as he and Hawley walk out of frame.

Davies, A. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections

Davies, A. (2022), email correspondence with Justin Smith, 29th November

Davies, A. (2022) original interview conducted by Justin Smith and Lucy Hobbs, 22 February 2022, for 'Transforming Middlemarch' project, (D/104), De Montfort University Special Collections, UK

Marks L. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections

Steedman, C. (2001) ‘Going to Middlemarch: History and the Novel’ in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol.40, No.3 pp.531-52

Sutherland, J. (1996) ‘Is Will Ladislaw Legitimate?’ in Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Puzzles in Nineteenth Century Fiction, Oxford University Press, pp.146-55

220. Commentary 25: Scenes 4/6-4/7a

These two short scenes, the first liberally adapted from Chapter 45 of the novel where Lydgate’s notions of charging for consultations rather than prescriptions become the talk of Middlemarch, and the second, where Farebrother warns his friend about getting into debt and given a different setting by Davies, are pivotal in revealing to the viewer how blind Lydgate is to the mesh that is enclosing him. In the Shooting script these scenes appear early in Episode 4 and follow Chettam’s outrage at discovering the codicil to Casaubon’s will and the damage this will do to Dorothea’s reputation. In the Post-production script, they appear later, after a more positive scene where Lydgate recommends Farebrother to Dorothea for Rector of Lowick.

The focus on Farebrother and Lydgate continues through these scenes, but the former proves himself more knowing about Middlemarchers and their entrenched ways than the newcomer. In scene 4/6 Lydgate is accosted by the grocer Mawmsey from the ‘Top Market’ (Ch.45, p.259), who enquires politely why Mrs Mawmsey has not received her strengthening medicine. He is bemused when Lydgate ridicules such placebos and suggests, ‘Let her take a glass of wine with her dinner’. He explains, condescendingly that if doctors could charge for their visits it would curb overprescribing – indeed ‘overdosing the king’s lieges’ which is ‘the worst kind of treason’. Farebrother may smile at this analogy, but it leaves Mawmsey and his assistant confused. In Chapter 45, Lydgate talks to Mawmsey then mounts his horse and is off, and Mawmsey takes this news upstairs to his wife where she exclaims, ‘I should like him to tell me how I could bear up at Fair time, if I didn't take strengthening medicine for a month beforehand’ (Ch.45, p.261). Lydgate has offended both Mrs Mawmsey and Mr Mawmsey who, according to Eliot’s narrator, prides himself on being able to afford medicines for his family and is secure in his opinion that, ‘If physic had done harm to self and family, I should have found it out by this time’ (Ch.45, p.261). In this brief scene, Davies distils the mood of the whole chapter where the Middlemarch medics, as well as patients like Mrs Mawmsey, discuss Lydgate’s new ideas with disdain leading, in Chapter 46, to their refusal to work at the new Fever Hospital.

The character of Mawmsey is itself a distillation by Davies of the Middlemarch mentality. Eliot describes him as a grocer ‘whose retail deference was of the cordial, encouraging kind —jocosely complimentary’ (Ch.45, p.259), which lulls Lydgate into his smugly humorous analogy of ‘overdosing the king’s lieges’. In fact, the novel tells that Mawmsey’s mask of seeming dullness belies his cunning, revealed when he crows to his wife: ‘I was not going to tell him my opinion. Hear everything and judge for yourself is my motto. …People often pretend to tell me things, when they might as well say, “Mawmsey, you're a fool”’ (Ch.45, p.261). The essence of this character is embodied in Ken Campbell’s performance, down to his red hair ‘arranged in a flame-like pyramid’ (Ch.45, p.259). Campbell himself was described in his obituary as ‘an irrepressibly jovial elf, with a thin streak of malicious devilry about him - he was Puck, hobgoblin’ (Coveney, 2008), which is not too far away from Eliot’s Mawmsey. While he is smiling and deferential in craving Lydgate’s attention, once he is out of earshot he mutters cantankerously, ‘Mrs. Mawmsey is not a well woman. Mrs. Mawmsey needs her strengthening medicine.’ Partly because of Lydgate’s poor explanation and superior disregard, but also due to Middlemarch’s resistance to change, the viewer knows that Mawmsey remains unpersuaded by the doctor’s obscure logic.

Davies’ penchant for a walk-and-talk scene again comes to the fore in scene 4/7a as Lydgate and Farebrother progress down the main street and pass the church. His dialogue for Lydgate neatly transitions from the conversation with Mawmsey, as he complains about ‘these Middlemarchers’ being both ‘slow to take on new ideas’ and ‘slow to pay their bills’. Thus, Davies provides the wiser Farebrother with the chance to advise Lydgate that in order ‘to be wholly independent of their ignorance and spite, it's as well not to incur too many debts.’ (This is Davies’ only use of the term ‘Middlemarchers’ whereas in the novel it is used seven times – first by Mrs Cadwallader as she observes the guests from the town at Dorothea and Casaubon’s engagement dinner in Chapter 10.) Eliot introduces Farebrother’s intervention on the topic of money matters in Chapter 46 where, in the comfort of his study, he advises Lydgate to 'keep clear of wanting small sums that you haven't got' (Ch.46, p. 277). Lydgate, the narrator explains, takes these hints from his friend 'though he would have hardly have borne them from any other man' (Ch.46, p.277) such is his extreme pride. In the Shooting script, however, Davies’ Lydgate introduces the subject lightly – because debt is not yet an insurmountable burden in his mind and the script echoes the doctor’s interior monologue in Chapter 58 when ‘a man in setting up a house and preparing for marriage finds that his furniture and other initial expenses come to between four and five hundred pounds’ (Ch.58, p.83). In the Shooting script for 4/7a, Lydgate can still imagine that asking Rosy to ‘cut our coat according to our cloth’ (while ‘smiling fondly’) will be the solution. But by the Post-production script this notion has been cut from Lydgate’s lines along with his fantasy of her rising from the waves like Boticelli’s Venus needing no fine clothes, in fact ‘no adornment’ at all. This, and Farebrother’s resulting joke, may have been deemed out-dated for a 1990s television audience and instead the scene ends with Lydgate claiming he takes Farebrother’s point even though he has just said that domestic economy is ‘easier said than done’.

Scene 4/7b, which only appears in the Shooting script, is a counterpart to 4/7a in that having warned Lydgate against incurring debts in Middlemarch, Farebrother then warns him against allying himself too closely with Bulstrode, advising him to ensure that ‘people can see fresh air between you’. Lydgate it seems is in danger of being tainted in the eyes of Middlemarch not only by his own novel professional ideas but also by the company he keeps. This sense is conveyed visually in the production by the women Lydgate and Farebrother pass by in scene 4/7a. Davies states in his stage directions that ‘they are quite clearly gossiping about them’ (SS 4/7a) and while they greet Farebrother they do not greet his companion. Once the two men pass, the women ‘turn away and continue their conversation’ (SS 4/7a). Structurally, scene 4/7a is crafted to remind the audience of Lydgate’s previous walk-and-talk scene with Farebrother at the hospital in SS 1/13 and also of his walk across town with Bulstrode in SS 2/45, again shadowed by the Middlemarch gossips, when he is warned off paying his attentions to Rosamond. These visual motifs and repeated scenarios build a sense of foreboding that may equate with the ’sarcastic hand of destiny’ in Eliot’s narrative. Davies deploys these recurrent dramatic markers to show that by increments, and despite the kind warnings of his friend, Lydgate is on his way down.

Coveney M. (2008) ‘Ken Campbell’ obituary, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/sep/01/obituary.ken.campbell

225. Commentary 26: Scene 4/20

Chapter 46 of Middlemarch begins with a Spanish proverb: ‘Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get’ (p. 282). Unlike many of Eliot’s epigraphs, the proverb is both translated and located for the reader, and it serves as an excellent example of the novel’s frequent ‘split [….] against itself, where what is asserted at one point is questioned or negated at another’ (Ginsburg, p.542). Ginsburg continues, the ‘dialogical’ quality to Eliot’s varied narrative techniques provides ‘no simple, positive truth presented for the reader’s edification’ (p.552). Indeed, the chapter that follows tests this maxim, debating whether either Ladislaw or Lydgate can accomplish their political aims (to like what they can get) while in bed with Brooke and Bulstrode. This commentary will thus focus on the culmination of the chapter’s interest in moral expediency — an evening at the Lydgates. By examining this scene, one can chart Davies’ simultaneous adaptation and discussion of the shaping principle of this chapter, as well as his divergence from the novel towards a more determined reading of Ladislaw in particular.

Examining the progression of scene 4/20 from Shooting script to Post-production script continues to reveal Davies’ characterisation of Lydgate as a quasi-tragic figure; a man increasingly trapped between his ambitions and the mundane reality of living in Middlemarch. There is, for instance, a much quicker trajectory to 4/20 in the Post-production script, occurring after only seven scenes, compared to the Shooting script’s fourteen. Relocated to after 4/20 are Lydgate’s refusal to prescribe Mrs Mawmsey’s ‘strengthening medicine’ and, most importantly, Farebrother’s caution about town opposition and continued association with Bulstrode (the latter is also significantly cut). Arguably these scenes serve well in their original position because they illustrate precisely the tensions which a ‘stung’ and ‘nettled’ Ladislaw uses in retaliation to Lydgate’s barbs (SS 4/20).

The finished version of 4/20 is not without these pressures though, and in many ways Davies’ condensation of Chapter 46 only heightens their visibility as Lydgate is challenged about his association with the banker across the episode. In the novel, Ladislaw poses his friend the hypothetical question: 'If there were one man who would carry you a medical reform and another who would oppose it, should you inquire which had the better motives or even the better brains?’ (Ch.46, p.293). Unsurprisingly, Lydgate’s response touches upon Bulstrode, but he is not explicitly asked to. By comparison, in both the Shooting script and Post-production script, Ladislaw is irritated by Lydgate's dismissal of Brooke as 'part of the very disease that needs curing'. After claiming he endorses the man who supports those previously unrepresented, Ladislaw questions, 'What about you? You want medical reform and there's a man who'll help you deliver it. Are you going to reject him because of his morals or his motives? I don't think so ' (SS 4/20). Even if introduced on similarly abstract terms ('a man'), Bulstrode is thus much more clearly the subtext to Ladislaw’s argument and Lydgate is required to qualify that he values his independence too much to ‘cry up Bulstrode on any personal ground’ (SS 4/20).

Davies’ adaptation of the scene thus seems to align Ladislaw and Lydgate as men wrestling with essentially the same difficulty: the necessity — or indeed, inevitability — of compromising one’s integrity to work with what is ‘not ideal’ but ‘good enough’ to accomplish one’s moral purpose (SS 4/20). Of course, this is not wholly removed from the novel, which engineers Ladislaw’s and Lydgate’s conversation for similar effect. But pairing the two young men in this way reduces some of the subtlety of Ladislaw’s characterisation in the service of more easily positioning him within the social and political landscape of Middlemarch. In the novel, for instance, Ladislaw’s allegiance to reform is clearly contingent on his attachment to Dorothea. While he agrees with the principles of reform, we are told that he could have just as easily been ‘rambling in Italy sketching plans for several dramas, trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and finding it too artificial’. For Ladislaw, ‘self-culture’ is the ‘principle point’ (Ch.46, p.285); reform and political writing are convenient — if enjoyable — modes of expression. Indeed, he is flattered by Brooke’s comparison of his expression with that of Edmund Burke. When Brooke continues that they ought to buy Ladislaw a pocket borough to guarantee men of such ‘talent’ a place in parliament, he notes that pocket boroughs can be a ‘fine thing […] if they [are] always in the right pocket’ (Ch.46, p.284). In the adaptation, however, Sewell’s Ladislaw passionately rebukes Brooke for the same offer. Ladislaw reminds him that 'one of the prime purposes of reform is to remove pocket boroughs' and vows that if elected, he will work to remove such 'moribund, cruel complacency' (SS 4/2). Of course, smoothing away some of the complexities of Ladislaw’s character has an additional benefit for Davies: he can more readily be positioned as a young, vital, and passionate counterpart to Casaubon. Although Sewell’s characteristic intensity and striking, pale gaze conveys effectively enough the apparent ‘irregularity […of Ladislaw’s] dangerously mixed blood’ (Ch.46, p.289), some of his stranger foibles are also absent from this scene. Ladislaw doesn’t vie with the Lydgate’s spaniel for space on the rug; he sits opposite from Lydgate at the table, his narrative counterpoint and intellectual equal.

Ginsburg, M.P. (1980), ‘Pseudonymn, Epigraphs, and Narrative Voice: Middlemarch and the Problem of Authorship’, ELH, Autumn, Vol. 47, pp.542-558

230. Commentary 27: Scene 4/23

In scene 4/23, Mr Brooke (Robert Hardy) visits Mr Mawmsey (Ken Campbell) while canvassing. This is a meeting of some importance for the aspiring politician because while Brooke is both his social superior and his customer, Mawmsey is — the novel tells us — ‘a chief representative in Middlemarch of that great social power, the retail trader, and naturally one of the most doubtful voters in the borough’ (Ch.50, p.345). Brooke fails to capitalise on this opportunity, though. Seeking to distinguish himself from the Tories who have already threatened to cancel their accounts with the grocer, Brooke assures Mawmsey that he will not go elsewhere ‘as long as my butler brings me good reports of your sugar and spices’ (PP 4/23). In doing so, Mawmsey is freed to vote Tory without ‘the painful necessity […] of disappointing respectable people whose names were on his books’ (Ch.50, p.345).

The exchange between the two men exemplifies not only Brooke’s inability to represent the possibilities of reform to voters, but Lydgate’s censure of Middlemarchers as small-minded and resistant to change (‘the ignorance of people about here is stupendous’ (Ch.44, p.253)). Both the novel and Davies’ adaptation focus on the former failing over the latter. The Shooting script version of the scene in particular lampoons Brooke by emphasising the way that Mawmsey outmanoeuvres him. Davies imagines the conversation taking place outside of the grocers, surrounded by Mawmsey’s assistants who start ‘grinning’ as soon as their employer ruefully explains that he has to ‘look at [reform] in a family light’ (SS 4/23). The assistants’ merriment only increases as the scene progresses, as does Mawmsey’s pleasure at ‘his triumph’ when he ‘salute[s]’ Brooke ironically for ‘the promise you were good enough to give me not to withdraw your esteemed custom, vote or no vote’ (SS 4/23). One of the assistants takes Brooke’s sherry glass, he is bid goodbye, ‘battled’ by the exchange and Mawmsey continues with business as usual.

The Shooting script thus emphasises Mawmsey’s canniness, as well as the power he wields within his own domain implied by frequent cuts between the grocer and a chorus of knowing, grinning assistants. A later decision to shoot the scene inside the shop necessitated a good deal more set building and set dressing than using just the exterior. But the relocation similarly conveys Mawmey’s assuredness in dealing with Brooke. The addition of a line first present in the novel, ‘Those very words spoken from that very chair you’re in now’ to the Post-production script, for instance, confirms that Mawmsey has already entertained other candidates in the same set-up.

