Currer Bell is dead!” lamented the Daily News, in an obituary penned by Harriet Martineau; “a pang will be felt in the midst of the strongest interests of the day, through the length and breadth of the land.” Martineau was unequivocal about Currer Bell’s achievement: her works would, she was sure, “hold their place in the literature of our country.” Still, she forefronted the biographical facts that already dominated public opinion about the writer: the isolation, emotional and physical hardships of her upbringing and the loss of her family one by one. It was Charlotte Brontë, as much as Currer Bell, who was on her way to becoming “for ever known.”
Elizabeth Gaskell had been abroad that winter and only heard the news from John Greenwood, the Haworth stationer. She wrote at once to Patrick Brontë, in stunned surprise, and he replied, “My Daughter, is indeed, dead…The marriage that took place, seem’d to hold forth, long, and bright prospects of happiness, but in the inscrutable providence of God, all our hopes have ended in disappointment, and our joy, in mourning.” In their shared bereavement, Patrick Brontë had drawn much closer to Arthur Nicholls, who continued to care for and support the frail old man as a sacred duty to his late wife. When Patrick rewrote his will after Charlotte’s death, he left small bequests to his brother Hugh and to Martha Brown but all the rest of his estate went to Arthur Bell Nicholls, no longer the despised seducer but “my beloved and esteemed son-in-law.”
Even while she was trying to take in the news of Charlotte’s death, Elizabeth Gaskell was asking John Greenwood for every detail he could remember about Miss Brontë, “EVERY particular,” already thinking that she might write some sort of memorial. By May she had mentioned such a possibility to George Smith, to whom she had applied for a copy of Richmond’s portrait, although she imagined having to wait until “no one is living whom such a publication would hurt.”
Her surprise was great, then, when she had a letter from Patrick Brontë, in June 1855, suggesting that she write a biographical appreciation of Charlotte, “long or short…just as you may deem expedient & proper,” and she accepted right away. A number of crudely inaccurate pieces of journalism had appeared immediately after Charlotte’s death, which Patrick Brontë had been inclined to laugh off and Arthur Nicholls thought deserved no response at all. Ellen Nussey, however, had persuaded Patrick that similar “attacks” would continue unless they oversaw an official biography, setting out the facts of Charlotte’s life and defending her (and her sisters) against criticisms of coarseness. Ellen had suggested Mrs. Gaskell as being the ideal candidate; what none of them seems to have realised (as Juliet Barker has pointed out) is that the most offensive article, in Sharpe’s London Magazine, had drawn heavily on gossip generated by Janet Kay-Shuttleworth, which Elizabeth Gaskell herself had helped to spread.
Gaskell went over to Haworth that July with Catherine Winkworth, to discuss the memorial and to meet Mr. Nicholls for the first time, something she had avoided doing during Charlotte’s lifetime. It was a difficult day: feeling the reality of Charlotte’s death and seeing her grave were hard enough, but she also had to try to convey to the two bereaved men what she hoped to do—write a full-length book, not an article or monograph, and concentrate not on the works but on “her wild sad life, and beautiful character that grew out of it.” When Nicholls brought down some of Charlotte’s letters, both he and Patrick Brontë wept sadly over them. Nicholls probably wished he had already destroyed the papers that were now about to be handed over to the biographer, as her quick eye appreciated: “his feeling was against it’s [sic] being written, but he yielded to Mr. Brontë’s impetuous wish.”
Gaskell set about her task with energy and deep interest. Ellen Nussey’s horde of almost 600 letters was the most fascinating resource, thrilling the biographer with their narrative power and revelations of character, wit and pathos. Gaskell’s daughters were set to copying large swathes of the material, as their mother kept up copious correspondences with Charlotte’s friends and associates and travelled to many of the places connected with her subject, including Cowan Bridge, Roe Head, Oakwell Hall, even the Chapter Coffee House. By the spring of 1856 only one major source remained unexplored—the Heger family.
