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What is Silas' vocation in Silas Marner by George Eliot?

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Silas Marner's vocation is that of a linen weaver, a craft he practices in his stone cottage near the village of Raveloe. This occupation highlights the transition from traditional hand-loom weaving to industrialized textile production during the Industrial Revolution. Silas's weaving skills, while once valued, become obsolete with the advent of factory weaving. This change mirrors the broader societal shifts and loss of traditional ways of life depicted in George Eliot's novel.

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Silas Marner was a weaver. Weavers were significant in England because the advent of the power loom at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is representative of the transformation the rise of factory work had on the English working class. Hand-loom weavers, like Silas, were replaced by factory workers, and the skill Silas is famous for in his village has become irrelevant – in factory work, machine operators only need to keep the machines running; they don’t need to know anything about weaving itself. In more than one case, hand loom weavers revolted against factory owners (Charlotte Bronte's novel Shirley tells the story of one such revolt).

All of this forms a backdrop to Eliot’s novel, which foregrounds the social changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution by alluding to fairytales (e.g., there is a lot of Rumplestiltskin in Silas; Silas is also a weaver, who is able to spin flax...

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into gold). What happens to Silas – the theft of his money, and his finding the abandoned child, his near-sightedness – can be seen as equivalences to plot points in the Rumplestiltskin story, but also as commentary on real social ills. In a sense, Marner’s story is like the retelling of a fairy tale gone hopelessly wrong; to the extent that we can see Silas as a stand-in for pre-industrial England, his story also comes to be about England's "loss of innocence," the loss of the old way of life in the village, and the rise of the industrial age.

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Silas Marner's vocation is shown to us on Chapter 1, and it states that he is a linen weaver. He appears to be specially talented in this area since he really catches the attention of the Raveloe boys each time their hear the sound of Silas Marner's loom. The effect is so profound that they even stop what they are doing in order to be able to witness Silas doing what he apparently does best. His job, he does from "a stone cottage that stood among the hedgerows near the village of Raveloe". It is also known that Silas's vocation is characteristics of emigrants who, from generations, have had a good hand at linen weaving and are often rejected in the towns to where they move. Hence, linen-weaving is thought to be a job for people who are eccentric and lonely.

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In Silas Marner, what is Silas's vocation?

This question can be answered with reference to the second paragraph of Chapter 1. Having introduced the setting and the time period within which the story was set, the narrator then introduces the main character to her readers in the following way:

In the early years of this century, such a linen-weaver, named Silas Marner, worked at his vocation in a stone cottage that stood among the nutty hedgerows near the village of Raveloe, and not far from the edge of a deserted stone-pit.

Silas Marner was therefore a "linen-weaver" who worked in his stone cottage near Raveloe, and was one of the linen-weavers that Eliot talks about in her opening paragraph. She describes that weavers appeared almost alien because of the paleness of their skin through staying indoors so much working on their machines, and certainly Silas Marner is no exception. As a weaver, he spends the majority of each day inside, away from light, working on his loom, weaving, and as a result has rather an odd appearance.

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What was Silas Marner's vocation?

Silas Marner is a linen weaver. He works out of his own cottage, as weavers did in the early years of the nineteenth century before textile weaving became mechanized and the work was done in big factories under arduous conditions. Silas has to spin flax fiber into thread and then weave the threads into linen. The fact that Silas Marner works at home enables him to adopt the little golden-haired girl named Eppie who wanders into his home one night after her mother dies in the snow. The identity of the child's father is unknown. Marner is able to look after the little girl personally even though she is very young when she first comes into his life. They develop a loving relationship, and she becomes a substitute for him in place of the hoard of gold he accumulated with years of work and had stolen from him on night by a drunken wastrel named Dunstan.

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