Mawmsey’s confidence aside, the scene takes on a slightly different tenor in the Post-production script as dialogue has also been cut and simplified. In a nod to the earlier version of the scene, Davies writes that Mawmsey exchanges glances and ‘winks’ with his assistant (PP 4/23), but the gesture is somewhat lost on screen as Campbell turns away from the camera to address his employees before smiling, and ushers Hardy into the next room. From there the scene continues in medium close-up and Brooke is saved some of the embarrassment of a quasi-public besting. Indeed, one feels that the resultant scene places less emphasis on the pleasure of watching Mawmsey outsmart Brooke — although he clearly does this still — than watching Brooke fall into, and belatedly realise, the trap Mawmsey has set him; a trap set in both the novel and Davies’ scripts by Mawmsey’s emotive question, ‘will Reform support Mrs Mawmsey and our six children when I am no more? (PP 4/23).

Davies must find evident use in these kind of scene endings, as the humorous and ironic quality of the denouement serves a quasi-narrative function. One might compare, for instance, Brooke’s encounter with Mawmsey against Lydgate’s experience at the Hospital election. In this scene, Davies notes that Brooke ends the scene on the realisation that ‘It's all been very pleasant, but something's mysteriously gone wrong’ (PP 4/23). Certainly, by cutting straightforwardly between just Mawmsey and Brooke, we are given sufficient time to watch Brooke slowly realise that he has been outplayed. The scene ends with a delicious couple of seconds on Hardy, his eyes darting up and side-to-side in anxious thought, his mouth readying in an ‘o’ and his fingers grasping for a retort that clearly eludes him.

The final version of 4/23 is helped in its slight shift of focus, moreover, by the reinstatement of an establishing scene immediately before it, which does not appear in the Shooting script. On their approach to Mawmsey’s shop, Ladislaw cautions Brooke that he needs to ‘let them [voters] know where you stand [….]. Wavering arguments won’t win wavering votes’ (PP 4/22). Ladislaw’s words are doubly ironic. They quite deliberately echo and invert Brooke’s impression in the novel that wavering voters will be won by ‘wavering statements’ (Ch.50, p.344). And of course, Ladislaw is proven right only minutes later when Mawmsey rebuffs Brooke’s genial assurances that reform is vital because ‘we’re all one family’ (PP 4/23). Mawmsey effectively silences Brooke in what Eliot calls ‘a decisive check’ (Ch.50, p.346). ‘That goes a bit deep for me’, Mawmsey retorts; the grocer’s canny self-interest is directly at odds with Brooke’s woolly bonhomie.

235. Commentary 28: Scenes 4/32-4/32a

The Hustings (scene 4/32) is a big set piece and it is no coincidence that it falls right at the very heart of Episode 4. It was one of the most demanding scenes to build and stage during the Stamford shoot of July-August 1993 and was preceded by the transformation of St George’s Square with the construction of the hustings platform and then the assembling of a seemingly vast Middlemarch crowd. This consisted of many Stamford residents as extras and, according to the Call sheet, a host of minor characters, ranging from Caleb Garth’s apprentice Tom, to Hopkins the undertaker to farm labourer Timothy Cooper, and Jenkins the printer.

With this scene set, Brooke and his supporting committee emerge from the White Hart and up the steps to the platform. The Shooting script differs in its opening to 4/32 from the Post-production script. The latter introduces Brooke via Dagley and Mr Sparks (adapting dialogue subsumed from SS, 4/30) before Ladislaw launches into his fulsome introduction of Brooke. In asking if Brooke is a ‘manufacturer’ Sparks illustrates that the working man of Middlemarch has no prior knowledge of his potential representative in Parliament. And Brooke’s tenant, Dagley, is keen to paint him as a bad country landowner growing ‘fat as a pig while poor folk’s children starve’ (PP, p.4/47).

In contrast, when Ladislaw addresses the crowd, his inclusive language and tone, with ‘Fellow citizens of Middlemarch’, ‘My friends’ (SS, p.4/50) and his perpetual use of the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’, immediately stamp him as a man of the people. Indeed, Davies’ annotations to the Shooting script (SS 4/50) show that he deletes the only sentence from Will’s first speech where he introduces himself using ‘I’ and ‘me’. The inference is that he is already well known to Middlemarchers. Ladislaw’s use of rhetoric throughout is innate and compelling. He places the political change that is coming in the context of the sweep of history, tells the crowd that this is what they want and ‘have deserved’, and makes it clear that it will come peacefully not through ‘bloody revolution’ or ‘civil war’ (SS, p.4/50). His rhetorical questions (for instance, ‘Is this not good news?’) keep the audience engaged and inspire hope for real change. And he primes the crowd for the fact that Brooke is the man to deliver this change. The power of this speech is all the more curious for the fact that Ladislaw is given no voice at the hustings in the novel. In Chapter 51, it is reported that an anonymous political man from Brassing delivers the build-up to Brooke while Ladislaw stands in the window opening out on to the balcony where the hustings take place. In only a few short speeches, Davies seizes the opportunity to demonstrate Will’s talent and passion for politics which his lack of status and entitlement in the novel does not allow.

Leading with Ladislaw’s fervent speech, Davies’ script and the ambiance of the production evokes the scale of mass unrest during a time of political change, in the way that only the visual medium of television drama can. It comes closer than Eliot does to the political edginess of newly industrialising towns like Coventry in the early 1830s. Historian Carolyn Steedman criticises Eliot for continually viewing history through the ‘filter of culture’ (Steedman 2001, p.547), although she acknowledges that, due to her “exile” from Coventry, Eliot would not have had access to town records from just before the Reform Bill which might have led to the ‘Middlemarch’s extremely low-key election riot’ being written differently (Steedman 2001, p.541). Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch notebooks’ may refer to ‘The keen and constant sight and sense of suffering conspired with political enthusiasm’ among framework knitters (Pratt and Neufeldt 1981, pp.46-7), but she does not portray the perspective of such characters, which Davies encapsulates through Dagley and Sparks at the start of scene 4/32.

Brooke’s self-inflicted political derailment, with his loss of nerve and deviation from his prepared speech, is closely represented from the novel as scene 4/32 unfolds. Eliot emphasises that Brooke is naturally abstemious and so taking a second glass of sherry quickly after the first ‘scattered his energies rather than collecting them’ (Ch.51, p.350), and after announcing to the crowd how happy he is to stand before them the ‘sherry is hurrying like smoke among [his] ideas’ (Ch.51, p.351). Davies’ stage direction baldly states, ‘His mind goes completely blank’, and in performance, Robert Hardy consciously dries. Brooke’s initial speeches to the crowd are littered with the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’ and his claim to be a ‘close neighbour’ is undermined by his reminder that they have ‘known’ him on the bench, instantly reinforcing any prejudices about his entitlement. This, coupled with Hardy’s 'far back' accent, which is at its most pronounced, leads naturally into the mimicking of his phrases by the character Vent.

This childish imitative trick which Eliot refers to as a ‘Punch-voiced echo’ (Ch.51, p.352) is coupled with the unveiling of the stuffed effigy of Brooke by Hawley’s cronies. Brooke, whom Davies’ stage directions note, recovers ‘his senses but not his script’ (SS, p.4/52), then provides Vent with all the verbal ammunition he needs to disrupt the crowd and to mock the candidate. His ramblings, expertly filleted from the novel by Davies, about Pope, Peru, Johnson and the Baltic are lost on his audience, even when they are relevant, like his point about the Levant, a market to which Middlemarch goods are exported. Eliot’s pun on the word ‘bill’ is a gift preserved in the script by Davies as the final verbal blow from Vent. Brooke may refer to reform when he promises ‘you shall have your Bill, my friends’ but Vent’s riposte is that the bill for voting in Brooke will be ‘five thousand pounds and… all the beer and bribes accounted for’ (SS, p.4/54).

Davies’ Vent is a generic, but visually present, character who delivers the message of the Tories to the crowd without them being directly incriminated. George Eliot’s disembodied voice of Punch makes it even more intriguing to the assembled Middlemarch crowd and effectively distances it from Hawley. Just as with all other intrigues in Middlemarch, those born and bred are in the know. While eggs fly and Bulstrode complains that the ‘new police’ are not there to break up the crowd, Standish identifies the voice as ‘Bowyer’: ‘I know it as well as if it had been advertised. He’s uncommonly good at ventriloquism’ (Ch.51, p.356), and has been dining recently with Hawley.

Significantly, scene 4/32 is bookended first by the hopeful emergence from the White Hart of Brooke’s committee and then by their hasty retreat to the hotel shielding their humiliated candidate. Davies signals in Ladislaw’s dispairing looks through the brief PP 4/32a that all except Brooke fully appreciate ‘it’s all up now’ (Ch.51, p.351). In the novel, Eliot leaves this inference to ‘the political personage from Brassing’ who ‘was writing busily, as if he were brewing new devices’ (Ch.51, p.356).

Pratt, J. C. and Neufeldt, V. A. (1981) 'Middlemarch Notebooks', University of California Press

Steedman, C. (2001) ‘Going to Middlemarch: History and the Novel’ in Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol 40, No 3, pp.531-552

240. Commentary 29: Scene 4/43

At the beginning of Book 6 of Middlemarch, the widowed Dorothea returns to Lowick with a ‘deep longing…the longing was to see Will Ladislaw’ (Ch.54 p.9). When he comes to say goodbye (having sensed, the opposition of Dorothea’s family to him, and after Brooke’s abandonment of politics and The Pioneer), Dorothea has him shown into the drawing-room because it ‘was the most neutral room in the house to her’ (Ch.54 p.12).

The equivalent scene, 4/43 was shot at Brympton d’Evercy, near Yeovil, on Wednesday 25th August 1993, the penultimate day of filming. It is the same room (adjacent to the library) in which they sit when Ladislaw visits Dorothea post-Rome (3/32 – filmed the following day), but the set-up here is reversed. This is important. In 3/32 Dorothea and Ladislaw are seated opposite one another on settees the lighting augmenting the natural light from the windows (behind the camera); this is the scene in which Ladislaw agrees to stay in Middlemarch. Conversely, in 4/43, where Will announces his intention to leave, he and Dorothea remain standing (although they are seated in the novel), with the windows and world beyond a continual reminder of the transience of this space and their situation. These rooms, forming the late 17th century south-facing Baroque wing known as the ‘state apartments’, originally constituted a salon on the ground floor opening onto the garden terrace. In the early 18th century this long room was divided into ‘the Drawing Room, the following room became known as the Oak or Small Drawing Room [library], and the next room the Dining Room’ (Wikipedia contributors, 2022 'Brympton d'Evercy'). These three interconnected, liminal spaces are clearly established in scene 4/43. Ironically, they meet in this central ‘communicating’ room, in which they are unable to communicate their feelings for one another.

The first shot (camera positioned in the library doorway) is of Ladislaw waiting awkwardly, putting his hat down on the central table and then nervously picking it up. Stage directions in both scripts dictate: ‘He puts his hat on the table. It looks silly and incongruous, so he picks it up again. Oh, God, it's left a mark on the polished surface (damp with dew). He rubs at the mark. Feels ridiculous. The most tragic meeting of his life and here he is messing about with a wet hat' (SS, p.4/69). At such crucial moments Davies’ colloquial interpretations of the characters’ emotional states are especially candid, and empathetic; Eliot tells us Ladislaw is ‘peculiarly uneasy’ (Ch.54 p.13), and Rufus Sewell embodies that particularly well, although the intricacies of the hat being wet and the mark on the table are sacrificed as perhaps being too extravagantly comic.

Dorothea enters from the dining-room. Both scripts suggest: ‘She is a bit agitated now she is face to face with him. She has never spelt it out to herself, but he does make her heart go pit-a-pat’ (SS, p.4/69). In the novel, Dorothea has acknowledged to herself her feelings for Will; it is rather the changed circumstances of her widowhood that complicate those feelings: ‘Just outside the door she had felt that this longed-for meeting was after all too difficult, and when she saw Will advancing towards her, the deep blush which was rare in her came with painful suddenness’ (Ch.54 p.13). In performance Juliet Aubrey does not noticeably blush but expresses much of her suppressed emotion through the modulation of her voice rather than physically.

First, when Dorothea praises Will’s plans to go to London, Davies indicates, ‘She's trying to be warm and encouraging, but there's something a bit tremulous about it. She's going to miss him terribly, and she feels that he doesn't want to go either’ (SS, p.4/70). The Davies script offers little direction for the next telling exchange: LADISLAW [bitterly] ‘You will forget all about me’ (SS, p.4/70). In fact, Sewell’s delivery is not bitter so much as a rather pathetic whisper (his little boy lost which he plays to such effect in 3/32 when reflecting on his childhood). To this Aubrey responds with a warm smile and love in her eyes: ‘I should never forget you’. This achieves an open tenderness on both sides that is missing from the scene in the novel.

Secondly, as Davies suggests, ‘This, at last, sounds like the declaration of love he's been longing for. But then she spoils it for him,’ by qualifying this with: ‘I have never forgotten anyone I used to know’ (SS, p.4/71). This provokes Will’s exasperation: ‘Great God!’. He turns away, leaving her out of focus. In the novel the narrator indicates: ‘It had seemed to him as if they were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other's presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning’ (Ch.54 p.16). Aubrey’s yearning, in performance, is conveyed by a move forward into focus again, towards his turned back. The viewer half expects her to raise her hand and touch him on the shoulder, but she cannot presume. Sewell, throughout this medium close-up, shot-reverse-shot sequence, is framed in the doorway of the library, as if Casaubon’s ghostly presence hangs over their meeting.

Thirdly, Dorothea makes another mistake in offering him the miniature of his grandmother. Will’s smart response, ‘Why should I have that when I have nothing else. It would be more consoling to me if you wanted to keep it’, seems candid enough: ‘Now surely she must realise that he loves her. But are her feelings for him love, or just a tender sympathy? Her eyes fill with tears’ (SS, p.4/71). Indeed, Aubrey’s tone here seems to suggest the latter, and her eyes scarcely water, although her face is held in tighter close-up, suggesting greater intimacy. It still seems to Dorothea that his agitation is about the unjust terms of Casaubon’s will rather than about his feelings for her.

Finally, before they are interrupted by Sir James Chettam, Davies reverses the polarity of their last exchange, compared with the novel. Davies chooses to end on a less intransigent, though equally unresolved, note, by having Dorothea conclude, ‘Two years ago I had no notion of the way that trouble comes, and ties our hands and makes us silent when we long to speak ...’ to which Davies adds Will’s private urging: ‘Speak, speak, please speak, he is willing her. The charged silence is interrupted by PRATT knocking and entering’ (SS, p.4/71).

