text:
Middlemarch

Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by English author George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. It appeared in eight installments (volumes) in 1871 and 1872. Set in Middlemarch, a fictional English Midlands town, in 1829 to 1832, it follows distinct, intersecting stories with many characters. Issues include the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism, self-interest, religion, hypocrisy, political reform, and education. Despite comic elements, Middlemarch uses realism to encompass historical events: the 1832 Reform Act, early railways, and the accession of King William IV. It looks at medicine of the time and reactionary views in a settled community facing unwelcome change. Eliot began writing the two pieces that formed the novel in 1869–1870 and completed it in 1871. Initial reviews were mixed, but it is now seen widely as her best work and one of the great English novels.

Background
Middlemarch originates in two unfinished pieces that Eliot worked on during 1869 and 1870: the novel "Middlemarch (which focused on the character of Lydgate) and the long story "Miss Brooke" (which focused on the character of Dorothea). The former piece is first mentioned in her journal on 1 January 1869 as one of the tasks for the coming year. In August she began writing, but progress ceased in the following month amidst a lack of confidence in it and distraction by the illness of George Henry Lewes's son Thornie, who was dying of tuberculosis. (Eliot had been living with Lewes since 1854.) After Thornie's death on 19 October 1869, all work on the novel stopped; it is uncertain whether Eliot intended at the time to revive it at a later date.

In December she wrote of having begun another story, on a subject that she had considered "ever since I began to write fiction". By the end of the month she had written 100 pages of this story and entitled it "Miss Brooke". Although a precise date is unknown, the process of incorporating material from "Middlemarch into the story she had been working on was ongoing by March 1871. While composing, Eliot compiled a notebook of hundreds of literary quotations, from poets, historians, playwrights, philosophers, and critics in eight different languages.

By May 1871, the growing length of the novel had become a concern to Eliot, as it threatened to exceed the three-volume format that was then the norm in publishing. The issue was compounded because Eliot's most recent novel, Felix Holt, the Radical (1866) – also set in the same pre-Reform Bill England – had not sold well. The publisher John Blackwood, who had made a loss on acquiring the English rights to that novel, was approached by Lewes in his role as Eliot's literary agent. He suggested that the novel be brought out in eight two-monthly parts, borrowing the method used for Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables. This was an alternative to the monthly issues that had been used for such longer works as Dickens's David Copperfield and Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and avoided Eliot's objections to slicing her novel into small parts. Blackwood agreed, although he feared there would be "complaints of a want of the continuous interest in the story" due to the independence of each volume. The eight books duly appeared during 1872, the last three instalments being issued monthly.

With the deaths of Thackeray and Dickens in 1863 and 1870, respectively, Eliot became "recognised as the greatest living English novelist" at the time of the novel's final publication.

Plot
Middlemarch centres on the lives of residents of Middlemarch, a fictitious Midlands town, from 1829 onwards – the years up to the 1832 Reform Act. The narrative may be considered to consist of four plots with unequal emphasis: the life of Dorothea Brooke, the career of Tertius Lydgate, the courtship of Mary Garth by Fred Vincy, and the disgrace of Nicholas Bulstrode. The two main plots are those of Dorothea and Lydgate. Each plot occurs concurrently, although Bulstrode's is centred on the later chapters.

Dorothea Brooke is a 19-year-old orphan, living with her younger sister, Celia, as a ward of her uncle, Mr Brooke. Dorothea is an especially pious young woman whose hobby involves the renovation of buildings belonging to the tenant farmers, although her uncle discourages her. Dorothea is courted by Sir James Chettam, a man close to her own age, but she is oblivious to him. She is attracted instead to the Rev. Edward Casaubon, a 45-year-old scholar. Dorothea accepts Casaubon's offer of marriage, despite her sister's misgivings. Chettam is encouraged to turn his attention to Celia, who has developed an interest in him.

Fred and Rosamond Vincy are the eldest children of Middlemarch's town mayor. Having never finished university, Fred is widely seen as a failure and a layabout, but is content because he is the presumed heir of his childless uncle Mr Featherstone, a rich but unpleasant man. Featherstone keeps as a companion a niece of his by marriage, Mary Garth; although she is considered plain, Fred is in love with her and wants to marry her.

Dorothea and Casaubon experience the first tensions in their marriage on their honeymoon in Rome, when Dorothea finds that her husband has no interest in involving her in his intellectual pursuits. She meets Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's much younger disinherited cousin whom he supports financially. Ladislaw begins to feel attracted to Dorothea; she remains oblivious, but the two become friendly.

Fred becomes deeply in debt and finds himself unable to repay what he owes. Having asked Mr Garth, Mary's father, to co-sign the debt, he now tells Garth he must forfeit it. As a result, Mrs Garth's savings from four years of income, held in reserve for the education of her youngest son, are wiped out, as are Mary's savings. Mr Garth thus warns Mary against ever marrying Fred.

Fred comes down with an illness and is treated by Dr Tertius Lydgate, a newly arrived doctor in Middlemarch. Lydgate has modern ideas about medicine and sanitation which draw ire and criticism of many in town. He allies himself with Bulstrode, a wealthy, church-going landowner and developer who wants to build a hospital and clinic that follow Lydgate's philosophy, despite the misgivings of Lydgate's friend, Farebrother, about Bulstrode's integrity. Lydgate also becomes acquainted with Rosamond Vincy, who is beautiful and educated, but shallow and self-absorbed. Seeking to make a good match, she decides to marry Lydgate, who comes from a wealthy family, and uses Fred's sickness as an opportunity to get close to him. Lydgate initially views their relationship as pure flirtation and backs away from Rosamond after discovering that the town considers them practically engaged. However, on seeing her a final time, he breaks his resolution and the two become engaged.

Casaubon arrives back from Rome about the same time, but suffers a heart attack. Lydgate attends him and tells Dorothea it is difficult to pronounce on the nature of Casaubon's illness and chances of recovery: that he may indeed live about 15 years if he takes it easy and ceases his studies, but it is equally possible the disease may develop rapidly, in which case death will be sudden. As Fred recovers, Mr Featherstone falls ill. On his deathbed, he reveals that he has made two wills and tries to get Mary to help him destroy one. Unwilling to be involved in the business, she refuses, and Featherstone dies with both wills still intact. Featherstone's plan had been for £10,000 to go to Fred Vincy, but his estate and fortune instead go to his illegitimate son, Joshua Rigg.

Casaubon, in poor health, has grown suspicious of Dorothea's goodwill to Ladislaw. He tries to make Dorothea promise, if he should die, to forever "avoid doing what I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire". She is hesitant to agree, and he dies before she can reply. Casaubon's will is revealed to contain a provision that, if Dorothea marries Ladislaw, she will lose her inheritance. This leads to the general suspicion that Ladislaw and Dorothea are lovers, creating awkwardness between the two. Ladislaw is in love with Dorothea but keeps this secret, having no desire to involve her in scandal or cause her disinheritance. She realizes she has romantic feelings for him, but must suppress them. He remains in Middlemarch, working as a newspaper editor for Mr Brooke, who is mounting a campaign to run for Parliament on a Reform platform.

Lydgate's efforts to please Rosamond soon leave him deeply in debt, and he is forced to seek help from Bulstrode. Meanwhile, Fred Vincy's humiliation at being responsible for Caleb Garth's financial setbacks shocks him into reassessing his life. He resolves to train as a land agent under the forgiving Caleb. He asks Farebrother to plead his case to Mary Garth, not realizing that Farebrother is also in love with her. Farebrother does so, thereby sacrificing his own desires for the sake of Mary, who he realises truly loves Fred and is just waiting for him to find his place in the world.

