George Eliot: The Last Victorian

Those conflicts concerned the what and how of daily faith. As she continued her careful comparison of the different denominations, Mary Ann’s sympathies began to shift and broaden. By March 1840, she could read a book by the Anglo-Catholic William Gresley and find herself ‘pleased with the spirit of piety that breathes throughout’. In the same letter she mentions with approval three of the most celebrated texts of the High Church Oxford Movement – Oxford Tracts, Lyra Apostolica and The Christian Year. The last of these became a particular favourite, and several of her letters now quoted the ‘sweet poetry’ of its author John Keble, the kind of thing which only eight months earlier she would have characterised as the work of Satan.3

Mary Ann was also reading widely in the natural sciences. The elaborate geological metaphor she had used despairingly to Maria Lewis to describe the random contents of her mind suggests that she was well acquainted with Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, the work which paved the way for Darwin’s implicit questioning of Genesis. Now, when she came across a book like The Doctrine of The Deluge, which attempted to sustain the scriptural account of the beginning of the world, she found it ‘allusive and elliptical’ where once she would have treated it as Gospel.4

Maria Lewis could hardly fail to pick up the clues that Mary Ann was moving away from the Evangelicalism which had sustained their friendship during the past ten years. If she had not taken account of the drift in her former pupil’s reading matter, she surely noticed a new tone in her letters. Although not necessarily less pious, they were shorter, lighter and not so inclined to quote from the Bible. A few months earlier Martha Jackson had signified her secession from intellectual competition with Mary Ann by assigning them both flower names and retreating into the language of conventional letter writing. Now Mary Ann, armed with her own flower name dictionary, dubbed Maria Lewis ‘Veronica’, meaning ‘fidelity in friendship’, and showered her with sugary declarations of love. Instead of the sober and stilted greetings with which she had used to open her letters, she employed the kind of arch flourish associated with young ladies’ correspondence: ‘Your letter this morning, my Veronica, was sweet to me as the early incense of the Jasmine, and sent a thrill from my heart to my finger ends that impels them at the risk of indigestion, to employ the half hour after dinner, being the only one at liberty, to thank you for the affection that same letter breathes.’5

But the fulsomeness of the tone calls attention to the lack of real feeling it is trying to conceal. Interspersed with these overblown protestations of love were alarming, and surely intentional, hints that Maria was no longer the emotional centre of her life. By May 1841 Mary Ann had moved from Griff to the outskirts of Coventry, and was keen to let Maria know that she was busy making new and exciting contacts. In a letter of the 21st she mentions ‘my neighbour who is growing into the more precious character of a friend’.6 This teasingly unnamed acquaintance was, in fact, Elizabeth Pears, the woman who was to introduce Mary Ann to the circle of people who would replace Maria as her confidante. For Miss Lewis, now middle-aged and soon to be out of a job, it must have felt as if every anchor in her life was being pulled away.

As the power balance between the two women shifted, their roles polarised. Maria became the junior member of the partnership, asking Mary Ann for advice about where she should look for work next. Mary Ann, in return, slipped easily into the role of advice-giver, discouraging Maria from running a school of her own by citing a whole string of horrors including ‘rent, taxes, bad debts, servants untrustworthy, scarlet fever, panic of parents, imposing tradesmen’.7 Instead, she promised she would look out for a position in a private household for Maria, and even asked Signor Brezzi if he knew of a family that needed a governess. But when a possible situation did present itself in May 1841, Mary Ann took the opportunity to drop hints to Maria about the change in her own religious opinions.

Of course in Mr. W’s family perfect freedom of thought and action in religious matters would be understood as an unquestioned right, but as education, to be such, implies aggression on supposed error of every kind and incubation of truth it is probable you would not choose to put yourself in a position apparently requiring the anomalous conditions of neutrality and command. It is folly to talk of educating children without giving their opinions a bias. This is always given whether weak or strong, not always nor perhaps in a large proportion of cases, a permanent one, but one instrumental in determining their point of repose.8

The message is coded, though easily unpicked. In matters of religious faith, Mary Ann supports the principle of ‘perfect freedom of thought and action’ in preference to Maria’s assumed desire to stamp out ‘supposed error of every kind’. She finishes with an oblique warning that while Maria may have used her authority as a governess to shape Mary Ann’s early religious views, her former pupil is now beginning to think for herself.