Although the ebbs and flows of this difficult interchange are managed differently between the novel and the final production, the emotional temperature of their awkward stand-off is reproduced with palpable credibility. Following Ladislaw’s formal departure, at which Aubrey looks at Sewell utterly bereft, and Dorothea’s passionate defence of him to the incredulous Chettam, scene 4/44, a wide shot across the garden towards the lake, sees ‘LADISLAW striding away, his stupid hat in his hand, he bangs it against his thigh as he walks’ (SS, p.4/74). It is the exact reverse of his approach, through the trees, in the establishing scene 4/39. And here, as there, the stirring minor colours of bassoon and strings underscore the melodrama of the moment. Apart from the hat, he walks away empty-handed.

Wikipedia contributors, 'Brympton d'Evercy',Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 19 July 2022, 17:49 UTC, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Brympton_d%27Evercy&oldid=1099232724 [accessed 19 December 2022]

245. Commentary 30: Scene 4/51

The character of Raffles plays a more prominent part in George Eliot’s novel than in Andrew Davies’ screenplay. Nonetheless, despite his condensed appearance in the adaptation, his plot function is not diminished. Although Raffles is a colourful iconoclast in his own right, who serves to ruin Bulstrode’s reputation in Middlemarch, he is also one of a number of minor characters who prick the consciences of the established elite. These characters themselves range across the social spectrum from Mrs Cadwallader and Mr Hawley, to Mr Bambridge the horse-dealer, Mr Mawmsey the grocer, and even the Garths. Furthermore, Raffles is a type in Victorian fiction; like the ghost of Jacob Marley he disrupts the present order with a visitation from a nefarious past. And while Marley is already long dead in Dickens’ story A Christmas Carol (1843), Raffles’ involuntary martyrdom, engineered by Bulstrode, precipitates the pious banker’s own downfall.

Popular though such roguish soothsayers may have been with contemporary readers, critical opinion, led by Jerome Beaty, is unkind to Eliot here, perhaps with good reason. Beaty writes, ‘Rigg and Raffles are the least successful characters in the novel by almost common consent. They are incompletely visualised, incompletely presented. The coincidences are too many’ (1960, p.75). Without space or necessity to enter into an examination of the more elaborate charades of the Bulstrode-Rigg-Raffles plot in the novel, their relationship to each other and to Will Ladislaw (the grandson of Bulstrode’s first wife whom Raffles has helped Bulstrode deprive of his rightful inheritance), it will suffice to say that here the screen adaptor is blessed with the opportunity to improve upon the weaknesses of his source material.

First, Andrew Davies disassociates Joshua Rigg-Featherstone (Raffles’ step-son, who in the novel leads Raffles to Bulstrode) from the historical alliance, thus simplifying the transactional sale of Stone Court to the Bulstrodes: ‘You've got the property, Mr. Bulstrode, and I've got the cash. Both rich men in our way.’ (PP 4/50, p.4/53). Secondly, Davies omits the complicated (and scarcely credible) business of Ladisaw’s inheritance and his relationship to Bulstrode, such that Ladislaw never meets with either Bulstrode or Raffles in the dramatisation. Thirdly, Raffles on screen is completely visualised and completely presented in John Savident’s wonderful rendition of this grotesque Fool - an antiquarian Sir Les Patterson, larger than life and twice as uncouth.

In scene 4/51 Raffles inveigles himself into the parlour at Stone Court, having apprehended Bulstrode overlooking the farmlands of his new estate in the company of Caleb Garth in the previous scene of the Post-production script, 4/50b. The ‘b’ indicates that this scene was an addition. In fact, the same encounter occurs in the Shooting script immediately following the handover of Stone Court from Rigg to Bulstrode in scene 4/50. In the screened version scene 4/50 is split and the two occurrences are separated by some distance: the Rigg/Bulstrode deal (4/50a) is put back between 4/32a (Brooke’s stoicism following humiliation at the hustings) and 4/34 (Brooke being laughed at in the street on his way to The Pioneer office to tell Ladislaw he’s stepping down). There then follows 4/60-1 (Rosamond and Captain Lydgate out riding and Lydgate’s remonstrance), Brooke’s departure from Freshitt (4/36), Mrs Cadwallader’s advice to Dorothea on the croquet lawn (4/37-8) and Ladislaw’s visit to Dorothea at Lowick (4/43). Then comes 4/50b. This reordering of events may well have taken place in the edit suite, in order to balance more effectively the four storylines in play and to give a sense of time having elapsed between Rigg’s departure and Raffles’ arrival in Middlemarch.

In the Stone Court parlour, Raffles tucks into his supper and brandy, brought by Mrs Abel the housekeeper, while Bulstrode (on tenterhooks) explains to his bemused wife that ‘Mr. Raffles has come about a matter of business’, and encourages her off to bed as quickly as possible. In the Post-production script Raffles manages to drop in an additional barbed comment as she leaves: ‘I could tell you a tale or two about old Nick's London days! Goodnight, goodnight!’ (p. 4/74). This is the opening gambit of his blackmail mission, complete with reference to the Devil himself, and the first intimation of a sordid past. The detail follows swiftly her departure: ‘Lots of money in stolen goods, a fine game is the fencing game, and you and the old lady ran the best fencing shop in London, eh? Regular thieves kitchen! And off to church on Sundays as if butter wouldn't melt...’ It is also revealed by Bulstrode that he had paid Raffles to go to America.

The origins of his bribery emerge in Raffles’ next revelation: ‘I've often thought I'd have been better off by telling the first Mrs. B that I'd found her runaway daughter. I got very little from you for keeping it quiet - and seeing you take her fortune. I've a tender conscience about that pretty daughter. She died penniless, but I s'pose you know that?’ (PP, p.4/75). This is rather different from how the matter is broached in the Shooting script: ‘All ill-gotten gains, Nick, and none of it yours by rights. Oh, he's a clever fellow, old Nicky Bulstrode, he cheated the daughter out of her money and let her die destitute while he married the mother and got the lot!’ (SS, p.4/88). Interestingly, this alteration implicates Raffles more directly in the cover-up, and suggests that Bulstrode may not have been party to the daughter’s ultimate fate. However, neither here, nor elsewhere in the adaptation, is the daughter identified as Ladislaw’s mother. Later, in the Hospital Boardroom scene (6/41) for example, Hawley (at his strident best) calls upon Bulstrode to deny the charges laid upon him: ‘I don't maintain thieves and cheat offspring of their inheritance in order to set myself up as a saintly kill-joy!’ (PP, p.6/47). The matter of the offspring cheated of their inheritance (Ladislaw) remains a loose end in the adaptation’s plot to the last.

None the less, Raffles’ tragic tale in 4/51 serves to establish the gravity of Bulstrode’s crimes, and the corrosiveness of his Christian guilt. He warns Raffles in this scene, ‘You will do well to reflect that it's possible for a man to overreach himself in his efforts to secure undue advantage’, to which Raffles smartly retorts: ‘Well, you'd know all about that, Nick’ (SS, p.4/87). Davies reinforces this irony by allowing Raffles’ swift riposte, while in the novel Bulstrode’s speech continues uninterrupted: ‘Although I am not in any way bound to you, I am willing to supply you with a regular annuity…’ (Ch.53, p.390).

But while Bulstrode’s conscience is an easy target for the self-serving Raffles, Eliot’s narrator, characteristically, adopts a more temperate perspective. In the unravelling of Bulstrode’s historic deceit we are told, "If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all" (Ch.61, p.132). ‘Thus,’ for Will Glovinsky, ‘there remain two Bulstrodes: one serving as the narratively necessary foil to Dorothea's imperfect virtue, the other as synecdoche of "us all"’ (2022, p.424). The other significant alteration between Shooting script and final production is the deferral of Raffles’ immediate demands for payment until the next morning (4/56), keeping Bulstrode on tenterhooks and on his knees that night in fervent prayer (4/54). Instead, as 4/51 concludes, Raffles gorges himself on Bulstrode’s brandy, as if to remind the banker that it is because of their enduring pact that he can afford to drink so well.

Beaty, J. (1960) Middlemarch from Notebook to Novel: A Study of George Eliot’s Creative Method, Urbana, University of Illinois Press

Glovinsky, W. (2022) ‘Narrative Guilt and the Victorian Novel’ in Victorian Studies, Vol. 64, No. 3, pp.401-424

250. Commentary 31: Scene 5/9

It is not known how different the versions of the last three episodes that Louis Marks (producer) and Susie Chapman (script editor) proposed were from Andrew Davies’ own, but it is clear from the Post-production script that the final dramatisation altered the emphasis of Episode 5 away from the Lydgates’ failing fortunes (in money and marriage) to the upward trajectory of the Fred and Mary sub-plot.

Episode 5 eschews the trials of the Lydgates, with which Episode 4 ended (Rosy’s miscarriage) and which the Shooting script continued (Spooner’s credit (5/4), gossip on the street (5/5-5/6) and in the Green Dragon (5/7), and conflict at home (5/8)). It opens instead with Fred Vincy’s speculative visit to Rev Farebrother, who is moving in at Lowick Rectory, for advice (PP 5/9). Fred, newly-graduated from college, is resistant to the expectation that he will take holy orders. Farebrother initially thinks Fred wants moral guidance from a man of the cloth (who is an unconventional parson in his own way). But it emerges that Fred’s antipathy is not simply that he would rather be a farmer, but that Mary will not have him if he becomes a clergyman. Fred’s real motive is not moral guidance therefore, but to entreat Farebrother to petition Mary on his behalf to elicit the strength of her feelings, if he should choose another path. This, as Mrs Garth later informs him (5/45) ‘was a mistake’. It is doubly insulting to Farebrother. Firstly, Fred disparages the life of a clergyman (which Farebrother himself took up reluctantly). And secondly, he fails to divine Farebrother’s own regard for Mary. In agreeing to act as Fred’s emissary, Farebrother shows the same, self-effacing moral rectitude as he does when Lydgate votes against him in the hospital chaplaincy election, and hubristically ignores his advice about how to handle Middlemarchers.

The Garths and the Farebrothers form the undemonstrative and unselfish moral axis of Middlemarch in many respects, and it is productive (both in the novel and the adaptation) that their actions and values impinge upon the unstable foundations of the main relationships at this juncture in the unfolding of events. They impact upon the Lydgates, Fred, Bulstrode and even Dorothea and Ladislaw (indirectly).

Whilst the dialogue is little altered, there are a number of scenic changes between the Shooting script and Post-production script here. In the former Fred arrives on foot, Farebrother is indoors unpacking books. In the latter, Fred is on horseback (his favoured mode of transport) and Farebrother is met outside the parsonage, directing removals; their conversation is conducted among the gravestones of the churchyard. It is likely that the changes were to accommodate both the exterior possibilities of the location at Brympton d’Evercy and its interior limitations. Brympton’s fifteenth-century ‘Priest House’ (now called the Castle House), lies south of the main house and adjacent to St. Andrew’s Church. Although we only see this building from the outside, it makes for a plausible parsonage, though the novel suggests that the church and living are at some further remove from the manor house at Lowick.

What relocating the conversation to the churchyard also provides is a symbolic setting that enables Anthony Page (director) to bring out something of the relative masculine power relations of Mary’s rival suitors. This is the first time they have discussed her together. In the stage directions Farebrother ‘sits down on a stone slab, takes off his hat and runs his fingers through his hair’ (PP, p.5/5). This is a nervous response which suggests the physical weakness of the older man despite his superior wisdom. Fred, by contrast, remains standing over Farebrother and irreverently, raises one booted leg atop the monumental slab, showing that what he may lack in sense he makes up for in youthful virility. Fred’s desire to ride across country and do what other men do (rather than be a clergyman) demeans Farebrother’s vocation, and Fred’s overbearing physical stance completes his emasculation. As the stage directions impart, ‘he's feeling used’ by Fred and his tone indicates he is affronted. Fred, sensing he may have overstepped the mark, invokes pathos in his final plea: ‘I don't know how I could live without the hope of her ... it would be like learning to live with wooden legs. Please... speak to her for me’. Thus, Fred substitutes his muscular, riding-booted leg with the imaginative simile of an artificial one. The image is George Eliot’s, but its symbolism here is empowered by the staging. And over Fred’s plea, Mary’s pastoral recorder theme plays, softening both men’s hearts. Farebrother relents: ‘He knows he's going to have to do it’ (PP, p.5/6).

By contrast, in Chapter 52 of the novel, Fred visits Farebrother at home before his move to Lowick; he is packing rather than unpacking, and has recently been on the receiving end of much encouragement from his aunt and mother (and especially his sister ‘Winny’) to marry (Mary Garth) now he has gained the living. Conveniently, Mary Garth is already installed as their housemaid at the parsonage, making her on hand and alone when Farebrother delivers his commission. Therefore, the novel makes both the possibility of a romance between Farebrother and Mary more openly discussed, and their proximity more encouraging to that possibility (and discouraging to Fred). However, it also facilitates the Parson’s further altruism in engineering time and space for Fred and Mary to be alone when he plucks up courage (after Farebrother’s intervention) to visit her at Lowick. In the adaptation, Mary returns home after Featherstone’s death and Garth’s new position as land agent for Freshitt and Tipton ensures they are, as Mrs Garth tells Farebrother, ‘rich enough to educate Alfred and to keep Mary at home’ (SS, 3/54). In this way, both Farebrother’s and afterwards Fred’s visits to Mary are on the Garths’ home soil (in the fecund environs of the orchard).

Fred Vincy’s ‘coming of age’ and finding his way (which is the one positive plot-line anchoring Episode 5) is the result of support from Farebrother, Garth, Mary and, grudgingly, his own father, before Bulstrode’s provision of Stone Court (out of guilt) finally secures his marriage and future (in Episode 6). In some ways it is remarkable that the new class of businessman Vincy represents is unable to employ his eldest son (which was common). But it is precisely the precarity of their socio-economic elevation (in hock to Bulstrode), that makes the succession of Fred (in business) and Rosamond (by marriage) both needful and risky. Jonathan Firth brought a quality to Fred which Andrew Davies identified in interview as ‘a bit grumpy and resentful’ (Davies 2022, p.5). But the chip on his shoulder, which Firth carries so well, may be seen as a function of Fred’s economic insecurity as well as his personal fecklessness.

Davies, A. (2022) original interview conducted by Justin Smith and Lucy Hobbs, 22 February 2022, for 'Transforming Middlemarch' project, (D/104), De Montfort University Special Collections, UK

255. Commentary 32: Scenes 5/27-5/28

Davies’ adaptation in these two scenes of the conversation at Freshitt, where Mrs Cadwallader advises Dorothea against meeting Ladislaw again, is particularly intriguing. It at once celebrates the heritage setting of the English country house and displays all the self-centred and hypocritical entitlement of the characters who dwell there. This is Davies at his most playful in conveying the ideas that Dorothea contests with her peers and elders.