John Raffles, a mysterious man who knows of Bulstrode's shady past, appears in Middlemarch, intending to blackmail him. In his youth, the church-going Bulstrode engaged in questionable financial dealings; his fortune is founded on his marriage to a wealthy, much older widow. The widow's daughter, who should have inherited her mother's fortune, had run away; Bulstrode located her but failed to disclose this to the widow, so that he inherited the fortune in lieu of her daughter. The widow's daughter had a son, who turns out to be Ladislaw. On grasping their connection, Bulstrode is consumed with guilt and offers Ladislaw a large sum of money, which Ladislaw refuses as being tainted. Bulstrode's terror of public exposure as a hypocrite leads him to hasten the death of the mortally sick Raffles, while lending a large sum to Lydgate, whom Bulstrode had previously refused to bail out of his debt. However, the story of Bulstrode's misdeeds has already spread. Bulstrode's disgrace engulfs Lydgate: knowledge of the loan spreads and he is assumed to be complicit with Bulstrode. Only Dorothea and Farebrother retain any faith in him, but Lydgate and Rosamond are still encouraged to leave Middlemarch by the general opprobrium. Disgraced and reviled, Bulstrode's one consolation is that his wife stands by him as he too faces exile.

When Mr Brooke's election campaign collapses, Ladislaw decides to leave the town and visits Dorothea to say his farewell, but Dorothea has fallen in love with him. She renounces Casaubon's fortune and shocks her family by announcing that she will marry Ladislaw. At the same time, Fred, having been successful in his new career, marries Mary.

The "Finale" details the ultimate fortunes of the main characters. Fred and Mary marry and live contentedly with their three sons. Lydgate operates a successful practice outside Middlemarch and attains a good income, but never finds fulfilment and dies at the age of 50, leaving Rosamond and four children. After he dies, Rosamond marries a wealthy physician. Ladislaw engages in public reform, and Dorothea is content as a wife and mother to their two children. Their son eventually inherits Arthur Brooke's estate.

Characters

 * Dorothea Brooke: An intelligent, wealthy woman with great aspirations, Dorothea avoids displaying her wealth and embarks upon projects such as redesigning cottages for her uncle's tenants. She marries the elderly Reverend Edward Casaubon, with the idealistic idea of helping him in his research, The Key to All Mythologies. However, the marriage was a mistake, as Casaubon fails to take her seriously and resents her youth, enthusiasm, and energy. Her requests to assist him make it harder for him to conceal that his research is years out of date. Faced with Casaubon's coldness on their honeymoon, Dorothea becomes friends with his relative, Will Ladislaw. Some years after Casaubon's death she falls in love with Will and marries him.
 * Tertius Lydgate: An idealistic, talented, but naive young doctor, is relatively poor, but of good birth. He hopes to make big advances in medicine through his research, but ends up in an unhappy marriage with Rosamond Vincy. His attempts to show he is answerable to no man fail, and he eventually has to leave town, sacrificing his high ideals to please his wife.
 * Rev. Edward Casaubon : A pedantic, selfish, elderly clergyman who is so taken up with his scholarly research that his marriage to Dorothea is loveless. His unfinished book, The Key to All Mythologies, is intended as a monument to Christian syncretism, but his research is out of date as he cannot read German. He is aware of this but admits it to no one.
 * Mary Garth: The plain, kind daughter of Caleb and Susan Garth serves as Mr Featherstone's nurse. She and Fred Vincy were childhood sweethearts, but she will not let him woo her until he shows himself willing and able to live seriously, practically and sincerely.
 * Arthur Brooke: The oft-befuddled, none-too-clever uncle of Dorothea and Celia Brooke has a reputation as the worst landlord in the county, but stands for Parliament on a Reform platform.
 * Celia Brooke: Dorothea's younger sister is a beauty. She is more sensual than Dorothea and does not share her idealism and asceticism. She is only too happy to marry Sir James Chettam when Dorothea rejects him.
 * Sir James Chettam: A neighbouring landowner, he is in love with Dorothea and helps with her plans to improve conditions for the tenants. When she marries Casaubon, he marries Celia Brooke.
 * Rosamond Vincy: Vain, beautiful and shallow, Rosamond has a high opinion of her own charms and a low opinion of Middlemarch society. She marries Tertius Lydgate, believing he will raise her social standing and keep her comfortable. When her husband meets financial difficulties, she thwarts his efforts to economise, seeing such sacrifices as beneath her and insulting. She cannot bear the idea of losing social status.
 * Fred Vincy: Rosamond's brother has loved Mary Garth from childhood. His family hopes he will advance socially by becoming a clergyman, but he knows Mary will not marry him if he does. Brought up to expect an inheritance from his uncle, Mr Featherstone, he is a spendthrift, but later changes through his love for Mary and finds by studying under Mary's father a profession that gains Mary's respect.
 * Will Ladislaw: This young cousin of Mr Casaubon has no property, as his grandmother married a poor Polish musician and was disinherited. He is a man of verve, idealism and talent, but no fixed profession. He is in love with Dorothea, but cannot marry her without her losing Mr Casaubon's property.
 * Humphrey Cadwallader and Elinor Cadwallader: Neighbours of the Brookes, Mr Cadwallader is a rector and Mrs Cadwallader a pragmatic and talkative woman who comments on local affairs with wry cynicism. She disapproves of Dorothea's marriage and Mr Brooke's parliamentary endeavours.
 * Walter Vincy and Lucy Vincy: A respectable manufacturing couple, they wish their children to advance socially and are disappointed by Rosamond's and Fred's marriages. Vincy's sister is married to Nicholas Bulstrode. Mrs Vincy was an innkeeper's daughter and her sister the second wife of Mr. Featherstone.
 * Caleb Garth: Mary Garth's father is a kind, honest, generous surveyor and land agent involved in farm management. He is fond of Fred and eventually takes him under his wing.
 * Camden Farebrother: A poor but clever vicar and amateur naturalist, he is a friend of Lydgate and Fred Vincy and loves Mary Garth. His position improves when Dorothea appoints him to a living after Casaubon's death.
 * Nicholas Bulstrode: A wealthy banker married to Vincy's sister, Harriet, he is a pious Methodist keen to impose his beliefs in Middlemarch society. However, he has a sordid past he is desperate to hide. His religion favours his personal desires and lacks sympathy for others.
 * Peter Featherstone: An old landlord of Stone Court, he is a self-made man, who has married Caleb Garth's sister. On her death he takes Mrs Vincy's sister as his second wife.
 * Jane Waule: A widow and Peter Featherstone's sister, she has a son, John.
 * Mr Hawley: A foul-mouthed businessman, he is an enemy of Bulstrode.
 * Mr Mawmsey: A grocer
 * Dr Sprague: A Middlemarch physician
 * Mr Tyke: A clergyman favoured by Bulstrode
 * Joshua Rigg Featherstone: Featherstone's illegitimate son, he appears at the reading of Featherstone's will and receives a fortune instead of Fred. He is also the stepson of John Raffles, who comes into town to visit Rigg, but instead reveals Bulstrode's past. His appearance in the novel is crucial to the plot.
 * John Raffles: Raffles is a braggart and a bully, a humorous scoundrel in the tradition of Sir John Falstaff, and an alcoholic. But unlike Falstaff, Raffles is a truly evil man. He holds the key to Bulstrode's dark past and Lydgate's future.

Historical novel
The action of Middlemarch takes place "between September 1829 and May 1832", or 40 years before its publication in 1871–1872, a gap not so pronounced for it to be regularly labelled as a historical novel. By comparison, Walter Scott's Waverley (1814) – often seen as the first major historical novel – takes place some 60 years before it appears. Eliot had previously written a more obviously historical novel, Romola (1862–1863), set in 15th-century Florence. The critics Kathleen Blake and Michael York Mason argue that there has been insufficient attention given to Middlemarch "as a historical novel that evokes the past in relation to the present".

The critic Rosemary Ashton notes that the lack of attention to this side of the novel may indicate its merits: "Middlemarch is that very rare thing, a successful historical novel. In fact, it is so successful that we scarcely think of it in terms of that subgenre of fiction." For its contemporary readers, the present "was the passage of the Second Reform Act in 1867"; the agitation for the Reform Act of 1832 and its turbulent passage through the two Houses of Parliament, which provide the structure of the novel, would have been seen as the past.

