Readers have long noted the pervasiveness of sympathy in George Eliot's work. But why always sympathy? One cannot fully answer this question without attending to a crucial and yet still understudied context for Eliot's work: evangelicalism. It is from evangelical thought and practice that she gleaned the concept of what I will call sympathetic “insight,” which evangelicals privileged for its ability to “see” the real and to move between the dichotomous barriers of the in/visible and in/external. I want to suggest that even after Eliot no longer found compelling its accompanying theology, sympathetic “insight” persisted in her imagination as a way to see into and within her realist fictional worlds.Footnote ¹

In what follows, I will examine the role of evangelical sympathy in Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) in both its content — her descriptions of Methodist practice — and its form — its deployment as a narrative technique. Drawing on William Wilberforce's widely-read treatise A Practical View (Reference Wilberforce1797), I will demonstrate how a specifically evangelical sympathy shaped Eliot's first full-length novel. This analysis thus aims to contribute to the ongoing scholarship on sympathy in the work of Eliot, who was raised in the evangelical faith, by recontextualizing it within contemporary religious discourse.Footnote ² Attention to how this religious context informs Eliot's earlier prose and continues to do so, as I will suggest in closing, in her later novel Middlemarch (1871–72) reveals the ways in which Eliot reimagined the technique of evangelical sympathetic insight as a literary resource.

Beginning “in the year of our Lord 1799,” Adam Bede sketches a portrait of turn-of-the-century evangelical practice through the character of Dinah Morris, a Methodist lay-preacher who delivers a sermon on the Hayslope village green in the novel's second chapter (61; bk. 1, ch. 1). She begins with a prayer:

Dinah's refrain of “see Thee” organizes the rhythm and imagery of her prayer, and her insistence that her auditors “see” is inextricable from her insistence that Jesus is spatio-temporally present (“art with Thy people still”). The crucifixion story continues in the present as Jesus is physically and temporally suspended (“hanging”) before the eyes of those who can see. It is not only this past event but also the future that is present, for Dinah urges her auditors to see Jesus as he “wilt come again. . . at the last.” This vision is also perceptibly felt with “heart burn,” reminding the reader of John Wesley's pervasive account of his conversion experience when, as he wrote, “my heart was strangely warmed.”Footnote ³

Such a heart-warming experience of God's presence, achieved through the intensity of an inwardly felt realization, also characterizes Dinah's private prayer life. Eliot describes this later in the novel:

Dinah's prayer technique is based on the imaginative, inward sight of God as a “presence” that is closely tied to “feel[ing]. . . intensely.” This inward, felt sight — a particular type of “insight” — is also a sight of sympathy: through it she feels God's “Sympathy” and also herself feels as God does (her icy feelings become his warm and tender ones).

In the sermon that follows Dinah's prayer on the Hayslope green, she continues to develop the link between sight and feeling, modeling for her hearers how to be sympathetic, or to identify one's experience with another's. Dinah narrates her early experience of hearing a Methodist sermon: “It was on just such a sort of evening as this, when I was a little girl, and my aunt, as brought me up, took me to hear a good man preach out of doors, just as we are here” (82; bk. 1, ch. 2). Dinah makes present her past experience to enable the audience to better imagine and identify with it: that time and that place are “just such” as these. She also identifies her own preaching with a Methodist authority. The “good man” whom she heard, in whose place she now stands, was John Wesley. Dinah also preaches on the same verse as Wesley: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.”Footnote ⁴

Dinah then uses this principle of identification as an exegetical technique in her explication of the scriptural passage:

Dinah's explication folds in multiple layers of identification. Not only are time and place to be imagined through their similarities with the present moment, but Jesus was also “just like God” and his love to the poor “is the same” as God's for us. Jesus's body was also “like ours” and his words were “such as we speak.” Furthermore, Wesley “spoke words such as [Dinah] speak[s],” which were also the words that Jesus spoke (Luke 4:18), which were also the words of the prophet Isaiah (Is. 61:1). Identification happens via a combination of understanding, feeling, and seeing: we “know about” and “can understand” God's “love,” “heart,” and “feelings towards us” because Jesus “showed [it] to the poor” and “showed us.” Furthermore, Dinah asserts that “because he came in a body like ours,” Jesus and her auditors can be physically and emotionally sympathetic (“We can understand what Jesus felt”).

Dinah proceeds to link this feeling to seeing as she repeats her prayer's urgent “see” refrain to make Jesus vividly and presently “c[o]me in a body” to her auditors: “‘See!’ she exclaimed, turning to the left, with her eyes fixed on a point above the heads of the people — ‘see where our blessed Lord stands and weeps, and stretches out his arms towards you. . . . See the print of the nails on his dear hands and feet. It is your sins that made them!’” (88; bk. 1, ch. 2). Casting her auditors as Doubting Thomases, the disciple who declared “[e]xcept I shall see in his hands the print of the nails. . . I will not believe” (John 20:25), she asserts that Jesus is present for them now, just as he was to Thomas when he saw and felt Jesus's wounds and believed. Moreover, she says that their own sins are visibly present as wounds on the crucified body of Jesus. She urges them to envision his “body like ours” imprinted with their sins that it may visually move them to sympathy.

Dinah narrates the moment before the crucifixion that “made” the wounds in past tense before again yielding to the imperative of the present to dramatize the sympathetic sight she practices and preaches:

Though Jesus was “spat upon” and “buffeted” and “they nailed him up” in the past, currently his “lips are parched,” “they mock him still” and “he prays for them.” The merging of the two tenses occurs at the moment of keenest sympathetic identification: “he felt what sinners feel.” The past and the present are also compressed as the audience is exhorted to imagine themselves at the crucifixion: “See where our blessed Lord stands.” They are also to understand Jesus as transcending his own incarnational moment in sympathetic identification with how people “feel” throughout time, and he continues to reenact the crucifixion scene as he still prays “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Dinah's prayers and sermon reveal the centrality of a type of “insight” into the invisible, which involves the ability to sympathetically feel with the object in a way that collapses spatio-temporal distinctions. Dinah feels the “presence” of God's “Sympathy” and uses the same felt insight as a narrative technique when describing “just such a sort of evening as this” — whether that evening is a childhood event or the crucifixion.

