DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

'Good Teaching': Adam Bede and Education

Authors

Dinah Birch

Date of this Version

2010

Document Type

Article

Citation

The George Eliot Review 41 (2010)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

George Eliot's commitment to teaching motivates her writing from the first. Like many of those whose thinking was shaped by early nineteenth-century evangelicalism, she saw education as a vital responsibility. In 1847, when she was twenty-eight years old, she remarked to Sara Hennell that she thought '''Live and Teach" should be a proverb as well as "Live and Learn"'.1 Eliot's persistent interest in teaching and learning was a reason for her turning to fiction as her primary medium as a writer - not the only reason, but an important one. She had no inclination whatsoever to become a professional teacher, in a school or in any other formal context, and was often surprisingly suspicious of institutional channels for teaching. It was the practice of fiction that enabled her to reach a wide audience, and teach them in the way that she chose. In the years after her death the perception that she was primarily a didactic novelist hardly enhanced her critical reputation, for the impulse to teach was seen to reflect the heavy Victorian earnestness that writers of the fin-de-siècle and of modernism, and beyond, wanted to deflate. In fact, her pedagogic thinking is more complex, and often more divided, than readers and critics have generally recognized. Her ambivalence has many sources, but its deepest roots lie in a fruitful dissonance between different cultures of learning in her work, and different definitions of competing economies of knowledge - intellectual definitions, and concepts associated with the exercise of emotion and imagination.

These complications lie at the heart of Adam Bede (1859), where George Eliot is closely concerned with the multiple identities of knowledge, and the disparate methods through which it might be taught. In a novel that directly addresses both religious experience and the influence of feeling, Adam Bede's growing maturity is marked by his becoming 'a teacher as well as a learner'? Dinah Morris, whose Methodism stands at the moral centre of Adam Bede, is repeatedly acknowledged as a teacher, and her work is contrasted with the formal teaching practice of Bartle Massey, who runs a school. The legacies of George Eliot's youthful evangelicalism are evident in her representation of the distinctive work of these two teachers. But she was a poet, as well as a novelist, and the influence of her wide reading in Romantic literature is as pervasive as that of her evangelical faith. This ambitious novel is designed to persuade its readers that the sympathetic imagination is the foundation of a morally potent education.