Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot are advised to read the introduction after the novel.
WHEN Marian Evans left her native Warwickshire in 1851 for London to assist John Chapman as editor and writer for the Westminster Review, she took with her the memory of people and places that appear, transformed, in the fiction published under her pseudonym ‘George Eliot’. The setting for her first two works of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) and Adam Bede (1859), was so precisely detailed that Warwickshire readers could identify Cheverel Manor in Scenes of Clerical Life with the eighteenth-century Gothic restoration of Arbury Hall by Sir Roger Newdigate and Shepperton Church with the church of Chilvers Coton, where Mary Anne Evans1 was baptized. In Adam Bede, the Hall Farm, home to the Poyser family and their two nieces, Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris, resembles the author’s childhood home, Griff House, ‘a delightful, roomy, red-brick farm-house’ with ‘low rambling stables and out-buildings’ and a garden where ‘flowers and fruit trees jostled each other in profusion’.2 The Hall Farm is also a ‘very fine old place, of red brick’, with ‘great buildings at the back’ (pp. 64, 65) and a ‘true farm-house garden’ filled with ‘hardy perennial flowers, unpruned fruit-trees, and kitchen vegetables growing together in careless, half-neglected abundance’ (p. 197).
The novel’s rural setting at the end of the eighteenth century was part of its appeal to an increasingly urban population of readers. Its story of beguilement and seduction was common enough in fiction and in life, but it was George Eliot’s ability to create complex true-to-life characters whose lives were bound up in the rhythms and rituals of the small agricultural community that so engaged the reading public in the spring of 1859. The progression of the agricultural year is evoked in speculations on the effect of the weather on the hay and wheat harvests (Chapters XVIII, XIX, and XXVII) and in the enactment of traditional rural festivities like the Harvest Supper in Chapter LIII, at which the Poysers’ farm workers and friends celebrate the close of the agricultural year. The late July celebration of the coming-of-age of the heir to the Donnithorne estate is also connected to the agricultural calendar: ‘it is a time of leisure on the farm—that pause between hay and corn-harvest, and so the farmers and labourers … thought [Arthur Donnithorne] did well to come of age just then, when they could give their undivided minds to the flavour of the great cask of ale which had been brewed the autumn after “the heir” was born, and was to be tapped on his twenty-first birthday’ (p. 225).
Arthur Donnithorne plays a significant role in Adam Bede, but the novel’s opening, in ‘the roomy workshop of Mr Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799,’ signals its focus on ordinary people—carpenters, tenant farmers, field workers, domestic servants, and a female Methodist preacher. This focus is consistent with the theory of literature George Eliot had espoused in essays on literature in the Westminster Review and other periodicals, and the narrator in Adam Bede continues her argument that a writer’s duty is to depict the lives of ordinary working people in all their virtues and flaws, thereby generating a sympathetic identification with these ‘fellow-mortals … amongst whom your life is passed’ and whom ‘it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love’ (p. 160).
George Eliot’s own early life was spent among people like her characters in Adam Bede. The young Mary Anne Evans often accompanied her father on drives around the Warwickshire countryside. While he conducted business, his little daughter would be ‘left prattling with the servants in the kitchen at Astley Castle or Packington Hall or in the housekeeper’s room at Arbury till her father was ready to go’.3 Her childhood experience of different occupations and classes, different dialects, and different forms of religious dissent was stored in her memory and many years later informed the realism of both Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede.
George Eliot began Adam Bede in October 1857, just before the three stories in Scenes of Clerical Life completed their serial publication in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. E. S. Dallas in the London Times called it ‘a first-rate novel [whose] author takes rank at once among the masters of the art’. The ‘mature thought, finished portraiture, and crowd of characters’ all signalled ‘genius … of the highest order’.4 It was only after the novel was published that the identity of the author became known; George Eliot’s wish that it be judged on its merits had been triumphantly fulfilled.5
George Eliot’s precise dating in her opening paragraph—‘the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799’—signals the importance of the historical moment, on the brink of a new century that saw the consolidation of British political and economic supremacy after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, increasing urbanization,6technical innovations in manufacturing and transportation, and the growth of the middle class and the reading public.
Both the author’s personal history and the opportunities that the new century brought to talented artisans played a role in shaping Adam Bede’s character. Her father, Robert Evans, began his working life as an apprentice carpenter and eventually filled numerous managerial roles on the Arbury estate, including surveyor, rent collector, supervisor of repairs, and manager for sales of the estate’s timber and mineral produce. When the novel opens, Adam Bede is carpenter and foreman in Jonathan Burge’s workshop; later he becomes manager of the Donnithorne woods and finally owner of Burge’s timber-yard and workshop. In character, too, Adam resembles Robert Evans, a man of ‘severity and uprightness amounting to priggishness, a respect for those above him socially but no fear of criticizing them when he disapproves of them, a thorough knowledge of his work and pride in doing things properly, an indispensable ability to work with both his hands and his head’.7 Adam too exhibits a touch of priggishness when he scolds Wiry Ben for his parodic use of the Bible in Chapter I. He gives due deference to his social superiors, but also defies Squire Donnithorne when he calls Adam’s workmanship into question (Chapter XXI) and challenges Arthur when he discovers him with Hetty Sorrel in Chapter XXVII. In a letter to Charles Bray dated 30 September 1859, eight months after the publication of Adam Bede, George Eliot wrote that her father ‘raised himself from being an artizan to be a man whose extensive knowledge in very varied practical departments made his services valued through several counties’.8The narrator describes Adam as ‘not an average man. Yet such men as he are reared here and there in every generation of our peasant artisans … [T]hey make their way upward, rarely as geniuses, most commonly as painstaking honest men, with the skill and conscience to do well the tasks that lie before them’ (p. 193). With this echo of Thomas Carlyle’s admonition in Sartor Resartus to ‘Do the Duty which lies nearest thee’, the narrator valorizes ambitious, upwardly mobile men like her father and her fictional working man.
