Adam Bede

First edition. 3 vols. 8vos. Pp. [vi], 325, [1, blank]; [vi], 374; [vi], 333, [1, blank]. Contemporary full calf, reddish-brown labels titled and ruled in gilt with raised bands to spines; russet-stained edges, marbled endpapers. Bound without half-titles and minus the publisher's catalogue to rear of vol. iii, as many sets were issued without one. Includes the statement 'The Right of Translation is reserved' to bottom of the title page. Some copies published without it (no priority established). 1/2,101 sets printed.

Bookplates of Claude Goldsmid-Montefiore (1858–1938), [the intellectual founder of Anglo-Liberal Judaism and the founding president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism] on paste-down front endpapers. Some flaking to board edges and folds (as can be seen on the images), light foxing mostly to prelims. and blank endpapers, else a clean, sound, and attractive set overall.

Published pseudonymously, despite the author's stature as a highly respected scholar, her first full-length novel, featuring seduction, unwanted pregnancy and infanticide in a pastoral setting, proved a critical and popular success and remained Eliot's most popular work during her lifetime. By the end of its first year, there were a total of 16,000 sets printed over seven editions. The Athenaeum praised it as a "novel of the highest class," and The Times called it "a first-rate novel." Eliot herself labelled it "a country story – full of the breath of cows and scent of hay."

The plot revolves around a love "rectangle" made up of a beautiful milkmaid, the young squire who seduces her, her unacknowledged suitor and title-character (modelled on Eliot's father), and the maid's cousin, a Methodist lay preacher. According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1967), "the plot is founded on a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris of the novel, of a confession of child-murder, made to her by a girl in prison." As per the ODNB "Adam Bede at once placed its author in the front rank of contemporary literature."

[Sadleir 812; Wolff 2056; Parrish p.12; Baker & Ross A4.1]