Unique role of narrator in Middlemarch

Thanks KK for pointing out that in fact the is a British TV version of Middlemarch; I'm sure it's good, although I probably won't watch it - it's enough to read the novel, great, long, heavy (literally, a thumb-sprainer in the two-volume illustrated hb edition I'm reading), abundant with Eliot's intelligence. One of the reasons we read novels is to gain consciousness of the consciousness of another - and in Middlemarch we certainy see how Eliot's mind works, her metaphors and analogies and quips and learned asides - the narrator becomes truly the key persona in, almost the protagonist of, the novel - and I think this aspect would be completely lost in any dramatization of the work, which naturally would focus on character and action; second reason we read novels is (often) to gain access to a time and place other than our own. Think of how little we would know about, say, 19th-century Russia if it were not for the great novelists of that century. Same true for many other times and places - even our own time, which accounts for the great and growing interest in world literature. Historians look back on people and events and at their best bring them to life for contemporary readers, but novelists are in a sense cultural historians in their own time. I don't know what Eliot was thinking as she wrote Middlemarch, what her intentions were, but one of the last pleasures - though a difficult one - of the novel is that it is a meticulous record of its time and place (English midland provinces). The long chapter in which she gives us Dr. Lydgate's back story an excellent example: there is little or no action in this chapter, which does not move the narrative (or plot) forward an inch, but it's a record of the history of medicine, the forces that were shaping the science and practice, at that time that is much more vivid (and accurate?) than anything you'd find in any historical or scientific text - all part of Eliot's copious knowledge and curiosity, which makes Middlemarch a near-unique document, though sometimes a challenge as a narrative: her work begs for condensation, but any abridged edition (such as the abridged Silas Marner we were forced to read back in 8th grade) loses the whole point. Without Eliot's narration, these are nothing.