Though rarely categorised as a historical novel, Middlemarch's attention to historical detail has been noticed; in an 1873 review, Henry James recognised that Eliot's "purpose was to be a generous rural historian". Elsewhere, Eliot has been seen to adopt "the role of imaginative historian, even scientific investigator in Middlemarch and her narrator as conscious "of the historiographical questions involved in writing a social and political history of provincial life". This critic compares the novel to "a work of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus", who is often described as "The Father of History".

A Study of Provincial Life
The fictional town of Middlemarch, North Loamshire, is probably based on Coventry, where Eliot had lived before moving to London. Like Coventry, Middlemarch is described as a silk-ribbon manufacturing town.

The subtitle—"A Study of Provincial Life"—has been seen as significant. One critic views the unity of Middlemarch as achieved through "the fusion of the two senses of 'provincial'": on the one hand it means geographically "all parts of the country except the capital"; and on the other, a person who is "unsophisticated" or "narrow-minded". Carolyn Steedman links Eliot's emphasis on provincialism in Middlemarch to Matthew Arnold's discussion of social class in England in Culture and Anarchy essays, published in 1869, about the time Eliot began working on the stories that became Middlemarch. There Arnold classes British society in terms of Barbarians (aristocrats and landed gentry), Philistines (urban middle class) and Populace (working class). Steedman suggests Middlemarch "is a portrait of Philistine Provincialism".

It is worth noting that Eliot went to London, as her heroine Dorothea does at the end of the book. There Eliot achieved fame way beyond most women of her time, whereas Dorothea takes on the role of nurturing Will and her family. Eliot was rejected by her family once she had settled in her common-law relationship with Lewes, and "their profound disapproval prevented her ever going home again". She omitted Coventry from her last visit to the Midlands in 1855.

The "Woman Question"
Central to Middlemarch is the idea that Dorothea Brooke cannot hope to achieve the heroic stature of a figure like Saint Teresa, for Eliot's heroine lives at the wrong time, "amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion". Antigone, a figure from Greek mythology best known from Sophocles' play, is given in the "Finale" as a further example of a heroic woman. The literary critic Kathleen Blake notes Eliot's emphasis on St Teresa's "very concrete accomplishment, the reform of a religious order", rather than her Christian mysticism. A frequent criticism by feminist critics is that not only is Dorothea less heroic than Saint Teresa and Antigone, but George Eliot herself. In response, Ruth Yeazell and Kathleen Blake chide these critics for "expecting literary pictures of a strong woman succeeding in a period [around 1830] that did not make them likely in life". Eliot has also been criticised more widely for ending the novel with Dorothea marrying Will Ladislaw, someone so clearly her inferior. The novelist Henry James describes Ladislaw as a dilettante who "has not the concentrated fervour essential in the man chosen by so nobly strenuous a heroine".

Marriage
Marriage is one of the major themes in Middlemarch. According to George Steiner, "both principal plots [those of Dorothea and Lydgate] are case studies of unsuccessful marriage". This suggests that these "disastrous marriages" leave the lives of Dorothea and Lydgate unfulfilled. This is arguably more the case with Lydgate than with Dorothea, who gains a second chance through her later marriage to Will Ladislaw, but a favourable interpretation of this marriage depends on the character of Ladislaw himself, whom numerous critics have viewed as Dorothea's inferior. In addition, there is the "meaningless and blissful" marriage of Dorothea's sister Celia Brooke to Sir James Chettam, and more significantly Fred Vincy's courting of Mary Garth. In the latter, Mary Garth will not accept Fred until he abandons the Church and settles on a more suitable career. Here Fred resembles Henry Fielding's character Tom Jones, both being moulded into a good husband by the love they give to and receive from a woman.

Dorothea is a St Teresa, born in the wrong century, in provincial Middlemarch, who mistakes in her idealistic ardor, "a poor dry mummified pedant... as a sort of angel of vocation". Middlemarch is in part a Bildungsroman focusing on the psychological or moral growth of the protagonist: Dorothea "blindly gropes forward, making mistakes in her sometimes foolish, often egotistical, but also admirably idealistic attempt to find a role" or vocation that fulfils her nature. Lydgate is equally mistaken in his choice of a partner, as his idea of a perfect wife is someone "who can sing and play the piano and provide a soft cushion for her husband to rest after work". So he marries Rosamond Vincy, "the woman in the novel who most contrasts with Dorothea", and thereby "deteriorates from ardent researcher to fashionable doctor in London".

Contemporary reviews
The Examiner, The Spectator and Athenaeum reviewed each of the eight books that comprise Middlemarch as they were published from December 1871 to December 1872; such reviews speculated on the eventual direction of the plot and responded accordingly. Contemporary response to the novel was mixed. Writing as it was being published, the Spectator reviewer R. H. Hutton criticised it for what he saw as its melancholic quality. Athenaeum, reviewing it after "serialisation", found the work overwrought and thought it would have benefited from hastier composition. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine reviewer W. L. Collins saw as the work's most forceful impression its ability to make readers sympathise with the characters. Edith Simcox of Academy offered high praises, hailing it as a landmark in fiction owing to the originality of its form; she rated it first amongst Eliot's œuvre, which meant it "has scarcely a superior and very few equals in the whole wide range of English fiction".

Henry James presented a mixed opinion, Middlemarch, according to him, was "at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels ... Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole". Among the details, his greatest criticism ("the only eminent failure in the book") was of the character of Ladislaw, who he felt was an insubstantial hero-figure as against Lydgate. The scenes between Lydgate and Rosamond he especially praised for their psychological depth – he doubted whether there were any scenes "more powerfully real... [or] intelligent" in all English fiction. Thérèse Bentzon, for the Revue des deux Mondes, was critical of Middlemarch. Although finding merit in certain scenes and qualities, she faulted its structure as "made up of a succession of unconnected chapters, following each other at random... The final effect is one of an incoherence which nothing can justify." In her view, Eliot's prioritisation of "observation rather than imagination... inexorable analysis rather than sensibility, passion or fantasy" means that she should not be held amongst the first ranks of novelists. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who read Middlemarch in a translation owned by his mother and sister, derided the novel for construing suffering as a means of expiating the debt of sin, which he found characteristic of "little moralistic females à la Eliot".

Despite the divided contemporary response, Middlemarch gained immediate admirers: in 1873, the poet Emily Dickinson expressed high praise for the novel, exclaiming in a letter to a friend: "What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory."

In separate centuries, Florence Nightingale and Kate Millett remarked on the eventual subordination of Dorothea's own dreams to those of her admirer, Ladislaw. Indeed, the ending acknowledges this and mentions how unfavourable social conditions prevented her from fulfilling her potential.

Later responses
In the first half of the 20th century, Middlemarch continued to provoke contrasting responses; while Leslie Stephen dismissed the novel in 1902, his daughter Virginia Woolf described it in 1919 as "the magnificent book that, which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." However, Woolf was "virtually unique" among the modernists in her unstinting praise for Middlemarch, and the novel also remained overlooked by the reading public of the time.

F. R. Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948) is credited with having "rediscovered" the novel: "The necessary part of great intellectual powers in such a success as Middlemarch is obvious ... the sheer informedness about society, its mechanisms, the ways in which people of different classes live ... a novelist whose genius manifests itself in a profound analysis of the individual." Leavis' appraisal of it has been hailed as the beginning of a critical consensus that still exists towards the novel, in which it is recognised not only as Eliot's finest work, but as one of the greatest novels in English. V. S. Pritchett, in The Living Novel, two years earlier, in 1946 had written that "No Victorian novel approaches Middlemarch in its width of reference, its intellectual power, or the imperturbable spaciousness of its narrative ... I doubt if any Victorian novelist has as much to teach the modern novelists as George Eliot ... No writer has ever represented the ambiguities of moral choice so fully".