This duality becomes evident in the opening lines of scene 5/27 as Chettam (Julian Wadham) expresses his disgust that Ladislaw is still in Middlemarch - something he views as a danger to Dorothea’s reputation. Although Davies takes much of the dialogue verbatim from the novel, Mrs Cadwallader’s ‘joke’ about it not yet being a crime to be a foreigner is all the screenwriter’s. (The only character in the novel to label Ladislaw of ‘foreign extraction’ is the minor character Hackbutt, around the time of Will’s appointment at The Pioneer (Ch.37, p.129), although Farebrother and Hawley do problematically discuss Will’s ‘queer genealogy’ (Ch.71, p.285) when Bulstrode’s past starts to emerge). The fact that Chettam takes Mrs Cadwallader’s comment as a joke and that it is accepted into the script is a sign both of Middlemarch’s aversion to ‘outsiders’ and of how far UK society has since come in terms of diversity criteria for television output.

Chettam successfully intimates to Mrs Cadwallader (Elizabeth Spriggs) the challenge he faces in talking to Dorothea about Ladislaw. The viewer has seen how she countered Chettam when he interrupted her previous encounter with Ladislaw at Lowick (scene 4/43) and, as her brother-in-law, he does not want to risk marring their family relationship. But the sub-text is that in addressing the topic with Dorothea he might come across as jealous. The adaptation quotes directly from the novel with Chettam’s line that any advice ‘will come more lightly from’ Mrs Cadwallader (Ch.62, p.145).

This rather insidious dialogue takes place against the backdrop of an idealised English country house (Walcot Hall, Shropshire) with its imposing façade and generous lawns upon which Celia is strolling with the Nanny, baby Arthur in her arms, and Dorothea is walking with two English setters. The trap is set for Dorothea as she wanders, out of focus, into the two-shot of Chettam and Cadwallader just as the latter has agreed to offer her advice and cries, ‘Oh, I hear you’re going to Tipton, my dear’. Dorothea stops still, framed between them, and then the camera brings her into focus. She has sprung their trap.

This is all very different from how it happens in the novel, where Dorothea is detained at Freshitt by a meeting with Caleb Garth and is then invited to walk down the gravel path with Chettam and Cadwallader. It is in this setting that Mrs Cadwallader begins her verbal diatribe against Ladislaw still being in Middlemarch when it was reported he was to leave weeks earlier and talks of him ‘warbling at the piano’ with Mrs Lydgate or ‘lying on the rug’. Dorothea issues a similar retort to the one in Davies’ dialogue: ‘You began by saying one report was false… I believe this one is too, (Ch.62, p.146), which threatens to derail Mrs Cadwallader’s argument. The older woman however, recovers herself enough to reply, ‘Heaven grant it… I mean that all bad tales be untrue’. This is a back-handed way of saying that they will not all prove to be untrue but with the ’I mean’ she makes it clear that she is not echoing Dorothea’s last comment that Ladislaw has ‘already suffered too much injustice’. This double slight is a provocation that the young Dorothea cannot stand and she exits unceremoniously on her own by carriage to Tipton, leaving Chettam, who has remained silent for the duration, repenting ‘of his stratagem’ (Ch.62, p.147).

Davies’ Dorothea is not so lucky to escape; it is not until Mrs Cadwallader has her in the confines of the carriage (in scene 5/28), having bagged a drive to Tipton, that she begins with her advice about ‘Young Mr. Ladislaw’. The gulf between them, implied metaphorically in the two shot which places them either side of the Freshitt driveway with the house still visible, widens as their conversation continues. Dorothea looks away from her companion until she mentions Ladislaw’s visits with Rosamond and then, contrasting with Mrs Cadwallader’s slow drawl, she delivers her defence of him with pace, emotion and sentiment that echo the feelings that the novel’s narrator attributes to her:

As in other scenes, the extremities of emotion with which Eliot endows in her teenage protagonist are often downplayed both in Davies’ script and in the more mature performance of Aubrey.

The account of Will ‘lying on the rug’ is surely a euphemism for physical intimacy and the seed of this image is sown much earlier in the narrator’s comment that ‘the house where he visited oftenest and lay most on the rug was Lydgate’s’ (Ch.46. p.289). Ironically, of course Dorothea is right and in Ladislaw’s eyes this merely a Romantic pose showing he is at ease in a friend’s house. Indeed, Lydgate himself does not raise an eyebrow when Ladislaw lies there on the rug in his presence along with ‘the house spaniel’. But the insinuation from Mrs Cadwallader really affects Dorothea, partly because such behaviour would be considered outlandish by her immediate peers.

Mrs Cadwallader’s snobbishness about the ‘disreputable’ people of ‘manufacturing towns’ has its origins in the novel as does her disappointed tone about Lydgate’s choice of wife when after all, ‘Wasn’t he the son of somebody?’ This is immediately followed by Mrs Cadwallader catching Dorothea’s eye as she delivers her generalisation that ‘one cannot be wise for other people’ (SS 5/28). The implication is, of course, that Dorothea could make the same unforgiveable mistake if she chooses to ruin her reputation and seek Ladislaw as her partner. An obvious irony is that this is exactly what Mrs Cadwallader has done herself. She fell for the Reverend Cadwallader and married beneath her birth status. Davies chooses not to include this sub-plot in his adaptation or to ever introduce viewers to the Reverend, but readers of the novel will see the ultimate hypocrisy of Mrs Cadwallader in these comments.

Towards the end of scene 5/28, Mrs Cadwallader backs off for a few moments to give her advice time to sink in – instead talking about the perversity of ‘we English’ in persevering with ‘open carriages’. The viewer might wish this was the worst of habits of ‘the English’ upper classes that these scenes had revealed. It is no accident that Dorothea falls silent at this point and the minor key theme of raging strings takes off. In interview, Davies discusses how initially he tried to write out Mrs Cadwallader altogether on the grounds that she does not carry any significant plot but soon reneged on this because quite simply ‘she’s got some of the best lines’ in the novel (Davies 1993, p.116) and indeed in scenes like 1/64 proves to be a useful surrogate narrator/social commentator.

It is here that 5/28 ends in the Shooting script. However, in the Post-production script, as the carriage rounds the corner of the drive to follow the Freshitt estate boundary wall, Mrs Cadwallader renews her onslaught. This time, in voiceover, she warns more openly that ‘it would be scandalous if you received him’ (PP 5/28), echoing her comment earlier in the novel to Chettam that Ladislaw is ‘making a dark-blue scandal’ (Ch.62, p.146) at the Lydgates. Her voice trails off but this leaves the viewer in no doubt that the journey will be tortuous for Dorothea.

Davies, A. (1993) unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections

260. Commentary 33: Scenes 5/31-5/33

In the sequence of private encounters between Ladislaw and Dorothea, scene 5/31 marks the climax of their melodrama’s emotional contortion. It is also another example of Andrew Davies’ techniques of excision and compression and his dramatic structuring through progressive repetition. In the Post-production script the scene is presented as a chance meeting, at Tipton (in Brooke’s absence). In the Shooting script, Ladislaw is there apparently to retrieve ‘a portfolio of sketches’ before his final departure (SS, p.5/50). Dorothea tells the housekeeper, Mrs Kell, in the previous short establishing scene (SS 5/29), ‘I've just come to pick up some documents’ (SS, p.5/49). In the Post-production script she says simply, ‘Uncle's asked me to sort a few things out for him’ (PP, p.5/33). Yet on meeting, Ladislaw says, ‘I wrote to you - I am going away immediately, and I could not go without speaking to you again’ (SS, p.5/50). The word ‘today’ is inserted after ‘I wrote to you’ in the final version of this speech. The viewer is led to believe, therefore, that Ladislaw has requested this meeting in his letter.

In Chapter 62 of the novel, Ladislaw sends the letter proposing to call at Lowick, and is awaiting a reply; Dorothea has yet to receive this missive before her Tipton visit to write some memoranda for her uncle. In the Shooting script there is a short scene (SS 5/26) which sees Ladislaw still at The Pioneer writing the letter: ‘My dear Mrs. Casaubon. I hesitate to communicate with you again, but I should be very grateful if you would consent to one last brief meeting. I have to collect certain papers from Tipton Grange this afternoon, but perhaps I might be allowed to call at Lowick briefly tomorrow evening’ (SS, p.5/45). The Production schedule confirms that this scene was shot (on Sunday 11th July 1993) but evidently did not make the final cut. Therefore, this scene does not appear in the Post-production script. Either way, Dorothea does not get the letter.

As it is, they meet by chance at Tipton, though it is chance informed by intention and mutual desire. So what is George Eliot’s purpose in the letter that is never read? And what of the changes between Davies’ Shooting script and the final production which favours coincidence over intention? In the first place, Will’s letter is an act of resolution informed by the new knowledge he has both of Casaubon’s codicil (which he learns from Rosamond) and, in the novel, his mother’s disinheritance (acquired from encounters with Raffles and Bulstrode). Yet he ‘felt the awkwardness of asking for more last words’ with Dorothea, since ‘a first farewell has pathos in it, but to come back for a second lends an opening to comedy’ (Ch. 62, pp.142-3). The reader knows in advance, that he is driven by both passion and the defence of his own integrity, to overcome his embarrassment.

He adopts a direct approach (the letter), rather ‘than to use any device which might give an air of chance to a meeting of which he wished her to understand that it was what he earnestly sought’ (Ch.62, p.143). Why then, does it come down to chance, in the event? The answer perhaps, lies as much with Dorothea as with Will. Had Dorothea received Will’s letter, her consent to a final meeting might have been tantamount to an act of devotion on the one hand, but it would also have been an act of defiance (of Chettam and Mrs Cadwallader) on the other. As she drives alone from Freshitt to Tipton, with their recent blackening of Will’s character (vis a vis Rosamond) reducing her to private tears, she felt ‘a strange alternation between anger with Will and the passionate defence of him’ (Ch. 62, p.148). In this state of mind, it is crucial that their encounter is circumstantial and perhaps destined. In both the novel and the adaptation, Ladislaw’s first words are about his unseen letter, turning chance back to purpose. In the adaptation, however, she travels to Tipton with Mrs Cadwallader as chaperone (continuing to besmirch Ladislaw, sotto-voce, on the way). Judging by her facial expressions Dorothea is moved but resilient. Certainly, there is no sign of tears.

It is Ladislaw who is impassioned in this brief encounter: ‘What I care for more than I can ever care for anything else is absolutely forbidden me’. Davies uses Eliot’s dialogue verbatim, but the speech is truncated. In the novel he goes on to say: ‘I don't mean merely by being out of my reach, but forbidden me, even if it were within my reach, by my own pride and honour— by everything I respect for myself’ (Ch.62, p.153). This is an important idea which is lost in the adaptation; perhaps it would be lost on a modern audience too.

The simple choreography of shot-reverse-shot which frames each actor individually and never together, turns on the point where Ladislaw fastens his bag and says, with finality, ‘I must go’. He crosses before the camera and the scene is concluded in reverse. Dorothea is left stunned by their last exchange when her entreaty to ‘remember me’ is answered ‘almost savagely’ with: ‘As if I were not in danger of forgetting everything else’. In the Shooting script they were to have been interrupted by Mrs Kell. And the stage directions there suggest: ‘She takes his hand. He holds hers for a moment. He feels terrible. He is going to have to let go for ever and never touch her again’ (SS, p.5/53). There is no physical connection between them in the scene as played, and Ladislaw is notably colder. The camera lingers for a while on a close-up of Dorothea’s perplexity, her darting eyes doing the thinking. Davies’ stage direction, which doesn’t appear in the Post-production script, puts it with customary candour: she ‘realises now, that it is her he's crazy about, not Rosy’. We cut to a country road with the stagecoach carrying Ladislaw away.

In the novel Dorothea’s epiphany is expressed in terms which are perhaps as alien to a television audience of the 1990s as Ladislaw’s hurt pride. ‘Dorothea drew a deep breath and felt her strength return — she could think of him unrestrainedly. At that moment the parting was easy to bear: the first sense of loving and being loved excluded sorrow’ (Ch.62, p.156). She is overjoyed because, ‘He had acted so as to defy reproach, and make wonder respectful.’ Destined or not, this is unadulterated melodrama, because it celebrates a love which is renounced as pure and unimpeachable. A brief encounter indeed.

265. Commentary 34: Scenes 5/15-5/20

In this sequence of five short scenes, lasting only four and a half minutes on screen, Andrew Davies adapts an episode from Chapter 56 of the novel, where George Eliot uses a seemingly random act of aggression among minor characters to advance the Fred Vincy quest for a purpose plot. However, this scene also offers an opportunity to explore the wider historical context from the perspective of a farmworker who views the effects of industrial change – the coming of the railway - with scepticism for the lot of the working man.

More unusually for Davies, the screenwriter adheres strongly to the order and detail of events in the 10 pages of the novel, where Eliot outlines the way Fred comes across the scene near Yoddrell’s farm where the haymakers are about to confront the railway surveyors. Scene 5/15 introduces Garth and Tom his assistant measuring out land that Dorothea plans to sell off and about which in the novel Eliot’s narrator reveals Garth’s ‘bias was towards getting the best possible terms from railroad companies’ (Ch.56, p.35). In the Post-production script, scene 5/16 sees Fred on horseback charging down to intervene in the fracas; in scene 5/17 Tom is knocked out by the farmworkers; scene 5/18 shows Fred halting his horse between the farmers and the fleeing railway men; scene 5/19 has Fred checking on Garth and Tom and the longer scene 5/20 is where Garth first talks with the farmworkers and then with Fred, leading to the plan for Fred to have a trial working for him.

This is a slightly streamlined flow of events compared with the Shooting script, where scene 5/15 contains more dialogue between Tom and Garth about the technicalities of measuring out the land. This detail is replaced in the Post-production script with Hiram Ford’s threats to the surveyors to ‘Go cut up land in another parish!’, initiating the momentum for this action scene and establishing this character as the principal agitator. In the Shooting script Caleb Garth’s intervention is more active than in the onscreen version in scene 5/17 and generally he has fewer lines across the whole sequence than Davies originally scripts. Clive Russell’s physical bearing and calming aura successfully conveys Garth thoughts in performance without the need for some of the original dialogue. Fred may play the young squire in both versions of scene 5/18 but his language and threats to see the farmworkers ‘transported’ are toned down from the novel where he offers to see them ‘Hung at the next assizes’. Even Eliot’s Fred seems to recognize that he has performed a stereotypical lord-like act in this scenario though, when he ‘afterwards laughed heartily at his own phrases’ (Ch.56, p.37).

Fred’s salutary warning of transportation may stop the belligerent Hiram Ford in his tracks but Davies, consciously removes the rashest move of Fred’s in responding to Hiram’s challenge to a personal fight, if he will only get down from his horse. In the novel, Fred says he will come back and help Garth for the day, ‘Only I want to go first and have a round with that hulky fellow who turned to challenge me’ (Ch.56, p.38-9). He is dissuaded from this by Caleb and although Fred offers to go and talk to the workers with Caleb in the Shooting script in scene 5/19, the older man refuses the help of his ‘young blood’, the implication being he might be too hot-headed (SS, p.5/32). This is perhaps a signal that for Davies, Fred’s rehabilitation starts here.

