Take a story's temperature by studying its tone. Is it hopeful? Cynical? Snarky? Playful?
Critical Yet Compassionate
Eliot's narrator runs as hot and cold as a mid-2000s Katy Perry song. On the one hand, our narrator has no trouble calling characters stupid, greedy, fat, delusional, you name it. You'll usually get an eloquently worded opener, like:
Mr. Casson's person was by no means of that common type which can be allowed to pass without description. (2.2)
And then you'll get a quip about how Mr. Casson's gut "might be said, at a rough guess, to be thirteen times larger" than his empty head (2.2). In case you ever wondered, this is what a 19th-century fat joke looks like.
Yet this is a narrator with a soul—a narrator who is capable of describing nature in a thoughtful, delicate way, and of describing people even more exquisitely. For this narrator, it is:
[…] needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me. (17.8)
There's no sugarcoating in Adam Bede, but not much lowballing, either. We're given a heady mixture of the good and the bad.