In the 21st century, the novel is still held in high regard. The novelists Martin Amis and Julian Barnes have both called it probably the greatest novel in the English language, and today Middlemarch is frequently included in university courses. In 2013, the then British Education Secretary Michael Gove referred to Middlemarch in a speech, suggesting its superiority to Stephenie Meyer's vampire novel Twilight. Gove's comments led to debate on teaching Middlemarch in Britain, including the question of when novels like Middlemarch should be read, and the role of canonical texts in teaching. The novel has remained a favourite with readers and scores high in reader rankings: in 2003 it was No. 27 in the BBC's The Big Read, and in 2007 it was No. 10 in "The 10 Greatest Books of All Time", based on a ballot of 125 selected writers. In 2015, in a BBC Culture poll of book critics outside the UK, the novel was ranked at number one in "The 100 greatest British novels".

On 5 November 2019, the BBC News reported that Middlemarch is on the BBC list of 100 "most inspiring" novels.

Legacy and adaptations
Middlemarch has been adapted several times for television and the stage. In 1968 it appeared as a BBC-produced TV mini-series of the same name, directed by Joan Craft, starring Michele Dotrice. The first episode, "Dorothea", is missing from the BBC Archives, while the third episode, "The New Doctor", can be viewed online, although only as a low-quality black and white telerecording owned by a private collector. The other five episodes have been withheld from public viewing. In 1994 it was again adapted by the BBC as a television series of the same name, directed by Anthony Page with a screenplay by Andrew Davies. This was a critical and financial success and revived public interest adaptating the classics. In 2013 came a stage adaptation, and also an Orange Tree Theatre Repertory production adapted and directed by Geoffrey Beevers as three plays: Dorothea's Story, The Doctor's Story, and Fred & Mary. The novel has never been made into a film, although the idea was toyed with by the English director Sam Mendes. In April 2022, Dash Arts produced The Great Middlemarch Mystery, an immersive theatre experience staged across three locations in Coventry, including Drapers Hall.

The opera Middlemarch in Spring by Allen Shearer, to a libretto by Claudia Stevens, has a cast of six and treats only the central story of Dorothea Brooke. It was first staged in San Francisco in 2015. In 2017, a modern adaptation, Middlemarch: The Series, aired on YouTube as a video blog. Lyrics for the song "How Soon Is Now?" by The Smiths were taken from Middlemarch ("I am the son and heir, of nothing in particular").

Contemporary reviews

 * Athenaeum, 7 December 1872
 * Bentzon, TH. Revue des deux Mondes, February 1873
 * Broome, F. N. The Times, 7 March 1873
 * Collins, W. L. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, December 1872
 * Colvin, Sidney, The Fortnightly Review, 1 January 1873
 * Hutton, R. H. The Spectator, 1 June 1872
 * Hutton, R. H. British Quarterly Review, 1 April 1873
 * Simcox, Edith, The Academy, 1 January 1873

Later reviews

 * Woolf, Virginia, "George Eliot", The Times Literary Supplement, 20 November 1919

title: Middlemarch


text:
All My Babies

All My Babies: A Midwife's Own Story is a 1953 educational film written, directed and produced by George C. Stoney which was used to educate midwives in the Southern United States and promote greater cooperation between midwifery and the modern health system. It was produced by the Georgia Department of Public Health. The film follows Mary Francis Hill Coley (1900–66) an African American midwife from Albany, Georgia who helped deliver over 3,000 babies in the middle part of the 20th century. On December 17, 2002, it was announced by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington that "All My Babies, George Stoney's landmark educational film used to educate midwives in Georgia and throughout the South" was among the annual selection of 25 motion pictures to be added to the National Film Registry.

Plot
The film was produced as a method of educating "granny midwives," the term applied to African-American lay women who delivered the majority of both black and white women's babies in the rural south, and their patients. The film stresses the need for midwives to maintain scrupulous standards of sterility. This lecture comes from a doctor who is explaining the cause of a recent infant death. The second message concerns the necessity of prenatal care and here Coley, or "Miss Mary" as she's referred to in the film, functions as the expert. The film follows her through two births, the first of which focuses on a woman who has had several successful deliveries, while the other woman has had two miscarriages due to lack of prenatal care. Under Coley's careful guidance and tutelage, both women achieve successful pregnancies and home births. Films such as All My Babies represent part of the transition to State legal oversights and eventual elimination of lay midwifery (also called direct-entry midwifery) in many States.

Production
All My Babies was written produced and directed by documentary filmmaker, George C. Stoney, and is one of his earliest and most widely recognized. Stoney was interested in the subject as a child watching the midwives go about their work in odd hours and later as a Southern field representative who gave midwives lifts and learning more about their work. He first worked with the Georgia Department of Public Health writing and directing Palmour Street, a documentary about mental health in black families. Due to its success the Georgia Department of Public Health determined he was qualified to direct a film on midwives and was initially granted $20,000. The final production cost was $45,000 and filming took place between August 1951 and fall 1952.

Stoney partnered local African American Dr. William Mason to gain the trust of the black community while Stoney, with backing from the health department, worked on gaining trust from the white community. To gain their trust, Stoney assured the white community that the film would not suggest an unhappy relationship between blacks and whites existed and worked with the local press to publish favorable articles. Stoney also gained the support of progressive black pastor, Bishop Noah, who preached to the Church of the Kingdom of God, and where Mary Coley attended, not to be afraid of white people. Coley and the congregation therefore welcomed both blacks and whites, including the all-white film crew, and weren't overly suspicious due to Bishop Noah's direction. While the white film crew and cast had a good working relationship, the film's production wasn't devoid of segregation or bias (racial and north–south) between the white community and cast and the crew and black cast. The southern medical establishment was also uneasy with the film's glorification of the midwife's role in the community.

Prior to filming, Stoney followed Coley at her appointments to do field research having learnt from Palmour Street that it is important to meet the black community where it was at to create an authentic film and not solely rely on information from experts and books. Coley advised on the film as well, helping to plan and structure the film's scenes so they were more realistic to her work. While some scenes were scripted, the film is notable for featuring a 15-minute real-time sequence of a live birth, a technique pioneered by filmmakers Pare Lorentz and Robert Flaherty. The live birth scene is silent with narratives of the doctors, Coley, and the chorus creating the joyous music with the babies cries upon birth being the emphasis. The score, written by Louis Applebaum and performed by the Musical Art Chorus in Washington, D.C., gives the film a sense of joy during childbirth. Coley also sings throughout the film as she cares for mothers.

Reception
The film met some criticism with the public due to the graphic nature of the birth scene, but was still shown to avant-garde audiences in New York at Cinema 16 and the inaugural Flaherty Film Seminar in 1953. It met all the requirements of the Health Department for safe birthing and was officially sanctioned for medical audiences due to the birth scene. This meant it could only be shown at private screenings, which included the New York locations, where it would not be fined or censored. Stoney also encouraged the restriction desiring to protect the film's subjects and legitimatize the film as a teaching tool. The film was distributed by UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, to various other countries, and become widely used in medical school curriculum. The film was also used to promote respect of midwives by doctors and the medical establishment, particularly in countries where the film was demonstrated the United States' medical establishment wasn't afraid to work with midwives. However, the Georgia Department of Public Health provided an accompanying pamphlet with the film stating that the medical profession was not endorsing midwives, seeing them as a "temporary and unfortunate necessity."

Preservation
In 2002, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film is the subject of a short 2006 article by Christine Dell'Amore. Photographic stills by Robert Galbraith from the film formed the basis of an exhibition curated by Linda Janet Holmes called "Reclaiming Midwives: Stills from All My Babies," on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: All My Babies


text:
Baron Munchausen

Baron Munchausen is a fictional German nobleman created by the German writer Rudolf Erich Raspe in his 1785 book Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. The character is loosely based on baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen.

