In On Liberty, Mill championed the ‘example of nonconformity’, deeming ‘the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom’ ‘a service’ (p. 120), and citing eccentricity as a prerequisite of a society’s ‘genius, mental vigour, and moral courage’ (p. 121). We might readily associate George Eliot with those last three qualities, but for a writer of fiction, seeking to make a living by their publications, the ‘tyranny of opinion’ (p. 120) was not something that could simply be side-stepped or ideally eschewed but rather a factor that had actively to be negotiated. As Eliot awaited the publication of Adam Bede, she was acutely aware of the need to win over public opinion and for her work to achieve popularity, however complex an aspiration that might be. This chapter looks at the world of popular culture at the start of 1859, and the attractions with which Adam Bede had to compete and, based on a small but representative sample of the year’s popular fiction, suggests ways of understanding Eliot’s work alongside these other novels with which hers had perhaps more in common than might be expected. Nonetheless, Eliot’s is a unique work, and it is one that, as her peers recognised, had an appeal based in the creation of familiarity and the workings of a disposition to the customary.

As they awaited Adam Bede’s publication, John Blackwood and Eliot discussed their expectations for the novel in terms of its ‘popularity’, a word which crops up throughout the year in discussion of her work and that of her contemporaries, including Darwin. Before publication, Blackwood wrote cautiously that ‘[Adam Bede] can never come under the class of popular agreeable stories, [though] those who love power, real humour and true natural description will stand by the sturdy Carpenter’ (John Blackwood to George Eliot, 29 January; Letters, III, p. 6). In her reply, Eliot described her hope for the novel in these terms: ‘I perceive that I have not the characteristics of the “popular author”, and yet I am much in need of the warmly expressed sympathy which only popularity can win’ (George Eliot to John Blackwood, 31 January; Letters III, p. 6). There is a tension between their views of the popularity of the agreeable writer of unthreatening popular fiction and a popularity represented by the love of the people, which is rather a characteristic of the interest and affection gained by writing, its affect, than a generic measure of the fiction itself. We can also see an interesting distinction between the person of the author and their work: Blackwood wrote of the characteristics of Adam Bede, whereas Eliot wrote of herself.

Within their correspondence, we see Blackwood and Eliot’s working relationship evolving: sometimes anxiously prickly on Eliot’s part, it was sustained by Blackwood’s great tact, kindness, and his publishing acumen. She began to trust his generosity and his judgement, and in turn that judgement evolved as the year progressed. Blackwood’s use of the term ‘popularity’ shifted, as he saw how the market responded to Eliot’s work, and, indeed, how she began to create a market for the new type of thoughtfully engaged, serious fiction that reviewers came to recognise in Adam Bede. In the novel’s first reviews, we can see how, out of familiar materials, she was perceived to be developing a new mode of fiction. Indeed, in his survey of British Novelists and Their Styles, David Masson had briefly noted of the newly published novel that ‘readers are hailing the advent of a new artist of the real school, in the author of Adam Bede’ (p. 260). Its success began to redefine the ‘popular’ novel, and the concept of popularity itself, as a less pejorative form. With this novel, Eliot took Victorian fiction into a new phase of psychological complexity, via a deeply moral, realist aesthetic, and an ambitious reading practice that demanded not only serious critical attention but a degree of committed, empathetic dedication that created a socially invested body of readers, and that was founded in recognition of a community based in large measure on custom.

Leisure and Publishing

Eliot’s anxious aspirations for her work are contextualised by her acute sense of the ways in which a pursuit like reading was a key part of the burgeoning industrialisation of leisure, and consequently of how consumers and readers were interpellated by writers, and came to understand and experience themselves as part of the frantic, more atomised forms of audience created by the newly hectic pursuit of leisure. In this long extract, leisure is a trope that Eliot invokes in Adam Bede to describe the contemporaneity of her readers’ world, which she contrasts with the ways in which leisure used to be enjoyed:

Eliot’s healthy, bucolic ‘stout gentleman’ closely resembles Mr Pullet, who would soon appear in The Mill on the Floss, and Mr Jerome in ‘Janet’s Repentance’, one of Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life. He is a creature of the countryside, lacking intellectual curiosity, content to be guided by the seasons, and in complete contrast with the modern, London-based man of active leisure.

The portrait is not without gentle parody, but Eliot’s description of ‘Leisure’ gives a clear sense of the conditions in which novelists and publishers in the late 1850s were having to compete for the public’s attention, and of how dazzled consumers might need to be guided through leisure’s multiple attractions. In the same week as Adam Bede was published, popular preachers at St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey were another potential distraction for the reader, and ‘The great room’ of Exeter Hall ‘was well filled on Sunday night’ for the preaching of the Rev Samuel Monton of Percy Chapel, Tottenham Court Road. He chose for his text ‘For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich.’ He competed with the Rev John Staughton of Kensington, who preached the same night at St James’s Hall on ‘He restoreth my soul.’ ‘In a few minutes after the doors were thrown open the hall was declared full, and vast numbers were disappointed.’²

Plenty of secular amusements were on offer too: Monday Popular Concerts and Barnum on ‘Money Making and Humbug’ at the St James’s Hall; Mr C. Dickens reading ‘his CHRISTMAS CAROL and the TRIAL FROM PICKWICK’ at St Martin’s Hall; ‘Madame Delevanti’s grand ascent on the Telegraph Wire’ at the Alhambra Palace, Leicester Square; ‘The original and celebrated SPANISH MINSTRELS’ at Winchester Hall on the Southwark Bridge Road; and the men-only invitations to listen to ‘Short and interesting interludes between the Musical Portion of the Entertainment, embracing an amount of singular ability never before presented to the public’ by ‘THIRTY VOCALISTS at Evans’s Magnificent Music and Supper Rooms, Covent Garden’, and to learn from lectures at Dr Kahn’s Anatomical Museum on Tichborne Street (‘OPEN DAILY (for Gentlemen only))’ (Lloyds Weekly, p. 6). Many men also attended the ‘monster’ meetings discussing voting reform throughout the country.

