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

Abstract

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.