Adam’s characterization was also influenced by a historical figure in the same mould, George Stephenson. In June and July 1857, just three months before beginning Adam Bede, George Eliot read Samuel Smiles’s The Life of George Stephenson: Railway Engineer, which records Stephenson’s early life in the mines, his study at night school where he increased his mathematical knowledge, his inventiveness, and other details evident in the characterization of Adam Bede.9 Both embody the spirit of the ‘text’ Lisbeth Bede quotes as one Adam is ‘allys a-sayin’, “God helps them as helps theirsens”’ (p. 42), a colloquial rendition of Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism in Poor Richard’s Almanack. Samuel Smiles’s influential book Self-Help, published in the same year as Adam Bede, opens with a variation of Adam’s favourite text, ‘Heaven helps those who help themselves.’
Personal and public history also converge in the character of Dinah Morris, who, in her role as Methodist preacher, challenges the traditional influence and power of the Church of England, represented in Hayslope by Mr Irwine, a gentleman who has inherited ‘more blood than wealth’ (p. 50) and whose income is derived from three livings, or benefices, a practice that came under increasing criticism in the eighteenth century.10 His gentleman’s education inclines him to prefer the literature of ancient Greece and Rome to religious texts, in contrast to the Methodists, who consulted the Bible frequently to find ‘direction’ before they acted, worked vigorously to convert sinners, and lived frugally as Christ admonished his followers.11 Mr Irwine lacks their evangelical zeal, but is a tolerant man who refuses to persecute the Methodists, as his sexton Joshua Rann advocates in Chapter V, and he is kind and considerate in his familial relationships. He is one of the clergymen about whom the narrator reminds readers, ‘Sixty years ago … all clergymen were not zealous’ (p. 159) but Mr Irwine’s gentility, with which zeal is incompatible, contributes to the tragic consequences of the novel, when, in Chapter XVI, he is ‘too delicate to imply even a friendly curiosity’ when Arthur Donnithorne appears to be on the brink of a confession (p. 158). This failure is a ‘bitter remembrance’ in Chapter XXXIX, when he realizes what Arthur wanted to confess and wishes he had been ‘less fastidious’ (p. 365). At the same time, the Methodist preacher Dinah Morris, whose earnestness and zeal to save sinners is depicted in her sermon on the Green in Chapter II, is no more successful than Mr Irwine and only brings her cousin Hetty Sorrel to hysterical tears and not the serious religious thought she intends in Chapter XV. It is necessary to the plot that both Dinah and Mr Irwine fail, but the manner of their failure also delineates the differences between the Established Church and religious denominations like Methodism.
In creating Dinah’s character, George Eliot drew on her own experience as an earnest Evangelical Anglican in her teenage years12 but particularly on a conversation she had in 1839 with her aunt by marriage Elizabeth Tomlinson Evans, a Methodist preacher and wife of her father’s brother Samuel Evans. In her journal entry ‘History of “Adam Bede”’, George Eliot noted that Mrs Evans’s story of the 1802 trial and conviction of Mary Voce for infanticide provided the ‘germ’ of Adam Bede:
We were sitting together one afternoon during her visit to me at Griffe [sic], probably in 1839 or 40, when it occurred to her to tell me how she had visited a condemned criminal, a very ignorant girl who had murdered her child and refused to confess—how she had stayed with her, praying, through the night and how the poor creature at last broke out into tears and confessed her crime. My Aunt afterwards went with her in the cart to the place of execution.13
In a letter dated 7 October 1859 to a Coventry friend, Sara Hennell, George Eliot distinguishes between the facts of the story and her creation of the scene in the prison. Of her aunt’s conversation, George Eliot recalled ‘no word she uttered—I only remember her tone and manner, and the deep feeling I had under the recital. Of the girl she knew nothing, I believe—or told me nothing—but that she was a common coarse girl, convicted of child-murder.’14 In the ‘History of “Adam Bede”’ she emphasizes the artistic transformation of her father’s and aunt’s stories: ‘Adam is not my father, any more than Dinah is my aunt. Indeed, there is not a single portrait in “Adam Bede”: only the suggestions of experience wrought up into new combinations.’15
The novel’s rural setting does not, however, exclude national and international events. Their most significant impact occurs when the Loamshire Militia is transferred to Ireland to maintain order after the 1798 Rebellion, freeing up the regular army to fight the French. Arthur Donnithorne’s absence from Windsor and his long journey home keep him away until after the trial in Chapter XLIII. The war with France is alluded to several times, beginning with the unnamed horseman’s comment on Adam in Chapter II: ‘We want such fellows as he to lick the French’ (p. 15). The war against Bonaparte also gave the author a plausible reason for Arthur’s removing himself from Hayslope after the trial and sentencing, so that the Poysers and the Bedes would not have to leave their homes to avoid working for him. The French are objects of ridicule in Chapter LIII, ‘The Harvest Supper’, when Mr Craig describes a French soldier gone missing and claims that ‘they put the regimentals on a big monkey, and they fit him as the shell fits the walnut, and you couldn’t tell the monkey from the mounseers’ (p. 467), an example of French stereotyping that Victorian novels frequently satirized.
