Published in 1861, Silas Marner was George Eliot’s fourth novel and was standard required reading for high school students in the 1960’s and 1970’s, including this writer. It no longer is generally part of the required curriculum. The reason for this is that it has been deemed too demanding for contemporary teenagers because of its slow pace and the numerous authorial interventions, which express her psychological and social commentary.
Earlier this year, I decided to reread Eliot’s classic novel. Well, maybe read it for the first time, since I wasn’t the most diligent high school student. I did so because I was looking for a quotation for my recently published novel, Chasing the Wind, to introduce the section on a character who sought fulfillment through wealth.
I have to admit that the first part was slow going, but I think the novel is definitely worth reading. I was moved emotionally by the story; my mind was stimulated by Eliot’s ideas, and my soul improved by her moral reflections.
Let me present five reasons why you should read Silas Marner despite some of its challenges.
- Its moving story of redemption
- Its outstanding prose
- Its reflections on English society of the time
- Its character portrayals
- Its perspective on work and wealth
First, the story is simple, but quite good. Silas Marner is a weaver in early nineteenth-century England. He is falsely accused of theft by his best friend and is excluded from the religious sect of which he was a devout member. He moves to the village of Raveloe, hence the subtitle The Weaver of Raveloe, and becomes a complete recluse. Without fellowship with God or man, he lives just for the gold that he makes from his weaving. He is redeemed by the appearance of Eppie, a golden-haired toddler who appears almost miraculously at his door, whom he raises as his own child. She restores him to society and to God.
The contrasting parallel between the gold coins and the golden curls of the little girl is a powerful irony. I remember gasping when I read it. The story leads us to reflect upon the moral choice between the love of money and the love of one’s fellow man and the consequences of each.
The second reason, Silas Marner’s outstanding prose, is probably a shocker. Eliot clearly violates perhaps the most sacred rule of writing coaches: show don’t tell. This is particularly true in the first section. I’ll grant it. However, there’s more to be said on this score.
While certainly not the style most readers are used to today, Eliot’s telling of the story in the first part leaves an impression of darkness and mystery. Indeed, there is almost a fairy-tale like quality to it that Eliot turns on its head. Instead of in an isolated cottage in a dark forest, the evil takes place in an urban setting among a devout religious sect and the redemption comes out from a murderous storm to Marner’s isolated cottage. There is the mysterious ailment that at key points overcomes Marner and leaves him in a trance. Superstition also plays an important role. His knowledge of herbal remedies is considered by the poor as a kind of wizardly knowledge that further isolates Marner from the people of Raveloe.
This fairy-tale atmosphere is effectively conveyed by Eliot. However, I’d like to highlight another example that demonstrates her skill as an author. Chapter 6 marvellously relates the conversation of several commoners in the local tavern. Hurried impatient modern readers might complain that this scene doesn’t advance the story and be tempted to skip it.[1] This would be a shame. If one of the chief joys of good fiction is to carry the reader via the imagination to different times and places, then the atmosphere, humor and interaction of the commoners described by Eliot makes one feel like they are in an old English pub. At the same time the scene introduces several minor characters who play important roles in the story.
The third reason to read Silas Marner is that it is a novel of social criticism. Chapter 3 is a telling critique of the landed gentry in England. Eliot foretells their fall in two ways. First, she truthfully states that they are a doomed group because their inefficiency will not survive the onslaught of the industrial revolution and its impact on the economy as a whole but on agriculture in particular.
However, her portrayal of the Cass family is even more telling as a vivid illustration of the statement of their demise. In the tradition of Squire Western in Henry Fieldings’ Tom Jones, although not so cruel, is the patriarch Squire Cass. He is a drunken traditionalist lord devoted above all to hunting. His dress his unkempt; his manners crass, and his house is filthy. His elder son Godfrey lacks the courage to face immediate consequences to his faulty actions and is blackmailed by his thoroughly decadent younger brother Dunstan because he secretly married and had a child by a lower-class opium addict.