Born in Bodenwerder, Hanover, the real-life Münchhausen fought for the Russian Empire during the Russo-Turkish War of 1735–1739. After retiring in 1760, he became a minor celebrity within German aristocratic circles for telling outrageous tall tales based on his military career. After hearing some of Münchhausen's stories, Raspe adapted them anonymously into literary form, first in German as ephemeral magazine pieces and then in English as the 1785 book, which was first published in Oxford by a bookseller named Smith. The book was soon translated into other European languages, including a German version expanded by the poet Gottfried August Bürger. The real-life Münchhausen was deeply upset at the development of a fictional character bearing his name, and threatened legal proceedings against the book's publisher. Perhaps fearing a libel suit, Raspe never acknowledged his authorship of the work, which was only established posthumously.

The fictional Baron's exploits, narrated in the first person, focus on his impossible achievements as a sportsman, soldier, and traveller; for instance: riding on a cannonball, fighting a forty-foot crocodile, and travelling to the Moon. Intentionally comedic, the stories play on the absurdity and inconsistency of Munchausen's claims, and contain an undercurrent of social satire. The earliest illustrations of the character, perhaps created by Raspe himself, depict Munchausen as slim and youthful, although later illustrators have depicted him as an older man, and have added the sharply beaked nose and twirled moustache that have become part of the character's definitive visual representation. Raspe's book was a major international success, becoming the core text for numerous English, continental European, and American editions that were expanded and rewritten by other writers. The book in its various revised forms remained widely read throughout the 19th century, especially in editions for young readers.

Versions of the fictional Baron have appeared on stage, screen, radio, and television, as well as in other literary works. Though the Baron Munchausen stories are no longer well known in many English-speaking countries, they are still popular in continental Europe. The character has inspired numerous memorials and museums, and several medical conditions and other concepts are named after him.

Historical figure

Hieronymus Karl Friedrich von Münchhausen was born on 11 May 1720 in Bodenwerder, Hanover. He was born into the "Black Line" of the Rinteln-Bodenwerder, an aristocratic family from Brunswick-Lüneburg. His cousin, Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen, was one of the founders of the University of Göttingen and served as the Hanoverian Prime Minister. At a young age, Münchhausen served as a page in the royal court of Duke Anthony Ulrich of Brunswick, following the duke to the Russian Empire during the Russo-Turkish War of 1737–1739. In 1739, he was appointed as a cornet in the Brunswick Cuirassiers, an Imperial Russian Army cavalry regiment. On 27 November 1740, Münchhausen was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. Though he was stationed in Riga, Münchhausen participated in two military campaigns against the Ottoman Empire in 1740 and 1741. In 1744, he married Jacobine von Dunten, and six years later Münchhausen was again promoted to the rank of rotmistr.

In 1760, he retired and settled down on his estates in Bodenwerder to live as a Freiherr, remaining there until his death in 1797. It was during this period of his life, especially at dinners he would host for local aristocrats, that Münchhausen developed a reputation as an imaginative storyteller, creating witty and highly exaggerated accounts of his military career in Russia. Over the ensuing decades, his storytelling abilities gained such renown that he frequently received visits from travelling noblemen wishing to hear his tales. One guest described Münchhausen as telling his stories "cavalierly, indeed with military emphasis, yet without any concession to the whimsicality of the man of the world; describing his adventures as one would incidents which were in the natural course of events". However, rather than being considered a liar, Münchhausen was seen as an honest man. As another contemporary put it, Münchhausen's unbelievable narratives were designed not to deceive, but "to ridicule the disposition for the marvellous which he observed in some of his acquaintances".

Von Dunten died in 1790. In January 1794, Münchhausen married Bernardine von Brunn, a woman who was fifty-seven years his junior. Von Brunn reportedly became ill soon after the marriage and spent the summer of 1794 in the spa town of Bad Pyrmont, although contemporary gossip claimed that she spent her time there dancing and flirting. She gave birth to a daughter, Maria Wilhemina, on 16 February 1795, nine months after her summer trip. Münchhausen filed an official complaint that the child was not his, and spent the last years of his life in divorce proceedings and alimony litigation. Münchhausen died childless on 22 February 1797.

Fictionalization
The fictionalized character was created by a German writer, scientist, and con artist, Rudolf Erich Raspe. Raspe probably met Hieronymus von Münchhausen while studying at the University of Göttingen, and may even have been invited to dine with him at the mansion at Bodenwerder. Raspe's later career mixed writing and scientific scholarship with theft and swindling; when the German police issued advertisements for his arrest in 1775, he fled continental Europe and settled in England.

In his native German language, Raspe wrote a collection of anecdotes inspired by Münchhausen's tales, calling the collection "M-h-s-nsche Geschichten" ("M-h-s-n Stories"). It remains unclear how much of Raspe's material comes directly from the Baron, but the majority of the stories are derived from older sources, including Heinrich Bebel's Facetiæ (1508) and Samuel Gotthold Lange's Deliciæ Academicæ (1765). "M-h-s-nsche Geschichten" appeared as a feature in the eighth issue of the Vade mecum für lustige Leute (Handbook for Fun-loving People), a Berlin humor magazine, in 1781. Raspe published a sequel, "Noch zwei M-Lügen" ("Two more M-Fibs"), in the tenth issue of the same magazine in 1783. The hero and narrator of these stories was identified only as "M-h-s-n", keeping Raspe's inspiration partly obscured while still allowing knowledgeable German readers to make the connection to Münchhausen. Raspe's name did not appear at all.

In 1785, while supervising mines at Dolcoath in Cornwall, Raspe adapted the Vade mecum anecdotes into a short English-language book, this time identifying the narrator of the book as "Baron Munchausen". Other than the anglicization of Münchhausen to "Munchausen", Raspe this time made no attempt to hide the identity of the man who had inspired him, though he still withheld his own name.

This English edition, the first version of the text in which Munchausen appeared as a fully developed literary character, had a circuitous publication history. It first appeared anonymously as Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, a 49-page book in 12mo size, published in Oxford by the bookseller Smith in late 1785 and sold for a shilling. A second edition released early the following year, retitled Singular Travels, Campaigns, Voyages, and Sporting Adventures of Baron Munnikhouson, commonly pronounced Munchausen, added five more stories and four illustrations; though the book was still anonymous, the new text was probably by Raspe, and the illustrations may have been his work as well.

By May 1786, Raspe no longer had control over the book, which was taken over by a different publisher, G. Kearsley. Kearsley, intending the book for a higher-class audience than the original editions had been, commissioned extensive additions and revisions from other hands, including new stories, twelve new engravings, and much rewriting of Raspe's prose. This third edition was sold at two shillings, twice the price of the original, as Gulliver Revived, or the Singular Travels, Campaigns, Voyages, and Adventures of Baron Munikhouson, commonly pronounced Munchausen.

Kearsley's version was a marked popular success. Over the next few years, the publishing house issued further editions in quick succession, adding still more non-Raspe material along the way; even the full-length Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen, again not by Raspe and originally published in 1792 by a rival printer, was quickly subsumed into the body of stories. In the process of revision, Raspe's prose style was heavily modified; instead of his conversational language and sportsmanlike turns of phrase, Kearsley's writers opted for a blander and more formal tone imitating Augustan prose. Most ensuing English-language editions, including even the major editions produced by Thomas Seccombe in 1895 and F. J. Harvey Darton in 1930, reproduce one of the rewritten Kearsley versions rather than Raspe's original text.

At least ten editions or translations of the book appeared before Raspe's death in 1794. Translations of the book into French, Spanish, and German were published in 1786. The text reached the United States in 1805, expanded to include American topical satire by an anonymous Federalist writer, probably Thomas Green Fessenden.

The first German translation, Wunderbare Reisen zu Wasser und Lande, was made by the German Romantic poet Gottfried August Bürger. Bürger's text is a close translation of Smith's second edition, but also includes an interpolated story, based on a German legend called "The Six Wonderful Servants". Two new engravings were added to illustrate the interpolated material. The German version of the stories proved to be even more popular than the English one. A second German edition in 1788 included heavily altered material from an expanded Kearsley edition, and an original German sequel, Nachtrag zu den wunderbaren Reisen zu Wasser und Lande, was published in 1789. After these publications, the English and Continental versions of the Raspe text continued to diverge, following increasingly different traditions of included material.

