As the Brontë siblings grew to adulthood, they did not integrate successfully with their Haworth neighbours—or strive to. A notable example of their isolation was at the election in 1837, when the family found themselves in a decided Tory minority in the town, against the Whig candidate, Lord Morpeth, an old Etonian who had held a pre-Reform family seat. One of Haworth’s traditions was open-air debate in the area in front of the Black Bull and the church at the top of Main Street, where “many remarkable discussions” took place over the years, sometimes turning violent at sensitive times such as elections. The election of 1837 proved one such. The Whigs had a much larger turnout than the Tories, the candidate having brought in supporters from the outskirts, and when Patrick Brontë tried to speak against him he was rudely shouted down. Branwell, in his impetuous way, “rushed to the front crying, ‘If you won’t let my father speak, you shan’t speak,’ ” and as a punishment for his presumption, an effigy of the parson’s son was carried along Main Street later and burned, while Branwell watched aghast from inside a shop. It was made recognisable by the addition of a herring in one hand and a potato in the other—enough to signify an Irishman.
Feelings in the parish were running high over the issue of church tithes too. No one had really believed that Dissenters would be prosecuted for non-payment, but when the first cases were brought at the end of 1838, Patrick Brontë’s unpopularity and the family’s isolation reached new levels. This coincided with violent disturbances in the area in the first years of the Chartist movement, with “ultra-Radicals” organising huge public gatherings such as the one in Manchester in September, when an estimated 300,000 people turned up to demand universal suffrage (for adult men) and a ballot vote, among other measures. The events were mirrored in Angria in Charlotte’s story called “Stancliffe’s Hotel,” in which the city of Zamorna (named after the Duke, and ostensibly an African location) seems to be taking on more and more of the attributes of a West Riding industrial town like Bradford or Leeds, and its citizens the aspects of the disaffected working men of 1838. In the story, an assemblage of “mad mechanics and desperate operatives of Zamorna” are dispersed by sword-wielding cavalry in a scene reminiscent of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, an event much referenced by the contemporary Chartists. Thus Charlotte and Branwell played out in “the world below” the turbulence that surrounded them so uncontrollably day to day.
Charlotte’s own inner turbulence and chronic dissatisfaction with her lot was leading inevitably towards a crisis at Roe Head. Just before Christmas 1837, Anne had been taken so severely ill at school that both she and Charlotte believed her life to be in danger, as did the Moravian minister, James La Trobe (later an influential bishop), who visited her sickbed several times to console her. His words were truly comforting to Anne, who was a deeply pious girl. Charlotte meanwhile was becoming frantic, just as she had been when Emily was ill at Roe Head two years before. The difficulty and pain Anne had breathing were inextricably linked in her mind with consumption. “I cannot tell you what agony these symptoms give me,” she told Ellen when Mary Taylor suffered from similar shortness of breath and chest pains; “they remind me so strongly of my two sisters whom no power of medicine could save.” But Miss Wooler did not share Charlotte’s view of the seriousness of the situation and appeared “hard and unfeeling” about it. Possibly she was rather tired of having to deal with her young colleague’s hyper-sensitivity and was trying to encourage her to snap out of it; certainly Charlotte’s implied criticism of her judgement and management—that she couldn’t recognise a danger to one of her charges—was insulting.
What started as a difference of opinion about Anne’s health rapidly escalated to a row, and after years of biting her tongue Charlotte suddenly let fly at Miss Wooler with bitter reproaches and “one or two rather plain truths,” as she reported to Ellen with pride. Miss Wooler was reduced to tears during the shocking scene, and unsurprisingly wrote to Patrick Brontë the next day, reporting his daughter’s behaviour. The day after that Charlotte and Anne were called home. Charlotte, utterly unrepentant of her outburst and scornful of Miss Wooler’s distress, had resolved to give in her notice, but in their parting interview agreed, rather loftily, to Miss Wooler’s request that she should return after a break at home. She was determined that Anne was not going back, however.