Gaskell travelled to Brussels in the spring of 1856 to find that the Hegers did indeed know all about Currer Bell’s fame, and identity. Madame Heger, who had read a pirated French translation of Villette, refused to see the biographer; Monsieur was, however, the soul of politeness, showed Gaskell some of Charlotte and Emily’s devoirs, explained his teaching methods, described their school careers—and showed or read her some of Charlotte’s letters. Towards the end of their interview, he asked if she could find out from the family what had happened to his replies to Charlotte. “[H]e is sure she would keep them,” Mrs. Gaskell told Ellen, “as they contained advice about her character, studies, mode of life.” What else they contained we shall never know, but Heger’s concern at knowing their whereabouts at this sensitive juncture is very interesting—it may even have been the only reason he agreed to meet Gaskell at all. Presumably, Mrs. Gaskell returned a negative answer from Mr. Nicholls, for nothing more was said about Heger’s letters, and she had already intuited enough about the story to decide to hide it from her readers. In the rue d’Isabelle, both Monsieur and Madame must have breathed a sigh of relief.
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PATRICK BRONTË DIED in June 1861, at the age of eighty-four. He had lived to see his family made famous by the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s bestselling Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857, and in the last years of his life would often be waylaid on the short walk from the Parsonage to the door of the church by people who wanted to shake the hand of “the father of the Brontës.” The church was packed for his funeral, where Arthur Bell Nicholls, the chief mourner, was so deeply affected that he had to be supported by his friends.
Nicholls had expected to be appointed perpetual curate in his father-in-law’s place, but the church trustees did not elect him and, with short notice, he found himself required to move out of the Parsonage and the town. In some upset and confusion, he returned to Banagher to live with his remaining family there, gave up his ministry and turned to farming. In 1863 he married his cousin Mary Anna Bell (the charming girl whom Charlotte had met on honeymoon), his junior by eleven years. They had no children and led a very quiet life together in a house at the top of the hill above the town filled with relics from Haworth: the Richmond portrait hung in the sitting room, Brontë first editions lined the bookshelves, Brontë watercolours and sketches covered the walls, and a glass case contained some choice items of memorabilia. A substantial link with the old days was kept through Nicholls’s retention of Martha Brown as an employee: like Reverend Brontë, she had become devoted to Nicholls over time and was remembered in Banagher for her quaint Yorkshire accent and excellent sponge cake.
Only a few weeks after Nicholls’s departure for Ireland, and the accompanying sale of effects from the Parsonage, a young American friend of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Hale, made the pilgrimage to Haworth to see for himself the sites so memorably described in his friend’s biography. Making his way up Haworth’s Main Street, he met locals who already had Brontë anecdotes in place for tourists, and in the Black Bull was served his supper on a tray that, the publican’s wife assured him, had previously belonged to Charlotte. Hale got into conversation with a young man who was surrounded by tracings, plans and saucers of india ink, busy transferring his day’s observations on to an immense sheet of paper. He was a surveyor for the railway company planning to open a branch line from Keighley to Haworth, “so that future worshippers will find their pilgrimage easier.”
Hale’s visit came at a strange turning point in the Brontës’ fame and the village’s life. On the one hand, a new broom was in operation: Reverend Brontë was dead, Mr. Nicholls was gone, and the new incumbent, John Wade, was busy having the Parsonage thoroughly refitted, in ways that would have made it almost unrecognisable to the former family.*1 He was also about to knock down and rebuild the church. On the other hand, there was a growing sense of the value of what was being swept away. Locals who had picked up items at the house clearance, like the tray in service at the Black Bull, found, when Hale and his like turned up, that they were in possession of precious relics. Disappointed that he had so nearly missed the sale of effects at which he could have acquired books, pictures and intimate possessions of the Brontës, Hale had to content himself with soaking up as much of the atmosphere as he could, interviewing and photographing locals who remembered the family, and coming away from the Parsonage with some substantial items from the builders’ rubbish pile, Mr. Brontë’s old bell-pull and half a sash window from Charlotte’s room.*2
Ellen Nussey was well aware of the value of her letters from Charlotte, and, as the years went by and the fame of the Brontës grew, hoped to profit from them both financially and by association. Once Patrick Brontë was dead, she wrote to Constantin Heger, asking his “advice” about possible translation of her material into French, and whether he would collaborate with her on an edition. He didn’t rise to the threat of exposure implicit in her letter, but cautioned her not to do anything of which her friend would have disapproved, despite the undoubted interest of the subject, “even after Mrs. Gaskell’s detailed biography”:
Could I, without the consent of my friend, publish his intimate letters—that is to say, his confidences? Has he not allowed me to see more of himself than he would wish to show to the first comer?…I make no unconscionable claim, Madam, to settle this question for you. I know that you have too much delicacy for me to be able to suppose that your reason and your heart have need of help in this.
