Analysis of George Eliot’s Adam Bede

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 1, 2025

George Eliot’s first full-length novel, Adam Bede, testifies to her skill in crafting a narrative of domestic realism. Although published in 1859, the story looks back nostalgically to the end of the previous century before railroads and factories had transformed the rhythms of rural English life. Both Eliot’s contemporaries and later critics praised her realistic characters and settings. Few proved more skilled at shaping a purely innocent rustic character and the countryside that accommodated him.

She captured the cyclic rhythms of country life, both in her narrative descriptions of planting and harvest, and in native speech patterns. The innocence of her novel’s characters contrasts well with the sly Edenic setting that suggests sexual temptation. While the characters from her later works also proved realistic and well drawn, they could not match those in Adam Bede for human potential; like blank canvases, Adam and his fellow characters awaited the coloring of life. A popular novel into the 21st century, Adam Bede was adapted for television in 1991, and a movie version directed by Giles Foster was produced in the United Kingdom in 1992.

Eliot sets her story primarily in the idyllic village of Hayslope. The fictional lush England farming district, Loamshire—literally “soil province”—is home to simple farmers and laborers who speak in a broad dialect, which the author captures in accurately rendered conversations. The farming community’s surface simplicity, however, hides a complicated larger social order, from which conflict grows among various characters and between the characters and society itself.

Adam’s name symbolizes the first human, unblemished and naive, whose future depended not only on his own choices, but also on those of his mate. His occupation as a carpenter suggests a creative personality whose vision converts basic materials into symbols of domestic order—an order that eludes him when social conventions are shattered.

In Eliot’s vision of social order, a particular community, such as a family or a group established by social custom, may set its own moral standards as a subset of civil law. It then holds individuals responsible for complying with those standards. Social responsibility directs a person’s behavior. However, personal commitment to community ideals establishes that same individual’s self-identity as part of a small group positioned within a larger class structure.

Eliot’s subject came partially from the true case of a woman accused of child murder with whom Eliot’s aunt, the Methodist minister Elizabeth Samuel, spent her final night before the execution. Historians later determined that the prisoner Samuel ministered to was one Mary Voce, executed in Nottingham in 1802. Critics point to other likely influences on Eliot, including Sir Walter Scott’s child-murder novel, The Heart of Midlothian (1818); one of Scott’s probable inspirations, William Wordsworth’s 1798 poem “The Thorn”; Charles Dickens’s The Chimes (1844), which focuses on the common belief that the 1834 Malthusian New Poor Law led to child murder and suicide among poverty-stricken mothers; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1848 child-murder abolitionist poem, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.”

In more than 55 titled chapters divided into six books, Eliot examines love’s effects on five key characters and the disastrous consequences when that love is stymied by personal folly and class bias. Related by a third-person omniscient narrator, the novel begins at the leisurely walking pace of village life. Adam Bede and his brother Seth are carpenters in a prosperous woodworking shop.

Adam, the elder brother and shop foreman, is 25. Tall, handsome, and talented, he has a penetrating intelligence and has set his heart on beautiful 17-year-old Hetty Sorrel, the orphaned niece of a tenant farmer. In turn, Hetty falls prey to the attentions of Arthur Donnithorne, 20-year-old heir to the estate of which Hayslope is a part. Seth, meanwhile, attempts to court Hetty’s cousin, Dinah Morris, a woman so moved by her Methodist faith that she begins preaching in Hayslope’s village green. By the novel’s end, each of these characters faces heartache, and some come to public shame and personal ruin.

The tragic drowning death of Adam’s alcoholic father places the Bedes at the center of village attention and brings Dinah into their household for a day to comfort Adam’s mother. Dinah soon makes clear that she cannot return Seth’s love. She gently tells him that her service to God leaves no time or energy for marriage and family. She leaves Hayslope to continue her mission in the harsh upland factory town of Snowfield in rugged, forbidding, infertile Stonyshire.

In contrast to Dinah’s cool avoidance of love, Hetty becomes enraptured with Arthur Donnithorne, imagining herself as his wealthy wife. She sees no reason why a fine gentleman should not marry the most beautiful girl in the district. She does not suspect that Arthur accepts class dictates not to marry a woman of a lower social status. He knows that he should not succumb to his attraction for Hetty, but his desire to possess her overmasters his will.

