as they did, be satisfied with outside pleasures, and conform to popular beliefs without any reflection or examination’.28 As it dawned upon her that her search for spiritual truth might mean that her current social isolation would soon be replaced by total ostracism, Mary Ann longed for the easy life which came with a numb conscience.
Still, she was not completely solitary during these first months in the city. The Misses Franklin tried to be helpful, singing her praises to their extensive circle of cultured, nonconformist friends. One important introduction was to the Sibree family, who lived not far away. Mr Sibree was minister of the local Independent Chapel, John junior was preparing to follow him into the ministry and sixteen-year-old Mary was a clever, lively girl who would become the first of the many ardent younger female admirers who clung to Mary Ann throughout her life.
An even more crucial contact was Elizabeth Pears, the neighbour who Mary Ann had hinted to Maria was ‘growing into the more precious character of friend’.29 Mr and Mrs Abijah Hill Pears, to give them their magnificent full name, lived in the house adjoining Bird Grove. Mr Pears, a ribbon manufacturer, was a leading Liberal in the city and about to be made mayor. He was in partnership with one of the Misses Franklin’s brothers and it was through them that Mary Ann came to meet his Evangelical wife. The Franklins, as we have seen, introduced their distinguished former pupil with the oddly textured compliment that not only was she a ‘marvel of mental power’ but also ‘sure to get something up … in the way of a clothing-club’. Sure enough, within a few weeks of moving into the area Mary Ann had set up just such a scheme for unemployed miners and had organised the older and more established Mrs Pears into helping her.30
Although on the surface Mary Ann continued to behave with her usual pious busyness, her private reading during these first months in Coventry was taking her deeper into unorthodoxy. The frequent starting points for her speculations were books which had been written to bolster literal interpretations of the Bible, but which raised more questions than they could answer. Books like Isaac Taylor’s Physical Theory of Another Life (1836) and John Pye Smith’s Relation between the Holy Scriptures and Some Parts of Geological Science (1839) attempted to respond to the onslaught made on orthodox Christianity by the new discoveries in physical science about the material origins of the earth. Both, however, failed to deal with these counter-proposals and ended up weakening their case. Other authors whom Mary Ann now encountered had already made the journey from orthodoxy and were able to present their material in a more open manner. John Pringle Nichol, who wrote The Phenomena and Order of the Solar System and View of the Architecture of the Heavens (1839), both of which gave Mary Ann great pleasure, had felt obliged to give up Holy Orders because of the change in his religious beliefs.
But by far and away the most influential single book Mary Ann came across during these months was Charles Hennell’s An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity. It had first been published in 1838, and a second edition – the one which Mary Ann bought – appeared in August 1841. Exactly when she read An Inquiry is unclear, but it is certainly the case that she was aware of the book’s existence and general argument by the autumn of 1841, not least because all the major participants in its remarkable genesis were related to her friend and neighbour Elizabeth Pears.
Charles Hennell was a London merchant who, along with his tribe of adoring sisters, had been brought up as a Unitarian. Unitarianism was the most tolerant, rational and forward-thinking of the many Protestant sects which flourished during the first part of the nineteenth century. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, the writer Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale were all brought up within its generous and humane parameters. Unitarians rejected any kind of mysticism, including the doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. Jesus was a great teacher, philosopher and living example, but not the Son of God. Although Unitarianism had developed outside the Anglican Church and within the dissenting tradition, it excluded much of the apparatus associated with nonconformity. There was no original sin, no doctrine of atonement and certainly no elect of chosen souls destined for heaven.
The Unitarians more than made up for their tiny numbers by their bustling, active presence in public life. With their intellectual roots in the Enlightenment philosophers Locke and Hartley, they placed a great deal of emphasis on the influence of education and environment in determining adult personality. Less concerned with the hereafter than the here and now, they worked hard to make certain that the best conditions prevailed for both individuals and societies to reach their full potential. This meant welcoming scientific progress, intellectual debate and the practical reforms that would naturally follow. In London, Coventry, Liverpool, Norwich and Manchester Unitarians were associated with a whole range of progressive causes from non-denominational education to the abolition of slavery. It was this social radicalism, combined with their rejection of Christ’s divinity, which made them highly suspect to the Anglican Establishment and even other dissenters, to whom they seemed little more than atheists and revolutionaries.
In 1836 Charles Hennell’s youngest sister Caroline, always known as Cara, had married a prosperous twenty-five-year-old Coventry ribbon manufacturer, Charles Bray. Since his adolescence Bray had moved in and out of faith. During his apprenticeship in London he had taken the same path as Mary Ann into dour, self-denying Evangelicalism. Since then he had enjoyed sufficient income and leisure to follow up a whole range of alternative ways of looking at the nature of man and his relationship to God.
Bray was particularly influenced by a strand in the Unitarian philosophy known by the awkward name of Necessitarianism. This had its roots in the work of the eighteenth-century philosopher Joseph Priestley, who maintained that the moral and physical universe was governed by unchanging laws authored by God. It was the duty of man to discover these rules and then follow them, in effect working with God to promote an ever-improving world. Bray’s reading of Necessitarianism resulted in a personal creed that was cheerful and vague, but productive of social change. He believed in a God who did not need to be formally worshipped since ‘God will always do what is right without asking and not the more for asking.’31 Instead of wasting time in prayer, Bray threw himself into a whole range of progressive causes designed to improve the quality of life for the people he employed in his flourishing ribbon business. His quirky, optimistic philosophy was summarised in his two-volume The Philosophy of Necessity, which was published in October 1841, just before he met Mary Ann Evans.
Given his puppyish lack of tact, it is surprising that Charles Bray managed to conceal his views from Cara until their honeymoon in Wales. It was then that he started his intellectual onslaught, believing that he ‘had only to lay my new views on religious matters before my wife for her to accept them at once. But … I only succeeded in making my wife exceedingly uncomfortable.’32 Uncomfortable she may have been, but as a woman of principle and integrity, Cara was not about to brush her new husband’s objections to Christianity under the table. One of the central tenets of Unitarianism was the individual’s duty to question every new piece of information, knowledge or experience, even if it implied an error in the status quo. Although deeply attached to her faith, Cara felt obliged to consider her husband’s proposition that there was no firm evidence for the divine authorities of the Scriptures.
Cara asked her brother, Charles Hennell, to undertake a rigorous assessment of Bray’s claims on her behalf. Hennell had only just completed his own very thorough investigation of these matters, concluding that the spare creed of Unitarianism did indeed rest on incontrovertible biblical evidence. But being a man of moral energy, he agreed to his sister’s request to re-evaluate his work. The result was An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity, which scrupulously separated the known historical facts of Jesus’s life from the later accretions of myth, fantasy and desire. Hennell took each Gospel in turn, explored the personal slant of the author and teased out those points at which objectivity gave way to invention. There is, Hennell argues, insufficient evidence to support the view that Christ was divinely born, worked miracles, was resurrected from the dead or ascended into heaven. Everything that happened to Him