Silas Marner (with an Introduction by Esther Wood)

By George Eliot

First published in 1861, “Silas Marner” is George Eliot’s tale of an English linen weaver. When Silas is falsely accused of stealing the funds of the small Calvinist congregation to which he belongs, his fiancé breaks off their engagement and he flees in shame to the English Midlands settling near the rural village of Raveloe in Warwickshire. Here he lives alone quietly plying his trade in the pursuit of gold. After awhile Silas has amassed a small fortune but when he returns one day to his cottage he finds his stash of gold stolen. Devastated by this loss, Silas sinks into a deep state of gloom. His life soon changes though when he finds a young girl resting in his home. The child’s mother, Molly, is the opium addicted estranged wife of fellow villager Godfrey Cass. Silas finds Molly dead in the snow where she has laid down to rest after taking some opium. Silas adopts the young girl whom he names Eppie. Despite the loss of his fortune Silas finds a new treasure in the golden-haired young girl, giving his life a new meaning. Eliot’s tale is a relatively simple one however it is noted for its realism concerning human relationships and in how it deals with the themes of religion in society, custom and tradition, status and community, and the impact of industrialization in 19th century England. This edition includes an introduction by Esther Wood and a biographical afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Jan 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781420955125

George Eliot

George Eliot was the pseudonym for Mary Anne Evans, one of the leading writers of the Victorian era, who published seven major novels and several translations during her career. She started her career as a sub-editor for the left-wing journal The Westminster Review, contributing politically charged essays and reviews before turning her attention to novels. Among Eliot’s best-known works are Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, in which she explores aspects of human psychology, focusing on the rural outsider and the politics of small-town life. Eliot died in 1880.

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SILAS MARNER

THE WEAVER OF RAVELOE

By GEORGE ELIOT

Introduction by ESTHER WOOD

"A child, more than all other gifts

That earth can offer to declining man,

Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts."

WORDSWORTH.

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe

By George Eliot

Introduction by Esther Wood

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5511-8

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5512-5

This edition copyright © 2017. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of Grandfather’s Little Nurse, by James Hayllar (1829-1920) / Private Collection / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Part II

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Conclusion

Biographical Afterword

Introduction

As to a poet, in the midst of his stately epic, there sometimes comes a lilt of song, a sudden lyric inspiration, full of the freshness of his earliest work—so to George Eliot, in the midst of the monumental labors of Romola, the idea of Silas Marner came; a breath of the old Warwickshire homeland sweeping through medieval monasteries and Florentine museums. The first record of it in her journal is on the 28th November, 1860, when she writes:—I am engaged now in writing a story—the idea of which came to me after our arrival in this house (10 Harewood Square) and which has thrust itself between me and the other book I was meditating. It is ‘Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe.’ I am still only at about the 62d page, for I have written slowly and uninterruptedly. In January she mentions the plan to her publishers:—"I am writing a story which came across my other plans by a sudden inspiration. I don’t know at present whether it will resolve itself into a book short enough for me to complete before Easter, or whether it will expand beyond that possibility. It seems to me that nobody will take any interest in it but myself, for it is extremely unlike the popular stories going, but Mr. Lewes declares that I am wrong, and says it is as good as anything I have done. It is a story of old-fashioned village life, which has unfolded itself from the merest millet-seed of thought. I think I get slower and more timid in my writing, but perhaps worry about houses and servants and boys, with want of bodily strength, may have had something to do with that. I hope to be quiet now."

The house in Harewood Square was taken furnished, for six months, while Lewes and George Eliot were searching for a more permanent London home. Naturally, George Eliot never quite settled down in it to regular work at so unwieldy a task as Romola, and the time was favorable to a less pretentious effort, thrown off with a lighter hand. She was suffering seriously at this time from ill-health, and from the removal from a more open situation at Holly Lodge, Wandsworth; but her home-life at this time was particularly happy and bright. Mr. Lewes’s sons were about leaving school and coming more and more into companionship with their father and stepmother. I begin, she writes to Monsieur D’Albert, at Geneva, to consider myself an experienced matron, knowing a great deal about parental joys and responsibilities. Indeed, I have rather too ready a talent for entering into anxieties of all sorts.

It was now ten years since George Eliot had left the scenery of the English midlands in which all her most perfect work is set. She had already written Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. In Silas Marner she withdraws a little further into the spectator’s place, though losing nothing of her grip upon the actualities of the drama. The whole scene is focused more perfectly in her mind; the emotion is less intense, but the art more refined. For unity of conception and structure, ease and delicacy of treatment, and idyllic beauty of imagination, Silas Marner stands unsurpassed by any other of her novels.

