Silas Marner, when the spinning wheels hummed

George Eliot published 1861 389 characters hard

In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses—and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak—there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.

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About this text

George Eliot published Silas Marner in 1861 and it is the shortest of her novels. Her real name was Mary Ann Evans and she used a pen name for her fiction. She broke off work on Romola to write the book, because the story of the weaver arrived unsought. Project Gutenberg holds the complete text.

Where this text comes fromThe novel opens by placing itself in a past that is deliberately not dated. In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed is a formula rather than a fact: it tells you the story is set in a time that has already passed, without saying when, so nothing in the book can be checked against a calendar. Eliot uses the whole first sentence to build that distance, working outward from a household object to great ladies and then to the men who carried the wool. It is one sentence and it does the work of a chapter.

What you might not noticeThe sentence runs to sixty-four words and contains a single capital letter, the one that starts it. Nothing else in the passage is capitalized at all, which is unusual for an opening paragraph of the period. Source

What it trainsOne sentence of sixty-four words carries seven commas, four hyphens and two long dashes across 389 characters, with no full stop until the end. Both kinds of short horizontal mark turn up within a few words of each other and reach the screen as one and the same hyphen, so that key is struck six times inside a single sentence. Three of the hyphenated words are compounds you would write as two today: spinning-wheels at fifteen characters, thread-lace and country-folk. One word then runs straight into a long dash with no space at all, which is the shape that catches people. One capital letter in the entire passage, so the left little finger has nothing to do.

More about this textThe Weavers Who Made the Shepherd’s Dog Bark

Read the full text at the publisher: Project Gutenberg