Silas Marner. George Eliot.

Silas Marner
George Eliot
New York: Washington Square Press, (1861), 1960.

Why read it? Novel. Bitter, miserly weaver who has no friends in the village, has come there after having been accused of a crime committed by a friend, has his hoard of gold stolen, but takes in a little yellow-haired baby girl, Eppie. Gradually, as she grows older, she brings him back to a more normal view of life. Much of the story is centered on the two sons of Squire Cass, Dunstan and Godfrey. Dunstan, wild and reckless and always in debt, disappears. Godfrey marries the young woman of his choice, Nancy Lammeter. Sixteen years after he had disappeared, Dunstan’s skeleton is found with Silas’s stolen gold and Godfrey confesses that Eppie is the daughter of an earlier, secret marriage, a woman who died on the night that Eppie had been delivered. Invited to live with the wealthy Godfrey, Eppie chooses to stay with Silas and marries a village lad she had long known.

RayS: Silas Marner is a wholesome novel that was characterized by a writer in the 1960’s craze for “relevance” as “that Silas Marner crap.” I never read the novel until after I had completed graduate school, expecting something in the nature of “Goody Two-Shoes,” and I was surprised by the delightful scenes of village life. I should have known from having previously read Middlemarch that George Eliot would never write “crap.” To read Silas Marner is to experience a time when people knew only their villages and the surrounding countryside. No one living today can appreciate how provincial and limited was their outlook on life.

Some sample ideas from the novel: “No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin; and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?” “To the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experiences was a region of vagueness and mystery….” “…his way of life—he invited no comer to step across his doorsill, and he never strolled into the village to drink a pint at the Rainbow, or to gossip at the wheelwright’s; he sought no man or woman, save for the purposes of his calling, in order to supply himself with necessaries….” “…and that was how folks got over-wise, for they went to school…to those who could teach them more than their neighbors could learn with their five senses and the parson.”

“He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection.” “…to reduce his life to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect.” “He had seemed to love it [money] little in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then.” “His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of an end toward which the functions tended.” “Raveloe lay low among the bushy trees and the rutted lanes, aloof from the currents of industrial energy and Puritan earnestness; the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor thought the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly life.”

“…those fresh bright hours of the morning when temptations go to sleep and leave the ear open to the voice of the good angel, inviting to industry, sobriety and peace.” “The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction….” “Every one of Mr. Macey’s audience had heard this story many times, but it was listened to, as if it had been a favorite tune, and at certain points the puffing of the pipes was momentarily suspended, that the listeners might give their whole minds to the expected words.” “…that superstitious impression which clings to us all, that if we expect evil very strongly it is the less likely to come.” “ ‘Ah,’ said Dolly, with soothing gravity, ‘it’s like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest—one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where.’ ” “…that if he had tried to give them utterance, he could only have said that the child was come instead of his gold—that the gold had turned into the child.”

Quote: Silas to Godfrey: “ ‘Then, Sir,’ he answered with an accent of bitterness… ‘then, Sir, why didn’t you say so sixteen years ago, and claim her before I’d come to love her i’stead o’ coming to take her from me now, when you might as well take the heart out o’ my body.’ ”

Quote: Godfrey: “…it is too late to mend some things….”