Raspe, probably for fear of a libel suit from the real-life Baron von Münchhausen, never admitted his authorship of the book. It was often credited to Bürger, sometimes with an accompanying rumor that the real-life Baron von Münchhausen had met Bürger in Pyrmont and dictated the entire work to him. Another rumor, which circulated widely soon after the German translation was published, claimed that it was a competitive collaboration by three University of Göttingen scholars—Bürger, Abraham Gotthelf Kästner, and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg—with each of the three trying to outdo one another by writing the most unbelievable tale. The scholar Johann Georg Meusel correctly credited Raspe for the core text, but mistakenly asserted that Raspe had written it in German and that an anonymous translator was responsible for the English version. Raspe's authorship was finally proven in 1824 by Bürger's biographer, Karl Reinhard.

In the first few years after publication, German readers widely assumed that the real-life Baron von Münchhausen was responsible for the stories. According to witnesses, Münchhausen was deeply angry that the book had dragged his name into public consciousness and insulted his honor as a nobleman. Münchhausen became a recluse, refusing to host parties or tell any more stories, and he attempted without success to bring legal proceedings against Bürger and the publisher of the translation.

Publication history
The following tables summarize the early publication history of Raspe's text, from 1785 to 1800. Unless otherwise referenced, information in the tables comes from the Munchausen bibliography established by John Patrick Carswell.

Fictional character
The fictional Baron Munchausen is a braggart soldier, most strongly defined by his comically exaggerated boasts about his own adventures. All of the stories in Raspe's book are told in first-person narrative, with a prefatory note explaining that "the Baron is supposed to relate these extraordinary Adventures over his Bottle, when surrounded by his Friends". The Baron's stories imply him to be a superhuman figure who spends most of his time either getting out of absurd predicaments or indulging in equally absurd moments of gentle mischief. In some of his best-known stories, the Baron rides a cannonball, travels to the Moon, is swallowed by a giant fish in the Mediterranean Sea, saves himself from drowning by pulling up on his own hair, fights a forty-foot crocodile, enlists a wolf to pull his sleigh, and uses laurel tree branches to fix his horse when the animal is accidentally cut in two.

In the stories he narrates, the Baron is shown as a calm, rational man, describing what he experiences with simple objectivity; absurd happenings elicit, at most, mild surprise from him, and he shows serious doubt about any unlikely events he has not witnessed himself. The resulting narrative effect is an ironic tone, encouraging skepticism in the reader and marked by a running undercurrent of subtle social satire. In addition to his fearlessness when hunting and fighting, he is suggested to be a debonair, polite gentleman given to moments of gallantry, with a scholarly penchant for knowledge, a tendency to be pedantically accurate about details in his stories, and a deep appreciation for food and drink of all kinds. The Baron also provides a solid geographical and social context for his narratives, peppering them with topical allusions and satire about recent events; indeed, many of the references in Raspe's original text are to historical incidents in the real-life Münchhausen's military career.

Because the feats the Baron describes are overtly implausible, they are easily recognizable as fiction, with a strong implication that the Baron is a liar. Whether he expects his audience to believe him varies from version to version; in Raspe's original 1785 text, he simply narrates his stories without further comment, but in the later extended versions he is insistent that he is telling the truth. In any case, the Baron appears to believe every word of his own stories, no matter how internally inconsistent they become, and he usually appears tolerantly indifferent to any disbelief he encounters in others.

Illustrators of the Baron stories have included Thomas Rowlandson, Alfred Crowquill, George Cruikshank, Ernst Ludwig Riepenhausen, Theodor Hosemann, Adolf Schrödter, Gustave Doré, William Strang, W. Heath Robinson, and Ronald Searle. The Finnish-American cartoonist Klaus Nordling featured the Baron in a weekly Baron Munchausen comic strip from 1935 to 1937, and in 1962, Raspe's text was adapted for Classics Illustrated #146 (British series), with both interior and cover art by the British cartoonist Denis Gifford.

In the first published illustrations, which may have been drawn by Raspe himself, the Baron appears slim and youthful. For the 1792 Sequel to the Adventures of Baron Munchausen, an anonymous artist drew the Baron as a dignified but tired old soldier whose face is marred by injuries from his adventures; this illustration remained the standard portrait of the Baron for about seventy years, and its imagery was echoed in Cruikshank's depictions of the character. Doré, illustrating a Théophile Gautier fils translation in 1862, retained the sharply beaked nose and twirled moustache from the 1792 portrait, but gave the Baron a healthier and more affable appearance; the Doré Baron became the definitive visual representation for the character.

The relationship between the real and fictional Barons is complex. On the one hand, the fictional Baron Munchausen can be easily distinguished from the historical figure Hieronymus von Münchhausen; the character is so separate from his namesake that at least one critic, the writer W. L. George, concluded that the namesake's identity was irrelevant to the general reader, and Richard Asher named Munchausen syndrome using the anglicized spelling so that the disorder would reference the character rather than the real person. On the other hand, Münchhausen remains strongly connected to the character he inspired, and is still nicknamed the Lügenbaron ("Baron of Lies") in German. As the Munchausen researcher Bernhard Wiebel has said, "These two barons are the same and they are not the same."

Critical and popular reception
Reviewing the first edition of Raspe's book in December 1785, a writer in The Critical Review commented appreciatively:

"This is a satirical production calculated to throw ridicule on the bold assertions of some parliamentary declaimers. If rant may be best foiled at its own weapons, the author's design is not ill-founded; for the marvellous has never been carried to a more whimsical and ludicrous extent."

At around the same time, English Review was less approving: "We do not understand how a collection of lies can be called a satire on lying, any more than the adventures of a woman of pleasure can be called a satire on fornication."

W. L. George described the fictional Baron as a "comic giant" of literature, describing his boasts as "splendid, purposeless lie[s] born of the joy of life". Théophile Gautier fils highlighted that the Baron's adventures are endowed with an "absurd logic pushed to the extreme and which backs away from nothing". According to an interview, Jules Verne relished reading the Baron stories as a child, and used them as inspiration for his own adventure novels. Thomas Seccombe commented that "Munchausen has undoubtedly achieved [a permanent place in literature] ... The Baron's notoriety is universal, his character proverbial, and his name as familiar as that of Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, or Robinson Crusoe."

Steven T. Byington wrote that "Munchausen's modest seat in the Valhalla of classic literature is undisputed", comparing the stories to American tall tales and concluding that the Baron is "the patriarch, the perfect model, the fadeless fragrant flower, of liberty from accuracy". The folklore writer Alvin Schwartz cited the Baron stories as one of the most important influences on the American tall tale tradition. In a 2012 study of the Baron, the literary scholar Sarah Tindal Kareem noted that "Munchausen embodies, in his deadpan presentation of absurdities, the novelty of fictionality [and] the sophistication of aesthetic illusion", adding that the additions to Raspe's text made by Kearsley and others tend to mask these ironic literary qualities by emphasizing that the Baron is lying.

By the beginning of the 19th century, Kearsley's phenomenally popular version of Raspe's book had spread to abridged chapbook editions for young readers, who soon became the main audience for the stories. The book, especially in its adaptations for children, remained widely popular throughout the century. It was translated into nearly all languages spoken in Europe; Robert Southey referred to it as "a book which everybody knows, because all boys read it". Notable later translations include Gautier's French rendering and Korney Chukovsky's popular Russian adaptation. By the 1850s, Munchausen had come into slang use as a verb meaning "to tell extravagantly untruthful pseudo-autobiographical stories". Robert Chambers, in an 1863 almanac, cited the iconic 1792 illustration of the Baron by asking rhetorically:

"Who is there that has not, in his youth, enjoyed The Surprising Travels and Adventures of Baron Munchausen in Russia, the Caspian Sea, Iceland, Turkey, &c. a slim volume—all too short, indeed—illustrated by a formidable portrait of the baron in front, with his broad-sword laid over his shoulder, and several deep gashes on his manly countenance? I presume they must be few."

