Treby Magna

Treby Magna,Town in North Loamshire; the home of Felix Holt and the Lyons and the scene of an election riot. "Treby Magna, on which the Reform Bill had thrust the new honour of being a polling-place, had been, at the beginning of the century, quite a typical old market-town, lying in pleasant sleepiness among green pastures, with a rush-fringed river meandering through them. Its principal street had various handsome and tall-windowed brick houses with walled gardens behind them; and at the end, where it widened into the market-place, there was the cheerful rough-stuccoed front of that excellent inn, the Marquis of Granby . . . And the church was one of those fine old English structures worth travelling to see, standing in a broad churchyard with a line of solemn yew-treesbeside it, and lifting a majestic tower and spire far above the redand-purple roofs of the town. . . Treby Magna gradually passed from being simply a respectable market-town—the heart of agreat rural district, where the trade was only such as had close relations with the local landed interest—and took on the more complex life brought by mines and manufactures." It has been suggested that in the original of Treby Magna was the ancient town of Coventry, in Warwickshire, where George Eliot lived for some time, but beyond the fact that there was a Coventry original for Rufus Lyon's chapel, there seems to be nothing to support this suggestion. (Manuscript information; also Dryden, Memorials of Old Warwickshire, p. 125; Muirhead, England, p. 326.)

<em>Felix Holt, the Radical</em>

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