While Dinah's and Eliot's references for Methodist prayer and preaching were its founder, John Wesley, there is another important source for understanding evangelical thought and practice contemporary both to the novel and to Eliot's own evangelical youth. In November of 1838, nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Evans wrote in a letter that she was reading the biography of William Wilberforce (1759–1833) published that year: “I have just begun the Life of Wilberforce, and I am expecting a rich treat from it. There is a similarity, if I may compare myself with such a man, between his temptations or rather besetments and my own that makes his experience very interesting to me. O that I might be made as useful in my lowly and obscure station as he was in the exalted one assigned to him.”Footnote ⁵ Eliot sees a “similarity” between their situations in part because Wilberforce represented an educated and middle- or upper-class Evangelicalism, rather than the unlettered and lower-class one that was more characteristic of the early Evangelical Revival of the prior generation. (His “exalted” station was his time as an MP, during which he abolished the slave trade.) Wilberforce, a central member of the retrospectively named “Clapham Sect,” influenced evangelical thought and practice through both his career and his writing. In 1797, two years before Adam Bede’s narrative begins, Wilberforce published A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in the Higher and Middle Classes in This Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity.Footnote ⁶ This immensely popular and influential treatise is an important resource for understanding the version of evangelical thought and practice Eliot experienced and presented in her novel.

In the treatise Wilberforce takes issue with the charge of undue enthusiasm, the dangerously expanded role of the emotions, leveled first against Methodism and later against evangelical practice in his own time and Eliot's, a charge which she too dramatizes in Adam Bede. In the third chapter he considers at length “the Admissions of the Passions into Religion” (sect. 2) and “the Reasonableness of Affections towards an invisible Being” (sect. 3). He not only argues that there are “abundant proofs” in the Bible “that it is the religion of the Affections which God particularly requires” (84). He also notes that the passions are necessary for any “arduous and necessary undertaking,” religious or otherwise, in which one may be tempted to deviate from the goal: “You should endeavour not only to convince the understanding, but also to affect the heart; for this end, you must secure the reinforcement of the passions” (93).

After arguing for the necessity of the passions, Wilberforce imagines the objection that “by the very constitution of our nature, we are not susceptible of them [affections] towards an invisible Being.” Wilberforce concedes that “[w]e receive impressions more readily from visible objects, we feel them more strongly, we retain them more durably” (98–99). But, Wilberforce argues, we often have strong feelings for things that we do not see, even when this should not rationally be the case: “We read of slaughtered thousands with less emotion, than we hear the particulars of a shocking accident which has happened in the next street; the distresses of a novel, which at the same time we know to be fictitious, affect us more than the dry narrative of a battle” (101).

Because of this, Wilberforce argues, there must be a way to overcome “a certain strangeness between the passion and its object” that reason would otherwise reinforce (101). Wilberforce names this the technique of “close contact”:

Wilberforce notes that we have passion for an object if it is close physically (“in the next street”) or imaginatively/affectively (“distresses of a novel”) — and indeed these two seem to be much the same. He argues that there is not much difference between talking “with” someone and talking “of” someone. By imaginatively “using our minds” to see and to converse with him, to imagine him in situations that affect us, we have “close contact” with him.Footnote ⁷

In arguing for the use and “reasonableness of affections,” particularly “towards an invisible being,” Wilberforce not only addresses detractors of evangelical practice. He also seeks to provide a rebuttal to the dominant contemporary philosophy of sympathetic affection. He says that his explanation of close contact is “less discreditable than that which has been sometimes given, of an undoubted phænomenon in the human mind, that the greatest public misfortunes, however [to] the understanding may lecture, are apt really to affect our feelings less than the most trivial disaster which happens to ourselves” (105). Wilberforce then quotes from Adam Smith's description in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, rev. ed. 1790) of one such phenomenon in which a person would be more upset about having his finger cut off than about a mass-casualty in China. However, “the most unfeeling brute on earth would surely think nothing of the loss of a finger, if he could thereby prevent so dreadful a calamity” (106).

Though Wilberforce stops his quotation of Smith there, Smith goes on to state his famous theory of the “impartial spectator”:

In Smith's theory of moral perception, an individual corrects his own biases and moderates his selfish feelings so that others can sympathize with him, and vice versa, through the mechanism of the “impartial spectator” in which he views his own responses as if through the eyes of another. Though reason is described as “the man within,” this interiority is accompanied by the spectator's resemblance to a mirror in which to see oneself from a more distanced, outside perspective.

Audrey Jaffe has pointed to the centrality of Smith's visual model of sympathy for Victorian fiction, including Eliot's, and Rae Greiner argues that it is Smith's temporal model of sympathy that most significantly informs Eliot's, based on their mutual insistence on the deliberative space necessary to produce sympathetic responses. Greiner's analysis aligns with Sue Zemka's identification of Eliot's privileging of Adam Bede's “Wordsworthian” time because it allows for reflective distance, versus Dinah's Methodist inhabiting and “redeeming” of the moment.Footnote ⁸ While these approaches uncover Eliot's nuanced treatments of sympathy in the visual and temporal registers, I want to suggest that the model of sympathy deployed in Adam Bede more closely resembles Wilberforce's, particularly as a qualification of Smithean sympathy.

After quoting Smith's hypothetical example of the sacrificial finger, Wilberforce advances his argument in place of Smith's impartial spectator. He argues that it is not distance or impartiality that produces sympathetic responses but rather the “doctrine of contact”:

What is important for Wilberforce is not to reinforce, via “reason,” “a certain strangeness between the passion and its object.” It is crucial to bridge the gap between them via the “close contact” that is the product of “full knowledge” and “pathetic contemplations.” One must make the object a continual presence in the mind and “keep [it] in exercise” in a continuous present-tense.

