In Our Time - Silas Marner

Episode Date: January 28, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and guests Rosemary Ashton, Dinah Birch and Valentine Cunningham discuss George Eliot's novel Silas Marner.Published in 1861, Silas Marner is by far Eliot's shortest and seemingly simplest work. Yet beneath the fairytale-like structure, of all her novels it offers the most focused expression of Eliot's moral view. Influenced by the deconstruction of Christianity pioneered by leading European thinkers including Auguste Comte and Ludwig Feuerbach, Silas Marner is a highly sophisticated attempt to translate the symbolism of religion into purely human terms.The novel tells the story of Silas, a weaver who is thrown out of his religious community after being falsely charged with theft. Silas is embittered and exists only for his work and his precious hoard of money - until that money is stolen, and an abandoned child wanders into his house.By the end of her lifetime, George Eliot was the most powerful female intellectual in the country. Her extraordinary range of publications encompassed novels, poetry, literary criticism, scientific and religious texts. But beneath her fierce intellecualism was the deep convinction that for society to continue, humans must connect with their fellow humans. And it is this idea that forms the core of her writing.Rosemary Ashton is Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College, London; Dinah Birch is Professor of English at Liverpool University; And Valentine Cunningham is Professor of English Language and Literature at Corpus Christi, University of Oxford.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, by the end of her lifetime, George Elliott was the most powerful female intellectual in the country. Her extraordinary range of publications encompassed novels, poetry, literary criticism and scientific and religious essays.

Her third novel, published in 1861, Silas Manor, tells the story of a weaver who's thrown out of his religious community after being falsely charged with theft. Silas is embittered and exists only for his work and his hoard of money until that money is stolen and an abandoned child wanders into his house.

Beneath this simple fable-like story, Silas Manor offers the most focused expression of Elliot's moral view. People by characters remarkable for their ordinariness and influenced by Ludwig Fuerbach and August's deconstruction of Christianity, Silas Manor is a highly sophisticated attempt to translate the symbolism of religion

into purely human terms. With me to discuss the extent of Silas Manor's literary ambitions at Dinah Birch, Professor of English at Liverpool University, Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English at Corpus Christi College of Oxford, and Rosemary Ashton, Quain, Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London. Rosemary Ashton, Elliot described Silas Manor in her letters It's a simple idea that thrust itself in front of our other projects.

Can you tell us about the genesis of the book? Yes. Well, she had sprung to fame with Adam Bede in 1859, the first full-length novel. Her name was Marion Evans, but she wrote under a pseudonym, and everyone was wondering who was George Elliott, Elizabeth Gaskell, was pleased that somebody thought she might have written it and so on. So there was a great outcry delight at Adam Bede, and who was this new novelist. Then in the following year, came Mill on the Floss,

which was also a success, although there were some difficulties with some of the moral outcomes that readers were not so happy with. And by this time, readers also knew that Marian Evans was living with a man who was not her husband, George Henry Lewis. And so there was a certain amount of criticism, really, moral criticism of her own life. Well, after Milan the Floss, which was also a success, she then started to think about a historical story, which would be set in 15th century Florence and this would eventually become Romola but as she said in letters and in her journal an idea thrust itself in the way of this

and this idea was a picture that she had from early childhood of having seen a linen weaver so that would be in the early 1820s with a bag on his back and it presented itself to her as a legendary tale she said but then she began to think about making a more realistic treatment of it and that was the genesis of Silas Marna, which she wrote in six months.

It's much shorter than her other novels, and it didn't take very long, and it was published in 1861 a year after Milon the Floss. As I understand it, another distinguishing factor is that she didn't suffer from the usual depressions while she was writing it. That's right. The journal's groan with groans,

and G.H. Lewis, her faithful partner, did an awful lot of supporting and writing to their excellent publisher, John Blackwood in Edinburgh, telling him also to support her in his letters. But not for Silas Marna, it seems to have gone relatively easily for her. For those viewers who have, just to refresh us all, can you give us the bare bones of the story, Rosamund Ruelly.