These considerations were easily overridden in Ellen’s mind by the need to tell “the truth” about Charlotte, and to have her own position as best friend to genius adequately recognised. In the 1870s she allowed Thomas Wemyss Reid extensive use of the letters for his biography of Charlotte, and in the next decade made an attempt to publish an edition in collaboration with the antiquarian Joseph Horsfall Turner, but fell out with him at a late stage in the production, causing all but a few copies of the book to be destroyed. The next person to court her for her Brontë manuscripts was the journalist Clement King Shorter, later editor of The Illustrated London News, who first visited Ellen in 1889 and won her trust. It was Shorter who warned her that copyright law would prevent her printing the letters she owned (news that increased her already very sour feelings towards Nicholls, whom she abused freely in her correspondence); this intelligence undoubtedly influenced her decision to sell a large number of the letters via Shorter to his associate T. J. Wise, ostensibly a highly reputable collector and antiquarian, but actually a shameless forger of literary manuscripts and high-class con-man. Wise promised to keep the Charlotte Brontë letters together as a collection, to be donated at some future date to the nation. In fact, he started selling them off piecemeal almost as soon as he got his hands on them, much to Ellen’s understandable horror.
Shorter travelled to Banagher in the spring of 1895 and managed to persuade Arthur Nicholls (then in his seventies) not only to give him access to many of the treasured manuscripts he had kept to himself for forty years and sell some to Wise, but to sell him the copyright on any material that he was to handle for publication, including copyright (and therefore veto) on any of Charlotte’s letters to Ellen Nussey that Ellen might seek to publish. Whether or not Nicholls quite understood the extent of the powers he was handing over (he had been confused about the difference between “copyright” and “permissions” when Mrs. Gaskell’s biography was in production), the result of his sudden change of policy was that Clement Shorter and his heirs maintained control over the Brontë literary estate well into the 1970s.
Interested parties such as Nicholls and Ellen Nussey (not to mention Monsieur Heger in Brussels) must have been amazed when a “Brontë Society” was formed in 1893, one of the first ever associations of its kind, which two years later opened a small museum of manuscripts and relics in a room over the Yorkshire Penny Bank at the top of Haworth’s Main Street. When Nicholls died in 1906, at the ripe age of eighty-seven, his widow sold some items from his remarkable collection straight to the Society, and much of the rest of the material was disposed of in two large auction sales, one in 1907 and one in 1916 after her death. In the meantime, Haworth had become such a draw for tourists that the Parsonage became difficult for any parson to live in quietly, and in 1927 the Ecclesiastical Commission put the building up for sale. It was bought by a local worthy, Sir James Roberts, specifically so that he could donate it to the Brontë Society, and the following year the Brontë Parsonage Museum opened, then as now one of the most hauntingly atmospheric writers’ house museums in the world.
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FOR ALL HIS TALK of respecting the wishes and privacy of a dead friend, Constantin Heger proved an unpredictable respecter of them himself. What he felt in 1856 on perusing Charlotte’s agonised love-notes and carefully extracting anodyne passages for Elizabeth Gaskell’s use is impossible to say, but once that had been done, he may have thought there was no good reason—and perhaps some danger—in keeping the originals.
His wife obviously took a different view: the danger in “those letters” might lie in their not being available as evidence, hence her removal of the fragments from the bin and reconstruction jigsaw-wise. Madame Heger is said to have kept her actions secret (exactly as Madame Beck would have done), showing the letters to her daughter Louise only after the latter had attended a lecture in Brussels, in about 1868,*3 explicitly connecting their family with the characters in Villette and criticising their treatment of the Brontë sisters. Louise said that the letters were at that time kept by her mother in a compartment of her jewel box, flat, one imagines, as the intricate mending with gummed strips and thread shows no signs of having been disturbed.
