In these Midland districts, the traveller passed rapidly from one phase of English life to another; after looking down on a village dirty with coal dust, noisy with the shaking of looms, he might skirt a parish all of fields, high hedges and deep rutted lanes; after the coach had rattled over the pavement of a manufacturing town, the scene of riots and trades union meetings, it would take him in another ten minutes into a rural region where the neighbourhood of the town was only felt in the advantage of a near market for corn, cheese, and hay, and where men with a considerable banking account were accustomed to say that “they never meddled with politics themselves.”The passage is from the preface to George Eliot's novel Felix Holt the Radical, written between 1865 and 1867. It describes a world which the writer knew intimately; she grew up in it, and it provided the setting for much of her best work. George Eliot's father, Robert Evans, whose influence profoundly affected the novelist's development, was born in Staffordshire two years before the beginning of the American War of Independence. He was apprenticed to the family trade of builder and carpenter, and rose through “his large knowledge of building, of mines, of plantations, of various branches of valuation and measurement” to become agent to Francis Newdigate of Arbury in 1806. Newdigate had interests in the North Warwickshire coalfield and in the canal navigations which, before the coming of the railway, had played such an important part in the development of the region. It might be inferred from this that he was among the most advanced landowners of the day. Progressive notions in estate management, however, went hand in hand with an enlightened, but profoundly conservative paternalism in political and social affairs: an attitude shared by his steward, whom Marian Evans remembered to have pronounced “the word ‘Government’ in a tone that charged it with awe, and made it a part of my effective religion, in contrast to the word ‘rebel,’ which seemed to carry the stamp of evil in its syllables.”