There were also nineteen West End theatres advertising in Lloyds Weekly London Newspaper; dioramas of ‘the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky, the Prairies of Illinois, and the Scenery of Niagara’ at the Royal Gallery of Illustration; the Ohio Minstrels, whose only fault is that ‘they betray too thoroughly their Anglo-Saxon origin’; and the production of The Gipsy Girl of Madrid; or, the Edict of Spain at Astley’s Amphitheatre, best-known for its equestrian spectacles. Despite the difficulties of the previous month, the Regent Street Polytechnic was open again, with a lecture on ‘The Genius of [John] Gay’ advertised as forthcoming (Lloyds Weekly London Newspaper, p. 6). And, lest they miss out on the explosion in printed matter occurring in the 1850s, ‘under the enterprising auspices of Captain Hicks, governor, a library is about to be formed in Whitecross-Street prison, for the use of the debtors confined in the prison’ (p. 11). Even prisoners were not immune from the leisure resources springing up around them, many of which, in coming into Britain from overseas, suggest a more generous and open attitude to the rest of the world than is often apparent in Hansard and the daily newspapers, where the need to maintain good trade relations barely restrains an underlying xenophobia. Culturally, Britain was extremely cosmopolitan in 1859.

Peter Bailey uses Eliot’s passage from Adam Bede as an exemplar of modern leisure, where ‘change and modernity predominated over continuity’, and where old leisure was communal, ‘answering to the prescriptions of ritual and custom’.³ Leisure had been ‘severed from its traditional moorings in work, custom, and community’ (p. 622), and was often located not in the street and public space but in the home. Eliot’s reference to ‘scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes’ might be a rueful reference to Lewes’s work, including dissection, which was carried out in their home, but which had temporarily flagged in the face of the demands of ‘upholsterers, landlords, and other organisms’: ‘My frogs mutely reproach me for neglect. My microscope gathers the dust of disuse’ (to John Blackwood, 5 February; Letters, III, pp. 10–11). Modernity is defined by papers, politics, and the post, and a perceptible speeding up of sensation, enabled by the increasing industrialisation, which in turn necessitated its workers’ distraction, as Dickens so memorably recounted in Hard Times (1854). Adam Bede concerns itself with ‘work, custom, and community,’ as we have seen, and this chapter will explore how important these aspects were to the novel’s contemporary success, how Adam Bede was received alongside more overtly ‘popular’ works, and how Eliot began to redefine the concept of literary popularity.

The Mechanics of Popularity

In the mid-nineteenth century, Mudie’s Circulating Library was critical to determining a work’s commercial success. Readers had been borrowing books from Mudie’s since 1842, but the company’s move to Oxford Street in 1851 had increased its influence and significance, which even extended to the content of the books it lent. In 1858, according to Judith Flanders, Mudie’s bought 100,000 new books, a figure which nearly doubled to 180,000 three years later.⁴ Mindful of Mudie’s power, Eliot had queried anxiously why ‘Mudie has almost always left the C S [i.e. Clerical Scenes] out of his advertised list, although he puts in very trashy and obscure books? I hope it is nothing more than chance’ (to John Blackwood, 31 January; Letters, III, p. 7). Mudie was trying to drive a hard bargain over Adam Bede, initially threatening to take only fifty copies, but finally succumbing to ‘taking 500 at our terms 10 per cent off sales, to which I think he is entitled when he takes so large a number’ (John Blackwood to G. H. Lewes, 4 February; Letters, III, p. 9). Blackwood was finally satisfied with Mudie’s decision, not least because, as he wrote privately to Lewes, he understood the lender’s caution: ‘As I have often explained before, I felt distinctly that by Clerical Scenes a reputation with readers and men of letters was made, but not a public general reputation … When the reviews begin to appear and people who have read [Adam Bede] begin to talk about it the movement will take place.’ As we will see, this proved to be the case: the novel is mentioned in private correspondence, public speeches, as well as multiple reviews throughout the year. Its success was also helped by the fact that Blackwood was of course ‘sending copies to the Press in all directions’.

Eliot and Lewes were avidly concerned with how Adam Bede was reviewed, by whom, and how it would fare alongside more overtly ‘popular’ novels. Eliot herself condemned ‘damnatory praise from ignorant journalists’ (to Blackwood, 24 February; III, p. 24) and charged Blackwood with making sure that no ‘hackneyed puffing phrase’ be tacked to her book in advertising columns. She goes on:

One such advertisement for Hurst and Blackett’s popular novels appeared in The Times for 10 February (p. 10). The densely packed text includes praise for a miscellaneous range of texts (some of which we will return to later), which though containing several probably superfluous superlatives, nonetheless seem not entirely deserving of Eliot’s extreme opprobrium; it is more likely indicative of her anxiety that her work should reach people well above ‘the rank of an idiot’, a phrase lifted from a note to Hazlitt’s essay ‘What Is the People? (1818). It is interesting that Eliot lands on this phrase at a moment when the ability of the ‘people’ to govern was at the heart of debates about voting reform and suggests a continuity of the process of cultural formation between the literary and political spheres, which we will see played out later in the year (see Chapter 4).

