George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859): chps 1-8

"there's the sperrit o' God in all things and all times--week-day as well as Sunday--and in the great works and inventions, and i' the figuring and the mechanics . . . and if a man does bits o' jobs out o' working hours . . . he's doing more good, and he's just as near to God, as if he was running after some preacher and a-praying and a-groaning" (66).

Points of Reflection

1. Adam Bede (1859) is set in 1799, a year after the publication of Lyrical Ballads and seven years after Wollstonecraft's The Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Does Eliot's novel engage the topics and ideas set forth by these poetic and political manifestos?

2. what attitudes does the narrator adopt towards her main characters, towards Adam Bede and his unwavering work ethic, towards Dinah Morris and her earnest religious fervor, towards the relaxed and flexible Rev. Adolphus Irwine?

3. what is the narrator's own posture towards Methodism?

4. does the narrator respect her titular hero, one who is "at once penetrating and credulous" (110, my emphasis)?

"Waiting" (1854)
John Everett Millais

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu