George Eliot: The Last Victorian. Kathryn Hughes
above the drawing room, from which when a little girl, I often looked towards the distant view of the Coton “College” [the workhouse] – thinking the view rather sublime.’17
Although as a mature novelist George Eliot referred repeatedly to memory and childhood as the bedrock of the adult self, she actually left very little direct information about her own early years. Even John Cross, the man she married eight months before her death, wrestled with large gaps as he attempted to recall his wife’s childhood for the readers of his three-volume George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, published in 1885. To bulk out his first chapter he leaned heavily on the account of Maggie Tulliver’s early years in The Mill on the Floss, introducing distortions which biographers spent the next hundred years consolidating into ‘fact’.
Drawing on the relationship between Mr Tulliver and Maggie, Cross has Robert Evans clucking in wonder at the cleverness of his ‘little wench’ and making her a special pet. In fact, there is no evidence that Evans had a particular fondness for Mary Anne, although plenty to suggest that she worshipped him. By the time his youngest child was born, Evans was forty-six years old and established in both his career and family life. A head-and-shoulders portrait from 1842 shows him massive and impassive as a piece of great oak.18 A high, wide forehead gives way to a long nose and broad lips – features that were repeated less harmoniously in Mary Anne. Evans radiated physical strength – one anecdote has him jauntily picking up a heavy ladder, which two labourers were unable to manage between them. But it was his moral authority that made him a figure to be reckoned with. Once, when travelling on the top of a coach in Kent, a female passenger complained that the sailor sitting next to her was being offensive. Mr Evans changed places with the woman and forced the sailor under the seat, holding him down for the rest of the journey.19
It was this reputation for integrity that meant that Evans was increasingly asked to play a part in the burgeoning network of charitable and public institutions, which were becoming part of the rural landscape during the 1820s and 1830s. His meticulous bookkeeping and surveying skills were an asset to church, workhouse and hospital. In a blend of self-interest and social responsibility, he was able to take advantage of this move towards a professional bureaucracy by charging fees for services rendered. Less officially he also became known as someone who would discreetly lend money to embarrassed professional men, including the clergy. By charging a fair interest, the frugal carpenter’s son was able to make a profit out of those gentlemen who had been less successful than himself at negotiating the violent swings of the post-war economy.
But the heart of Evans’s empire would always remain his work as a land agent. This was what he understood and where he excelled. Since the middle of the previous century English agriculture had been developing along capitalist lines. The careless old ways of farming were giving way to scientific methods, which promised to yield bigger crops and profits. Landowners now employed professional agents to oversee the efficient running of their estates. It was Robert Evans’s job to ensure that the Newdigate tenant farmers kept their land properly fenced, drained and fertilised.20 Livestock was carefully chosen according to its suitability for particular pasture. Farm buildings were to be light, airy and dry. Evans was an excellent draughtsman, and one of his letters to his employer includes a meticulous scale drawing of a proposed farm cottage, complete with threshing floor, corn bay, straw bay, cowshed, kitchen and dairy. Dorothea Brooke would have been delighted.21
Evans’s expertise encompassed every aspect and activity of the Arbury estate. He regularly inspected the coal-mine, arranged for roads to be built and kept a watchful eye on the quarries, which were only a few yards from the gates of Griff House. As his reputation grew throughout the region, Evans came to be seen less as a clever servant of the Newdigates and increasingly as a professional man in his own right. Several other local landowners, including Lord Aylesford at Packington, now asked him to manage their land. Evans’s relationship with the Newdigates became subtly different as he started to carry himself with more authority. Francis Parker-Newdigate senior was, according to local sources, ‘a despisable character – a bad unfeeling Landlord’.22 Evans was not prepared to carry out policies which he felt to be unfair. In 1834 he suggested to Newdigate that a particularly bad wheat harvest obliged him to return a percentage of the rent to the tenants. The old man was typically reluctant, so Evans wrote directly to his son, now Colonel Newdigate, in Blackheath. Permission to refund came back immediately.23
Years later, as interest in George Eliot’s social origins reached fever pitch, a rumour arose that her father had been nothing more than a tenant farmer. According to this reading, Eliot’s literary achievement became heroic, the stuff of fairy-tales, instead of the continuation of a trajectory which had started long before she was born. Indignantly, Eliot intervened to explain her father’s status as a man of accomplishment and skill, in the process putting her own achievement into a more realistic context.
My father did not raise himself from being an artizan to be a farmer: he raised himself from being an artizan to be a man whose extensive knowledge in very varied practical departments made his services valued through several counties. He had large knowledge of building, of mines, of plantation, of various branches of valuation and measurement – of all that is essential to the management of large estates. He was held by those competent to judge as unique amongst land agents for his manifold knowledge and experience, which enabled him to save the special fees usually paid by landowners for special opinions on the different questions incident to the proprietorship of land.24
For all his modernity, Robert Evans remained a staunch conservative. Like many children who had gone to bed hearing stories of Madame Guillotine, he fetishised the need for strong government. And government, for him, must always be rooted in the power and prestige of land. It was not to Westminster he looked for leadership, but to the alliance of squire and clergy serving together on the magistrates’ bench. Evans believed in keeping corn prices high by means of artificial protection even if that meant townsmen having to pay more for their bread. The notorious ‘Peterloo’ incident, a few months before Mary Anne’s birth, in which the cavalry cut a murderous swathe through thousands of people gathered in Manchester to protest against the Corn Laws, would have drawn from Evans a shiver of fear followed by a glow of approbation. Closer to home, the violent hustings at Nuneaton in December 1832 would have confirmed his suspicion that extending the franchise to men with no stake in the land could result only in a permanent breakdown of precious law and order.25
Even if Robert Evans had not been a natural conservative, ties of deference and duty to the Newdigates meant that he was obliged to follow them in supporting the Tory party. He attended local meetings on the family’s behalf and in 1837 made sure the tenants turned up to the poll by ‘treating’ them to a hearty breakfast. At times his support for the Tories against the reforming Whigs took on the flavour of a religious battle. Describing his efforts at the 1837 election in a letter to Colonel Newdigate, he urged ‘we must not loose a Vote if we can help it’.26
We know less about Mrs Evans. Eliot mentions her only twice in her surviving letters, and Isaac and Fanny seem to have been unable to recall a single thing about her for John Cross when he interviewed them after his wife’s death. Cross’s solution was to take the generalised and evasive line, followed by many biographers since, that Mary Anne’s mother was ‘a woman with an unusual amount of natural force – a shrewd practical person, with a considerable dash of the Mrs Poyser vein in her’,27 referring to the bustling farmer’s wife in Adam Bede. But what evidence there is suggests that Christiana Evans was actually more like Mrs Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, a kind of Mrs Poyser minus the energy and wit, but with a similar