The Time Revolutionaries of 1859

The three principals, their partners, families, and networks are introduced. The chapter uses Darwin’s explanation of natural selection in 1857: ‘We have almost unlimited time; no-one but a practical geologist can fully appreciate this.’ Evans, Lubbock, and Prestwich were all practical geologists but with conflicting interests in managing London’s water supply for health and business. The chapter explores their geological passion and how they came to investigate the question of great human antiquity—the crux of the time revolution. The idea of using stone tools as a proxy for remote human ancestors is examined and the challenges which faced them set out. The characters of the principals are mapped onto the ideals in Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, where zeal and perseverance sum up the qualities of success in all walks of life. George Eliot’s observations in Adam Bede on the men of New Leisure provides another fit for the three time revolutionaries. The preoccupation of the mid-nineteenth century with time is also examined using three inventions, the railways and railway time, shrinking distance—and hence time—by telegraphy, and freezing time with photographs. Examples range across literature and engineering.

Adam Bede, Realism, the Past, and Readers in 1859

This article gives an account of the immediate publication context of George Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede, in terms of competing opportunities for leisure, anxieties about the reading of fiction, the publishing industry, and the social and political context of February 1859. It examines the way in which the novel engages with its first readers, specifically through its treatment of the experience of reading fiction, and the ways in which Adam Bede differs from readers’ previous experiences. The article argues that the novel’s impact is determined by its engagement with the past of its setting, and by the ways it which it encourages a historically-nuanced appreciation in its readers, and that these factors are integral to Eliot’s articulating a new form of realist fiction.

George Eliot’s Spot of a Native Land

George Eliot reimagines what it means to belong to the land. In Adam Bede, Eliot explores both the importance of attachment to a rural life-world and the religious revival of Methodism. The too-earnest preacher of Adam Bede, Hetty Sorrell, is transformed into the too-earnest Daniel Deronda of Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda. Here Eliot embraces the idea of a Promised Land for the diasporic Jews, with Daniel as a new Moses. But she also explores, in the novel’s competing plot lines, autochthonous attachments to the soil that emerge through blood continuities and long tenure on the soil. Eliot works out in parallel plots the moral deracination of Gwendolyn and the geographical deracination of Mirah. Daniel is the link between them. He has lived half his life as a spoiled, aimless English aristocrat, but then suddenly plans to live the second half as a migrating leader of his newly found people.

Moral Problems in the Major Characters of George Eliot’s Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859) is the first full length novel written by George Eliot. In this hovel both Hetty and. Arthur suffer for their violating moral principles. Poignant tragedy ensues because of their being creatures of weak moral fibre. This moral weakness results in sin and this is followed by punishment and intense suffering. The Arthur -Hetty story traces the movement from weakness to sin and from sin to nemesis. Hetty’s tragedy is woven through certain episodes that spring from her moral weakness. In the light of these moral issues that the novel, Adam Bede is to be read.