"Silas Marner" by George Eliot

This classic novel is, especially given its relative brevity, a great introduction to the works of that great Victorian novelist George Eliot.

The Plot: spoiler alert

Silas Marner comes from "north'ard"; he was a member of a puritan sect who was accused of stealing money by a fellow member; who, we infer, had designs on the girl betrothed to Silas and framed Silas while Silas was in a "cataleptic fit". Silas, expelled from his home town, comes to Raveloe, a "Merrie England" village in the middle of the country. Silas, regarded with suspicion by the peasants because of his newcomer status, because he rejected the offered role of 'wise woman' after he suggested a herbal remedy, and because he doesn’t have a pint at the Rainbow. 

He's a weaver, like a spider, and all he lives for is work (in a social comment Eliot says that Marner changes to fit his loom: "Marner's face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constant mechanical relation the the objects of his life, so that he produced the same impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart"; in the same way as in Huxley's Brave New World men are bred to for the assembly line to which they are destined). He needs very little money to feed and clothe himself etc and he no longer contributes to the church so he buries his savings. 

The other side of the coin [sorry about that] is that the rich are corrupt. The Squire's son Godfrey has embezzled from his father, loaning money to his brother, Dunstan, who threatens to expose the fact that Godfrey has married secretly. A plan to sell Godfrey's horse falls at the first jump [sorry again] when the horse dies (badly ridden by Dunstan, a metaphor for the ruling class exploiting the workers). Walking home in a fortuitous mist, Dunstan finds Silas out and steals his gold. 

The loss of his gold prompts Silas to seek help, walking into a comedy crowd scene at the local pub (it's always great to schedule the humour immediately after a moment of great drama - as with the porter scene in Macbeth which comes immediately after the murder of the King). This is the first interaction Silas has had with the village, and asking for help is the first indication that nobody can live entirely alone. Silas begins to mellow. 

The New Year’s Day party at the Squire’s  mirrors the crowd scene in the pub, being a sort of upper class comedy sketch to complement the peasantry version.

Godfrey’s abandoned wife is heading through the snow with their child, intent of confronting him at the party. But she is addicted to opium and, taking a draught, the soporific drug combines with her fatigue to send her to sleep; hypothermia finished her off. Her toddler toddles off and wanders into Silas's cottage (he is in yet another convenient fugue state so he doesn’t notice her coming in) and falls asleep in front of the fire. Silas comes to and thinks the child is his missing gold, returned in human form. Pulling himself together, he retraces  the girl’s steps to find the woman in the snow and then turns up at the Squire's feast with the baby, asking for the doctor. 
Godfrey semi-recognises the child but says he doesn’t; Silas insists the child is his (the gold went, the child came; both being mysterious) and, since the woman is dead, Godfrey, now free to marry Nancy, lets Silas take the child. 

Dolly Winthrop proves invaluable to Silas in instructing him to to bring up the girl, now called Eppie, and giving him baby clothes etc from her last-born Aaron. She insists Silas gets Eppie baptised. As a toddler, Eppie proves a handful, and Silas is too soft to discipline her. But his love for her begins to soften him.

Sixteen years later (this is a little like 'A Winter's Tale' in which a girl is lost and rediscovered after a long gap) the Stone Pits are being drained. Dunstan's body, with the stolen gold, is discovered. Godfrey confesses to (childless) Nancy that Eppie is his child (by the dead woman). 

Godfrey and Nancy go to Silas and claim Eppie as theirs; they propose to take her away (though they will make sure that Silas is cared for in his old age, and permit Eppie to continue to see him) and adopt her. However, Eppie elects to stay with Silas (though she will soon be marrying Aaron) and Godfrey (and Nancy who, though very much the wronged woman, sides with her husband in this game of social one-upmanship) are turned away.

Nancy and Godfrey reflect on what has happened and decide that they must make the best of things. Chastened, they repent.

Silas and Eppie journey to Lantern Yard ... to find that the church has been replaced by a factory and the city is too busy for their simple country ways.

The structure of the plot

One of the joys of SM is the juxtapositions. Immediately after the dramatic theft of Silas's gold comes the comic rustic yokel scene in the pub; this reversal reminded me of the way, in Macbeth, the murder of the King is immediately followed by the only comic interlude, the 'hell porter' scene. Eliot then follows the scene in the pub with another scene of a social gathering: the New Year's Eve party thrown by the squire to which the poor people are invited to entertain the guests (and afterwards to dine off the leftovers). Both social occasions are interrupted by Silas, once to announce that his gold has gone and the second time to announce that Eppie, who symbolises eternal gold (Eliot would have known that in the Bible's Gospel of Matthew chapter 6, (verses 19-20) Jesus is reported to have told his followers "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth. and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal".

Sleeping Beauty or Hero's Adventure?

Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots (pp 202 - 203) cites SM as a classic ‘Rebirth’ story along the lines of Sleeping Beauty. The jealous fairy is William Dane, who frames Silas for theft, so stealing his fiancee and causing Silas to seek self-exile in the semi-mythical rural paradise of Raveloe. But the poison has entered the soul of Silas and he gradually (over fifteen years, about as long as it would take a princess to grow up) withdraws from the world, first into his miserhood, and then, following the loss of his gold, into embittered "Self-pitiful brooding". From this “state of living death” he is awakened by the semi-magical arrival of Eppie and is happy but the 'ever after' bit is undecided until Eppie acknowledges Silas as her father, despite discovering that her natural father is Godfrey. One might also note that the two of the three moments of magic in the Sleeping Beauty tale, the fairy's curse and the prince's kiss are both occasions on which Silas has fallen into his "cataleptic fit", itself an echo of the Sleeping Beauty. (Perhaps the other moment of magic, when Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger, is heralded by the fortuitous mist that shields the theft of Dunstan ... and leads him to fall, with his stolen gold, into the pools.)

An alternative analysis of the story is that it is a 'Hero's Adventure' (an analysis along these lines is supported by the comment of GE herself that SM was a "legendary story"). Silas, the hero, leaves his home country to travel to the mythical land of Raveloe where he meets trials: the first being the offer of becoming the village's 'wise woman', which he fails; the second being the theft of his gold, which he passes, at least in part, by seeking help from the village pub; and the third being his acceptance of the responsibility for the care of the abandoned child. The grail that the hero has been seeking turns out to be Eppie's love and, armed with this, he returns to his own world, only to find that it has changed and that the past no longer has any hold over him. In this analysis the antagonist is Godfrey and he is in many ways the mirror image of Silas: wasteful and indolent rather than hard-working and miserly, and, fundamentally, he ducks responsibility where Silas accepts it.

The author's messages
Although George Eliot believed fiction should have a morally beneficial effect, as a critic, she asserted that “We don’t want a man with a wand, going about the gallery and haranguing us. Art is art and tells its own story.” Nevertheless, as an author, she cannot resist the authorial voice commenting upon issues, though it is far less intrusive than in many contemporary novels. But Silas Marner is, first and foremost, a story and the dance of the characters offers the reader enjoyment and delight.

• One of my U3A Central Eastbourne reading group suggested that the book's message is that suffering is rewarded.
• Another suggestion is that the message is that a man can only find fulfilment when he is part of a community in which he both gives help and receives it. 
• Alternatively, a man can find fulfilment only when he acknowledges both the male and the female sides of his character. Silas has his masculinity ripped away from him when he is first falsely accused and doesn't stand up for himself and second has his gold stolen (symbolic of emasculation) and accepts the loss. When he adopts Eppie he accepts that a human can only be complete if he accepts responsibility for and nurtures and cares for others. (One could argiue that the role of protector is a masculine virtue and he has therefore reasserted his masculinity when he says, pivotally, apropos the baby Eppie: "It's come to me - I've a right to keep it."; Ch 13).
• Another message might be that neither miserliness nor wastefulness bring happiness. Marian Evans knew her Dante and in Dante's Inferno one of the circles of hell contains both those who spend too much come against those who spend too little. Dante, like Aristotle, believed in the doctrine of the golden middle: that good lies in moderation. Silas himself is, famously a miser: "as Silas walked homeward across the fields in the twilight, he drew out the money and thought it was brighter in the gathering gloom.” (Ch 2) What is less obvious is the wastefulness of the squirearchy. This is referred to overtly in chapter one: "there were several chiefs in Raveloe who could farm badly quite at their ease, drawing enough money from their bad farming, in those war times, to live in a rollicking fashion". In chapter two we are told that the poor people enjoy the leftovers from the feasts of the rich (an early example of trickle-down economics or further confirmation that the rich are wasteful?) One of the symbols of this waste is the undrained and deserted stone-pit next to which Silas lives (though it is Godfrey's decision to drain the stone-pits that leads to the discovery of Dunstan the thief and Godfrey the unacknoledged father). The Lammeters are Eliot's ideal: “for the Lammeters had been brought up in that way, that they never suffered a pinch of salt to be wasted, and yet everybody in their household had of the best, according to his place.” (Ch 3) Silas himself recognises the virtue in moderation near the end of the book when he has achieved wisdom: urged to continue smoking he demurs: “I’ve done enough for to-day. I think, mayhap, a little of it does me more good than so much at once.” (Ch 16) Nancy's sister, a Lammeter, describe: “that way o’ the men—always wanting and wanting, and never easy with what they’ve got: they can’t sit comfortable in their chairs when they’ve neither ache nor pain, but either they must stick a pipe in their mouths, to make ’em better than well, or else they must be swallowing something strong, though they’re forced to make haste before the next meal comes in.” (Ch 17) but she specifically exempts “our father” (is that a deliberate Biblical echo?) from this general foolishness.

