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Adam Bede

A transitional work. Like her earlier “Scenes from Clerical Life,” we have a Hardy-esque assortment of country characters looking for love, battling the traditional distribution of labor and resources, getting pushed into terrible terrible crimes (Hetty is like Hardy’s Tess). Eliot adds a religious element (the Methodist preacher Dinah) that echoes the religious stuff in Mill, at which time Eliot picks up her social critique (criticizing St Ogg’s), which will snowball into her two sweeping looks at all facets of Victorian life, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda.

Who wins? The preacher and the good carpenter, who’s a good worker.

• A passage about old v new leisure: 484-5
  • “Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a walk in the fields from ‘afternoon church’” that occurred only “in those old leisurely times, when the boat, gliding sleepily along the canal, was the newest locomotive wonder.”
  • “Leisure is gone—gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses”
  • “Ingenious philosophers” say that the new inventions are there to create leisure for us: “to create leisure for mankind”
    • “Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in”
  • New Leisure: “exciting novels,” excursion-trains, periodicals, museums, “prone even to scientific theorizing”
  • Old Leisure: “read only one newspaper” and “free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time”
    • “contemplative…rather stout…of easy digestion” “undiseased by hypothesis”
    • happily ignorant
    • his scenery: country, pears, apricots, homesteads, “sauntering by the fruit-wall”
    • NO HAMLET: “not squeamish” (no “doubts and qualms”) but jolly; not tortured by doubts, but instead likes his beer and prefers the shorter sermons and will sleep through morning church
    • “Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure.”
    • “slept the sleep of the irresponsible”
  • Old Leisure, she says, be nice to Old Leisure. “He never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the Times or Sartor Resartus.”