Adam Bede

Article written by Onyekachi Osuji

B.A. in Public Administration and certified in Creative Writing (Fiction and Non-Fiction)

It narrates the love triangles, hopes, and heartaches of the eponymous character Adam Bede, a poor carpenter but held in high esteem in the village for his hard work, integrity, intelligence, and skill; Dinah Morris, an altruistic Methodist preacher, gentle but strong-willed; Hetty Sorrel an orphan girl living in her uncle’s farm, selfish and vain in the charms of her physical beauty; Arthur Donnithorne, a young captain from the gentry, good-humored and pleased in the good opinion the people in the village have of him; and Seth Bede, Adam Bede’s brother, also a carpenter but with more fervor for religion than work and with a mild disposition.

Key Facts about Adam Bede

• Publication year: 1859
• Genre: Historical Fiction; Pastoral Romance
• Point of View: Third Person Narrative
• Setting: The fictional village of Hayslope and its environs in Rural England during the Georgian Era
• Climax: Adam’s visit to Hetty Sorrel in prison after she confessed to her crime
• Protagonist: Adam Bede .

George Eliot and Adam Bede

George Eliot is a pseudonym for Mary Ann Evans, a female English writer who adopted a pen name because of her desire to keep her personal life private and for critics to judge her novel on its own merits without the influence of her personality. Another reason for adopting a pen name was that she lived in an era when female writers were not well accepted in the literary world and society, and so she adopted a masculine name to get a more objective critic of her novel.

Adam Bede is George Elliot’s first full-length novel, but when she wrote Adam Bede, she was already a journalist, translator, and critic. Her first work of fiction was a collection of short stories first published in a magazine in 1857 and later published as a book in 1858 with the title, Scenes of Clerical Life which consisted of three short stories.

The setting for Adam Bede was inspired by the English countryside of George Eliot’s childhood, where her father was an estate manager in the midlands town of Warwickshire. Some of the characters in Adam Bede were said to have striking similarities with folks in George Eliot’s life such as the resourceful protagonist, Adam who has similarities with Mary Ann Evan’s father Robert Evans, and the compassionate Dinah Morris who was a female Methodist preacher like Mary Ann Evans’s aunt Elizabeth Evans, the same aunt whose narration of an event in which a woman named Mary Voce was imprisoned and sentenced to death for killing her child, inspired the infanticide in the plot of Adam Bede. Adam Bede has been praised by many for its endearing depiction of the countryside of England and the author herself described the novel as “a country story full of the breath of cows and the smell of Hay”.

George Eliot wrote Adam Bede in the late 1850s at a time when the pious religious views of her childhood had transitioned into a more radical and agnostic stance and Adam Bede was an outlet through which she expressed these religious views through her characters and the narration of the story. For instance, in Chapter 1 “The Workshop”, Adam remarks, “There’s such a thing as being [overspiritual]; we must have something beside Gospel in this world”.

George Eliot had also become an advocate of realism in literature which is the belief that art should portray the mundane and ordinary things in human existence without embellishments that distort their true nature. And she had particularly condemned female writers for telling stories and creating characters that were too idealistic and ridiculously out of touch with reality in an essay she wrote on the Westminster Review in 1856, titled “ Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”. She believed art and literature should depict genuine observation and have elements of humor and passion.  Adam Bede was the first comprehensive literary expression of George Eliot’s literary realism.

In line with her realism and the setting of Adam Bede being almost sixty years before its writing, Eliot meticulously researched the political context, dressing, lifestyle, and even mundane details such as the weather of the late 18^th century and early 19^th century to depict Adam Bede as realistically as possible.

Adam Bede was well received in the literary world, and its successful reception was among the motivating factors that led George Eliot to write and publish six other novels after it.

Adam Bede Related Books

Below is a number of books that share certain similarities with Adam Bede which readers who enjoyed Adam Bede by George Eliot might also enjoy.

Mary Barton by Elisabeth Gaskell: This book was written by Elisabeth Gaskell and published in the year 1848. It tells the story of Mary Barton, a girl from a working-class family who is raised alone by her father after the death of her mother and brother. When she comes of age, she is faced with two prospects of marriage to different men. The first is Jem Wilson, a hardworking young man from a fellow working-class family, and the second, Harry Carson the son of a wealthy mill owner. Harry Carson eventually gets killed and Jem Wilson is accused of the murder and Mary Barton takes it upon herself to investigate the crime and exonerate Jem Wilson.

The book is similar to Adam Bede in being the first full-length novel written by a female British writer in the Victorian era. But even beyond this similarity, Adam Bede and Mary Barton are both books whose settings showcase rural England in the literary world of fiction and they share themes on family ties, love triangles, and the dynamics of social and economic stratification in the British society.

George Eliot being a hitherto unknown pseudonym when Adam Bede was published, it is reported that some readers had believed the real author of Adam Bede to be Elisabeth Gaskell because of the similarities between Adam Bede and Mary Barton. Elisabeth Gaskell had been so impressed by Adam Bede that she was pleased to be thought of as the author.

The Heart of Midlothian by Walter Scott: This novel was published in 1918 and chronicles the journey of Jeanie Deans who travels all the way from Scotland to London on foot with the intent of getting a royal pardon for her sister Effie Deans who was in prison and sentenced to death on the charge of infanticide.

The sensitive issue of infanticide is the most prominent similarity between Adam Bede and The Heart of Midlothian. Like Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, Effie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian gets pregnant out of wedlock, conceals the pregnancy from her family, and goes to prison on the charge of killing her own child.

Both novels are also similar in their allusion to sibling love and camaraderie. Adam Bede and his brother Seth Bede love each other and can go to great lengths to help each other in times of need, the same way love for her sister Effie inspires Jeanie to go to great lengths to help her in her moment of need.

Another similarity is found in having a differing religious disposition from one’s family. Seth in Adam Bede is from an Anglican family but later converts to Methodism. And in The Heart of Midlothian, Effie leaves the devout Presbyterianism of her family and converts to Catholicism.

Silas Marner by George Eliot: This is another eponymous novel by the author of Adam Bede. It was published in 1861, two years after Adam Bede. It follows the story of Silas Marner, a reclusive weaver in the fictional village of Raveloe who finds joy in his solitude and in his huge savings in gold. His gold gets stolen and as he mourns the loss of his gold, a toddler strays into his hut. On establishing that the toddler is motherless, Silas Marner decides to adopt the girl and in the course of taking care of her, he grows to love her and gradually reintegrates into the church and society.

George Eliot further utilizes her favored Realism in Silas Marner as she did in Adam Bede. And again, the themes of hard work, family, religion and social classes, and the rustic rural life in England are weaved into Silas Marner as well as Adam Bede and many other of George Eliot’s novels.

The Lasting Impact of Adam Bede