The importance of historical awareness is also signalled in the narrator’s role as oral historian. In Chapter IV, as Adam works through the night to make the coffin his father has neglected, he is startled by ‘a smart rap, as if with a willow wand’, a sign, in Lisbeth Bede’s folk-belief, that ‘some one was dying’ (pp. 45, 46). In the manuscript and first edition, the paragraph ends, ‘yet he believed in dreams and prognostics, and you see he shuddered at the idea of the stroke with the willow wand’. However, after John Chapman argued, in the Westminster Review for April 1859, that ‘The introduction of the supernatural incident on the night when Thias Bede was drowned is, in our opinion, a disfigurement,’ George Eliot sent her publisher a correction for the first two-volume edition: ‘Some readers seem not to have understood what I meant, namely—that it was in Adam’s peasant blood and nurture to believe in this, and that he narrated it with awed belief to his dying day.’16 Her clarification makes the superstition part of oral history, something that the narrator heard from Adam, who ‘bated his breath a little when he told the story of the stroke with the willow wand. I tell it as he told it, not attempting to reduce it to its natural elements: in our eagerness to explain impressions, we often lose our hold of the sympathy that comprehends them’ (p. 46).
Most significantly, the narrator’s role as historian reinforces the argument for the truth value of fiction in Chapter XVII, ‘In Which the Story Pauses a Little’ to address an imagined reader17 who would prefer ‘the most unexceptionable type of clergyman’ who would give Arthur ‘some truly spiritual advice’ by putting ‘into [Mr Irwine’s] mouth the most beautiful things—quite as good as reading a sermon’ (words attributed to the putative reader). That, the narrator argues, could happen only ‘if I held it the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be’. Refusing to paint such an ‘arbitrary picture’, he asserts his duty ‘to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind’ (p. 159; emphasis added), and develops his argument by analogy with seventeenth-century Dutch painting.18 In the second half of the sentence, however, a different metaphor of truth-telling appears: ‘I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath.’ The narrator’s testimony is not, however, precisely that of an eyewitness. As in Chapter IV’s willow-wand incident, he19 is a recorder of oral history, whose information came ‘from Adam Bede, to whom I talked of these matters in his old age’ (p. 163).20
The sense of authenticity provided by this narrator-historian was part of Adam Bede’s appeal to its urban readers. Thanking George Eliot for sending her a copy of the novel, Jane Welsh Carlyle expressed its effect on readers whose urban life began in adulthood:
It was as good as going into the country for one’s health, the reading of that Book was!—Like a visit to Scotland minus the fatigues of the long journey, and the grief of seeing friends grown old, and Places that knew me knowing me no more! I could fancy, in reading it, to be seeing and hearing once again a crystal-clear, musical, Scotch stream, such as I long to lie down beside and—cry at (!) for gladness and sadness; after long stifling sojourn in the South; where there [is] no water but what is stagnant or muddy!21
A scene in Chapter XX foregrounds such identification. Visiting the Hall Farm after his workday, Adam accepts a drink of whey, which the narrator vicariously shares:
Ah! I think I taste that whey now—with a flavour so delicate that one can hardly distinguish it from an odour, and with that soft gliding warmth that fills one’s imagination with a still, happy dreaminess. And the light music of the dropping whey is in my ears, mingling with the twittering of a bird outside the wire network window—the window overlooking the garden, and shaded by tall Gueldres roses. (pp. 196–7)
In Bentley’s Quarterly Review, July 1859, Anne Mozley cites the same passage: ‘How every sense recalls its pleasantness! All summer, with its sights and sounds and delicious labours seem [sic] to surround us as we read—“Ah! I think I taste that whey ….”’22 Mozley also shares the narrator’s nostalgia for the first dance at Arthur’s birthday celebration: ‘There is a dance, too, in another part of the story with which we sympathise: of course a country dance, so dear to memory—a “glorious country dance, best of all dances”—the dance bewailed in many a tender elegy, which, if the pen of genius could be allowed a voice, would again be in the ascendant.’23
Adam Bede’s power to evoke a lost—and sometimes idealized—rural past grows not only from the author’s personal history of the Warwickshire countryside, but also from her lifelong reading and rereading of William Wordsworth. Stephen Gill traces George Eliot’s ‘affectionate relationship’ with Wordsworth back to June 1841, when her brother Isaac ‘returned from his honeymoon in the Lake District with a gift he knew his sister would prize, “some rose-leaves from Wordsworth’s garden”’.24 At the end of her life, ‘she could recall and locate … at will’ passages from Wordsworth’s poems.25 Wordsworth’s long narrative poem The Excursion, which George Eliot and Lewes were rereading in 1858 as she wrote the first thirteen chapters of her novel,26 provided its epigraph, a passage from Book VI, ‘The Churchyard among the Mountains’, which emphasizes the importance of human sympathy or ‘brotherly forgiveness’ that lies at the ethical centre of her novel.
