Adam Bede

In Adam Bede (1859) George Eliot took the well-worn tale of a lovely dairy-maid seduced by a careless squire, and out of it created a wonderfully innovative and sympathetic portrait of the lives of ordinary Midlands working people - their labours and loves, their beliefs, their talk. Hugely popular in its own time, Adam Bede is one of the greatest examples of humane and liberal Victorian social concern, a pioneering classic of radical social realism. It is also important for the way itmeditates on the need for such fiction and the methods of writing it. As the Introduction declares: `The distinction of Adam Bede is to tell a story, and also to tell about telling a story. This is a novel about obscure lives, and also about how to be a novel about obscure lives.' This edition reprints the original broadsheet reports of the murder case that was a starting point for the book, and the notes illuminate Eliot's many literary and religious references.