Two types of faith

Eliot, who herself as a young woman moved from a devoted Christian to an agnostic position, contrasts two conceptions of faith:

• Eliot explicitly attacks the narrow-mindedness of the Lantern Yard (surely a deliberate name with its implications of the light for the world) version of Christianity: “The little light he [Silas] possessed spread its beams so narrowly, that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to create for him the blackness of night.” (Ch 2) 
  
• In contrast, the faith of the village is relaxed and easy-going; perhaps one might say that it is less concerned with right and wrong and more with good and bad. The village is almost pre-Christian in its beliefs: “Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the grey-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity. A shadowy conception of power that by much persuasion can be induced to refrain from inflicting harm, is the shape most easily taken by the sense of the Invisible in the minds of men who have always been pressed close by primitive wants, and to whom a life of hard toil has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic religious faith. To them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear.” (Ch 1; second paragraph)
  
• The fundamental faith in the village is ‘neighbourliness’, a word Eliot often uses. This is pretty close to the Christian commandment to ‘Love Thy Neighbour’: “There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort, and took the shape least allied to the complimentary and hypocritical.” (Ch 10)
  
• Even going to church is not central to the villagers’ faith, although it is thought more suitable for the higher social orders: “The inhabitants of Raveloe were not severely regular in their church-going, and perhaps there was hardly a person in the parish who would not have held that to go to church every Sunday in the calendar would have shown a greedy desire to stand well with Heaven, and get an undue advantage over their neighbours—a wish to be better than the “common run”, that would have implied a reflection on those who had had godfathers and godmothers as well as themselves, and had an equal right to the burying-service. At the same time, it was understood to be requisite for all who were not household servants, or young men, to take the sacrament at one of the great festivals: Squire Cass himself took it on Christmas-day; while those who were held to be “good livers” went to church with greater, though still with moderate, frequency.” (Ch 10)
  
• Dolly expresses the fundamental faith of the villagers thus: “there’s trouble i’ this world, and there’s things as we can niver make out the rights on. And all as we’ve got to do is to trusten, Master Marner—to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o’ good and rights, we may be sure as there’s a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know—I feel it i’ my own inside as it must be so.” (Ch 16)
  
• These two faiths are explicitly contrasted in the rambling story about a marriage which the sexton tells in Chapter 6. In the story, he parson muddles up the words ‘wife’ and ‘husband’ in a wedding ceremony: “Is’t the meanin’ or the words as makes folks fast i’ wedlock?” (Ch 6) the sexton asks.
  
• Eliot seems to be attacking the narrow-mindedness that accompanies monotheism. “In the early ages of the world, we know, it was believed that each territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities, so that a man could cross the bordering heights and be out of the reach of his native gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and the groves and the hills among which he had lived from his birth.” (Ch 2) This idea has Biblical roots. There is a lot of evidence that the early Israelites (eg pre Moses) were not monotheistic, but possibly polytheistic, or at best henotheistic (they recognised many gods but worshipped only one. For example, in Exodus 20:3 God tells the Israelistes that “you shall have no other gods to set against me”, implying that there are others. In Psalms 89: 5-7 there is a question: ’Who among the heavenly beings is like Yahweh, a God feared in the council of the holy ones, great and awesome above all that are around him?’ Finally, there are suggestions that other gods are local. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 states “When Elyon [translated in the New English Bible as ‘the Most High’] apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods [the NEB has ‘sons of God’]; Yahweh’s own portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share.” Lastly, David, exiled by Saul, curses those who have sent him into foreign lands where he will have “to serve other gods” (1 Samuel 26:19)
  

