Imperialistic Publishers
Whatabunchofmalarky
London
England
4 July, the Year of our Lord,  1860

Mr George Elliot
Erudite Manor
Abstruse
London
England

My dear Mr Elliot,

We have read your exhaustive and exhausting manuscript for the novel “Silas Marner” and we regretfully decline its publication.  There are problems two numerous to enumerate in this shortly letter, but I feel it my duty as editorial spokesman to correct your literative and grammatical mistakes.  Herewith below lays a listing:

1. Your sentences are too long, too cumbersomly and too complexedly and go on, seemingly without end or sometimes even a real purpose in mind, with clauses and words just dangling here and there as anyone could discern and with metaphors mixed without any apparent sense of connection, as we might say: all’s well as the crow flies. We have never seen any descent book with a sentence length of words as yours, which we counted to be perchance 54 words.  That is, my dear sir, more cards than in a playing deck and since a set has both King and Queen, we are in total agreement that your reckless use of more words in a sentence than the King or Queen of Hearts can entertain borders on treasonousness.  We were on the verge of reporting you to the Court of Her Royal Majesty Queen Victoria when one of the serfs in our employ, or rather in our hock, informed us that the averaging of the total words per sentence in your long-winded novel was a merely 25.1.  Not wanting to add grief by endlessly counting the onslaught of words myself, I was rather inclined—both on my couch and in my mind—to believe the young man’s appeal. So you may rested assured that your indiscretionings here will stay in our confines. Queen Mum is the word, as they say.
2. Our Censor of Decency was rather offended that you include such a scandalous account of religion in your shocking but unentertaining story. What would our readers think to see a man, such as Mr Silas Marner so blatantly treated by fellow churchmen?  What kind of lesson is that for the souls of our dear patrons?  We strongly recommend you change the morally ambiguous church fellow William Dane to a completely and unabashedly upright even uptight congregant who is drawn under the spell of the to-be-depicted-as devious single-namedly Sarah, former fiancé to Silas, but now revealed to be a witch. Further, you should most assuredly change the death of the cowardly thief Dunstan Cass, in one of the later scenes, to that of being boiled in a pot by the witch Sarah, thus giving God his due and Satan his required downfall.
3. It has come to the attention of our Master of Proper Manners—or rather should I say rather delicately of the existence of some unfounded rumour which has entered our building–that the Mr George Elliot is really a woman. Naturally, I would be loath to even repeat such a despicable thing here, but I just wanted to let you know the terrible words that travel about regarding your identity. We know that any honorable man such as yourself would never consider going about the city dressed in clothing unbecoming.  This means to us one sex dressing as the other, but we cannot discern which of the sexes is which. Everyone knows these malicious statements to be patently falsehood, for no femalely creature could suppose to construct a meaningfully sentence that contained more than perchance 10 words.  And such a womanly form would only be capable of writing silly and supposititious stories of sentimental romance, any of which we would not even allow entrance into our hallowedly offices.

In conclusion, we wish you luck in finding any publisher so feckless as to take on this disagreeable manuscript.  If we thought you had any hope of a sliver of literarily talent, we would most heartily recommend a grammatication tutor, but we would be poor stewards of your likely meager resources to suggest such an unseemingly course of action.

Yours almost sincerely,
Mr Dalston Chamberpot
Chief of Editorialification