George Eliot shared Wordsworth’s belief that poetry should use the ‘language really spoken by men’27 and, in Adam Bede more than in any other of her novels, she used dialect to authenticate rural characters, most notably Lisbeth Bede. John Blackwood recorded the source of Lisbeth’s dialect in a letter to his wife after a visit to George Eliot in London: it ‘arose from her occasionally hearing her father when with his brothers revert to the dialect of his native district, Derbyshire. She could not tell how the feeling and knowledge came to her, but when Lisbeth was speaking she felt it was a real language which she heard.’28 Lisbeth, who seldom interacts with anyone outside her immediate family, is given such distinctive dialect speech that it poses a challenge to some modern readers. In fact, in manuscript, Lisbeth’s speech was even more distinctive, and Lewes and Blackwood’s concern about its intelligibility for readers in 1859 led George Eliot to modify it on proofs for the first edition.
Adam’s speech also reflects the author’s careful realism. Having heard her father speak to people of different classes, George Eliot would have known how speakers adjust pronunciation, grammar, and lexicon according to context. The narrator makes this point in Chapter IV: ‘“Donna thee sit up, mother,” said Adam in a gentle tone. He had worked off his anger now, and whenever he wished to be especially kind to his mother, he fell into his strongest native accent and dialect, with which at other times his speech was less deeply tinged’ (p. 40). In contrast, when Adam converses with Mr Irwine or Arthur Donnithorne, his speech is more like theirs. The author must have felt she made it too much like Arthur’s speech in Chapter XVI, and, instead of lessening the dialect as she did with Lisbeth Bede, she marked the class difference between Arthur and Adam by making the latter’s speech in the first edition slightly more dialectal than it had been in manuscript.29 The speech of the two main female characters, Dinah and Hetty, seldom shows the distinctive pronunciation, grammar, or lexicon that George Eliot gives to other characters similarly placed in the social and educational hierarchy of Hayslope. Dinah, an outsider, employs the rhythms and diction of the Bible and Methodist prayers and sermons. Much of the time, Hetty’s thoughts are represented by the narrative voice, but even in her occasional speeches, there is little evidence of the local dialect she would have shared with Adam and Seth Bede and the Poysers. Its existence, however, is noted rather ominously on two occasions. First, in Chapter XII the narrator comments that ‘While Arthur gazed into Hetty’s dark beseeching eyes, it made no difference to him what sort of English she spoke,’ a mark of his wilful blindness to the social realities that her ‘sort of English’ (p. 120) signifies. In Chapter XXXVI, the landlady at the Green Man in Windsor identifies Hetty as ‘from a good way off, to judge by her tongue’ and at the same time recognizes what ‘sort of business’ has brought Hetty in search of Captain Donnithorne, a man well above her station in life (p. 338).
Realism in fiction, with its connection to the sympathetic imagination, was a subject to which the author had given much thought when she was Marian Evans, reviewer for the Westminster Review and other periodicals. Writing on Ruskin, she argues that ‘The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism— the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality.’30 An analogy to music shows how this is effected: ‘It is not enough simply to teach truth; that may be done … to empty walls, and within the covers of unsaleable books; we want it to be so taught as to compel men’s attention and sympathy. Very correct singing of very fine music will avail little without a voice that can thrill the audience and take possession of their souls.’31 In another review, of ‘The Natural History of German Life’, she does not, however, share Ruskin’s ‘indignation’ against peasants in operas (they ‘are surely too frank an idealization to be misleading’), but condemns as a ‘grave evil’ false representation elsewhere:
Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.32
One passage has particular applicability to Adam Bede:
Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions—about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily-laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of the true one.33
Both Adam and Arthur must learn by hard experience the importance of human sympathy, ‘especially,’ as the narrator asserts in Chapter XVII, ‘for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy’ (p. 162).