For once Charlotte had asserted control over her situation, albeit violently, and when she returned a few weeks later, she was in a detached mood and disinclined to oblige anyone. She had spent her month’s respite finishing a story called “Mina Laury,” her most ambitious fiction to date, depicting the slavish devotion of the heroine to the Duke of Zamorna. Sequestered and neglected in a country hideaway, Mina is poorly rewarded for her love by Zamorna’s increasing disdain, and her obsessive focus on her cruel lover mirrors Charlotte’s own feelings for this favourite product of her imagination: “She had but one idea—Zamorna, Zamorna!…She could no more feel alienation from him than she could from herself.”
The school moved that winter from Roe Head to a smaller property on Dewsbury Moor, Heald’s House, nearer Miss Wooler’s ailing parents at Rouse Mill. Charlotte thought the situation damp and unhealthy, but one gets the impression that she had no intention of staying there long. The sole advantage of the move to Charlotte was that it was within easy walking distance of Brookroyd, the house in Birstall where Mrs. Nussey and her family had moved after her brother-in-law’s death, but, frustratingly, Ellen was away from home that spring on an extended visit to her brother John in London. Charlotte missed her terribly, worried about her health and that of all the Nusseys in the over-sensitive way that became characteristic of this period, and called on Ellen’s mother and sisters whenever opportunity allowed. The family were having a dreadful year with William, Ellen’s 31-year-old apothecary brother, suffering from a psychotic illness that led to his suicide in the summer. Ellen suppressed all references to William’s death in her papers, as she did to her brother George’s later mental breakdown, her brother Joseph’s alcoholism and her sister Mercy’s chronic nervous disorders. But, as Ellen’s close friend and confidante, and friend to her sisters Mercy and Ann too, Charlotte was aware of the family’s troubles, and agonised over them almost as much as she did her own.
By March, Charlotte was again sent home in a state of collapse, then returned in April to superintend the empty building at Heald’s House during the holidays while Miss Wooler tended her father in his final illness. Sixteen days on her own in the school proved anything other than easy or restful, and an even more dramatic collapse followed. Term started again, but now that both Charlotte’s sisters had gone home, her nerves gave way: “she would turn sick and trembling at any sudden noise, and could hardly repress her screams when startled,” Mrs. Gaskell heard. Miss Wooler clearly recognised that Charlotte’s insurrectionary outburst at Christmas, released on Anne’s behalf, had reflected her own chronic disturbance, and was genuinely concerned about Charlotte’s mental state. She insisted that a doctor was called, and he, diagnosing the case as nervous, advised that Charlotte should also go home. She departed in May, on an indefinite sick leave, reinforcing the now familiar pattern of the Brontë siblings failing to thrive in any environment other than the Parsonage.
Miss Wooler had presented Charlotte with two books at her departure, inscribed with affection. Charlotte was by far the most remarkable student she had ever had, and Miss Wooler—who had no inkling of Charlotte’s literary output and ambitions at this date—could not have imagined a more benign plan than for Charlotte to persevere with her career as a teacher. She was possibly already thinking ahead to her own retirement and who was to take over the running of the school—a subject she raised a few years later.
The severity of Charlotte’s collapse can be gauged by the unusual treatment she received at home, where she was put to bed for a period of absolute rest and quiet. Who prescribed this? Patrick Brontë or Aunt Branwell? The doctor? The Brontës didn’t always follow medical advice very closely, or seek it promptly, and Patrick’s trusty reference work, Dr. Thomas John Graham’s Modern Domestic Medicine,*1 had little to say on the subject of nervous disorders. Charlotte was kept alone and quiet for a full week, removed from all sources of excitement, including books and pictures. No doubt she was given a sedative, perhaps rather a heavy dose, to help her sleep and regain physical strength. The episode in Jane Eyre where Jane recovers from her collapse from hunger and exhaustion outside Moor House—and the similar scenes of extreme convalescence in Shirley and Villette—might well recall some of this time:
I knew I was in a small room, and in a narrow bed. To that bed I seemed to have grown: I lay on it motionless as a stone; and to have torn me from it would have been almost to kill me. I took no note of the lapse of time—of the change from morning to noon, from noon to evening. I observed when any one entered or left the apartment; I could even tell who they were; I could understand what was said when the speaker stood near to me; but I could not answer: to open my lips or move my limbs was equally impossible.
