Characters
- Silas Marner – a weaver and miser who is cast out of Lantern Yard by his treacherous friend William Dane, and accumulates a small fortune only to have it stolen by Dunstan Cass. Despite these misfortunes, he finds his faith and virtue restored by the arrival of young Eppie.
- Godfrey Cass – eldest son of the local squire, who is being constantly blackmailed by his dissolute brother Dunstan over his secret marriage to Molly. When Molly dies, he feels relief, but in time realises he must account for his deceit to those he has wronged.
- Dunstan Cass – Godfrey's greedy brother with a penchant for alcohol and manipulation, and the real culprit in the theft of Silas's bag of gold.
- Molly Farren – Godfrey's first (and secret) wife, who has a child by him. She dies in the attempt to reveal their relationship and ruin Godfrey, leaving the child, Eppie, to wander into Silas' life.
- Eppie – child of Molly and Godfrey, who is cared for by Silas after the death of her mother. Mischievous in her early years, she grows into a radiant young girl devoted to her adoptive father.
- Nancy Cass (née Lammeter) – Godfrey Cass' second wife, a morally and socially respectable young woman.
- Aaron Winthrop – son of Dolly, who marries Eppie at the end of the novel.
- Dolly Winthrop – mother to Aaron; godmother to Eppie. Sympathetic to Silas.
- William Dane – William Dane is Silas’ former best friend, who looked after and respected Silas in Lantern Yard. William ultimately betrays Silas by framing him for theft and marrying Silas’ fiancée Sarah after Silas is exiled from Lantern Yard.
- Sarah – Silas' fiancée in Lantern Yard, who subsequently marries his treacherous friend William Dane.
Read more about this topic: Silas Marner
Famous quotes containing the word characters:
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga—stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)