Eliot may well have been dismayed at the first review of Adam Bede, which appeared in the same John Bull and Britannia that praised the novel Onwards for its earnest thinking. It was less than glowing, made no mention at all of Adam, and concentrated on Hetty’s attractions as a popular heroine.⁵ And an early review from the ‘Statesman’ ‘disgusted and disheartened’ Lewes as ‘it was laudatory throughout; but the kind of laudation was fatal … The nincompoop couldn’t see the distinction between Adam and the mass of novels he has been reading’ (12 February; GHL Journal, p. 153). More than one early reader is tempted, as F. R. Leavis would be with Daniela Deronda nearly ninety years later in The Great Tradition (1948), to split the novel in two, and in Adam Bede’s case, to treat its final volume as an aberration. The romance of Hetty and Arthur, and particularly the trial scene and Hetty’s reprieve, are deemed by some critics to ‘give a due measure of excitement to the story’ but ‘at the expense of the artistic merits of the tale’.⁶ For the Saturday Review, despite their enthusiasm for the novel, the reviewer wrote that its final volume plunges us into ‘a sea of horrors’ and ‘the hackneyed region of sham legal excitement’ (p. 250). The end of the novel was a challenge for the reader, as was Hetty herself. The Times dismissed her as ‘a thoughtless little kitten’, ‘one of those who are so much less than they seem to be, whose most significant acts mean so little’, and for Caroline Norton, Hetty’s ‘blind vanity and apathy’ was ‘a check and a drag on the power of [her] one attraction’, her beauty. Indeed, she asked, if Hetty could command our sympathy, how might Adam and Arthur ever have been reconciled? (p. 236). These are judgements that Eliot’s whole aesthetic eschewed.

Responses to Hetty reflected reviewers’ judgement of the novel as a whole, and specifically its generic markers: those that focussed closely on Hetty and elevated her to the most prominent position in the novel made of Adam Bede an example of popular fiction. They disregarded the ‘concluding pages’ that ‘give a sense of relief’ after the trial scene, which was ‘almost painful in its intensity’ (Bath Chronicle),⁷ with one reviewer finding Eliot’s desire to restore order, as at the conclusion of a Shakespeare tragedy, ‘rather disagreeable’.⁸ The Era’s sympathy is very much with Hetty and Arthur rather than Adam and Dinah, describing the novel as ‘[t]his fearful tale of seduction and its fatal consequences’, and, despite its title, not seeing Adam as the ‘real hero of the book’. Rather, the novel was judged as a new variation, a ‘new turn’ in the kaleidoscope of fictional plots about fallen women whose predecessors reviewers recognised as including Scott’s Effie Dean and Dickens’s Little Emily. The same reviewer found in the novel startling ‘anatomical revelations’, and The Literary Examiner protested ‘against the depiction in a novel of the stages of childbirth, related with almost obstetric accuracy of detail’.⁹ The concentration on Hetty misled this reviewer into believing Eliot’s aim was the narrow one of ‘exhibiting the fruits of vice’ in order to make them ‘hateful’, deeming this a tendency found particularly in the work of ‘our lady novelists’ (Literary Examiner), and subsequently finding it ‘a serious defect’ in ‘a work like Adam Bede’. The reviewer seemed to acknowledge that Adam Bede was a novel of a different order but lacked the vocabulary fully to realise that awareness, and was hamstrung by the difficulty of embedding the matter of a more sensational text into the quietness of Eliot’s realism, despite a widespread, albeit largely tacit, recognition that Hetty’s story was in itself not exceptional: as Queen Victoria wrote to her daughter in Germany:

This recognition of Hetty’s situation, broad-minded though it seems, signals a dangerously ignorant complacency towards the plight of other classes, which it was Eliot’s explicit desire to challenge through her fiction.

Popular Fiction in 1859

As Blackwood’s reviewer noted, the ‘painfully absorbing’ third volume, which demonstrated the ‘author’s power in vivid melodramatic description’, was a marked deviation from the rest of the novel, but for him that does not put ‘its truthful feeling, its wise and large philosophy’ on a par with contemporary popular fiction. And, he wrote, Hetty, ‘[t]he one character which, in the hands of many writers, would have been invested with a dangerous interest, awakens in us only a pity nearer to contempt than love’ (p. 504). Geraldine Jewsbury came nearer the author’s purported intention when she suggests that we are invited to look at Hetty ‘through something of the same medium with which she regards herself’ and that that medium ‘is a gentle extension of the self-love with which we all soften ourselves and our actions to our own conscience’.¹⁰ Jewsbury recognised that even in Hetty, Eliot was seeking to engage the reader in a response based in a reflective rather than instinctive empathy, albeit one that risked being defeated by the undue fascination of Hetty’s beauty. The ‘great degree of interest’ excited by Hetty’s ‘beauty and coquettish attractions’ (Sheffield) was felt as an aberration on the part of the author but might have been registering instead the reader’s propensity to be seduced by Hetty’s beauty and kitten-ish ways, and Eliot’s challenge to the reader to acknowledge that character’s dangerous attractions: the reader might, like Arthur, be seduced without, or against the best interests of, their willing volition.