Social commentary

There is a degree of social commentary which might suggest that politically Eliot is to the left of the spectrum; she is on the side of the working man rather than the landowner:

• From early on, it is made clear that there is nothing special about the social hierarchy of the village. The Squire “was only one among several landed parishioners”, the big difference being that he not only owned his land, he even “had a tenant or two”. (Ch 3)
• “It was still that glorious war-time which was felt to be a peculiar favour of Providence towards the landed interest, and the fall of prices had not yet come to carry the race of small squires and yeomen down that road to ruin for which extravagant habits and bad husbandry were plentifully anointing their wheels.” (Ch 3)
• “the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor thought that the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly life; besides, their feasting caused a multiplication of orts, which were the heirlooms of the poor.” (Ch 3)
• “The Squire had been used to parish homage all his life, used to the presupposition that his family, his tankards, and everything that was his, were the oldest and best” (Ch 9)
• “By this advanced hour of the day, the Squire ... felt it quite pleasant to fulfil the hereditary duty of being noisily jovial and patronizing” (Ch 11)
• At the squire’s party, Ben Winthrop (father to Aaron, husband to Dolly, and therefore representative of the kindly, easy-going villagers, defends Godfrey the Squire’s son against sexton Mr Macey: “I should like you to pick me out a finer-limbed young fellow nor Master Godfrey—one as ’ud knock you down easier, or ’s more pleasanter-looksed when he’s piert and merry.” Macey replies: “he isn’t come to his right colour yet: he’s partly like a slack-baked pie. And I doubt he’s got a soft place in his head, else why should he be turned round the finger by that offal Dunsey as nobody’s seen o’ late, and let him kill that fine hunting hoss as was the talk o’ the country? And one while he was allays after Miss Nancy, and then it all went off again, like a smell o’ hot porridge, as I may say. That wasn’t my way when I went a-coorting.” (Ch 11)

But how radical was Eliot? Her idealised village community of Raveloe is set in the past (Eliot had seen many of the early Victorian changes in the countryside and she is aware that Raveloe is special in that it is set away from a coaching route (and pre railway) and so has remained unspoilt); Eliot is a small-c conservative at heart (as is shown by her horror at the industrialisation of Lantern Yard at the end of the novel). 

In her treatment of women, despite Eliot's own scandalous personal life, Eliot is quite conventional: the three main female characters are Dolly, the perfect farmer's wife (perhaps paralleled by Mrs Poyser in Adam Bede), Eppie, the adopted daughter of Silas, who has remained steadily nice despite being spoiled rotten as a child, and Nancy, the only remotely complex female character, who is the wronged but loyal wife of the young squire.

Of course, the peak of the social commentary comes when we ask whether the right of a biological father (and from there the old traditional system of inheritance of land and title) should overturn the right of an adopted father. Eliot's answer in this case is a resounding 'no'. 

• “Godfrey had from the first specified Eppie, then about twelve years old, as a child suitable for them to adopt. It had never occurred to him that Silas would rather part with his life than with Eppie. Surely the weaver would wish the best to the child he had taken so much trouble with, and would be glad that such good fortune should happen to her ... Was it not an appropriate thing for people in a higher station to take a charge off the hands of a man in a lower?” (Ch 17)
• “But I’ve a claim on you, Eppie—the strongest of all claims. It’s my duty, Marner, to own Eppie as my child, and provide for her. She is my own child—her mother was my wife. I’ve a natural claim on her that must stand before every other.” (Ch 19)

Influences:

The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan: One of our U3A group suggested that Eliot derived the original idea for Silas from seeing a jobbing weaver going across the countryside with a large pack on his back ... and remembered the description of Christian, in the early part of the Pilgrim's Progress, who travelled with a burden on his back until, with sufficient faith, he could cast it off.

Shakespeare: as well as the murder/hell porter juxtaposition in Macbeth described above, the rural pub scene could have been inspired by Nick Bottom and his mates in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But the obvious Shakespearean influence is A Winter's Tale, in which Perdita is a child who is lost and then rediscovered after a gap of sixteen years. 