Yes, well, you started it off, didn't you? Silas Marna is a weaver. The novel is set, like most of George Eliot's novels, back, in this case in the early years of the 19th century. And he starts off as this weaver in a northern industrial. town, not named. He's part of a very narrow Calvinistic religious community

and an injustice occurs. He's accused of stealing money, which he didn't do. This narrow sect draw lots to see whether God says that he did steal it or not. God appears to say that he did. So at that point, Silas Marner says, right, there is no God

and I'm leaving you and I'm leaving my religious beliefs. And off he goes with his pack on his back and arrives in the Midland countryside of Ravalo, where he sets up, but is isolated from his neighbours. He is embittered, as you said, and he just weaves away in his cottage, making a living, and becomes a kind of hermit and exile, a sort of miser, really. He doesn't want anything, so he saves his money, and he keeps his gold coins under the bricks of the hearth. The money is stolen shortly afterwards.

a golden-haired child appears, Epi, and because he's short-sighted, George Edith is very precise about these things, he thinks it's the gold restored to him. And then he realizes that the joy that would have occurred had it been the gold is actually made greater when he touches it and he finds it soft and curly, and it's a child.

And the child then restores him to the community. He has to take account of his neighbours and go to them for help because he wants to adopt the child and bring her up, which is what he does. And then there's a kind of unraveling towards the end. Thank you. Dianabuch, can you just give us a little more context for George Eilett? Well, she certainly didn't come from the kind of background

that you might expect would produce a great intellectual novelist. She was born in 1819 in the provincial West Midlands. She was the daughter of Robert Evans, who was an estate manager, an accomplished and capable man, but certainly not a scholar nor anyone with pronounced intellectual, interests. The family was not poor, but it wasn't spectacularly wealthy, very far from it. She was sent away to school really very early for a girl of her generation in class. She was sent away to boarding school when she was only five years old. So there was the beginnings of a separation from her family

at quite an early stage. Later, at a later boarding school, she became deeply attached to one of her teachers, a woman called Mariah Lewis. And that was the start of really the first great intellectual and spiritual commitment of her life. She became a passionate evangelical Christian. And that was very important to her. I think it's also important when you're thinking about where she comes from, that she wasn't taking her models and her mentors in her early life from male figures. It was her school and her teachers that provide. those models, those independent, spirited women who were earning their own living. The first real breakthrough in terms of a more sophisticated intellectual environment came

when she moved into the circles of free thinkers, Charles and Cara Bray, who were living in Coventry at the time. And this was when she was a young woman. there she was able to meet people like Harriet Martineau, Herbert Spencer, John Chapman. She talked to them. Both of whom she had disastrous a house. That's true. That's true. But at the same time, both of whom she learned enormously from,

so though she paid an emotional price, there were huge intellectual gains. And then she really did begin to separate herself from her family. There was a very telling incident when she started to refuse to go to church. And that was a difficult thing for her and for her family. And I think it's very revealing that in the end, because her family was so upset, her father particularly, was truly distressed, she thought that she didn't want to go through with that. She didn't change her beliefs, her principles,

but she didn't want to cause that pain to another human being. So she carried on going to church, and I think that's very revealing. Her mind was changed by reading, and particularly by reading the new German scholarship on the fact that the Bible was just another history really and that Jesus was a man of great moral saint, but he was not the son of God and there was no... And she, through the reading, she abandoned her faith

and kept away from it, translated one of the great, as it were, biography of Jesus at the time into English. It's curious, the way she... Where did she get this energy or... learning at that day. She hadn't gone to London, she wasn't on Westminster's review, to have that intellectual energy to translate from German, to engage with these big books from Europe. It is curious. It's very remarkable that she had that. There was a huge task to translate Strauss's Das Lebonnezu, the book you're talking about, which had come out in 1835. I think that she had acquired that momentum,

that commitment, if you like, to the life of mine, which she always had. thought of as the life of the spirit when she was at school, where she had had a continental education. That's where her interest and proficiency in modern languages had begun. Of course, if she'd been a boy going to a rather grander school, she would have been taught primarily the classics. But because she was a girl and not going to that kind of school with those sorts of expectations. She had encountered European ideas and culture really quite

early on, but she was also hugely determined to make her own mark on the world, on her own terms. And that, I think, began very early. She moved to London and she became a sub-editor on the Westminster Review, very intellectual magazine. She was in touch

with the great writers of the time, editing their stuff, this very young woman come in. Under the tutelage of the man she lived with, George Henry Lewis, who was divorced and who was married and would not get divorced, wrote and changed and used the name George Elliott. Three big things happened there, moving to London Westminster Review, George Henry Lewis and George. Can you do something brisk about that, please, Diana? Well, again, she was lucky.