Throughout the summer of 1841 Mary Ann’s letters to Maria continue in this contradictory fashion. Elaborate pledges of affection are followed by hurtful snubs. On 12 August she declared, ‘How should I love to join you at Margate now that you are alone!’ before bewailing the fact that ‘I have no one who enters into my pleasures or my griefs, no one with whom I can pour out my soul, no one with the same yearnings the same temptations the same delights as myself.’9 How wounding to the woman who had spent the last decade as Mary Ann’s chief confidante. How could the girl claim that she had no one who understood her? What were these ‘yearnings’ and ‘temptations’ which separated them? Once again, Mary Ann realised she had gone too far, adding disingenuously, ‘Pray regard all I have written as cancelled in my own mind.’10 But Maria could not. She wrote back anxiously demanding reassurances that nothing had changed. The response she got was inflatedly insincere, declaring, ‘Yes, I firmly believe our love is of a nature not to be changed by place or time.’11 Maria, by now rattled, countered with ‘a very ambiguous reply’ and suggested that it might not be a good idea for her to visit at Christmas. Mary Ann did her best to sound reassuring in her next letter, but actually came across as evasive, skidding off into a description of the glorious autumn weather.12 Then, on 16 October 1841, she gave the clearest indication yet that something was different, if not actually wrong. In an abrupt postscript on that day she writes, ‘May I call you Maria? I feel our friendship too serious a thing to endure even an artificial name. And restore to me Mary Ann.’13 Despite her reasoning that a return to their real names reinstated the dignity of the friendship, it sounded more as if Mary Ann wanted to withdraw from a correspondence which had become a bore.

But turning Veronica back into Maria did not have the desired effect. Far from easing up on her demands for reassurance, Maria redoubled her anxious enquiries to know exactly what was going on. Exasperated by her growing revulsion for the older woman, on 23 October Mary Ann let loose with a brutal letter, conspicuously lacking the respect due to a former teacher.

You are veritably an overreaching friend, my dear Maria, not content with my scribbling a couple of sheets to every quarter of the moon, you even insist on dictating the subjects of the same, and the one you now impose on me is at once so sterile, so incomprehensible and so unfascinating that I should be quite justified in refusing to descant thereon. If you complain that my letters become increasingly illegible, just take into consideration the necessary effect of having to write a few pages almost daily. This has been the case with me of late, and I am likely to be more and more busy, if I succeed in a project that is just now occupying my thoughts and feelings.14

Maria, unsurprisingly, did not reply and Mary Ann realised that this time she was in danger of losing her only intimate friend: despite her boastful teasing, her new contacts in Coventry had not yet yielded the kind of emotional intimacy she craved. In a continuation of that earlier pattern of assertion followed by withdrawal, she wrote a few days later with muffled apology – ‘tell me that you forgive my – something between brusquerie and confusion in my last letter’.15

Somewhat mollified, Maria responded by again raising the vexed subject of her Christmas visit. After a delay of a week and a half, Mary Ann wrote back with the strongest hint yet that something profound had happened to her which Maria might not like. She mentions that her ‘whole soul has been engrossed in the most interesting of all enquiries for the last few days, and to what result my thoughts may lead I know not—possibly to one that will startle you, but my only desire is to know the truth, my only fear to cling to error’. Then she continues urgently, ‘Think – is there any conceivable alteration in me that would prevent your coming to me at Christmas? I long to have a friend such as you are I think I may say alone to me, to unburthen every thought and difficulty – for I am still a solitary, though near a city.’16

Maria evidently wrote back reassuring Mary Ann that there could be no ‘conceivable alteration’ in her friend that would make her not want to spend Christmas with her. Word of Mary Ann’s religious crisis may have already reached Maria Lewis through their network of mutual acquaintances. Or perhaps she put Mary Ann’s restlessness down to the fact that the Evans family was going through one of its periodic crises.