Clearly, this aspect of the novel brought it into a close connection with popular fiction, and in a number of cases, Adam Bede was reviewed alongside more popular novels. Eliot recognises this fiction, that Masson associated with the ‘lady novelists’ in whose hands ‘there has been a serious contraction of [the novel’s] capabilities’ (p. 294), as an inescapable part of the contemporary reading experience. Eliot also recognised the tensions between these different types of fiction and tried to educate her readers about them. In chapter 17 of Adam Bede, ‘In Which the Story Pauses a Little’, Eliot anchors readerly sympathies in the possibilities opened up precisely by the absence of the more customary ‘sorrows of heroines in satin boots and crinoline, and of heroes riding fiery horses, themselves ridden by still more fiery passions’ (Adam Bede, I, p. 65), as she puts it earlier in the novel when seeking the reader’s sympathy for Seth Bede’s tender, but hopeless, love for Dinah. Adam Bede is part of a dialogue between Eliot and popular fiction, which had been going on since 1856, when, just before she began her career as a fiction writer, she published a review on ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ in the Westminster Review.¹¹

The essay may be read as an apprentice’s analysis of the contemporary conditions of the craft she aspired to, and as evidence of the writer’s antagonism towards the ‘particular quality of silliness that predominates’ in popular fiction by women,¹² and perhaps as a proleptic safeguarding of her own fictional ambitions: Laurel Brake argues that the essay represents ‘a critique of one zone of reading (the popular) by another (higher journalism)’.¹³ However, despite Eliot’s own ‘higher’ aspirations for her fiction and its readers, the relationship between silly novels, characterised by ‘the conversion of the Novel … into a mere love and marriage story’ (Masson, p. 294), and Eliot’s own fiction is far from being so exclusive. Rather, there is an energising symbiosis between the popular and Adam Bede, which suggests that Eliot recognised that she was in competition, both commercially and in terms of popularity, with the creators of this fiction whose work, she feared, might seem to represent so poor a return on the education of women, and who might also have mis-educated Eliot’s potential readers. In writing Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede, Eliot had become a fellow-practitioner, and not just a critic, and it is instructive to see how far her own fiction implicitly acknowledges and actually incorporates elements of the popular novel. We may also examine both how far some of the novels by her female contemporaries seemed to be influenced by the aspirations for fiction that Eliot had articulated in Scenes of Clerical Life, and in her anonymous journalism to date, and how they thus came to challenge Eliot’s 1856 critique by echoing some attributes of her own fiction.

Eliot’s was not the only voice concerned with the power of women’s popular fiction. For W. R. Greg, lady novelists’ danger lay in their ‘false morality’: he writes distrustfully of the influence and easy effectiveness of light literature, which as the ‘sole or the chief reading’ of numerous readers in the ‘idler or more impressionable hours, when the fatigued mind requires rest and recreation’, needed to be ‘watched[ed] with the most vigilant concern’.¹⁴ The young are most vulnerable to the influence of such fiction, as their experience and education are not yet robust enough to enable them to be discriminating readers, as are women, ‘who are always impressionable, in whom at all times the emotional element is more awake and more powerful than the critical, whose feelings are more easily roused and whose estimates are more easily influenced than ours’ (pp. 145–46). The very ease of reading fiction is dangerous. In a metaphor that speaks to the contemporary interest in digestion and the consumption of food, Greg writes: ‘Histories, philosophies, political treatises, to a certain extent even first-class poetry, are solid and often tough food which requires laborious and slow mastication. Novels are like soup or jelly; they may be drunk off at a draught or swallowed whole, certain of being easily and rapidly absorbed into the system’ (p. 146). The fact that so many novels are written by young women, with inadequate moral development, immature judgement, and ‘superficial insight’ (p. 149) is cause for particular anxiety: ‘The result is, that we are constantly gazing on inaccurate pictures, constantly sympathizing with artificial or reprehensible emotions, constantly admiring culpable conduct, constantly imbibing false morality’ (p. 149). This evidences the predominance of fiction in the literary landscape; the enthusiasm with which women were taking it up, as both readers and writers; and a tacit admission that a higher proportion of women writers worked in fiction than in any other genre.¹⁵

Yet, the more one reads the ‘popular’ fiction of 1859, the more difficult it becomes confidently to sustain Eliot’s bifurcation of fictional sub-genres, and the entirely derogatory views of Greg and Masson. The quality of writing is as diverse as the subject matter of the fiction being published, and some of it is extremely poor, but many of the lightest of novels also offer serious commentary on contemporary events. There are of course ‘silly’ elements in some of these texts: inept – often incredible – plotting and coincidences, under-developed characters, hackneyed language, and some of the social and educational pretensions to which Eliot objected in 1856. Milton is misquoted by Mrs Octavius Freire Owen in Raised to the Peerage, and the same author intriguingly notes her heroine’s ‘touching air of insouciance and reverie upon so young and intellectual a countenance’.¹⁶ She later elevates the English Channel into ‘the mighty barrier … of hopes and fears to how many hearts; there is the type of the great “once and for ever”’ (II, p. 285). More attention is paid throughout this fiction to details of dress than one finds in Eliot. For example, this description of a wedding dress from Mrs Charles J. Proby’s The Dennes of Daundelyonn reads like a detailed fashion plate for aspirational readers:

However, the author perhaps feels a little uneasy herself about this wealth of detail and puts it all into a fictionalised newspaper account within the novel. This also of course heightens the verisimilitude at which many of these novels aim. Two, for instance, include specific references to Queen Victoria, spotted in one novel in a box at the opera, where ‘in her simple, quiet grace, sat England’s young and noble Queen’.¹⁸

Almost without exception, these and the majority of other novels that I’ve read from this year are set in contemporary times, and often refer explicitly to contemporary events and texts. In The Dennes of Daundelyonn, the eccentric old Miss Crockett finds that ‘people are so dreadfully similar nowadays; no originality about them’ (I, p. 173), which is foot-noted in the text: ‘Miss Crockett had not the advantage of reading Mr Mill on Liberty’. And in Millicent Neville, which is concerned very largely, as so many of these novels are, with the challenges of marriage, and not simply with the romance that ends with a wedding, we are told that: ‘If women did but know the blessing that follows a soft word or a quiet answer – if their hearts were but filled a little more with tender submissive feelings … how much more of happiness would be found by the domestic fireside, and how much less work would there be cut out for Sir Cresswell Cresswell’. (I, p. 105)