For its idyllic qualities are combined in so unique a way with absolute realism, and clothe so entirely natural and probable a tale, that we are conscious of no flux between actuality and romance, no breach of the utter sincerity of the story. It is a fragment caught unspoiled from the very life of pastoral and industrial Warwickshire in the eighteen-twenties, not idealized, but crystallized by that fine atmosphere of kindly memory which plays most effectively round long-past things. The art of Silas Marner is more mature than Adam Bede; the persons and places in it are less literal transcripts, more typical creations; and each figure on the stage is more perfectly finished, more vividly and exquisitely drawn. Thus, were it not for the intrinsic charm of the story, and a certain moral fervor peculiar to herself which gives it weight and seriousness, we should have said that George Eliot had chiefly achieved for us here an incomparable picture of manners in rural England at that period. It is this indeed, but it is much more. Slight as it is in structure, its dominant characters are strongly marked, and move to their destinies with no less significant steps than Savonarola to his martyrdom, or Tessa to her small pathetic dependence on others’ care and love. Never did George Eliot illustrate more powerfully the law, which she was the first English novelist fully to recognize and work by, that character is fate, and that we make our own hell and heaven; never did she correct and temper it more wisely—as it needs—by that other law which her austere soul took with great reservations, that environment makes character; that sometimes men are led away from threatening destruction; a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.

By the beginning of the year 1861, George Eliot and her household were settled in their new home at 16 Blandford Square, and here the writing of Silas Marner proceeded. On February 1st she says in her journal:—I have reached page 209 of my story, which is to be in one volume, and I want to get it ready for Easter, but I dare promise myself nothing with this feeble body. On the 15th, however, she sends off 230 pages to Mr. Blackwood, because printing and its preliminaries have always been rather a slow business; and as the story—if published at Easter at all—should be ready by Easter week, there is no time to lose.

Ten days later she writes again in answer to her publisher’s first criticisms:—I don’t wonder at your finding my story, as far as you have read it, rather somber: indeed, I should not have believed that any one would have been interested in it but myself (since Wordsworth is dead) if Mr. Lewes had not been strongly arrested by it. But I hope you will not find it at all a sad story, as a whole, since it sets—or is intended to set—in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural human relations. The Nemesis is a very mild one. I have felt all through as if the story would have lent itself best to metrical rather than to prose fiction, especially in all that relates to the psychology of Silas; except that under that treatment there could not be an equal play of humor. It came to me first of all quite suddenly, as a sort of legendary tale, suggested by my recollection of having once, in early childhood, seen a linen-weaver with a bag on his back; but as my mind dwelt on the subject, I became inclined to a more realistic treatment. My chief reason for wishing to publish the story now is that I like my writings to appear in the order in which they are written, because they belong to successive mental phases, and when they are a year behind me, I can no longer feel that thorough identification with them which gives zest to the sense of authorship. I generally like them better at that distance, but then I feel that they might just as well have been written by somebody else.

On March 10th we find the happy entry in the diary:—"Finished Silas Marner and sent off the last thirty pages to Edinburgh."

This was, of course, the most rapidly written of her novels, and it seems to gain something in spontaneity and coherence by being thus produced. In those early spring days when she was at work upon it, her chief recreation, she tells us, was a daily stroll in the Zoological Gardens, which were within easy walking distance from her house. The removal from Harewood Square to Blandford Square had also to be done in the midst of the writing of Silas Marner, and in a letter from the former address to her old friend Miss Kennell, of Coventry, she says:—"I should like for your own sake that you should rather see us in our own house than in this; for I fear your carrying away a general sense of yellow in connection with us,—and I am sure that is enough to set you against the thought of us. There are some staring yellow curtains which you will hardly help blending with your impression of our moral sentiments. In our own drawing-room I mean to have a paradise of greenness."

In April, when Silas Marner is published, she writes acknowledging her publisher’s check, and adding:—I prize the money fruit of my labor very highly as the means of saving us dependence or the degradation of writing when we are no longer able to write well, or to write what we have not written before. "Don’t think about reading Silas Marner she says to Miss Kennell, just because it has come out. I hate obligato reading and obligato talk about my books. I never send them to any one, and never wish to be spoken to about them, except by an unpremeditated spontaneous prompting. They are written out of my deepest belief, and as well as I can, for the great public,—and every sincere strong word will find its mark in that public."

