The symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil.

Thursday afternoon I belatedly fulfilled a promise to post a book to Wilcannia. The school day was just finishing and as I left the Post Office I overheard a child around eight years old:

Dad, I was so good today I got FIVE stickers.

Dad was a little distracted, navigating cars and pavements and no doubt the shopping list for tonight’s dinner.

Dad, I was so good at music today I got FIVE STICKERS!

I noticed Dad respond, but I did not hear how. For my part, I wondered what exactly one must do in music to earn FIVE stickers. Were there five different songs? Five instruments? Or was her performance five times the expected quality of a young woman attending Primary School? What unit of account does one sticker represent, that FIVE of them is such a windfall?

Regardless, five stickers was clearly a treasure indeed. A hoardable treasure, surely, for to my knowledge stickers can be traded for neither goods nor services. A store of some sort of value, perhaps, but not one ultimately realised by interest or made liquid via sale of accrued assets. Sure, Tom Sawyer likely would have traded stickers for an old doorknob, a dead rat and a used band-aid (and then for the tokens that in due course would make him CEO of Westpac) but this is 2025.

Even so, it reminded me of Silas Marner, hoarding gold under a brick in the floor of his cottage as a manifestation of the Protestant Ethic:

Spoiler alert – Silas Marner. TBF the book is 164 years old, not just out in cinemas.

George Eliot’s Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe was published in 1861 – six years before Marx’s Das Kapital, which includes a study of money that has some striking parallels to Eliot’s. Obv I’m not accusing anyone of 150+ yo plagiarism. Ideas about money were in the air, which were central to the politics then emerging.

Silas Marner was a weaver. He had a loom, on which he wove cloth. By hand. This was close work that he did for very long hours, so his eyes were not great. By the time Eliot’s story really begins, Silas is a master weaver, known in his small town of Raveloe as Master Marner.

We have been given a prelude, however, by which we understand that once Silas’s world was a tiny nonconformist community in which he imbibed the Protestant Ethic. His work was applied to a Higher Cause and in which he had friends, a fiancé and a sense of stable belonging. All this was torn asunder, in what is by now his distant past, by the casting of lots which showed (not unlike the joust by which I vaguely recall Lancelot’s guilt vis a vis Guinevere being exposed) poor Silas to be ‘guilty’ of theft. He wasn’t. In fact it turns out lots are not a great way to determine guilt; I cannot, of course, speak for jousting. Thus by the random capriciousness of a small religious community, Master Marner was thrust upon the world with no friend but what passed for a vocation: weaving cloth.

In place of community and belonging, all that Silas Marner now was able to achieve via his weaving was made of gold. Here is the full quote:

But what were the guineas to him who saw no vista beyond the countless days of weaving? It was needless for him to ask that, for it was pleasant to him to feel them in his palm, and look at their bright faces, which were all his own…The weaver’s hand had known the touch of hard-won money even before the palm had grown to its full breadth; for twenty years, mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil.

Money for an artisan like Marner had practical purposes of course, for the payment of rent and food – but also, according to the beliefs in which he was raised, spiritual purpose. The tithes of Raveloe, as Eliot acerbically pronounces, were highly desirable ‘from a spiritual point of view’ – but in Marner’s previous life, such uses for money were indeed spiritual:

He had seemed to love it in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then. But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit of looking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire; and as Silas walked homeward across the fields in the twilight, he drew out the money and thought it was brighter in the gathering gloam.

Now an outcast from both faith and community, money was no more than a fetish:

…how the love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it. Marner wanted the heaps of ten to grow into a square, and then into a larger square; and every added guinea, while it was itself a satisfaction, bred a new desire…

This might explain the relentlessness with which very rich people pursue money, accumulating it with no end in sight and/or finding the most ludicrous things on which to spend it – each guinea breeding the desire for more.

Money being, of course, a unique commodity which, unlike shoes – even were one to have three thousand pairs as Imelda Marcos was reputed to have – there is always room for more.

