George Eliot (11 page)

Bray was particularly influenced by a strand in the Unitarian philosophy known by the awkward name of Necessitarianism. This had its roots in the work of the eighteenth-century philosopher Joseph Priestley, who maintained that the moral and physical universe was governed by unchanging laws authored by God. It was the duty of man to discover these rules and then follow them, in effect working with God to promote an ever-improving world. Bray’s reading of Necessitarianism resulted in a personal creed that was cheerful and vague, but productive of social change. He believed in a God who did not need to be formally worshipped since ‘God will always do what is right
without asking
and not
the more for asking
.’
³¹
Instead of wasting time in prayer, Bray threw himself into a whole range of progressive causes designed to improve the quality of life for the people he employed in his flourishing ribbon business. His quirky, optimistic philosophy was summarised in his two-volume
The Philosophy of Necessity
, which was published in October 1841, just before he met Mary Ann Evans.

Given his puppyish lack of tact, it is surprising that Charles Bray managed to conceal his views from Cara until their honeymoon in Wales. It was then that he started his intellectual onslaught, believing that he ‘had only to lay my new views on religious matters before my wife for her to accept them at once. But … I only succeeded in making my wife exceedingly uncomfortable.’
³²
Uncomfortable she may have been, but as a woman of principle and integrity, Cara was not about to brush her new husband’s objections to Christianity under the table. One of the central tenets of Unitarianism was the individual’s duty to question every new piece of information, knowledge or experience, even if it implied an error in the
status quo
. Although deeply attached to her faith, Cara felt obliged to consider her husband’s proposition that there was no firm evidence for the divine authorities of the Scriptures.

Cara asked her brother, Charles Hennell, to undertake a rigorous assessment of Bray’s claims on her behalf. Hennell had only just completed his own very thorough investigation of these matters, concluding that the spare creed of Unitarianism did indeed rest on incontrovertible biblical evidence. But being a man of moral energy, he agreed to his sister’s request to re-evaluate his work. The result was
An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity
, which scrupulously separated the known historical facts of Jesus’s life from the later accretions of myth, fantasy and desire. Hennell took each Gospel in turn, explored the personal slant of the author and teased out those points at which objectivity gave way to invention. There is, Hennell argues, insufficient evidence to support the view that Christ was divinely born, worked miracles, was resurrected from the dead or ascended into heaven. Everything that happened to Him was explicable within ‘the known laws of nature’. Out of this exhaustive study Jesus 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:

As if to confirm the truth of this pounds-shillings-and-pence argument, Robert Evans arranged to give up the lease of Bird Grove and set about preparing to move to a small cottage on Lord Aylesford’s estate. True to form, he would not make it clear whether or not he expected Mary Ann to come with him. This frustrating silence continued even once she had returned from Meriden to Foleshill at the end of February.

In a desperate attempt to provoke her father into communi
cation, Mary Ann wrote him a letter, the only one to him which survives. It is an extraordinary document for a girl of twenty-two to write – intellectually cogent, emotionally powerful. She starts by making clear the grounds for her rebellion. She assures him that she has not, contrary to his fears, become a Unitarian. Nor is she rejecting God, simply claiming the right to seek Him without the clutter of man-made dogma and doctrine. As far as the Bible is concerned, ‘I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life … to be most dishonourable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness.’ For this reason, continues Mary Ann, it would be impossible for her ‘to join in worship which I wholly disapprove’ simply for the sake of social appearance. She then proceeds to discuss the vexed issue of ‘my supposed interests’ and the financial aspects of the case. She understands that now she has put herself beyond the reach of respectable society, it is unfair to expect her father to maintain the expensive Coventry house. The last thing she wants is to syphon off capital which will eventually be divided among all five Evans children. Then she turns to the question of where she is to go next.