During her visit to Florence in May and June, 1861, George Eliot was "much cheered by the way in which Silas Marner is received. In July, after her return home, the entries in her diary give us many interesting glimpses of her social life. Went to see Fechter as Hamlet, and sat next to Mrs. Carlyle. Mr. Lewes is gone to see Mrs. Congreve and carry his net to the Wimbledon ponds. I hope he will get a little strength as well as grist for his microscope. Talked with Mr. Spencer about his chapter on the Direction of Force—i.e., line of least resistance.—September 29th (Sunday)—Finished correcting Silas Marner. I have thus corrected all my books to a new and cheaper edition, and feel my mind free for other work. Walked to the Zoo with the boys. In a letter written just after Silas Marner and Romola is this equally characteristic outburst:—"I am terribly frightened about Mrs. ——. She wrote to me telling me that we were sure to suit each other, neither of us holding the opinions of the Moutous de Panurge. Nothing could have been more decisive of the opposite prospect to me. If there is one attitude more odious to me than any other of the many attitudes of ‘knowingness,’ it is that air of lofty superiority to the vulgar. However, she will soon find out that I am a very commonplace woman. This wholesome faith in mediocrity, from the broadest human standpoint,—the only form in which the democratic idea ever gained ground in her mind—may have had much to do with her unfailing cheerfulness towards the world in general in spite of all private causes of depression (it is remarkable to me that I have quite lost my personal melancholy, she says years later), and certainly is the key to her treatment of human character in her books. How gently does she deal with the bruised reed" in Silas Marner! How just and stern, and yet how relenting and pitiful is her treatment of that so amiable and well-meaning sinner, Godfrey Cass! And Nancy Lammeter—what more vivid and dainty picture could be found of the middle-class provincial gentlewoman of Georgian days than this of Nancy, seated on a pillion, and attired in a drab Joseph and a drab beaver bonnet, with a crown resembling a small stew-pan? Miss Nancy was going to a Christmas party at the Squire’s house, and had, according to invariable custom, sent her bandbox on before. Everything belonging to Miss Nancy was of delicate purity and nattiness . . . . and when at last she stood complete in her silvery twilled silk, her lace tucker, her coral necklace, and coral ear-drops, the Miss Gunns could see nothing to criticize except her hands, which bore the traces of butter-making, cheese-crushing, and even still coarser work. . . . The Miss Gunns smiled stiffly, and thought what a pity it was that these rich country people, who could afford to buy such good clothes (really Miss Nancy’s lace and silk were very costly) should be brought up in utter ignorance and vulgarity. She actually said ‘mate’ for ‘meat,’ ‘’appen’ for ‘perhaps’ and ‘oss’ for ‘horse,’ which to young ladies living in good Lytherly society, who habitually said ‘orse’ even in domestic privacy, and only said ‘’appen’ on the right occasions, was necessarily shocking. Miss Nancy, indeed, had never been to any school higher than Dame Tedman’s; her acquaintance with profane literature hardly went beyond the rhymes she had worked in her large sampler under the lamb and the shepherdess; and in order to balance an account, she was obliged to effect her subtraction by removing visible metallic shillings and sixpences from a visible metallic total. There is hardly a servant-maid in these days who is not better informed than Miss Nancy; yet she had the essential attributes of a lady—high veracity, delicate honor in her dealings, deference to others, and refined personal habits,—and lest these should not suffice to convince grammatical fair ones that her feelings can at all resemble theirs, I will add that she was slightly proud and exacting, and as constant in her affection towards a baseless opinion as towards an erring lover.

This description of the heroine introduces one of the most delightful chapters in the book, and one of the most admirable in literary craftsmanship,—in balance of light and shade, in exquisite humor; leading up as it does to the central incident which brings together the hermit weaver and the tiny golden-haired child. Never in her many charming pictures of child-life has George Eliot excelled this story of Eppie’s adoption by Silas Marner, and of his timid attempts at discipline, ending in the dreaded ultimatum of the coal-hole, and the young culprit’s total disarming of her chastiser by accepting it as a new and amusing game. This total failure of the coal-hole discipline shook Silas’s belief in the efficacy of punishment. The humor throughout is of a less caustic kind than that which we associate with the immortal Mrs. Poyser and Mrs. Hackitt, but it is incomparably delicate and true to type. The scene at the Rainbow inn has often been quoted as a marvel of realism in a woman’s record of the tavern-talk of men. So absolutely English is it—so distinctively Warwickshire, indeed—that a letter referring to a French translation of it reads quite curiously, as if suggesting an absurd and impossible thing. I have to thank you, the author writes to M. D’Albert, of Geneva, who had already made a French translation of Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, "for two copies of Silas Marner, which arrived the other day. I looked through the scene in the village tavern, and thought, so far as I am a judge of the French rendering, that you had given the spirit of the scene very charmingly: here and there it was inevitable that, for want of the knowledge which only a native of England can have, you should mistake the meaning of a phrase."