Cresswell Cresswell was the first judge in the new Probate, Divorce, and Matrimonial Causes Court, and was noted for his work in the field of divorce law. Class mobility, conflict, and resentments figure in all novels, most often in terms of negotiating how characters experience an enforced movement between classes. For example, when Millicent Neville’s mother, the daughter of a tailor, marries her husband, who was ‘then a rather fast young gentleman, lodged in the first-floor’ of her house, she subsequently, through ‘instruction from her indulgent husband’ as to her pronunciation, and ‘reading and digesting no end of fashionable novels, procured from a famous circulating library’, began to ‘look a little more like other people’ (I, pp. 13, 14). The need for Mrs Beeton’s advice on the achievement of conformity through domesticity is made very clear in a number of these novels, as is the prevalence of narratives of self-made men rising through the ranks, and prospering by virtue of their intelligence and diligence, which would reach its climax this year in Smiles’s Self-Help. These novels give ample evidence for Mill’s fears about unthinking conformity.

In these popular novels, we can see the day-to-day preoccupations and issues about which people wished to read, the anxieties that pressed upon their lives, the terms and forms in which they were expressed, and also get an insight into the structures that implicitly underpinned the period. Each of the novels carries frequent references to colonialism, the individual countries being colonised, and the lives of the British and indigenous populations within them. Mention of India and Africa embeds those continents in contemporary Britain’s everyday life. There is little detail about the many relatives who disappear off to India: the word conjures up a set of narratives of service and expansionism that apparently requires little explanation. And for those in need of a new start, there is America, resort of the black sheep who fall just short of criminality, but who nonetheless need either to escape the respectability of Britain, or to ‘retrieve’ ‘shattered fortunes’.¹⁹ There is a more raffish edge to those who go west: they go for their own advancement; those who go East may do the same, but their motivation is most usually implicated in serving the greater national good.

Many of the men who leave the country are, like Eliot’s Arthur Donnithorne, military men. Indeed, the character of the military man figures largely in novels from this year, as veterans of recent Indian and Crimean campaigns, and those of more distant wars, did in society and the world of letters at this newly belligerent time. They are invoked as a set of readily available types, not all of whom are admirable. Mrs Charles Proby writes of a character that he is:

War is invoked as a form of eugenic machinery, which would come to chime bleakly with the mechanism of natural selection proposed by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species later in the year. Proby’s language of types, of genus and variety, supports that pseudo-scientific reading of her analysis, which is not intended entirely ironically, and which is seen again in her description of a dinner party consisting of ‘a stray Indian General, bronzed, bilious, and garrulous; a wandering Admiral, weather-beaten [… and] A ruddy major from the neighbouring depot’ (III, p. 7). We also see in these texts fervent anti-Catholicism and a depressing, apparently inextinguishable, suspicion about the French, who crop up in several novels as the epitome of untrustworthiness, cowardice, and a general lack of (English) backbone, whether their challenge is crossing the Channel or struggling with a moral dilemma.

In addition to their shared investment in the contemporary metaphor of the military, Adam Bede echoes other contemporary novels in containing a form of duel in the woods. This was a popular scenario in 1859, appearing in A Life-Struggle, as well as in Wilkie Collins’s collection of stories, The Queen of Hearts. There are, across all types of fiction, illegitimate babies, epic journeys on foot, and several ‘true gentlemen’ in the Smilesian mode, of whom Adam Bede is simply the best-developed example. We can also see in these texts, with their often minute detailing of how day-to-day life is managed, the burgeoning of a kind of capitalist equilibrium, whereby families who rise are equalled by those, often old landed families, who go into decline. Families run out of energy as new modes of production and money-making challenge their way of life, as is the case with the Donnithorne family in Adam Bede, whose land-owning complacency is usurped by Adam’s artisanal entrepreneurship.

In the relationship between Adam, Hetty, and Arthur, Eliot employs a structural trope which underpins a great many other novels by women novelists of this year, and indeed fiction more generally: the heroine’s choice between a worthy lover (like Adam) and an altogether more dashing and exciting, though ultimately unreliable, prospect (such as Arthur). This triangular structure is a staple of romantic fiction. Sometimes the heroines of 1859 get a second chance at success with the worthier man after the flighty, sexier man has inevitably let them down, sometimes not; Hetty’s infanticide, transportation, and death represent by far the most drastic punishment for a wrong choice. Some male characters are more despicable and openly calculating than Arthur, whose fault lies mainly in a selfishly lazy desire to indulge and to be indulged, yet which has results even more devastating than the more overtly malign purposes of cold-hearted, often foreign, seducers. Eliot carefully develops the popular triangular plot by juxtaposing two such plots, one male- and one female-centred: in the first, Hetty opts for Arthur over Adam, only turning to the latter when it is too late, and she is already carrying Arthur’s baby. With his first love gone, Adam can turn to Dinah, the woman he’s respected from the beginning of their relationship, with whom he is allowed to grow old happily, along with their children and his gentle brother, Seth. This second triangle attempts, not entirely successfully, to re-calibrate the text and shift its centre decisively away from illicit romance to the achieved satisfaction of a marriage based in virtue and hard work. This, alongside Hetty’s death, and Arthur’s emasculation, represents both a chastening dose of Eliot’s realism and also the cost of the security of the novel’s ending, which rests in large part on the expulsion of those aberrant and disruptive elements that are personified in Hetty and Arthur.