Chapman was running the Westminster Review. And you say that she became sub-editor, but really she was doing the work. She was the editor. and that was an enormous break for her. Of course it was also a great stroke of good fortune for Chapman because she was doing the work but not getting any of the credit. But it meant that it was a professional apprenticeship in writing, in reading over huge diversity of subjects,

in meeting deadlines, in communicating effectively to a diverse audience. It was a big break for her. So that's a Westminster Review. Now George Henry Lewis. George Henry Lewis, again, really transform. formed her life. She'd had, as you mentioned earlier, two fairly disastrous affairs. Herbert Spencer and John Chapman. Neither of those things had worked out for her, and there's no question but that left bruises. She'd been rejected twice. She was not, and I have to say, I think this is

an important fact about her life. She was not a pretty young woman. She had many virtues, but physical grace and charm was not among them. George Henry Lewis, was later called, I think by Leslie Stephen, the ugliest man in London. So maybe he couldn't afford to be so very choosy. But I think that they did recognise in each other, kindred spirits. I mean, George Lewis, too, had huge intellectual appetite. He was very interested in new directions and forms of science. And that was a very big turning point in George Eliot's intellectual life.

I'm going to go across to Valentine, Cunningham now. Briscally, Valentine, why did she call herself George Elliot and then we'll get on to next question. Ah, well, of course, this is one of the old discussions and the question of, you know, whether there's more of a kind of market for a male name in the publishing world,

as well as women, I don't know about that. But certainly she was very protective of her identity and it's very interesting that she found it troubling when Adam B. came out that somebody else claimed to have written it and so on. She was definitely, I think, sort of wanting to hide her hand. Prattis had something to do with living in sin publicly with George Henry Lewis and maybe there was that. There's something about, it seems to me,

not wanting to shame her family either, by writing books, which are, of course, offensive to them, especially in their post-Christian sympathies and projects and so on. And I think it's very interesting, when she married very late on, somebody called Johnny Cross and became Mrs. Cross, her brother, who had rejected her very early on for going off, essentially, with George Henry Lewis.

Well, first of all, for not going to church. Instantly, he writes to her, instantly, out of all those, dear Mrs. Cross, and there's something about, I think, not wanting particularly to bring her family name into the open. In 1856, she wrote an article on the natural history of German life. She argues in this that art is the nearest thing to life. It's a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

Would you say this was a manifesto? Oh, yes, yes. And one of the great things about it, George, Ellie, one of the most important things about her, is that she sort of sets out a kind of program for fiction before she writes any. And it's quite clear. I mean, that's in a review of a work of a German peasantry

by a German, essentially we would say a sociologist called Wilhelm von Riehl and it's part of her extraordinary reading in German stuff actually I thought she's translated Straussi's Life of Jesus and then for about the essence of Christianity and she's up on German stuff

and that reading von Riehl piece in the Westminster Review of course and it excites her I think she's thinking, as she writes that, of course, of doing sociology. She says if only a man would come along and do this kind of work for the artisans and ordinary rural people, it will be a terrific work of social reform.

But gradually, very quickly, her thoughts turned to doing that kind of work, a natural history, as she puts it, of our social class. classes, ordinary people doing that work for England in a novel. And that is the revolutionary movement. And of course it is an extraordinary moment for English fiction, actually.

Because I mean, this is a project for realism, for a kind of humanist realism. Novels taking seriously ordinary lower class and even sort of peasant persons. in ordinary towns, small towns, English Midlands towns, and in the case of Silas Manor, of course, in particular,

in an English Midlands village. I mean, this is an astonishing move for the novel, and it's incited by the fact that this woman is taking, as it were, modern sociology seriously. I think, I can do that, I can do that in fiction. Rosemary Ashton It was written in 1860 It was set about 40 years earlier

Why do you think she chose to write about that recent past? Well it follows on really from what Valentine and Dine have been saying Now there was her intellectual interests And she saw that it would be quite useful as a novelist To be able to look back And use the intervening knowledge and wisdom And the progress of the intellect As she might call it, the progress inside.

