Adam Bede

"It was originally planned as an extension of Scenes of Clerical Life . Already in ‘Janet’s Repentance’, she was clearly moving towards needing the full canvas of the novel. She then turned from ‘Janet’s Repentance’ to write Adam Bede , which includes a transmuted version of her own father as Adam Bede. The novel can be thought of as a triangle, with characters for its points. There’s Adam Bede: tough, morally scrupulous and self-made, but with an edge to that toughness. So, he doesn’t like his fellow workers downing their tools at six o’clock just because it’s six o’clock. He likes them to finish the job. It’s that sort of artisan strictness. He’s thoroughly straight and decent. There is also Hetty, a beautiful young woman with whom he falls in love. Hetty hasn’t even begun to think yet, and has no need to: she’s a fantasist. Adam Bede loves her and they are engaged, but—here lies the complication—there is another man. That other man is Arthur Donnithorne, who is a Squire and becomes Adam Bede’s employer. It is Arthur who takes Hetty away from Adam without him knowing it. He seduces her and leaves for the army, not knowing that Hetty is pregnant. Suddenly, this provincial novel goes wild. Hetty leaves her home and embarks on a journey to try to find Arthur while heavily pregnant. Her world turns into a nightmare, and she has to bear the most terrible thoughts. It’s as if a limited human being were thrown into a limitless situation. You might have thought that George Eliot would have been critical of her character Hetty, given that she is beautiful but not very intelligent. But such considerations suddenly drop away (just as they had dropped for Janet in relation to Tryan) when she sets Hetty in this terrible predicament: pregnant, wandering around without direction, unable to find Arthur, not knowing what to do with the baby who is about to be born, and thinking of committing suicide. At one point, she sits by the side of a pool in which she might drown herself. She had been a vain creature, but here her vanity is transformed. She begins to feel her own arms, and the pleasure of that feeling, the warmth and the roundness of the flesh, makes her think that she should live—that she shouldn’t commit suicide. What had been before silly and weak, is now something on the side of life. George Eliot loves those transitions. It was a chapter that George Henry Lewes had partly suggested: to bring the two men together to create a sort of implosion. But what is remarkable about it is not the anger and violence on Adam’s part, although that is there. Rather, what is interesting, in one of those switches of perspective that are so powerful in George Eliot, is the effect on Arthur. When Arthur realises how damaged and hurt Adam is by his actions, he experiences something irrevocable. At that moment the feckless Arthur—who is not a bad man but is sexually besotted with Hetty—suddenly sees for the first time, looking at Adam’s face, that there are things that you cannot get away with. “Suddenly, this provincial novel goes wild” That reality principle—that there will be consequences—is the astounding depth of the ‘Crisis’ chapter. It’s not about the sensationalism of bringing the two men together in a potential fight. Instead, it explores ‘morality’ (which might otherwise seem a very dull Victorian concept) as an inner psychological process, in which Arthur realises the indelible consequences of his actions. In those moments when Arthur realises the terrible damage that he’s done, you get an interior language—what Lawrence called ‘action’ on the ‘inside’—which is not spoken out loud. It is what we all silently say in our hearts or minds or brains, and sometimes don’t even want to know that we’re saying it. Technically, this is called free indirect discourse. It’s not direct discourse in which a character says something out loud, or ‘thinks that…’. Rather, it’s an ambiguous discourse that follows Arthur’s train of thought, even though he himself may not know or want to know what he is thinking. That’s one of the important technical moves that George Eliot makes. Basically, it’s about getting into areas—often of secrecy—where suddenly that which will not be spoken out loud in society, nonetheless begins to find expression in a secret language of unconsummated confession. These areas can be geographical or prompted by geography. For example, when Hetty leaves her home and goes into the country in search of Arthur, it’s not just that she’s in the wilderness but that she’s in a different psychological place prompted by that wilderness. Her thoughts almost seem outside her, as she looks at the pool as the place of suicide. For other people, these fields go on inside . For example, there’s the dishonest banker Mr Bulstrode in Middlemarch who wants to forget his past, but eventually that past begins to be uncovered and he begins to feel terrible fear. George Eliot said that it’s like trying to look out of the window during a dark night. When the lights are illuminated behind you in the room, you can’t see out of the window: what you see are reflections of yourself and the room behind you. That is a wonderful image of creating a psychological field: you want to look out but suddenly with the reflection, you’re being turned