How are Romantic ideas reflected in the telling of Adam Bede?
Although she called herself a realist and eschewed the sentimental, Eliot was very much influenced in her pastoral depictions in Adam Bede by the poetry of William Wordsworth. (Arthur Donnithorne even mentions the book written by Wordsworth and his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, in Chapter 5). Wordsworth’s poems on rural people, though to a degree sentimental, brought attention to the real tragedies of country folk as their peaceful way of life was disappearing at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, the time frame of Adam Bede. Wordsworth’s portrait of the shepherd Michael, for instance, who loses his son to the dissolutions of city life; or Margaret in “The Ruined Cottage” whose husband goes off to war and leaves her in poverty; or the deformed leech-gatherer who teaches the poet how to endure a hard life—these were the literary archetypes that Eliot drew on. Hetty is similarly like Wordsworth’s Martha Ray in “The Thorn” who kills her