in political reform, for example, which had occurred in her lifetime. And by the time she's writing novels in the 1860s and 70s, she can look back to her early years and sometimes before, and she can look back and talk about communities in a way in which she can take really a double view, which is what she does, and it gives a kind of richness to the novels. She can look back and she can regret the loss of some of the innocence and the jolly countryside activities and so on.

but at the same time she can criticize ignorance, in particular, where ignorance leads to unthinkingness and unkindness. And so she really can take a kind of moral view at the same time as she's looking historically. And this is important for her because sometimes she was thought to have been rather a moral writer at the expense of an aesthetic one. She really wants to do this, as she says in that article that we've been talking about, through the imagination.

so it's important to her to create characters and embed them in their social, historical, realistically observed settings, but to write a plot, to have patterns, to be aesthetically pleasing. It's also true there's a nostalgia there, isn't there? Deep nostalgia. One of the most interesting things about that natural history

of German life article, that programme, as it were, for her novels. She said, this German writing about German peasants, it reminds me very much of what life was like in England 50 years ago. And it tapped into a vein of her own sort of early memories, actually. And that sustains her in a quite extraordinary way. Although she goes and lives in London and she moves around European cities and eventually will write one of the great London novels down in Toronto. Nonetheless, her heart is in small time and deeply rural Midlands, England.

But it's not a sentimental nostalgia. And it's also true that that rural life of Ravolo is not ideal. She makes the point over and over again, in fact, that the farming that's going on around Ravlo is bad farming, that it's complacent, that it's not effective managed. Because they're making money out of the war, aren't they? Exactly. We're at war with France and it's easy to get loads of money by farming even badly, yes. There's a real political point there. But there's also a point going back to what Rosemary said about writing about ordinary people. They are ordinary, they're not wealthy, but at the same time, They are given a real richness and a complexity. They're given an inner life. They're given an intellectual life.

And this is one of the things that the first readers noticed particularly. Here are the rural poor, but they are not presented simply as the victims of oppression or as people in need of conversion, religious tracts. They're not shiningly good. They're not dreadfully wicked like Fagin or Bill Sykes. they have a proper life of their own. And though they're not articulate,

they are nevertheless given intelligence. And I think that that's also very important the sort of thing that George Eliot wants to communicate to her readers, and it was certainly noticed at the time. Valentine Can I come back to you from it? It's social, we can begin to call it social realism. You summed it very well. It's an important time for fiction, British fiction,

well, English literature fiction. But it's also a fairy tale. it's the town, the lantern yard, chapel England, and then it's the countryside, could be medieval in a way. Is she making judgments between, let's say, the countryside and the town, because these opposites are going on all the time. Can you just briefly dwell on the town country thing? She is making...

When Silas goes back to Lanternia, to look for the chapel, it's become a factory. That will do. And when he goes to Ravalo, it's kind of... it spun into a spider's web, a superstition which will go back several centuries, as it were. I mean, there are a couple of things to say about this. One, of course, is that she's not writing a fully-fledged realist novel, or, let's say she's writing a novel,

which is running in several different directions. One is its kind of deeply socially realistic fiction. But at the same time, it's also heavily allegorical. I'm sure she was thinking, a lot with Silas Marna, the weaver with the burden on his back, reminded everybody of Bunyan's pilgrim who had the

burden of sin on his back and so on. It's highly allegorical, and there are huge, as well, fairy elements. People sometimes rightly think of this as a kind of version of a Cinderella story, and so a kind of Cinderella story upside down

and all of that. So it's a curious mixture of this new kind of realism and in a way old-fashioned narrative and there are lots of kind of gothic and melodramatic elements you know women

dying of drink and drugs in the snow and lost children and theft and goodness knows what there's all of that and it's worked in on this opposition between town and country

one would have thought in some ways that the new realism would focus particularly on kind of the new industrialism and so on and in a way she gives us an interesting picture or to begin with anyway of this chapel

up lantern yard and so on in filthy part of town and so on in opposition to the countryside definitely the countryside is thought of as a better place not least because of its religious and community and so on and so on and to be sure at the end

However, there is this extraordinary moment, isn't it, when the adopted little girl goes back with her adopted father, and they go back to the town, and he looks for the old chap, he's gone, replaced by a factory. And there's a kind of funny mixture there, isn't there, of intense regret. The old world has gone, and replaced by,

something new, something awful actually, the factory, crowds of people coming out and so on, it's become a fully fleshed factory town, and that's not good, but it's worked in with a kind of sense of desolation once again. There's a funny mixture here, isn't it, of town versus country, etc., etc. There is, and as you say, it's actually more complicated than that, because in a sense that going back to sea lantern yard, which he hadn't seen since he'd left swearing that, you know, he was giving. up both the town and his religious beliefs and so on.

