Abstract
In the good (or bad, depending on one’s point of view) old days when it was taken as a matter of course that classic literary texts were central to any English syllabus, Silas Marner was one of the most widely studied of Victorian novels in schools. Part of the reason for this, no doubt, was that it was short by nineteenth-century standards, as well as being perceived as a simple story written in an accessible style. But perhaps even more important was its identification with Victorian moral idealism since it would appear to present a world in which moral order is intrinsic and triumphs over moral disorder, with the good being rewarded and the bad being punished. In an edition of the novel for schools first published in 1912 and often reprinted, the editor discusses the appropriateness of Silas Marner as a school text and states:
above all, the ethical interest must be paramount; and no treatment of Silas Marner can be really educative which does not make its appeal to the moral consciousness. It is in the belief justified by a long experience that in this lies the true value of the teaching of literature, that this edition of Silas Marner is included in the series of English Literature for Schools.1
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, trans. Angus Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 352.
Walter Allen, George Eliot (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), p. 120.
F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 59.
Jerome Thale, The Novels of George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 59.
U.C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 247.
David Cecil, Early Victorian Novelists: Essays in Revaluation (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1948), p. 244.
See K.M. Newton, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist (London: Macmillan Press, 1981), pp. 82–3.
Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894), p. 214.
Bernard J. Paris, ‘George Eliot’s Unpublished Poetry’, Studies in Philology 56 (1959), pp. 541–2.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Newton, K.M. (1998). ‘Victorian Values’ and Silas Marner. In: Day, G. (eds) Varieties of Victorianism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26742-2_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26742-2_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-26744-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-26742-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)