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 stream of angry complaints issuing from her thin lips. Anecdotal sources indicate that from the time of her last two confinements Mrs Evans was in continual ill-health. She had, after all, lost twin boys eighteen months after Mary Anne’s birth. For a woman who had already produced two girls, losing two sons, especially towards the end of her fertile years, must have been a blow. Whether this was the lassitude of bereavement, depression or physical exhaustion is not clear, but the impression that emerges is of a woman straining to cope with the demands of her family.
Raising stepchildren is never easy, but Christiana seems to have found it intolerable, especially once she had three babies of her own to look after. Around the time of Mary Anne’s birth, seventeen-year-old Robert was dispatched to Derbyshire to manage the Kirk Hallam estate, with fourteen-year-old Fanny accompanying him as his housekeeper and, later, as governess to a branch of the Newdigate family. It may not have been a formal banishment, but the effect was to stretch the elder children’s relationship with their father and his second family to the point where on their occasional visits home they were greeted as stiffly as strangers.28
Chrissey, too, was rarely seen at Griff. According to John Cross, ‘shortly after her last child’s birth … [Mrs Evans] became ailing in health, and consequently her eldest girl, Christiana, was sent to school at a very early age, to Miss Lathom’s at Attleboro’.29 Even during the holidays Chrissey rarely appeared at home: her biddable personality made her a favourite with the Pearson aunts who were happy to take her off their youngest sister’s hands. Only Isaac was allowed to stay at Griff to the more reasonable age of eight or nine. Even at the end of her life, Eliot had no doubts that Isaac had been their mother’s favourite. In part this was due to temperamental similarity. The boy’s subsequent development suggests that he was a Pearson through and through – rigid, respectable, intolerant of different ways of doing things. But it may also be the case that Christiana was a woman who found it easier to love her sons – both living and dead.
Critics have long noted the lack of warm, easy mother-child relationships in Eliot’s novels. Mothers are often dead and if they survive, then, like Mrs Bede, Mrs Holt and Mrs Tulliver, they are both intrusive and rejecting, swamping and fretful. Mrs Bede and Mrs Holt both demand constant attention from their sons by complaining about them. Mrs Tulliver, likewise, cannot leave Maggie alone. She worries away at the child’s grubby pinafores, stubborn hair and ‘brown skin as makes her look like a mulatter … it seems hard as I should have but one gell, an’ her so comical’.30
Throughout her career George Eliot repeatedly explored what it is like to be the child of such a mother, one who both pulls you towards her and pushes you away. In a late poem, ‘Self and Life’, she describes the lingering desolation of being put down too suddenly from a warm maternal lap.31 Speaking in the more accessible prose of The Mill on the Floss, she shows the way in which a child in this situation responds with an infuriating mix of attention-seeking and self-punishing behaviour. In angry reply to Aunt Pullet’s insensitive suggestion that her untidy hair should be cropped, Maggie Tulliver seizes the scissors and does the job herself.32 In another incident she retreats to the worm-eaten cobwebby rafters, surely based on the attic at Griff, where she keeps a crude wooden doll or ‘fetish’ and, concentrating this time on the image of hated Aunt Glegg, drives a nail hard into its head. When her rage is exhausted, she bursts into tears and cradles the doll in a passion of remorse and tenderness.33 Maggie’s swoops from showy self-display to brutal self-punishment were rooted in the violent swings of Mary Anne’s own childhood. An anecdote from around the age of four has her thumping the piano noisily in an attempt to impress the servant with her mastery of the instrument. Five years later she is cutting off her hair, just like Maggie. This sense that her childhood had been a time of uneasy longing remained with the adult Mary Anne. In 1844, at the age of twenty-five, she wrote to her friend Sara Hennell: ‘Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect – to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.’34
Rejection by her mother forced Mary Anne to look elsewhere for a passionate, intimate connection. At the age of three she fell violently in love with her elder brother Isaac. She trotted behind him wherever he went, following him as he climbed trees, fished or busied himself with imaginary adventures down by the quarry. The Eden that was Griff now had its own tiny Adam and Eve. Eliot’s ‘Brother and Sister’ sonnets, written in 1869, open with a description of the children as romantic soulmates, twins, each other’s missing half.
I cannot choose but think upon the time
When our two lives grew like two buds that kiss
At lightest thrill from the bee’s swinging chime,
Because the one so near the other is.35
But while they may be deeply attached to one another, there is still division and difference in this Eden. The boy in the sonnets and Tom in The Mill on the Floss are older, bigger and more powerful than the little sisters who dote on them. The girl in the sonnets watches, admiring, while her brother plays marbles or spins tops; Maggie idolises Tom as the fount of all practical knowledge. And to cope with this power imbalance, Maggie likes to fantasise that the positions are reversed. In a cancelled passage from The Mill on the Floss, she imagines that,
Tom never went to school, and liked no one to play with him but Maggie; they went out together somewhere every day, and carried either hot buttered cakes with them because it was baking day, or apple puffs well sugared; Tom was never angry with her for forgetting things, and liked her to tell him tales;… Above all, Tom loved her – oh, so much, – more, even than she loved him, so that he would always want to have her with him and be afraid of vexing her; and he as well as everyone else, thought her very clever.36
The split, when it comes, is awful. Tom comes home from school to find that
