Editor's Note: this article covers the entire plot of The Long Song. Don't read it unless you've finished the show.
The Long Song condenses approximately 75 years into three short hours. Although the bulk of the story focuses on July (Tamara Lawrance) in adolescence and young adulthood, the viewer also sees flashes of her as a child and as a grandmother. What are the changes screenwriters Sarah Williams and Andrea Levy made to bring Levy’s novel to the small screen?
Miniseries adaptations always have to consider screen time vs. detail in addition to formatting differences. July’s first-person narration was very easy to convert into voiceovers. The script for the series makes July’s dialect easier to understand as the text demands a phonetic spelling of the Jamaican patois dialect. The show scripts removed many instances where the n-word was printed and replaced them with negro. PBS also censored other curse words throughout the miniseries.
Episode 1 begins in media res when July was already a teenage slave who was assigned as a ladies’ maid to Caroline (Hayley Atwell). In contrast, the novel begins after the prologue with Old July (Doña Croll) with July’s mother Kitty’s (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) continual rape by Tam Dewer (Gordon Brown), followed by July’s birth and early childhood. The one element retained from the beginning of the novel is July’s insistence that her story is not about the white woman. July’s cleverness and willingness to subvert Caroline’s authority over her is obvious from her opinions and actions as she narrates the beginning of the story.
The most important shift from the page to the screen is the prologue of the book being moved to the conclusion of Episode 3. Old July in the prologue explains she is writing down her life story because the son she put up for adoption thirty four years earlier is now a printmaker with his own business. Thomas (Arinzé Kene) was raised by Baptist missionaries and then moved to England. He moved back to Jamaica to find out who his biological parents were. Creating suspense for the viewers to anticipate July’s rescue from slavery was the main motivation for this change. In the end, the viewer realizes Old July telling the screaming children to calm down earlier on was in fact foreshadowing.
Overall, the show scripts prioritized visuals and dialogue to show the major events in July’s life, relationships, and the larger historical picture. Minor backstories and characters, fleeting references, and hard to display on-screen side stories were left out. Some of these minor details could in fact have fleshed out the story more on screen but would have also meant cuts to important aspects of July’s life.
In terms of backstories, the largest cut is the explanation of Amity’s existence before Caroline’s arrival. Caroline’s brother, John Howarth (Leo Bill), was married to a biracial woman named Agnes but she died in childbirth. There is an aside about John never allowing Agnes to visit his extended family back in England because she was too “rough” for proper society. While the show and book provide evidence that interracial marriages were legal in Jamaica, they carried the risk of losing social prestige due to racism. It is clear Agnes did not have any formal education or ladies’ etiquette training. Caroline arrives at Amity after Agnes’ death where she then finds young July.
In the novel, Levy goes into a lot more detail on the prelude to the Christmas Rebellion of 1831 and events outside of Amity. Some of these details include who started the rebellion, as well as the formation of the militias by the slaveholders to put down the uprising. John was guilty of several terrible war crimes against women and children which led to his suicide. These details were left out of the show in order to emphasize July’s lack of political and social knowledge of the world beyond Amity. In the book, these historical details come from either Old July or Thomas’ editing of her memories.
Although we get a clear view of Miss Clara (Madeline Mantock) as an ideal for social advancement in the series, the show cuts context that some viewers would find helpful for understanding the racial caste system in Jamaica at the time. Miss Clara organized parties for mixed-race women to meet eligible white bachelors. For these women, having white husbands would mean their children would never be sold into slavery. Their prospective husbands would also be involved in business, thus ensuring long-term financial security. July’s inability to leave domestic service makes it clear that employment opportunities for women were extremely limited. Black and biracial women owning property or business in their own right only happened because of inheritance or marriage.
Robert’s (Jack Lowden) initial interactions with July played out in a similar fashion in the book but one critical conversation which revealed the depth of his religiosity and his manipulation was cut from the show. After July accepts Robert’s lift back to the plantation, he asks July if she has ever been to Miss Clara’s parties. She replies that she spends her spare time reading the Bible. Robert makes a few comments about Miss Clara’s parties being a den of sinful behavior. In all likelihood, July would not have been invited to attend because she was also described in the novel as “darker” than the common perception of biracial women. This detail enriches the duality between Robert’s profession of living a “Christian” life and his growing attraction to July.
Caroline’s jealousy in the series appears to be rooted in July taking up space as Robert’s “true wife” but the novel also gives a little bit more of a look into Caroline's life before Amity. She was married before, but failed to get pregnant. There was also a description of how Caroline’s first husband did not frequent her bedside. Emily’s birth compounded this jealousy as Robert didn’t even try to conceive a child with Caroline. In between the lines in the series, Caroline is incredibly insecure about her ability to be a “good wife” and July is the target of her alienation plan as a result. The rest of the labor strike, Robert’s breakdown, and the plan to separate Emily from July all transpire in the same way in the novel.
Thomas’ backstory before he reunites with July represent the largest edits to the end of the novel. Old July narrates several pages of explanation about how the Baptist missionaries educated Thomas and his adoption. His adopted parents moved to London where he was eventually apprenticed to a printmaker. Some of these details are important for establishing that Black people lived in the UK in the Victorian era. In the novel, Old July also describes the role missionaries played in the abolition movement, how Thomas met his wife, and his search for July based on inconsistent documentation. These are historical details that help readers understand the picture beyond July’s perspective but also would take up a considerable amount of screen time to fill in.
The script of The Long Song gives viewers just as many rich details of July’s life in 1800’s Jamaica as readers of the book. Levy’s active role in writing the script ensured her vision and her perspective as a Black British woman would remain intact on screen. However, viewers interested in even more historical context and character detail would still enjoy the added nuance in the novel.
