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Teacher Resource PackYear 9 English: George Eliot, Silas Marner (1861) Community, Migration, HomeWelcome:Thank you for downloading our Y9 Silas Marner resource. This pack is free to all and we welcome sharing, reuse, and feedback. Please share any feedback with Ruth Livesey via Ruth.livesey@rhul.ac.uk, tweet @liveseyruth, or post on our project blog Our Project:This pack has been developed as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, Provincialism: Literature and the Cultural Politics of Middleness AH/S002545/1 in partnership with the George Eliot Fellowship as part of its commemoration of the 2019 Eliot Bicentenary: . The authors would like to thank the Fellowship, Roberta Gillum, Wendy Lennon, Simon Winterman, and Alisha Miller for their substantial contributions to the planning stages of the pack, with a special acknowledgement to Wendy Lennon for coming up with our enquiry question on community. The pack has been designed to build KS3 students’ analysis skills, to foster communication skills and, more specifically, to help prepare your students for GCSE English Literature Papers 1 and Paper 2. There are cross-curricular links with Art, History, Geography, RE and PSHE. The lessons have been designed with depth and detail to challenge top sets but are readily adaptable with alternative tasks for lower sets Who we are: Project AuthorsRuth Livesey is Principal Investigator on the project. She is Professor Nineteenth-Century Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has taught a wide range of nineteenth-century literature in universities for over 20 years and her most recent publications focus on George Eliot.Colette Ramuz is Research and Teacher Engagement Associate on the project. She is a former secondary school Head of English and is currently completing a PhD on Charles Dickens and teaching in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London.Our Enquiry Question: What is Community?The project held initial teacher workshops on Silas Marner in June 2019 in partnership with the George Eliot Fellowship in Nuneaton. Our attendees suggested that an approach that opened up the text for discussion in relation to very current concerns would serve to engage pupils. As our lesson plans show, the different spokes that radiate from the core question structure a series of thematic and stylistic investigations of the text week-by-week. Livesey’s wider research project explores Eliot’s interest in ‘provincial life’: small town and village communities far from big cities. Silas Marner dramatizes the positive and negative aspects of those sorts of smaller communities: how they can make some people feel secure and at home whilst shunning others. The scheme of work takes pupils on a journey that draws on their own experience of community, face-to-face and distant communication, starting over, remembering old places and living through change. This then informs the subsequent lessons before returning to that question again at the end in relation to Eliot’s novel. Scheme of Work at a Glance: What is community? Maps of communication. Understanding Silas’s exclusion. Homework: write a first person account of joining a new community. Focus: Chapter 1.Silas’s communities: village life vs Lantern Yard and Silas’s place. Resource for discussion: David Wilkie’s The Blind Fiddler. Exclusion, identity, disability. Country vs city in Silas Marner and Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). Focus: Chapter 1 continued.Money and wealth. How does money connect the community? What does money mean to Silas? Focus: Chapter 2.Family, Community, Authority: Squire Cass, Molly, the feast. Focus: Chapter 3.How objects make community: Silas and his brown jug. Context: migration museums and mementos. Homework: make a museum of you - collect, label, and describe two objects that tell a story about your past. Focus: Chapter 2; Chapter munities of Speech and literacy makes communities. Listening to dialect and accent. What does accent mean to you? The Rainbow; meaning or words as glue. Role play: how do we speak differently in different context? Focus: Chapter 6. Women, power, and secrets. Reputation, shame and community. What does it mean to be ‘respectable’, especially for women? Why is Godfrey so ashamed of Molly? Why did he marry her? What did it mean to be unmarried (link to Eliot herself)? Focus: Chapter munity and change. How does Silas’s view of the world change from following Eppie? Symbolism in the novel. Focus: Chapter 14; Chapter 21. Loneliness and Secrecy: Godfrey vs Silas. Chapter 12, 13 & recap of earlier in novel.Structure and Endings. Fairytales and realism; context of what Eliot wrote about the purpose of art and literature. Good and evil: how does Eliot hand out rewards and punishments? Is any character thoroughly good or completely evil? Focus: Chapter 20, 21, munity and justice. Courtroom drama: where does Eppie belong? Barristers, witnesses, jurors made up of characters from the novel. What kind of evidence matters? What does the novel say about the law and getting justice? Different models of truth and reconciliation from round the world. Focus: Chapter 19 and recap.Assessment. Nine essay questions; one creative response.Background Context:Who was George Eliot?George Eliot was one of the richest women in Britain during the nineteenth century thanks to her fame as a novelist. But by that time, she knew she could never go home to the setting for many of her books: North Warwickshire and the wider landscape of the English Midlands. Eliot challenges everything we think we know about Victorian women. She rejected the religion she was brought up with and lived a passionate life outside conventional marriage, shunned by her family and community as a result. Her ambition and intelligence opened a world to her: from school, to the libraries of the grand estates that employed her father, to the radical freethinkers of Coventry, to editing one of the leading periodicals of her day. Born Mary Ann Evans at South Farm, Arbury in November 1819, she took the pen name George