The picture is not completely negative. Squire Cass recognizes the value and virtues of a good wife and sincerely seems to enjoy his social function of entertaining the village on certain holidays. Godfrey is not wholly irredeemable. His marriage to the admirable and morally upright Nancy Lammeter helps him turn his life around and he becomes a responsible lord of the manor. However, the final nail in the coffin of the landed gentry’s future is that Godfrey and Nancy are childless. The Cass family line has reached its end.
Commoners are presented more positively, but not completely. The religious sect which expelled Silas Marner is harsh and shares the dark and oppressive atmosphere characteristic of the early chapters. They are also superstitious. They depended on lots to determine guilt or innocence, which in the case of Silas Marner resulted in an unjust decision. Superstition is not foreign to the commoners of Raveloe. They view of the practitioners of folk medicine as having magical powers. The religion of the Raveloe commoners, who were Anglicans, is simple, traditional, and sincere.
Their religion also reflects their views of social hierarchy. Dolly Winthrop—more on this delightful character later—comforts Silas grievance against God in the language of hierarchy.
It allays comes into my head when I ’m sorry for folks, and feel as I can’t do a
power to help’em, not if I was to get up i’ the middle o’ the night — it comes into
my head as Them above has got a deal tenderer heart nor what I ’ve got — for I
can’t be anyways better nor Them as made me; and if anything looks hard to me,
it’s because there’s things I don’t know on; and for the matter o’ that, there may
be plenty o’ things I don’t know on, for it’s little as I know — that it is (II:16).[2]
While Eliot rejected orthodox Christianity, she was not anti-religious. Clearly, she admired or, at least, had a place in her heart, for such humble and charitable religious sentiments about God.
Dolly Winthrop leads us to our fourth reason to read Silas Marner—the novel’s character portrayals. Dolly Winthrop is a remarkable creation. She is uniformly kind and helps to reopen Marner’s “fountains of human love and divine faith” (I:10). Her views on men are humorously tolerant, as can be seen in her reflections on her husband’s jokes and drinking.
She took her husband’s jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else,
considering that “men would be so,” and viewing the stronger sex in the light of
animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls
and turkey-cocks (I:10).
Godfrey Cass’s transformation into a caring husband and responsible squire rings true, as is the character of his second wife, Nancy. Their mutual acceptance of their childless fate is touching. One could mention other characters, but the reader should explore them by reading the novel.
Obviously, however, the main character is Silas Marner, who is one of great and unique creations of nineteenth-century literature. Marner was and is throughout the novel a naturally retiring sensitive man who is a skilled and industrious weaver. He has a genuine capacity for loving relationships and faith in God. These traits are crushed by the unjust accusation and subsequent expulsion by his religious community. His retiring and sensitive nature is so bruised that he becomes a complete recluse. He remains a capable weaver, but his loss of human and divine fellowship means that his occupational skill lacks its purpose beyond the mere hoarding of treasure. He becomes a miser.
Although I dearly love Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge in the Christmas Carol, he is a bit of a caricature whom Dickens uses to convey a message of the need for charity and generosity. However, Eliot’s Silas Marner is a much more multidimensional protagonist and encourages us to reflect upon the nature of work and wealth, our fifth reason for reading the novel.
The dehumanizing effect of industrialization on the worker was a common theme in the nineteenth century. Often the description of workers as “hands” is meant to demonstrate this effect.
Karl Marx’s discussion of the alienation of the worker from his labor is a more philosophical discussion.
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his
production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper
commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of
men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor
produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as
a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in
general.[3]
Although one might question Marx’s explanation, the dehumanizing of the worker in the industrial revolution rings true.
In Silas Marner, George Eliot takes a different approach. As a weaver, Marner is an example of the pre-factory industrial revolution. What begins his dehumanization is not the nature of his labor in and of itself, but his mistreatment that leads him to cut himself off from God and human society. This results in a loss of one of the true purposes of labor. He works not to serve God and man, but just for the money he gets from selling his linen. Eliot writes of this effect in the quotation I used in my novel. “For twenty years mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good and the immediate object of toil” (Marner, I:2).
