"With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen, I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799."
The first paragraph of Adam Bede in itself is enough to mark the novel as a pre-modern-century product. With few exceptions, modern authors accept Henry James' notion that a novel should create a world unto itself; a novelist should not take the pose of someone "telling a story" to a group of listeners but should simply present a self-contained, complete imitation of reality and let it stand on its own merits.
In Eliot's time, the "dear reader" technique was widely used. The method derives from the earlier popular conception that fiction, since it was literally "untrue," was a base deception and morally unhealthy. Eighteenth-century authors, especially Defoe, took pains to insist that their novels were really accounts of true happenings, and, although the nineteenth century gradually came to accept fiction as fiction, the custom of speaking directly to the reader, as the editor of a journal or the author of a set of memoirs would do, persisted. Probably the most celebrated example of the use of the technique is Thackeray's Vanity Fair, where the author refers to his characters as "puppets" and admits almost shyly that he created an artificial world. The impulse to separate truth from fiction was still alive; it took the novel about another forty years to take its place as a serious art form which did not apologize for its own existence.
