Adam Bede and Work

Abstract Built from the materials of George Eliot’s own rural upbringing, Adam Bede lives and breathes through the rhythms of agricultural work. Work, which both organises narrative time and determines character relations, shapes the fictional world of Hayslope, circa 1799, socially as well as aesthetically. In this, Eliot’s first full novel, however, the dually subjective and communal aspects of work—its organisation of the individual mind as well as the social body—were the perfect context for Eliot’s experiments with the democratising possibilities of realist art. Alongside her contemporary sage writers, Eliot’s metaphysical and moral interest in work crossed boundaries of class, gender, and education, delving into the motivations and effects of work at its most primary level. This chapter argues that this motive of work and the discipline of realist aesthetics were necessarily linked for Eliot and that Adam Bede offers readers a portrait of this kinship.