That's really actually more done, I think, to fulfil a kind of psychological pattern. He has got to exorcise that ghost, that past. So that in a sense, this novel isn't one which really gives us a straight contrast, good or bad, between a town or country. The town life is only a very tiny, narrow, Calvinistic sort of life within the town, which, as I said earlier, was not even named. So it's more complicated, I think. No, no.

I'd like to bring in here your favourite Cumbrian poet, Wordsworth. And this is... Favorite comment? You're a strict name to Cumberland. Universal poet. Well, certainly... Cumbrians can be universal, you know. George Eliot certainly thought that he was universal.

George Eliot certainly thought that he was universal. She was deeply engaged with Wordsworth. And this is a very wordsworthy and novel. And, of course, Wordsworth had done something equivalent to what Rosemary was talking about. that is to construct a new aesthetic and imaginative image of rural life. But there's something deeper going on here, I think. In spite of what we've all been saying about George Eliot's construction of ordinary human life, there is something extraordinary about Silas,

and he's extraordinary in a rather wordsworthy way in the completeness of his loss. He has lost everything. He's lost his family, he's lost his religion, he's lost his community. He has lost his money after the theft. He is in a state of complete deprivation pushed right to the borders of life in the way that Wordsworth would often write about in his poetry.

Michael and Leechgather, exactly. But there's also a resistance to Wordsworth in that that loss in Silas is balanced with compensating gain and restoration. And of course it's not an accident that that turns on the image of VATES the child. And what the child

does for Silas is to reconnect him with memory and it's memory that saves his life. And that's a very wordsworthy and topos. Yes, it is. And in fact of course, as we know the novel had as its opening epigram a quotation from

Wordsworth's poem, Michael, which is about the old shepherd who has, his wife has a child late in life and he loves this child Luke and they build the sheep full together. and then Luke goes off and, you know, it's all very sad and so. But the idea is that Luke brings him into fresh life and links of life, and she quotes this quite a bit through the novel.

She likes the idea. She wants to take the idea of restoration, of second chances, really. And that's the romance. And giving him hope, gives him nothing like to give him hope. And forward-looking thoughts. That's the quotation that she makes. But one is getting aversion, isn't it, of Michael? I mean, the old man loses his sight.

and never lifted up a single stone at the end. His life is finished, whereas in this case, loss is massively followed by gain. And the loss of Victorian novels, there's even one called loss and gain. And this is a common trope. But it's the particular kinds of losses and gains that are terribly important. I mean, as being said, I'm going to cut in, and we could talk on this one thing, Losson going to the rest of the programme.

I wouldn't mind getting to one or two other points, really. First of all, I'd just like to say this, and then we'll move on to money, which I wanted to talk about, which is obviously very, very important to, to Silas and to others in the book. We're talking about the book in terms of ideas, and we'll have even more of that.

But just so we know, it is actually, it's old-fashioned, heart-wrenchingly plotted. I mean, from the very beginning, I mean, on about page, whatever it is, 19, you think, what's this friend doing, planting a knife in poor old Silas's rumours

and pretending he stole the money, folk? And again and again, you're outraged with what is happening. She's got this capacity to make you outrage with the injustices that are done to these people, and with the delights as well. So there's lots of plotting going on with as Godfrey plotting, as the killing of the horse, as the marriage it doesn't admit to,

there's the death, as you said, of the opium. And so there's lots of, there. I just want to say that, because it isn't, I know you're deconstructing it and reconstructing, but it's a... but it's also a big story in a small compass. I really do want to come to money. Valentine, money in this book and materialism.

He hoards his coins that his security. She makes a wonderful sentence about how this makes him feel secure, this is his habit, this is his happiness, these guineas he gets. And money plays a part, of course, in the second plot, the Godfrey and so on. So how does this feed into the Victorian fascination with materialism? Well, there is, of course, a tremendous interest in money and materialism in Victorian fiction.

