Well I have started my journey and begun Adam Bede. In the introduction, describing the life and times of George Eliot, Stephen Gill writes "Writing shortly after her death JA Froude spoke of the earlier part of the Victorian age, in which the spirit of critical inquiry had led the finest minds to question and doubt all established certainties, as a time in which 'all around us, the intellectual lightships had broken from their moorings ... The present generation which has grown up in an open spiritual ocean, which has got used to it and has learned to swim for itself, will never know what it was to find the lights all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by except the stars'".