"Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a sunny walk through the fields from 'afternoon church'—as such walks used to be in those old leisurely times, when the boat, gliding sleepily along the canal, was the newest locomotive wonder; when Sunday books had most of them old brown-leather covers, and opened with remarkable precision always in one place. Leisure is gone—gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow waggons, and the pedlars, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons. Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now—eager for amusement; prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage […] He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling […]

"Fine old Leisure! Do not be severe upon him, and judge him by our modern standard. He never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the Times or Sartor Resartus." (Chapter LII)

We're almost at the end of the novel. The drama with Hetty and her trial is over. Dinah and Adam have revealed that they do, in fact, madly love one another. The only problem that hasn't been resolved yet is Dinah: she isn't sure if she should get married, or if she should devote herself to religious duty (think: a Mother Theresa for the British working class). So now Dinah is basically waiting for a divine answer to get beamed down to her. And then, as so often happens in Eliot's novels—everything pauses so we can take five for some serious reflection.

The Golden Days of Spinning Wheels and Wagons?

Adam Bede is set in the past—about sixty years before Eliot wrote it, and twenty years before she was even born. So when the narrator talks about how life used to move slower back in the day, she's talking about a time that Eliot never actually lived in. This makes it all the easier to wax nostalgic: spinning wheels and slow wagons are so far in the past that the memories are fuzzy. It's easy to romanticize this stuff when you've never had to actually use a spinning wheel.

And compared to Eliot's reality—full of fast trains and microscopes—these fuzzy memories grow all the more golden and idealized. Surely life was different back then. People took naps under fruit trees, right? They patiently waited to eat those apricots until they were perfectly ripe, right? They sauntered, right?

Basically, Eliot's narrator is pretty sure that life was different back then—time moved slower, and people knew how to take a leisurely stroll. And maybe they also knew how to read a novel and enjoy it, rather than rushing to the end?

Hit Pause!

The funny thing about this passage is that it enacts exactly what it's talking about. Eliot is describing Adam and Dinah's leisurely walk and then starts reflecting that, really, her entire society has forgotten how to slow down and take a leisurely stroll. But she doesn't just tell us to slow down, she makes us: this passage takes a step back from the plot and the characters. The reader is champing at the bit here: we're nearly at the end of the novel, we're rushing along, and we're thinking: "Come on, Dinah, marry Adam already." Get to it.

In the midst of this bustling plot, Eliot makes us pause and think. Are we too "eager for amusement"? Are we rushing through our exciting novels, instead of slowly digesting them?

Regardless, she's going to slow down the style here: we get long descriptive passages of old leisure, and of the present day (i.e., mid-19th century). None of this is about getting to the end; it's just about taking a leisurely, readerly stroll.