What impressions of Silas Marner do you form early in the novel? What techniques does the author adopt to guide her reader's response?

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What impressions of Silas Marner do you form early in the novel? What techniques does the author adopt to guide her reader’s response?

        This essay plans to tell the reader about the early chapters in the book Silas Marner. Part I begins with the description and comparisons of the two settings that are introduced to us in this book, it then goes on to tell the reader about Silas himself, Silas’s physical drawbacks and his membership of the sect in the Lantern Yard. Part II then goes on to tell the reader about the more social aspects of Silas’s life and then about his settlement in Raveloe.

PART I

        In the opening chapters of this book we are introduced to two types of setting. Firstly we are introduced to Raveloe (pages 10 through to 12), this is quite a verdant village, a woody village tucked away in the back woods of the fresh English Midlands. The way Raveloe is placed geographically and its seclusion from the rest of the Midlands, the intellectual and spiritual confinement of its quite simple and its very misunderstood tastes to the countryside are premeditated. In this setting the writer George Eliot captures all the views of the bygone era, prompted by her indelible Warwickshire memories.

        The second setting that we are given is one that is not written in the text but one, which we have to look for. Just before the industrial revolution was due to begin is the book’s second setting. This is between the decades 1810 and 1840, when the first signs of industrialization were being seen in the urban areas, the first roads into the English countryside had begun to be put in place and land enclosures had fallen off the agenda and the peasants were being forced to move into the towns and cities to earn a decant living. Whilst this was proceeding, Raveloe village itself was remaining unaffected by this looming industrialisation and it continued to proceed with its rural backdrop still fertile and exuberant. The spinning wheels still hummed busily in the farmhouses, the bigger families lived in wealth and luxuries swearing by the thriving land, inherited estates and still using their ancestral tankards.

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        Whilst these events are continue in the Raveloe village, Silas’s life as a weaver is starting to become quite easy for him and he is becoming quite a prosperous member of the village, but his fortune is still very secret and nobody knows the amount of money he has stored away apart from him. Silas is a very simple and extremely trusting man who lives for his work and works with pride. Silas’s has a “Thread-bore” physique; he appears to be very shabby and untidy. His body is not one thriving with muscles but a rather slender build. His ...

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