Program Title
Middlemarch

Episode Title
Part 6

Episode number:
1 2 3 4 5 6

Description
It is February 1832: the Lydgates marriage grows increasingly bitter with the prospect of bankruptcy. Sir James tells Dorothea that her plans for a model village are too expensive. The return of John Raffles, now a sick man, sets off a train of events which dramatically changes the lives of everyone in Middlemarch. Bulstrode tries to defend himself against all allegations, but is unable to satisfy his accusers. Dorothea finds Will Ladislaw with Rosamond Lydgate.

Original broadcast date
1994-05-15

Cast	Characters

Intro
MIDDLEMARCH/Episode 6/Intro by Russell Baker

When "Middlemarch" was shown on the BBC, British television reviewers gave it rave notices, and two or three called it a great Victorian soap opera.

These vast nineteenth century novels are often likened to soap operas… I've done it myself trying to propagandize people.

"‘War and Peace' is really just a great soap opera," I tell them.

Well it's an easy comparison, but it's terribly misleading about how a soap opera differs from the novel.

In the first place, soap operas never come to an end, as novels do, and as "Middlemarch" does with tonight's installment.

The main difference, though, is that in soap opera there are no consequences. In my own favorite soap, the chief human rat once suffered a terrible stroke. Did it put him permanently out of commission and end his nasty mischief-making? Of course not. This was soap opera.

He was back on his feet in a week or two, good as new and twice as mean. His stroke had no consequences.

Good novels are just the opposite. In a novel, as in life, bad decisions make bad things happen.

When Dorothea and Lydgate make foolish decisions about marrying, the logic of the novel means they will have to take the consequences.

If they were soap opera characters, the scriptwriter could get them out of their predicaments by conjuring up, say, a terrible thunderstorm in which Rosamond and Casaubon take shelter under the same tree and are conveniently hit by lightning.

In fact, the George Eliot scholar Jerome Beaty has an essay noting that "Middlemarch" readers have always hoped Lydgate and Dorothea would end up married to each other…

In fact, he points out, cholera was widespread in England in the early 1830s, so George Eliot might have been excused for using it to get rid of Rosamond and marry Lydgate to Dorothea. She was not writing a soap opera, however, as we are about to see.

Final Episode, Middlemarch.



Episode number: 1 2 3 4 5 6




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