'Fine old Leisure! Do not be severe upon him, and judge him by our modern standard. Old Leisure was quite a different personage He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling Even idleness is eager now-eager for amusement prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Leisure is gone-gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow waggons, and the pedlars, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.'Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a sunny walk through the fields from 'afternoon church'-as such walks used to be in those old leisurely times, when the boat, gliding sleepily along the canal, was the newest locomotive wonder when Sunday books had most of them old brown-leather covers, and opened with remarkable precision always in one place. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. In its thematic focus, if not also its artistic strategies, Adam Bede offers an important slant on the layman’s faith and so the relation of religion and literature. The narrator’s running commentary, epitomized in the seventeenth chapter unabashedly titled “In Which the Story Pauses a Little,” becomes so important a part of the total narrative that we (may) finally recognize that the work before us, in fact, is both novel and essay. 1 Like other great novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in England, Adam Bede is a rather unholy mix of narrative and essay, the narrator the embodiment of the author’s values, its “massive” slowness both reflective of the era in which it takes place and indicative of a way of life-in harmony with nature-that George Eliot prizes and sets against more modern times.

Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans Cross, leaves little to the reader’s interpreting, for her relentless and loquacious narrator constantly intervenes, filling in details, explaining, and reassuring. Many if not most readers of George Eliot’s Adam Bede find distracting and annoying not only the West Midlands dialect of the late eighteenth century but also the massively slow pace of the story, partly the result of obtrusive and irritating narrative commentary.

Adam george eliot