NOTES FROM THE COUNTRY OF

“IT

"ADAM BEDE.”

T had always been a vague dream of mine that some time or other I might write a novel. But I never went further towards the actual writing of the novel than an introductory chapter describing a Staffordshire village and the life of the neighbouring farmhouses. . . . My introductory chapter' was pure description." Such is the substance of Mary Ann Evans's modest apology for relinquishing journalism in her own name in favour of fiction-writing under a masculine cognomen. The "introductory chapter," written probably in the earliest infancy of her literary career, does not, like the initial prose efforts of Sir Walter Scott, appear to have been preserved; rather, we should say, it has not been given to the world in its original shape. The unfinished manuscript was pigeonholed, and the "Scenes from Clerical Life" were the tardy first-fruits of George Eliot's patiently-nursed aspiration. But the "Scenes," like the "Sketches" of Charles Dickens, were only an earnest of more excellent and enduring work. The "Staffordshire village and neighbouring farmhouses" of the crude manuscript were destined to fill a foremost place in the first and most famous novel of George Eliot, "Adam Bede."

In the conception of the work which was to follow the "Scenes" the author forcibly appreciated the distinction between a short story and a novel; the essential importance in the latter case of a clear perception at the outset of the scope of the work and a consistent adherence throughout to the individuality of character and environment. Hence her anxiety to utilise material with which she was thoroughly familiar.

Somebody has said that the most commonplace individual possesses sufficient store of romance and incident in his life history to make a great novel. Some have all the romance and incident crowded into one epoch; others have the constituent elementsfortune and misfortune-pretty evenly distributed along the course.

It has always seemed to us a pathetic circumstance that Mary Ann Evans, as a girl of twenty-five, should say that "One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy... that we are happier than we were when seven years old, and that we shall be happier when we are forty than we are now." Whether or not she found this to be her own experience can hardly be said; but, be this as it may, the George Eliot of forty selects from the store of her experience no present memory for the subject of her first great novel. The kernel of her story lies twenty years back in the prosaic home life of the Evans family, and she gives its well-worn, conventional incidents a setting amid the familiar surroundings of which she had treated in the unpublished effort of her juvenile days.

It seems a pity, speaking from the standpoint of to-day, that the author of "Adam Bede" should have resorted to the trivialities of half-disguised place names. If such a course were necessary, "Stonyshire," "Loamshire," "Oakburn," "Norburne," "Norburne," "Eagledale," "Rossiter," are absurdly poor disguises for Derbyshire and Staffordshire, Ashbourne and Norbury, Dovedale and Rocester, especially as characters and places have become, locally at least, so absolutely identified. The folk names and the place names of the novel have grown into interchangeable terms as regards the real personages and places. The most unlettered inhabitant of Wirksworth or Ellastone is au fait with the various characters of the book, and they can be heard unconsciously talking about Mr. This as "Adam Bede's cousin," or of Mr. That as being "a relative of Dinah Morris."

George Eliot has told us that "there is not a single portrait in 'Adam Bede'; only the suggestions of experience wrought up into new combinations." This is true and yet resemblances are not destroyed-which makes it only half true. There is a fine perception of main characteristics and subtle differences which lifts, for instance, the scene-painting portions of the book above the plane of the mere copyist. The "pure description" has been idealised as well as the character models; landscapes, like persons, have been rearranged and rechristened. But they have not been mutilated, and the familiar eye can still see in them most of the familiar features. We will try to explain what we mean. The difference in point of fertility between "Stonyshire" and "Loamshire" is weighted throughout by the author with an emphasis which cannot fail to bear strongly upon the reader. He is convinced that "Stonyshire" is barren, and that "Loamshire" is not barren. What is really the case is that Derbyshire, or, at any rate, that portion of it which comes into "Adam Bede," is not barren; and Staffordshire-the Staffordshire

of the novel-is very fertile. The pitch is thus somewhat shifted, but the comparative qualities are preserved.

South-west Derbyshire is by no means a stern rock-bound territory like the more northern Peakland. Wirksworth (or "Snowfield ") lies in a verdant basin. Ashbourne ("Oakburn ") rises amid a paradise of rolling woodland, possessing beauty enough to foster and stimulate the imagination of Tom Moore, who made the place his home while he wrote "Lalla Rookh." "Stonyshire" is undoubtedly very fine, but just across the Dove, that "princess of rivers," is Staffordshire, a name suggestive of Potteries and Black Countries, cinder roads and blasted herbage. But never could prejudice be more agreeably overmastered. For we are in a veritable land of Goshen. "Loamshire" would be a fitly appropriate name for East Stafford if it ever contrives to free itself from the name and reputation of its sordid hinterland. Patches of woodland abound; the hills lie out on a far distant horizon, not bleak, blue, and misty, but verdure-clad to their summits, and the ample foreground spreads away, thickly dotted with wide-branching trees and lined with deep leafy hedgerows. It is this delicious domain which nurses "Hayslope" and "Norburne" and "Donnithorne Chase"; places suggestive of the fulness and joy of harvest-and sadly reminiscent, too, of the erring love of Arthur Donnithorne and poor Hetty.

Such is the landscape to-day; and it has changed but little since the horseman (why does George Eliot emulate G. P. R. James in the employment of "a horseman "?) noted its features in the second chapter. The landlord of the "Donnithorne Arms" has changed, for in these latter days mine host of the Bromley Arms is, for the betterpreservation of the unities, related to Adam Bede.