Charlotte recovered in the warmth of her family’s concern, and in the company of the Taylor sisters, who had been asked to come and cheer her up. The Parsonage brightened in the presence of these lively friends—Martha had been “in a constant flow of good-humour during her stay here and has consequently been very fascinating,” Charlotte reported to Ellen, who was still at her brother’s house in London—and one can imagine the spirited discussions the group had over religion, literature and politics, Mary’s forthright opinions voiced freely and Charlotte’s mind expanding pleasurably after her lonely vigils at Heald’s House. “They are making such a noise about me I can not write any more,” she wrote happily; “Mary is playing on the piano. Martha is chattering as fast as her little tongue can run and Branwell is standing before her laughing at her vivacity.”
No doubt the Taylors took a keen interest in the difficulties the Brontë girls were facing trying to establish themselves as wage-earners. Mary and Martha had been spared the same fate—so far—by a fairly narrow margin of privilege. Their large family was supported by ever-diminishing resources from Hunsworth Mill, and the two girls had been encouraged not to be complacent about their futures. Since leaving school, both had travelled and continued to study, but Mary was as unenthusiastic about teaching for a living as her friend. Mary’s novel Miss Miles shows how engaged she became with the subject of women’s self-sufficiency, and her later essays (published in the 1860s) insisted that women should be able to learn and earn enough to ensure they weren’t “driven into matrimony.”
In the next few years Charlotte and her siblings seem to have come to a form of compact between them that they would share the hated necessity of “going out” to earn money, as long as they could also share times of respite, such as Charlotte greedily took advantage of in the summer of 1838. It’s a measure of how reduced Charlotte was when she came home from Heald’s House that Emily, the most ferocious hater of Elsewhere, attempted to do her bit and take a post at a school run by a Miss Elizabeth Patchett at Law Hill, on the hills outside Halifax.
Law Hill was large in comparison with Roe Head, having almost forty pupils, half of whom were boarders. Emily was kept at her work from the moment the girls woke up until after their bedtime, with, as Charlotte reported to Ellen, “only one half hour of exercise between—this is slavery.” Emily responded with her own brand of non-compliance: one of the girls later recalled her as dreamy and untidy, a loner who at least once lashed out and told them that she preferred the house dog to any of her pupils. But privately she was studying and translating Virgil that year, writing a remarkable number of poems and storing up material. Law Hill had been built some fifty years earlier by a man called Jack Sharp, who had been adopted by John Walker of nearby Walterclough Hall, and was later ousted from the property by the rightful heir, his cousin. Law Hill was as near as Sharp could get to Walterclough, against which he conducted a cold-blooded campaign of revenge. This energetically malevolent man has so much in common with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights that it is hard not to see him as a direct inspiration for the novel Emily would write in the next decade.
The Law Hill estate had a contemporary neighbour of equal notoriety and interest, the heiress Anne Lister, who lived at Shibden Hall with her lover Ann Walker in a lesbian relationship, the nature and ardour of which were only made widely known in the twentieth century when Lister’s remarkable diaries were decoded and published. Local gossips would not have needed the evidence of a diary to confirm what was going on at Shibden Hall, though. Lister’s masculine style was so pronounced that one of her lovers, Marianna Lawton, used to be ashamed to be seen in public with her, and her nickname in Halifax was “Gentleman Jack.” “You do not know what is said of your friend,” a tipsy well-wisher once warned Marianna, but she did, and Elizabeth Patchett surely did too. It would have been strange if Emily Brontë had not met Anne Lister at some time in her seven-month soujourn next door, or heard the stories about her, and it is interesting that Emily’s time at Law Hill, high on the moors, gave her both stories of bitter past rivalries prosecuted over generations, and understanding of a wild, passionate and very unconventional erotic force.
Anne Brontë went bravely off alone to her first governess post with a family called Ingham at Blake Hall, Mirfield, just a few weeks after Emily’s return home. None of the sisters had any experience of governessing before, from either side of the divide, and her reports back must have been something of a shock. Anne was in charge of the elder two of five children, both “desperate little dunces,” as Charlotte told Ellen, whose bad behaviour Anne was not empowered to discipline: “she is requested when they misbehave themselves to inform their Mamma—which she says is utterly out of the question as in that case she might be making complaints from morning until night.” This was the sort of difficulty that none of the sisters had imagined, and that they were all singularly ill-qualified to deal with, being so anxious socially. Anne had her extreme taciturnity to overcome too, and her stammer (the one probably exacerbated the other). She was the least complaining of all the siblings, the most long-suffering and the best employee among them by far. But she certainly found the life of a governess hard to bear, and missed home as much as any of them. Her survival strategy at Blake Hall, like Emily’s in Halifax, was to collect her impressions for later use.