Eliot on publishing her first fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, in 1857. Her major novels Adam Bede, Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda gained her a huge following and reshaped what people thought novels could and should do. They show us a picture of provincial English life that was disappearing even as Eliot wrote about it. Her writing helps readers understand what it is to live through change and makes us sympathize with those forced out of their communities as a result. Eliot’s fiction helps us feel together and gives a sense of place in world that is always in motion. This power of her fiction to make readers feel and think deeply about the world made her work particularly important during the Victorian period when many commentators were concerned about the decline of traditional moral frameworks grounded in religion.George Eliot CountryEliot started writing fiction in the 1850s, when the census revealed for the first time that more people were living in towns than the countryside. Her depiction of a landscape of ‘tree-studded hedgerows’, brown canals, ‘high banks where the ash trees grew’, red earth, and farmsteads appealed to a new, urban readership. Many of the characteristics she writes about in her fiction are now identified in the official ‘Warwickshire Landscape Guidelines’ used in heritage and planning processes in the county. But Eliot’s books remind readers that this is only one aspect of a rapidly changing landscape, cut up for coal, canals, and rail in her lifetime as it is for giant distribution parks, bypasses, new housing in our own. Most of her novels are set in the recent past, around 30-50 years before the time she wrote them. This allows her to show a world that was about to undergo even more dramatic change, with the coming of the railways and political reforms about to bring about new ideas of England and Empire. Introducing Silas Marner (1861):In the context of Eliot’s career:By the time Eliot came to write Silas Marner she was living in London in self-imposed exile from her home country of the Midlands. The year before she wrote the novel there had been great excitement in the newspapers about who the author ‘George Eliot’ really was. Her first books – Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) and Adam Bede (1859) - had been a huge success but she kept her identity a secret, even from her publisher at first. She was concerned that the fact of her living with her partner, journalist George Henry Lewes, while not being married to him, would mean that all her novels were judged the work of a sinful woman and dismissed as bad on that ground alone. Eliot’s resolve to stay anonymous was broken down in 1859. A campaign started up in her home town of Nuneaton on behalf of a local man, Joseph Liggins, who was believed locally to be the ‘real’ George Eliot and apparently claimed he had been cheated out of his earnings. Only at that point did Eliot reveal herself to be that scandalous woman, Mary Ann Evans, who had left the town. Eliot lived through the first era of celebrity authors, but she wanted her work to be judged for itself as art, rather than people being influenced by her image. Even after she was identified as the author of so many beloved novels, she managed her public image very carefully, avoiding the celebrity circuits, publicity, and photographs that made novelists such as Charles Dickens instantly recognisable – and very wealthy. Eliot started writing Silas Marner in 1860 shortly after the disturbances of the revelation of her authorship and the publication of The Mill on the Floss (1860). She was in a very unsettled period of her life in which she moved frequently between short-term rented properties in the London suburbs. She had even managed to lose the pen she wrote her first novels with and was all at sea. She wrote to friends that the idea of the novel came to her all of a sudden in this slightly disorientated period and interrupted the longer project she was supposed to be working on. The first ‘millet seed’ of the idea of the novel was the image we see at the opening of the novel: a man – an outsider - with a burden on his back – and it grew from there.In the context of the novel as a genre:Marner is Eliot’s shortest novel and perhaps for this reason has been the most widely taught of her works in schools in Britain and the USA for many years. There is a long critical tradition of describing Silas Marner as a kind of fairy tale, unlike the realism of her longer works, such as the later Middlemarch. There is, after all, a kind of miraculous providence in the replacement of Silas’s lost gold with the golden hair of Eppie; the true wealth of love cures the miser of his loneliness. But there is a hard edge of social analysis and psychological realism about the novel too. Unlike the tradition of romances in which lost royal babes are found in all grown up in cottages in the woods just in time to marry the prince, Eppie is never going to leave Silas. She is made by her environment. Equally Silas goes off in search of justice and an explanation, at last, of William Dane’s behaviour at Lantern Yard that led to so much misery and to Silas’s exile. But there is no sign of the place by the end of the novel. It has been swept away entirely by the reality of urban industrial development in the 1820s. Perhaps one image to think of here is that of weaving a piece of linen. When we first encounter Silas he is endlessly working inside his loom, treading away as if walking and going nowhere, turning the hundreds of threads of spun flax into fine fabric. He’s caught in habit, working unthinkingly like a spider. When Eppie arrives, he tries to bind her into his life with that long strip of woven fabric around her waist tied to the loom. But she cuts the strip with the shears and wanders off into the fields, forcing him to follow in her footsteps and see the village afresh through her eyes. By following Eppie he can find new ties into the village of Raveloe. He can’t go back and unpick or remake the past; neither can Godfrey reclaim Eppie. His second chance in