We can well imagine how such typical groups and conversations had impressed themselves on George Eliot’s mind when as a child she drove in her father’s cart from village to village, observing all sorts and conditions of men. I am rather fond, she said, looking back upon these things, of the mental furniture I got by having a father who was well acquainted with all ranks of his neighbors. . . . I have always thought that the most fortunate Britons are those whose experience has given them a practical share in many aspects of the national lot, who have lived long among the mixed commonality, roughing it with them under difficulties, knowing how their food tastes to them, and getting acquainted with their notions and motives, not by inference from traditional types of literature, or from philosophic theories, but from daily fellowship and observation. It was the insight and sympathy of genius that enabled George Eliot to preserve for us the actual type as she knew it, and to earn for herself, among many more enduring tributes, the pretty gift that brightened a gray New Year’s morning for her in after years. This morning when I was in pain, says the barometric diary, "and taking a melancholy breakfast in bed, some sweet-natured creature sent a beautiful bouquet to the door for me, bound round with the written wish that ‘every year may be happier and happier, and that God’s blessing may ever abide with the immortal author of Silas Marner.’"

ESTHER WOOD.

1901.

Part I

Chapter I

In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses—and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak—there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. The shepherd’s dog barked fiercely when one of these alien-looking men appeared on the upland, dark against the early winter sunset; for what dog likes a figure bent under a heavy bag?—and these pale men rarely stirred abroad without that mysterious burden. The shepherd himself, though he had good reason to believe that the bag held nothing but flaxen thread, or else the long rolls of strong linen spun from that thread, was not quite sure that this trade of weaving, indispensable though it was, could be carried on entirely without the help of the Evil One. In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every person or thing that was at all unwonted, or even intermittent and occasional merely, like the visits of the pedlar or the knife-grinder. 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 experience was a region of vagueness and mystery: to their untravelled thought a state of wandering was a conception as dim as the winter life of the swallows that came back with the spring; and even a settler, if he came from distant parts, hardly ever ceased to be viewed with a remnant of distrust, which would have prevented any surprise if a long course of inoffensive conduct on his part had ended in the commission of a crime; especially if he had any reputation for knowledge, or showed any skill in handicraft. All cleverness, whether in the rapid use of that difficult instrument the tongue, or in some other art unfamiliar to villagers, was in itself suspicious: honest folk, born and bred in a visible manner, were mostly not over-wise or clever—at least, not beyond such a matter as knowing the signs of the weather; and the process by which rapidity and dexterity of any kind were acquired was so wholly hidden, that they partook of the nature of conjuring. In this way it came to pass that those scattered linen-weavers—emigrants from the town into the country—were to the last regarded as aliens by their rustic neighbours, and usually contracted the eccentric habits which belong to a state of loneliness.

In the early years of this century, such a linen-weaver, named Silas Marner, worked at his vocation in a stone cottage that stood among the nutty hedgerows near the village of Raveloe, and not far from the edge of a deserted stone-pit. The questionable sound of Silas’s loom, so unlike the natural cheerful trotting of the winnowing-machine, or the simpler rhythm of the flail, had a half-fearful fascination for the Raveloe boys, who would often leave off their nutting or birds’-nesting to peep in at the window of the stone cottage, counterbalancing a certain awe at the mysterious action of the loom, by a pleasant sense of scornful superiority, drawn from the mockery of its alternating noises, along with the bent, tread-mill attitude of the weaver. But sometimes it happened that Marner, pausing to adjust an irregularity in his thread, became aware of the small scoundrels, and, though chary of his time, he liked their intrusion so ill that he would descend from his loom, and, opening the door, would fix on them a gaze that was always enough to make them take to their legs in terror. For how was it possible to believe that those large brown protuberant eyes in Silas Marner’s pale face really saw nothing very distinctly that was not close to them, and not rather that their dreadful stare could dart cramp, or rickets, or a wry mouth at any boy who happened to be in the rear? They had, perhaps, heard their fathers and mothers hint that Silas Marner could cure folks’ rheumatism if he had a mind, and add, still more darkly, that if you could only speak the devil fair enough, he might save you the cost of the doctor. Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship might perhaps even now be caught