Louise, who was just a toddler when the Brontë sisters arrived at the Pensionnat in 1842 and who lived until 1933, acquired the letters at her mother’s death in 1890, but kept them secret in turn. She said that when she told her father about them, he was surprised to discover that they still existed and he tried to throw them away again, but, like her mother, she managed to thwart him. Like many details and dates in Louise’s account, this is hard to square with the other evidence. Why would Monsieur Heger ever have thrown the letters away in anger, if he seemed happy to show them and quote them to Elizabeth Gaskell in 1856?
And other evidence indicates that the letters were not kept strictly secret, nor did Monsieur think them destroyed in the 1860s. In 1869 Thomas Westwood, an employee of an Anglo-Belgian railway company who had lived in Brussels for twenty years and whose wife and wife’s cousin were former pupils and friends of the Hegers, told a correspondent that Villette was “truer than the biography” and that “the one true love of [Charlotte Brontë’s] life was M. Paul Emanuel.” Westwood himself was in possession of one of Charlotte’s school essays, presumably given to him by a member of the family. “M. Paul Emanuel has quite a bundle of them,” he said. Westwood makes it clear to his correspondent, whose curiosity had been piqued, that Constantin Heger had ceased to be very secretive or discreet about his association with the famous authoress and had “told the whole story” to Westwood’s wife’s cousin: his drawing out of Charlotte’s talent, her growing obsession with him, “an enforced parting” when the violence of her feelings became understood, and her despairing letters to him afterwards. “He told the story,” Westwood said, “and, I am sorry to say, he showed the letters also. He is a finished specimen of a Jesuit, but with all that a worthy & warm-hearted man.”
Westwood had been given one of the devoirs (he didn’t say which one) and another of them—Charlotte’s essay, “L’Amour Filial”—was given to Heger’s colleague at the Athénée, Charles-Henri Randolphe, in August 1876. By 1894 someone called Tamar possessed Charlotte’s gift to Constantin, Ashburnham Church on the Valley-Land*4 (it was sold on to a collector), and “E. Nys” owned “The Spell” (and was probably the person who had it expensively bound)—it is now in the British Library. The family seem indeed to have been handing their manuscripts out fairly freely, and in 1894, four years after Madame Heger’s death, and presumably at Monsieur Heger’s instigation, they began to release Brontë devoirs for publication in magazines. And yet, when Clement Shorter went to Brussels in 1895 on the trail of manuscript material, he was not granted an interview, and his inquiries were answered on a calling card by Claire Heger, the second-youngest daughter: “Doctor Heger regrets not possessing any letters whatever of Charlotte Brontë, having given them to friends of England a number of years ago.”
Among Brontë memorabilia given by the Hegers, before 1890, to another ex-pupil called Marion Douglas were Emily’s and Charlotte’s gifts to Madame on departure from the Pensionnat in 1842, The North Wind and Watermill, also two less explicable items, a photograph of Patrick Brontë and a lock of Charlotte Brontë’s hair.*5 The photograph could have been sent at any time after the early 1860s—they were sold as souvenirs in Haworth, even before Patrick Brontë’s death—but the lock of hair would be hard to account for, unless given or sent to Monsieur Heger by Charlotte herself. In Shirley, Caroline Helstone relates how she took such a keepsake from Robert Moore:
He was sitting near the table…on the temples were many such round curls. I thought he could spare me one: I knew I should like to have it, and I asked for it. He said, on condition that he might have his choice of a tress from my head; so he got one of my long locks of hair, and I got one of his short ones. I keep his, but, I dare say, he has lost mine. It was my doing, and one of those silly deeds it distresses the heart and sets the face on fire to think of: one of those small but sharp recollections that return, lacerating your self-respect like tiny penknives, and forcing from your lips, as you sit alone, sudden, insane-sounding interjections.
Could this reflect what happened in real life? So much in Charlotte’s novels is confessed or exposed under the veil of fiction.