back in, back to the past. You cannot get away from the zone—in this case, of guilt—that has been created around you. It’s a place that you now have to inhabit psychologically. I think she did learn from her, though there’s no explicit record of this. It’s a deep and complicated question that you’re asking here, but I suppose that it’s different in George Eliot for this reason: she is utterly obsessed with secrets. It’s true that Jane Austen is very committed to privacy within the public, and in that sense there’s a likeness in terms of hidden psychology and hidden forms of being. But it’s a lot more fraught in George Eliot than it is in Jane Austen, because often her characters either want those things to come out, or they are fearful that they will come out. For George Eliot, psychology is doubly important because there isn’t anything else. That is to say, if you want to find purpose or meaning in life, you’re going to have to find it in this psychological holding ground. She does not subscribe to a firm theology; she is a big reader of philosophy but does not believe in a single philosophical system. In a world without answers, the great holding ground is within the human psyche, with all of its messiness. This is why George Eliot’s realism is not just about the external. It’s about trying to find that language that lies hidden beneath the surface. In a better world—a world that we still don’t have—more of it would be in the outside. But so much is hidden, unfulfilled, and unappreciated."

"It could almost have been any of her novels, but Adam Bede is her first so I chose that. I remember at Humanists UK when we were celebrating the 150th anniversary of 1859; that was the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species which transformed biology and our sense of ourselves as animals. Also in 1859, John Stuart Mill published On Liberty –again, an incredible work that transformed political and liberal thought across the world. So, we were celebrating those two books and the humanist philosopher Richard Norman pointed out that this was not fair because, also in 1859, George Eliot published Adam Bede and completely changed the novel. And that’s true. I’m making up for it now by putting it in this list. “It’s incredible, these complicated creatures that human beings are, born animals, and then throughout our lives we are making a character all the time, we’re developing.” George Eliot was a great 19th century humanist. She moved from being quite devout in her early years—growing up in a very Christian culture in the Midlands—but then losing her faith. I don’t usually like that phrase, ‘losing your faith,’ because I think you’re gaining something, but, in her case, it’s appropriate. She actually felt this loss of her faith. She then constructed for herself an almost romantic but humanist creed of duty and personal relationships and moral responsibility. It had a big part in it for freedom of choice. She famously chose to live in a very unconventional way for the time. It’s the way they concentrate on character. They are driven by character. If you read Adam Bede , the characters are all so familiar—within a few words. They’ve got huge depth and richness and she really understands people. I don’t know whether it was being raised in a very stable domestic environment like the Midlands of the 19th century (much like the Midlands today!). Nothing much happens, but what does happen happens within families and relationships. Although it would be wrong to say that humanism is somehow the deification of human beings—it’s certainly not that, though some of its detractors like to accuse humanism of putting human beings on a pedestal—but one of the things that lots of humanists feel is a fascination with the human being, with their character, and the preciousness of it. “George Eliot was a great 19th century humanist” It’s incredible, these complicated creatures that human beings are, born animals, and then throughout our lives we are making a character all the time, we’re developing. We develop through relationships with others but also as a result of our experiences. Everyone is different. And she just observes that beautifully. Her characters are so well drawn. It’s a good moral universe that she inhabits. There’s peace and a sort of reward for good behaviour in this world, which is something that she thought, by this point, would never come in another world. I also like this call to be happy with a simple life. But it’s also full of tragedy. In the 19th century, a lot of critics romanticised her novels as being beautifully observed scenes of country life. Actually, there’s infanticide and all sorts of terrible things going on, which they didn’t mention at the time, but now perhaps we do. She did. And Spinoza is remarkably influential on British humanism. He is essentially humanist in his thinking. Of course we’re in the 17th century so, like a lot of people at the time, he does believe there may be some divine principle out there moving the universe. His thought is very complicated. He was influential, for example, on John Locke and his idea about the separation of church and state in England. Rebecca Goldstein has an excellent book on Spinoza where she makes it clear just how influential Spinoza was."