George Eliot Trivia

1. In what kind of setting was the weaver Silas Marner, the eponymous hero of George Eliot's tale, born and brought up?

From Quiz Silas Marner

Answer: a large manufacturing town in northern England

The young Silas belonged to a strict Calvinistic sect in an alley or square called Lantern Yard, in an unnamed manufacturing town in northern England. In the novel's opening chapter, we learn how he has been betrayed by a false friend and fellow-member of his sect, William Dane, who stole money from the organisation and then framed Silas for robbery, as a result of which the young weaver's fiancée has deserted him for this "friend". The sect's leaders, after a pseudo-Biblical drawing of lots, decree Silas to be guilty. (Lantern Yard sends out "a pathetically ignorant inner light" of Evangelical wisdom, the literary critic Q.D. Leavis once commented.) Disillusioned and heartbroken, the weaver leaves town to start his life anew in a rural Midlands village called Raveloe. He had loved the chapel in Lantern Yard because it was like a family to him: but his disgust with what has happened to him is so strong that he bids William Dane a final farewell with the venomous words, "You may prosper, for all that: there is no just God that governs the earth righteously, but a God of lies." (Mrs Leavis imaginatively - if rather melodramatically - compares Silas to John Bunyan's Pilgrim "'with a great Burden upon his back', crying lamentably, 'What shall I do?' and setting forth from the City of Destruction to another country to seek salvation". It takes Silas Marner a very long time to find his salvation, however.) Wikipedia observes that this short novel (or "novella", as we might call it) "is notable for its strong realism and its sophisticated treatment of a variety of issues ranging from religion to industrialisation to community". These significant issues are broached immediately in the opening pages, as the early part of Silas's story unfolds. As the novel begins (the earlier events in Lantern Yard are given a little later as a kind of flashback) Silas has already lived for fifteen years in Raveloe - which lies, as a tongue-in-cheek Eliot informs us, "in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England" - as a chronic loner ("a stranger in a strange land", the Schmoop website calls him) who has made no effort to integrate into society, a society which naturally distrusts comers-in as unfamiliar aliens to their culture. He works hard at his loom, which to the local people gives off a "questionable sound ... so unlike the natural cheerful trotting of the winnowing machine or the simple rhythm of the flail". (Eliot comments philosophically at this point that "Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.") By these means, since he has little to spend money on, Silas gradually acquires a hoard of golden guineas - a fact which is not lost on the inquisitive villagers.

From Quiz Daniel Deronda

Answer: Mirah and Grandcourt

Daniel saves Mirah from drowning near the beginning. Later, Gwendolyn doesn't help Grandcourt when he is drowning (which makes her blame herself for his death).

From Quiz Silas Marner: The Basics

Answer: Weaver

He toiled at his loom, day and night.

From Quiz Middlemarch Quotes - Who Said It?

Answer: Dorothea

Dorothea says this to Celia when they are dividing the contents of their mother's jewelry boxes. Dorothea refuses to wear a cross as a trinket, but superiorly suggests that Celia may wear it without being wicked. This is one of the very few incidents in which the character Dorothea is insensitive to anyone. She has a few other uncomfortable moments rebuffing the failed suitor Sir James - and then spends the rest of the novel as kind as a boxload of Virgin Marys.

From Quiz Mill On The Floss

Answer: Dodson

Pullet and Deane are of course the married names of Mrs Tulliver's sisters. Moss is the married name of Mr Tulliver's sister.

