George Eliot (10 page)

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.
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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.

Charles Hennell was a London merchant who, along with his tribe of adoring sisters, had been brought up as a Unitarian. Unitarianism was the most tolerant, rational and forward-thinking of the many Protestant sects which flourished during the first part of the nineteenth century. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, the writer Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale were all brought up within its generous and humane parameters. Unitarians rejected any kind of mysticism, including the doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. Jesus was a great teacher, philosopher and living example, but not the Son of God. Although Unitarianism had developed outside the Anglican Church and within the dissenting tradition, it excluded much of the apparatus associated with nonconformity. There was no
original sin, no doctrine of atonement and certainly no elect of chosen souls destined for heaven.

The Unitarians more than made up for their tiny numbers by their bustling, active presence in public life. With their intellectual roots in the Enlightenment philosophers Locke and Hartley, they placed a great deal of emphasis on the influence of education and environment in determining adult personality. Less concerned with the hereafter than the here and now, they worked hard to make certain that the best conditions prevailed for both individuals and societies to reach their full potential. This meant welcoming scientific progress, intellectual debate and the practical reforms that would naturally follow. In London, Coventry, Liverpool, Norwich and Manchester Unitarians were associated with a whole range of progressive causes from non-denominational education to the abolition of slavery. It was this social radicalism, combined with their rejection of Christ’s divinity, which made them highly suspect to the Anglican Establishment and even other dissenters, to whom they seemed little more than atheists and revolutionaries.

In 1836 Charles Hennell’s youngest sister Caroline, always known as Cara, had married a prosperous twenty-five-year-old Coventry ribbon manufacturer, Charles Bray. Since his adolescence Bray had moved in and out of faith. During his apprenticeship in London he had taken the same path as Mary Ann into dour, self-denying Evangelicalism. Since then he had enjoyed sufficient income and leisure to follow up a whole range of alternative ways of looking at the nature of man and his relationship to God.