Adam Bede — George Eliot

Picture a sessions court in Mumbai where the whole case against a frightened young woman rests on two ordinary people: the widow who gave her a bed for the night, and the labourer who saw her near a wood. Nobody shouts, nobody lies, and yet by the time they step down there is nothing left to say for her. That is the trial of Hetty Sorrel in George Eliot's Adam Bede. The question it asks every law student is uncomfortable: when honest evidence convicts a person whom everyone else failed, has justice been done?

In two minutes

In Adam Bede, Hetty Sorrel, a young farm girl seduced and abandoned by the young squire Arthur Donnithorne, is tried at Stoniton for killing her newborn child; the plain, honest evidence of Sarah Stone (who sheltered her and saw the child born) and John Olding (who found the baby dead in a wood) convicts her, she is sentenced to hang, and only Arthur's last-minute reprieve changes the sentence to transportation.

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