New Year’s Eve Party: George Eliot & the possibilities of redemption

 

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot

published 1861

 

The New Year’s Eve party is the central moment in this book, an extended scene in which all kinds of dramas occur, and the future is changed for most of the book’s key characters.

It it nicely placed halfway through the book (which is quite short) – structure is something Eliot was very good at.

The title character is a weaver who moves to a Warwickshire village after being wrongly accused of a crime in his home town in the North, and losing his friend and fiancée. He is bitter and isolated and his only pleasure is in making and hoarding money.

He is devastated again when his money is stolen, although this leads to his making some connections in the village. On New Year’s Eve a beautiful child will suddenly appear in his life, and he will turn up at the Squire’s grand party with all the local nobs. The child has golden curls, and it is no big stretch to see that these are replacing the lost golden coins.

In parallel with this we are also following Squire Cass’s two sons, both problematic, with troubles in their past. Their stories will collide.

One of many excellent features of Eliot's writing is that this is a book with great themes and great events and mythic resonance, but the young women bitching at the party is given full importance:

The Miss Gunns were rather hard-featured…. And such very low dresses as they wore might have been attributed to vanity if their shoulders had been pretty, but that, being as they were, it was not reasonable to suppose that they showed their necks from a love of display.

As are the clothes: Nancy turns up at the party on the back of her father’s horse, so has to wear a ‘drab joseph and a drab beaver-bonnet’ – drab being the colour, which is just what you would expect, a dull light-brown. A joseph is a riding-coat, and Eliot says the hat looks like a small stewpan.

But Nancy is still bewitching, and even more so when she does herself up in her party clothes. Her older sister Priscilla – not as beautiful – now talks very tactlessly: ‘I am ugly – there’s no denying that. But law! I don’t mind, do you?’ Priscilla here turned to the Miss Gunns, rattling on in too much preoccupation with the delight of talking, to notice that her candour was not appreciated. ‘The pretty uns do for fly-catchers – they keep the men off us.’

Splendid – reminiscent of a favourite quotation from Dickens’ David  Copperfield:

Miss Murdstone [said] ‘I consider our lamented Clara to have been, in all essential respects, a mere child.’

‘It is a comfort to you and me, ma’am,’ said my aunt, ‘who are getting on in life, and are not likely to be made unhappy by our personal attractions, that nobody can say the same of us.’

‘No doubt!’ returned Miss Murdstone, though, I thought, not with a very ready or gracious assent. 

There is also food on offer at the party, and I was surprised at the mention of ‘that super-excellent pork pie’ – the wording sounds so modern.

The story is haunting and at times sad, and has great themes wrapped in a small story – redemption always a favourite round here, especially at New Year.

The book is set in the early years of the 19^th century – the pictures show women’s fashions of the era.