Evans, Marian [ pseud. Robert Evans's work on the estate was wide-ranging. He not only surveyed land and buildings, managed relations with the tenant farmers on the estate, collected rents, oversaw repairs, and arranged the buying and selling of land, but was also involved in negotiations with road builders and coalmining businesses in the area.
His journals and correspondence with Francis Newdigate show Evans to have been an inventive and inconsistent speller, but a man of integrity and determination, and one in whom his employer invested a great deal of trust and authority. The eponymous hero of George Eliot's first full-length novel, Adam Bede , is based in some respects—particularly in regard to his pride in his work and his determination of character—on Robert Evans.
Robert Evans's first wife, Harriet Poynton , with whom he had a son, Robert — , and a daughter, Fanny — , died in In he married Christiana Pearson ? The children of this marriage were Christiana , known as Chrissey — , Isaac — , and Mary Anne , the youngest, born in Twin sons were born in March , but survived only a few days.
In the spring of , when Mary Anne was only a few months old, the family moved from South Farm to a house known as Griff, situated just off the main road between Nuneaton and Coventry.
This was her home until she was twenty-one. It was a large house with stables and outbuildings, a dairy and farmyard, and an orchard. In her semi-autobiographical sketch, 'Looking backward' , found in her last published work, Impressions of Theophrastus Such , George Eliot describes her native country as ' fat central England ' with its elms, buttercups, and tree-studded hedgerows, but she remembers also the coalmining, the building of roads and railways, the cutting of canals to carry the coal from the mines.
