George Eliot (3 page)

To any landed proprietor, intent not simply on gazing at his parkland but increasing its profit, a man like Evans could be useful. It was now that he came to the attention of Francis Parker, a shrewd young gentleman of about the same age, who spotted the carpenter’s potential to be more than a maker of cottage doors and fancy cabinets. Parker persuaded his father – another Francis Parker – to put Evans to work managing Kirk Hallam, their Derbyshire estate. So began Evans’s career as a self-made man. Reworked in fiction as the ruptured rivalrous bond between Adam Bede and Arthur Donnithorne, the real-life Parker and Evans remained cordial, but always mindful of their vastly different stations. Over the next forty years they offered each other – often by letter, since Parker lived much of the time in Blackheath, Kent – cautious encouragement and condolence as the trials of their parallel lives unfolded.
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In 1806, by a cat’s cradle of a will, Francis Parker senior inherited a life interest in the magnificent Warwickshire estate of Arbury Hall from his cousin Sir Roger Newdigate. Parker, now renamed Newdigate, moved to Arbury and brought Evans with him as his agent. Evans, by now thirty-three and a father of two, was installed at South Farm, from where he could manage the 7000-acre estate while running his own farm.

The Evans family and the Parker-Newdigate clan had attached themselves to one another in a mutually beneficial arrangement which was to last right down the nineteenth century. While the Newdigates spent many years and much money pursuing pointless lawsuits about who was responsible for what under the terms of Roger Newdigate’s eccentric will, the Evans brothers quietly consolidated their own empire. With Robert now moved to Warwickshire, Thomas and William stayed behind to manage the Newdigates’ Derbyshire and Staffordshire estates. The moment Robert’s eldest boy was old enough, he was sent back to Derbyshire to learn the family trade. And when occasionally something did go wrong, Robert Evans stepped in quickly to make sure that there was no blip in the steady arc of the family’s influence. In 1835 brother Thomas went bankrupt. This was a potential disaster, since if Thomas left his farm at Kirk Hallam he would also
have to give up as estate manager. Robert immediately proposed a solution to his employer whereby he would become the official tenant of the farm, allowing Thomas and his son to continue to work the land and stay in place.
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In the Evanses’ world, business relationships always took precedence over family ones. Although during Mary Anne’s childhood Robert made regular trips northwards, on only a couple of occasions did he take her with him to meet her uncles and aunts. Their odd-sounding dialect struck her as strange, but years later she found good use for it when she came to create the North Midlands accents in
Adam Bede
.
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Evans applied the same canny caution to his personal life. While working in Staffordshire he had noticed a local girl called Harriet Poynton. She was a servant, but a superior one. Since her teens she had been lady’s maid to the second Mrs Parker-Newdigate senior and occupied a position of unparalleled trust. Her duties would have involved looking after the wardrobe and toilet of her mistress, buttoning her up in the morning and brushing out her hair at night. Constantly in her mistress’s presence, the lady’s maid frequently became the recipient of cast-off clothes, gossip and affection. All the signs suggest that Mrs Parker-Newdigate looked on Harriet as something like a daughter. Marriage to Harriet Poynton cemented Robert Evans’s ties to his employers. The Parker-Newdigates were presumably delighted that two of their favourite servants had forged an alliance. At the very least it meant that their own comforts and conveniences would not be disturbed. In an unusual arrangement, Mrs Parker-Newdigate, now moved to Arbury Hall, insisted that Harriet continue to work after her marriage.

We know nothing of the courtship. It is hard to imagine Robert Evans divulging much beyond the current cost of elm or the need to drain the top field. But this was not about romance. Evans offered the thirty-one-year-old Harriet the respectability of marriage without the need to leave her beloved mistress. In return, her ladylike manner promised usefully to soften his blunt ways and flat vowels. They married in 1801 and children followed quickly. Robert was born in 1802, Frances Lucy, shrewdly named for Mrs Parker-Newdigate, in 1805.

In the end, it was Harriet’s attachment to her mistress that killed her. In 1809 Mrs Parker-Newdigate went down with a fatal
illness to which the heavily pregnant Harriet also succumbed. A baby girl, also Harriet, was born, but died shortly afterwards and was buried with her mother. In acknowledgement of her unique relation to them in both life and death, the Parker-Newdigates took the unusual step of adding Harriet’s name – ‘faithful friend and servant’ – to the family memorial stone in nearby Astley Church.

