Evans preferred to dwell in the stable and particular. As a young carpenter he had learned how to turn the elms and ash of Derbyshire and Staffordshire into windows, tables and doors. And as he walked through the forest on his way to the farmhouses where he was employed, he looked around at the trees that ended up on his work-bench. He took note of the conditions under which the best wood flourished. He saw when a stand was ready to be cut and when it should be left for a few weeks more. Later in his career it was said that he had only to look at a tree to know exactly how much timber it would yield.
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.12
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.13 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.14
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.15 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 indifferent to the privilege of having been born a Dodson, rather than a Gibson or a Watson.’16
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.