In the novel as Garth approaches the farmworkers, he has mixed feelings ‘having always been a hard-working man himself—of rigorous notions about workmen and practical indulgence towards them’ but reluctantly feels he must give them a ‘little harangue’ (Ch.56, p.39). The irony is that when he addresses them to defend the coming of the railway as a good thing’ he is held up by Timothy Cooper as ‘being for the big folks’. Davies retains this line in the script but instead of Garth replying ‘If you don't think well of me, Tim, never mind’ (Ch 56, p.41), Clive Russell, takes the comment as if a dose of medicine and accepts the farmer’s apology which follows swiftly.

Timothy Cooper is described in Davies’ stage directions as the workers’ ‘moral leader’ even if Hiram Ford is their ‘employer’ (SS 5/20, p.534. It is this everyman character who, as in the novel, gives the long view of the rural workforce – they have experienced ‘war’, ‘peace’ and the coming of the ‘canells’ and none of these have brought them any greater prosperity or change of status. In the adaptation, his speech is an extrapolation of Ford’s sneering reaction to Garth’s suggestion that they ‘Live and let live’ – a rather modern phrase for Davies to have added to the dialogue. To these rural workers it is always they who are required to ‘Live and let live’, not their betters.

Following the successful dissipation of the fight, Garth comments ‘that’s my day’s work gone’ (SS 5/20, p.5/32), which prompts Fred’s offer to help him. This offer comes much earlier in the novel – before Caleb goes to speak with the ruffians. And the suggestion comes not from Fred but from Garth himself. This strand of the plot is all tidied into 5/20 in the script, lest the audience will have forgotten Fred’s offer of help during the intervening debate with the farmworkers. In scene 5/20 as the two walk uphill, away from the railway men resuming their survey, their dialogue is much filleted from the longer conversation in Chapter 56 which takes place over the whole day they spend outdoors together. There Garth holds forth on the importance of loving ‘your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin’ (p.43). He expresses a genuine interest in Fred’s future and is pleased at his desire to enter his own trade. Davies perhaps missed an opportunity by showing Fred at work with Garth, getting his hands (and his clothes) dirty and bonding with Garth as they measure the land together. It is a crucial moment where Fred, who is struggling to find his role in life but does not want to accept the role of clergyman which Vincy has chosen for him, begins to find his way.

In the novel Garth seems keen to consult with Susan about Fred working for him but before he arrives home he has ‘taken his resolution’ to pursue the idea. Davies is careful in his script to retain Garth’s general guiding principle from the novel – that ‘the young ones always have a claim on the old to help them forward’ (PP 5/20, p.53). But it is also clear from Clive Russell’s demeanour that Garth feels he has an extra responsibility to Fred if this lad wants to ‘take Mary’s happiness’ into his ‘keeping’ (Ch.56, p.44).

The shooting of this complicated sequence over two days (31st July and 1st August 1993), required Lighting cameraman Brian Tufano, unusually, to produce storyboards ‘to make it absolutely clear to everybody involved exactly what the director [Anthony Page] had in mind’, and to help ‘the director to visualise the set-ups he would need to tell the story’ (Tufano 1993, p.31). The camera ranges from the wide angle of high vantage points of both Fred and Garth on the banks either side of the track through the valley where the fight takes place to the shot-reverse shot of the conversation between Garth and the farmworkers after the fight. Also most effective in the encounter between Fred and Ford are the circling shots of Fred on horseback and Ford beneath him trying to avoid the hooves. Tufano orchestrates this variety of shots to create the closest experience to an action sequence that the viewer will have in Middlemarch. However, the fight itself also prompted one of the funnier moments that occurred during the shoot, as Script editor Susie Conklin recalls:

Conklin, S. (2022) original interview conducted by Lucy Hobbs and Justin Smith via Zoom, 3 February 2022, for 'Transforming Middlemarch'

270. Commentary 35: Scenes 5/45-5/46

The enlightenment of Fred Vincy continues in two scenes which complete the chain of events he set in motion in enlisting Rev Farebrother’s help at the start of Episode 5. In the first, Fred is tested and found wanting by Mrs Garth, in failing to recognise and respect Farebrother’s affection for Mary. In the second, he is teased by both Farebrother and Mary before her affection for him is confirmed.

5/45 is a triumph both of Andrew Davies’ adaptive economy and Gabrielle Lloyd’s measured performance as Mrs Garth. Apart from the removal of Ben and Letty, the younger Garth children, the Shooting script was filmed as written. However, in Chapter 57 of the novel the dialogue between Fred and his future mother-in-law is punctuated with significant narrative commentary on Mrs Garth’s emotional state: ‘The power of admonition which had begun to stir in Mrs Garth had not yet discharged itself. It was a little too provoking even for her self-control that this blooming youngster should flourish on the disappointments of sadder and wiser people—making a meal of a nightingale and never knowing it—and that all the while his family should suppose that hers was in eager need of this sprig; and her vexation had fermented the more actively because of its total repression towards her husband. Exemplary wives will sometimes find scapegoats in this way’ (Ch.57, pp. 61-2). This is strong stuff, difficult to convey in performance. Yet on screen Lloyd manages to bring out much of Mrs Garth’s changing disposition, and to embody perfectly Eliot’s observation that ‘while her grammar and accent were above the town standard, she wore a plain cap, cooked the family dinner, and darned all the stockings’ (Ch.24, p.370). The mise-en-scène here plays a significant visual function too.

Fred enters the parlour, having finished his day’s work with Garth, apparently without motive; in the novel, he deliberately calls on Mrs Garth ‘to assure himself that she accepted their new relations willingly’ (Ch.57, p.57). In 5/45 she is enjoying a letter from Alfred (informing her he has won a prize as best apprentice); in the novel it is the bookish Christy (home from college) who is the ‘incorporate criticism on poor Fred, a sort of object-lesson given to him by the educational mother’ (Ch.57, p.58). In the adaptation, Mrs Garth puts aside her letter and takes up her needlework. Rather sheepishly, Fred seats himself and begins pleading his own cause by citing the faith shown in him by her husband, Farebrother and Mary. The shot-reverse-shot exchange gives way to a brief two-shot across the table at which they are seated on opposite sides, with the backdrop of the fireplace and mantleshelf framing them. There is a merry blaze in the grate, fresh herbs and flowers hanging in front to dry, what looks like an apprentice-piece on the shelf above, a simple pewter candlestick and a jug of roses. This straightforward home, this open hearth, is what is at stake between them, and what Mrs Garth is defending.

Absorbed in her work, Mrs Garth’s responses to Fred’s self-promotion are curt. We cut back to her in close-up, she looks up at him directly over the rims of her spectacles: ‘You made a mistake in asking Mr. Farebrother to speak for you’. Fred’s failure to recognize Farebrother’s interest in Mary is underlined by her next admonishment: ‘Yes, young people are usually blind to everything but their own wishes’. And, as the penny drops with Fred her next reply is brusque: ‘If it were so, Fred, I think you are the last person who ought to be astonished’ (PP, p.5/65). Though Mrs Garth (here), like Farebrother (in 5/9), commands the moral high ground, our focus is on Fred’s education. Having endured Mrs Garth’s opprobrium, he is allowed to pass this gatekeeper and encounter Mary and Farebrother in the orchard, disarmed but not dissuaded by his new knowledge.

In the novel, Fred visits Mrs Garth (at home) on his way to see Mary (at Lowick parsonage). There, he finds Mary entangled in conversation with the three ladies of the household: ‘They were in animated discussion on some subject which was dropped when he entered’ (Ch.57, p.66). Mary has to defend her antipathy towards clergymen ‘except the Vicar of Wakefield and Mr Farebrother’ (p.66), while Fred is marooned. Farebrother is out, ‘somewhere in the village’ (p.66), but returns in time to engineer Fred and Mary’s removal from the company of the ladies to his study, where he, in turn, leaves them both alone. In the dialogue which follows, Fred pours out his jealousy while Mary is non-plussed by Fred’s insistence about Farebrother’s romantic intentions. She reassures him, yet on Farebrother’s return, ‘Fred had to return to the drawing-room still with a jealous dread in his heart, but yet with comforting arguments from Mary's words and manner. The result of the conversation was on the whole more painful to Mary: inevitably her attention had taken a new attitude, and she saw the possibility of new interpretations’ (p.70). This possibility is already closed off in the adaptation, since in scene 5/11 where Farebrother visits Mary as emissary for Fred, she clearly recognizes the vicar’s personal interest in her and politely declines it; the on-screen Mary is altogether more savvy.

This difference, in turn, plays into the romantic setting of the orchard (5/46), where Fred discovers Mary (on a swing) and Farebrother (seated at her feet) laughing together; they play on his jealousy before Farebrother gallantly leaves them alone. Fred continues to bemoan the rival with whom he can’t compete until Mary, playfully, settles the matter. The stage directions conclude: ‘to his amazement, she gives him a brief but emphatic kiss on the mouth, and runs off to the house, laughing, leaving him gobsmacked’ (PP, p.5/67). This is both a more modern rendition of Mary’s character and a more emphatic resolution of their courtship than the novel affords in Chapter 57. It is also another scene which ends with Andrew Davies’ favoured technique of dramatic upstaging, leaving a central protagonist dumb-struck (as previously noted with Lydgate (1/74) and Brooke (4/23)).

There are two conclusions to be drawn about the emphasis that the dramatisation places upon Farebrother’s magnanimity and Mary’s candour. These traits are not inconsistent with their portrayals in the novel, but are certainly amplified in the adaptation. One is simply that the upheavals which take place in Episode 5 (Ladislaw’s ultimate estrangement from Dorothea, the Lydgates’ mounting debts and failing marriage, Raffles’ exposure of Bulstrode) require a dramatic corrective which is provided by the positive trajectory and resolution of the Fred and Mary sub-plot. Fred is the prodigal (or at least feckless) son reformed by the altruistic guidance of Farebrother, Garth and Mary herself. But this salvation narrative is reinforced by a second aspect. Nicole M. Coonradt, in a trenchant focus on Mary’s role (as Eliot’s only female author), cites Bernard J. Paris who views ‘Mary and her family as "foil[s] to the egoists" the variously self-centered characters with whom much of the action of the novel concerns itself’ (2012: 24). Coonradt reminds us that the Garths are Eliot’s only unimpeachable family: ‘They are hard- working, honest, fair, compassionate, humble, and never prone to gossip’ (2012: 18). Those selfless guides who steer Fred towards the righteous path by believing in him, possess a self-assurance, a stability and a faith in humanity which the bold idealists, the social climbers and the petty self-interests of Middlemarch lack. In the stormy seas of melodrama the viewer needs these small but bright beacons of light by which to navigate.

Coonradt. N. M. (2012), ‘Writing Mary Garth: Locating middle ground among female characters in George Eliot's "Middlemarch" in George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies, September 2012, No.62/63, pp.16-33

275. Commentary 36: Scene 6/4

Scene 6/4 is short but impactful, beginning Episode 6 with the same tone that Episode 5 ended in. The scene depicts yet another skirmish between Rosamond and Lydgate as she endeavours to conceal their financial struggles from the Middlemarch community and minimise her own hardship by deliberately ignoring or obstructing her husband’s decisions. In this instance, Rosamond excitedly gives Lydgate a letter from his uncle Godwin, who she has contacted in secret, seeking financial support. Far from receiving the positive outcome she anticipated, however, Godwin’s response rebukes Tertius for apparently asking his wife to write on his behalf. This is, Godwin writes sternly, a ‘roundabout wheedling sort of thing which I should not have credited you with’ and he observes perhaps more fairly that Tertius has evidently ‘made a mess’ to request such assistance (Ch.65, p.200).

In both the novel and the adaptation, Godwin’s letter arrives shortly after Lydgate realises Rosamond has instructed Trumbull not to readvertise the house for sale after the Plymdales take another property. These are unacceptable actions for Lydgate because — the narrator explains — while he is ‘prepared to be indulgent towards feminine weakness’, he cannot tolerate ‘feminine dictation’: ‘The shallowness of a waternixie's soul may have a charm until she becomes didactic’ (Ch.64, p.177). The sequencing of events thus serves to compound Lydgate’s anger and lead him to the realisation at the end of Chapter 65 that he has been ‘mastered’ (p.205) by his wife.

Although Davies’ adaptation cannot deliver so easily or explicitly a moment of anagnorisis for Lydgate, the scene has a similar function that is created in part, by mirroring the sequencing of events in the novel: Episode 5 ends with the Plymdale conversation and Episode 6 begins immediately with the letter. This is a change from the Shooting script which opens instead with overlapping scenes of Lydgate working in the hospital (SS 6/1) and gossip and jokes about his debt at a soiree at the Vincy house (SS 6/2). Of course, these scenes also function to emasculate Lydgate, who Davies describes in attendance at the party looking ‘pale, drawn, at odds with the world’ and then later, ‘almost desperate’ (SS 6/2). But in excising 6/1-6/2 and opening with a scene that clearly continues the dynamic of 5/43, Davies gets us to same point in arguably a more economical fashion.

Condensation occurs not only on a structural level, however. Lydgate is more direct, succinct and convinced of his position in the Post-production script than in the Shooting script where he asks, for instance, ‘Am I such an unreasonable, furious brute? Why should you not be open with me?’ (6/4). He qualifies similarly in the Shooting script, ‘I should never have been angry with you if you had been open with me’ (6/4). Greater concision in the Post-production script also diminishes the emphasis on the upsetting quality of Lydgate’s words. Rosamond’s complaint that Lydgate has not made her ‘life pleasant of late’ is lost as is her husband’s subsequent reaction (‘LYDGATE can’t help wincing at that…. it’s so mild, so understated, compared to what he said’ (SS 6/4)).

Our overriding impression of the exchange is thus one of mutual distress. Despite Davies’ note that Rosamond looks ‘so meek, so victimised’ that Lydgate feels ‘a wavering, a hopeless tenderness’ (PP 6/4), we are not necessarily more sympathetic to either character. With his flushed and sweaty expression, Douglas Hodge’s Lydgate has an explosive fury. He stamps his foot to emphasise his exclamation of ‘for God’s sake!’ and the scene cuts to Trevyn McDowell’s Rosamond who bursts promptly into surprised tears. McDowell’s wet sobs and quick, high inhales of breath are quite a departure from either the ‘quiet passivity’ (Ch.65, p.201) and ‘coolness’ (Ch.65, p.203) or the gentle weeping the novel describes. Davies’ repeated stage direction that Rosamond ‘genuinely feels ill used’ (PP 6/4) also lends a sincerity to her final, shocking outburst that she wishes she had ‘died with the baby’ (PP 6/4). Eliot’s narration is not necessarily sceptical of this claim, but our feelings towards Rosamond are perhaps complicated by the unique insights the novel provides into her ‘quiet elusive obstinacy’ (Ch.64, p.194). As the narrator observes sardonically, ‘there was but one person in Rosamond’s world whom she did not regard as blameworthy, and that was the graceful creature with blond plaits and with little hands crossed before her’ (Ch.65, p.202). Davies is typically kinder on Rosamond than Eliot, therefore and in this scene, her underhandedness is further mitigated by her husband’s failure to address the crisis. It is striking that in a condensed version of the scene in the novel, Davies maintains Lydgate’s admission that he had ‘nearly resolved on going to Quallingham’, but decided it was apparently no ‘use’ (PP 6/4); Lydgate wants to be the man of the house but he is reluctant to act.

