Silas

• Silas Marner's life in Lantern Yard


  "Filled with movement, mental activity, and close fellowship"
• Silas Marner in Lantern Yard


  "Highly thought of, believed to be a young man of exemplary life and ardent faith"
• Silas Marner


  "Expression of trusting simplicity, unsuspecting"
• Silas Marner: '"God will clear me"'
• Silas Marner after Lantern Yard

  Weaves "like the spider", life "narrowing and hardening into a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction that had no relation to any other being"
• After the robbery, at Christmas


  Silas "sat .... pressing his head between his hands and moaning"
• Silas Marner after Lantern Yard

  "that shaken trust in God and man"
• Upon discovering the robbery


  Silas is quick to decide "Jem Rodney was the man"
• Silas Marner


  Weaver who lives happily as part of sect in Lantern Yard until framed for theft by his best friend William Dane, loses his faith and moves to Raveloe
• Silas Marner in Raveloe

  Lives a miserly life, spending all his time weaving to displace his overwhelming sense of desolation, develops a monomania for the money this brings him
• Silas Marner


  Lives on the margins of the Raveloe community, distrusted by the villagers and making no effort to integrate into the community, until the evening when he discovers his gold has been stolen
• Silas Marner

  Arrival of Eppie reminds him of the younger sister he nursed in his youth and reawakens within him long dormant feelings of love and affection, and ultimately happiness
• Silas Marner

  Sixteen years later, living happily with Eppie, who plans to marry Aron Winthrop. When Godfrey confesses Eppie is his daughter, Silas angrily asks Godfrey why he did not make the offer sixteen years earlier, and Eppie says she would rather stay with Silas
• Silas Marner


  Revisits Lantern Yard with Eppie, finds it has disappeared, replaced by a large factory. This, together with Dolly's reassuring words gives Silas a sense of closure, and he lives happily ever after with Eppie and Aron
• Silas Marner's eyes


  • At the beginning, his eyes are "short-sighted" and he sees "nothing very distinctly", symbolic of the narrowing of his horizons. By the end, his eyes "seem to have gathered a longer vision", symbolising he can once again see what is important in life
• Silas Marner's cottage and garden


  • Initially barren and symbolic of his emotional desolation, transformed by Eppie's arrival with the happy animal life and bright, clean and decent furniture. The exterior is also transformed into a garden, symbolic of the fundamental improvement in his life
• Plant and season imagery

  • Silas is metaphorically compared to a plant in winter, which seems lifeless but retains the potential to be revived in spring. The theft of the gold and his desolation take place in midwinter, symbolic of his emotional state, but the scene describing his happiness in raising Eppie takes place in spring, symbolic of his spiritual reawakening
• Silas Marner: '"...there is no just God that governs the earth righteously, but a God of lies, that bears witness against the innocent."'
• Silas Marner: '"[Silas] thought fondly of the guineas that were only half-earned by the work in his loom, as if they had been unborn children"'
• Silas Marner: '"Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken."'
• Silas Marner: '"to his blurred vision, it seemed as if there were gold on the floor in front of the hearth."'
• Silas Marner: '"God gave her to me because you turned your back upon her, and He looks upon her as mine: you've no right to her!"'
• Single parent families looked down upon in C19; adoption of a child by a single man extremely rare
• Huge changes between when novel is set (1800) and written in (1861): industrialisation, transport, scientific discovery
• George Eliot had a deeply ambivalent attitude to religion. She was raised a devout Christian, but lost her faith in adulthood. Whilst she did not believe in a divine being or god, she retained a strong sense of Christian morality
• Silas' fulfilled life in Lantern Yard

  "filled with... close fellowship"

  "highly thought of

  "young man of exemplary life"
• Silas' naivety in Lantern Yard

  "expression of trusting simplicity"

  "the unsuspecting Silas"

  "God will clear me"
• Silas' desolation

  weaves "like the spider"

  with the "unquestioning activity of a spinning insect"

  weaves to "bridge over the loveless chasms of his life"

  his life is "narrowing and hardening" and he "had no relation to any other being"

  at Christmas sat "pressing his head between his hands and moaning"
• Silas' mistrust for people

  "shaken trust in God and man"

  after the robbery "his thoughts glanced at all his neighbours who had made any remarks... he might now regard as a ground of suspicion"

  quickly decides "Jem Rodney was the man"
• Silas' fulfilled life after discovering Eppie

  she "called him away from his weaving"

  Eppie "forced his thoughts onward"

  "reawakening his senses with her fresh life"

  "the little child had come to link him once more with the whole world"
• Silas becomes more trusting after Eppie arrives

  "sense of presiding goodness and the human trust"

  trusts Dolly to "open his mind" to her about his past

  "I think I shall trusten till I die"