Unfortunately, Arthur is unaware of Adam’s intentions toward Hetty, because Adam remains too proud to declare himself until he feels sure of winning her love. Hetty allows Adam to cherish the hope of gaining her affection, but makes no commitment. Arthur respects and admires Adam, and longs to win approval from the villagers he will one day govern, but this very longing is his undoing. Arthur’s rustic woodland lodge near the path Hetty takes every week to visit his aunt’s maid for lace-making lessons soon becomes their secret trysting place.

In the book’s midsection, as the summer crops ripen, Arthur celebrates his own coming-of-age with a grand party. Arthur leaves the village with the coming of the harvest season, joining his militia regiment in London. Hetty soon discovers she is pregnant but tells no one, suddenly accepting Adam’s marriage proposal. She has never loved Adam, but he remains blind to her faults with no idea that his best friend, to the extent that friendship can cross class lines, has already unintentionally ruined all their hopes for happiness.

As plans for Adam and Hetty’s marriage develop over the winter and Hetty’s secret becomes harder to hide, she decides to find Arthur. Pretending to visit Dinah in Snowfield, she turns south toward London, unaware that Arthur’s regiment has been ordered to Ireland. She considers suicide, but lacks the will to take her own life. When she arrives in London, Hetty learns that Arthur has departed and decides to go to Dinah as her second-best hope. She travels homeward, but gives birth one night along the way.

Two weeks after Hetty departs, Adam determines to go himself and bring both Hetty and Dinah home. He searches frantically for Hetty, but soon learns of her arrest on suspicion of murdering her newborn. Stunned by grief and rage, Adam immediately connects Arthur with Hetty. His great love for Hetty causes him to blame Arthur completely, because a gentleman should behave honorably.

Hetty retreats into silence; her unwillingness to discuss events or name her child’s father leads to her conviction and sentence to be hanged. As Hetty waits in jail, Dinah arrives to provide spiritual guidance. Her steadiness and deep faith soon move Hetty to a heart-wrenching confession of her affair, her journey, the baby’s birth and abandonment, and her inability to leave the vicinity afterwards. Dinah vows to stay with Hetty, mounting the cart with her for the shameful journey to the gallows.

In contrast to the book’s opening slow-paced narrative, the story races as Arthur is summoned home from Ireland upon his grandfather’s death, and he learns of Hetty’s impending execution. Deeply ashamed, Arthur realizes that he has squandered the villagers’ respect and spoiled many lives. He makes an appeal in a higher court, galloping homeward with a commutation of Hetty’s sentence from death to “transportation”—exile to the Australian penal colony. As the condemned girl stands on the gallows, he tears into the square waving the document and saves Hetty’s life.

The final portion of the book sees Arthur beginning penance in form of a voluntary exile from Hayslope when he embarks on military service in distant lands. Adam will manage the estate, as Arthur had always intended. Dinah comes to help her aunt and uncle in the dairy and assists Lizbeth Bede, virtually becoming her daughter.

Gradually Dinah realizes she has fallen in love with Adam, who has come to view her as a sister. He is slow to recognize her pain and to realize that she is the only woman who will understand his suffering. With Seth’s blessing, he tries to court her. Knowing her devotion to a family would conflict with her divine mission, Dinah tries to stifle these emotions by again running away. This time, her passion cannot be cooled even in the symbolically named Snowfield; she at last joyously accepts Adam’s suit.

In a tender epilogue set some eight years later, Adam and Dinah’s son and daughter play under the eye of their devoted uncle Seth. Arthur will soon return to Hayslope, broken by wounds and illnesses; Hetty is also homeward bound, but dies at sea. Of the original five young people at the threshold of life and love in the novel’s opening, only two achieve love, a happiness no less sweet for the bitterness they have tasted.

Bibliography

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Marshall, Joanna Barszewska. “Shades of Innocence and Sympathy: The Intricate Narrative Syntax of Gossip, Metaphor, and Intimacy in Eliot’s Treatment of Hetty Sorrel.” Dorothea’s Window: The Individual and Community in George Eliot. Edited by Patricia Gately, Dennis Leavens, and Cole Woodcox. Kirksville, Mo.: Thomas Jefferson Press, 1994.

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