Quick quiz:
Question 1: Name the most critically acclaimed book written by George Eliot?
Question 2: What is George Eliot’s real name?
Answer 1: Middlemarch. Middlemarch is considered by many to be one of the best novels every written in English. I had read Middlemarch, but until I read Silas Marner I did not make the connection that the author of these two books were the same.
Answer 2: Mary Ann Evans. It was common for women authors of the 1800s to use a masculine pen name if they hoped to get published.
Before I had read this book I simply thought of Silas Marner as a story about a miser. It is really a morality play where a miser loses his hoard and has his heart opened. The cause of Marner’s miserliness is understandable. He suffers a devastating blow within the narrowness of the religious community in which he was raised. He flees the injustice, and sets himself up as weaver in an area far from his troubles. Due to his looks and his temperament he is set apart from his neighbors. However, they find his trade very useful, and Marner stays occupied and accumulates his pile of gold.
The morality portion of the story also applies to the Cass brothers. They are the sons of Squire Cass one of the major property owners in the area. Dunstan Cass is pretty much a ne’er-do-well. His older brother, Godfrey Cass, had a youthful indiscretion. He impregnated a lower class woman, and secretly married her. He lives in fear of this being found out, and Dunstan is basically blackmailing him with this. Also Godfrey desires Nancy Lammeter, but is barred from marrying her due to his unrecognized wife.
Marner’s gold is stolen by Dunstan who then disappears. The stolen gold brings Marner out of his seclusion as he rushed to town to report this to the authorities. Dunstan disappearance is not much thought about as it has happened before. However, this time it drags out to 16 years.
There is the traditional big New Year Eve’s party at the Squire Cass’s house. Godfrey is pining after Nancy, and afraid his father will be pushing marriage with her. Unknown to Godfrey his wife, carrying his daughter in her arms, is walking through the snowy, wintery night to confront him at his father’s home. Godfrey essentially has not taken care of either the mother or the child, and they are in a very poor way. The mother who has an opium problem, lays down in the snow and eventually dies. This is not far from Marner’s cottage.
The young child of two sees light of the open cottage door and walks to it. Marner besides being very myopic is prone to some sort of illness that causes him to lose conscious awareness without his falling down. This allows the child to enter his house without being seen. She lays down in front of the fireplace and falls asleep. When Marner comes back to himself his myopic eyes mistakes her golden hair for his gold returned. After realizing it is a child, he follows her footsteps in the snow and finds her dead mother.
Marner goes on to raise the child over the next 16 years. He has help and advice from one of the town’s craftsman’s wife, Dolly Winthrop. She becomes the child’s godmother. Since no one knew the name of the woman or the child, Marner names her after his mother. With the advice of Mrs. Winthrop he shortens her name to Eppie.
Godfrey Cass claims neither the dead wife nor his child. He does help out Marner in small ways over the years to ease his conscience. Godfrey does marry Nancy, but keeps his secret. Nancy is unable to bear him any children, and this is a great sadness in their marriage.
The story jumps ahead 16 years to when Eppie is 18 and Marner 55. A pond is drained and the body of Dunstan is found along with Marner’s gold. This bring great shame to the Cass family, and brings Godfrey to a crisis of conscience. He confesses to his wife the story of his early marriage and that Eppie is his child. Godfrey and Nancy want to bring Eppie home to live with them and give her the things that their status and wealth would allow. Even with Godfrey being revealed as her biological father, she chooses to remain in the cottage with Marner as she considers him her true father. The Casses are at first angry about this, but have a change of heart. They do what they can to make life even more pleasant at the cottage, and expand it as Eppie brings home a husband.
Besides the story Eliot touches on several social issues of the time. The following passage illustrates the wealth gap present in 1800 England. The Squire has been feeding his dog beef from his table.
“The Squire’s life was quite as idle as his sons’, but it was a fiction kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe that youth was exclusively the period of folly, and that their aged wisdom was constantly in a state of endurance mitigated by sarcasm. Godfrey waited, before he spoke again, until the ale had been brought and the door closed—an interval during which Fleet, the deer-hound, had consumed enough bits of beef to make a poor man’s holiday dinner.”
There is the constant theme of an all knowing God. Things happen for a reason. Marner lost his gold for a reason, and Eppie was brought into his life for a reason.
‘”Anybody ‘ud think the angils in heaven couldn’t be prettier,” said Dolly, rubbing the golden curls and kissing them. “And to think of its being covered wi’ them dirty rags—and the poor mother—froze to death; but there’s Them as took care of it, and brought it to your door, Master Marner. The door was open, and it walked in over the snow, like as if it had been a little starved robin. Didn’t you say the door was open?”
“Yes,” said Silas, meditatively. “Yes—the door was open. The money’s gone I don’t know where, and this is come from I don’t know where.”’
This was the period of great industrialization in England and elsewhere. This is illustrated when Marner and Eppie travel back to Marner’s home to get some nagging questions from his early life answered. They cannot find the old chapel or his religious community. No one in town remembered either of them.
‘”It’s gone, child,” he said, at last, in strong agitation—”Lantern Yard’s gone. It must ha’ been here, because here’s the house with the o’erhanging window—I know that—it’s just the same; but they’ve made this new opening; and see that big factory! It’s all gone—chapel and all.”’
I really enjoyed this book, and the only real criticism I have with it is how quickly and tritely Eliot tied it up at the end. It reminded me a bit of a TV murder mystery where all the characters are discoursing at the end of the show to tie up loose ends. Other than that I understand why it is a classic that has stood the test of time. It is well the worth the time to read it.
This book is in the public domain and can be downloaded for free.
Audio book from LibriVox.org : Silas Marner
e-Book from Gutenberg.org: Silas Marner
I am always interested in the movies inspired by books. Here are links to movies this book inspired:
- Silas Marner – 1985 TV movie
- Silas Marner – 1922
- And a few more to be found at imdb.com