Like all widowers with children, Robert Evans needed to marry again and quickly. We do not know who looked after the babies during the four years before he took his second wife. Perhaps Harriet’s family rallied round. Maybe one of his sisters from Derbyshire came to help at South Farm. The next thing known for certain, however, is that he made another smart match. Christiana Pearson was the youngest daughter of Isaac Pearson, a yeoman who farmed at Astley. Yeoman farmers were freeholders and so harder to place socially than those who rented their farms, a point which was to unsettle the snobbish Mrs Cadwallader in
Middlemarch
.
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The Pearsons were certainly not gentry, but they were prosperous, active sort of people, used to serving as church wardens and parish constables. If Evans’s first marriage confirmed his allegiance to the Newdigates, his second proclaimed a growing independence from them.

The Pearson daughters – there were four of them – embodied a particular kind of rigid rural respectability which would be reworked by their niece to such powerful and funny effect in the Dodson sisters in
The Mill on the Floss
. Literary detectives have matched up the Dodsons to the Pearsons exactly. Ann Pearson, who married George Garner of Astley, became the model for Aunt Deane; Elizabeth was second wife of Richard Johnson of Marston Jabbett and formed the basis for rich, pretentious Aunt Pullet; while Mary, second wife of John Evarard of Attleborough, was transformed into thrifty, superstitious Aunt Glegg. The overriding characteristic of the Dodson sisters (and hence the Pearsons) is their sense of superiority on every imaginable topic and an assumed right to comment on those who do not match their exacting standards. ‘There were particular ways of doing everything in that family: particular ways of bleaching the linen, of making the cowslip wine, curing the hams and keeping the bottled gooseberries, so that no daughter of that house could be indiffer
ent to the privilege of having been born a Dodson, rather than a Gibson or a Watson.’
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Christiana was the youngest of the Pearson girls – there was a brother, too – and perhaps here lies the clue to why she agreed to become Robert Evans’s second wife. Still unmarried in her late twenties, she may have wanted to flee the role of companion and nurse to ageing parents. Perhaps she also wanted protection from her overbearing sisters. At forty-one, Robert Evans was a vigorous man whose reputation as the cleverest agent in the area was growing all the time. No longer a servant exactly, he was a ‘rising man’. South Farm needed a mistress, someone who could run a dairy, organise a household, feed the workmen and supervise the servants. Christiana Pearson could do worse than become the second Mrs Evans.

The marriage, in 1813, produced five children, three of whom survived. First came Christiana, always known as Chrissey, in 1814. Next, in 1816, was Isaac and two and a half years later came Mary Anne. The fact that these were all Pearson names suggests that Mrs Evans’s nearby family continued to take what seemed to them a natural precedence and influence in the children’s lives. That the last baby was a girl – Robert Evans’s third – was probably a disappointment, especially since boy twins born in 1821 did not survive more than a few days. For a man who was still busy building a business dynasty, girls were not especially useful. They could run a farmhouse, but they could not trade, build or farm. Until they married – when they had to be provided with a dowry – they remained a drain on their family’s resources.

Four months after Mary Anne’s birth the family moved to Griff House, the Georgian farmhouse on the Coventry-Nuneaton road which was to be home for the next twenty-one years. It was far more impressive than the boxy South Farm and, together with the attached 280 acres of farmland, represented the high noon of Robert Evans’s status and influence. There were eight bedrooms, three attics and four ground-floor living-rooms. A cobbled courtyard was surrounded by a dairy (which was to become the model for the richly seductive Poyser dairy in
Adam Bede
), a dovecote and a labourer’s cottage. The four acres of garden were picture-book perfect, with roses, cabbages, raspberry bushes, currant trees and, best of all, a round pond. During
her adult years spent in boarding-houses, hotel rooms and ugly suburban villas, Mary Anne’s imagination would return repeatedly to the Eden that was Griff. When, in 1874, Isaac’s daughter Edith sent her some recent photographs of the house, Mary Anne found herself spinning back in time: ‘Dear old Griff still smiles at me with a face which is more like than unlike its former self, and I seem to feel the air through the window of the attic 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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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