Though Raspe's book is no longer widely read by English-speakers, the Munchausen stories remain popular in Europe, especially in Germany and in Russia.

Literature
As well as the many augmented and adapted editions of Raspe's text, the fictional Baron has occasionally appeared in other standalone works. In 1838–39, Karl Leberecht Immermann published the long novel Münchhausen: Eine Geschichte in Arabesken (Münchhausen: A History of Arabesques) as an homage to the character, and Adolf Ellissen's Munchausens Lügenabenteur, an elaborate expansion of the stories, appeared in 1846.

In his 1886 philosophical treatise Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche uses one of the Baron's adventures, the one in which he rescues himself from a swamp, as a metaphor for belief in complete metaphysical free will; Nietzsche calls this belief an attempt "to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness". Another philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, makes reference to the same adventure in a diary entry from 1937, recording a remark he made in a dream: "But let us talk in our mother tongue, and not believe that we must pull ourselves out of the swamp by our own hair; that was – thank God – only a dream, after all. We are only supposed to remove misunderstandings, after all."

In the late 19th century, the Baron appeared as a character in John Kendrick Bangs's comic novels A House-Boat on the Styx, Pursuit of the House-Boat, and The Enchanted Type-Writer. Shortly after, in 1901, Bangs published Mr. Munchausen, a collection of new Munchausen stories, closely following the style and humor of the original tales. Hugo Gernsback's second novel, Baron Münchhausen's New Scientific Adventures, put the Baron character in a science fiction setting; the novel was serialized in The Electrical Experimenter from May 1915 to February 1917.

Pierre Henri Cami's character Baron de Crac, a French soldier and courtier under Louis XV, is an imitation of the Baron Munchausen stories. In 1998, the British game designer James Wallis used the Baron character to create a multi-player storytelling game, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, in which players improvise Munchausen-like first-person stories while overcoming objections and other interruptions from opponents. The American writer Peter David had the Baron narrate an original short story, "Diego and the Baron", in 2018.

Stage and audio
Sadler's Wells Theatre produced the pantomime Baron Munchausen; or, Harlequin's Travels in London in 1795, starring the actor-singer-caricaturist Robert Dighton as the Baron; another pantomime based on the Raspe text, Harlequin Munchausen, or the Fountain of Love, was produced in London in 1818. Herbert Eulenberg made the Baron the main character of a 1900 play, Münchhausen, and the Expressionist writer Walter Hasenclever turned the stories into a comedy, Münchhausen, in 1934. Grigori Gorin used the Baron as the hero of his 1976 play That Very Munchausen; a film version was made in 1980. Baron Prášil, a Czech musical about the Baron, opened in 2010 in Prague. The following year, the National Black Light Theatre of Prague toured the United Kingdom with a nonmusical production of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

In 1932, the comedy writer Billy Wells adapted Baron Munchausen for a radio comedy routine starring the comedians Jack Pearl and Cliff Hall. In the routine, Pearl's Baron would relate his unbelievable experiences in a thick German accent to Hall's "straight man" character, Charlie. When Charlie had had enough and expressed disbelief, the Baron would invariably retort: "Vass you dere, Sharlie?" The line became a popular and much-quoted catchphrase, and by early 1933 The Jack Pearl Show was the second most popular series on American radio (after Eddie Cantor's program). Pearl attempted to adapt his portrayal to film in Meet the Baron in 1933, playing a modern character mistaken for the Baron, but the film was not a success. Pearl's popularity gradually declined between 1933 and 1937, though he attempted to revive the Baron character several times before ending his last radio series in 1951.

For a 1972 Caedmon Records recording of some of the stories, Peter Ustinov voiced the Baron. A review in The Reading Teacher noted that Ustinov's portrayal highlighted "the braggadocio personality of the Baron", with "self-adulation ... plainly discernible in the intonational innuendo".

Film
The early French filmmaker Georges Méliès, who greatly admired the Baron Munchausen stories, filmed Baron Munchausen's Dream in 1911. Méliès's short silent film, which has little in common with the Raspe text, follows a sleeping Baron through a surrealistic succession of intoxication-induced dreams. Méliès may also have used the Baron's journey to the moon as an inspiration for his well-known 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. In the late 1930s, he planned to collaborate with the Dada artist Hans Richter on a new film version of the Baron stories, but the project was left unfinished at his death in 1938. Richter attempted to complete it the following year, taking on Jacques Prévert, Jacques Brunius, and Maurice Henry as screenwriters, but the beginning of the Second World War put a permanent halt to the production.

The French animator Émile Cohl produced a version of the stories using silhouette cutout animation in 1913; other animated versions were produced by Richard Felgenauer in Germany in 1920, and by Paul Peroff in the United States in 1929. Colonel Heeza Liar, the protagonist of the first animated cartoon series in cinema history, was created by John Randolph Bray in 1913 as an amalgamation of the Baron and Teddy Roosevelt. The Italian director Paolo Azzurri filmed The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in 1914, and the British director F. Martin Thornton made a short silent film featuring the Baron, The New Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the following year. In 1940, the Czech director Martin Frič filmed Baron Prášil, starring the comic actor Vlasta Burian as a 20th-century descendant of the Baron.

For the German film studio U.F.A. GmbH's 25th anniversary in 1943, Joseph Goebbels hired the filmmaker Josef von Báky to direct Münchhausen, a big-budget color film about the Baron. David Stewart Hull describes Hans Albers's Baron as "jovial but somewhat sinister", while Tobias Nagle writes that Albers imparts "a male and muscular zest for action and testosterone-driven adventure". A German musical comedy, Münchhausen in Afrika, made as a vehicle for the Austrian singing star Peter Alexander, appeared in 1957. Karel Zeman's 1961 Czech film The Fabulous Baron Munchausen commented on the Baron's adventures from a contemporary perspective, highlighting the importance of the poetic imagination to scientific achievement; Zeman's stylized mise-en-scène, based on Doré's illustrations for the book, combined animation with live-action actors, including Miloš Kopecký as the Baron.

In the Soviet Union, in 1929, Daniil Cherkes released a cartoon, Adventures of Munchausen. Soviet Soyuzmultfilm released a 16-minute stop-motion animation Adventures of Baron Munchausen in 1967, directed by Anatoly Karanovich. Another Soviet animated version was produced as a series of short films, Munchausen's Adventures, in 1973 and 1974. The French animator Jean Image filmed The Fabulous Adventures of the Legendary Baron Munchausen in 1979, and followed it with a 1984 sequel, Moon Madness.

Oleg Yankovsky appeared as the Baron in the 1979 Russian television film The Very Same Munchhausen, directed by Mark Zakharov from Grigori Gorin's screenplay, produced and released by Mosfilm. The film, a satirical commentary on Soviet censorship and social mores, imagines an ostracized Baron attempting to prove the truth of his adventures in a disbelieving and conformity-driven world.

In 1988, Terry Gilliam adapted the Raspe stories into a lavish Hollywood film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, with the British stage actor and director John Neville in the lead role. Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, described Neville's Baron as a man who "seems sensible and matter-of-fact, as anyone would if they had spent a lifetime growing accustomed to the incredible".

The German actor Jan Josef Liefers starred in a 2012 two-part television film titled Baron on the Cannonball; according to a Spiegel Online review, his characterization of the Baron strongly resembled Johnny Depp's performance as Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series.

Memorials
In 2004, a fan club calling itself Munchausen's Grandchildren was founded in the Russian city of Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg). The club's early activities included identifying "historical proofs" of the fictional Baron's travels through Königsberg, such as a jackboot supposedly belonging to the Baron and a sperm whale skeleton said to be that of the whale in whose belly the Baron was trapped.

