Their extreme social inequality meant that Godfrey could never publicly avow the marriage. A few years ago, his older brother Godfrey Cass entered into an ill-advised secret marriage with Molly Farren, a laborer from a nearby town. Dunstan isn’t the only member of the Cass family with social problems.
Still, word of his hoard gets out, and one night Dunstan Cass, the depraved youngest son of a local landowner, steals all of Silas’s gold and disappears. When he is not working, he spends his time admiring the gold coins he earns through his work, secreting them under the floorboards of his house after polishing them. Living completely apart from everyone else there, Silas works as a weaver and only interacts with the other residents to sell his craft. He travels south to the small village of Raveloe, in Warwickshire. A devastated Silas loses his faith and leaves the community. When the ostensibly randomly drawn lots point to Silas, Sarah leaves him and marries William. Instead of looking at evidence, the congregation decides to leave justice to God by drawing lots to see who is responsible for theft. Although there are several pieces of evidence that seem to point to his guilt, the text makes it clear that Silas has actually been betrayed by his best friend, William Dane, who wants to get rid of Silas in order to be with Silas’s fiancée, Sarah. When Silas stops working to care for his church’s aging deacon, he is accused of stealing the congregation’s money. Silas belongs to a low-church Christian sect, a close, insular Calvinist congregation that espouses predestination, the belief that some people are predestined to be saved while others are predestined to be damned, regardless of their actions on Earth. In the early nineteenth century, Silas Marner is a weaver in Lantern Yard, a small, rundown neighborhood in Northern England. The novel follows a wronged working man’s evolution from isolated miser to someone who forms meaningful connections with a community after unexpectedly becoming a father. Exploring the ways industrialization and capitalism warp human ethics, how uplifting religious faith can be transformed into destructively blind belief, and the redemptive value of human connection, the novel is written in Eliot’s trademark empathetic and unvarnished realism. Celebrated Victorian novelist George Eliot (the penname of Mary Anne Evans) published her third novel, Silas Marner, in 1861.
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