From Quiz Silas Marner

Answer: in a hole under the floorboards of his cottage

Silas, then, does not adapt very positively to his dramatically new environment in the village of Raveloe, except in purely financial terms. George Eliot sets her novel thirty years back from her own time, to an era during the Napoleonic Wars before industrialisation has had time to suck dry all the traditional village economies in the heart of England. Silas has abandoned the industrial culture of his birthplace for what Mrs Leavis, in her essay of 1967, evocatively calls "the timeless past of packhorse and spinning wheel", although not everything is as idyllic as that phrase may imply: "Raveloe," we read, "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, and accepted gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families, and the poor thought that the rich were entirely in the right of it to lead a jolly life." The young incomer's weaving skills are in great demand in the village, but his strange, alien manner and indisposition to mix with his neighbours (not to mention an affliction he suffers from which results in occasional cataleptic trances) alienate the local community and turn him in on his own resources. With no need to spend most of the money he earns, he takes on the stereotypical characteristics of a miser: "The weaver's hand," we read, "had known the touch of hard-won money even before the palm had grown to its full breadth ... money ... stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil." The American critic Maxine Green, in her introduction to the Collier Books edition of the novel, summarises Eliot's message thus: "When the bonds that bind a person to his past are broken ... he loses his sense of roots and continuity so important in the village world. Silas lies like a barren island in the river of time, and this reinforces his separation from the human world." David Carroll, introducing the Penguin Classics edition, prefers to say that Silas "has to be reconstructed virtually ... from nothing ... he carries with him into exile ... his skill in weaving, but around this a miniature creation myth is enacted as he weaves himself back into existence". Having hidden his growing hoard of gold coins under the floorboards, the weaver takes them out every evening in order to indulge in a grotesque and almost gruesome ritual; as Eliot describes it, "He spread them out in heaps and bathed his hands in them; then he counted them and set them up in regular piles, and felt their rounded outline between his thumb and fingers, and thought fondly of ... the guineas that were coming slowly through the coming years, through all his life, which spread far away before him, the end quite hidden by countless days of weaving." (David Carroll comments that "Silas has turned himself into a machine for making gold.") The reader may feel a presentiment that this state of affairs is unlikely to continue indefinitely, and what occurs to initiate mighty changes in Silas's lifestyle is the sudden theft of his gold by the local squire's reprobate younger son, Dunstan Cass.

From Quiz Daniel Deronda

Answer: diamonds

At Grandcourt's request, Mrs. Glasher sends Gwendolyn the diamonds he had given her as an informal promise of marriage. Mrs. Glasher encloses a letter to Gwendolyn accusing her of breaking her promise not to marry Grandcourt, and cursing Gwendolyn for it.

From Quiz 'Middlemarch' Quiz

Answer: Lydgate

Poor Lydgate...he had such ambition. But he was a sucker for a pretty face.

From Quiz Mill On The Floss

Answer: Garum Firs

Dorlcote Mill is the home of the Tullivers, Park House is lived in by the Guests.

From Quiz Silas Marner

Answer: he disappears from view completely

Dunstan (or "Dunsie") is described by Eliot as "a spiteful, jeering fellow, who seemed to enjoy his drink the more when other people went dry" - a young man who took "a delight in lying" and the sort of person who, as the Shmoop website puts it, "likes to make mischief just for the sake of mischief". Neither his outside nor his inside is at all prepossessing: on his first appearance in the story - a significant touch, given his callous disregard for the welfare of animals as well as for that of humans other than himself - "the handsome brown spaniel that lay on the hearth retreated under the chair in the chimney corner" - and the reader is given no reason to like this young man any better as the novel progresses. Dunsie persuades his reluctant elder brother Godfrey, the heir to their father's estate, who is desperate for some ready cash, to allow him to sell Godfrey's beloved horse Wildfire at the hunt meeting he is due to attend the following day. Dunsie agrees on a price with one of his associates but on the spur of the moment, for the sheer fun of it, decides to participate in the hunt himself on Wildfire before taking him to his new owner and collecting the money. With unforgivable carelessness he then - fortunately for him with no witnesses - somehow contrives a clumsy accident while jumping one of the fences, which results in the death of the horse (the reader is surely encouraged, here and elsewhere, to associate this young man's name with the word "dunce"). "His own ill-favoured person, which was quite unmarketable, escaped without injury," comments the author acidly, "but poor Wildfire, unconscious of his price, turned on his flank and painfully panted his last." Required to walk home penniless as the misty, wet autumn weather closes in, Dunsie's thoughts turn to Silas - whom he thinks of as "the old staring simpleton" - and his reputed pile of gold. Passing the weaver's cottage, he decides to knock on the door ostensibly to borrow a lantern to help him find his way home in the now total darkness - but the door is unlocked, and Silas is not at home. It takes Dunsie - even though, in the author's words, "his mind was as dull the mind of a possible felon usually is" - less than five minutes to find the two leather bags of money and leave the house with them. We are not told what he does next until much later in the story, but we learn in the following chapter of his sudden disappearance from the vicinity, and are encouraged to speculate that he may have gone on a spending spree with the weaver's money somewhere far away from Raveloe. But if we think that, as it turns out later, we are to be proved wrong.