From the first chapter, Adam’s strong work ethic distinguishes him from the other carpenters, but with it comes a rigid, judgemental attitude toward his fellow-workers and his alcoholic father. When he learns Thias Bede has spent the day at the ‘Waggon Overthrown’ instead of completing a coffin promised for a burial the next morning, Adam refuses both the supper his mother has prepared and his brother’s offer of help. While his hands work on the neglected coffin, his mind replays the ‘shame and anguish’ he feels at his father’s behaviour and imagines its continuance ‘for many a long year to come’. At that very moment comes the mysterious ‘smart rap, as if with a willow wand’ (pp. 44, 45). The next morning, when he and Seth discover their father’s body in the Willow Brook outside the cottage, Adam has his first experience of remorse that comes too late: ‘This was what the omen meant, then! And the grey-haired father, of whom he had thought with a sort of hardness a few hours ago, as certain to live to be a thorn in his side, was perhaps even then struggling with that watery death’ (p. 48). In his reverie in church after the burial, he reflects:
‘Ah, I was always too hard … It’s a sore fault in me as I’m so hot and out o’ patience with people when they do wrong, and my heart gets shut up against ’em, so as I can’t bring myself to forgive ’em. I see clear enough there’s more pride nor love in my soul, for I could sooner make a thousand strokes with th’ hammer for my father than bring myself to say a kind word to him…. It seems to me now, as if I was to find father at home tonight, I should behave different; but there’s no knowing—perhaps nothing ’ud be a lesson to us if it didn’t come too late.’ (pp. 182–3)34
If the lesson comes too late for Adam’s relationship with his father, it is not lost on the reader of Chapter XVII where the novelist defines his duty to represent characters not as the reader would have them be, but as they are, lest (like Adam) you ‘turn a harder, colder eye … on the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice’ (p. 160). The novel first enacts this message in the next chapter, as Adam reflects on his hardness towards his father and his sorrow that he ‘had not been able to press his father’s hand before their parting’ and ask forgiveness (p. 182). Later, remembrance of these feelings enables him to relinquish his desire for vengeance against Arthur Donnithorne:
‘It’s true what you say, sir: I’m hard—it’s in my nature. I was too hard with my father for doing wrong…. I’ve known what it is in my life to repent and feel it’s too late. I felt I’d been too harsh to my father when he was gone from me—I feel it now, when I think of him. I’ve no right to be hard towards them as have done wrong and repent.’ (p. 420)
Adam’s lesson in fellow-feeling is crucial to his moral development and to the novel’s ethos. Arthur Donnithorne’s actions, whereby he learns the lesson of fellow-feeling, have more painful and far-reaching consequences.
The first evidence of Arthur’s lack of fellow-feeling is his description of Wordsworth’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’ as ‘twaddling stuff’ (p. 59). Stephen Gill observes that this passage
marks the axes on which the novel moves. Like Lyrical Ballads, Adam Bede emphasizes feeling as the fundamental connective between human beings, between themselves and their environment, and between their sense of present and past. Key sequences of the novel recapitulate Lyrical Ballads and The Excursion on this theme, such as the lengthy expositions in chapter 18, ‘Church,’ which branch out from the narrator’s declaration that the ‘secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object but in its subtle relations to our past.’35
Arthur’s cordiality, which makes him popular among the tenant farmers and the people of Hayslope, stems not from fellow-feeling but from good fellowship and a desire to be liked. In Chapter XVI he anticipates the time when he becomes squire and can ‘set improvements on foot, and gallop about from one place to another and overlook them. I should like to know all the labourers, and see them touching their hats to me with a look of goodwill.’ Although Mr Irwine tells him not to depend too much on gratitude, Arthur is certain he has only to make himself ‘personally agreeable’ to win approval (p. 154).
His focus on homage signals the egoism underlying his confidence that Providence will not allow things to turn out badly for him. But if Providence should fail him, his wealth and position enable him to compensate the injured party:
we don’t inquire too closely into character in the case of a handsome generous young fellow, who will have property enough to support numerous peccadilloes—who, if he should unfortunately break a man’s legs in his rash driving, will be able to pension him handsomely; or if he should happen to spoil a woman’s existence for her, will make it up to her with expensive bon-bons, packed up and directed by his own hand. It would be ridiculous to be prying and analytic in such cases, as if one were inquiring into the character of a confidential clerk. (p. 113)
In Chapter XXIX we see his theory of compensation at work in childhood: ‘When he was a lad of seven, he one day kicked down an old gardener’s pitcher of broth, from no motive but a kicking impulse, not reflecting that it was the old man’s dinner.’ Learning this ‘sad fact’ provides a lesson not in sympathetic identification, but in the power of privilege: ‘he took his favourite pencil-case and a silver-hafted knife out of his pocket and offered them as compensation’ (pp. 280–1). Arthur’s thoughts at the age of 21 reveal the tenuousness of his compensatory theory: ‘if deeds of gift, or any other deeds, could have restored Adam’s contentment and regard for him as a benefactor, Arthur would not only have executed them without hesitation, but would have felt bound all the more closely to Adam, and would never have been weary of making retribution’ (p. 281; emphasis added), and Hetty ‘might have had the trouble in some other way if not in this. And perhaps hereafter he might be able to do a great deal for her’ (p. 282; emphasis added). Instead of regarding Providence as a guide and support for ethical behaviour, he sees it as a guarantor against unpleasant consequences: ‘he had never meant beforehand to do anything his conscience disapproved—he had been led on by circumstances. There was a sort of implicit confidence in him that he was really such a good fellow at bottom, Providence would not treat him harshly’ (pp. 284–5).
