The Victorians loved Silas Marner, George Eliot’s 1861 novel about a weaver’s transformation from reclusive miser to adoptive father. In an age of increasing religious doubt, it celebrated and affirmed the value of the human heart. Yet do we still enjoy it today? Silas Marner is a set text on English literature syllabuses at GCSE and AS, yet it can seem staid, sentimental and unfashionably didactic. My intention here is to show that Silas Marner, especially in its treatment of money and greed, is a more radical text than we might at first imagine.
The novel is engaged with contemporary concerns about political economy. Money talks. It spoke to Eliot’s first readers (many of whom were struggling to get used to the displacement of coins by paper bills) and it can speak to us today — we are, after all, still experiencing the effects of the global banking crisis of 2008. The question of where to safely deposit our hard-earned pennies is perhaps even more topical today than it was when Silas Marner was first published.
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