Silas Marner Trivia Quiz

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.

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.

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.

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".

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!

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.

Answer: he hopes the child's mother is dead

Silas has come to the Red House with the baby in order to find a doctor to attend to Molly, whom he fears is dead. As he recognises his own baby daughter and listen's to the weaver's news, "Godfrey felt a great throb," we read. "There was one terror in his mind at that moment; it was that the woman might not be dead. That was an evil terror - an ugly inmate to have found a nestling-place in Godfrey's kindly disposition." This flawed young man's disturbing thoughts are not spared us by the author, and yet he never somehow quite loses our sympathy (for how many readers of novels are themselves without sin, after all?). He is evasive when Nancy asks him whose child it is, but then forgets to change out of his dancing shoes as he rushes out into the snow to accompany the doctor to Silas's cottage. Dolly Winthrop, the practical and capable wife of the village wheelwright, is already there, and he winces under her "undeserved praise" of his apparently gallant actions. Something inside Godfrey tells him he ought to own up to everything, and yet "he had not moral courage enough to contemplate that active renunciation of Nancy as possible for him".

"'Is she dead?' said the voice that predominated over every other within him. 'If she is, I may marry Nancy; and then I shall be a good fellow in future, and have no secrets, and the child - shall be taken care of somehow'". George Eliot ironically adds her own rhetorical question on the perceived moral duplicity of Godfrey Cass's continued behaviour: "And when events turn out so much better for a man than he has reason to dream, is it not a proof that his conduct has been less foolish and blameworthy than it might otherwise have appeared?" Godfrey's public behaviour is transformed in the weeks and months after his wife's death: his "cheek and eye were brighter than ever now. He was so undivided in his aims that he seemed like a man of fairness. No Dunsey had come back ... Godfrey had ceased to see the shadow of Dunsey across his path ... it was pretty clear what would be the end of things", as he rides over to the Warrens, the Lammeter home, almost every day. As for his child, "he would see that it was well provided for. That was a father's duty", adds the author ironically. Godfrey, with his everyday character defects, is described by Shmoop as "the most interesting character in the book, because ... he has the potential to become either good or bad": he is "a more rounded character than Silas". But there is also a sense, as the story develops, in which Godfrey's character turns out in the end to be much greedier than the "miser" Silas's. It is not until sixteen years later that this privileged young man will finally learn that he cannot always have his cake and eat it.

Answer: the Bible

Dolly Winthrop, the wheelwright's wife - "so eager for duties that life seemed to offer them too scantily unless she rose at half-past four, though this threw a scarcity of work over the more advanced hours of the morning which it was a constant problem with her to remove" - had already begun to befriend Silas on the Christmas morning before the momentous events of 31st December, visiting him with her small son Aaron and bringing him home-made lard-cakes. After the seemingly magical arrival of the little girl and Marner's determined insistence upon keeping the child, Dolly's practical, no-nonsense friendship and advice are invaluable, and her understanding of Christianity has little or nothing of the Evangelical about it. ("Dolly's religion," remarks Mrs Leavis, "is about as far from Calvinism as possible; it is seen to be a matter of custom, traditional pieties and pagan practices." "In the Anglican church," adds Shmoop, "tradition, or what people have always done, is just as important as what the Bible says.")

"Hephzibah" was the name shared by Silas's long-dead mother and little sister. The original Hephzibah (queen to the good king Hezekiah of Judah) appears in the Second Book of Kings in the Old Testament, but - more relevantly to Eliot's theme - the name is later invoked (in an apostrophe to the Church) by the prophet Isaiah: "Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah ... for the Lord delighteth in thee." (KJV) In thinking of the name as a possible one for his newly-adopted daughter, Silas instinctively links the joys of life he has freshly discovered with the dimly-remembered joys of his own early childhood in that northern industrial town. On first finding a golden-curled baby girl on his hearthrug, he had experienced a sudden pang of remembrance: "Could this be his little sister come back to him in a dream - his little sister whom he had carried about in his arms for a year before she died, when he was a small boy without shoes or stockings?" Peering at the angelic-looking vision on his rug, "he had a dreamy feeling that this child was somehow a message come to him from that far-off life". Dolly thinks the Calvinistic-sounding name "Hepzibah" sounds too solemn for the playful child before them, but Silas explains that his sister's name was habitually shortened to the perkier-sounding "Eppie", so that is the form decided upon for this child too.

