Jane Mullett Evans

Jane Mullett Evans (1797-1876) was the eldest daughter of J. J. and Mary Anne Evans. She became the family chronicler, publishing her family history c. 1870. She attended the boarding school of her aunt, Sarah Norton Biggs, in Denmark Hill c. 1808-12 with her sister Mary, both siblings returning home upon the death of their father in 1812. After the demise of the family firm in 1815, Jane and Mary left London with their mother and their brothers for Melksham, where they lived until 1827, when they removed to Bristol to join Thomas Evans and his wife in Clifton, first at Upper Berkeley Place and later in a house along Jacob Wells Road, not far from the current University of Bristol. Whether Mrs. Evans and her children were worshiping at this time as Baptists, Unitarians, or Anglicans is not clear, though the marriages of two of her children to Evangelical Anglicans at Melksham suggests the latter. Jane and her mother spent most of 1835-37 in Bath for health reasons. For a number of years, Jane used her mother’s home as a base for tutoring students, even though she suffered frequently from a debilitating illness. In 1855 her health had improved enough for her and her mother to return to London to live with Jane’s brother, Frederick Evans, the publisher. In 1856, while Jane Mullett Evans and her mother were living with Frederick Evans at his Stoke Newington home, his three sons—Frederick, Jr., Tom, and George—traveled through Scotland with Charles Dickens, Jr. (known to the Evanses as ‘Charley’) and a Mr. Hogarth, his uncle (Evans, Family Chronicle, 33). During this time Jane and her mother moved in a social circle in which Dickens and Wilkie Collins were frequent guests in their home, even attending one of five semi-public performances in January 1857 of The Frozen Deep, a dramatic collaboration between the two famous novelists. Jane Evans would later write of the experience: 

One circumstance which occurred this winter caused a good deal of excitement in our circle, and afforded me one evening of great pleasure never to be forgotten, namely, the acting at Tavistock House of ‘The Frozen Deep’; the scene is vividly before my eye as I write, and my account of it the next day gave my dear mother great pleasure. (Evans, Family Chronicle, 34)

Four years later, the Evans and Dickens families were formally united when Frederick’s daughter, Elisabeth Matilda Moule Evans (1841-1909), the great-great-granddaughter of Hugh Evans and great-granddaughter of Caleb Evans, married Charley Dickens. After her husband’s death, she was granted a state pension of £100. Jane returned to the Bristol area after the death of her mother in 1857; by 1870 she was living at Bridport, Dorset, near her sister Mary Evans Moule, and died there in 1876. See Jane Mullett Evans, Family Chronicle of the Descendants of Thomas Evans, of Brecon, from 1678 to 1857 (Bristol: privately printed, c. 1870).