Having established that her book is to focus on the common people, Eliot now introduces the gentry. Arthur, the local representative of the aristocracy, serves as the agent for provoking the novel's crisis, while Mr. Irwine, with Dinah, is the focal point for the development of its moral message.
The introduction of the gentry creates the need for some background information. The reader should try to understand the relationship which existed between the country aristocracy and the lower classes around 1800. In the first place, Squire Donnithorne, Arthur's grandfather, is literally the local landowner; his estate includes the land on which the town of Hayslope and its surrounding farms are built, and most of the other characters in the novel are tenants holding leases on his property. This economic arrangement, coupled with the traditional reverence of the common people for the aristocracy, accounts for the great respect with which the lower class people in the novel treat Arthur, heir to the estate. This great social distinction will become very important later on.
Mr. Irwine is an attractive figure. He does not take his religion as seriously as Dinah takes hers. He is not very hard-working or ambitious, Eliot tells us, and he is not very interested in teaching his parishioners the niceties of dogma. But he has charity, and this for Eliot is the important consideration. Mr. Irwine shares with Dinah a sincere love for humanity. They do not express themselves in the same way, but each applies principles in daily life; what Dinah does out of a love for God the rector does out of a generalized benevolence. This humanitarian attitude is significant in several ways; for the moment it will suffice to note that it is the attitude which Adam will eventually come to. His pride sometimes prevents him from reacting sympathetically toward others.
Mr. Irwine, then, is in general an easygoing, sophisticated, comfortable man, one who, more by instinct than by training, strives to behave like a Christian in any given situation. The picture we get of Arthur is much more ambiguous. He is obviously a charming fellow, very casual, very affable, very popular for his good nature among those who know him. But as the novel progresses, we also learn that Arthur is vain and dangerously overconfident; he is not aware of his own faults and thus can take no steps to compensate for them. The negative aspects of Arthur's personality come to the fore only subtly in this chapter, but Eliot does give the young man some dialogue which indicates a certain shallowness. He refers, for example, to his upcoming twenty-first birthday as "the grand epoch of my majority" and complains lazily of being bored in the country.