In Chapter XLIV he learns otherwise in a scene that effects the sudden reversal of fortune, or peripeteia, of a Greek tragedy. The manuscript of Adam Bede shows how George Eliot repositioned this chapter, which was originally to have been Chapter XLI, following ‘The Bitter Waters Spread’. Its new place, after the trial, heightens the dramatic irony, as Arthur rides comfortably homeward in a swift chaise, imagining himself a victim (‘He had been knocked down, and … forced to tell a lie’) and contemplating how he will, nonetheless, ‘do a great deal more for Adam’ and will compensate Hetty ‘a hundredfold’ (p. 394) for any pain he caused. The fatuity of his complacent self-congratulation resonates with the power of the climactic revelation by the shepherd in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tryannus, which George Eliot had read in spring 1857, a few months before beginning Adam Bede. What the reader already knows, Arthur learns at the end of this chapter in the letter from Mr Irwine, whose reference to ‘the retribution that is now falling on you’ (p. 398) recalls their dialogue in Chapter XVI, specifically his answer to Arthur’s question, ‘But surely you don’t think a man who struggles against a temptation into which he falls at last, as bad as the man who never struggles at all?’ Mr Irwine’s reply invokes Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution: ‘“No, certainly; I pity him in proportion to his struggles, for they foreshadow the inward suffering which is the worst form of Nemesis. Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before—consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves”’ (p. 156). But Arthur, whose classical studies have given him at best only ‘a little inapplicable Latin to adorn [his] maiden speech in Parliament six or seven years hence’ (p. 154), resists the implications of Mr Irwine’s allusion, and turns the conversation.
The necessity of work and the consequences of doing it badly or having no work to do are themes that run through most of George Eliot’s novels. In Adam Bede, little details celebrate the fulfilment of the Carlylean imperative to ‘do the duty which lies nearest’—windows made ‘bright and speckless’ by Dolly, Mr Burge’s aged housekeeper; the mirror-like surfaces of Mrs Poyser’s oak clock-case and oak table that are the result of ‘genuine “elbow polish”’ (pp. 12, 67). And the hard-working (and sometimes judgemental) Poysers cite instances of the non-fulfilment of Carlyle’s command—Mrs Chowne’s ‘wash draggin’ on to th’ end o’ the week’ and Mike Holdsworth’s ‘foul fallow’ (pp. 171, 185).
The value and importance of work are celebrated first in the person of Adam Bede. The story begins and ends at his workplace, where his work ethic sets him apart from his fellow carpenters. When they lay down their tools as the clock strikes six, Adam preaches a sermon (as Wiry Ben regards it) on the virtue of work: ‘I hate to see a man’s arms drop down as if he was shot, before the clock’s fairly struck, just as if he’d never a bit o’ pride and delight in ’s work’ (pp. 10–11). Chapter XIX, ‘Adam on a Working Day’, uses the historical perspective of the writer and her readers to place Adam in the tradition of men whose work changed the face of England in the sixty years between the novel’s setting and its publication. For Adam, work is a kind of sacred calling, and the results are apparent in the Epilogue where Adam’s rise in status from carpenter and workshop foreman to business owner is recorded.
Although for Dinah Morris and Mr Irwine work is literally a sacred calling, the latter’s role is more frequently practical than spiritual. His first response to Thias Bede’s death focuses on its effect on Adam’s life: ‘I should have been glad for the load to have been taken off my friend Adam’s shoulders in a less painful way’ (p. 57), and his consolatory role involves riding to the Bede cottage to assure Lisbeth that her husband will have the burial plot by the white thorn, about which she has dreamt. The narrator describes his ‘mental palate’ as ‘rather pagan’, and he ‘found a savouriness in a quotation from Sophocles or Theocritus that was quite absent from any text in Isaiah or Amos’ (p. 63). In Chapter XVI, when Arthur finds him at breakfast reading from the Greek playwright Aeschylus, he ascribes his inability to become a studious Greek scholar again to the time he devotes to his secular roles as magistrate and community arbitrator.
In contrast, Dinah Morris’s calling is literal: ‘I felt a great movement in my soul, and I trembled as if I was shaken by a strong spirit entering into my weak body … and I spoke the words that were given to me abundantly,’ she tells Mr Irwine (p. 83). Yet Dinah’s preaching and private attempts to minister in Hayslope initially have limited success. Bessy Cranage resumes her earrings and other vanities after Dinah’s departure, and her attempt to draw Hetty into serious conversation produces fear, but no spiritual awakening (p. 146). In her conversation with Mr Irwine, Dinah identifies the spiritual quiescence endemic to fertile and productive regions like Loamshire where physical comforts abound,
‘I’ve noticed, that in these villages where the people lead a quiet life among the green pastures and still waters, tilling the ground and tending the cattle, there’s a strange deadness to the Word, as different as can be from the great towns, like Leeds … It’s wonderful how rich is the harvest of souls up those high-walled streets, where you seem to walk as in a prison-yard, and the ear is deafened with the sounds of worldly toil. I think maybe it is because the promise is sweeter when this life is so dark and weary, and the soul gets more hungry when the body is ill at ease.’ (p. 84)
But even in Loamshire, suffering cannot be excluded. The initial depiction of Dinah’s ministry to the poor and suffering follows Thias Bede’s drowning, when she visits the sorrowing Lisbeth Bede, who takes her for a spirit, first of her long-dead sister and then of the angel pictured on the tomb of the resurrected Christ in Adam’s new Bible. Dinah’s efficacy stems from both her human sensitivity and her spiritual message: ‘poor aged fretful Lisbeth, without grasping any distinct idea, without going through any course of religious emotions, felt a vague sense of goodness and love, and of something right lying underneath and beyond all this sorrowing life’ (p. 104).
