Dempster, Mr. Robert

Lawyer in Milby; a prosperoud, overbearing and unscrupulous man who is brutal toward his beautiful wife and intolerant toward Mr. Tryan. "He was a tall and rather massive man, and the front half of his large surface was… well dredged with snuff…. Mr. Dempster habitually held his chin tucked in, and his head hanging forward, weighed down, perhaps, by a preponderant occiput and a bulging forehead, between which his closely-clipped coronal surface lay like a flat and new-mown table-land. The only other observable features were puffy cheeks and a protruding yet lipless mouth. Of his nose I can only say that it saw snuffy, and as Mr. Dempster was never caught in the act of looking at anything in particular it would have been difficult to swear to the colour of his eyes." Although a man of much native ability, he yields more and more to his evil propensities, and beats his wife when he is drunk. He is the mainstay of the persecution of Mr. Tryan, turns his wife, Janet, out of the house at midnight and shortly after is thrown from his cart, receiving injuries which result in his death in delirium tremens. The original of Robert Dempster was a Mr. J. W. Buchanan, a lawyer of Nuneaton. The original of the Dempster house in "Orchard Street" still stands in Church Street, Nuneaton. (Manuscript and personal information; also Andrews, Bygone Warwickshire, p. 275; Browning, Life of George Eliot, pp. 52-3.)

<em>Janet's Repentance</em>

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