George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Kathryn Hughes
emerges as ‘a noble-minded reformer and sage, martyred by crafty priests and brutal soldiers’. In a conclusion that echoes his brother-in-law Charles Bray, Hennell argues that there is no point in concentrating on a future life because it is impossible to know whether it exists. Man’s focus should be on the present, both in terms of the pleasures he can derive from ‘this beautiful planet’ and also of the improvements he can make in the lives of himself and others.33
Once Cara Bray had absorbed her brother’s findings, she stopped going to church and suggested her husband do likewise. Her strict regard for conscience and horror of hypocrisy meant that she could not bear the idea of attending a service in whose teachings she did not believe. That did not imply, however, that she now considered herself an atheist. On the contrary, she pursued God as earnestly as ever – Mary Ann was to maintain that Cara was ‘the most religious person I know’34 – through private reading, careful thought and selective attendance at a variety of sermons, meetings and even services. She believed, as Mary Ann was to come to believe, that it was the duty of each individual to follow the truth wherever it might lead, without fear of social disgrace or superstitious terror.
Ironically, Elizabeth Pears first took Mary Ann with her on a visit to the Brays because she hoped, according to her brother Charles Bray, ‘that the influence of this superior young lady of Evangelical principles might be beneficial to our heretical minds’.35 In fact, after nine lonely months in Coventry, Mary Ann doubted that she was about to have much of an effect on anyone. ‘I am going I hope to-day to effect a breach in the thick wall of indifference behind which the denizens of Coventry seem inclined to entrench themselves,’ she wrote to Maria Lewis on 2 November, ‘but I fear I shall fail.’36 She did not, although Charles Bray’s recollection of their first meeting, written up in the autobiography he produced at the end of his life, may well have been embellished by hindsight. ‘I can well recollect her appearance and modest demeanour as she sat down on a low ottoman by the window, and I had a sort of surprised feeling when she first spoke, at the measured, highly cultivated mode of expression, so different from the usual tones of young persons from the country. We became friends at once.’37
Either at this meeting, or a subsequent one, Mary Ann and the Brays started to talk about religion. The young woman who had been introduced to them as a strict Evangelical turned out to be almost as advanced a free-thinker as they were themselves. The point was a crucial one to Cara Bray who resented the implication, which hung around for years, that she and her husband were responsible for converting Mary Ann from deep piety to unbelief. For this reason, too, Charles Bray stressed in his autobiography that Mary Ann had already bought Hennell’s Inquiry by the time he and his wife met her in November 1841. However, the flyleaf of her copy is inscribed with the date 1 January 1842. Two explanations are possible. The first is that Mary Ann did not actually read the book until several months after meeting the Brays, which seems unlikely. The second, and more feasible, is that she had already tackled the book once before meeting the Brays and reread it subsequently during December, enthused by her acquaintance with the author’s sister and brother-in-law. Writing ‘1st of Jany’ on the flyleaf was her way of marking the moment when she formally renounced orthodox Christianity. For it was on the very next day, 2 January 1842, that she refused to go to church.
Christmas Day 1841 passed off unremarkably at Bird Grove. Fanny and Henry Houghton, Chrissey and Edward Clarke, Isaac and Sarah Evans, all came to dine at Foleshill. Two days later Robert Evans left on a business trip to Kirk Hallam, while Maria Lewis went to Nuneaton to look over a school she was hoping to run. Both of them had returned by Sunday, 2 January, the day on which Mary Ann refused to go to Trinity church.38 She may have waited to make her stand until Maria was there because she wanted a buffer between herself and her father. Or perhaps she needed the woman who had shaped her earliest beliefs to witness their rejection. Either way, this was no momentary faltering of faith. A fortnight later, with Maria Lewis now gone, she was still refusing to accompany her father to church.
Robert Evans’s response was to withdraw into a cold and sullen rage. It was not the state of Mary Ann’s soul that troubled him so much as the social disgrace that came from having a daughter who refused to go to church. He had gone to considerable trouble and expense to ensure that she was given the best possible chance of marriage and here she was, undermining his efforts. He would, in truth, probably have been delighted if she had eased up on the fanatical religiosity which was in danger of repelling all but the most pious suitor. But to swing violently the other way and reject church worship altogether was to put herself outside respectable society. By refusing to accompany him to Trinity Mary Ann was condemning herself to spinsterhood.
In this ‘holy war’, as Mary Ann was to dub the difficult weeks that followed, God, housing and marriage were all tangled up together. The roots of the crisis went back to those ten uncertain months during which it was unclear whether Isaac would marry and take over Griff. Although Mary Ann’s letters to Maria during that time cast Isaac obliquely in the role of prevaricator, it is unlikely that a young man of twenty-five was powerful enough to hold the whole family to ransom. It was the old man himself, Robert Evans, who could not decide whether this was the time to hand over the business and, if so, where he and Mary Ann would now live. Staying at Griff, moving in with Chrissey at Meriden, going to a cottage on Lord Aylesford’s Packington estate, or opting for a smart town house in Coventry were all possibilities over which Evans pondered. And it was during this stop-start, yes-no period that Mary Ann was brought up sharp against the realisation that as an unmarried woman she had no power to shape her own life. It was her job to endure while Evans dithered, delayed and distracted himself from giving her a clear indication about the future.
When Mary Ann refused to go to Trinity with Robert Evans, she was rejecting not just her Heavenly Father but her earthly one too. The God who had tied her in self-denying, guilt-ridden knots for so many years had become identified with the patriarchal Evans, who remained indifferent to her emotional security and peace of mind. Rejecting an orthodox God was not simply about being up to date with theological and scientific debate. Nor was it concerned solely with asserting the primacy of individual conscience. It was, for Mary Ann, a refusal to be tied into a nexus of obligations that required her to attend church in order to get herself married and so relieve her father of the cost of her support.
As a result, the holy war was fought on two distinct levels. Evangelical and dissenting friends like the Sibrees, the Franklins and Mrs Pears fielded their most persuasive and sophisticated acquaintances in an attempt to argue Mary Ann out of her doubts. Within the Evans family itself, however, the struggle concerned more practical issues like daughterly duty, bricks and mortar, money and marriage. Robert Evans’s first response was to treat Mary Ann with ‘blank silence and cold reserve’ – a literal sending to Coventry – followed by ‘cooled glances, and exhortations to the suppression of self-conceit’.39 When this didn’t work, Evans called upon his other children to persuade their younger sister to change her mind. Fanny Houghton, a well-read woman who also had doubts about orthodox Christianity, urged Mary Ann to keep her thoughts to herself and continue with outward observance.40 Chrissey had no particular argument to make, but was requested to keep Mary Ann out of Robert’s way by having her to stay at Meriden. It was during these few days that Isaac rode over from Griff to ‘school’ Mary Ann about where her duty lay. According to Isaac the expensive house at Foleshill had been taken in order to find Mary Ann a husband. Wilfully to put herself outside the marriage market by refusing to go to church was an act of great financial selfishness. Cara Bray, reporting the whole saga to her sister Sara Hennell, explained:
It seems that brother Isaac with real fraternal kindness thinks that his sister has no chance of getting the one thing needful – ie a husband and a settlement, unless she mixes more in society, and complains that since she has known us she has hardly been anywhere else; that Mr Bray,