Professor Justin Smith
What goes into turning a literary classic into popular TV drama? That’s the question at the heart of a DMU research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in partnership with the British Library.
‘Transforming Middlemarch’ traces the journey from book to screen of George Eliot’s groundbreaking novel, drawing on the scripts, notes and correspondence of celebrated screenwriter Andrew Davies, who adapted Middlemarch for the BBC in a 6-part series starring Juliet Aubrey, Douglas Hodge, and Rufus Sewell first aired in 1994.
2022 marks the 150th anniversary of the first, serialised, publication of Middlemarch, set in a fictionalised Coventry at time of the great Reform Bill. So it is a timely choice from the extensive back catalogue of the prolific Davies, who donated his personal archive to DMU’s Special Collections in 2015. Middlemarch (1994) also marked a watershed for the BBC. In partnership with WGBH (Boston), Michael Wearing (Head of Drama) gambled what was then a risky £6m on a lavish production shot on film and set on location (in Rome and the Lincolnshire town of Stamford) that was big on period detail. In turn, it spawned a raft of BBC Education resources, a (then unusual) ‘making of…’ documentary, and lively arts show critics’ debates; and it boosted Stamford’s tourist trade with location tours and a repertoire of visitor souvenirs. Following its success, Davies’ next BBC heritage adaptation was Pride and Prejudice (best remembered for that scene of Mr Darcy’s dip in the lake which doesn’t appear in Jane Austen). The rest, as they say, is history.
These base texts will be augmented with Davies’ own hand-written annotations, notes
and correspondence, and a range of additional assets the project is gathering from interviews with Davies himself and members of the cast and crew, educational materials, production ephemera and clips. The resulting ‘genetic edition’ will be a new digital scholarly edition not of Middlemarch the novel, but of Middlemarch the Andrew Davies adaptation of Eliot’s novel, tracing the cross-media transformation. It promises to reveal much about what goes into (and comes out of) the process of literary adaptation.
The design of the genetic edition is being developed in consultation with Dr. Beverley Rilett, digital humanities specialist at the University of Auburn, Alabama and director of the George Eliot online archive. John Burton, chairman of the George Eliot Fellowship, is also part of an expert panel informing the project’s progress. The impact potential of the project’s methodology will be explored in a study day to be held at the British Library in December 2022, which will invite archivists, educational publishers and visitors’ centre curators to consider further genetic modifications to the digital adaptation of literary adaptations for a range of audiences .