From Quiz Daniel Deronda

Answer: She has four half-sisters

Gwendolyn is closest to her mother because she is the only daughter by her first husband; her second husband was abusive.

From Quiz Silas Marner: The Basics

Answer: Lantern Yard

He might as well have been from Mars, as far as the inhabitants of Raveloe were concerned.

From Quiz 'Middlemarch' Quiz

Answer: Casaubon and Chettam

Sir James Chettam turns his attentions to Celia after Dorothea becomes engaged to Casaubon, and they eventually marry.

From Quiz Mill On The Floss

Answer: Minny

From Quiz Silas Marner

Answer: Jem Rodney, a mole-catcher and part-time poacher

"Was it a thing who had taken the bags? or was it a cruel power that no hands could reach, which had delighted in making him a second time desolate?" The weaver can scarcely credit that such a thing could happen to him to disrupt his so-long uninterrupted daily routine. In his now irrational state of mind Silas - having first "put his trembling hands to his head and given a a wild ringing scream, the cry of desolation" - decides without any evidence that the first slightly disreputable village character he can think of must be the culprit. In his dazed condition he instinctively makes his way, running dishevelled and hatless in the pouring rain, to the Rainbow public house, where Jem Rodney and the other pub regulars are engaging in a pseudo-philosophical discussion about the existence of ghosts (which, while entirely convincing on a surface level as an unconsciously comical pub conversation, is also - according to David Carroll - a clever parody of "the contemporary Victorian debates in theology and history as to the nature of evidence and its interpretation"). "We want to be taught to feel," wrote George Eliot in one of her essays, "not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness." She makes a meal out of these richly comic peasant dialogues conducted in the impeccably rendered dialect of the North Warwickshire of her girlhood and young womanhood. "The villagers," remarks Maxine Green, "reveal themselves best in their reminiscent talk ... We find ourselves laughing with them and accepting their prejudices and viewpoints". They are "a plain man's chorus, an outer circle around the drama taking place ... they remain as the public context in which that drama must be resolved". Every one of these villagers is expertly individualised (in much the same manner as that employed later by Eliot's younger contemporary Thomas Hardy in his haunting rustic tale "Under the Greenwood Tree".) In the Rainbow, the rather heated discussion of reputed local ghostly goings-on is suddenly cut short when "the pale thin figure of Silas Marner was suddenly seen standing in the warm light, uttering no word but looking round at the company with his strange unearthly eyes". The self-important farrier, who has been loudly denying the existence of spiritual visitors from other worlds, is noticeably struck dumb for quite some time by Silas's appearance, as one or two of his bolder drinking partners try to collect themselves sufficiently to speak to the apparition. The weaver fixes his gaze on Jem Rodney, next to whom he happens to be standing, and accuses him of the theft - but his mind is soon changed by Jem's indignant response and by the reasoned objections to the idea made by the landlord and the other drinkers. As the men listen to Silas's story, a human bond begins to develop for the first time between them and the man they had hitherto thought of as somehow less than a human being. Although Silas's consciousness does not immediately register the fact, the robbery has started a process which will eventually lead to his spiritual regeneration. It gives the villagers a new interest in life, too, and (as the author remarks) "there was a general feeling in the village, that for the closing-up of this robbery, there must be a great deal done at the Rainbow, and that no man need offer his wife an excuse for going there while it was the scene of several public duties".

From Quiz Daniel Deronda

Answer: move to America

Although Rex wants to move to America, his father convinces him to go back to university instead. Afterward Rex says the law is his mistress and he will never marry.