Possibly Silas would have eventually run out of room under the brick in the floor. These days, when money amounts to deposits and assets, measuring our worth was never more space-saving.

Silas’s daily ritual was to look at his money. Just to enjoy it, exactly as it was. Not for what it could achieve or purchase, just for its beautiful, pleasurable self.4

For Silas, money accumulated its own value, independent of anything he might do with it. Certainly, it was a reward for his work – and some of it was spent on that commodity most desired by the working class, but often best available on religious holidays: meat.

Here we might examine the distinctions between money that was earned and money to which one was was entitled by happenstance of birth. If money was a symbol of the rewards of work, what did it mean to those who merely stumbled upon it?

Consider young Godfrey, the more responsible of Raveloe’s local squire’s two sons – at least, more financially responsible, for Godfrey was secretly married to a girl from a wholly ‘unsuitable’ background and who had given birth to Godfrey’s child.

In a key scene, Godfrey is simultaneously trying to cover for his more feckless brother Dunstan (who has just lost an awful lot of the money that he did nothing at all to earn) and to gather the courage to tell his father about Godfrey’s own secret love-child. As Godfrey squirms, the squire berates him, suspecting his sons were after more unearned cash. I’m absolutely broke, sez the squire – all the while feeding his dog ‘enough bits of beef to make a poor man’s holiday dinner’.

The rich, even when they feel themselves impoverished, know that their dogs (let alone their sons) are entitled to more than the poor, or the working class. Not subject to any pesky Protestant Ethic, the dog does not need to earn his Christmas dinner-worth of beef. The dog, let alone the squire, deserves such extravagances merely by its position in life. God-given, so to speak.

This seems inconsistent, to be sure. For is not the whole point of this Protestant Ethic malarkey that money is the outward reward of grace – a grace that is (less paradoxically than it sounds) exhibited in the goodness and hard work of a life lived in its light?

That is, the squire’s meat, let alone the dog’s, ought by the ethic then becoming embedded in social and economic life, be an expression of their good behaviour – including their commitment to work effort.

To think about this, let us consider the meritorious system we inherit from this body of beliefs. How do we know, for example, that an examination system is measuring qualities correctly? Answer: when those we know should succeed, do succeed (my favourite work about this is by Richard Teese).

We can think too, about the performance measures imposed in workplaces, that magically reward white middle class blokes first – that may well be because those fellas are literally the measure by whose success we know the system ‘works’.

This is a bit confusing because it requires us to see that in just the moment that money is a thing that must be earned, it was also a thing to which some people could continue to claim to be entitled. Often enough this earning-by-work business was a cover for entitlement – and this entitlement persists, to this day.

In Silas Marner we can see something of this in the ways that, while the squire’s dog was entitled to a holiday’s worth of beef, for all his hard-earned gold, Silas was not.

Godfrey’s brother Dunstan, who was indeed in dire financial straits, wandered in despair on a cold, rainy and (importantly) slippery evening, into Silas Marner’s cottage. Silas had popped out to run an errand and left the piece of pork he planned to eat for supper roasting over the open fire. Dunstan, whose sense of entitlement was thoroughly well-developed, saw the piece of pork as an affront, considering his own financial woes:

The old simpleton had hot meat for his supper, then?

Silas obviously worked hard and earned his money. But it was Dunstan, who did nothing to earn the riches that he repeatedly squandered, who knew, as much as he knew anything, that he deserved it.

This sounds outrageous, but is more common than you think.

A colleague, whose son attended a posh private school, told me how absolutely outraged her child was at the end of high school that their friend did not get into the Medical School at Sydney University. Ranting about special entry for First Nations students, it was clear (at least from my colleague’s description) that her son was absolutely persuaded that his friend deserved this place in the medical program, more than anyone from another class or race-based background.

