German Philology
Kathrin Ehlen
George Eliot’s "Silas Marner": How a Man’s
Life is Influenced By his Environment
Seminar paper
M.A. Komparatistik
04.05.2007
HS: Europäischer Realismus
WS 2006/2007
George Eliot’s Silas Marner:
How a Man’s Life is Influenced
By his Environment
Kathrin Ehlen
7. Semester
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Introduction
3
2 Lantern Yard
5
3 Raveloe
10
4 Conclusion
17
5 Works Cited
19
6 Works Consulted
19
2
1 Introduction
George Eliot’s Silas Marner, “that charming minor master piece“ (in Eliot 252) as F. R.
Lewis calls it, was published in 1861 by John Blackwood. Her publisher explains: “Silas
Marner sprang from her childish recollection of a man with a stoop and an expression of face
that led her to think that he was an alien from his fellows” (Eliot VII). This man was a weaver
like Silas Marner. In making him the protagonist of her novel, George Eliot emphasizes his
strangeness by adding short-sightedness and cataleptic fits to set him off from the people
around him. The difficult process of this outsider’s integration into society is the theme of the
novel.
Silas Marner grows up as a member of an illiberal religious sect at Lantern Yard, whose
chapel is situated in a small side street of a big manufacturing town in the North. Here human
relations are of secondary importance, it is the form reliance on divine intervention which
counts. When the weaver is falsely accused of having stolen the church money, he loses his
faith in God and humanity, and moves to the small parish of Raveloe “in the rich central plain
of what we are pleased to call Merry England” (10). The villagers are narrow-minded,
ignorant, and naïve, but they are connected by “ties of fellowship and communal warmth”
(Draper 229). Although they are members of the Church of England, their religion is rather
haphazard, interwoven with superstition and chance associations. Marner’s “advent from an
unknown region called ‘North’ard’” (Eliot 10), and his strange appearance instil a “vague
fear” (12) into the villagers, and make them keep aloof from him, only turning to the weaver
for his handicraft. By two acts of fate affecting the weaver, however, human relations
gradually develop between Marner and the community of Raveloe.
George Eliot, whose real name is Mary Ann Evans, grew up in Griff House in a rural
area as the youngest daughter of a large, rather well-to-do family of firm traditional
convictions. Their house lay near a run-down community, the main support of which was
weaving and mining (Karl 15-16). Hence she was personally concerned with the topics she
took up in her novel. That “the society into which Eliot was born often seemed to her as
parallel to Eden” (9), is one of the reasons why she often chose earlier eras as the setting for
her novels (5).
Yet Silas Marner is not a nostalgic fairy tale of by-gone times George Eliot is a learned
woman, and a keen observer of contemporary developments, and well acquainted with the
prevailing trends: Calvinistic Dissent, Utilitarism, Providentialism, Chance, and Darwinism
(Carroll 165), which she does not negate. Neither does she unconditionally embrace the
changes evolving around her, but her view of the complex heterogeneity of modern
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