Adam Bede

The surviving ideal of the proud and anonymous worker is expressed nowhere better than in the words of George Eliot:

It would not be at all a safe conclusion that the next best man you may happen to see with a basket of tools over his shoulder and a paper cap on his head has the strong conscience and strong sense, the blended susceptibility and self command of our friend 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 labour: they make their way upward, rarely as geniuses, most commonly as painstaking honest men, with skill and conscience to do well the tasks that lie before them.