All of these qualities are observable in Adam Bede; indeed, as Eliot's first novel, it is her first experiment in the new fiction. Its revolutionary aspect is generally recognized; many scholars point to 1859, the year in which Adam Bede, Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities were published, as one of the major turning points in the breakdown of mid-Victorian certainties. Adam Bede is a test case for a new view of the function of prose fiction; Eliot clearly feels that the novel need not be merely a form of entertainment for those seeking diversion from the problems of real life, but that it could, like poetry, be a vehicle for the expression and teaching of fine and serious ideas about the quality of the human condition. Samuel Chew, in A Literary History of England, noted that Eliot's work concentrates on the elucidation of moral issues and concluded: "If these issues are no longer felt to be vital, . . . the raison d'etre of the stories . . . is enfeebled, if, indeed, it does not vanish altogether."
It is difficult to see how the issue of man's responsibility towards himself and his fellows can cease to be vital, and the resurgence of interest in Eliot in our own day indicates how improbable it is that the relevance of her ideas and the value of the books in which she expressed them will "vanish altogether" in the foreseeable future.