There is no doubt that the topographical licence in which GeorgeEliot indulged could only have been exercised by a writer thoroughly familiar with the ground. Her geography is an amalgam, or rather, as we said before, a rearrangement. The places, like the names, are fictitious, in that they combine the characteristics of a whole neighbourhood rather than the peculiarities of a single town or village. Take, for example, Adam's journey from Hayslope to Snowfield in search of Hetty. The distance of the former place from Oakburn is given as ten miles; whereas Ellastone is only five miles from Ashbourne, After Oakburn the country is described as growing barer and barer, "grey stone walls intersecting the meagre pastures and dismal widescattered grey stone houses on broken lands, where mines had been and were no longer." Snowfield itself is described as "fellow to the country. The town lay grim, stony, and unsheltered up the side of

VOL. CCLXXXV. NO. 2011.

C

a steep hill." This, as we have before remarked, is not an accurate description of Wirksworth, but it nevertheless faithfully portrays a village which lies not very far from Wirksworth, and which is in several ways associated with early Methodism. Au contraire, the account of Dinah's lodgings in Snowfield brings us back to Wirksworth. The "cottage outside the town a little way from the mill-an old cottage standing sideways to the road, with a little bit of potato-ground before it "is literally the house where Mrs. Samuel Evans, the aunt of the novelist, lived and died.

Wirksworth itself is a quiet, sleepy country town, renowned from the days of the Emperor Adrian, down to the early part of the present century, as the centre of a considerable lead mining industry. The lead mining has now, owing to foreign competition, fallen into decay. Dinah Morris is described in the novel as earning her living in the Snowfield mills: another anachronism, inasmuch as there are no mills at Wirksworth, yet true in point of fact, because Dinah at one time did work in the Nottingham lace mills. The earlier portion of her life is not connected with Wirksworth. Elizabeth Tomlinson (her real name) was born at Newbold, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, in 1775, and after living at Derby in domestic service, she removed to Nottingham, being then twenty-one years of age. At Nottingham she joined the Methodists. Six years after this the notable event which subsequently became known in George Eliot's circle as "My Aunt's Story" occurred. A girl named Mary Boce was convicted of child murder at Nottingham Assizes. Miss Tomlinson and a Miss Richards made it their pious duty to attend to the spiritual needs of the culprit, and the poor creature, after a prolonged and sullen reticence, broke down in the presence of their disinterested attentions, and, like Hetty Sorrel, confessed her crime. Unlike Hetty, however, she did not obtain a reprieve, and on the day of execution she was drawn to the gallows in a cart with a rope round her neck, her two devoted girl friends accompanying her.

Down to this period, and for some years afterwards, Elizabeth Tomlinson had not commenced public preaching; she long and anxiously debated the "to be, or not to be," with her own conscience, before finally deciding that her mission lay in that direction. When at last she did begin the work she quitted Nottingham and returned to Derby, drawing large crowds wherever she preached. Afterwards she moved to Ashbourne, and there it was that Samuel Evans ("Seth Bede ") first saw his future wife. It was then and afterwards, from time to time, that the "Hayslope" preachings were held, and here the details of the novel coincide generally with the actual facts.

There is no suggestion in the book that "Seth Bede" owed his conversion to Dinah; his admiration for her is quite independent of his religious fervour. His prototype, in the same way, was already a Methodist from conviction when Miss Tomlinson first came to Ashbourne. Long before this time Samuel Evans had been influenced by the sermons of a Mr. Hicks, a "round preacher" or circuit minister, who came to do duty in the neighbourhood, and as a result he joined the class of Mr. Beresford, a farmer of Snelston. This Mr. Beresford on his death-bed nominated Samuel to be his successor as class-leader.

Fifteen years after their marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Evans came to live at Wirksworth, the intervening period having been spent at Derby and elsewhere. The reiterated assurances of "Seth Bede" that marriage should not interfere with Dinah's spiritual occupations were fully redeemed by Samuel, for at Derby the public labours of Mrs. Evans were so prominent as to attract the attention and elicit the encouragement of Elizabeth Fry, and later on, when her home was at Wirksworth, the wide country-side was her parish, and on Sundays she would range from village to village, preaching in the open air or in the chapel, according to circum

stances.

Her

As to personal characteristics, the author of "Adam Bede" herself admits that she has diverged from the original. The tall, quiescent, Methodist Madonna is a striking creation of the novelist. Mrs. Evans herself was short, and her manner rather partook of the stringendo e fortissimo vehemence of Mrs. Poyser. portrait, which lies before us as we write, is that of a keen-eyed, livelytempered little woman of sixty, wearing a Quakerish poke-bonnet and white shoulder wrap. She had given up preaching when George Eliot knew her, but there are persons yet living who, along with "Chad's Bess" and "Timothy's Bess," listened to her exhortations at Hayslope. Their impressions of the "woman preacher" are distinct, the reason for this probably being because she was a woman preacher. The present little Wesleyan chapel at Ellastone is one of the practical results of her efforts. Her religious endeavours at Wirksworth are perpetuated in the Beeley Croft Chapel by a monument inscribed "To the memory of Elizabeth Evans, known to the world as 'Dinah Bede,' who during many years proclaimed alike in the open air, the sanctuary, and from house to house the love of Christ. She died in the Lord November 9, 1849, aged 74 years." It was thus nearly ten years after Mrs. Evans was laid by that her gifted niece immortalised her personality, in a romance which is