As we have seen, Dinah's prayer and sermon engage in this type of “frequent mental entertainment” toward Jesus. Her “see Thee” refrain “keep[s Jesus] in exercise” such that “he is not weary of toiling for you.” Like Dinah, Wilberforce links this type of presentness to what he calls “habitual views of the blessed Jesus” (112), who is both the model and the foundation for sympathetic close contact:

The Christian establishes close contact with Christ through “pathetic contemplations” and is “assured” that Christ equally sympathizes with her or him because he shared a similar incarnated experience. Dinah also repeats the logic of sympathetic identification that Wilberforce makes; she says, “We can understand what Jesus felt, because he came in a body like ours.” Just as Christ once “enter[ed] into” a body, so too now “is” he capable of “entering into our little concerns” as a sympathizing presence.

In a later section in Practical View Wilberforce practices what he preaches, so to speak, by providing his reader with “habitual views of the blessed Jesus.” Beginning with a quotation from Hebrews 12:1–2, “‘let us run with patience the race that is set before us, Looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith’” (331), Wilberforce presents six tableaux of Jesus, each headed with the title “LOOKING UNTO JESUS!” (332–45). The significance of this practice is visually manifested in the anomalous appearance of these titles, which are in all capitals, centered on the page, and separated from the text before and after, a visual move not replicated in the rest of the treatise. The reader is enjoined repeatedly to look with Wilberforce “Here” (as the first four passages begin) at Jesus or at the scene of the cross.

In the final tableau Wilberforce urges the reader to accompany him on a sightseeing journey that requires the technique of sympathetic insight:

This “animating view” is what Wilberforce previously called the “close contact” of “lively impressions” and “lively interest.” The reader's imaginative “follow[ing]” of Jesus mirrors Jesus’ own “lively interest” in people, since he “ever liveth” and “is still full of sympathy and love.” This “view” of Jesus is that which Dinah achieves in her private prayers (“She closed her eyes, that she might feel more intensely the presence of a Love and Sympathy”) and which she enjoins her auditors to “see!” in her similar repeated refrain. By “looking unto Jesus” she asserts his close contact: “Thou art with Thy people still.”

Readers familiar with Eliot's 1855 essay on “Evangelical Teaching” and its scathing review of Dr. Cumming's brand of Evangelicalism might object to the idea that Eliot would endorse the ideas of a leading figure in Evangelicalism like Wilberforce. Indeed, the essay itself highlights Eliot's own move away from evangelicalism and toward a secular humanism. But this paradigm shift does not necessarily preclude certain ideas from the evangelical tradition from remaining influential in Eliot's thought and practice. Looking closer at her critique of Cumming reveals two (perhaps unexpected) things: that Eliot continued to endorse certain evangelically-inflected ideas, and that Eliot's attack on Cumming has less to do with Evangelical teaching as a whole and more to do with the fact that Cumming is not Evangelical enough. Eliot faults him for his lack of a “pietistic” mind, for his failure to teach about salvation as an “experience,” and that he “rarely represents [good works] as the spontaneous, necessary outflow of a soul filled with Divine love” (Ashton 141).Footnote ⁹ These attributes are hallmarks of evangelicalism.

Indeed, Eliot describes Cumming's teaching as lacking in precisely those elements she depicts in Dinah's sermon: “But of really spiritual joys and sorrows, of the life and death of Christ as a manifestation of love that constrains the soul, of sympathy with that yearning over the lost and erring which made Jesus weep over Jerusalem, and prompted the sublime prayer, ‘Father, forgive them,’. . . — of all this, we find little trace in Dr. Cumming's discourses” (141–42). This understanding of Christ as a “manifestation. . . of sympathy,” which we also see in Wilberforce's treatise, is related to Eliot's chief complaint against Cumming's teachings:

This “perversion” is essentially a version of sympathy that eschews the close contact Wilberforce describes as necessary to overcome “a certain strangeness between the passion and its object.” Eliot stresses that “sympathetic feelings” must be “direct” and “directly” related to “their proper objects.” She criticizes Cumming's belief that a person should exercise sympathy exclusively for the purpose of “the glory of God,” since this is an ancillary motivation that reroutes and separates sympathetic feeling from its object.

Eliot instead argues that our relation to God and our relations to people are founded on the same sympathetic mechanism that Wilberforce called close contact:

Though Eliot's formulation of “the idea of a God” here is Feuerbachian, like Wilberforce she identifies “the same principle” underlying the close contact of “the sense of His presence” and interhuman close contact in “time” (synchronous heartbeats) and “place” (a hand's touch).

Whereas Dinah seems able to achieve the type of sympathetic close contact through habitual views of Jesus that Wilberforce describes, Eliot depicts its misfiring for another character in the novel. In her narrative of Dinah's interaction with Hetty Sorrel after the latter is condemned to death for infanticide, Eliot portrays the concept of the sympathetic closeness of being “among them bodily” in the scene in which Dinah is present with Hetty in her jail cell as she awaits hanging. This element of the plot was the kernel for the novel and is based on the experience of Eliot's evangelical aunt, Elizabeth Evans, in the trial and execution of Mary Voce in 1802.Footnote ¹⁰ A broadsheet published after the event narrates how Mary Voce denied killing her child during and following the trial, but she eventually confessed at the continued encouragement of several evangelical women. These women, as the broadsheet narrates,

Eliot recasts the testimony of Mary Voce in the novel as Dinah goes to the jail to visit Hetty, who until Dinah's visit has denied any wrongdoing:

Here Dinah's action in which she “opened her arms and stretched them out” is what she encouraged her sermon auditors to see of Jesus, whom she says “stretches out his arms towards you.” Dinah offers Hetty the close contact of sympathetic arms, and Hetty responds by desperately clinging to Dinah. Dinah's refrain here is not “see,” as in the sermon, but another assertion of presence: “with you.” This refrain links physical close contact to emotional sympathy: “somebody with you, that feels for you” both externally (a “body” that “feels”) and internally.

Dinah then attempts to instruct Hetty in the relationship between the close “human contact” of her arms and the invisible though spiritually seen and felt presence of the divine:

Dinah tries to get Hetty to make the epistemological leap from her external bodily experience to the insight of an internally perceived realm of close contact with God, which Dinah believes to be so nearly the same that it causes Hetty's comical spook. As in her sermon, Dinah links the “presence of God” to an immediate present: “Now, Hetty — now.”