From Quiz Middlemarch Quotes - Who Said It?

Answer: Mary Garth

Mary Garth says this to Fred Vincy, the wastrel, when he provokes her by saying, "When a man is not loved, it is no use for him to say that he could be a better fellow - could do anything - I mean, if he were sure of being loved in return." Mary loves Fred, but she absolutely has no time for his whining. "On the contrary, I think it would be wicked in me to marry you even if I did love you." She refuses to give him any hope at all until he shapes up. Good for her!

From Quiz 'Middlemarch' Quiz

Answer: the Pioneer

He uses it to try to aid his political career. (It doesn't help!)

From Quiz Mill On The Floss

Answer: Gritty

From Quiz Silas Marner

Answer: he is secretly married to another woman

This guilty secret of Godfrey Cass's is known only to his disreputable brother Dunsie, and is in fact the main reason why the latter is able to manipulate him so easily, since were their father, Squire Cass, to learn of it Godfrey would almost certainly be disinherited - and so banished forever from the company of the lovely Nancy, his delightful and eligible neighbour. Even apart from that all-important consideration, though, a disinherited Godfrey would be "almost as helpless as an uprooted tree, which, by the favour of earth and sky, has grown to a handsome bulk on the spot where it first shot upward". Like his scapegrace brother Dunsie, he has been brought up carelessly by his distinctly irresponsible father, and appears noticeably lacking in backbone as a result. Although privileged, his upbringing has not been very happy: "Godfrey's was an essentially domestic nature, bred up in a home where the hearth had no smiles and where the daily habits were not chastised by the presence of household order." Godfrey's clandestine wife is a working-class girl called Molly Farren, with an addiction to laudanum: as readers we are spared the details of how this ill-matched pair first came together, but we are left in no doubt that the husband bitterly regrets a liaison which appears to have condemned him to a life of dissimulation and deceit as well as frustration and bitterness. The village cannot understand why Godfrey perpetually holds back from proposing marriage to Nancy Lammeter, as it would appear to be in the interests of both parties for such a match to be confirmed. For one thing, the Red House, where the widowed Squire lives with his four sons "a domestic life destitute of any hallowing charm", is desperately short of a woman's touch. The whole village would benefit, too, from a marriage between the two: "If she could come to be mistress of the Red House, there would be a fine change, for the Lammeters had been brought up in that way, that they never suffered a pinch of salt to be wasted ... such a daughter-in-law would be a saving to the old Squire, if she never brought a penny to her fortune, for it was to be feared that, notwithstanding his incomings, there were more holes in his pocket than the one where he put his hand in." Squire Cass, who epitomises what David Carroll calls "the aimless, indulgent and bored life of the rural landowners", proudly and cynically toasts the "glorious war-time which was felt to be a peculiar favour of Providence towards the landed interest". In Raveloe, he is a big fish in a small pond - but with historical hindsight George Eliot's readers will have known that times were changing, and that his type would quickly die out after the end of the Napoleonic Wars with the fall in the price of grain and England's rapid development as a manufacturing nation: the Squire's careless spendthrift ways would no longer pass muster then. Nothing, it appears, could turn things round at the Red House more expeditiously than the presence there of Nancy Lammeter, whose hands "bore the traces of butter-making, cheese-crushing, and even still coarser work", in keeping with the hard-working, clean-living spirit of her family: she, her widowed father and her down-to-earth sister Priscilla are all portrayed in the novel with sympathy and even tenderness. What's more, she could hopefully make a man out of the physically strong and muscular, but also infuriatingly weak-willed and vacillating, heir to the estate!

From Quiz Daniel Deronda

Answer: absence of demonstrativeness

Grandcourt does have good lineage, but Gwendolyn likes it that he doesn't show his attraction to her. Being "made love to" turns her off, which was Rex's mistake.

From Quiz Silas Marner: The Basics

Answer: His money

Silas became the quintessential miser, fondling his money late at night.

