In 1828 the evangelical curate of Stockingford chapel, the Reverend John Edmund Jones, was invited to give a series of Sunday evening lectures in St. Nicolas Church, an event that caused great controversy throughout the Parish.
The lawyer James Buchanan – the Dempster of George Eliot’s fiction – led the strong opposition to the lectures being permitted.
James Buchanans’ wife Nancy was born Nancy Wallington and her Mother, also Nancy, ran the school at the Elms, where George Eliot attended and where she was first influenced by Evangelicalism.
Eliot depicts in fiction many of the other Nuneaton figures she would have remembered as a girl, at school in the town – people such as the St Nicolas Church Curate, Hugh Hughes, who served the parish for 50 years and is ‘old Mr. Crewe’ in the story. Hughes is at the end of his career and struggling to cope.
The vicar of the Nuneaton Parish is non-
Eliot describes the bad behaviour of the young people in the large church galleries during the services.
In Scenes, other events in the life of the Church, such as the Bishop arriving for a confirmation service are portrayed in affectionate detail.
The clergyman George Eliot’s, Reverend Edgar Tryan is based on the real clergyman,
Jones. Tryan – a sympathetically drawn portrait -
Unfortunately ' The Elms', near the church, was totally destroyed by bombs during the Second World War in 1941.
Page last updated on 14th March 2008..
The Buchanan family tomb can be seen in St. Nicolas churchyard at the far end from the Church, near King Edward Road.
St. Nicolas Church, Nuneaton, is immortalised in fiction. In George Eliot’s first book Scenes of Clerical Life (published 1857) it is depicted as ‘Milby’ Church and plays a major role in the third of the Scenes, Janet’s Repentance. The story centres around the stormy and violent relationship of the prominent Milby lawyer Robert Dempster and his wife Nancy and depicts an actual event in the religious history of the town.