Presumably the techniques used to subdue her charges by Agnes Grey in Anne’s novel were ones that Anne herself used, since they are presented as perfectly reasonable: shaking, pulling hair, holding down the child until she repeats part of the lesson correctly, pinning her in a corner with a chair. Just as surprising to twenty-first-century sensibilities is Agnes’s solution to the discovery of little John’s tormenting of a nest of baby birds—she finds a rock and smashes it down on the nest to put an end to the creatures’ suffering. In the novel, this is proof of Agnes’s tenderness as much as resolve, but is unquestionably severe. Anne was the sister who was least impatient with children, but even she found dealing with them more like battle than anything else: “it was one struggle of life-wearing exertion” to keep the little Inghams “in anything like decent order.”
Charlotte knew it would soon be her turn to rejoin “that dreary Gin-horse round” and was due to go out herself as a governess that summer. But something happened in the spring of 1839 to remind her, if rather uncomfortingly, that there were other fates than work for a young woman in her position. Ellen’s 27-year-old brother Henry, a recent graduate of Magdalene College Cambridge, had been aware of Charlotte’s concern for their family during their crisis with William the previous year, and was probably much impressed by her fervent discussion of religious matters with Ellen around that time, for he was a rigidly pious man himself. He had had a personal crisis of his own in March 1838 (obliquely referred to a year later in his diary) and difficulties settling in to his first curacy at Earnley in Sussex. Charlotte undoubtedly heard about the latter through her friend; nevertheless, she was extremely surprised to get a letter from Henry Nussey, written on his birthday in February 1839 from Earnley, proposing marriage to her. Henry’s diary shows that he was working his way methodically through a list of possible candidates, rather as Patrick Brontë had done in the early 1820s, and had just been turned down by a friend’s sister: “On Tuesday last received a decisive reply from M. A. L.’s papa. A loss, but I trust a providential one. Believe not her will, but her father’s. All right. God knows best what is good for us, for his Church, & for his own Glory. This I humbly desire. And his Will be done, & not mine in this or in anything else…Wrote to a Yorke Friend, C. B.”
“C. B.” must have been more astonished by his proposal than flattered: it showed him to be so reckless. “I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you,” she wrote back to him, in a suitably matter-of-fact manner, “but I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you.” In describing what that might be, Charlotte gave an interesting self-portrait in the negative: “[Your future wife’s] character should not be too marked, ardent and original—her temper should be mild, her piety undoubted, her spirits even and cheerful, and her ‘personal attractions’ sufficient to please your eye and gratify your just pride.” She expressed herself grateful for his attention and for the suggestion that she could help him run a school in Sussex; but even with these incentives—and the alluring possibility that Ellen could come and live with them—Charlotte knew she could never marry for the sake of it, nor “take a worthy man whom I am conscious I cannot render happy.” “You do not know me,” she said truthfully. “I am not the serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose.”
“Received an unfavourable report from C. B.,” Henry noted in his diary with barely perceptible disappointment. “The will of the Lord be done.” Charlotte’s wisdom in rejecting Henry’s suit (if suit isn’t too strong a word) seems obvious, and to Ellen, who had naturally been anxious to know the outcome, she was far more explicit about her reasons: “I felt that though I esteemed Henry—though I had a kindly leaning towards him because he is an aimiable [sic]—well-disposed man Yet I had not, and never could have that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him—and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my Husband.” One would expect no less from the creator of Mary Percy and Mina Laury, but it wasn’t just “intense attachment” and passionate love that Charlotte hoped for in a mate, but an all-encompassing familiarity, like that she had with her siblings: “I was aware that Henry knew so little of me he could hardly be conscious to whom he was writing—why it would startle him to see me in my natural home-character he would think I was a wild, romantic enthusiast indeed—I could not sit all day long making a grave face before my husband—I would laugh and satirize and say whatever came into my head first—and if he were a clever man & loved me the whole world weighed in the balance against his smallest wish should be light as air—”
The proposal didn’t put an end to the respectful friendship between Charlotte and Henry Nussey—if anything, it opened up their interest, or rather disinterest, in each other. Charlotte admired Henry’s spiritual earnestness, but knew he was a prig at heart and she drew heavily on his characteristics for the worthy but priggish St. John Rivers in Jane Eyre.
