It is clearly ironic that Arthur, more responsible than anyone else for the tragedy contained in this novel, should be so dismissive of such themes, and attracted more to stories such as “The Ancient Mariner” but he is dismissive not out of cruelty or cold-heartedness, but out of an inability to see the significance of “nature’s unambitious underwood”. The “twaddling stuff” refers presumably to the various poems of everyday rural lives, “nature’s unambitious underwood”, that was a favourite theme both of Wordsworth, and, under his direct influence, it seems, of George Eliot herself. It’s a volume of poems, ‘Lyrical Ballads’: most of them seem to be twaddling stuff but the first is in a different style – ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is the title.” “I know you are fond of queer, wizard-like stories.

Lyrical Ballads itself – published one year before the start of the story of Adam Bede – is explicitly mentioned in the novel: Arthur Donnithorne, the future squire, presents a volume to his godmother:

In that poem, we are presented with a woman who is demented with guilt and grief, and who, it is implied, may have murdered her illegitimate child. This is, one suspects, a somewhat familiar theme: it had occurred earlier, and more famously, in Wordsworth’s poem “The Thorn”, included in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. The lines are from The Excursion – not admittedly one of Wordsworth’s better-known efforts – in which, at one point, a pastor tells of a young woman, now dead, who had been seduced and abandoned, and who is buried next to a baby to whom she had given birth in “distress and shame”. Upon whose lapse, or error, something more I speak of such among the flock that swerved

One comes to a novel by the author of Middlemarch with the highest of expectations, even when one knows that the novel is her first, and that the author may not, so early in her career, have completely mastered her craft, or be in full or even partial possession yet of a mature artistic vision.Īdam Bede is prefaced with a few lines by Wordsworth:Īnd flowers that prosper in the shade.

Bede eliot