Fairy-tale symbolism is insisted upon by the author. "Thought and feeling were so confused within him [Silas] that if he had tried to give them utterance he could only have said that the child was come instead of the gold - that the gold had turned into the child." (This is surely the "legendary core" of the novel, as David Carroll perceives it: "the golden guineas and the golden-haired child".) But on a more realistic level, as day follows day, Eppie acts as an unconscious catalyst to bring the weaver closer and closer to the community he had for fifteen years lived deliberately apart from. This child - "a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and loving sounds, and living movements ... created fresh and fresh links between his life and the lives from which he [Silas] had hitherto shrunk continually into narrower isolation". The weaver attends church for the first time in his life to witness Eppie's baptism, and finds the atmosphere utterly alien to a former chapel-goer: "He was quite unable, by means of anything he heard or saw, to identify the Raveloe religion with his old faith." The humour inherent in a middle-aged man with a "dull bachelor mind" attempting to bring up a little girl is played upon by the author, as when his attempt to punish her by putting her in the coal-hole - a favoured local form of infant chastisement - is turned by Eppie into a wonderful game. "So Eppie was reared without punishment, the burden of her misdeeds being borne vicariously by father Silas."

Answer: Dunstan Cass is arrested in a nearby town

The sixteen-year hiatus between the two parts of George Eliot's novel irresistibly calls to mind a break of the same duration - "this wide gap of time" - in Shakespeare's late romance "The Winter's Tale", which also has as its centrepiece the off-stage transformation of a baby girl of high birth - Perdita, "the lost one" - into a beautiful marriageable teenager who has been reared among the peasantry. But this long break in the time scheme of a narrative is also a familiar theme of many traditional folk tales and fairy stories, and it all adds to the magical sense that something greater than the sum of its parts is being related.

The old Squire has died and his inheritance has been divided among his three remaining sons: Godfrey and Nancy are now long since married, but (sadly for them) still childless. Silas - "an old winter-fly crawling out under the reviving spring sunshine", as Mrs Leavis (borrowing George Eliot's own imagery) evocatively characterises him - is observed leaving church on a fine Sunday morning: "The weaver's bent shoulders and white hair give him almost the look of advanced age, though he is not more than five-and-fifty; but there is the freshest blossom of youth by his side - a blonde dimpled girl of eighteen who has vainly tried to chastise her curly auburn hair into smoothness under her brown bonnet." Silas and Eppie now own a dog and cats, and furniture from the Red House, but Silas "would not consent to have a grate and oven added to his conveniences; he loved the old brick hearth ... and was it not there when he had found Eppie?"

As they return home, Silas and Eppie notice how the draining of the Stone-pits is progressing, to water some fields that Godfrey Cass has exchanged with his neighbours the Osgoods because he wants to start dairying. We are thus unobtrusively prepared for the shock that sweeps through the village later that afternoon, when further drainage reveals the skeleton of Dunstan Cass - who had, as we now discover, fallen into the pond immediately after stealing Silas's gold on that dark, misty night so long ago - lying at the bottom of the drained pool, still clutching his brother Godfrey's riding whip, with the weaver's golden coins alongside him, forever incriminating him for his cruel theft all those years before. Godfrey, who is strolling in the vicinity to contemplate his new farming ventures, is quickly apprised of the discovery and, in terrible shock, hurries home to his wife to tell her about it and at the same time to come clean about his long-suppressed identity as the dead Molly's husband and father of Eppie. There are no bitter recriminations: there is only sadness at the way things have turned out, but a decision is made between them that the least they can now do (especially as it would be likely to bring them happiness themselves, as a childless couple) is to visit the old weaver that very evening and offer to take Eppie off his hands for the rest of his life. As an idea, the reader may agree - especially since we have, after all, come to know Silas better than Godfrey and Nancy do - that it takes some beating for crass insensitivity, but Mr and Mrs Cass are looking at things from a different angle.

