ABSTRACT
George Eliot seems to be fascinated by childhood, and the subject would certainly deserve a full-length critical study. Children are everywhere in her novels — more or less, depending on which one is considered. They play important roles in her early novels, until 1861 — in Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and chief ly in The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner. In her late novels, one can still find children, like the remarkable young Cohens in Daniel Deronda, for instance, but they tend to be given the status of minor characters or mere utility actors. Hence the interest of returning to the earlier part of her career as a novelist, and particularly to The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Silas Marner (1861), two novels in which she endeavours to give us an original and complex image of childhood.