A final contributing effect on the scene’s adaptation from the novel comes not from Davies’ screenplay or indeed, Hodge’s and McDowell’s excellent performances but from the soundtrack and its (re)use of the cor anglais. Composer Chris Gunning – who used the woodwind instrument to great effect to accompany Dorothea and Casaubon on screen – returns to it again for the scene’s ending because of its ‘wonderfully sonorous, sombre sound’(Gunning 1993, p.7). One can identify, for instance, both a musical and a thematic kinship between this scene and Casaubon’s impossible request in 3/79. In both scenes, the cor anglais moves through arpeggio-like rising phrases against thrumming, unsettling strings. But the score’s minor key and the instrument’s tonal quality lends its progression from the mellow, lower notes of its register to the clearer, higher notes, a consistently plaintive quality that cleverly complicates the optimistic tug of the sequence’s upward trajectory. What begins in Episode 1 as distinct musical themes for each couple thus merges in tone and effect to the point where we hear in 6/4 a deliberate echo of a previous emotional stalemate. Rosamond’s and Lydgate’s desperate embrace echoes the fate of another couple doomed by their irreconcilable differences: Dorothea and Casaubon.

Gunning, C. (1993) Unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections

280. Commentary 37: Scenes 6/14-6/15

In the BBC adaptation, Caleb Garth is the only character to whom John Raffles relates the story of Bulstrode’s disreputable past. It is supposed, of course, that Raffles is also drunkenly indiscrete in every local tavern he frequents, thus feeding the Middlemarch rumour-mill (as Bambridge boasts in scenes 6/37-6/78). But it is, significantly, Caleb Garth in whom Raffles confides on his return to Middlemarch, when Garth finds him incapable at the roadside on the way to Stone Court. It is also important that Garth, the man of honour, does not disclose what he learns from Raffles, even though it is enough for him to refuse to work for Bulstrode forthwith.

Thus, Garth occupies a position as Bulstrode’s conscience. From high tragedy through to popular melodrama, the embodiment of conscience is a powerful device. Garth will neither publish what he knows, nor even tell Bulstrode: ‘What he has said to me will never pass from my lips, unless something now unknown forces it from me’ (Ch.69, p.249). Moreover, in the adaptation it is not revealed to the viewer either. In the novel, Raffles has already reminded Bulstrode of his historic iniquities (Ch.53) and later revealed them to Will Ladislaw (Ch.60). The adaptation simplifies and concentrates this subplot in the malevolent presence of Raffles, and the principled conscience of Garth. For Davies, the details of Bulstrode’s crimes are less important than the effect of their disclosure which is, paradoxically, amplified by remaining obscure. The case against Bulstrode is not proven by evidence in court; he is tried by rumour in public. What Carolyn Steedman says of Lydgate is as true of Bulstrode: ‘Middlemarch gets him’ (2001, p.537).

Garth is, by chance, Bulstrode’s inconvenient witness to Raffles’ first arrival in Chapter 53. They are on Stone Court land, laying plans for its management following Bulstrode’s purchase from Joshua Rigg. It is Garth who first spots Raffles: ‘Bless my heart! what's this fellow in black coming along the lane? He's like one of those men one sees about after the races’ (Ch.53, p.380). Once met, Garth quickly assesses the awkwardness of the situation and takes his leave, for ‘if there was anything discreditable to be found out concerning another man, Caleb preferred not to know it’ (p.381). This first encounter is reproduced in scene 4/50(b) of the Post-production script.

It is also by chance that Garth later discovers Raffles on his final return and delivers him to Stone Court in his gig, thus affording the opportunity for Raffles to tell the story we never learn. Yet this episode is another example of an encounter that is dramatized on screen (scene 6/14) but merely reported (by Garth to Bulstrode) in the novel. Davies conveys the mounting sense of the past catching up with Bulstrode through a sequence of short scenes which segue into one another, depicting Garth’s discovery of Raffles (6/14), his delivery to Bulstrode at Stone Court (6/15a), Garth’s resignation (6/15b) and Lydgate’s attendance on the bed-ridden Raffles (6/17). This narrative compression adds pace and tension to Bulstrode’s downfall (via Raffles’ demise). This was aided in the final production by the removal of the unnecessary scene (6/16) showing Lydgate riding to Stone Court.

In the novel Bulstrode is not at Stone Court when Raffles is delivered. Rather, in Chapter 69 Garth calls on Bulstrode at the bank and tells him what has happened, advising a doctor should be summoned. As usual, Andrew Davies draws effectively on the essential dialogue from the novel for scene 6/15b, but the linking scene which precedes it (6/15a) is an invention. By dividing scene 6/15 in two, Davies effects a structural improvement which separates Garth’s delivery of Raffles to Mrs Abel in the hallway and thence up to bed, Garth’s insistence that a doctor should be called and Bulstrode’s request that he summon Dr Lydgate, from Garth’s resignation (which takes place in the privacy of the parlour), leaving Bulstrode to contemplate his predicament.

The altercation between the two men is a supreme example of dramatic contrast. Clive Russell’s Garth is upright, plain-speaking and honest: (‘I believe he told the truth, Mr. Bulstrode. And I can't be happy in working with you or profiting by you any more. It hurts my mind’, (PP, p.6/20)). This is matched by Peter Jeffrey’s puritanical Bulstrode, whose financial and evangelical domination of the community is now threatened by the desertion of loyal servants. When Garth assures him, ‘No need to repeat it. I'll never talk of it with anyone else. It's not for me to make your life any harder than it is’, Bulstrode responds in ‘genuine anguish’: ‘But you do make it harder, by turning your back on me’. Garth’s reply is couched in another phrase of disarming vernacular: ‘I have that feeling inside me that I can't go on working with you’. Bulstrode’s despair turns to anger. If he has lost Garth he must vouchsafe his silence (which has already been pledged): ‘I must have your solemn assurance that you will not repeat these ... slanderous allegations to any living soul!’ His ‘imperious manner’ riles the humble Garth to retort: ‘Why should I have said it if I didn't mean it? I'm not in any fear of you’ (PP, p.6/21). With that he leaves.

In the power relations between them the tables are turned. Having removed himself from the moral burden of Bulstrode’s corrupted employment, Garth is free. His silence is a matter of his own honour, not something to be extorted by Bulstrode’s social superiority. Although this action holds a powerful emotional charge in the adaptation, and is a significant turning point in Bulstrode’s rapid downfall, George Eliot informs her readers of what is at stake. In the novel, it is Garth himself who has had the idea that the management of Stone Court might be an apprenticeship opportunity for Fred Vincy, enabling his marriage to Mary (Ch.68, pp.240-244). Bulstrode has approved this. Yet with his painful knowledge of Bulstrode’s past, the honourable Garth is unable to put his own family interests above a matter of conscience. This stands in plain distinction to Bulstrode’s false piety; for the novel tells us that Garth never ‘chose to be absolute except on some one else's behalf’ (Ch.56, p.46). In this way, he is the only character to stand up for Raffles (excepting Lydgate’s professional services).

In the novel’s stark division between characters who act out of self-interest and those few who demonstrate altruism, Garth and Farebrother thus stand above even Dorothea (whose burden of inheritance is slow to be divested upon Farebrother, Lydgate and, ultimately, given up for Ladislaw). But Farebrother putting Fred’s feelings for Mary before his own, is as nothing to Garth’s sacrifice. And, indeed, Farebrother is not a man without his faults. By contrast, in a novel where few characters escape personal criticism, as Nicole M. Coonradt reminds us, ‘the narrator never presents Garth in an unfavourable light’ (2012, p.19).

Coonradt, N. M., (2012), ‘Writing Mary Garth: Locating middle ground among female characters in George Eliot's "Middlemarch", George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies, September 2012, No. 62/63, pp.16-33

Steedman, C. (2001), “Going to Middlemarch: History and the novel”. Michigan Quarterly Review 40: 3: pp.531-552)

285. Commentary 38: Scenes 6/36-6/38

Andrew Davies establishes the morning of Raffles’ death scene quite beautifully in the Shooting script in 6/33 which doesn’t appear in the Post-production script. And the mise-en-scène he describes is realised only minimally in the scene as shot. Perhaps the symbolism would have appeared too obvious on screen: ‘On the table by the bed, the brandy bottle, three quarters empty, a little glass, a spoon, the opium phial…. It's like a genre painting. The little room. The morning light streaming in. The still life on the table’ (SS, p.6/51). What remains is the morning light, embalming the unconscious Raffles and washing away the night’s dark subterfuge under the clinical examination of the doctor.

When Lydgate arrives to attend the last moments of Raffles’ life the narration in the novel and scripted stage directions make for an interesting comparison. In Chapter 70 Eliot writes: 'Lydgate arrived at half-past ten, in time to witness the final pause of the breath. When he entered the room Bulstrode observed a sudden expression in his face, which was not so much surprise as a recognition that he had not judged correctly. He stood by the bed in silence for some time, with his eyes turned on the dying man, but with that subdued activity of expression which showed that he was carrying on an inward debate' (p.273, emphasis added).

Lydgate’s reaction to Raffles’ deteriorated condition is spelt out quite explicitly by Andrew Davies: ‘LYDGATE is thinking it's very strange, but doesn't feel he can ask further. BULSTRODE knows that he won't. The £1000 is not altogether irrelevant in this prolonged silence.’

Actually, Lydgate does ask ‘further’ in Davies’ script than he does in Eliot’s novel. When Bulstrode explains that Mrs Abel had been left to tend to the patient the previous night (which is taken verbatim from the novel), Davies’ Lydgate responds with a new question: ‘And she understood the dosage?’ (SS, p.6/54). In this way, Douglas Hodge’s Lydgate is not quite as reticent as Eliot’s of whom we’re told: ‘he hardly knew how to put a question on the subject to Bulstrode without appearing to insult him; and if he examined the housekeeper—why, the man was dead’ (Ch.70, p.274). Davies’ additional question places the blame more firmly on Bulstrode’s actions and less upon the possibility of his own misjudgement. Eliot’s Lydgate is less inclined to make a fuss about a man who is already dead and therefore shares more of Bulstrode’s moral culpability for the death. However, Douglas Hodge scarcely looks at Peter Jeffrey when he asks the question; had he done so, he would have seen the guilt in Bulstrode’s face.

Lydgate’s contested part in the death of Raffles is also at the centre of the differences between the Shooting script and the Post-production script in the Middlemarch scenes which follow. First, is the exchange between Hopkins, the undertaker and Bambridge in the street, in which the latter ascertains that Raffles is dead and Bulstrode has paid for the funeral. In the novel Hopkins is a draper by trade who also ‘furnishes funerals’. Secondly, Bambridge’s swift calculations (‘Raffles and Bulstrode’), take the viewer into the next scene where he is seated opposite Hawley in the Green Dragon, presided over by Mrs Dollop and the cantankerous Hiram Ford. Much of Bambridge’s recounting of what Raffles had told him about his past dealings with Bulstrode, and Hawley’s extemporising upon this theme with his fellow lawyer Standish in the short scene which follows (6/39a), is cut from the final production. In 6/38 Bambridge has this: ‘The fact of it is, from what poor Raffles told me, if everybody got their deserts, Bulstrode would be saying his prayers in Botany Bay. Guilty secrets, crimes in the past. Raffles told me that he could tap Bulstrode to any amount. And now he's dead’ (SS, p.6/57). Only the last two short phrases make the final cut. Then thirdly, in 6/39a, Hawley has two speeches for Standish in the ‘Main Street’. In the first he says of Raffles: ‘Man's a rascal, of course, but I believed him. Seems our friend Bulstrode has a criminal past, and this man Raffles knew about it and was making Bulstrode pay for his silence.’ In the second he adds: ‘Apparently he made his fortune by buying and selling stolen goods... the man Raffles was in the same game. He threatened to tell the world, and now he's dead. It all looks very bad for Bulstrode’ (SS, p.6/59). Fourthly, back in the Market Square (6/39b), Lydgate walks past groups of gossipers and we catch the doctors Chichley and Wrench sharing the news. The latter concludes, ‘Too proud, the pair of them. And of course neither of 'em was from these parts. Foreigners, really, the pair of 'em’ (SS, p.6/60). Finally, the Shooting script returns us to the Green Dragon (6/41) where Crabbe (the glazier) and Dille (the barber – it’s Dill in the novel) converse with Hiram Ford and Mrs Dollop: ‘Doctor Lydgate, well known for cutting up folk before the breath is well out of their body ...’ (SS, p.6/61).

One can see here what Andrew Davies is trying to do, and much of this gossip - spreading like wildfire through Middlemarch – is taken from the novel (Chapter 71). It demonstrates the local appetite for revenge upon Bulstrode and Lydgate and attributes this across the social strata. This quality of the animated populous is an aspect of the novel which is largely sacrificed in the adaptation. It is an ensemble effect which is difficult to achieve in character-centred television drama beyond the genre of soap opera in which character hierarchies are differently organised. In the novel it relies upon the effective marshalling of an omniscient narrator. Although Chapter 71 begins (like scene 6/37) with Bambridge and Hopkins, Hawley is swiftly apprised of the news and becomes the self-appointed investigator whose inquiries into the case take him as far as Farebrother at Lowick (who knows about Ladislaw’s mother) and Caleb Garth whose honourable reticence is so mangled in the rumour-mill ‘that even a diligent historian might have concluded Caleb to be the chief publisher of Bulstrode’s misdemeanours’ (p.284). Hawley’s investigations culminate in his hijacking of the Town Hall meeting originally convened to discuss an outbreak of cholera in Middlemarch (SS 6/43).

The challenge for the screen adaptor at this point in the narrative is that the reader of the novel has already been apprised of all the facts of Bulstrode’s chequered history and knows the process of their revelation, and can thus recognise how community gossip manipulates and circulates stories. Because Davies had chosen early on not to include much of Bulstrode’s backstory, the dramatisation trades solely in rumour. The viewer knows that Bulstrode’s past has caught up with him (via Raffles) and this is enough to ruin his reputation and force his departure. The details are immaterial. In fact, rumour needs few facts to empower it and, in the final production, the circulation of the news of Raffles’ death and Bulstrode and Lydgate’s supposed culpability is much compressed into the scene in the Green Dragon (6/38) even if that necessitates the incongruous presence of Hawley sharing a pint with Bambridge. Mrs Dollop is given most of the lines condemning Lydgate’s unethical practices. This economy works up to a point to bring the drama to boiling point at the Town Hall meeting. But there Hawley’s odd summation leaves for the viewer some unaccountable details hanging in the air: ‘I don't maintain thieves and cheat offspring of their inheritance in order to set myself up as a saintly kill-joy!’ (SS, p.6/66). In an otherwise neat job of giving Bulstrode just enough rope to hang himself, this is the one loose end.

