A drawing of lots
And Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices. Not that it was one of those barren parishes lying on the outskirts of civilization—inhabited by meagre sheep and thinly scattered shepherds; on the contrary, it lay in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England…1
The country folk inhabiting the rustic parish of Raveloe would doubtless find it difficult to believe that Silas Marner, the strange, nearsighted weaver living in a cottage on the outskirts of the village, was once "a young man of exemplary life and ardent faith."2 Above and beyond the characteristic mistrust of settled people toward a wanderer, his proneness to cataleptic fits, and peculiar obsession with a trove of gold coins accumulated from his trade, set him apart from ordinary people.
Nevertheless, before he came to Raveloe, Marner was a promising disciple of an insular Christian sect at a place called Lantern Yard. There, his fits of paralysis were viewed as auguries of spiritual significance, and his simple honest nature was accepted and admired. As his esteem in the community rose, so did the jealousy of his friend William Dane. Before Silas's pending marriage to a servant-girl can come to pass, William frames him for stealing money from a dying cleric. Silas's guilt is decided in the community by a drawing of lots. Devastated by William's treachery and disillusioned with "a God of lies, that bears witness against the innocent,"3 Silas goes into exile rather than ask forgiveness for a crime he did not commit.
Thus Silas came to his home by the 'Stone-pits' in Raveloe, where the inner turmoil of his soul sits ill at ease with the placid cheerfulness of the native people.
Early in his tenure at Raveloe, Silas learns of a woman who had been afflicted for months with heart disease. Remembering a similar illness that his mother had suffered, he brings her an herbal remedy that cures her. The possibility of rapprochement that this act of charity brings is quickly lost, as the villagers instead suspect him of occult powers. And, aside from this brief episode, little changes in the fifteen years after his arrival.
Treasure departed and treasure delivered
In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction…4
The first murmurings of an awakening from his "insect-like existence" come in an unlikely form. Two sons of Squire Cass, the richest man in the village, are embroiled in a sordid plot in which Dunsey—a scoundrel if ever there was one—is blackmailing Godfrey over his secret marriage to a woman in another town. The revelation of it would ruin Godfrey's hopes of wedding the lovely Nancy Lammeter.
Godfrey has turned over his prized steed, Wildfire, to Dunsey to be sold, but Dunsey rashly takes the horse out on a hunt and accidentally causes its death. Walking home, preoccupied more by his potential embarrassment than by his brother’s loss, he passes Silas's home and finds the door open and the cottage empty. In short order, he slips in, uncovers the treasure-trove, and absconds with it.
The burglary evokes a degree of sympathy for Silas in Raveloe, though the connection between the disappearance of the gold and of Dunsey passes unnoticed, and the hope of recovery of the money fades. Silas is left to ponder the painful coincidence of the two traumas of his life: to be accused of theft and to be the victim of it.
Some time thereafter, on a cold night, Silas wakes from a fit and is startled to find a young girl happily playing beside his hearth. The frozen body of the mother is soon found collapsed on the road outside. It is Godfrey's wife, and her unrecognized death frees him to wed Nancy. For his own part, Silas senses that the loss of his gold has been compensated by the delivery of something more precious. Improbably, he decides to adopt the girl, whom he christens Eppie, and the sudden entrance of an unforeseen and unfamiliar being in his life sets him on a new path.
Virtue rewarded
Favourable Chance, I fancy, is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in… The evil principle deprecated in that religion, is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.5
Silas Marner takes place a world in which the good, ultimately, are vindicated and the wicked punished. Dunsey's skeletal remain are found, along with the stolen gold, years later when the Stone-pits are drained; he had fallen in and died directly after the burglary. Godfrey, whose fatal flaw is weakness rather than malice, has the satisfaction of a worthy wife, but his happiness is tempered by a nagging regret: his union with Nancy is childless, and by concealing his secret marriage, he has forfeited his paternal rights to Eppie.
Silas is the best of the lot, and the basic decency of his nature is rewarded with a loyal daughter whose love and warmth bring him out of his long isolation. But redemption for Silas is not total. Silas and Eppie—at this point a young woman on the cusp of marriage—return to his hometown for the first time since his exile. He finds it transformed beyond recognition by industrialization. The chapel at Lantern Yard is gone, replaced by a factory, and neither William Dane nor anyone else from that distant past can be found to offer him closure.
Silas’s fruitless reunion with Lantern Yard brings to mind one other point. The main part of the novel takes place in the early years of the nineteenth century, during "that glorious war-time which was felt to be a peculiar favour of Providence towards the landed interest."6 A half century later, the contemporary reader would be conscious of the vast changes that had swept England and forever altered a way of life that had persisted for generations. The portents of change remain far-off from the untroubled life at Raveloe, however, and we can take comfort in the knowledge of a world now lost, "where men supped heavily and slept in the light of the evening hearth, and where women seemed to be laying up a stock of linen for the life to come,"—and where a young man of enduring goodness at last enjoys his just deserts.7
Silas Marner by George Eliot. Originally published 1861. Quotations and page numbers from the 1992 Bantam Classic edition.
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