thor does "not pretend that his was an ordinary character
among workmen." Yet such men as he are found among his class, and the noble
qualities he possessed are not out of place among workingmen. Her warm
sympathy with this class, the class in which she was born and reared, and
her earnest desire to do it justice, is seen in what she says of Adam.

He was not an average man. Yet such men as he are reared here and there
in every generation of our peasant artisans--with an inheritance of
affections nurtured by a simple family life of common need and common
industry, and an inheritance of faculties trained in skilful,
courageous labor; they make their way upward, rarely as geniuses, most
commonly as painstaking, honest men, with the skill and conscience to
do well the tasks that lie before them. Their lives have no discernible
echo beyond the neighborhood where they dwelt, but you are almost sure
to find there some good piece of road, some building, some application
of mineral produce, some improvement in farming practice, some reform
of parish abuses, with which their names are associated by one or two
generations after them. Their employers were richer for them, the work
of their hands has worn well, and the work of their brains has guided
well the hands of other men. They went about in their youth in flannel
or paper caps, in coats black with coal-dust or streaked with lime and
red paint; in old age their white hairs are seen in a place of honor at
church and at market, and they tell their well-dressed sons and
daughters seated round the bright hearth on winter evenings, how
pleased they were when they first earned their twopence a day. Others
there are who die poor, and never put off the workman's coat on
week-days; they have not had the art of getting rich; but they are men
of trust, and when they die before the work is all out of them, it is
as if some main screw had got loose in a machine; the master who
employed them says, "Where shall I find their like?" [Footnote:
Chapter XIX.]

In _Amos Barton_ she states her reasons for portraying characters of so
little outward interest. Amos had none of the more manly and sturdy
qualities of Adam Bede, and yet to George Eliot it was enough that he was
human, that trouble and heartache could come to him, and that he must carry
his share of the burdens and weaknesses of the world.