He is not someone I’d like to disappoint. Adam’s plainspoken attitude, amplified by Eliot’s use of a strong dialect, casts him as someone who views life in very plain, black-and-white terms. A major incident early in the book concerns Adam having to make up work left unfinished by his ailing father, who has succumbed to alcoholism in his later years. He is a paragon of responsibility and moral propinquity. The titular character is an upright and eligible young carpenter. The plot of Adam Bede really is one of the simplest of all time (though it takes a while to become evident). In hindsight, I can see how her style is less polished than her later works however, at the time, I was captivated by all the hallmarks of Eliot’s writing that make her my favourite Victorian novelist.

I didn’t realize this until I read the introduction after finishing the book. For my third experience I’ve chosen Adam Bede, her first novel. A very good set indeed, well-margined and bright.So far I’ve been reading George Eliot’s work in a reverse-chronological order. Occasional light rubbing to extremities, a few corners gently bumped, a little loss of leather to headcaps of four vols., contents mildly toned, internally clean. III of Daniel Deronda bound without errata and vol. IV of Middlemarch bound without fly-title, vol. Mill on the Floss bound without half-titles, vol. Late 19th-century dark brown half morocco by Tout, spines with raised bands, gilt lettering and decoration in compartments, double gilt rules to boards, marbled sides and endpapers, top edges gilt, red silk book markers.

12 works in 29 volumes, octavo (192 x 129 mm). Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge University Press, online database. Tout was also a member of the early staff of Karslake's Hampstead Bindery, which opened in Charing Cross in 1898. He then worked in a bindery in Whitechapel with William Coward, continuing on his own after 1880. From 1868 through 1879, bookbinder Samuel Tout (1841-1902) operated in Nassau Street in Soho, London. Her biographer Kathryn Hughes calls her the 'last Victorian' because she thought it possible to face the crises of her time without 'shattering in shards'' (Orlando). Her writing evinces a strong belief in progress, which for her meant the gradual improvement of the world through difficult, often imperceptible human effort, sometimes characterised as meliorism.

One of the major novelists of the 19th century and a leading practitioner of fictional realism, George Eliot (1819-1880) was 'the most extensively anthologized novelist among her contemporaries. A handsomely bound library set comprising all of Eliot's novels, two short stories, one poetry collection, one volume of her posthumously collected essays, and the three-volume biography by her husband J.

Adam Bede by George Eliot