For this novel she received four thousand dollars for the copyright for four years.  Fame had actually come.  All the literary world were talking about it.  John Murray said there had never been such a book.  Charles Reade said, putting his finger on Lisbeth’s account of her coming home with her husband from their marriage, “the finest thing since Shakespeare.”  A workingman wrote:  “Forgive me, dear sir, my boldness in asking you to give us a cheap edition.  You would confer on us a great boon.  I can get plenty of trash for a few pence, but I am sick of it.”  Mr. Charles Buxton said, in the House of Commons:  “As the farmer’s wife says in Adam Bede, ’It wants to be hatched over again and hatched different.’” This of course greatly helped to popularize the book.

To George Eliot all this was cause for the deepest gratitude.  They were able now to rent a home at Wandworth, and move to it at once.  The poverty and the drudgery of life seemed over.  She said:  “I sing my magnificat in a quiet way, and have a great deal of deep, silent joy; but few authors, I suppose, who have had a real success, have known less of the flush and the sensations of triumph that are talked of as the accompaniments of success.  I often think of my dreams when I was four or five and twenty.  I thought then how happy fame would make me....  I am assured now that Adam Bede was worth writing,—­worth living through those long years to write.  But now it seems impossible that I shall ever write anything so good and true again.”  Up to this time the world did not know who George Eliot was; but as a man by the name of Liggins laid claim to the authorship, and tried to borrow money for his needs because Blackwood would not pay him, the real name of the author had to be divulged.

Five thousand copies of Adam Bede were sold the first two weeks, and sixteen thousand the first year.  So excellent was the sale that Mr. Blackwood sent her four thousand dollars in addition to the first four.  The work was soon translated into French, German, and Hungarian.  Mr. Lewes’ Physiology of Common Life was now published, but it brought little pecuniary return.

The reading was carried on as usual by the two students.  The Life of George Stephenson; the Electra of Sophocles; the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, Harriet Martineau’s British Empire in India; and History of the Thirty Years’ Peace; Beranger, Modern Painters, containing some of the finest writing of the age; Overbech on Greek art; Anna Mary Howitt’s book on Munich; Carlyle’s Life of Frederick the Great; Darwin’s Origin of Species; Emerson’s Man the Reformer, “which comes to me with fresh beauty and meaning”; Buckle’s History of Civilization; Plato and Aristotle.

An American publisher now offered her six thousand dollars for a book, but she was obliged to decline, for she was writing the Mill on the Floss, in 1860, for which Blackwood gave her ten thousand dollars for the first edition of four thousand copies, and Harper & Brothers fifteen hundred dollars for using it also.  Tauchnitz paid her five hundred for the German reprint.