Hetty's epistemological failure of “I can't know anything about it” — her inability to see or feel the divine presence in the cell — is a failure of sympathy. The narrative continues: “At last Hetty spoke, in a tone of beseeching, ‘Dinah. . . help me. . . I can't feel anything like you. . . my heart is hard’” (492; bk. 5, ch. 45). Hetty eventually confesses and narrates the events leading up to her infant's death, and the reader learns that failure of sympathetic sight also characterizes her crime. She says “I don't know how I felt about the baby. . . . I daredn't look at its little hands and face” (495; bk. 5, ch. 45). She similarly describes her return to the place where she had abandoned the infant: “I don't know whether I was frightened or glad. . . I don't know what I felt. I only know I was in the wood, and heard the cry. I don't know what I felt till I saw the baby was gone. . . . when I saw it was gone, I was struck like a stone, with fear. . . . My heart went like a stone” (496–97; bk. 5, ch. 45). Hetty's refrain indicates that the epistemological and pathetic crises are intertwined: “I don't know how/what I felt.” (She only “knows” the physical landscape and what she heard.) When Hetty finally does feel, it is after not seeing her baby, and it is a feeling of paralyzing fear that turns her hardhearted. Her stone-like heart (echoing the prior comparisons of her to stone fruit) signifies not just a lack of repentance and response to God in the Judeo-Christian sense of the term (c.f. Wilberforce's comment that in the Bible “a cold, hard, unfeeling heart is represented as highly criminal”).Footnote ¹¹ It is also coded as a lack of sympathy: “I can't feel anything like you.” Though Hetty does confess her crime, she never experiences the exultant conversion of Mary Voce. She continues to enact a mode of sympathy that is merely physical and external (bodily feeling with Dinah) and is therefore denied the emotional ecstasy that both Mary, in the broadsheet account, and Dinah, in the account of her prayer, experience.

This type of sympathy continues to dominate Hetty's behavior with Dinah when Adam visits her two days later:

In her sympathetic attachment to Dinah via the body, Hetty attempts as best as she can to achieve maximal bodily “close. . . contact” with Dinah so that her strength and hope can be Hetty's own, in an externalization of the mechanism of sympathy. This type of “con-tact” — tactilely feeling with — is a merely external version of what Wilberforce described as the “close contact” of “affection toward an invisible being.” Instead of seeing the “Invisible Mercy” in her mind's eye, she has only a mediated view of the divine in Dinah's face.

It does seem at first that Hetty is able to achieve emotional sympathy through visualization: when she sees Adam she “feels the change” in him. But this sympathetic register is a little too external and physical: it “seemed to strike her.” And it is only because she registers Adam's identification with her situation that she can feel what he feels at all: he is like a mirror that “reflects” her own image back to her (more akin to the mirror-like apparatus of Smith's impartial spectator). In this feedback loop “the dreadful past and the dreadful present” become merged as she experiences the bodily manifestation of fear that makes her tremble more and more “as she looked at him,” or her reflection in him. This is a failed version of the presentness enacted in Dinah's sermons, in which sympathetic sight is used to identify with another instead of merely oneself.Footnote ¹²

Hetty continues to experience the arresting bodily sensation of trembling and exclusively physical sympathy through to the scene of her impending execution. When Dinah accompanies Hetty in the cart on its way to the gallows, Dinah prays intensely while “the trembling creature. . . clung to her and clutched her as the only visible sign of love and pity” (503; bk. 5, ch. 47). The stories of Mary Voce and Hetty continue to diverge in Eliot's revision. Whereas Mary “felt the evidence of her pardon much clearer, [and] her consolation was amazingly increased,” she is still put to death. Conversely, Hetty's sympathetic experience of divine “love and pity” is limited to that gained through bodily contact with Dinah, and she receives a temporal reprieve from the death sentence when it is commuted at the last minute to deportation. Arthur Donnithorne, the father of the deceased child, is her temporal savior who arrives just in the nick of time with a pardon for her in a bit of deus ex machina (the reader is never told how he acquired it).

This somewhat supernatural intervention is emphasized in the unusual formal and narrative brevity of the chapter, which is short enough to appear on a single page. It ends:

At this moment of quasi-divine intervention (by the omnipotent author) to save Hetty, the narrator switches in the same paragraph from past tense narration to present tense direct address to the reader, drawing her to imaginatively participate in the dramatic scene: “See, he has something in his hand.” Like the divinely visionary rider who is enacting Dinah's habit of seeing things “unseen by others,” the reader is urged to “see” this savior imaginatively and immediately. Eliot transforms the sympathetic sight that Dinah enacts into a formal mechanism required of her readers. The narrator also performs the same temporal shifts as Dinah in her sermon, which reaches a climax at a moment of intense sympathetic identification: “he felt what sinners feel.” (It is also not a coincidence that both of these scenes dramatize executions.) Thus in the moment in which Eliot denies to Hetty the evangelical divine assurance of pardon and felt presence in Mary Voce's story and instead grants Hetty an earthly reprieve by a human intervention, she takes up the evangelical techniques in her narrative. Though there has been a failure of evangelical sympathetic sight of the invisible for Hetty, Eliot asserts its power as a literary technique.

The secularization of this salvation scene happens at two levels: at the diegetic, Hetty experiences salvation not from Christ but from Arthur; at the narrative, sympathetic sight is how the novel's event is made present (real, vivid, proximate) for the reader. While critics like Zemka have argued that Eliot was skeptical of the techniques employed in “The Last Moment” — the “momentariness” of it aligning with a sensationalism that the remaining “slow” fourth of the novel eschews — I believe the recourse to evangelical insight as a narrative technique reveals Eliot's anxiety but also is her attempt to allay it.Footnote ¹³ Eliot anticipates that the reader will be skeptical of the sensational move of the deus-ex-machina plot twist. In a way Eliot, like Dinah, perhaps imagines her audience as Doubting Thomases who must have close contact in order to “be not faithless, but believing” (John 20:27).

