SOURCE: “Adam Bede, from The Times,” in A Century of George Eliot Criticism, edited by George Haight, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965, pp. 2-8.

Originally published in 1859, the following review praises Adam Bede for demonstrating that despite social differences, people are more similar than not, and recommends the author for imbuing her characters with goodness.

There can be no mistake about Adam Bede. It is a first-rate novel, and its author takes rank at once among the masters of the art. Hitherto known but as the writer of certain tales to which he gave the modest title of Scenes, and which displayed only the buds of what we have here in full blossom, he has produced a work which, after making every allowance for certain crudities of execution, impresses us with a sense of the novelist's maturity of thought and feeling. Very seldom are so much freshness of style and...