
Ulysses
February 2nd is James Joyce’s birthday – and also the 100th birthday of Ulysses! Sally Minogue
...
Feb
02
Feb
10
‘With
a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal
to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. That is what I undertake
for you, reader.’
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880) who was
known as a journalist, poet and translator before she wrote Adam Bede
(1859), the first of her seven novels. She used a male soubriquet in order that
her fiction was judged separately from her other writings and, more particularly,
she wanted to escape the belief that all women’s fiction was limited to lighted
hearted romances. The novel is set in the late 18th century and the
author described it as ‘A country story full of the breath of cow and scent of
hay.’
According to the Oxford Companion to English Literature (1967),
‘the plot is founded upon a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth
Evans, a Methodist preacher who was the model for the character Dinah Morris in
the novel’. The story, set in the Midlands, involved a confession made to the
aunt of child-murder by a girl in prison. Eliot also used her own experiences
of being brought up on a farm to add a detailed authentic reality to the
narrative and based the character of Adam on her own father.
Essentially the story is a dark love tangle. Adam Bede, a young
carpenter, is in love with Hetty Sorrel, a pretty but empty-headed girl. While
Adam has great difficulty expressing his feelings towards Hetty, his best
friend Arthur Donnithorpe, ignorant of Adam’s feelings, is also attracted to
her. As Hetty’s fondest dreams is to become the lady of the manor she
encourages Arthur, who succeeds in seducing her. When Adam finds out, he feels
betrayed and challenges Arthur to a fist fight. Conscience stricken at stealing
his best friend’s girl, Arthur writes a farewell letter to Hetty and goes off
to join his regiment. Reluctantly Hetty agrees to marry Adam in the spring to
make the best of a bad bargain, but as the wedding day approaches her pregnancy
can no longer be concealed. She is carrying Arthur’s child. He is ignorant of
this and so Hetty sets out in harsh weather to search for him, hoping that they
can be re-united. What follows is dramatic and tragic. Helping Adam to cope
with his distress is Hetty’s friend, the gentle Dinah Morris, a lay preacher
whose self-appointed mission in life is saving souls. Dinah is a great comfort
to Adam and helps him to track down Hetty. Towards the end of the novel their
relationship blossoms.
Adam Bede is a sternly moral novel and bears out Eliot’s
maxim that ‘our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.’ However
the tone of the narrative is lightened by the pastoral mood in its early
sections which capture the beauty and gentle serenity of country living. It is
in these chapters that the author gives a documentary record of the rural way
of life of the period. Eliot draws the reader into this world. In the first
chapter she writes:
‘With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy
workshop of Mr Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of
Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June in the year of our Lord
1799.’
This authorial attention to detailed realism flows through the whole
novel.
Having been born on a farm in Warwickshire, Eliot digs deep into her
memory bank to capture a time when she was a child to bring this period to
life. There is no strong evidence to suggest that Thomas Hardy was influenced
by this novel but there are certainly similarities in both the mood and
narrative plotting. The cruelty of fate and missed opportunities are found in
both Adam Bede and a number of Hardy’s works. Indeed one review of
Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd noted that, ‘when the first chapters
of Mr Hardy’s story appeared in the Cornhill Magazine many good judges
pronounced it to be a work of George Eliot’s’.
Adam Bede was exceptionally well received by contemporary
reviewers who praised its evocation of English rural life and well-rounded and
compelling characters. An anonymous review in The Atheneum praised it as
‘a novel of the highest class’ and Charles Dickens wrote: ‘The whole country
life that the story is set in, is so real, and so droll and genuine, yet so
selected and polished by art that I cannot praise it enough…’ Its popularity
made it a benchmark by which Eliot’s subsequent fiction was judged; even
reviews of her last two novels made the point of stating that George Eliot was
the author of Adam Bede.
The novel has not proved particularly popular with dramatists. There was
a theatre adaptation in 1885, a few years after the author’s death and a silent
movie version in 1918 which featured Bransby Williams, a well-known stage
performer, in the lead. However, there was a quite excellent television film
produced by the BBC in 1991. The adaptation by Maggie Wadley was very close to
the book, capturing the mood and the period excellently. It was directed by
Giles Foster and starred Iain Glenn as Adam, Patsy Kensit as Hetty, Susannah
Harker as Dinah and James Wilby as Donnithorpe.
Because of the author’s facility to create a realistic world for the
reader and present a cast of characters who avoid the pitfall of caricature, Adam
Bede remains a classic, one that is moralistic without preaching and
dramatic without being sensational. Elizabeth Gaskell, author of the successful
novel North and South (1854) noted in a letter that ‘I have a feeling
that it is not worth while trying to write when there are such books as Adam
Bede.’
Image: Dinah Morris Preaching in Stonyshire by Charles Gregory. Credit: Artepics / Alamy Stock Photo