Fancy meeting you here: coincidence in English fiction

I know it's probably mundane of me and these scenes are no doubt central to the novel, or perhaps essential if not central, but I'm getting pretty weary of the lengthy discussions about village politics in book 2 of George Eliot's Middlemarch. I realize that the very nature of the conversations, stultifying and provincial, is essential for our comprehension of the life and values of the Middlemarch community, in 1829 (time of setting of the novel) and that without seeing the petty politics in play regarding the appointment of the hospital chaplain - in which the socially conscious young Dr. Lydgate has to go against his principles, or against his judgment in any case, and vote to select the candidate who's the favorite of the nasty banker, Bulstrade, whose support is essential for construction of the new hospital. The point being in part that nobody is pure, that even in an English village in the 1820s favors were still bought and sold - folks in my state (Rhode Island) think somehow that dirty politics began right here but that's obviously not so. As Eliot goes to great lengths to establish this village climate, an old-boy network in which people have to bend their will to the wealthy and powerful, I feel the air is being let out of the novel - and am glad, well into book 2 (old and young) that Dorothea and her now husband, Casaubon, turn up again - in Rome - as they come across Casaubon's cousin, the young would-be aesthete Ladislaw (as is so true in many English novels, the characters are always running across one another in the most unlikely settings, as if all of England consists of about 100 people - and maybe it does? - the best example of this phenomenon, which occurs so often and in such unlikely ways throughout the course of his sequence of novels, is Anthony Powers's Dance to the Music of Time - quite funny) - in any case, the reappearance of Dorothea will get the novel back on track, and she will obviously come into some kind of relationship with Lydgate, both of them committed to social change, neither one exactly an idealist, and neither with a suitable match: Lydgate head over heels for the beautiful Rosamond Vincy, the mayor-elect's daughter, but it's clear she is far too shallow and weak a personality for him - an unsuitable match in exactly the opposite way from Dorothea's, suggesting the Lydgate and Dorothea are the ones truly destined for each other - though the path to that destiny will be difficult and maybe tragic.