Local color, as a literary term, refers to depictions of life and character in a particular locality. The customs of the people, their speech, their peculiar way of looking at things is presented to the reader, often in a slightly sentimentalized or nostalgic form. Dickens' Mr. Micawber and the Artful Dodger are local figures, and their environments are local color settings. Bret Harte is probably the best-known American practitioner of the genre.
Comic relief is a familiar term which needs little discussion. An author will seek to relieve the intensity of a serious plot line by inserting comic characters or situations; these entertaining diversions help keep the reader's interest lively and balance out the fictional picture of our half-tragic, half-comic world. Probably the most famous example of the use of comic relief in English literature is the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, where the sight of the drunken porter relaxes the audience after the murder of Duncan.
Eliot uses both these devices in Adam Bede. In a sense, most of the novel is local color; the settings and the speech of the characters obviously belong to a specific time and place. But certain characters function almost entirely as local color figures: Wiry Ben, for example, or Chad's Bess, or Mr. Craig. These people are part of the novel's background; they provide a concrete milieu in which the central action of the story takes place. Mr. Poyser is a typical (though unusually skilled) Warwickshire farmer; Wiry Ben exemplifies the typical attitudes of the Warwickshire town laborer of his day.
Eliot gives a lot of attention to the habits and customs of the local people. Most of Chapters 6 and 18, for example, describe what ordinary people did and said on ordinary days in the Warwickshire countryside in 1800. The operation of the Hall Farm and the description of Sunday morning churchgoing are presented not because they are relevant to the novel's conflict but because they help make up the picture of a realistic, functioning, physical world. Parts of Book III (especially Chapter 25 on the games at Arthur's birthday party) show how people celebrated an important event; Chapter 53 describes the local ritual of the harvest supper.