She thus uses, at the narrative level, the model of storytelling that she has already depicted at the diegetic level, one that sees and portrays the invisible as if real and present. We are told that Dinah, whom she marks as a storyteller (“It was on just such a sort of evening as this”), “had that belief in visible manifestations of Jesus, which is common among the Methodists, and she communicated it irresistibly to her hearers; she made them feel that he was among them bodily, and might at any moment show himself to them.” Similarly, to inculcate her audience's “belief in [the] visible manifestation” of Hetty's savior, who “might arrive at any moment” (especially the “last” one), and “communicate it irresistibly to her hearers,” Eliot turns to Dinah's narrative technique of sympathetic sight. Moreover, Eliot's narrator becomes a character present at the gallows in the moment in which she desires her reader, like Mary Voce, to “feel the evidence of her” — Hetty's — “pardon much clearer.”Footnote ¹⁴ The narrator manifests as a persona with close contact to the characters; the narrator is “among them bodily.” The narrator also urges readers to do the same with their mind's eye.

That this move might be a particular intensification of Eliot's realist technique rather than an aberration from it becomes clearer when we consider it again in the context of Wilberforce's description of how a Christian should deploy the technique of close contact:

These habitual views of the blessed Jesus cause an affective “relish” for an invisible world not unlike the type of “realizing view” Eliot presents of her seeing-the-“unseen” savior “obtaining [the] needful supplies of grace and consolation” in the release from death.

This “realizing view,” or insight into an invisible world, is that which the younger Eliot commented on in her note on reading Wilberforce's biography: “May the Lord gi[ve] me such an insight into what is truly good and su[ch] realizing views of an approaching eternity” (Haight, Letters 1: 12). Though she and Wilberforce are both referring to “realizing views” that make present the invisible and distanced time and place of the “heavenly world” of “eternity,” I argue that Eliot's narrative in Adam Bede aims to produce a “realizing view” of her imaginary world through the same technique of evangelical “insight” — or close contact — that makes the reader “relish” her narrative.

I want to suggest that there is a connection between this “realizing view” and Eliot's realist project, one that is more specific than an evangelically-informed moral appreciation of realism.Footnote ¹⁵ The novel demonstrates that Eliot believes in the efficacy and utility of evangelical sympathetic sight, but only to see men and women, rather than Christ. She draws attention to this technique of sympathetic insight when she (as narrator) famously explains the role of sympathy to her narrative in chapter 17 (“In Which the Story Pauses a Little”). Eliot justifies her mode of realism by saying, “It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions” (240; bk. 2, ch. 17). Eliot's description of her “delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures” reminds one of Wilberforce's “realizing views, which give. . . a relish.” Though Eliot intends “faithful” to signify “truthful,” the similarity to Wilberforcean sympathy makes us reconsider the extent to which these pictures or views have to do with “the evidence of things unseen” (as the AV defines “faith”).

Indeed, in another meta-narrative moment later in the chapter Eliot articulates sympathy in an evangelical context. The narrator again becomes a persona when recounting a conversation with Adam that took place some time after novel's incidents about his thoughts on religion relative to the clergymen Mr. Ryde and Mr. Irwine. Adam says:

Adam believes in the centrality of a type of felt knowledge to religion, which he links to the Methodist tradition. In his example of the difference between doctrines and religion, he contrasts the words of doctrine versus “knowing” the feelings that are the true substance of religion. He illustrates this by saying that one might “know” the names of tools, but until he has “seen” or “handled” them — in a word, felt, in the combined sense of seeing and feeling conveyed in Dinah's sermons (and in her Doubting Thomas allusion) — one has no true knowledge.

In the summary of Adam's approval of Mr. Irwine's practicing what he preached versus Mr. Ryde's habit of preaching doctrine, the narrator subtly shifts the frame from Adam's valuation of feeling of and about the divine to the value of feeling toward other people:

It would appear that the narrator here is the type of Evangelical storyteller Eliot described in her 1856 essay on “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”: “she has had the advantage. . . of mingling chiefly with men and women whose manners and characters have not had all their bosses and angles rubbed down by refined conventionalism” (Ashton 314).Footnote ¹⁶ The lack of sympathy the narrator criticizes as having the sense that one's “emotions” do not “find fit objects” among fellow-men echoes Wilberforce's observation that there exists “a certain strangeness between the passion and its object.” The narrator, like Wilberforce, thinks that close contact overcomes this “strangeness.” The narrator approves of Adam's acting as a “partial” rather than an “impartial spectator” (to use Smith's phrase) of Mr. Irwine, with whom he has been in “familiar” close contact.

In this moment Eliot presents a sentiment in accord with an evangelical ethos and then rewrites it into a secularized framework. In a move that replicates the narrative-persona-intrusion at the end of “The Last Moment” that secularizes a salvation scene, the narrator again makes himself a present presence — “I herewith” — in order to give his own testimony. His is not a testimony of repentance like Mary Voce (“she freely and fully confessed with real penitential contrition of soul all the sins she recollected being guilty of”) or of Wesley's “heart-warming” experience of divine assurance, but it is rather a (mostly) serious parodic imitation of theirs: “I herewith discharge my conscience, and declare, that I have had quite enthusiastic movements of admiration towards old gentlemen who spoke the worst English.”Footnote ¹⁷ The narrator takes the common epithet used to describe Methodists as “enthusiasts” and relocates it in a humanist paradigm, concluding that “human nature,” rather than God or Christ, “is lovable” and the locus of “deep pathos” and “sublime mysteries.”

