DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Title

Adam Bede and Emigration

Authors

Josephine McDonagh

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

Although emigration to settler colonies was a widespread phenomenon in mid nineteenth century Britain, it is a theme to which George Eliot appears to give very little attention. Of all the works, Adam Bede is the novel which seems especially home-bound. Characters who go abroad do so in penitence: Hetty is transported to Australia, where she dies; and Arthur goes to the East to make up for having committed 'the sort of wrong that can never be made up for' ('Epilogue'). In so far as it is discussed in the novel, migration is the chimera of the mistaken Mr. Gedge, the landlord of the Royal Oak, who thought his neighbours such a 'poor lot' that he considers moving:

I think he had a dim idea that if he could migrate to a distant parish, he might find neighbours worthy of him, and indeed he did subsequently transfer himself to the Saracen's Head, which was doing a thriving business in the back street of a neighbouring market-town. But, oddly enough, he has found the people up that back street of precisely the same stamp as the inhabitants of Shepperton - 'a poor lot, sir, big and little, and them as comes for a go o’ in are not better than them as comes for a pint 0' two penny - a poor lot'. (ch.17)

Migration, as Mr. Gedge's reflections reveal, is the resort of fools or mistaken idealists, the product of his 'dim' imagination. Throughout, the novel appears to caution against all forms of internal movement. Even Dinah's peripatetic life as a Methodist preacher eventually ends as she settles down to a domestic life with Adam.

On the face of it, the novel sets up what Elizabeth Ermarth names as an 'ethic of mobility', in which moving is related to danger and conflict, and resolution with stasis and stability.2 This same 'ethic' is followed through in Eliot's subsequent works. Only in her final novel, Daniel Deronda, at the end of which Daniel and his new wife Mirah embark on a journey to found a new Jewish homeland, does she take up the subject of emigration and colonial settlement in a direct way. Thus to think about Adam Bede in terms of emigration may seem wrong-headed or fruitless.