Historical Context
Silas Marner was published in 1861, at a kind of mid-point in
Eliot’s career. Her longer, more
well-known and epic works like Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda lay
ahead of her. And Marner is
similar in style to her earlier novels like Adam Bede and The Mill on
the Floss in that they all partake of a kind of “rustic realism” that
Eliot had perfected. This kind of
realism ran counter to prevailing pastoral styles for Eliot, although it
appeared to have much in common with them.
The pastoral is a genre in which the country-oriented life of the working
classes is represented in either poetry or prose, and was popularized throughout
the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century by poets like William
Wordsworth and Thomas Gray. But
Eliot wanted her writing to stand in opposition to these sorts of pastoralism,
which she saw as romanticizing the peasantry -- showing scenes of shepherds
frolicking bucolically alongside their herds, or of permanently giddy villagers.
She wanted, instead, to represent the working classes more realistically
-- to show them in all their “’coarse’” habits, she said.
She didn’t, that is, want to smooth over the representations of such
people.
This is not to say that all reviewers took kindly to Eliot’s project.
In fact many of her contemporaries disdained Eliot’s depictions of such
“’poor, paltry, stupid, wretched, well-nigh despicable’” characters.
So Eliot was up against a fair amount of resistance from a public that
was accustomed to glossed-over, cheery representations of the poor. And that’s not all that she was up to. Although Marner seems to be a more or less simple
fable in the rustic realist tradition, there are moments in the novel when we
see larger issues of mid-Victorian culture bleeding through. Look for the chapter at the Rainbow just prior to Silas’
entry and accusation of Jem Rodney. The
entire chapter is a transcription of the gossip of the pub dwellers.
Such dialogue might be said to represent some of the issues contemporary
with the novel, such as questions about evidence and experience; these are
larger issues that have to do with the rise of an enlightenment epistemology.
The same holds true for Marner’s preoccupation with faith: the
novel taps into debates about belief and theology that were raging as England
became increasingly secularized.
Another issue that Marner raises quite eloquently and forcefully
is the nexus of industrialization, commodification, and capitalism in general.
Not only by focusing on Silas’s work and the transition of Lantern Yard
from rural depot to manufacturing town, but also the attention the novel gives
to Silas’s very preoccupation with gold itself, is representative of larger
questions about how persons and things should be evaluated.
As England transitioned from an aristocratic to a capitalist society,
hoarding techniques such as Silas’s fall out of favor.
Indeed, holding on to one’s gold is a kind of false attribution of
value to the gold itself, when it is, instead, market practices through which
value is produced. The degree to
which Silas’s obsession with his gold is considered “unhealthy,” might
then be taken as representative of the atmosphere of mid-century England in
general: with its interest in producing interest -- that is, of
dissociating value from the coin itself, and moving towards a more credit-based,
abstracted version of economics.