The narrator espouses a secular version of the evangelical valuation of “close contact” with the divine who is “with Thy people” and “near” to them (as Dinah said). The narrator's interhuman sympathy is generated between people “we have known familiarly” and is learned by “living a great deal among people.” This moment of narrative instruction is a revision of Hetty's unsuccessful sympathy lesson. Whereas Dinah tried to get Hetty to make the mental leap from physical, external sympathy to an internal one with the divine, the narrator/Eliot instructs the reader to enact Adam's sympathetic understanding of the divine, or even of those holding divine office, toward “everyday fellow-men” and “human nature.” This is the third option that avoids both Dinah's Christ-centered enthusiasm and the pitfalls of Hetty's un-“speritial” sympathy. In aligning herself with Adam's version of sympathy, Eliot, like Adam, “go[es] so far with the strongest Methodist ever you'll find” in practicing Dinah's mode of sympathetic sight. But she only “goes so far” as her secular humanism will allow her. Hers is a modified evangelical sympathy that displaces “looking unto Jesus” with looking unto “everyday fellow-men.”

Indeed, it is precisely this modification of Dinah's Christ-centered enthusiasm in tandem with a continuing endorsement of sympathetic close contact that structures the novel's ensuing resolution, which ends (problematically for many readers) with Dinah's decision to leave preaching for marriage to Adam.Footnote ¹⁸ The drama of Dinah's decision whether or not to marry hinges on the question on which Eliot meditates both as narrator in the above example and in her essay on “Evangelical Teaching”: what is the relationship between love of and sympathy with God and love of and sympathy with everyday fellow-men?

Close contact proves to be the central element of both the narrative arc and of the characters’ reasoning about their situation. Toward the beginning of the development of the Adam-Dinah romance, which begins soon after Hetty's “last moment,” Adam matter-of-factly comments on the (lack of) effect of their physical parting if Dinah returns to preaching: “I'm satisfied for you to live thirty mile off, if you think it right. I shall think of you just as much as I do now; for you're bound up with what I can no more help remembering, than I can help my heart beating” (522; bk. 6, ch. 50). Though the comment is awkward because he is unaware of Dinah's romantic interest in him (“Poor Adam! Thus do men blunder,” interjects the narrator), he is after all only reiterating what Dinah already believes to be true: that close contact overcomes a strangeness between a passion and its object when it is founded on “frequent mental entertainment” and “pathetic contemplations,” as Wilberforce said. The reader is also informed that as time goes on, this sorrow over Hetty that he cannot help remembering gradually gives Adam a capacity for increased sympathy, which the narrator defines here as “the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love” (525; bk. 6, ch. 50). In an improved version of Hetty's physical sympathy of clinging to Dinah, Adam's growing sympathetic “insight” and “power of loving” (526; bk. 6, ch. 50) meant that “he clung more to his mother and Seth,” and “hardly three or four days passed but he felt the need of seeing [the Poysers], and interchanging words and looks of friendliness with them” (526; bk. 6, ch. 50). As for Dinah, “he cared to see her continually” (527–28; bk. 6, ch. 50). The effect of this sympathy is thus what the narrator earlier described as its cause, “living a great deal among people” and maintaining visual, physical, and emotional close contact.

When Adam's mother finally alerts him to the fact that the love between him and Dinah is amorous, the secularization of Dinah's love on which the conclusion relies begins. It happens first during the narrator's description of Adam's new feelings toward Dinah:

This narrative moment deploys religious terms in a naturalized context in a way that points to Dinah's eventual acceptance of a love that can operate in an earthly, marital sphere in addition to a divine one. The comparison of Adam's wishes to “the opening through which. . . the breath of heaven enters” is a naturalization of his aforementioned remarks about “times when feelings come into you like a rushing mighty wind, as the Scripture says” (about the Holy Spirit). Furthermore, “Sunday” here is not linked to the Sabbath but to “autumnal sunshine,” which then also becomes a simile for Dinah's love. Instead of discerning a divine “presence” in this moment, Adam “believes” instead in Dinah's love that becomes “one” with the soothing sunshine. And finally, in crucifixion-reminiscent language, he does “not forsake” but gives “a new sacredness” to the memories of his first “passion.”

While this use of religious language may not seem overly significant, it foreshadows Adam's ensuing logic for why Dinah should marry him: earthly love, he argues, is compatible with divine love. Their conversation about this point is essentially a final show-down between the different models of how love and sympathy is or should be exercised via close contact. Dinah worries that “the Divine presence” and Adam's presence are mutually exclusive: “if I had no clear showing to the contrary, I could find my happiness in being near you and ministering to you continually. I fear I should forget to rejoice and weep with others; nay, I fear I should forget the Divine presence, and seek no love but yours.” Adam then reminds Dinah of how not to “forget the Divine presence” through the technique of close contact: “we can ask God to be with us continually, and we'll help one another in everything as is good. I'd never think o’ putting myself between you and God” (544; bk. 6, ch. 52). It is perhaps strange that Dinah would forget this compatibility between divine and human close contact, given that this is essentially what she encourages Hetty to understand in the jail cell. Indeed, Dinah has a fearful vision that replicates Hetty's experience of close contact with human arms only: “It seems to me as if you were stretching out your arms to me, and beckoning me to come and take my ease, and live for my own delight, and Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, was standing looking towards me, and pointing to the sinful, and suffering, and afflicted” (545–46; bk. 6, ch. 52). She worries that (perhaps like Hetty) she “should become hard” (546), and the embrace of human close contact will preclude proper responsiveness to the sorrows of both Jesus and those with whom he sympathizes.Footnote ¹⁹

Adam's rebuttal relies in part on the identification of knowledge and feeling that he earlier describes as constitutive of the “deep speritial things in religion”: he says to Dinah, “I don't believe your loving me could shut up your heart;. . . for it seems to me it's the same with love and happiness as with sorrow — the more we know of it the better we can feel what other people's lives are or might be. . . The more knowledge a man has the better he'll do's work; and feeling's a sort o’ knowledge” (546; bk. 6, ch. 52). His mention of “work” here echoes his earlier illustration of the difference between “doctrines and notions” and felt knowledge; he likens the latter to the true knowledge of “tools” that comes when one has “seen ’em. . . handled ’em.” He thus argues that the type of felt knowledge that both he and Dinah understand as at the heart of “Methodist” religion is also continuous with the love and sympathy felt for a spouse. He concludes his argument with a final affirmation of the power of close contact: “and you'll be among all your own friends as love you, and can help ’em, and be a blessing to ’em, till their dying day. Surely, Dinah, you'd be as near to God as if you were living lonely and away from me” (546; bk. 6, ch. 52).

