the importance of wordsworth's "lyrical ballads" to the way "adam bede" is written has often been noted. like wordsworth's poems, "adam bede" features minutely detailed empirical and psychological observations about illiterate "common folk" who, because of their greater proximity to nature than to culture, are taken as emblematic of human nature in its more pure form. so behind its humble appearance, this is a novel of great ambition, seeking to manifest in novelistic form a key principle of wordsworth's aesthetic philosophy.