And, for all her talk of “ten to one I shall never have the chance again” to consider a proposal, only five months later the former Haworth curate Mr. Hodgson (who had moved away to Colne in 1837) came to tea with his subordinate, a 28-year-old Irishman, recently arrived from Dublin, called David Pryce. Pryce’s manner was expansive and lively “after the manner of his Countrymen,” as Charlotte told Ellen later, and he caught Charlotte in the mood to enjoy and reciprocate. Most importantly, this first meeting took place at home: “at home you know Ellen I talk with ease and am never shy—never weighed down & oppressed by the miserable mauvaise honte which torments & constrains me elsewhere—so I conversed with this Irishman & laughed at his jests.” The effect was remarkable: a few days later, she received a letter from him, asking for her hand. “[W]ell thought I—I’ve heard of love at first sight but this beats all.” She of course turned him down, but the episode was amusing and heartening.
—
BRANWELL’S CAREER WAS still undecided. His art master, William Robinson, died suddenly in 1838, leaving a wife and six children and at least one pupil without occupation. In February 1838 Patrick Brontë was applying to a Liverpool wine merchant he knew through a Haworth family (and also, evidently, through being the vintner’s customer) for help in procuring Branwell “an opening…as Clerk in some Respectable Bank. I know not what the usual terms, are, on which a Young man enters upon such a line of life, but I have heard, that they are comparatively easy, as far as money matters, are concerned.” The letter demonstrates again Patrick Brontë’s ignorance of the usual procedure, and his touching trust in the likelihood of ability being recognised. It would do Branwell good, his father thought, to see a little of the world beyond Yorkshire and “open a wider field, for talent, and suitable connexions.” His sights had been lowered from a possible move to London and the RA or a Continental tour; now the father was primarily interested in finding Branwell something respectable “and in time, should he conduct himself well, sufficiently lucrative.”
Aunt Branwell and her savings came to the rescue when, in a bid to do something definite for his son, and with the help of his old friend William Morgan, Patrick Brontë decided to set Branwell up in business as a portrait painter in Bradford in the summer of 1838. A studio was rented, and lodgings found with a family called Kirby, on Fountain Street; the rest was meant to be up to Branwell. William Morgan proved an active patron, commissioning portraits of himself and his family; the Kirbys too provided their young tenant with work, but Branwell’s talent was simply not up to the competition in his field, and he struggled from the first to find clients outside his immediate circle.
What Branwell enjoyed most about Bradford was the company of lively and intelligent friends who liked to congregate at the George Hotel, including John Thompson, a former fellow pupil at William Robinson’s studio, and the talented young sculptor Joseph Bentley Leyland. Leyland said later that Branwell was not a drunkard at this time (though he was no abstainer either). Under the eye of his godfather William Morgan, no doubt Branwell was on his best behaviour in public, but, as was to be expected from a 21-year-old youth set free for the first time, he was not immune to the temptations of the town and quickly got used to being in debt.
Portraits of local figures would have necessarily been Branwell’s bread-and-butter work, had he ever developed his career as a professional artist, but ambitious, imaginary painting interested him far more, and the few of his works that survive, heavily indebted to the style of John Martin, are much more distinctive than his wooden portraiture. By May 1839 Branwell had had such little success in Bradford that there was no justification for keeping on the studio, and he came home again. Charlotte had visited her brother in Bradford once, apparently the only member of the family to do so. One wonders what she made of his bachelor quarters and workplace there. Did “her sisterly ways,” as the Kirbys’ niece characterised them vaguely, include tidying up his canvases, brushes and paints, or did Charlotte and Branwell spend their time in discussion of their joint creations Wiggins, Townshend, Northangerland and mighty Zamorna? It would have been hard indeed for Charlotte not to run her eye over her brother’s studio and wonder what she could have done with such a place to herself and such an opportunity.
