Adam Bede

Adam Bede, novel written by George Eliot, published in three volumes in 1859. The title character, a carpenter, is in love with an unmarried woman who bears a child by another man. Although Bede tries to help her, he eventually loses her but finds happiness with someone else.

Adam Bede was Eliot’s first long novel. She described the work as “a country story—full of the breath of cows and the scent of hay.” Its masterly realism—evident, for example, in the recording of Derbyshire dialect—brought to English fiction the same truthful observation of minute detail that John Ruskin had commended in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites. But what was new in this work of English fiction was the combination of deep human sympathy and rigorous moral judgment.

Awake, my soul, and with the sun

Thy daily stage of duty run;

Shake off dull sloth…

Here some measurement was to be taken which required more concentrated attention, and the sonorous voice subsided into a low whistle; but it presently broke out again with renewed vigour —

Let all thy converse be sincere,

Thy conscience as the noonday clear.