Misrepresenting the Poor

The misrepresentation of the poor was a common factor in contemporary culture, and we can see this exemplified in a theatre visit made by Queen Victoria in February. Victoria’s grasp on the conditions of her country was limited by the extent to which she was exposed to her subjects, and the leanings of her political advisers. At dinner on 26th February, two days before the House of Commons was due to begin its debate on voting reform, Victoria was wrongly assured by Sir George Lewis that the ‘country was perfectly calm about [Reform] & most contented & peaceful.’ The Queen was in Windsor for most of February, going to London only for Parliament’s opening and to attend the theatre, a favourite pastime of hers.²⁰ This month she saw Satanella, or, The Power of Love three times at the English Opera. Billed as a ‘romantic opera’, it is a light piece combining a cross-class love-affair, the triumph of humble virtue over aristocratic scheming, the baffling of the devil, and the redemption of one of his female servants, the eponymous Satanella. She is lifted to heaven on a cloud at the finale, accompanied by a host of songs and supernatural effects, culminating with ‘the melody of “The Power of Love” sung by an invisible choir as the curtain slowly descends’.²¹ Victoria also saw ‘the two last acts of “Macbeth”’, at Charles Kean’s Princess’, which she described as ‘a stupid, though gorgeous Pantomime’ (Journal, 17 February); attended An Unequal Match at the Haymarket on the 24th, which she notes in her journal was the anniversary of the French Revolution (she refers to 1848, not 1789); and on the 28th went to see the popular comic actor Frederick Robson in a piece called The Porter’s Knot. It was an adaptation by John Oxenford of a French play by Messieurs Cormon and Grangé. Victoria recalls: ‘There is such a funny song Robson sings in the last verse of which he speaks of what might have been his lot, had he been a cobbler’s son & sent to the “Foundling Hospital, where the boys are dressed in woollen clothes, to warm their little limbs, – & they smell of yellow soap & sing like Cherubims”.’

This is at best a curious form of humour, and yet the piece is described in the Illustrated London News as having a subject ‘well calculated to appeal to English sympathies’:

The Englishness of the play apparently resides in its comfortable assurance of love and honour redeemed, worth and virtuous hard work rewarded, and the restoration of the prodigal son to the family home. The Porter’s Knot sentimentalises a story which was being less happily played out in the courts of London, where parents were unable to cover sons’ losses, and where imprisonment, hard labour, and suicide were the more usual results of financial loss and the criminality it could lead to, and indeed in Adam Bede where neither of the prodigal characters returns home unscathed. No wonder Victoria enjoyed a play that had enabled her to proclaim at the State Opening of parliament earlier in the month: ‘I am happy to think that, in the internal state of the country, there is nothing to excite disquietude, and much to call for satisfaction and thankfulness’; specifically, ‘Pauperism and crime have considerably diminished during the past year, and a spirit of general contentment prevails.’²³

The Queen and her Government were not, however, the best judges of their country. Unemployment was at a relatively low level, but it didn’t eradicate social distress. Reynolds’s Newspaper directly disputed this part of Victoria’s speech, describing the alleged decrease in pauperism and crime as ‘equivocal, and by no means supported by the experience of the judges or the state of the gaols’.²⁴ But quite apart from the partiality of her speech, Victoria’s comments on the play’s subject matter show how the plight of the poor was readily translated into entertainment for the middle classes, whether in theatre, in the court reports of the daily newspapers, or in fiction.

This is the situation that Adam Bede recognised, challenged, and sought to remedy by trying to invoke an empathetic response in its readers, which would both surpass the easy satisfaction of popular art and necessarily entail a form of critical and moral self-consciousness. Whilst Eliot was the author most consistently concerned with this end, she was not alone. Julia Tilt’s Millicent Neville appeared in August. It was the fourth novel by Tilt, who was also a poet, and it was received warmly by The Standard, which claimed over-optimistically that it would ‘rank high among the novels of a season which has produced “Adam Bede”’.²⁵ The Morning Chronicle’s critics were less impressed, finding the novel ‘flippantly written’, ‘silly ignorant’ and a danger to family morals in the very muted account of a seduction of a young milliner in the West Indies, which left her with an illegitimate child.²⁶ The child, a minor character in Millicent’s story, is, unlike Hetty’s baby, brought up by her devoted mother, becomes a singer, and is brought over to England to seek her fame.

Tilt is more reflective than most authors about her writing, noting: ‘There is no need to paint a man blacker than he is. I am not writing a novel portraying model patterns of virtue on the one hand and double-dyed villains on the other. I am simply telling a true story’ (I, p. 176). This echoes Eliot’s treatment of realism in fiction in her review ‘The Natural History of German Life’ (1856), the precursor of Adam Bede’s chapter 17, where she had written that ‘a picture of human life such as a great artist can give surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment’ and cites ‘opera peasants’ (Ashton, ed., p. 263) as an example of the evil of the unreality of some artists’ representations. A similar sentiment appears in Millicent Neville:

The conceit is less well-developed than in Eliot, but the approach and its repudiation of ‘opera peasants’ – an exemplary idea borrowed by Eliot from John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843–1860) – is clear, and suggests a debt to Eliot’s form of realism, as seen first in Scenes of Clerical Life.