He hoards the gold and delights in it—not in the quality of his work, not in service to God and man. He has become a greedy miser. His fellowship was with his gold coins alone. “He handled them, he counted them, till their form and color were like the satisfaction of a thirst to him; but it was only in the night when his work was done, that he drew them out to enjoy their companionship” (I:2).
But the dehumanization of Marner goes further than just delighting in gold rather than God and human society. He begins to lose even the point of artificial wealth like gold that has as its object the purchase of something else. Marner seeks to spend less for his own physical needs to that he can have more gold to hoard.
This neglect of his own needs has a horrific effect that Eliot vividly portrays. “He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection” (I:2). He had to feed himself but strove as much as possible to lessen the amount of food he ate and the time spent on it just so he could produce more and more linen to sell to get more and more gold. The end result was “to reduce his life to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect” (I:2). His was an “insect-like existence into which his nature had shrunk” (I:2).
Eliot’s portrayal of the psychological effect of Silas Marner’s greed is more profound than Dickens’ Ebeneezer Scrooge. He is not harsh or cruel toward others as is Scrooge.[4] Rather, Marner avoids human contact as much as possible. He is alone and without a purpose in his labor besides gathering his metal companions.
At the same time, Marner is not a laborer, a member of Marx’s proletariat, who is alienated from him work. He is being consumed by it so that there was nothing else to him.
But as I said, Silas Marner is a moving story of redemption. His treasure is stolen. Without his gold coins, he is at a loss. He grieves. He has no joy of holding them in the night and see them glitter in the firelight from the hearth. Then miraculously it would seem his gold has reappeared before the hearth.
Gold! — his own gold — brought back to him as mysteriously as it had been
taken away! He felt his heart begin to beat violently, and for a few moments he
was unable to stretch out his hand and grasp the restored treasure. The heap of
gold seemed to glow and get larger beneath his agitated gaze. He leaned forward
at last, and stretched forth his hand; but instead of the hard coin with the familiar
resisting outline, his fingers encountered soft warm curls. In utter amazement,
Silas fell on his knees and bent his head low to examine the marvel: it was a
sleeping child — a round, fair thing, with soft yellow rings all over its head (I:12).
The child, seemingly a helpless orphan, reminds him of his beloved sister whom he had held when she died. The child, later name Eppie, was the beginning of the end of his isolation from human fellowship.
In addition, “it stirred fibres that had never been moved in Raveloe — old quiverings of tenderness — old impressions of awe at the presentiment of some Power presiding over his life;” (I:12). The inexplicable appearance of the child, began to awaken in him the long lost feelings of a divine power that cared for him. Her appearance also was the beginning of the end of his isolation from divine fellowship.
It would take time and the kind help of Dolly Winthrop but eventually Silas Marner was restored to God and man. He also found purpose for his work. Marner tells the now grown Eppie, “Eh, my precious child, the blessing was mine. If you hadn’t been sent to save me, I should ha’ gone to the grave in my misery. The money was taken away from me in time; and you see it’s been kept — kept till it was wanted for you. It’s wonderful — our life is wonderful” (II:19). The gold coins had been put in their proper place, his work restored to its true end. He labored for the love of another.
Silas Marner is a wonderful story and worth overcoming our initial modern limitations in the reading of fiction. Read it. It will bring you joy. You’ll be changed by it.
[1] The reader can see more on this problem in “The Sin of the Impatient Reader,” in my blog post against skipping over landscape and seascape descriptions. The link is https://billisley.com/2015/06/the-sin-of-the-impatient-reader/
[2] Roman numerals represent the sections of the novel; Arabic numerals the chapter. This passage also captures the languages of the rural commoners. Some readers might object that it is more difficult to read, but such language gives to Eliot’s novel an authentic flavor that allows us to enter into the villagers’ mindset.
[3] Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marxist Internet Archive, XXII.
[4] Scrooge too is reacting to emotional trauma resulting from childhood neglect and loss. Money seems to be his security against poverty. As a financier and moneylender, he is different from Marner who is a craftsman.
