Adam Bede. One of "George Eliot's" earlier and most powerful novels, which she began writing Oct. 22, 1857, and the last proof-sheets of which she corrected, Jan. 15, 1859. It was published by Blackwood, who agreed to pay the author £800 for four years' copyright, but the sales were so great that he paid her £2,000 before his copyright expired. The first volume was finished at Richmond, March, 1858; the second was written at Dresden and finished the following September; the third was despatched to the printer, Nov. 16th.

The germ of the story was an anecdote told the writer by her Methodist Aunt Samuel, concerning an incident of her own experience. Years before, Mrs. Samuel visited a condemned criminal, a girl who had murdered her child. The good lady spent the night praying with her, and on the following day rode in the cart with her to the place of execution. The guilty mother had refused to admit her crime until the late morning of her earthly life, and then broke down and confessed. "George Eliot" was deeply affected by the story, and she thought much upon it, until it at length came into her mind to blend it with some other recollections of her aunt, and some points in her father's early life and character, in one continuous story. The character of Dinah, she says, grew out of her recollections of this aunt, but Dinah was not at all like her. The character of Adam was formed in a certain degree on that of her father, but Adam was a very different person from her father. Hetty was of course suggested by the child-murderer.

The manuscript of "Adam Bede" was inscribed: "To my dear husband, George Henry Lewes, I give the manuscript of a work which would never have been written but for the happiness which his love has conferred on my life."

When this book first appeared the public did not know who "George Eliot" was, and though the name was understood to be a nom de plume, the identity of the author was so long a subject of speculation, that a clergyman named Liggins took advantage of the occasion to claim "Adam Bede" and "Scenes of Clerical Life" (previously published) as his own literary productions.

"George Eliot" had scarcely established her title to the authorship, before the popularity of this work caused an unscrupulous publisher to issue and advertise a miserable book called "Adam Bede, Junior," purporting to be a sequel, in which the gifted novelist had added to the original plot, in order to finish to the satisfaction of the public a story which in the opinion of many critics had been left incomplete. Another parasite of the same sort also appeared, entitled "Seth Bede." "Adam Bede" was soon translated into French, German, and Italian.

Adam Bede: a village carpenter in love with Dinah Morris [George Eliot, Adam Bede].