Geraldine Jewsbury’s Right or Wrong (which appeared in the Hurst and Blackett advertisement above) and Adam Bede share an interesting insistence on the sacred importance of home to their heroes. In both novels, the home becomes the measure and the means of redemption.²⁷ Jewsbury’s novel insists on an attention to domestic details, which closely echo Eliot’s emphasis on the quotidian in Adam Bede. Adam builds and improves homes and their furniture; Jewsbury’s novel goes into minute details of interior decoration (‘The walls were light-grey, stenciled with a graceful trellis pattern, wreathed with green leaves’)²⁸ whilst she asserts the spiritual nature of the home that her hero Paul creates for his wife: ‘to him a Home meant so much, something so noble, so sacred, such an innermost life, that the materials took, under his hands, a meaning and expression quite different to their actual existence as articles of furniture’ (II, pp. 122–23). Jewsbury’s narrator continues:

This moment speaks to the ways in which the new technologies of the day, of which the microscope was one of the most accessible, literally offered new views of the familiar world, defamiliarising it through investing the familiar with unanticipated, intrinsic beauty. Jewsbury attempts to encourage her reader’s ‘realization’ of daily life as the repository of wonder and beauty, as do Eliot and scientists of that year, like Lewes, Darwin, and Philip Gosse, for whom the microscope was a revelatory instrument (see Chapter 6).

Jewsbury and Eliot use the domestic as the vehicle, the essence, and the substance of their approach to fiction, and Eliot’s use of the home lies at the heart of the aesthetic, which is exemplified in Adam Bede and which expounds the moral implications of such microscopic attention to domestic detail. In chapter 17 of Adam Bede, ‘In Which the Story Pauses a Little’, she writes of the ‘many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise’ that:

In Eliot, reverence for the familiar, customary details of home is both a recognition and an enabling of a shared humanity, a ‘deep human sympathy’, which over-rides the claims of conventional physical beauty, which was celebrated in popular fiction and the more rarefied visual arts:

This is one of the most famous of Eliot’s expressions of her aesthetic, of her conviction of the morality of a right apprehension of beauty in commonplace things. Properly employed, she argues, this apprehension will build cross-class understanding through art’s engendering of ‘deep human sympathy’. Fiction is being employed by both Eliot and some of her contemporaries to extend the scope of her readers’ sense of the familiar, by recognising the commonality of experiences like the domestic across a range of unfamiliar groups within society, particularly the poor, with whom they might not come into contact. The social and political context of February 1859 shows exactly how urgently this was needed.

The Popularity of Adam Bede

In Blackwood’s review, W. L. Collins compares Adam Bede with other tales of female preachers and fictional Puritans, arguing that this novel diverges from its contemporaries in its truthfulness. He writes, ‘in the volumes before us we think we have the genuine article’ (p. 491):

Throughout the review, the spectre of popular fiction lurked as something alongside which this particular novel had to be measured. As already noted, John Chapman wrote in the Westminster Review that ‘swinging on a gate is an intellectual amusement compared with reading most of’ ‘the crowd of novels which swarm from the press each year’ (Chapman, p. 486), and Ann Mozley agreed that, ‘A glance over any chance selection of novels of the day brings out one fact concerning style, that a certain facility belongs to the time without any body or substance to support it … it is surprising with what ease, and even promise, a novel will start, which in a chapter or two degenerates into the most vapid extravagance’.²⁹ ‘Ludicrous’, ‘capricious’, and other similar adjectives follow in her account of more popular fare, before the review concludes thus: ‘The insipidity of such [fiction] is felt when a picture of real nature [i.e. Adam Bede] is brought into competition with them, like fresh morning upon a revel. Such a contrast we have welcomed in the impressive tale to which our longest notice has been devoted’ (Mozley, p. 472).

To some extent, of course, these novels are straw men to be picked off in a one-sided competition with George Eliot. But as we have seen, some reviewers struggled to articulate Adam Bede’s innovative qualities. In this context, Ann Mozley’s substantial and thoughtful review of Adam Bede in Bentley’s Quarterly Review is instructive. She described it as ‘the most absorbing and original novel we have had for many a year’, one which employs ‘microscopic insight’ into characters, and which was contributing to the development of the novel as a genre (pp. 433, 443). She analysed the grounds of the novel’s popularity and suggested that from her position of isolation Eliot had been able to form a bond with her unknown readers through her novel’s ‘appeal to universal assent and sympathy’ (p. 435), something utterly foreign to the authors of the popular novels Mozley reviews alongside Adam Bede. Mozley roots the novel’s attraction in two aspects: first, the novel works through awakening sympathy in others, as Jewsbury had suggested in her earlier review, and sympathy specifically for ‘the people we live amongst [who] are just as full of interest as those whom other people have made famous’ (p. 440). Through the process of giving us ‘the gradual growth of a thought, or impulse, from its first unconscious stirring in the kindred nature to its maturity in speech and action’ (p. 440), we are invited to find common ground, and thus the capacity to sympathise with characters’ plights. Second, the novel has exceptional powers of ‘association’, that is, the active creation of memories of places which are ‘sacred’, ‘spots to which habit has so closely allied us that we see ourselves reflected in them; we belong to them, and they to us’; ‘It is in such moments that we feel our whole being; the past, the present are one; a sense of harmony pervades us; every gentle feeling is in the ascendant’, and through this experience, ‘perception is immediately quickened’, and ‘love is generated’ (p. 438). Mozley is describing here the presence of the customary in Eliot, the sense of home-like comfort and familiarity in the moment of apprehension that blends past and present.

In the same review, Mozley gives short shrift to other novels, including Anthony Trollope’s The Bertrams (see Chapter 4). In it, Mozley finds nothing like true heroism but rather:

George Eliot’s ‘keener observation and clearer insight’ had established new measures of success and aspiration for the novel, and the figure of the ‘hero’.