Isaac was about to be married. Some time previously, probably when he was living with his tutor in Birmingham, he had met a woman called Sarah Rawlins. A large dowry from her leather-merchant father sweetened the fact that she was ten years older than the prospective groom. The two families had long been acquainted and Mr Rawlins had been a pallbearer at Christiana’s funeral. And with a son in the Church, the whole family was clearly working its passage away from Trade. Like his father before him, Isaac was shrewdly cautious when it came to choosing a bride. Sarah, as with Christiana in the generation before, appeared to have most of the qualities required in the wife of a young man determined to consolidate his position as a gentleman.

Isaac was a ditherer in emotional matters, especially when their ramifications reached so far. If he and Sarah married, the obvious move was for them to become the new master and mistress of Griff, especially now that Isaac was already running much of the business. But in that case, where would Robert and Mary Ann live? Doubtless Sarah would be quite happy to look after the old man, but whether she really wanted her young sister-in-law watching her every move was quite another matter. Mary Ann might not have relished every aspect of housekeeping, but she depended on it for her sense of identity and was not about to relinquish it easily. ‘I will only hint’, she writes to Maria Lewis in May 1840, ‘that there seems a probability of my being … severed from all the ties that have hitherto given my existence the semblance of a usefulness beyond that of making up the requisite quantum of animal matter in the universe.’17 Toppled from her throne, she was unlikely to become an easy and serene deputy to Sarah. Her role henceforth would be marginal and ambiguous, involving a great deal of routine needlework and, in time, childcare. More specifically, it would mean taking instructions from the woman who had usurped her in Isaac’s life.

Such a potentially unhappy arrangement might well have caused Isaac to think twice about marrying Sarah at all. In July 1840 Mary Ann reports that her brother has gone to Paris and that the marriage is uncertain ‘so I know not what will be our situation’.18 Two months later the couple are re-engaged, although this time Mary Ann is cautiously optimistic that Isaac and Sarah will set up home elsewhere, so that ‘I am not to be dislodged from my present pedestal or resign my sceptre.’19 A few weeks further on the situation has changed again, although this time a workable solution emerges. Isaac and Sarah are to take possession of Griff, while Robert and Mary Ann will move to a new home in Coventry.

Mary Ann’s letters to Maria are loyally reticent about the anxiety to which she was being subjected during these ten agonising months. However, she was clearly at breaking-point. In September, possibly to celebrate the fact that the engagement was back on, Mary Ann travelled to Birmingham with Isaac for the annual festival. Together with Sarah they attended a concert of oratorios by Handel and Haydn, during which Mary Ann did her usual party piece of breaking down in hysterical tears, attracting embarrassed glances from her neighbours.20

Some of Mary Ann’s upset can be explained by her continuing battle to resist the pull towards musical performance. She had displayed the same panicky defensiveness two years earlier during the oratorio at Coventry and again at Mrs Bull’s dancing party. This time, though, there was an added pressure. Sarah’s presence at the concert was a reminder to Mary Ann that she was on the point of losing the three things which gave her life ballast: Griff and its landscape, her authority as housekeeper and tireless parish worker, and the constant attention, albeit antagonistic, of her brother Isaac.

None of this would have been so bad if Mary Ann had felt that it would not be long before she too would be getting married and moving to a new home of her own. Her gradual release from Evangelicalism meant that she no longer necessarily believed that marriage was a worldly snare and by 1840 there are signs that she was beginning to notice attractive men when they crossed her path. In March she fell for a nameless young man whom she felt obliged to give up because of his lack of serious religion, or indeed any religion at all. Her one comfort from this short, intense attachment was that she was probably the first person to have said any prayers on his behalf.21

A couple of months later she was describing Signor Brezzi, her language tutor, as ‘all external grace and mental power’, even though she told herself (via a letter to Maria Lewis), ‘“Cease ye from man” is engraven on my amulet.’22 This was the first of many infatuations with men who stood in the role of teacher. Until the age of thirty-four Mary Ann was to be involved in a series of unhappily one-sided love affairs, in which she confused a man’s delight in her intellect as a declaration of his sexual involvement. Luckily in this case there was no embarrassing moment of reckoning and the bachelor Brezzi seems to have been unaware of the feelings he had aroused in his eager pupil. Their lessons continued smoothly on her arrival in Coventry.

