By two acts of fate affecting the weaver, however, human relations gradually develop between Marner and the community of Raveloe. Marner’s “advent from an unknown region called ‘North’ard’” (Eliot 10), and his strange appearance instil a “vague fear” (12) into the villagers, and make them keep aloof from him, only turning to the weaver for his handicraft. Although they are members of the Church of England, their religion is rather haphazard, interwoven with superstition and chance associations. The villagers are narrow-minded, ignorant, and naïve, but they are connected by “ties of fellowship and communal warmth” (Draper 229). When the weaver is falsely accused of having stolen the church money, he loses his faith in God and humanity, and moves to the small parish of Raveloe “in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England” (10). Here human relations are of secondary importance, it is the form reliance on divine intervention which counts. Silas Marner grows up as a member of an illiberal religious sect at Lantern Yard, whose chapel is situated in a small side street of a big manufacturing town in the North. The difficult process of this outsider’s integration into society is the theme of the novel. In making him the protagonist of her novel, George Eliot emphasizes his strangeness by adding short-sightedness and cataleptic fits to set him off from the people around him. Her publisher explains: “ Silas Marner sprang from her childish recollection of a man with a stoop and an expression of face that led her to think that he was an alien from his fellows” (Eliot VII).

Lewis calls it, was published in 1861 by John Blackwood. George Eliot’s Silas Marner, “that charming minor master piece“ (in Eliot 252) as F.

Marner eliot