It is one of the greatest topics, and George Elliott is not, I think, slow to get in onto this business. What money does to people. Poor old Silas living in this kind of exile all alone, all he's got is this accumulating pots of gold and it's killing him actually morally and it's very powerful this

and of course for George Elliot there's something about work going on one of the things that she translated Feuerbach as saying in the essence of Christianity that work is worship the new religiosity will have work

and working people at its heart. And it's very important though for George Elliot that work should be for a good reason, not just to accumulate money. Silas is

a working man and makes money but his making of money is as it were the wrong kind of thing, doing the wrong kind of thing to him spiritually and I think that's very important. And don't forget in this novel also, there's quite a lot about theft and about gambling.

And she's very, very hostile to gambling and people who try and make money by not working. But at the same time, she wants to give us a view about proper reward and putting, as it were, the profits from work into a proper ethical location. or capacity, Diana. I think it's very important when you're considering Silas's relation with his hoard of guineas, he takes it out every night,

bathes his hands, that it's not for him power of purchase or social standing. What it represents in his life is a substitute, of course, a false substitute, for feeling.

And this centrally is a novel about feeling. It's about connection. Silas has tried to make connection with this substitution for an emotional life which he's lost, which is of course why the arrival of the child, the mistaking of the child and the money

has such power because there's an immediate immediate translation. And although, as we've said, this is such an intellectual novel, such a sophisticated novel engaging with those central scholarly debates, I think we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that all that plotting you were talking about. is really evoking a force of emotional engagement in the radio. I want to come to this. Just before we leave the topic of money,

which I don't think we quite got through. I think in a sense, it's not silencing. It's the money that matters, really. People steal money, people need to earn money. I think the point there is that actually the 19th century novel in general is a middle-class genre written for middle-class people. Middle-class people have to make money. They don't own land, they don't inherit land and so on.

So I think the money thing is actually something that George Eliot shares with a lot of her contemporaries, that people need to have it, and sometimes people will steal it and they will do wrong and so on. I want to try to get to three things before we end. It's going to be a bit of a rush, but let's have a go. I mean, we've been around the edges of her intellectuality, bringing intellectuality to play into a work of fiction, which Valentine mentioned much earlier on. So I'd like to talk about the influence on her and the way she wrote her novels from, August Comte and then from Feuerbach and then the Christianity. Now see what we can do. Rosemary,

can you start off with August Compt? How did that influence her thought and work into her fiction? Okay, well August Comte was really the father of sociology. He was the first sociologist, the French writer, about the history, mainly the history of beliefs, religious beliefs. And Georgianette knew his work very well. G.H. Lewis translated and adapted it and in fact corresponded with Comte and so on. And Comte's idea really was, he called his doctrine the religion of humanity. And what he thought was that you could look back at history and you could see that historically there were primitive periods when peoples believed in polytheism. They had fetishism and they had gods in the plural and so on and they were superstitious and primitive. Then you have, he's taking this a very broad brush of course, then you have the great monotheisms, the monotheistic religions,

particularly Christianity, Mohammedanism, and so on. And there, for centuries, people believe in one god and they build up what, for Comte, is a kind of myth of the one god. And then you have the era which Comte thinks that the world is now entering into,

and hopes it is, which is his coinage, which is the positivist era, where people will look scientifically, historically. And of course this ties in with the German work that was being done on the history of biblical texts and comparative literature, comparative history of religious beliefs and so on,

and the demythologising, really, of the Bible. And it all fits in together where you move over to Feuerbach, who actually wrote in the essence of Christianity, a kind of anthropology. Can I turn to Valentine for Feuerbach, the influence of Feuerbach on her work? She translated him early on. The Feuerbach is one of the great German Protestant rereaders.

of Christian theology is a book in English which she translated the essence of Christianity proposes the idea that all the good things within Christianity, the meanings, the symbols,

the practices and so on have got to continue, but continue in a secularised, demythologised way and you can see that in all her novels in a sense, she, enacts this kind of

proposition like at the end of at an abe in an upper room Adam is persuaded to forgive his errant beloved and in an evening

a supper when they drink bread and eat bread and drink wine it's a kind of modern sacrament and so here Jesus said a little child will lead you to the kingdom of heaven and there's this wonderful moment where Epi, the little girl, in hand with Silas, leads him back into the community of the village,

a little child leading him into the only version of the kingdom of heaven on earth that George Elliot now accepts. And so it goes on. I mentioned earlier, work is worship, yes, that's a piece of foyerbark induction and so on and so on. There is this recycling of Christian things. and into a post-Christian way, all on the basis of Foyabarkian essence. She's wanting the essences to carry on. Diana, can we just...