Although neither of these crushes had been very important, still Isaac’s engagement a few months later triggered Mary Ann’s sense of abandonment and her terror that she would be alone for ever. Even at this late stage she retreated into the language of Evangelicalism to explain to Martha Jackson – with whom she found it easier to talk about these things than the spinsterish Maria Lewis – about why she felt obliged to renounce her desperate need for love. ‘Every day’s experience seems to deepen the voice of foreboding that has long been telling me, “The bliss of reciprocated affection is not allotted to you under any form. Your heart must be widowed in this manner from the world, or you will never seek a better portion; a consciousness of possessing the fervent love of any human being would soon become your heaven, therefore it would be your curse.”’23 But if Mary Ann had decided to give up on marriage, her family had not. The reasoning behind the move to Coventry was that it would give her the chance to move in the social circles which might yield a husband. At twenty-one she was of a suitable age to embark on courtship and, although not pretty, she was clever, prosperous and good. A man might do worse than marry Miss Evans.

Coventry made Nuneaton look dingy and parochial. With its population of 30,000 and its fast railway to London, it crackled with purpose. Instead of the poky cottages with their clanking handlooms, there were steam-powered factories to which the workers walked every morning. And although the local ribbon trade fluctuated wildly, dependent on the vagaries of fashion and cheap foreign imports, it was still sufficiently sound to support a wealthy middle-class élite of manufacturers. Linked through a cat’s cradle of business partnerships and marriage, these families managed to combine a handy knack of making a profit with a busy social conscience. Educated, progressive and earnest, they favoured a broad range of social and municipal reform designed to improve the living conditions of the people who worked for them. It was men like these, rather than the old alliance of gentleman and parson, who increasingly dominated the city council.

If Coventry seemed to offer the perfect environment for Mary Ann, then the house Robert Evans took on the outskirts of the city showed her off to best advantage. Bird Grove was an impressive Georgian semi-detached building, set back from the Foleshill road in its own woody grounds. It was large enough for both Mary Ann and Robert to have their own studies. Flanked by similar properties owned by the city’s worthies, Bird Grove was a testimony to its new tenant’s social standing. Although Robert Evans was not well known in Coventry, his choice of house announced that here was a man who, even in retirement, regarded himself as a pillar of the community. On hearing that Evans was about to move into the new house, his former employer Lord Aylesford ‘Laphd and said they would make me Mayor’.24

Although it was a relief to Mary Ann finally to move to Coventry in the middle of March 1840, leaving Griff was a wrench: ‘it is like dying to one stage of existence,’ she told Martha Jackson.25 The strong feelings she had developed for the countryside, its buildings and people, as she drove around the Arbury estate with her father, had not dissolved over the intervening years of bookishness. Griff farmhouse would always remain the shape and colour of her childhood, the scene of those fierce loves which Wordsworth told her were the root of the adult self. Translated to Foleshill she found herself experiencing ‘a considerable disturbance of the usual flow of thought and feeling on being severed from the objects so long accustomed to call it forth’.26

Moving to Coventry in order to give Mary Ann a stab at courtship sounded like a good idea, but it soon became clear that neither she nor her father knew where to start. Evans’s contacts were all based in Griff, which was five miles away, or the even more distant Nuneaton. Chrissey and Fanny were both nearby, but neither was in a position to launch her younger sister into Coventry society. Ever energetic, despite his increasing frailty, Evans decided to make church attendance the starting point of their new life. The obvious place to go was Trinity, in the centre of Coventry, since its vicar had previously owned the lease on Bird Grove. Within a month of moving to Foleshill, Evans was acting as sidesman. Father and daughter frequently made trips to other churches in the area to hear a particular clergyman preach. Ironically, just as Mary Ann was beginning to have serious, though still secret, doubts about her faith, her father was becoming more intense and discriminating in his church attendance.

