Silas Marner (Eliot, 1861)

George Eliot. Silas Marner. Pub. 1861. Ed. Juliette Atkinson. Oxford: World’s Classics, 2016. Print.

• pub Blackwood in a 6 shilling edition in December 1861
• writing whilst correcting her work for "a new and cheaper edition" (xxix, journal, 28 sept 1861)
  • editions: “Cheap Edition of The Works," 1863 at 6/; stereotyped edition with no editorial changes, 1868; Cabinet Edition, 1878

General Notes

• epigram from Wordsworth, "Michael: A Pastoral Poem," Lyrical Ballads
• 5 fiction and imagination leading to new possibilities "Experience had bred no fancies in him that could raise the phantasm of appetite."
  • also the narratorial "I" dropping into the diegetic world, or at least a diegetic world
• 7 Silas some type of nonconformist at Lantern Yard before coming to Raveloe
• 8 S’s cataleptic vision a way to characterization:

A less truthful man than he might have been tempted into the subsequent creation of a vision in the form of resurgent memory; a less sane man might have believed in such a creation; but Silas was both sane and honest, though, as with many honest and fervent men, culture had not defined any channels for his sense of mystery and so it spread itself over the proper pathway of inquiry and knowledge. 

• 10 S accused of stealing church money from the dying deacon— his pocket knife the smoking gun
• 12 again that analytical remove (bringing narrator closer perhaps to the implied audience): "it is difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in which the form [of religious feeling] and the feeling have never been severed by an act of reflection.”
  • as in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872), a nonbeliever who wants to understand religious belief from the inside
• 14 moving on his emotional crisis of faith
• 25 Dunstan Cass might be that rare thing in an Eliot novel: a genuinely bad character

Themes

History

• 3: "In the days": from the beginning that sense of historical seriality and belatedness (Anderson 1983)
• "To the peasants of old times": again here you have the unevenness of historical transition (and the imagination that the same isn’t true for the peasants of 1861)
• 4 "in the early years of this century": vague historical positioning
• 12-3 secular time and space
• 13, 126 Comte influenced sense of the development of religious faith from fetishism to positivist religion of humanity (useful gloss for young Maggie in The Mill on the Floss (1860))
• 17 S filling empty homogenous time alone, becoming a purely functional "insect"
• 21 contrast with the town in The Mill on the Floss (1860), where to understand aunt and uncle you have to understand deep time: "...the Raveloe imagination having never ventured back to that fearful blank where there were no Osgoods" (a squirearchical family)

Materiality

• 3: great ladies’ "toy spinning wheels of polished oak": estrangement of gender from labor that Capuano 2015 discusses with relation to Shirley (Charlotte Brontë, 1849) (and which Shirley happily violates)

Reading/Writing

• 5 "And Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices.”— this can be read with a view to print culture and “tranching down” (St Clair 2004)
  • "...it was never reached by the vibrations of the coach-horn, or of public opinion."
• 8 S’s confident friend William "dreamed that he saw the words ‘calling and election sure’ standing by themselves on a white page in the open Bible."
  • Stallybrass 2002
• 17 "His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of an end towards which the functions tended. The same sort of process has perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when they have been cut off [18] from faith and love— only, instead of a loom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite research, done ingenious project, or some well-knit theory."
  • prefigures Casaubon in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872)