Just as Branwell returned home, Charlotte had to leave for her first post as a governess, to the Sidgwick family at Stonegappe in Lothersdale, only about twelve miles away. It was an appointment for less than two months (filling in for the regular governess), in a lovely place quite near home, among people of their acquaintance (the Sidgwicks were related to the Durys and Miss Wooler’s sister was married to the local parson); nevertheless, Charlotte was in deep distress the whole time.
Her charges were seven-year-old Mathilda and her brother John, who was only three—both far too young to be able to benefit from Charlotte’s teaching. Very young children did not interest her much, in fact she found them rather disgusting. Mrs. Sidgwick was expecting her fifth baby in August. The only member of the family whom Charlotte considered interesting was the head of the household, Mr. Sidgwick, who strolled the grounds at Stonegappe with a magnificent Newfoundland dog at his heels, looking “very like what a frank, wealthy, Conservative gentleman ought to be.”
When the family moved from one summer residence to another, where a large house-party gathered, Charlotte was very disturbed by being among so many strangers, writing to Emily (whose sympathy on this point could be guaranteed):
I used to think I should like to be in the stir of grand folks’ society but I have had enough of it—it is dreary work to look on and listen. I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil. While she is teaching the children, working for them, amusing them, it is all right. If she steals a moment for herself she is a nuisance.
The similarities to Jane Eyre’s feelings of being overlooked are striking. Charlotte’s former dreams of being in “grand folks’ society” were really dreams of having her true worth recognised, but now that she was among “grand folks,” her employer—a woman whose lack of feeling and bourgeois complacency she scorned—refused to recognise anything about her at all, beyond her relation to the children. “[She] does not know my character & she does not wish to know it,” Charlotte complained to Ellen. “I have never had five minutes conversation with her since I came—except while she was scolding me.” In a formulation much like that which Karl Marx was preparing to publish, she found Mrs. Sidgwick exploitative, with her determination that “the greatest possible quantity of labour may be squeezed out of me.” Not that labour repelled her; it was the loss of “mental liberty” she raged against and that her position rendered her invisible, condemned to “look on and listen” to fools, and then to wipe their children’s noses, fetch and carry their things or sit hemming their sheets. It was far worse than Roe Head, and she was both miserable and surprisingly angry. “At times I felt and I suppose seemed depressed,” she wrote to Ellen:
to my astonishment I was taken to task on the subject by Mrs. Sidgwick with a stern[n]ess of manner & a harshness of language scarcely credible—like a fool I cried most bitterly—I could not help it—my spirits quite failed me at first I thought I had done my best—strained every nerve to please her—and to be treated in that way merely because I was shy—and sometimes melancholy was too bad. at first I was for giving all up and going home—But after a little reflection I determined—to summon what energy I had and to weather the Storm—
The writer A. C. Benson was a nephew of her employers and recalled them as “extraordinarily benevolent people, much beloved, [who] would not wittingly have given pain to any one connected with them.” Their liberality was probably the problem, as far as Charlotte was concerned. A. C. Benson heard that one of his cousins “certainly on one occasion threw a Bible at Miss Brontë,” behaviour that she would have found intolerable, and yet was impotent to punish. This was her first experience of having to deal with headstrong boys (there’s no evidence that Branwell ever behaved ill towards an adult in his childhood) and it appalled her. The Sidgwicks’ impression was that the temporary governess “had no gifts for the management of children” and was “in a very morbid condition” all the time she worked at Stonegappe: “if she was invited to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was not invited, she imagined she was excluded from the family circle.”
The Bible that A. C. Benson heard about might be a confusion of the story that has come down through the Benson and Sidgwick families of Charlotte Brontë being left in sole charge of John and his ten-year-old brother William one day and their getting out of control. The elder brother egged on the younger, stones were lobbed at the governess, and she was cut on the forehead. Quizzed the next day by Mrs. Sidgwick, she refused to tell on them, thereby earning a modicum of respect from her charges. But her antipathy towards Mrs. Sidgwick was confirmed when little John on one occasion at dinner took Charlotte’s hand and said “I love ’ou, Miss Brontë,” and his mother reprimanded him: “Love the governess, my dear!”*2
The permanent governess returned to work in the middle of July, so Charlotte was free to go home, much to her employers’ relief as well as her own. What is surprising, given her intense antipathy to the work, is that she ever considered doing it again.