During these first few months in Coventry, there was no outward change in Mary Ann to suggest that she was anything other than a devout Evangelical Anglican. Her dour, censorious manner continued to repel those who made tentative approaches towards her. A family called Stephenson, friends of Maria Lewis, talked to her at church and said that they looked forward to seeing her soon. Yet neither Mrs Stephenson nor her two young daughters called at Bird Grove, not sure if their friendship was really wanted. With the hypersensitivity of the very shy, Mary Ann felt the snub keenly and hit back with lofty disdain, declaring in a letter to Maria that the two Stephenson girls ‘possess the minimum of attraction for me’.27

All the same, there is a hint that she was beginning to wonder whether other people – just like the silly Misses Stephenson – did not sometimes have the right idea. On one occasion she found herself shocked by the bright clothes of one local congregation, before going on to ponder ‘how much easier life would be to her, and how much better she should stand in the estimation of her neighbours, if only she could take things as they did, be satisfied with outside pleasures, and conform to popular beliefs without any reflection or examination’.28 As it dawned upon her that her search for spiritual truth might mean that her current social isolation would soon be replaced by total ostracism, Mary Ann longed for the easy life which came with a numb conscience.

Still, she was not completely solitary during these first months in the city. The Misses Franklin tried to be helpful, singing her praises to their extensive circle of cultured, nonconformist friends. One important introduction was to the Sibree family, who lived not far away. Mr Sibree was minister of the local Independent Chapel, John junior was preparing to follow him into the ministry and sixteen-year-old Mary was a clever, lively girl who would become the first of the many ardent younger female admirers who clung to Mary Ann throughout her life.

An even more crucial contact was Elizabeth Pears, the neighbour who Mary Ann had hinted to Maria was ‘growing into the more precious character of friend’.29 Mr and Mrs Abijah Hill Pears, to give them their magnificent full name, lived in the house adjoining Bird Grove. Mr Pears, a ribbon manufacturer, was a leading Liberal in the city and about to be made mayor. He was in partnership with one of the Misses Franklin’s brothers and it was through them that Mary Ann came to meet his Evangelical wife. The Franklins, as we have seen, introduced their distinguished former pupil with the oddly textured compliment that not only was she a ‘marvel of mental power’ but also ‘sure to get something up … in the way of a clothing-club’. Sure enough, within a few weeks of moving into the area Mary Ann had set up just such a scheme for unemployed miners and had organised the older and more established Mrs Pears into helping her.30

Although on the surface Mary Ann continued to behave with her usual pious busyness, her private reading during these first months in Coventry was taking her deeper into unorthodoxy. The frequent starting points for her speculations were books which had been written to bolster literal interpretations of the Bible, but which raised more questions than they could answer. Books like Isaac Taylor’s Physical Theory of Another Life (1836) and John Pye Smith’s Relation between the Holy Scriptures and Some Parts of Geological Science (1839) attempted to respond to the onslaught made on orthodox Christianity by the new discoveries in physical science about the material origins of the earth. Both, however, failed to deal with these counter-proposals and ended up weakening their case. Other authors whom Mary Ann now encountered had already made the journey from orthodoxy and were able to present their material in a more open manner. John Pringle Nichol, who wrote The Phenomena and Order of the Solar System and View of the Architecture of the Heavens (1839), both of which gave Mary Ann great pleasure, had felt obliged to give up Holy Orders because of the change in his religious beliefs.

But by far and away the most influential single book Mary Ann came across during these months was Charles Hennell’s An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity. It had first been published in 1838, and a second edition – the one which Mary Ann bought – appeared in August 1841. Exactly when she read An Inquiry is unclear, but it is certainly the case that she was aware of the book’s existence and general argument by the autumn of 1841, not least because all the major participants in its remarkable genesis were related to her friend and neighbour Elizabeth Pears.