Publisher's Synopsis
I do not remember, in all her novels, an instance of gross misery of any kind not directly caused by the folly of the sufferer. There are no pictures of vice or poverty or squalor. There are no rags, no gin, no brutal passions. That average humanity which she favours is very borné in intellect, but very genial in heart, as a glance at its repre-sentatives in her pages will convince us. In Adam Bede, there is Mr. Irwine, the vicar, with avowedly no qualifica-tion for his profession, placidly playing chess with his mother, stroking his dogs, and dipping into Greek trage-dies; there is the excellent Martin Poyser at the Farm, good-natured and rubicund; there is his wife, somewhat too sharply voluble, but only in behalf of cleanliness and honesty and order; there is Captain Donnithorne at the Hall, who does a poor girl a mortal wrong, but who is, af-ter all, such a nice, good-looking fellow; there are Adam and Seth Bede, the carpenter's sons, the strongest, purest, most discreet of young rustics.
