Nuneaton: George Eliot's Hometown, Ribbon Weaving, and the North Warwickshire Coalfield
Mary Ann Evans was born at Arbury Hall estate in 1819 and grew up in and around Nuneaton before becoming George Eliot, one of the greatest novelists in the English language. Scenes from the Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Adam Bede draw directly on the landscape and people of north Warwickshire. The town appears as "Milby" in Scenes of Clerical Life and as "Nuneham" elsewhere in her fiction. A statue of Eliot stands in Newdige Square, and the George Eliot Hospital, opened in 1948, carries her name. The literary connection is the most internationally significant thing about Nuneaton, though the town itself would probably shrug at the observation.
Ribbon weaving established Nuneaton's early industrial economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, concentrated in the top-shop cottages where handlooms occupied the upper floors. When ribbons declined, coal took over. The North Warwickshire Coalfield sustained the town through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. The last pit, Daw Mill Colliery near Arley, closed in 2013 after an underground fire. The coal economy shaped Nuneaton's character: working class, practical, and uninterested in pretension. The population of the town is approximately 86,000, with the wider borough of Nuneaton and Bedworth reaching around 130,000.
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Mary Ann Evans was born at Arbury Hall estate in 1819 and grew up in and around Nuneaton before becoming George Eliot, one of the greatest novelists in the English language. Scenes from the Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Adam Bede draw directly on the landscape and people of north Warwickshire. The town appears as "Milby" in Scenes of Clerical Life and as "Nuneham" elsewhere in her fiction. A statue of Eliot stands in Newdige Square, and the George Eliot Hospital, opened in 1948, carries her name. The literary connection is the most internationally significant thing about Nuneaton, though the town itself would probably shrug at the observation.
Ribbon weaving established Nuneaton's early industrial economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, concentrated in the top-shop cottages where handlooms occupied the upper floors. When ribbons declined, coal took over. The North Warwickshire Coalfield sustained the town through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. The last pit, Daw Mill Colliery near Arley, closed in 2013 after an underground fire. The coal economy shaped Nuneaton's character: working class, practical, and uninterested in pretension. The population of the town is approximately 86,000, with the wider borough of Nuneaton and Bedworth reaching around 130,000.
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