290. Commentary 39: Scene 6/61

The context for scene 6/61, where Dorothea tries to persuade Lydgate that he should remain in Middlemarch and they momentarily come close to understanding one another, is altered slightly but significantly between Davies’ Shooting script and the Post-production script. In the final production scene 6/56b, where Ladislaw steps down from the stagecoach and re-enters Middlemarch life, is repositioned to immediately precede 6/61. This juxtaposes his return with the Dorothea-Lydgate scene and reminds the viewer of Ladislaw’s former resolve in her presence: ‘I was dreaming that I might come back some day. I don't think I ever will now.’ (SS 5/31). Ladislaw’s return to the town thus comes as a surprise to viewers as Davies has chosen to omit the novel’s details of his continued correspondence with the Lydgates which recently announced his intention to return to Middlemarch as ‘a very pleasant necessity’ (Ch.75, p.379). His arrival by stagecoach also replaces 6/60, a more pedestrian establishing scene in which Dorothea watches as Lydgate approaches Lowick on horseback. Instead, in the Shooting script, scene 6/57, where Rosamond first tells Lydgate that their party invitations have all been declined and then reveals that she has heard all of the scandal linking her husband to Bulstrode, directly precedes Lydgate’s visit to Lowick. This reversal of 6/56b and 6/57 in the chronology places the dramatic buffer of Ladislaw’s arrival between this heated conversation of the Lydgates’ and the frank dialogue between Dorothea and the doctor.

Scene 6/61 is a long scene in the Shooting script, reflecting a lengthy dialogue in Chapter 77 (pp.353-66). It is partly this that leads to it being split in the Post-production script between scene 6/61, which takes place in the drawing room at Lowick, and 6/61a which occurs outdoors in its front courtyard. When the scene opens in the final production, Dorothea is in a most confident stance: one hand resting on the mantelpiece, the other on her hip. Indeed, she is wearing the same black, rather magisterial, silk dress as in SS, 6/46 where she endeavours to persuade Chettam, Farebrother and Brooke of Lydgate’s innocence and where Davies’ stage direction encourages the production not to ‘be afraid of Georges de la Tour type lighting: three men of the world being inspired by a latter day St. Theresa’ (SS, p.6/71). She looks resolved to effect a plan as she addresses the rather cowed Lydgate who stands behind the sofa on the opposite side of the room. Although Lydgate has the first speech, explaining how he is being judged in Middlemarch, she is intent on seizing the initiative in order to help him.

Nevertheless, as Davies’ annotations to the Shooting script show, he was wary of Dorothea coming across as ‘too self-centred’ and ‘self-pitying’ in some of the lines he takes straight from the novel. So he removes her sentiments that ‘to love what is great, and to try and reach it, and yet to fail’ causes only sorrow and, instead, Juliet Aubrey imbues eloquently the lines that are left - ‘You meant to lead a higher life than the common, and to find better ways’ (SS, p.6/86) - with sorrow and empathy. This is strong evidence that Davies knows when less is more. Susie Conklin confirms this when she recalls, ‘he was very good at knowing what was just too wordy…’, and ‘had a very good instinct… about making sure something has a dramatic background to it and not overloading it or being so precious about the book that you have something that doesn't come alive (Conklin 2022, pp.5-6).

Davies proceeds by selecting the most telling lines from the novel and sometimes splitting dialogue to give particular lines more impact, as Dorothea strives to convince Lydgate that he can overcome this humiliation and still achieve ground-breaking work at the hospital. Hence her second speech begins with a line previously embedded in her first in the Shooting script: ‘I cannot rest in this as unchangeable’, lending it more emphasis (PP 6/59).

The characters perhaps come closest when Lydgate shares the burden of his marriage with Dorothea: ‘you know what sort of bond marriage is’ he croaks out (PP 6/60). In the novel he prefaces this with ‘Why should I not tell you…?’ signalling that what follows will be something unusual for a man to share in confidence with a woman, let alone a client. Dorothea’s reaction also indicates shock and that she is unsure of how to respond: ‘Had he such sorrow too? But she feared to say a word’ (Ch.77, p.357). Unlike Eliot, in the 1990s Davies has no need to fear breaking such a taboo and accordingly when Douglas Hodge delivers the line about the marriage bond Aubrey steadily returns his gaze with no sense of shock. She will also go on in scene 6/77 to repeat almost verbatim Lydgate’s sentiments, that ‘marriage is so unlike anything else’ when counselling Rosamond (SS, p.6/108).

In contrast to his note of caution about self-pity in Dorothea’s opening speeches, Davies seems intent on preserving every drop of Lydgate’s self-loathing and defeatism from the novel. This is epitomised in the doctor’s resolution to retreat to a practice in London: ‘That's the sort of shell I must creep in and try and keep my soul alive.’ Although deriving this line directly from the novel, the stage direction which follows it (‘His aristocratic lip might curl a bit at the thought’ (SS, p.6/88)) illustrates Davies’ understanding of the bitterness this experience engenders in Lydgate. Brian Tufano’s lingering close-ups on the beleaguered Lydgate as he completes each speech track Hodge’s restless pacing around when he delivers his most bitterly self-hating lines.

Dorothea is still operating in a different social sphere, hoping that she can use her money to support the hospital and make Lydgate’s life ‘whole and well again’. He kindly but pointedly remarks that she has ‘the goodness as well as the money to do all this’ (SS, p.6/66) but that now he needs to ‘please the world and make money’ (SS, p.6/68). ‘Making your knowledge useful’ (PP, p.6/60), as she desires him to do, is now a redundant occupation to him. Distanced from the town and protected by privilege, Dorothea cannot understand that ‘knowing there were friends who would believe in you’ (PP 6/60) would not convince the ostracised Rosamond in Middlemarch.

Scene 6/61 in the Post-production script ends with Dorothea’s pledge to visit Rosamond. This resolve enables the discussion between her and Lydgate in the new 6/61a to proceed more philosophically and to contrast what Eliot’s contemporary, philosopher Henry Sidgwick, described as ‘the point of view of the individual seeking his own happiness’ with ‘the point of view of the universe’ (Sidgwick 1874, 186 and 417). Once in the courtyard at Lowick, walking him to the stables, Dorothea seems to accept that for now she must let things lie, after Lydgate rejects her repeated claim that he has ‘achieved much in Middlemarch’ (PP, p.6/62). Now outside, Dorothea shares how in the early morning she communes with the natural world (anticipating the diaphanous dawn in scene 6/72). Davies then takes an adaptive diversion, appropriating Eliot’s metaphor of the ‘roar… on the other side of silence’ from Chapter 20 of the novel. Davies’ Dorothea channels Eliot’s narrator, commenting on the intense disappointment of the newly-married Dorothea in Rome, for this much later scene in the adaptation. Davies also alters ‘Eliot’s’ ‘roar’ to a ‘muffled cry’ thus compressing the sense of the extended metaphor in the novel where Eliot refers to humanity being mercifully ‘well wadded with stupidity’ (Ch.20, p.298) and so both unaware of the ‘roar’ and protected from the pain it would cause. Douglas Hodge, as Lydgate, listens to this outpouring but looks ahead, neither making eye contact nor expressing any distinct emotion. There is a sense in Page’s direction that the focus has shifted from individual suffering to the suffering of humankind. Hence Lydgate is side-lined dramatically as Aubrey delivers one of the novel’s most significant lines. Lydgate and Dorothea walk on and out of the frame and the scene ends. The reiteration of her promise to visit Mrs Lydgate that appears in the Post-production script is most likely an error in the editing of the broadcast version of the script.

Scene 6/61a also offers a proleptic line from Dorothea, in which Davies anticipates Eliot’s summation of her protagonist’s life achievements in the novel’s Finale, when Dorothea enquires of Lydgate:

'… humankind does advance by small steps, as well as great ones. Does it not? I must believe that, or it would break my heart.' (SS 6/88)

to which, in his bruised state, he can only respond: ‘Perhaps’.

Conklin, S. (2022) original interview conducted by Lucy Hobbs and Justin Smith via Zoom, 3 February 2022, for 'Transforming Middlemarch' project, De Montfort University Special Collections, UK

Sidgwick, H. (1874) The Method of Ethics, (reissued 1981) Hackett, Indianapolis

295. Commentary 40: Scenes 6/71-2 and 6/77

The sequence that begins in 6/71, through 6/72a and into 6/77, takes place the morning after Dorothea catches Ladislaw and Rosamond in what she thinks is a romantic embrace. It prompts her to what she fears is a belated realisation — ‘Oh, I did love him!’ — and Dorothea spends the night in desperate ‘anguish’, her ‘grand woman’s frame’ shaken ‘by sobs as if she had been a despairing child’ (Ch.80, p.388). Not for the first time in the series, Dorothea thus spends a dark night of the soul in her bedroom before venturing out into Lowick’s grounds the following morning, still clad in her nightclothes. One might contrast 6/71, for instance, with the quiet resolution she reaches on the morning of Casaubon’s death when she greets him in the garden (‘Edward? I am come. I am ready’ PP, 3/84).

Davies’ adaptation of these emotional reckonings echoes Eliot’s accounts in the novel. ‘It was not in Dorothea’s nature’, we are told, ‘to sit in the narrow cell of her calamity’ for longer than ‘the duration of a paroxysm’ (Ch.80, p.390). Instead, the following morning, Dorothea forces herself to attend once more to Rosamond and Lydgate’s troubled marriage. She decides that her ‘own irremediable grief [….] should make her more helpful, instead of driving her back from effort’ (Ch.80, p.391). But while Eliot’s narrator has the privilege of sitting — both literally and figuratively — with Dorothea as she looks calmly ‘into the eyes of sorrow’ (Ch.80, p.390), the television series is challenged to express some of this resolution without a confiding narrator or the interpretive framework that Davies’ stage directions provide when reading from the script.

It does this in large part by reifying a brief but significant part of Dorothea’s cogitation. In the novel, Dorothea’s reflections take place entirely in the great chair by her bedroom window. As dawn breaks, she opens her curtains and looks out of the window to see ‘a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving —perhaps the shepherd with his dog’ (Ch.80, p.392). For Dorothea these figures represent palpably, ‘the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance’ (Ch.80, p.392). They are a reality from which she can neither ‘look out on’ from ‘luxurious shelter’ nor ‘hide her eyes in selfish complaining’ (Ch.80, p.392) and thus checked, Dorothea determines to make her ‘second attempt to see and save Rosamond’ (Ch.80, p.394).

As previously mentioned, the television series resituates Dorothea for the equivalent moment. 6/71 begins with Dorothea walking towards the camera as she leaves the house. Once in the grounds, the camera angle reverses so that we share her perspective as she watches a man and woman walk from left to right across the frame. The couple move briskly and with purpose. They are evidently itinerant farm workers as she carries a baby swaddled to her chest and he, a hoe, and a large bundle of goods. But at this point we see another difference from the novel: the man greets Dorothea and comments ‘Looks like a fine one [day]’ (PP 6/72a). The camera cuts to a medium close-up of her face in response and Dorothea answers, ‘Yes. Yes, it does’, with a half-smile (PP 6/72a). We cut once more to the couple as they exit the frame and then back to Dorothea again, who watches their passage pensively.

The Post-production script’s account of the meeting is less prescriptive than the Shooting script which notes that on their way, ‘the MAN stops, and takes the baby from the WOMAN, she takes his arm, and they walk on together’ (SS 6/72). It is not hard to imagine the emotional resonance of this version of the scene for Dorothea who watches, moved by a couple united in their purpose. As Davies notes on both scripts, in Dorothea’s ‘lightheaded state, it feels like an omen, a blessing’ (6/72a). In the finished scene, however, the couple simply walk past so that their fleeting presence has a similar but slightly more ambiguous effect on Dorothea. Before the scene ends, Davies’ prediction is realised regardless. A medium close-up of Dorothea’s face in pensive reflection dissolves and we return to the same shot of Aubrey’s body from behind, her body silhouetted against the brightening morning light.

Indeed, the scene’s visual echo of the poor family Dorothea and Celia ride past in 1/5 lends it a cautiously optimistic, and contemplative tone as the correspondence between the images invites us to reflect on the journey that Dorothea has made. In 1/5, the similar sight of an itinerant labouring family reduced Dorothea to 'distressed' tears (PP 1/5) but here, it only seems to settle her resolve. A further interesting contrast is offered by a scene in the Shooting script which didn’t make the final cut but nevertheless illuminates Davies’ adaptation of Dorothea’s character. In 1/79, Dorothea exits a Roman church she has just visited and happily describes to her new husband the space within: ‘DOROTHEA [inspired]: It’s not as I would have – but I think I liked it, it was so very… calm. And [smiling] the Christ-child was so very like a real baby!’ Davies notes that there is ‘a bit of biology operating there, not just art-appreciation' (SS 1/79). Though we do not see Dorothea looking at the realistic depiction of Christ, her delivery is meant to reflect a young woman starting to yearn to be not just a wife, but a mother. Of course, Casaubon ‘barely manages a twitch of the lips’ in response and the scholar observes sourly instead that the church is ‘not amongst the artist’s finest work’ (SS 1/79). Like the other scenes set in Rome, 1/79 hammers home the fundamental mismatch between the couple. Dorothea’s flourishing maternal ambitions are thwarted by Casaubon’s disinterest in anything beyond his notes and his insistence that he is old before his time.

Back in Episode 6, however, another dissolve moves us to the next scene (6/77) and into the interior space of Rosamond’s drawing room, where she and Dorothea sit directly opposite one another and within the same frame. The nature of this transition, with its momentary superimposition of Dorothea deep in thought and the two women sat intimately together, signals a relationship between the two scenes beyond their chronological placement. Unlike the novel, however, quite what links the scenes is not immediately apparent and it is worth pausing here to observe that this sequencing emerges from later drafts of the screenplay. In the Shooting script, Dorothea’s morning vigil cuts instead to Bulstrode who, Davies informs us, ‘might have been up all night as well’ (6/74). It is two scenes and an establishing exterior shot later that Dorothea then visits Rosamond in 6/77.