Dinah decides to go away to Snowfield for a time to assess her possible futures, and in the scene of their reunion in the penultimate chapter, when Adam stages their “Meeting On The Hill,” the narrative again naturalizes what had earlier in the novel appeared as an experience of “Divine Presence.” The narrator describes the vista from the hill overlooking the hamlet where Dinah has gone to preach that day:

The reader will recognize this as a revision of Dinah's habit of “clos[ing] her eyes, that she might feel more intensely the presence of a Love and Sympathy deeper and more tender than was breathed from the earth and sky. . . . then gradually her fears, her yearning anxieties for others, melted away like ice-crystals in a warm ocean.” Unlike this earlier moment of Dinah's “praying in solitude,” but like the “last moment” of Hetty's secularized salvation, the narrator urges the readers, whom he addresses as “you,” to imagine themselves as present at “this” time and place. Also similar to the earlier example of Hetty, Adam finds “assurance” not from the divine face but from Dinah's “alone.” Had Dinah been privy to Adam's thoughts she would perhaps have had her suspicions confirmed that marital love might too much resemble Hetty's overly secular sympathy; the narrator goes on to assert that Adam “chose this spot” because there was “no presence but the still lights and shadows, and the great embracing sky” (567; bk. 6, ch. 54). But when Dinah, on her walk home up the hill, hears Adam call her name twice, she “moved towards him so that his arm could clasp her round.” Finding solace in his clasping arms just as Adam found it in “the great embracing sky,” Dinah delivers her verdict:

In this final articulation of sympathetic presence (this moment, now, with me, I feel, same love), Dinah offers the same argument for the relationship between divine and human sympathy (minus the Feuerbachian overtones) that Eliot delivers in her essay on “Evangelical Teaching,” where she writes that “the idea of God and the sense of His presence intensify all noble feeling, and encourage all noble effort, on the same principle that human sympathy is found a source of strength: the brave man feels braver when he knows that another stout heart is beating time with his.” Adam's till-death-do-us-part vow takes on new resonance as a final assertion of close contact: the marital union is sanctioned (narratively and by Dinah) because it affirms the ethos that is at the heart of Dinah's evangelicalism and Eliot's/the narrator's secularized-evangelical humanism. Thus while one could read the novel's resolution as simply producing one more sacrificial victim to the marriage plot, it is closer to the truth of the novel itself that it is bearing out to completion the logic of sympathetic close contact that has been driving the narrative throughout. Dinah learns a “fuller” sympathy from Adam's combination of sympathetic close contact operating in the “deep speritial things in religion” as well as among everyday fellow-men.

To see how Eliot continued to use this type of evangelically-informed sympathy in her later prose, particularly in less overtly religious contexts, one can turn to a few brief examples from Middlemarch. Already in the novel's second chapter, the reader is introduced to a juxtaposition of the progenitors of the two versions of sympathy I have been tracking, Smith and Wilberforce. It comes from Mr. Brooke, who says that Smith's popular book on political economy (The Wealth of Nations, 1776) is an example of how “human reason may carry you a little too far”; however, Brooke notes, “we must have Thought; else we shall be landed back in the dark ages.” In contrast, later in the conversation Brooke mentions that he “knew Wilberforce in his best days” and that “Wilberforce was perhaps not enough of a thinker; but if I went into Parliament, as I have been asked to do, I should sit on the independent bench, as Wilberforce did, and work at philanthropy.”Footnote ²⁰ Though Brooke makes this comparison between Smithean reason and Wilberforcean “love of mankind” in the context of politics and political economy, their versions of the role of sympathy in moral sentiment similarly adhere to this binary: Smith calls his impartial spectator “reason,” and Wilberforce argues that one must “affect the heart” to be successful in any “arduous and necessary undertaking” (such as abolishing the slave trade). While these may be passing references given in the context of Brooke's habit of always “pulling up,” they still serve to highlight the status of Wilberforce as the affective (and active) alternative to Smithean reason/thought. As we have seen, Wilberforce's advocacy of an imaginative-embodied “close contact” makes his version of sympathy a more appropriate source for what Isobel Armstrong rightly clarifies about Eliot's practice: “Eliot spoke. . . about the extension of the sympathies, and saw feeling as a deeply corporeal experience” instead of a (Smithean) sympathy founded on “[p]ropriety, reserve, and distance. . . and above all the sense that the imagination is over against and outside the body.”Footnote ²¹

While there are many examples throughout Middlemarch of this type of sympathetic sight that brings together the in/external through close contact, we may revisit the important scene toward its end between Dorothea and Rosamond with renewed understanding, particularly in light of Adam Bede’s final affirmation of a sympathy that is more inclusive or effective than both Hetty's solipsistic and merely physical and Dinah's divinely-focused versions. As in the Dinah-Hetty and Adam-Dinah scenes, close contact is the central element guiding the physical and emotional choreography of Dorothea and Rosamond's conversation, in chapter 81, in which Dorothea comes to communicate her belief to Rosamond in her husband Lydgate's blamelessness.

In the beginning of the scene Dorothea waits in the drawing-room for Rosamond's arrival, and the narrator charts the initial sympathetic gulf between the women as Rosamond suspects Dorothea of animosity toward her because of her behavior with Will Ladislaw. Her failed insight into Dorothea's motivations is both cause and effect of Rosamond's commitment to “inwardly wrapping her soul in cold reserve” (792; bk. 8, ch. 81). When she enters the room,

