It was, in fact, not solitary at all, and the men in the dank cells passed their time in much the same way as the men who roamed free—rereading Adam Bede. (At one point, a shipment of books from the Red Cross arrived, and the men fell upon it in frenzied excitement when they saw that it contained a different George Eliot novel: Felix Holt. They were devastated to discover that there had been a clerical error. The two dozen books were, in fact, copies of Adam Bede with Felix Holt covers.)
