that she actually copied in Adam Bede the history and sermons of Dinah Morris. [Footnote:  “Dinah Morris and Elizabeth Evans,” an article by L. Buckley in The Century for August, 1882.] During visits to her aunt in 1842 we are told they spent several hours together each day.  “They used to go to the house of one of Mrs. Evans’s married daughters, where they had the parlor to themselves and had long conversations.  These secret conversations excited some curiosity in the family, and one day Mrs. Evans’s daughter said, ’Mother, I can’t think what thee and Mary Ann have got to talk about so much.’  To which Mrs. Evans replied, ’Well, my dear, I don’t know what she wants, but she gets me to tell her all about my life and my religious experience, and she puts it all down in a little book.  I can’t make out what she wants it for.’  While at Wirksworth, Miss Evans made a note of everything people said in her hearing; no matter who was speaking, down it went into the note-book, which seemed never out of her hand.  These notes she transcribed every night before going to rest.  After her departure Mrs. Evans said to her daughter, ’Oh dear, Mary Ann has got one thing I did not mean her to take away, and that is the notes of the first sermon I preached on Ellaston Green.’  The sermon preached by Dinah on Hayslope Green has been recognized as one of Mrs. Evans’s.”  The purpose here seems to be to convey the impression that George Eliot actually carried away one of Mrs. Evans’s sermons, and that she afterwards copied it into Adam Bede.  George Eliot’s own positive statement on this subject ought to be sufficient to convince any candid mind the sermon was not copied.  The evidence brought forward so far in regard to the relations of Dinah Morris to Elizabeth Evans is not sufficient to prove the one was taken from the other.  George Eliot’s declarations, written soon after Adam Bede was published, when all was perfectly fresh in her mind, and after her relatives had made their statements about Mrs. Evans, ought to settle the matter forever.  Unless new and far more positive evidence is brought forward, Dinah Morris ought to be regarded as substantially an original creation.

That some features of Elizabeth Evans’s character were sketched into that of Dinah Morris seems certain.  It is also said that the names of Mrs. Poyser and Bartle Massey were the names of actual persons, the latter being the schoolmaster of her father.  As showing her power of local coloring, Miss Mathilde Blind relates this incident:  “On its first appearance, Adam Bede was read aloud to an old man, an intimate associate of Robert Evans in his Staffordshire days.  This man knew nothing concerning either author or subject beforehand, and his astonishment was boundless on recognizing so many friends and incidents of his own youth portrayed with unerring fidelity, he sat up half the night listening to the story in breathless excitement, now and then slapping his knees as he exclaimed, ’That’s Robert, that’s Robert, to the life.’”