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| First Written | 1859 |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Origin | UK |
| Publisher | Librivox |
| My Copy | librivox audiobook |
| First Read | May 20, 2025 |
Adam Bede
Really one of the many pleasures of reading classic lit with my educational background is that I just literally do not know the plots. What's going to happen? When (spoiler alert) Adam punches the young lordling and thinks he has killed him, I was really shook: and I don't put this kind of sudden tragedy past Eliot, especially after Mill on the Floss!
Noted on May 27, 2025
George Eliot is such a complicated-feeling author, especially reading her and knowing that she's writing at the same time as Dickens et al. She's got this huge depth of understanding for her characters, and it's so skeptical and just-right-on-the-edge of bitter. Doubly so when she writes women, which I suppose is not surprising. But yeah, I should talk with people that have read more of her stuff.
Noted on May 20, 2025
Just described a table that has never been oiled with anything artificial but yet shines with ‘elbow polish’
Noted on May 20, 2025
Ch 2 - The young methodist preacher shows up, and at first I was like ‘oh fun, I go to a Wesleyan church now, it’s interesting to hear this come up in real literature.’ And then the preacher, Dinah, goes and delivers the first half of a BANGER of a sermon, just a great, clear, ‘this is what the gospel means’. Surprising!
Noted on May 20, 2025
OK, this is my third George Eliot book, I think, and I don't know why it took me so long to come around to her. She's great (obviously), which is kind of my theme of reading the classics as an adult. But it's interesting, funny, and oh gosh, I loved the intro to book 2, where Eliot spends some time addressing the reader and laying out a theory of aesthetics in the novel. I just made that sound boring, but it’s really quite charming.
Noted on May 20, 2025
This was really delightful, especially consuming this via this Librivox recording, where the narrator is shockingly competent with all the accents. I don't know if I would have made it through reading this on paper with all the phonetically spelled dialog. But beyond all that: what a human drama! I get why people regard Eliot so highly now.
Noted on June 4, 2025
What a tragedy for Hetty! I couldn't believe what an incredible job Eliot does with this character.
Noted on June 4, 2025
I didn't catch the quote, but I cracked up when someone said, 'Yes, we don't need to allow women to preach in church, because they're always preaching to their husbands anyways.'
Noted on June 4, 2025
OK, SPOILERS for the actual plot of Adam Bede here: but I was really surprised at the turn when it's revealed that Hetty is pregnant, and runs off to find the father. The book is too prim to actually say that she's pregnant, so it felt like a big reveal. And then after she fails to commit suicide, we hear she’s arrested for child murder! I assumed that meant she somehow had an abortion, which felt also pretty transgressive for the story, and then found out that assumption was wrong too. Eliot keeping me on my toes, I guess.
Noted on June 4, 2025
And on the whole, I daresay, society was not much the worse because Ben had not six months of it at the treadmill, for his views of depredation were narrow, and the House of Correction might have enlarged them.
Quoted on June 6, 2025
And so Adam went to bed comforted, having woven for himself an ingenious web of probabilities—the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.
Quoted on May 27, 2025
I’m willing to give you my work—it’s been done in my own time, and nobody’s got anything to do with it but me; but if I’m paid, I can’t take a smaller price than I asked, because that ’ud be like saying I’d asked more than was just.
Quoted on May 27, 2025
In the corpse we love, it is the likeness we see—it is the likeness, which makes itself felt the more keenly because something else was and is not.
Quoted on June 4, 2025
If a man had got no feelings, it ’ud be as good as a demonstration to listen to what goes on in court; but a tender heart makes one stupid.
Quoted on June 4, 2025
...As for th’ architects, they set up to be fine fellows, but the most of ’em don’t know where to set a chimney so as it shan’t be quarrelling with a door. My notion is, a practical builder that’s got a bit o’ taste makes the best architect for common things.
Quoted on June 4, 2025
But the long and the short of it is—I’ll have nobody in my night-school that doesn’t strive to learn what he comes to learn, as hard as if he was striving to get out of a dark hole into broad daylight. I’ll send no man away because he’s stupid: if Billy Taft, the idiot, wanted to learn anything, I’d not refuse to teach him. But I’ll not throw away good knowledge on people who think they can get it by the sixpenn’orth, and carry it away with ’em as they would an ounce of snuff. So never come to me again, if you can’t show that you’ve been working with your own heads, instead of thinking that you can pay for mine to work for you.
Quoted on May 22, 2025
Chapter XVII
In Which the Story Pauses a Little
“This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan!” I hear one of my readers exclaim. “How much more edifying it would have been if you had made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice! You might have put into his mouth the most beautiful things—quite as good as reading a sermon.”
Certainly I could, if I held it the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking; I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath.
Quoted on May 20, 2025
You must make it quite clear to your mind which you are most bent upon, old boy—popularity or usefulness—else you may happen to miss both.
Quoted on May 20, 2025
It was very much in this way that our friend Adam Bede thought about Hetty; only he put his thoughts into different words. If ever she behaved with cold vanity towards him, he said to himself it is only because she doesn’t love me well enough; and he was sure that her love, whenever she gave it, would be the most precious thing a man could possess on earth. Before you despise Adam as deficient in penetration, pray ask yourself if you were ever predisposed to believe evil of any pretty woman—if you ever could, without hard head-breaking demonstration, believe evil of the one supremely pretty woman who has bewitched you. No: people who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.
Quoted on May 20, 2025
Folks must put up wi’ their own kin, as they put up wi’ their own noses.
Quoted on May 20, 2025