Answer: they are both indignant at his presumptuous attitude

As they sit together in their cottage on the evening of the extraordinary discovery which has, among other things, solved the mystery of the weaver's stolen sovereigns, a transfiguring light is thrown over Silas and Eppie by their novelistic creator. They are not thinking primarily of the money, and its presence in the room appears really rather ironic, almost sacrilegious. "On a table near them, lit by a candle, lay the recovered gold - the old long-loved gold, ranged in orderly heaps as Silas used to range it in the days when it was his only joy". There is a knock at the door, and Godfrey and Nancy Cass are admitted, their presence immediately breaking the spell of what appears to be an atmosphere of perfect happiness. Godfrey wishes to make himself known to Eppie as her true biological father, and to propose that he and Nancy should adopt her. ("It had never occurred to him," Eliot tells us, "that Silas would rather part with his life than with Eppie.") The response to Godfrey's offer is the opposite of what he must have wished for, and it makes him frustrated and angry. Upon hearing the assertion of Godfrey's paternal rights, Silas (having made sure that Eppie is of one mind with him) answers "with an accent of bitterness that had been silent in him since the memorable day when his youthful hope had perished - 'then, sir, why didn't you say so sixteen years ago, and claim her before I'd come to love her, i'stead o' coming to take her from me now, when you might as well take the heart out o' my body?'"

Godfrey's response to this is merely that "the weaver was very selfish ... to oppose what was undoubtedly for Eppie's welfare" - "a judgment readily passed, comments Eliot, "by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice" - and as for Eppie, "she listened to the contest between her old long-loved father and this new unfamiliar father who had suddenly come to fill the place of that black featureless shadow which had held the ring and placed it on her mother's finger ... ". Eppie quickly registers "what this revealed fatherhood implied" and she feels, understandably in the circumstances, "a repulsion towards the offered and the newly-revealed father". She explains clearly enough why she could never leave Silas and adds that she's "'promised to marry a working man [Aaron Winthrop, Dolly's hard-working and personable son], as'll live with father and help me to take care of him'". Rising in the world socially means nothing to Eppie, it is clear. She takes Silas's hand and squeezes it: "it was a weaver's hand, with a palm and finger-tips that were sensitive to such pressure". (One can see why the American Maxine Green believes that in this novel, George Eliot "joins a company of writers ranging from Herman Melville to Arthur Miller who have enough faith in the plain man to impart a radiance to him ... no matter how poor and humble he may be".) Godfrey flushes with irritation at the frustration of his purpose, but he and Nancy leave quickly, and by the time they reach home Godfrey has come to recognise the justice of his defeat: "While I've been putting off and putting off, the trees have been growing - it's too late now."

Henry James referred impressionically to "a sort of autumn haze, an afternoon light of meditation" hanging over "Silas Marner". Q.D. Leavis classes it "with Shakespeare and Bunyan, rather than with other Victorian novels", but there is a Wordsworthian element too; the novel's epigraph is from Wordsworth's poem "Michael", and Wordsworth's early nature poetry is echoed in the descriptions of infant Eppie: "there was love between the child and the world - from men and women with parental looks and tones, to the red lady-birds and the round pebbles". To Maxine Green, the novel "distils the meaning from a range of intense experiences and communicates the sense of them by means of images - golden coins, stone pit, broken pitcher, furze bush, straining eyes, fog, and falling snow". To try and account for the power of such a work of art, far more complicated than it at first looks, is always to risk tying oneself in knots. Perhaps we simply have to pay tribute to the touch of genius which has blended together the symbolic fairy-tale elements with the sharply realistic ones, in such a way as to render this short but not-so-slight novel, for the most part, irresistibly profound and moving.