In contrast to the city where, paradoxically, suffering is familiar and known despite the high walls along the streets, in fertile Loamshire, which the Edinburgh Evening Courant called a ‘modern Arcadia’, suffering is concealed:
behind the apple-blossoms, or among the golden corn, or under the shrouding boughs of the wood, there might be a human heart beating heavily with anguish—perhaps a young blooming girl, not knowing where to turn for refuge from swift-advancing shame…. Such things are sometimes hidden among the sunny fields and behind the blossoming orchards; and the sound of the gurgling brook, if you came close to one spot behind a small bush, would be mingled for your ear with a despairing human sob. (p. 327)
The narrator’s conclusion, that it is ‘No wonder man’s religion has much sorrow in it: no wonder he needs a Suffering God’ (p. 327), reminds the reader of the message that Dinah has come to preach, that suffering and sin are part of the human condition, and that divine forgiveness is available, even when human forgiveness fails, as it does in Mr Poyser’s willingness to ‘pay any money as is wanted towards trying to bring [Hetty] off’ but ‘not [to] go nigh her, nor ever see her again, by my own will’ (p. 371). It is Dinah Hetty thinks of when she finds Arthur gone from Windsor: ‘Suppose she were to go to Dinah … Dinah did not think about things as other people did: she was a mystery to Hetty, but Hetty knew she was always kind. She couldn’t imagine Dinah’s face turning away from her in dark reproof or scorn’ (p. 341). Dinah’s acceptance of sin and suffering enables her to bring Hetty to repentance and confession, but modern readers may find the punishment for vanity and ignorance unduly harsh, when her confession is followed by transportation to the new penal colony in New South Wales and, seven years later, death on her way home. What George Eliot might have done with her were she to have returned to Loamshire, other than assigning her to the ‘distant farmhouse’ that was the anticipated fate of Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (chapter L) before Darcy steps in to effect her marriage to Wickham, cannot be known. There is no evidence that George Eliot’s original design for Adam Bede included any such ameliorative fate, but there is evidence from George Eliot’s journal of what her first plan did not include: the conventional happy ending in Book 6:
Dinah’s ultimate relation to Adam was suggested by George [Lewes], when I had read to him the first part of the first volume: he was so delighted with the presentation of Dinah and so convinced that the readers’ interest would centre in her, that he wanted her to be the principal figure at the last. I accepted the idea at once, and from the end of the third chapter36 worked with it constantly in view.37
In accepting his suggestion and closing her novel with the happy ending most Victorian readers preferred, the author transforms Dinah from independent woman to conventional housewife whose vocation to minister to the suffering is confined within the domestic space, ‘talking to the people a bit in their houses’, as Adam describes it in the Epilogue (p. 481).
Biographer Rosemary Ashton notes that ‘Feminists then and now have been frustrated by [George Eliot’s] limiting end choices for her heroines,’ and speculates that ‘what was operating was some combination of the urge to realism—the working woman was not the norm in 1859, let alone fifty years before—with a fear of alienating or scandalizing readers, and a temperamental timidity and adherence to convention despite the turns her own life had taken’.38 Nineteenth-century responses were mixed. Charles Dickens wrote to the author that ‘that part of the book which follows Hetty’s trial (and which I have observed to be not as widely understood as the rest), affected me far more than any other, and exalted my sympathy with the writer to its utmost height’.39 But Henry James, who was far less disposed than Dickens to happy endings, found ‘evidence of artistic weakness’ in Arthur’s melodramatic, last-minute appearance in Book 5 and in ‘the marriage of the nun-like Dinah, which shocks the reader’.40
This happy ending threatens to undermine the novel’s fundamental ethical position articulated by Adam in repulsing Bartle Massey’s consolatory words: ‘The smart’s bad for you to bear now: you must have time … But I’ve that opinion of you, that you’ll rise above it all, and be a man again; and there may good come out of this that we don’t see.’ Adam’s response sets out the novel’s ethical argument on the irrevocability of deeds and the fallacy of compensatory theories: ‘That doesn’t alter th’ evil: her ruin can’t be undone. I hate that talk o’ people, as if there was a way o’ making amends for everything. They’d more need be brought to see as the wrong they do can never be altered’ (p. 411).
While the novel endorses Adam’s message, it also acknowledges suffering as an inevitable part of the human condition and reinforces the narrator’s earlier argument for its transformative power: ‘Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.’ Waiting in his room in Stoniton on the morning of the trial, Adam
look[s] back on all the previous years as if they had been a dim sleepy existence, and he had only now awaked to full consciousness. It seemed to him as if he had always before thought it a light thing that men should suffer; as if all that he had himself endured and called sorrow before, was only a moment’s stroke that had never left a bruise. Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity. (pp. 382–3)
The term ‘awaked’ suggests Dinah’s Methodist diction, but the narrator’s message is a reprise of the secularized emphasis in Chapter XVII on the importance of fellow-feeling—‘new awe and pity’—for human weakness.