They went to a posh school. They should therefore come first. Don’t we see this – a lot, even? And that if it was marked between the local squire and a master artisan in George Eliot’s story, it was – and is – even more so between those who saw (and see) themselves as born to succeed and Indigenous peoples in the colonies?

Back to Silas’s cottage, which was quickly becoming a site of colonial expropriation.

Like all British colonialists, Dunstan starts to consider who should be entitled to the money that everyone knew Silas hoarded (him, obv). Knowing that there were only a few places a person could hide a hoard of coin, Dunstan quickly locates Silas’s bags of guineas.

Look at the consequences of this sense of entitlement. Not only does Dunstan turn any belief that wealth should be earned into rubbish, he also persuaded himself that he, Dunstan, deserved the gold that Silas really had earned with his weaving.

Why? His status was all the evidence that was needed.

This is one of the extra fun perversions of the Protestant Ethic. For all that one might imagine that status is the deserving consequence of effort, it also works in reverse. So self-serving, right?

One’s status – by race, class or gender – can also be the basis of ‘deserving’. This is to say that, one might be already of high status and that status by itself means that wealth should just accrue, even without any effort. Status means that one’s moral/intellectual/other superiority is just built-in.

Tell me you haven’t seen this, over and over? Is this not the basis of the massive sense of white masculine entitlement devouring the globe, right now?

Let us return to poor, entitled, Dunstan. Anxious that Silas might return to catch him with stolen cash in hand (for all that he knows himself entitled to it), Dunstan grabs Silas’s money and quickly takes it back out into the slippery, rainy night.

Whereupon Dunstan promptly slips and falls into a stone pit which, in this weather, is filled with water.

Still grasping Silas’s precious money, Dunstan dies.

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer fella.

Much of the book is then concerned with the community of Raveloe’s responses to the theft of Silas’s gold and his continued status as lonely outcast – now with no pot of gold to comfort him. Meat is important still – and Silas eats his, at Christmas, sadly alone.

Without the useless bags of gold under the stone in the floor, Silas is bereft:

During the last few weeks, since he had lost his money, he had contracted the habit of opening his door and looking out from time to time, as if he thought that his money might be somehow coming back to him..

Oh how we feel his longing!

Can I confess (it is awful and embarrassing) I relate to Silas, since leaving my academic job? A metaphorical looking out the door of my cottage, hoping that the rewards and measures of my worth will find their way to my door – a reward, even, for my (supposed – for look at my hypocrisy) humility in being satisfied with other work and rejecting the system of merit that my research sought – in exactly the way that Silas wanted guineas?

But we must not forget the squire’s other feckless son, Godfrey, whose opium-addicted wife is walking to Raveloe with their toddler, desperate for support.

This is George Eliot, so of course this poor woman does not get any help.

She dies, like many a poor junkie suffering a history of abuse and sexual exploitation, in the snow on the side of the road. But, not far from Silas’s cottage.

Her toddler, Godfrey’s child, a golden-haired girl, wanders from her poor dead mumma into Silas’s cottage.

Silas, whose eyesight was stunted from his years bent into the night, over the loom, did not notice that a toddler had crept in under his arm while he looked out longingly, hoping for the return of his gold.

Turning towards the hearth…he seated himself on his fireside chair, and was stooping to push his legs together when, to his blurred vision, it seemed as if there were gold on the floor in front of the hearth. Gold! – his own gold – brought back to him as mysteriously as it has been taken away!

It was not gold, but a golden-haired child, asleep in front of the fire. In a wondrous subversion of the ways that (as Marx was just about to describe) human relationships were commodified, Silas’s gold was transformed into true, human value. A child, who Silas would love, and raise and whose liveliness would bring him peace and joy.

What redemption this was, far truer than the religious one in which Silas was raised.

Love, in the place of gold.

Oddly optimistic for George Eliot. And for me, too. But I want to stay in it, for a while.

More about Tom Sawyer: https://hannahforsyth.substack.com/p/what-does-tom-sawyer-teach-us-about