Whatever the reason for their excision at this point in the episode, the reordering of scenes 6/74 and 6/75 allows Dorothea’s dawn encounter to imbue her subsequent meeting with Rosamond in a way that the novel itself invites. For instance, Chapter 81’s epigraph is taken from Goethe’s Faust and its description of one’s stirring sense of resolution amidst nature’s beauty echoes Dorothea’s realisation upon looking out on Lowick’s grounds and the ‘fields beyond’ (Ch.80, p.392). Certainly, when Dorothea speaks to Rosamond it is with the deliberateness that characterises her aforementioned announcement to Casaubon in 3/84; of a woman resolved to an unhappy fate. Aubrey’s slow, breathy delivery does not perhaps quite evoke the novel’s description of a ‘low cry from some suffering creature in the darkness’, but her increasingly wide and glassy eyes communicate the same point that she is clearly ‘speaking from out the heart of her own trial’ (Ch.81, p.402) when she imagines marriage as a murder that ‘stays with us [….] when everything else is gone’ (PP 6/77). And from there, the scene moves rapidly to its conclusion. Whereas the novel lingers on Dorothea’s efforts to vindicate Lydgate, the chief purpose of 6/77 is clearly to advance the Ladislaw plotline so that, having found some measure of equilibrium that morning, Dorothea is cast once more into a ‘tumult’ (Ch.81, p.407). The scene thus concludes with a tight close-up of Aubrey’s face, her eyes searching and her eyebrows quirking hopefully upwards at the last moment to a gently stirring soundtrack of violins and harp.

6/77 is not only significant because of its furtherance of the Dorothea-Ladislaw romance, however. Like its novel equivalent, the scene represents a key unifying moment between two central narratives which have hitherto run in parallel. Labouring under the apprehension that Rosamond is about to embark on an affair with Ladislaw which will doom her relationship with Lydgate, Dorothea delivers a heartfelt appeal that connects their experience of the ‘awful [….] nearness’ of marriage (PP 6/77). As Davies notes, ‘She [Dorothea] is thinking about her failed marriage with Casaubon, of course’ (PP 6/77). But even if Rosamond exonerates herself from this charge, Dorothea’s words have a clear impact. Rosamond’s continued resistance to Lydgate’s authority has in its own way indelibly shaped her relationship, just as in Dorothea’s chiasmic wisdom an imagined infidelity ‘murders’ marriage but damns the marriage to ‘stays with us like a murder’ (Ch.81, p.405).

This is a challenging sequence for both performers but perhaps more so for McDowell as Rosamond, who must move from being ‘a bit overcome and a bit overawed’ by Dorothea’s kindness; distressed to hear that Lydgate cares for her happiness ‘more […] than anything else’ (‘ROSAMOND starts to cry’); cognisant of the echo of her own failing marriage in Dorothea’s account; and lastly, eager to reassure the other woman (‘You are thinking what is not true’ (PP 6/77). Davies’ stage descriptions offer relatively limited notes for Rosamond at this crucial but complex moment, illustrating Gary Cassidy and Simone Knox’s observation that understanding ‘what actors do when they act, cannot be made more easily manageable through reference to other objects such as scripts, especially when those themselves are far from fixed’ (2015). One must turn instead to the nuances of McDowell’s performance, in which project we are aided by Middlemarch’s seriality. John Caughie muses that ‘[r]epetition – the fact that television is there, week in, week out, and actors appear repeatedly in different roles and with different functions – means that the television actor is more likely to carry a history with him’ (2000, p.149). For Caughie, repetition occurs on a macro scale across an actor’s career, but his point is applicable within the smaller and shorter repetitions of a series like Middlemarch too. By the final episode of the series, we, the audience, are already well acquainted with McDowell’s incarnation of Rosamond.

It is this knowledge which works with McDowell’s performance to convey the scene’s complicated emotionality, but which also indicates to us that we are witnessing something new from her character. Rosamond’s sobs are interrupted by a look of increasing intensity as she realises that Dorothea has the wrong end of the stick. McDowell delivers Rosamond’s assurances with red, tearful eyes but there is a selfless determination to her words that we have yet to see on screen. Although the two women have hardly met before, they are clearly united at this point by their shared experience of the solitude of marriage; through her empathy, Dorothea cultivates an understanding with Rosamond that contrasts starkly against the little other female friendship she has (the competitive intimacy Rosamond once shared with Mary Garth, for instance). Unlike previous, similarly tearful moments in the series, this is not a skirmish to be won, but a rare moment for Rosamond — like Dorothea — to step outside of herself and act on an impulse to comfort ‘which she had not known before’ (Ch.81, p.406).

Cassidy, G. and Knox, S. (2015), 'What actors do: Benedict Wong in Marco Polo', CST Online, https://cstonline.net/what-actors-do-benedict-wong-in-marco-polo-by-gary-cassidy-and-simone-knox/ [accessed 30 November 2022]

Caughie, J. (2014), ‘What do actors do when they act?’, in British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future, eds. Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp.143–56

300. Commentary 41: Scenes 6/85-91

When the interview with Andrew Davies for the BBC Education film ‘Screening Middlemarch’ was recorded, in Autumn 1993, the screenwriter wass not certain how his adaptation would end. ‘Did you think about actually having George Eliot in it?’, the interviewer asked:

I wanted to keep her out of it so far as possible because she writes such a wonderful story I wanted it to tell itself. But then right at the end I thought … it’s important about what happens to the characters after the end of the story because this isn't one of those stories that ends and so they lived happily ever after; they live fairly happily and some of them not very happily at all, and I thought whose voice can say this? – not one of the characters. So George Eliot's voice speaks it and at the moment when I'm talking to you I don't know what's going to be on the screen when George Eliot's voiceover is spoken about what happened to Lydgate, what happened to the Bulstrodes, what happened to the Garths, what happened to Fred and Mary and all those people, what happened to Dorothea. It's still up in the air. I'd like it to be sort of flashbacks of those characters, but by the time this is filmed we'll know what the answer is (Davies 1993, p.93).

Carolyn Steedman reminds us that George Eliot herself was still uncertain as to the ending of her story when Book I was already in print (Steedman 2001, p.107). Elsewhere in her stimulating collection of essays entitled Dust, she contrasts the contemporaneous rise of historical and biographical writing: history, she asserts, can never be about ends, only endings (2001, p.150). George Eliot’s historian-narrator of Middlemarch also plays upon this distinction. The unresolvedness of Middlemarch’s Finale, and its narrator’s self-conscious staging of these loose ends, is one of the qualities of the book which anticipates narration in twentieth-century fiction as well as looking back to the novel’s speculative origins in the hands of Sterne and Fielding. Another, as Steedman also shows us, is the narrator’s suggestion that ‘no-one wrote this book nor told this story at all’ (2001, p.108). This denial of authorship may be divined from the town’s speculation about the reported publications of Fred and Mary Vincy which concluded that, ‘there was no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since it was always done by somebody else’ (Finale, p.456). Nicole M. Coonradt reads this playful conceit as an ‘ironic commentary on the author's own early career in publishing before the public knew who "George Eliot" was’, and when assumptions were made that George Henry Lewes must be behind it (2012, p.26). This aligns with Coonradt’s committed argument that Mary Garth is the closest to being the novelist’s alter ego in her fictional world. Indeed, ‘in all of Eliot's novels there is only one female author: Mary Garth’ (2012, p.17). But Steedman’s point goes beyond matters of authorship and autobiography; it is about the Finale’s insistence upon the contingency of the fictional world: ‘Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending’ (p.455).

It is perhaps fitting that an adaptation which began so radically differently from the novel’s Prelude on Saint Theresa (and its ‘Fugue’ for Miss Brooke), should at its conclusion defer to the narrative voice which has been suppressed or diffused through much of the intervening drama. Yet film drama can accommodate non-realist framing devices most effectively in its beginnings (with title credits overlaying scenic exposition) and endings (as here with summary voice-over montage). Indeed, the viewers of television drama serials are quite used to summary montage sequences reprising key events (‘Previously…’) from the second episode onwards. What Andrew Davies imagined for the end of his Shooting script was a sort of cameo carousel (not dissimilar to the novel’s own Finale). Following Dorothea and Will’s passionate resolution (6/84), this sequence charts Dorothea’s breaking the news to Celia (6/85) at the end of which the narrative V/O begins; the Lydgates’ departure from Middlemarch (6/86-89) ending in a freeze-frame of the couple in a stagecoach in the market square; ‘Fred and Mary on the church steps on their wedding day’ (6/90) at Lowick (freeze-frame as wedding photo), and finally (6/91), ‘Dorothea and Ladislaw working in their library together… A small child sits playing on the rug’ (p.6/124). The last shot is ‘Dorothea's lovely face fades to black’.

In the novel, Dorothea’s visit to Celia comes at the end of a lengthy family counsel chez ‘Tipton and Freshitt’ which mainly demonstrates Chettam’s resolute refusal to accept Dorothea’s alliance with Ladislaw (Ch.84). This is followed (Ch.85) by the Bulstrodes’ ignominious departure (leavened only by their decision to reinstate the Garths’ management plan for Stone Court, enabling Fred and Mary to marry). Chapter 86 sees Caleb Garth setting out this arrangement to Mary, and then to Fred. These events have already been covered in the adaptation in the short scenes 6/74 and 6/75. The novel’s Finale then sequences the narrative future’s marital carousel thus: Fred and Mary, the Lydgates, Dorothea and Will.

Andrew Davies successfully fillets Eliot’s Finale for seven short speeches in the Shooting script across the scenes outlined above. In fact, the Post-production script allows for some expansion of these extracts into five substantive speeches. But the key difference between the Shooting script and the final production is not what is spoken by the narrator but the replacement of new scenes ending in freeze-frames with a montage sequence of flashbacks. The Production schedule confirms that none of the new scenes (6/86-91) was staged. From the testimony of Director Anthony Page this was likely because of time constraints rather than cost savings: ‘Time was… the worst constraint… and in fact… some scenes were dumped because there wasn't time to finish them or, to do them. So I would say the budget was very… generous and the schedule was, as is usual, rather tight’ (1993, pp.21-2). Thus a decision was made to use flashbacks and construct the ending in the edit suite. Davies would have known this at the time of his BBC Education interview, though he clearly did not know which scenes had been chosen.

What difference does this make? It creates a dissonance between the voice-over narration which reveals aspects of the characters’ future lives and the visuals which replay only moments we have already seen. This tension, which traps the characters visually within the dramatic world as screened and consigns their futures to the viewer’s own imagination, could be interpreted as a disservice to the novel’s concern for the future: ‘For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web’ (Finale, p.455). Flashbacks, when they are dissociated in montage from the psychological perspectives of specific characters, are redundant signifiers. At best, they suggest that these characters cannot inhabit the futures that the narrator predicts for them but are forever caught in this uneven web of drama (i.e. ‘Previously…’). The promise of progress is denied them. First, we see Rosamond and Lydgate in their early days of married bliss (from scene 3/53); second, there is the happy ending to the orchard scene where Mary kisses the dumbfounded Fred (5/46); finally, Dorothea comes from the Lowick library, crosses the hallway and climbs the heavy wooden staircase, as if still in Casaubon’s shadow. This sense of referring back to their past lives, not their futures, is reinforced by the last shot in the Post-production script: ‘[Mix to countryside - shepherd and sheep. Carriage enters frame L - credits roll]… [Credits roll over carriage moving L to R into the distance and shepherd and sheep going R and out of frame L…]’ (pp.6/82-3). The inference is that Lydgate, the newcomer to Middlemarch with his innovative ideas and arrogance of the youthful professional, has been humbled and expelled from the provincial town. Rather than the upbeat musical theme that heralded Lydgate’s arrival, the ‘Middlemarch’ melody accompanies his inferred departure. We are back where we started.

Of the three ‘flashbacks’ that make up the final scene, however, Dorothea’s needs qualifying. Its identification as a ‘flashback’ in the Post-production script signals its probable existence in an earlier edit, but for the audience at least, this is brand new footage. The fact of its reuse is further concealed by a lack of dialogue in Dorothea’s scene or indeed, any identifying noises other than the click of her shoes. Similarly, there is little else to place this moment temporally, even if we can locate it geographically. By comparison, the two couples’ original dialogue clearly continues underneath Dench’s voiceover and Gunning’s score, further adding to the disjointedness of this moment. There is no fooling the audience that these moments are unique.

As a result of this subtle difference, Dorothea’s described future feels perhaps less constrained to, or defined by her fellow protagonists. There is also more obvious visual correspondence between Eliot’s narration and the sequence playing on screen. Dorothea’s slow, solitary progress up the stairs, accompanied by the books cradled to her chest, becomes a neat visual shorthand for her hard-won knowledge and liberty; she had, the narrator tells us, ‘no dreams of being praised above other women’ but ‘the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable’ (PP 6/85). By choosing not to iterate Dorothea’s kiss with Ladislaw as her final scene, and to place her in a context where she is reflective, having learnt she could if she needed to exist alone, also appears to put a modern 1990s veneer on the ending.

Yet, this footage has in a sense been reused because — like the two other flashbacks — it expresses something apparently integral or representative about Dorothea. There is a familiarity to the image of Dorothea moving through the darkness of Lowick, attending to Casaubon's business, that allows it to function within the edit as a kind of intellectual rather than literal flashback. But it is Casaubon’s ghost that haunts these moments. One might reflect, for instance, on an inverted version of this sequence in 3/67 when Casaubon travels up the stairs to meet an expectant Dorothea. Certainly, there remains a forbidding quality to Lowick that the narration does not quite dispel. Dorothea looks contemplative and not unhappy, but she remains a solitary figure; her isolation only sharpened by her distance from the camera’s static position on the ground floor. The light pouring through the windows, meanwhile, does nothing to brighten the darkness of the house. It catches upon Dorothea’s pale face and neck, and on her cream shawl but, facing away from us, Aubrey’s dark head is easily lost amidst the shadows. It thus feels a particular unkindness that the voiceover is timed to end at the point when Dorothea is furthest from the camera and thus deepest in the house; Lowick, it implies inaccurately, will remain Dorothea’s ‘unvisited tomb’ (PP 6/85).

It may be useful here to reflect on Steedman’s identification of Eliot’s narrative world, where ‘Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand’ (Ch.11, p.142). For Steedman, ‘Eliot makes Destiny a woman, with a sarcastic attitude’ (2001, p.107). It must be remembered that in 1994 the much respected but widely eclectic Judi Dench had yet to be adorned with the mantel of ‘national treasure’. She was more familiar to British television audiences at the time for the bitter-sweet sit-coms A Fine Romance (LWT, 1981-84) and As Time Goes By (BBC, Series 1, 1992). It is perhaps difficult now to dissociate the magisterial benevolence of her disembodied incarnation of ‘George Eliot’ from her later roles (as Queens Victoria, Elizabeth I, and Bond’s ‘M’). And the simplicity with which the adaptation assumes, unproblematically, that Middlemarch’s narrator is George Eliot herself, and makes Destiny’s hand her own.

Coonradt, N. M. (2012), ‘Writing Mary Garth: Locating middle ground among female characters in George Eliot's "Middlemarch" in George Eliot - George Henry Lewes Studies, September 2012, No.62/63, pp.16-33

Davies, A. (1993) Unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections, UK

Page, A. (1993), Unpublished interview transcript made for BBC Education, BFI Special Collections

Steedman, C. (2001),Dust, Manchester, Manchester University Press