In her biography of George Eliot, Rosemary Ashton notes that in the character of Henleigh Grandcourt in her last novel, Daniel Deronda, George Eliot ‘adds her critical voice to those of Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, Thackeray in Vanity Fair, and Dickens in Bleak House. All had depicted the English aristocracy at its most worthless—hunting, shooting, fishing and putting in occasional stupid, lazy appearances in Parliament.’41 Arthur Donnithorne is no Henleigh Grandcourt, who is arguably the most vicious, mean-spirited, and unsympathetic major character in a George Eliot novel. Arthur is good-natured and desires to do well by those around him, but, in the midst of a community where work is imperative, Arthur has no work to do. He can only look forward to ‘the future, when he should come into the estate’—when he ‘would be the model of an English gentleman—mansion in first-rate order, all elegance and high taste … everything as different as possible from what was now associated with the name of Donnithorne’ (p. 113). For the present, he regards even his nominal work, serving in the Loamshire militia, as play: while he is ‘shut up at the Chase with a broken arm … every other fellow in his regiment was enjoying himself at Windsor’ (p. 115). Although he knows that ‘No gentleman, out of a ballad, could marry a farmer’s niece’ (p. 126), his recourse in idleness is a flirtation with Hetty, whom he sees as a ‘pretty butter-maker’ and ‘a perfect Hebe’, someone to paint if he were an artist (p. 92). Arthur’s godmother, Mrs Irwine, focuses a similar objectifying gaze on Hetty at the birthday fête: ‘a perfect beauty! I’ve never seen anything so pretty since my young days. What a pity such beauty as that should be thrown away among the farmers, when it’s wanted so terribly among the good families without fortune!’ (p. 248), a comment that David Carroll cites as evidence of Mrs Irwine’s ‘moral obtuseness’, which ‘is shared by her godson’.42
That his grandfather too shares this moral obtuseness is emphasized by parallel scenes in which each man’s hidden desire leads him to visit the Poysers’ kitchen and dairy. In Chapter VI, Arthur declines Mrs Poyser’s invitation to ‘walk into the parlour’: ‘No, indeed, thank you … I delight in your kitchen. I think it is the most charming room I know. I should like every farmer’s wife to come and look at it for a pattern’ (p. 73). Well known in Hayslope for refusing to hire a bailiff and neglecting repairs to the tenants’ farms, the old Squire, in Chapter XXXII, unwittingly echoes his grandson: ‘What a fine old kitchen this is! … And you keep it so exquisitely clean, Mrs Poyser. I like these premises, do you know, beyond any on the estate’ (p. 309). When she appeals for repairs, both men change the subject. Arthur disclaims any influence and adds: ‘By the by, I’ve never seen your dairy: I must see your dairy, Mrs Poyser,’ and again the old Squire echoes him: ‘I must see your dairy. I have not seen it for years’ (pp. 75, 309, emphasis added). But neither man cares about the dairy. Their fulsome praise is motivated by sexual or economic desire.
These parallel scenes identify Arthur as not so unlike his grandfather as people in Hayslope assume from his more congenial manner. Without a history of honeyed words, the old Squire’s speech is more easily read, but both men are a threat to the Poysers’ tenancy. Praising their farm as the ‘prettiest … on the estate’, Arthur jests that ‘if I were going to marry and settle, I should be tempted to turn you out, and do up this fine old house, and turn farmer myself’ (p. 74). Ironically, Arthur’s relationship with Hetty nearly effects what the old Squire threatens in earnest when he bids the Poysers to think of his ‘little plan’ for a land exchange that would be detrimental to them but enable him to get a new tenant for a vacant farm: ‘I know you will be glad to have your lease renewed for three years, when the present one expires; otherwise, I dare say Thurle [the prospective tenant] … would be glad to take both the farms, as they could be worked so well together. But I don’t want to part with an old tenant like you’ (pp. 311, 313).
In their exploitation of the tenants, grandfather and grandson together suggest the arrogance of hereditary power that would be challenged in many ways in the new century, a challenge anticipated in Adam’s insistence that in regard to Hetty, he and Arthur are ‘man and man’ (p. 279), and in Mrs Poyser’s refusal to ‘make a martyr o’ myself … for no landlord in England, not if he was King George himself’ (p. 312). In contrast to Arthur and the old Squire, Adam and Mrs Poyser represent the work ethic embodied in Benjamin Franklin’s maxim, ‘God helps those that help themselves’ and Carlyle’s dictum, ‘Do the Duty which lies nearest thee’. Their emphasis on individual responsibility and the importance of work is valorized in the novel’s conclusion, which foregrounds the two families, the Bedes and the Poysers. Arthur’s return is reported in Adam’s voice, just as Adam relates Mr Irwine’s speech to Arthur, ‘We must get you strong and hearty’ (p. 481). Adam’s observation that Arthur’s ‘colour [is] changed, and he looks sadly’ (p. 480) is juxtaposed with his mention of the doctor’s optimism, but Arthur returns to an estate and a rural community whose inhabitants are not likely to forget his role in the tragedy of Hetty Sorrel, even if the ending suggests the importance of reconciliation.
The contrast between Arthur’s ‘shattered’ health and the robust family of Adam and Dinah could hardly have escaped George Eliot’s readers, looking back half a century and recognizing in Adam and his family a promise of the ascendancy of working men whose conscientious labour would reshape the social and economic landscape. The ending both reinforces the ethical messages of duty and fellow-feeling and hints at the centrality of the working man in the forward progress of society in the new century.