Special Collections
Book of the Month, November 2009
Adam Bede
George Eliot
Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1859
[S.L.] I [Eliot - 1859]
First published on 1 February 1859, the three-decker Adam Bede was George Eliot’s first full-length novel. It was also her most successful. A second print run was required as early as April 1859, the first two-volume edition appeared in June 1859, and, with 80,035 copies printed between 1859 and 1880, it went through more print runs and sold more copies during Eliot’s lifetime than any other of her novels. Jane Carlyle and Charles Dickens both praised it highly, the Scottish preacher John Caird was an hour late for an appointment because his fascination with the work caused him to forget time; and reviews described it as ‘a work of true genius’ (The Athenaeum, 26 February 1859) and as ‘a first-rate novel [whose] author takes rank at once among the masters of the art’ (The Times, 12 April 1859). Eliot herself wrote of the novel itself: ‘I love it very much’ (16 November 1858) and on 17 April 1859 recorded its success as ‘so triumphantly beyond anything I had dreamed of’.
George Eliot began writing Adam Bede at the end of October, 1857. Its nucleus is a story recounted by Eliot’s Methodist aunt of a young woman called Mary Voce who in 1802 was condemned to death for infanticide. Eliot’s aunt spent a night with the girl in prison, finally bringing her to the confession that she had refused to make before, and accompanied her in the cart to the gallows. In the novel,the young woman, Hetty, exposes her illegitimate child on a hillside to die and is similarly convicted, but at the last minute her sentence is commuted to transportation.
This copy is from the library of Sir Louis Sterling of first and fine editions of English literature. An earlier owner’s veneration for the work is reflected by the fact that it has been rebound in full calf by Sotheran.
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