So we've got Compton, we've got Foyabark, brilliantly, though briefly, brilliantly, the idea that she wanted to continue the morality of Christianity into her books, and I'm fascinated me how idea of starting from the point of view of ideas, because in Ries-Sah, Man, it's a good plot, plot, plot, but it's also ideas are all around it, inside it, and she's representing characters as ideas.

So can you just bring her Christianity, her clasping of it when she was a young woman and her abandoning of it when she was still a young woman, but her fascination with it into her fiction, into Silas Manor? I think the crucial point here is that though she abandoned the, as it were, supernatural dimensions of Christianity, the concept of a divine intervention in human life. What she didn't abandon was the code of values

that she had constructed for herself really as a very young woman at school and in the Christian communities of her youth. That seriousness, that sense of a deeply felt inner life and also that sense, which is of course central to Christianity, that redemption and growth must finally depend on pain and science. suffering. What we see in Silas Manor and in her other fiction is a process in which that's internalised, in which every character, or that is every character who proves capable of spiritual growth,

enacts his or her own version of the passion, the crucifixion. If you are not able to assimilate that passion, then you will not be able to grow. And in Silas, in that completeness of loss that we were talking about earlier, the suffering that he undergoes, we see through the help of Epi and the community, we see that potential for moving forward. So what you have in Silas Monne and, again, in her other novels, is the notion that, yes, it is an internalised process and it must depend on suffering, but help has to come from outside too. You can't do it alone. You have to be open, sympathetically open to what your fellow human creatures can offer. People like Dolly Winthrop, and I do just want to mention Dolly

because of all the characters in Silas Marna, she has a claim to be a kind of moral heroine. She's not articulate, she's not sophisticated, but she is a deeply human character, so generous and so compassionate and so consistently right that she's a kind of moral landmark in the landscape of the novel. Yes, it's important, I think,

not to give any kind of sense in case we have been doing that George Erie is kind of po-faced or in any way antagonistic towards religion or towards human warmth. No, she's very much not. She wrote in a letter at the time

that she was writing Silas Marna that she quite understood why other people, including the people that she writes about in her novels, should look to religion for comfort and help, but that she herself had decided to do without opium which is actually strikingly what Karl Marx was saying much at the same time. But she's not scornful like Marx was of religion and what it might do,

as long as it is a force for good. Valentine, what influence, how has it received, Charles Manor? Did it have an influence on other writers? Was she beginning to influence the tone of fiction? I actually think, perhaps not justice novel, because this is a kind of encapsulation of George Eliot's, project. But you know, when Thomas Hardy and titles

his under the Greenwood Tree a Dutch picture of the realist school or some such subtitle, he's thinking of George Elliot. He's looking back to George Eliot. He writes a kind of imitative George Eliot novel and through Hardy, of course, we

lead to Lawrence. There is a kind of intense tradition of kind of moral, serious, ordinary life fiction which spins out from George Eliot and at least in that line, Hardy Lawrence. And I'd also want to point to Henry James

as someone who learned enormously from George Eliot writers like Gissing, George Gissing, and new woman fiction, because of course one of the things that George Eliot does is to think about the position of women, not primarily in Silas Mona, though I think it's there in Silas Marna. So I think in all kinds of context, she was hugely influential on the later development of the novel right into the 20th century, as Valentine suggests.

I think her influence on Henry James is particularly important in terms of what she's able to do in internalising, in doing psychology, getting into people's heads and moving between the authorial stance, the historian, the scientist, the observer, the natural historian, seamlessly between that and getting inside people's heads and finding their motivation and letting them speak and think as people might well speak and think. Well, thank you all very much. I'm sorry if I've appeared to hurry you, but you'd so much to say, and we've got so much else to say if we tackle Middlematch, we'd be here until Sunday night. Anyway, thank you very much to Diana Bertrand, and Val Cunningham.

Next week, we're talking about the 14th century North African philosopher of history, Ibn Haldun, I was wrote about the Medi, the Medi. evil Arab world. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio four.