A Little Child Shall Lead Them: Silas Marner
by Marilyn Green Faulkner

“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: a hand is put in theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.”

The man is Silas Marner, a miserable miser saved by the love of an abandoned child, and the fictional creation of a remarkable woman named George Eliot. Actually, her name was Mary Anne Evans, and the nom de plume she adopted for her fiction allowed her to be taken seriously in a time when women, if they wrote at all, wrote only what she derisively termed “silly novels.” Born in 1819 in Warwickshire, England, Mary Anne’s philosophical quest mirrored that of her society, which was undergoing a crisis of faith in the wake of the scientific discoveries that seemed to undermine traditional Christian dogma. From the start Mary Anne was a brilliant and emotional idealist, and she first embraced the Evangelical Christianity of one of her favorite teachers at school, then made a complete turnaround when she read the highly influential “The Origins of Christianity,” which claimed that Christianity was not a revealed religion. At twenty-two years of age she dismayed her family by refusing to accompany them to church, and from then on developed her own philosophy of secular humanism, based on a belief in the natural goodness of the individual. This little novel, Silas Marner, is an examination of a similar crisis of faith in the life of a simple weaver.

Silas, raised in one of the dissenting religious sects prevalent in the England of the early 19^th century, loses his faith when he is betrayed by his dearest friend and misjudged by his brethren. Eliot understands that a loss of faith in God is often precipitated by a loss of faith in those we have trusted on earth. An outcast from his tribe, Silas wanders alone until he finds a home in Raveloe, a little village where he plies his trade as a weaver. The townspeople are suspicious of this newcomer, since he is a weaver (a trade associated with the devil) and in addition because he suffers from epilepsy, a malady that causes him to freeze in a trance-like state now and then. Again the subject of social ostracism, Silas gradually forms an attachment to the money generated by his craft. His gold becomes his god, and he hoards it carefully in his tiny shack on the edge of the Raveloe stone pits.

The life of this unhappy weaver is itself woven in with the lives of his wealthy landlords, Squire Cass and his sons. It is a hallmark of Eliot’s fiction to portray the lives of humble peasants as carefully and completely as she does the rich and powerful. In the romantic novels of the time (mostly written by women) the poor were treated as a species apart from “real people.” Eliot wrote, “They (the poor) are so many subjects for experimenting on, for reclaiming, improving, being anxious about, and relieving. They have no existence apart from the presence of a curatethey live in order to take tracts and broth.” Eliot greatly admired Wordsworth and attempted, like him, to look closely at the lives of people who lacked all of the advantages she enjoyed, sympathetically recording their forms of speech, their customs, superstitions and struggles.

Eliot understood a life as a social outcast. As editor of the controversial Westminster Review, she was at the center of intellectual life in England and accepted in many circles. All that changed when she met and fell in love with George Henry Lewes, a prominent literary figure of the time. Lewes was married, though estranged from his wife, and after two years of close companionship they decided to share a life together. This move caused a scandal that turned even the more radical members of society against them. She and Lewes were referred to publicly as “the stinkpots of humanity.” Of this ostracism Eliot wrote, “I have counted the cost of the step I have taken and am prepared to bear, without irritation or bitterness, renunciation by all my friends.” Her beloved brother Isaac never spoke to her again and Eliot was excluded, for the rest of her life, from “respectable” homes. It was Lewes who first persuaded Mary Anne to write fiction and who provided the encouragement and emotional support she desperately craved. (He even hid unfavorable reviews of her novels from her, so she wouldn’t become discouraged.) Evans referred to herself as “Mrs. Henry Lewes” throughout her life, and they remained faithful companions for twenty-five years until his death in 1878.

Like the artisan in her tale, Eliot takes the strands of religious faith, peasant life, aristocratic pride and family love and weaves them into a perfect tapestry. We are drawn into the dilemmas that Silas faces and see them through his myopic vision (symbolically, he can only see up close). Eliot’s moments of crisis are often so subtle they slip by us. Consider, for example, the turning point of the novel, when Godfrey Cass confronts his baby daughter, who has wandered onto Silas’s hearth. The child simply looks into his face, then, when Cass says nothing, turns her blue eyes to the weaver and clings to him. The moment is past, and Cass has the illusion of having escaped the consequences of his actions since his child cannot condemn him for his sins. It appears as if nothing has happened, yet it is this moment that will haunt Godfrey Cass ever after. Eliot believes in the law of the harvest. Each of her novels feature protagonists who cannot escape the consequences of their actions. There are no great villains, no spotless heroes; only, as she called them, “mixed people.”

The imagery of weaving and spinning give this tale the dreamy quality of a fairy tale, and the connection to such stories as Sleeping Beauty and Rumplestilskin is deliberate. Eliot is attempting a new kind of fairy tale here, complete with such stock elements as the weaver, the wood, the rich landowner, the poor girl who is really an heiress, and the strange turns of fate that signal an order in the universe unknown to man. She combines these elements with a realistic portrayal of English village life unparalleled in fiction. This unlikely combination of the real with the mythical caused the book to be less popular than some of her other works, yet it has endured as a unique creation by a great and virtuous mind, who believed in the goodness of the human soul even as she searched in vain for a resolution to her own crisis of faith.

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