The Bible: As well as the reference from Matthew, above, and from Exodus and Deuteronomy, one could see call some of the villagers in the pub scene Job's comforters, after Silas has his gold stolen. The Christian interpretation is made even stronger when Silas is identified as Christ in only the fourth paragraph when the “Raveloe lasses ... declare that they would never marry a dead man come to life again.” (Ch 1)

Pantomime. We have discussed Sleeping Beauty. In the Introduction to the Penguin edition of this book, Q D Leavis suggests that Silas Marner is an 'anti-Cinderella' story: "Eppie ... renounces her birth-right as the Squire’s heiress to marry a working-man” (p 34)

Selected quotes:

• “Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices.” (Ch 1)
• “Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.” (Ch 2)
• “The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.” (Ch 5)
• “joy is the best of wine, and Silas’s guineas were a golden wine of that sort.” (Ch 5)
• “there’s allays two ’pinions; there’s the ’pinion a man has of himsen, and there’s the ’pinion other folks have on him.” (Ch 6)
• “there’s reasons in things as nobody knows on—that’s pretty much what I’ve made out; yet some folks are so wise, they’ll find you fifty reasons straight off, and all the while the real reason’s winking at ’em in the corner, and they niver see’t.” (Ch 6)
• “he’d got a bit confused in his head, what wi’ age and wi’ taking a drop o’ summat warm when the service come of a cold morning.” (Ch 6)
• “Did ever a ghost give a man a black eye? That’s what I should like to know. If ghos’es want me to believe in ’em, let ’em leave off skulking i’ the dark and i’ lone places—let ’em come where there’s company and candles.” (Ch 6)
• “Now, don’t you be for overshooting the mark ... That’s what you’re allays at; if I throw a stone and hit, you think there’s summat better than hitting, and you try to throw a stone beyond.” (Ch 8)
• “Like many violent and implacable men, he allowed evils to grow under favour of his own heedlessness, till they pressed upon him with exasperating force, and then he turned round with fierce severity and became unrelentingly hard.” (Ch 8)
• “I wouldn’t speak ill o’ this world, seeing as Them put us in it as knows best—but what wi’ the drink, and the quarrelling, and the bad illnesses, and the hard dying, as I’ve seen times and times, one’s thankful to hear of a better.” (Ch 10)
• “he isn’t come to his right colour yet: he’s partly like a slack-baked pie” (Ch 11)
• “It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.” (Ch 12)
• “uncle Kimble ... shuffled before his adversary’s deal with a glare of suspicion, and turned up a mean trump-card with an air of inexpressible disgust, as if in a world where such things could happen one might as well enter on a course of reckless profligacy.” (Ch 13)
• “We may strive and scrat and fend, but it’s little we can do arter all” (Ch 14)
• “For if the child ever went anyways wrong, and you hadn’t done your part by it, Master Marner—’noculation, and everything to save it from harm—it ’ud be a thorn i’ your bed for ever o’ this side the grave; and I can’t think as it ’ud be easy lying down for anybody when they’d got to another world, if they hadn’t done their part by the helpless children as come wi’out their own asking.” (Ch 14)
• “Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires” (Ch 14)
• “Silas had taken to smoking a pipe daily during the last two years, having been strongly urged to it by the sages of Raveloe, as a practice “good for the fits”; and this advice was sanctioned by Dr. Kimble, on the ground that it was as well to try what could do no harm” (Ch 16)
• “I know the way o’ wives; they set one on to abuse their husbands, and then they turn round on one and praise ’em as if they wanted to sell ’em.” (Ch 17)
• “‘A man must have so much on his mind,’ is the belief by which a wife often supports a cheerful face under rough answers and unfeeling words” (Ch 17)

July 2022; 244 pages

There is a BBC In Our Time podcast about Silas Marner which can be found here, although it spends more time considering GE than SM. 

A short biography of George Eliot can be found here.

Biographies of George Eliot reviewed on this blog are:

• George Eliot by Jenny Uglow
• George Eliot: A Life by Rosemary Ashton

Other novels written by George Eliot include:

• Scenes of Clerical Life
• Adam Bede
• The Mill on the Floss
• Middlemarch
• Silas Marner
• Felix Holt
• Romola
• Daniel Deronda

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God