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IN HER Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell related how, in her presence, someone once challenged Charlotte about the scene in Jane Eyre when the heroine “hears Rochester’s voice crying out to her in a great crisis of her life, he being many, many miles distant at the time. I do not know what incident was in Miss Brontë’s recollection when she replied, in a low voice, drawing in her breath, ‘But it is a true thing; it really happened.’ ” It was the loss of her sisters, Gaskell imagined, that Charlotte was thinking of, the “cries, and sobs, and wailings” of the wind around the sepulchral Parsonage that appeared “as of the dearly-beloved vainly striving to force their way to her,” in the manner of Cathy’s ghost at the windows of Wuthering Heights. True though this might have been to the intensity of Charlotte’s bereavement, a different cause probably stood behind that most striking and thrilling passage in Jane Eyre, one that, when she was writing the book, with her sisters still at her side, was overpoweringly alive to her: the calling of her soul to that of her Master.
The wavering line between fact and fiction seems to disappear altogether here, as does the distinction between what inspires a novel and how novels in turn affect life. In the late 1880s, Constantin Heger sat in his study in the rue d’Isabelle and wrote a charming letter to a former English pupil called Meta Mossman, to whom he felt he should apologise for the long delay in answering one of hers. He and his wife kept up many such friendships and correspondences; they liked to think of their past favourites as extended family, even when they had grown into women, wives, matrons. He hastens to reassure his young friend that, contrary to the evidence, she has not been forgotten by him:
although it is true that I have not written, I have nevertheless answered you frequently and at length, and this is how. Letters and the post are not, luckily, the only means of communication, or the best, between people who are really fond of one another: I am not referring to the telephone, which allows one to speak, to have conversation, from a distance. I have something better than that. I have only to think of you to see you. I often give myself the pleasure when my duties are over, when the light fades. I postpone lighting the gas lamp in my library, I sit down, smoking my cigar, and with a hearty will I evoke your image—and you come (without wishing to, I dare say) but I see you, I talk with you—you, with that little air, affectionate undoubtedly, but independent and resolute, firmly determined not to allow any opinion without being previously convinced, demanding to be convinced before allowing yourself to submit—in fact, just as I knew you, my dear [Meta], and as I have esteemed and loved you.
Here is the letter that Charlotte Brontë waited for all those miserable months in 1844 and 1845, the one she would have given almost anything to be handed by the Haworth postman; not the infrequent, testy notes that Heger sent so reluctantly, but an expansive, loving, intimate communication, wrapping the recipient in close and exclusive attention. He thinks of Meta Mossman as he sits smoking his cigar in the gloaming and works a form of magic for her, far away in England: I see you, I talk with you—with a hearty will I evoke your image.
In thinking it over you will have no difficulty in admitting that you yourself have experienced a hundred times that which I tell you about communication between two distant hearts, instantaneous, without paper, without pen, or words, or messenger, etc., a hundred times without noticing it, without its having attracted your attention, without anything extraordinary.
The question remains, was this the only time that worldly, wily Constantin Heger proposed a sort of emotional telepathy with one of his former favourites? Had he suggested something of the sort to Charlotte before they parted? Perhaps she felt she had “reached” him this way, when she said that Rochester’s call to Jane really happened. Was it his habit to attempt such mental communion across long distances and adverse circumstances?
Or had he simply been reading Jane Eyre?
*1 He was building a large extension on the lane side, to create a commodious dining room and office on the ground floor with a master bedroom above, a bath and indoor water closet (along with plumbing to the kitchen), all remarkable innovations.
*2 He later had the glass panes from this incorporated into picture frames (Miller, The Brontë Myth, 100). His photographs haven’t been traced.
*3 Louise said she was twenty-nine at the time, and she was born in 1839 (M. H. Spielmann, The Inner History of the Brontë–Heger Letters). On the whole, in her account to Spielmann, her dates and calculations are not very accurate.
*4 It is on display now at the Parsonage Museum.
*5 See Art of the Brontës, 385; notes to North Wind and Watermill. Other items in this stash of Brontëana included “a Brontë seal” and a sampler sewn by the Hegers’ English nanny, Martha Trotman.