In reading George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861) one is most startled not by a particular artifice of coincidence or character, nor by one of Eliot’s usual didactic asides. Rather it’s what she does with chapter six which registers as a curiosity at first and which is not easily recapitulated or understood through what follows. Chapter six is in the main a curiosity as regards pacing. Silas Marner until then is a pretty compact presentation of Marner’s redemptive tale, perhaps designed as a suitably humble chronicle of a humble life. Within the previous five chapters Marner has been efficiently exiled from his northern non-comformist church, settled in the rural village Raveloe in the Midlands, rewarded for his relentless linen weaving with a hoard of gold, and then robbed of it by the local squire’s son, Dunstan Cass.
Eliot has already conjured pre-Industrial England and placed the diminutive Silas, with his clever hands, as one of those craftsmen “regarded as aliens by their rustic neighbours.” She has described him in complete isolation from the villagers except through transaction, and established somebodies, nervous Godfrey and brother, dissolute Dunstan Cass, in a contrasting central position within the social life of Raveloe.
At the close of chapter five, Silas arrives at the pub, “The Rainbow”, to accuse Jem Rodney of stealing his gold. But chapter six is given over entirely to the ten or so minutes that precede Silas’ arrival, and the hierarchy of the drinkers:
The pipes began to be puffed in a silence which had an air of severity; the more important customers, who drank spirits and sat nearest the fire, staring at each other as if a bet were depending on the first man to winked; while the beer-drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and smock-frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands across their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a funereal duty attended with embarrassing sadness.
There is talk of a red Durham cow which redounds to the reputation of her former owner, Mr. Lammeter, an important figure because of the regard his daughter might hold for Godfrey Cass, the squire’s son. And with it some country flavor in the idiom, the farrier having by his own admission "been at the drenching [inoculation] of her—contradick me who will.” The landlord, Mr. Snell, guides the conversation back to Mr. Lammeter, challenging Mr. Macey, the tailor, who will not deign to give his own recollections, saying, “Ask them as have been to school at Tarley: they’ve learnt pernouncing; that’s come up since my day.” This apparent reference to the deputy clerk prompts that worthy to offer a puzzling scriptural moment: “I’m nowise a man to speak out of my place. As the psalm says— I know what’s right, nor only so, / But also practise what I know.” Folk religion is one of the clearest themes of the novel. With the dispute that follows regarding the church choir there is surely an opportunity for Silas’ entrance. Eliot has made much already of Silas’ solitude, and the queer view taken of him by the villagers, whose lax Anglicanism is so different from the prayer meetings among brothers that formed him. It’s the philosophical Mr. Macey who could almost be ushering Silas onto the stage, saying, “there’s allays two ‘pinions; there’s the ‘pinion a man has of himsen, and there’s the ‘pinion other folks have on him. There’d be two ‘pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself.” The first statement outlines the basic scheme of Silas’ social alienation, or indeed anyone’s, and the second, having offered a workable metaphor, asks in its conditional clause a poignant question, to which the answer is surely no, Silas’ does not even hear himself, being so entranced by his labors and their fruit.
This line of thought is buried by the laughter at Macey’s wit, there follows more talk of music (“There’s no voices like what there used to be”), and Mr. Macey, his authority puffed up, gratifies everyone with the whole history of Mr. Lammeter’s time in Raveloe. The herald for Marner is in the end a discussion about ghosts, specifically whether or not they are apprehended by sight or by the olfactory sense. Eliot even has her unnamed farrier invite Silas in: “If ghos’es want me to believe in ‘em, let ‘em leave off skulking i’ the dark and i’ lone places—let ‘em come where there’s company and candles.” But Silas Marner has never been a phantasm, either to us or to the company at the The Rainbow. He’s given far too much physicality; his hands are always fondling his gold or his loom, and the villagers have on their persons and in their homes too much of his handicraft to conceive of him as otherworldly.
The supposed entrance of the ghost at the beginning of chapter seven is given its due theatricality, but the landlord possesses himself quickly, and can soon welcome Marner as a strange creature, maybe, but one whose business must overlap with theirs. If the chapter has been successful in detailing village life with its layers of class and prestige, and in producing some comedy, it has some worth, but it slows Silas’ urgency at the end of chapter five in trying to recover his riches, and frustrates the reader besides. His breathless report at The Rainbow is made into a ghost at the feast scene, but from the expedient response of the villagers, among whom two are dispatched with Silas to the constable, we can see that Silas was never a ghost haunting Raveloe, but a plain rural figure of much interest to Eliot, one of the “certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race,” more insectoid than ghastly.