From Quiz 'Middlemarch' Quiz

Answer: Rome

Casaubon spends most of his time in the Vatican library. The honeymoon was not a great success.

From Quiz Mill On The Floss

Answer: Mrs Glegg

Mr Tulliver's reaction to the quarrel is one of the reasons why he cannot pay his debts and why he loses the Mill.

From Quiz Silas Marner

Answer: she dies in the snow after taking laudanum

Before we come to the tragic episode involving Molly Farren, George Eliot treats us to a long and delightful chapter describing the traditional New Year's Eve celebrations at the Red House, during the course of which - as the author ironically tells us - Squire Cass performs his "hereditary duty of being noisily jovial and patronising". "The Raveloe feasts," we read, "were like the rounds of beef and the barrels of ale - they were on a large scale and lasted for a good while." As she arrives at the Red House, Nancy - who, like her father, is very conventional in her moral attitudes - thinks complainingly of Godfrey Cass "sometimes behaving as if he didn't want to speak to her and taking no notice of her for weeks and weeks, and then, all of a sudden, almost making love again". This whole chapter is suffused with Eliot's delicious irony, with its characteristic sting in the tail: the snobbish Miss Gunns from Lytherley, for instance, look down their noses at Nancy's homely Raveloe pronunciation: "She actually said 'mate' for 'meat', ''appen' for 'perhaps', and ''oss' for 'horse', which to young ladies living in good Lytherley society, who habitually said ''orse', even in domestic privacy and only said ''appen' on the right occasions, was necessarily shocking." But then, immediately after the closing scene of this chapter when Godfrey and Nancy have danced together and are enjoying their most intimate conversation for a long while, we cut quite brutally to Molly trudging through the snow with her baby and bottle of laudanum, heading painstakingly for Raveloe with the intention of denouncing her husband to all and sundry at the Red House and ruining him once and for all. ("Molly's fate," suggests the canny Shmoop website, "is one sign that the idyllic Raveloe life might not be all it's cracked up to be. Villages have ruined lives and crushed dreams just as much as big cities do.") Poor Molly - with "no higher memories than those of a barmaid's paradise of pink ribbons and gentlemen's jokes", proceeds very slowly. "Belated in the snow-hidden ruggedness of the long lanes," by seven in the evening she is quite close to Raveloe but doesn't know it, and stops to finish her phial of laudanum, after which she is too drugged to notice or care about the big freeze that is setting in, although the child continues to sleep in her arms. When, however, Molly "sinks down against a straggling furze bush ... the fingers lost their tension, the arms unbent; then the little head fell away from the bosom, and the blue eyes opened wide on the cold starlight". The child's eyes are caught by a light emanating from Silas Marner's cottage, and she follows it "to the open door ... and right up to the warm hearth". Silas, having suffered one of his cataleptic fits as he stood with the door open, does not see her until he sits down again, and (at first short-sightedly mistaking the infant's blonde curls for his returned golden coins) as soon as he has identified her as a human child cuddles her, feeds her on porridge, and takes off her wet boots. Then, alerted by her repeated cries of "Mama!", he carries her outside and discovers Molly's frozen body.

From Quiz Daniel Deronda

Answer: A hidden panel opens to show an "upturned dead face."

Later, Gwendolyn is haunted by the memory of Grandcourt's "upturned dead face" in the water after he drowns.

From Quiz Silas Marner: The Basics

Answer: He was robbed

The theft, and Silas' pitiful grief, softened his neighbors' attitudes toward him, and they began to take a kindly interest in his welfare.

From Quiz Middlemarch Quotes - Who Said It?

Answer: Rosamond Vincy

Rosamond is the best flirt of the whole novel. This quote happens when she is ensnaring Lydgate, which is a really beautifully designed (by Rosamond) courtship. Their marriage however is dreadful - as Rosamond emerges as a monster of selfishness, and Lydgate as a man incapable of opposing her.

From Quiz 'Middlemarch' Quiz

Answer: St. Thomas Aquinas

The artist didn't really want to paint Casaubon at all...he just used this as an excuse to paint {Dorothea;} he was fascinated by her beauty.

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