SOURCE: “Adam Bede: History, Narrative, Culture,” in Victorians Institute Journal, Vol. 22, 1994, pp. 55-83.

In the following essay, McLaughlin examines the historical and ideological foundations of the English middle class, and identifies Eliot's Adam Bede as a narrative attempt to normalize and legitimize this growing segment of the population.

Late in October 1857, Engels wrote to Marx about the economic crisis then developing in England. Engels, who had predicted “a dies irae like no other,” now thought the times propitious: “Nous avons maintenant de la chance,” he wrote (Marx and Engels 197). Marx agreed that luck was on their side and he wrote that he could do little else besides work on what would become the Grundrisse and keep records of the present crisis. Over the next several months the crisis steadily developed into “one of the worst depressions of the nineteenth century” (Hughes, Fluctuations 30) and seemed to portend a worldwide...