The state of the historiography

When George Eliot wrote Silas Marner, she was acutely aware of the regional differences in religious cultures through which Silas moved. Even people ‘whose lives have been made various by learning’, she wrote, find it hard to maintain their beliefs when they are transported into a new region, ‘where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas … in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished’. In Silas' move from a northern, strongly Nonconformist chapel setting – its familiar phrases like an ‘amulet worn on the heart … the fostering home of his religious emotions’ – to the large Anglican church of Raveloe and its associated culture, Eliot captured one of the fundamental regional contrasts of her time. Silas, she wrote, was vaguely conscious that ‘each territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities’: by its own ‘native gods’, whose influence was locally contained and not transferable. In the consequent disassociation of Silas from religious belief, a response to this regional transition and confrontation with people of differing views, she defined a fundamental cause of religious disillusionment.

This was a subtle and sensitive lesson from a novelist of great intuition. We shall need to keep it in mind. For in her preoccupation with these themes, and in her awareness of regional contrasts and their effects, George Eliot was articulating thoughts which are now remote from the minds of many historians.