Mingy Stingy

George Eliot’s Silas Marner suffers only from the inevitable comparison with Middlemarch.  What is one supposed to do with an author who wrote a masterpiece “Cross-Section of a Town” Novel which is long and seemingly all-encompassing, when that same author also wrote a shorter, quicker novel doing much the same thing?  Had Middlemarch never been written, Silas Marner would seem even more brilliant than it is.

(Speaking of Middlemarch, I ran across this.  Things like that seem interesting to me, but that particular example doesn’t tell me anything new about Hamlet and so I eventually realized it only seems interesting—it actually isn’t interesting at all.  But, then I got to thinking.  I would really like to see a picture like that for Middlemarch.  (Without the red lines, of course.)  Who is the central character in that town?  Is there anyone who unites all the parts of the town?)

But, to return to Silas.  After finishing the novel, I feel like I could walk into Raveloe and know everyone in town.  Yet, surprisingly, the book is short, very short.  My copy is 151 pages.  You know you are in the hands of an expert novelist when she can paint a picture of a town so completely in a book of that size.  You don’t actually meet that many characters in this book, but it sure seems like you know the whole town by the end of the book.

The big theme:  children are more important than money.   This would have been an interesting message in 1861 with the Industrial Revolution in full swing;  indeed, the destruction caused by the Industrial Revolution shows up at the end of the novel—we are glad to see that Silas has escaped the fate of the factory by mummifying himself in a small town.   Today, the message still resonates, of course.    While reading a book like this, it’s hard not to look at your own daughters with a bit more fondness.

Curiously, (curiously, because this band keeps popping up in my life over the last few weeks) The Who even wrote a song loosely based on this novel.  It’s here.  I’ve listened to that song many, many times in my life, but I never knew the Silas in the song was named after the protagonist of this novel.  It was a rather jarring shock of discovery when I was reading about Silas stashing away his gold and I could suddenly hear John Entwistle crooning, “Once upon a time there was an old miser man by the name of Silas Stingy…”

In short, if you have never read Middlemarch, read this short novel and then you will want to read the long novel.  And if you have read Middlemarch, then why haven’t you already read this book?  I am asking myself that very question—I’ve read Middlemarch twice, but before now, I never read another Eliot novel.  Why ever not?

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