On 18 June 2005, to celebrate the 750th anniversary of Kaliningrad, a monument to the Baron was unveiled as a gift from Bodenwerder, portraying the Baron's cannonball ride. Bodenwerder sports a Munchausen monument in front of its Town Hall, as well as a Munchausen museum including a large collection of illustrated editions of the stories. Another Munchausen Museum (Minhauzena Muzejs) exists in Duntes Muiža, Liepupe parish, Latvia, home of the real Baron's first wife; the couple had lived in the town for six years, before moving back to the baronial estate in Hanover. In 2005, to mark the real-life Baron's 285th birthday, the National Bank of Latvia issued a commemorative silver coin.

Nomenclature
In 1951, the British physician Richard Asher published an article in The Lancet describing patients whose factitious disorders led them to lie about their own states of health. Asher proposed to call the disorder "Munchausen's syndrome", commenting: "Like the famous Baron von Munchausen, the persons affected have always travelled widely; and their stories, like those attributed to him, are both dramatic and untruthful. Accordingly, the syndrome is respectfully dedicated to the baron, and named after him". The disease is now usually referred to as Munchausen syndrome. The name has spawned two other coinages: Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which illness is feigned by caretakers rather than patients, and Munchausen by Internet, in which illness is feigned online.

In 1968, Hans Albert coined the term Münchhausen trilemma to describe the philosophical problem inherent in having to derive conclusions from premises; those premises have to be derived from still other premises, and so on forever, leading to an infinite regress interruptible only by circular logic or dogmatism. The problem is named after the similarly paradoxical story in which the Baron saves himself from being drowned in a swamp by pulling on his own hair. The same story also inspired the mathematical term Munchausen number, coined by Daan van Berkel in 2009 to describe numbers whose digits, when raised to their own powers, can be added together to form the number itself (for example, 3435 = 33 + 44 + 33 + 55).

Subclass ATU1889 of the Aarne–Thompson–Uther classification system, a standard index of folklore, was named "Münchhausen Tales" in tribute to the stories. In 1994, a main belt asteroid was named 14014 Münchhausen in honor of both the real and the fictional Baron.

title: Baron Munchausen


text:
The Black Stallion (film)

The Black Stallion is a 1979 American adventure film based on the 1941 classic children's novel of the same name by Walter Farley. The film starts in 1946, five years after the book was published. It tells the story of Alec Ramsey, a boy who is shipwrecked on a deserted island with a wild Arabian stallion that he befriends. After being rescued, they are set on entering a race challenging two champion horses.

The film is adapted by Melissa Mathison, Jeanne Rosenberg, and William D. Wittliff. It was directed by Carroll Ballard and stars Kelly Reno in his film debut, Teri Garr, Hoyt Axton, Michael Higgins and Mickey Rooney with the Arabian horse Cass Ole playing the eponymous Black Stallion. The film features music by Carmine Coppola, the father of Hollywood producer Francis Ford Coppola, who is credited as executive producer.

In 2002, The Black Stallion was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Plot
In 1946, Alec Ramsey is travelling by steamer off the coast of North Africa, where he sees a wild black stallion being forced onto the boat. Captivated, Alec sneaks to the horse's stall to feed him some sugar cubes, but he is caught by the horse's supposed owner, who tells him in Arabic to stay away from Shetan.

Later, his father shows Alec his winnings from a card game and gives him a pocket knife and a small statue of Bucephalus, telling the story of how Alexander the Great became Bucephalus's master. Later that night, Alec is thrown out of his bunk during a storm. The ship is engulfed in flames and is sinking. In the chaos, Alec makes his way to the black stallion and frees him. The horse then jumps into the sea. Alec is thrown overboard by the waves and grabs the ropes of the stallion's restraints just as the ship explodes, rendering him unconscious.

Alec wakes on the shore of a deserted island and starts to explore. He finds the stallion caught in his restraints. With his knife, Alec frees the stallion again. As Alec suddenly faces a cobra, The Black kills the snake, only to run off.

Alec decides to get closer to the horse and offers him some seaweed. The hungry stallion finds himself unable to resist, and the two become inseparable. After many failed attempts, Alec rides the stallion, and they travel the beaches, united as one. One day, a fishing ship arrives, rescuing the two.

Back in America, Alec is given a hero's welcome. The Black has a temporary home in his back yard, but a garbage man startles the horse, who races off. The next day, Alec finds the stallion in the barn of Henry Dailey, a retired racehorse jockey. Alec arranges for The Black to stay at the barn.

When Alec wonders how fast the horse is, he and Henry decide to train The Black for the racetrack, while Henry teaches Alec how to be a jockey. The Black surprises Henry with his speed. Henry starts planning to get The Black into a match race between the country's current two champions. To do that, he sets up a secret demonstration at night where a prominent reporter can witness his speed. The news spreads about the mystery horse and The Black is entered into the race.

Before the horses enter the starting gate, The Black gets into a fight with one of his opponents, wounding his leg. Alec does not see the injury until he is in the gate. As he begins to dismount, the bell rings and the horses take off. Alec desperately stays on his horse while trying to stop him. He falls far behind, but The Black will not stop. Alec starts urging him to run, and The Black catches his opponents to win.

Horses
Cass Ole, a champion Arabian stallion, was featured in most of the movie's scenes, with Fae Jur, another black Arabian stallion, being his main double. Fae Jur's main scene is the one where Alec is trying to gain the trust of The Black on the beach. Two other stunt doubles were used for running, fighting, and swimming scenes.

El Mokhtar, an Egyptian Arabian racehorse, was the producers' first choice to portray The Black, but they were unable to secure his services for the film from his owners, who declined any offers. He does appear in The Black Stallion Returns, alongside Cass Ole, by which time the studio bought out the syndicate of owners to secure El Mokhtar's services.

Napoleon was portrayed by Junior, that previously appeared in National Lampoon's Animal House as Trooper, Niedermeyer's horse.

Reception
The film was positively received by critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it holds a 90% approval rating based on 31 reviews, with an average rating of 7.9/10.

Academy Awards
The film received two nominations for the Academy Awards:
 * Mickey Rooney was nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
 * Robert Dalva was nominated for Best Film Editing.

In addition, Alan Splet was awarded with a Special Achievement Award for sound editing.

Golden Globe Awards
Carmine Coppola was nominated for Best Original Score at the Golden Globe Awards. He later won the award in this category for his score of Apocalypse Now.

British Academy Awards
Caleb Deschanel was nominated for Best Cinematography by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards.

LA Film Critics Awards
The film received two awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards for Best Cinematography (Caleb Deschanel) and Best Music (Carmine Coppola).

Others
The film also won the 1979 National Society of Film Critics award for Best Cinematography.

In 2002, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Also, the film is recognized by American Film Institute:
 * 2006: AFI's 100 Years...100 Cheers – #64

Music
In August 2009, Intrada Records released a three-disc special edition of the soundtrack containing the entire score from the film plus bonus material, including unused cues and alternate takes of some tracks as well as a restored re-issue of the original 1979 soundtrack album. This release was limited to 1,500 units.

Home media
The film was released on RCA SelectaVision VideoDisc (CED) in 1981. The film was released on Laserdisc and VHS by Magnetic Video in 1985. It was re-issued on VHS as part of the MGM/UA Family Entertainment Collection in 1994 and the MGM Family Entertainment Collection in 1997. The film was released on DVD by MGM Home Entertainment in 2004 and re-issued in 2013. A restored print of the film was released on Blu-ray by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment in 2013. The Criterion Collection released a special edition of the film on DVD and Blu-ray in 2015. This release features a new 4K transfer supervised by Caleb Deschanel, five short films directed by Carroll Ballard, new interviews with Deschanel, Ballard, film critic Scott Foundas and photographer Mary Ellen Mark as well as an essay written by film critic Michael Sragow.

Legacy
The film was followed in 1983 by a sequel, The Black Stallion Returns, which also starred Kelly Reno and Teri Garr. There was also a television series called The Adventures of the Black Stallion which aired from 1990 to 1993 and starred Mickey Rooney and Richard Ian Cox. In 2003, a 50-minute prequel called The Young Black Stallion, was shot and released for IMAX theaters.

title: The Black Stallion (film)