In her movements and feeling “impulse,” we may say that Dorothea overcomes, to use Wilberforce's phrase, “a certain strangeness between the passion and its object.” The physical staging of this encounter — which reminds us of Hetty's initial response to Dinah's visit, in which she “keeps aloof” — is not merely a visual analogue for the internal drama whereby Rosamond's attitudes of “cold reserve” and “impassibility” are softened by doubt. It is also its cause, as the hand's touch “immediately” initiates Rosamond's trajectory toward sympathy. Readers of Eliot's essay on “Evangelical Teaching” will find this technique familiar: it is the sympathy of “the pressure of a friendly hand which tells her that there is one who understands her deeds.” It seems that Eliot is particularly keen on alerting the reader to the dynamics of close contact here as she goes on to write (with some excessive protests of happenstance), “[s]o they sat down without a word of preface on the two chairs that happened to be nearest, and happened also to be close together; though Rosamond's notion when she first bowed was that she should stay a long way off from Mrs. Casaubon” (793–94; bk. 8, ch. 81).Footnote ²²

As the scene continues, Eliot reuses imagery from her description of Dinah's experience of divine “Love and Sympathy” to portray a similar though secular sympathetic success. Whereas the effect on Dinah of “feel[ing] herself enclosed by the Divine Presence” during prayer is that “gradually her fears. . . melted away like ice-crystals in a warm ocean,” the effect on Rosamond of being “close together” with Dorothea is that her “cordial, pleading tones. . . came as soothingly as a warm stream over her shrinking fears” (794; bk. 8, ch. 81). This warming effect continues as the feeling of both women increases to a moment of intense sympathetic contact when “Rosamond, with an overmastering pang, as if a wound within her had been probed, burst into hysterical crying” (795; bk. 8, ch. 81). Internal and external close contact are merged in this moment (and “quite enthusiastic movement,” to quote Adam Bede’s narrator) of emotional release. It is as if, in a Doubting-Thomas reversal, Dorothea's feelings “c[o]me in a body” (as Dinah said of Jesus) to “probe” Rosamond's “wound,” and what the narrator describes later as Dorothea's “strange unexpected manifestation of feeling” (796; ch. 81) and strong “emotion” that “take[s] hold” (797; bk. 8, ch. 81) of Rosamond is a secularized version of the moment in Dinah's sermon in which her “belief in visible manifestations of Jesus” causes Bessy Cranage to “beg[i]n to feel very much as if the constable had come to take her up.”

This echo with the earlier novel's use of the close contact of sympathetic insight continues to resonate as the scene develops into a type of rescue mission that resembles both the confessional stakes of the Dinah-Hetty scene as well as the sensational and redemptive “Last Moment” in Adam Bede:

As in the scene of Hetty's “rescue,” spatial presence (“close to her,” “together”) is tied to temporal presentness (“this moment”) with a dash of sensation (“thrilling consciousness”). Rosamond's feeling of being entrapped by “blood-guiltiness” perhaps also strikes the reader as “mysterious” (after all, she has not committed infanticide), but it seems that the actuation of such an intense sympathetic close contact necessitates, for Eliot, a life-and-death frame, if even a metaphorical one. Rosamond's “free[dom]” requires the type of atonement and redemption that only a divinely pitched love and sympathy can achieve. And indeed, this is what Dorothea attains and gives to Rosamond:

Dorothea's unlimited sympathy grants not only Rosamond's but also her own redemption. This fellow-feeling involves “over-estimation” and “generosity” (as well as “not counting”), an excessive exchange value that also parallels the logic of Christian atonement and redemption (actuated by grace, a “gift of God” [dorothea]).Footnote ²³ Whereas Hetty is redeemed from the bonds of (bodily) death, Rosamond and Dorothea are both redeemed from “the misery of false incompatible bonds” in their future companionable bonds of matrimony (Rosamond with Lydgate and Dorothea with Will). This encounter of sympathetic close contact, like the resolutions of both the Hetty and the Adam-Dinah plot-lines in Adam Bede, climaxes in a moment of secularized redemption in a way that makes present its religious framework while portraying its value or success within the realm of “everyday fellow-men” and women.

As in the earlier novel, this logic shapes not only what is told but how it is told. We see this, for example, when the narrator speaks in her own person at the beginning of Chapter 20: “I am sorry to add that she [Dorothea] was sobbing bitterly” (192; bk. 2, ch. 20). Shortly afterward, as in similar moments in Adam Bede, the narrator comments more expansively, calling attention to the role of sympathetic insight and close contact in achieving “realizing views”:

The narrator critiques the inability of mankind to correlate “frequency” with discerning or feeling tragedy in a way that reminds us of Wilberforce's argument that “frequent mental entertainment” is how one becomes affected by tragedy, whether it be small or large, near or far (“slaughtered thousands” or “a shocking accident which has happened in the next street”). But this type of insight, what the narrator calls “a keen vision and feeling,” has its mortal limits. (Perhaps Wilberforce was also attuned to this, as he moderates his call to “frequent mental entertainment” with the description “occasional thoughts of things unseen.”) Superhuman or supernatural insight would be like perpetually having your ear to a squirrel's chest — absurd close contact for sure. It is an image analogous to the (perhaps disturbingly) keen vision of God numbering “even the very hairs on your own head” (Luke 12:7). Although the point here is made inversely, it is similar to the one voiced by Adam Bede’s narrator about finding sympathy “among my fellow-mortals.” We imagine Middlemarch’s narrator “discover[ing]” Dorothea in person and sympathizing with this fellow-mortal's “ordinary” plight rather than with the “tragic suffering” of the exceptional figure.

The narrator's insistence on the dangers of superhuman sympathy may appear at odds with the positive presentation of Dorothea's sympathy “without check” later in the novel. In light of the other sympathetic successes we have seen, it seems that Dorothea manages to avoid the pitfalls of sympathetic excess that mark Dinah (and other characters like Deronda and Latimer) because hers is deployed within a redemption narrative that uses Christian concepts to realize the scene but does not actually require God's presence. As we have seen, this is also the same technique Eliot uses when she writes about sympathy and realism as narrator and as essayist.Footnote ²⁴ What all of these moments share, though the coding is less explicit in some, is that they are instances of “pulling up” from (or only “going so far with the strongest Methodist” toward) that which is beyond the mortal, secular “frame” — philosophically or narratively speaking. However, even after Eliot had moved away from its accompanying theology and devotional practice, evangelical insight retained a powerful grasp on her imagination as a technique for achieving realizing views through sympathetic contact in literary and in ethical practice.