life, towards the end of the novel, comes making himself feel in place in the village despite being a migrant. Language:The name of the village – Raveloe – itself carries a double meaning. ‘Ravel’ is a contronym – a janus word that can mean to tangle or to untangle. This doubleness of traditional village life – knotted or smoothing; community and exclusion – is everywhere we look in this novel. The novel opens by showing us how the village treats the recent migrant, Silas. His religion, his disability, his skills, and his language make him an outside shunned by the community and this triggers his miserly habits. But once he bursts into the Rainbow Inn after the theft of his gold the villagers start to interact in a different way with this ‘poor mushed creatur’. Our inquiry question: why focus on community?Thinking about community is more important than ever. Studying community involves considering what ties us together; how community can include and exclude people; how communication shapes relationships; how communities react to times of change and social pressures. Silas Marner explores all of these ideas and – through Eliot’s wider work – asks us to think about how reading fiction can help those from very different communities feel sympathy with others. Her works make a vital claim for the power of literature and imagination to transform human life. Eliot was very interested in studying societies and how they change. She read widely in early works of sociology and anthropology that examined the lives of ‘peasants’ and workers during the period of massive changes that accompanied the industrial revolution across Europe. Like many thinkers at the time, she saw human groups shifting from relations based on face-to-face relationships, shared beliefs and superstitions (we hear lots about this in Silas Marner -especially from Dolly Winthrop) and small communities settled in one place. Thanks to changes in labour, profitability, new means of mobility via road, canal, and then train, faster communications by post and newspaper circulation those communities changed irrevocably in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Small communities based on organic settled relations gave way to larger forms of social organisation, shaped by external forces with the advent of larger workplaces, standardised systems of education, welfare, and increasingly centralised government. Silas Marner explores the losses and gains of those changes in community. Silas Marner opens during the last years of the Napoleonic Wars with France (1803-1815). These are good times for farmers and landlords, with high prices for their products thanks to a lack of international trade – but tough for workers with basic food costs swallowing up their budgets. The community of Raveloe has remained unchanged for generations and is suspicious of the new skills and experience represented by the ‘alien’ immigrant, Silas, who is pushed to the outside of the village. The village has strong vertical relationships, from the Squire, through his tenants and employers, down to the poor who look forward to his handouts. Independent Silas doesn’t fit in. His own experience of a small fundamentalist religious community in a Northern factory town leaves him with real trouble understanding what ties the community of Raveloe together. Silas’s only thread of connection to it – 15 years after first emigrating there - is through the money he is paid for his skills in weaving. The second part of the story is set 16 years later – so some time in the 1820s. The community has changed in noticeable ways: Godfrey Cass is no longer ‘Squire’ and the falling prices after the war ends leave the landlords less powerful. The new generation of children – Aaron and Eppie, for example – can read and write, unlike Dolly. When Silas tries to go back to Lantern Yard so find justice for his exile from his first community there, the whole site has been demolished. Nothing is left of his past. This is the height of the industrial revolution when life in both country and city is being changed beyond recognition at a very rapid pace.There is no going back, no cure in simple nostalgia, this novel argues. After all, Silas reverses the direction of much migration in the nineteenth century, going from city to country. In the city he was deceived, robbed of his future, lied about, shunned. But the villagers of Raveloe do not treat him any better, lacking the imagination needed to connect and sympathises with this stranger, so different from them in appearance, in religion, experience, skills and with a disability that marks him out. It takes a new generation – and a second experience of theft, lies, betrayals for Silas – to grow fresh connections to his new community. In a world that is changing so rapidly, the novel suggests, community is something we need to keep open and learn to make on the move. The garden planned by Aaron and Eppie at the Stone Pits is a strong symbol of an open and inclusive community unlike Raveloe at the opening of the novel or Lantern Yard. Aaron brings ‘slips’ or cuttings of lavender from the Cass’s garden (a ‘slip’ was also a euphemism for an illegitimate child); he also encloses the wild bush of yellow furze under which Eppie’s mother died; the walls are made from stones from the quarry that holds the great secret shame of the novel. Most importantly, ‘in front there was an open fence’ allowing all to feel part of the garden. The last line of the novel – like many of Eliot’s closing sentences – can feel a bit underwhelming: ‘Oh father’, said Eppie, ‘what a pretty home ours is! I think nobody could be happier than we are.’ But it reminds us that Silas Marner works out that problem: how can those unsettled by change and conflict, shunned, exiled, made to start again, make a new home and find happiness in a new community? Further free and authoritative resources: George Eliot Fellowship - links and free essays on useful aspects of Eliot’s career. - articles on Eliot and images of her manuscripts at the British Library. ................
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