Where It All Goes Down
The Village of Hayslope, Rural England
Micro-Setting
Hayslope is a peaceful, fairly predictable place, where farmers and craftsmen live in peace with their social "superiors." Here, the only person who's likely to break into song and dance is that self-promoting Joshua Rann. And that's kind of the point.
With Adam Bede, Eliot has given us a study of what happens when the sleepiest, prettiest community imaginable is rattled by scandal. Face it: if Hetty Sorrel came from the ugliest place on earth, her ugly deeds wouldn't surprise anyone. Instead, she comes from beautiful, sunny Hayslope, where nothing bad ever happens. She's kind of like Laura Palmer that way.
Hayslope is a world in and of itself. Think Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Think Tolkein's Middle Earth. Hayslope is just like any one of these: a fully-articulated society that has its own values, architecture, jewelry styles, you name it.
There's lots of small stuff. Eliot doesn't have her characters speak Elvish, but she does use a pretty consistent "Hayslopian" dialect for her peasants. In Hayslope, you say "feyther" for "father," "'donna" for "don't," and drop your Ns all over the place (4.39-41). Sadly, it's not clear where Hayslope stands on the tomato-tomatoh issue.
The big stuff? Eliot is very clear about the tastes and prejudices of her rustic community. Nobody likes the rule of Old Squire Donnithorne, and everybody hopes that an Arthur-Adam-Irwine trifecta will bring in better days. And Eliot doesn't stop there.
She shows us the habits and psychological tics that rein in an "everybody knows everybody" community like this. As our narrator observes early on, you'll never see Hayslope villagers—
[…] gathered in a knot. Villagers never swarm; a whisper is unknown among them, and they seem almost as incapable of an undertone as a cow or a stag. (2.20)
We emerge from Adam Bede knowing Hayslope inside and out. Even though it's populated by people who never existed.
Macro-Setting
Adam Bede is a Victorian novel. So why are we in 1799, when Queen Victoria wasn't even born? Where are the factories, the hoop skirts, the cute street urchins? Clarification time. Adam Bede is a novel about how the world became Victorian.
Eliot's characters discuss Napoleon Bonaparte, or "Bony," as Mr. Craig calls him (53.29). Adam Smith-inspired capitalism is already in the air. By the time Eliot actually wrote Adam Bede, imperialism and capital gain would be the British way. Think of Victorian England as Hayslope on steroids.
We're looking at the early stages of "a whole new world" (as the folks in Aladdin would say) and at bracingly new ideas. Arthur Donnithorne, for instance, is reading Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, which is fresh off the press. Arthur isn't won over by this book's "queer, wizardlike stories" (5.59). But by mid-century, Wordsworth would be one of England's poetic bigwigs—probably the poetic bigwig. See what we mean about beginnings?
Yet there are endings too in Adam Bede. Eliot's narrator looks back longingly on less busy times, the days before people were "made squeamish by doubts and fears and lofty aspirations" (52.55). And Adam represents a kind of workman that has disappeared from English life: "painstakingly honest men, with the skill and conscience to do well the tasks that lie before them" (19.9).
Beautiful, rural England hasn't been obliterated by toxic sludge. Still, Eliot knows that she's describing a vanished society. A leisurely, picturesque society that gave way to the harsh and hectic Victorian world.