Estrangement at the church door: Silas Marner and the projection of new English spaces

ABSTRACT

The Act for the Commutation of Tithes, long-awaited and finally passed in 1836, receives almost no critical attention today. Thanks to the relative success with which commutation handled a taxing system that was as embedded as it was cruel, tithe maps – considered the most complete description of the agrarian landscape at any period – have been glossed over by literary studies. This article responds to calls in map studies to shift focus onto the materiality of maps and their historical conditions of circulation by considering the church door as a noticeboard for the Act. It does so through an analysis of George Eliot’s Silas Marner, a novella that was set pre-commutation but written in the same year as the Tithe Amendment Act and that bears a striking, but hitherto unexamined, resemblance to the century’s most infamous tithe story. Reassessing Silas’s crises of the threshold and the novella’s “at once occult and familiar” world means we not only complicate the novella’s fairytale status but also introduce Tithe Commutation to more critical conversations.

KEYWORDS:

• George Eliot
• tithe
• commutation
• land administration
• threshold
• interface

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The idea of perpetuity is baked into the language of the Act: “After these proceedings have been completed, and the agreement, award, or apportionment is confirmed, it is not to be questioned, but the lands are to be discharged for ever from tithes” (1836, xxvii).

2. Martin Spychal (2017) is leading work in this area, uncovering the importance of the boundary commission.

3. For descriptions of whimsically detailed tithe maps, see Kain (1991).

4. Amendments to the Act continued to emphasise the role of the church door, with all sessions of appeal, notices stating chosen land valuers, and meeting memoranda needing to be tacked to the threshold.

5. The term interface was coined in the nineteenth century by engineer James Thomson to define the threshold which separates areas of unequal energy distribution.

6. For the interface’s tendency towards self-erasure, see Galloway (2012).

7. For reflections on Eliot and “provincial” writing, see: McDonagh (2013), Plotz (2011), Gilmour (1989), Keith (1988), Lucas (1980), and Duncan (2002).

8. Bissell and Fuller also explore ideas of reterritorialization and deterritorialisation in terms of globalised experience (2010), as does Merriman (2014, 167–187).

9. For more on the shared maps between Commutation and the Poor Law Act, see Kain and Oliver (1998, 156–173).

10. For more on Toulmin Smith and Eliot, see Michael Martel (2019, 575–602).

11. Woodcuttings of the Rector’s shooting, the murder of Heming and the skeleton’s discovery all by W. Wright and combined in The Worcester Murders, are to be found in February 1830 issues of The Times. For more on the case and its treatment by the press, see Peter Moore (2012).

12. Eliot was only ten at the time of Clewes’s trial (although when is a gruesome “true story” more appealing?) and Oddingley was still 45 miles from Nuneaton, despite Worcester neighbouring Warwickshire. Moreover, when it comes to seeking out The Times' back catalogue, Eliot has history; for the mob scene in Felix Holt, she used the paper’s account of the Nuneaton riots, as reported on 9 April 1833 despite witnessing the riot as a child.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Delphine Gatehouse

Delphine Gatehouse studied English at the University of Oxford and King’s College London. She now teaches at King’s in the Digital Humanities.