One of my occasional flights of fantasy is thinking anachronistically about what football teams historic political or cultural figures might have supported.
In that regard, I sometimes refer to George Eliot as a
Coventry City supporter even though she died three years before the club was
founded.
Prompted by Coventry City’s return
to top-flight football after a 25-year absence and seeing the great author’s
grave at Highgate Cemetery earlier in the summer, I have been pondering that a
little more in the last few weeks. I think there are good reasons to see affinity between the two.
They are certainly her local team. As Mary Ann Evans, Eliot
spent her childhood near Nuneaton, went to school in Coventry and lived there
for many years. These days the whole area of Coventry and North Warwickshire is
marketed as ‘George
Eliot country’.
Not all authors, though, offer a favourable view of their
home city. James Joyce and Dublin come most obviously to mind. The other author
who one thinks of when Coventry is mentioned, Philip Larkin, was
at best ambivalent about the city. Yet there is every reason to suppose that
Mary Ann Evans had some affection for Coventry. While the events of Middlemarch – the eponymous
town clearly based on Coventry –are hardly a long tale of happy harmony, no
great novel is, the town itself is not portrayed unsympathetically.
There are other reasons though, grounded in her work, to see a connection between Eliot and the Sky Blues. She chose to set most of her novels in unglamorous,
provincial settings, not always directly within the Coventry area but clearly
drawing on that landscape. And Coventry City have never been a glamorous or fashionable
club. While teams based in all other large Midland cities – Birmingham,
Nottingham, Leicester and Derby – have had their moment of glory as English league champions, Coventry
City’s only major national trophy was a single FA Cup win in 1987.
So the characteristics of a Coventry City supporter involve a degree of stoicism, persistence and determination to overcome adversity.
They have had a lot of the latter to deal with in the last 25 years, as the club
went down to the fourth tier and lost access to their home stadium, having to
play games at different times in Northampton and Birmingham.
Eliot’s heroes and heroines demonstrate similar qualities: Dorothea Brooke
in Middlemarch, Adam Bede and maybe most of all Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the
Floss, stubborn but determined to recover from disaster. By contrast, those
seeking glamour or having delusions of grandeur, Rosamund Vincy, Arthur Donnithorne
or Edward Casaubon, are seen as ultimately destructive. Note: Anyone thinking from
the above that ‘He’s only read three George Eliot novels and can’t remember them
that well’ would be spot on.
So based on her place of birth and upbringing, I believe
George Eliot would make a pretty good Sky Blues supporter. There is no great
evidence of her being interested in team sport, although I suspect she might
have found football crowds an interesting phenomenon. I don’t see her as a
potential season ticket holder at the CBS Arena. But
perhaps she would have raised her eyes from more cerebral matters, checked the results
and smiled at a Coventry City win.
As the city is my birthplace, I am a lifelong supporter
of Coventry City, if mostly a passive one. And after living here for 50 years,
I have really transferred my loyalty to Watford FC, whose fortunes I follow far
more closely. With the clubs being in different leagues this year I can cheer wholeheartedly for both without any sense of divided loyalties. I like to think that Mary Ann
Evans, Coventrian and for a brief time Rickmansworth
resident, will, despite her atheism, be doing the same from beyond the
grave, and particularly this evening as the provincial and still unfashionable Sky Blues face the
glamorous, wealthy and metropolitan might of champions Arsenal.