However, another novel in Mozley’s article interestingly supplemented Eliot’s own work. Oliné Keese had lived in Tasmania from 1848 to 1853, and her novel, The Broad Arrow, is an account of the degradation which transportation wrought not only on prisoners but on those who policed and oversaw their punishment in Tasmania: Keese dwells ‘on the impossibility of escape from moral pollution, on the hardening effect on the sympathies, and on the atmosphere of slavery and slave ownership it engenders’ (p. 468). The novel tells the story of Maida Gwynnham, wrongly transported when she takes the blame for the crimes of her well-to-do lover, and of how she fares as a transportee. Her life as a domestic servant in Tasmania is minutely mapped out in its small moments of lack of trust, its indignities, its hardships, and the occasional respite offered by a sympathetic clergyman. As an account of domestic work, the novel effectively supplies the missing portion of Hetty’s story, as well as further ironising Hetty’s desire to go into service. As Mozley wrote, ‘It is on the women that the failure of this self-respect [occasioned by transportation] and the utter loss of caste tell the most; in them the degradation is greatest, the change most fundamental’ (p. 470). There is nothing noble about Keese’s heroine: she resents her servitude, works hard but unhappily, and misjudges acts of kindness that come her way. She is devoted to her virtuous young mistress but keeps an unassailable distance between them. Whilst as readers we are invited to regret Hetty’s not having made it back to England, Keese’s novel shows what Hetty might have become: hardened, cynical, with a core of goodness buried far away from public scrutiny; fundamentally corrupted by ‘the turn of thought, the language, the temptations, the pleasures, and the trials of convict domestic service’ (p. 469); not trusted, not respected, and with little incentive to reform. Indeed, removed from Dinah’s influence, Hetty might feel with Maida that:

The novel has a supplemental relationship to Adam Bede, participating unwittingly in the popular practice of the sequel, despite its appearing simultaneously with the original – enabling readers imaginatively to participate in a punishment left unspoken by Eliot. The novel also goes some way to further belying Eliot’s dismissal of women’s novels as ‘silly’: the subject matter here is sober, and its treatment far from sentimental or sensational.

To return to the question of the enormous popularity of Adam Bede, we should note that the character to whom most attention is paid in contemporary reviews, despite Hetty’s fascinations, is unquestionably Mrs Poyser. For The Times, she is ‘the pivot on which the plot revolves … the chorus who is continually intervening’.³¹ She is, for some reviewers, a familiar comic character, with The Times comparing her to Dickens’s Sam Weller, Mrs Gamp, or Mrs Nickleby, and every review contained its favourite nugget of Mrs Poyser’s eminently quotable wisdom, with the august Edinburgh Review devoting six pages of a fourteen-page review to her sayings. Her ability to be quoted, both in reviews and within the novel itself, is her pre-eminent feature and function. As The Times wrote, ‘Her wisdom is always coming out either spoken by herself, or quoted by somebody else, or mentioned by the author’. The reviews thus enact and perpetuate Mrs Poyser’s primary role, and in doing so, acknowledge a keystone of Eliot’s novel: the quotation works by first establishing and then confirming familiarity with a pre-existing statement. The act of quoting enables the sympathetic recognition of a common viewpoint or shared experience, both within and beyond the parameters of the novel. Ann Mozley wondered, ‘Do any two people ever talk three minutes over this story without quoting, with a particularly sly relish, the definition of Mr Ryde’s style of preaching, as though it met some case very near home, which, out of respect or delicacy, they will not further indicate?’³² The subject of a dull sermon may indeed have been ‘a general one’, but to quote Mrs Poyser’s views makes it ‘go home to each individual’s business and bosom’, and speaker and listener are thus enabled both to build a link with their fellows through the bridge of the quotation, and also tacitly to acknowledge the emotional impact of the novel as grounded in its recognition and invoking of a common experience already existing in the past, in the memory. The quotation, which must be known in order to be quoted and recognised, echoes that familiarity. The sharing that is inherent in quotation recognises that the act of quotation and the experiences that it invokes as universal and of long-standing are based in custom: to quote is to create a customary form of knowledge.

This is, in Mozley’s perceptive review, intrinsic to the success of a novel which ‘has found its way into hands indifferent to all previous fiction, to readers who welcome it as the voice of their own experience in a sense no other book has ever been’ (p. 434). Mrs Poyser confirms a communal set of values which might even displace the centrality of the church through the novel’s ‘well-directed moral[s]’ (p. 437). Her being quoted in the House of Commons on 8 March (see Chapter 2), as noted by the Blackwood’s reviewer, cemented Mrs Poyser’s position ‘amongst British worthies’,³³ such as those who were being exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery, who might have appeared in Charles Knight’s multi-volume Cabinet Portrait Gallery of British Worthies (1844), or who adorned the walls of the Athenaeum Club.³⁴ The act of quoting Mrs Poyser extended the novel’s initial reach and confirmed in its affirmation through a form of retrospection, which is fundamental to the act of quotation, the novel’s working primarily through the medium of the past that is both Adam Bede’s subject matter and the novel’s creative vehicle. Mrs Poyser epitomises the ‘country scenes in “Adam Bede” looked back upon with an almost passionate tenderness, as though the senses ached for the genial old home’ (Mozley, p. 436). This was the end-point of more than one readerly engagement with Adam Bede.³⁵

Eliot’s growing confidence in the novel becomes clear later in the year when she writes to John Blackwood:

John Blackwood replied by describing Eliot as ‘the most popular author of the day’ (30 October; Letters, III, p. 192). The past, home, ‘country scenes’, and ‘thoughts which have been lying half developed and struggling for expression in many minds’ (Mozley, p. 434), not startling novelty, were at the heart of the novel’s success.