—
ELLEN’S SUGGESTION of a seaside holiday together could not have come at a better time for Charlotte, who felt that the prospect of weeks alone in Ellen’s company was almost more fun than she deserved. The plan was in danger of frustration by Aunt Branwell’s rival idea (much more boring, and not carried through) of taking the whole family to Liverpool for a holiday, and arrangements became so knotty that Ellen took the unusually firm step of simply turning up at Haworth one day in a carriage and forcing Aunt Branwell and Reverend Brontë to let Charlotte come away with her. Branwell provided comic commentary on this “brave defeat” of the “doubters” as his sister hurriedly packed for her five weeks away, so nearly missed because of dithering and second-guessing. As it was, Charlotte’s visit to the north Yorkshire coast in 1839 was “one of the green spots” of her life, recalled later with deep pleasure. She had taken her first ride on an amazing new railway train (from Leeds to York), she had stayed with strangers and not been too traumatised, and, at the age of twenty-three, she and Ellen had walked several miles from Easton to Bridlington to capture her first view of the sea. “[S]he was quite overpowered,” Ellen recalled; “she could not speak till she had shed some tears…for the remainder of the day she was very quiet, subdued and exhausted.”
Between her release from Stonegappe and the end of the year, Charlotte was working on some much more ambitious stories, both in length and breadth, set ostensibly in Angria, but far from its “African” original, and more like a parallel-universe version of the north of England, with some real names and places thrown in (such as Alnwick). “Caroline Vernon” starts out in comic and domestic vein, with Northangerland grumpily back together with his wife and having to endure breakfast à deux, and Zamorna overseeing the harvest on his estates, like any complacent county landowner. Rather like Mr. Sidgwick, in fact, whose Newfoundland dog also makes an appearance.*3
The character of Caroline Vernon is a remarkable study of adolescent sensibilities, quite unlike anything Charlotte had attempted before. Still writing in the tiny script, Brontë hit a subject that she could express with freshness and wit—the swooning and trembling delights of female adolescent sexuality:
No doubt it is terrible to be looked fixedly at by a tall powerful man who knits his brows, & whose dark hair & whiskers & moustaches combine to shadow the eyes of a hawk & the features of a Roman statue. When such a man puts on an expression that you can’t understand—stops suddenly as you are walking with him alone in a dim garden—removes your hand from his arm & places his hand on your shoulder—you are justified in feeling nervous & uneasy.
“Nervous & uneasy”—otherwise known as overpoweringly excited. Charlotte was cleverly capturing the mixture of flutter and focus that burgeoning sexual awareness excites in young girls. Asked (by a character called Hector Montmorency, who is deliberately trying to shock her) if she likes Zamorna (to whose mesmeric sexual attraction she is just awakening), Caroline answers “No—yes—no—not much.” In fact, it is only this conversation, in which Montmorency reveals that Zamorna is a lifelong womaniser and that Mina Laury, whom Caroline thought a genteel recluse, is his mistress, that alerts Caroline to the nature of her own feelings about him, draws them into being, almost. “The young lady’s feelings were not exactly painful, they were strange, new & startling—she was getting to the bottom of an unsounded sea & lighting on rocks she had not guessed at.”
Caroline’s awakening sensibilities are described as a stream of consciousness, many decades before such a term became commonplace: “ ‘But how do I wish him to regard me? What terms should I like to be on with him? Really, I hardly know…I wonder whether I love him? O, I do!…I’m very wicked,’ she thought, shrinking again under the clothes.” The girl tries to account for her overpowering feelings, reasoning, “She did not want him to love her in return…she only wanted him to be kind—to think well of her, to like to have her with him—nothing more.” Ultimately, Caroline runs away to be with Zamorna, and he quickly seduces her (in a scene of glances, touches and kisses that Brontë utterly relishes), but her statement of what she hoped from this mesmerising older man seems both comic and tragic: a wish for a guilt-free, sin-free love with a man whose primary attraction is sex—the idealised erotics of the adolescent finely identified and expressed by a woman of twenty-three.
The novelette is startlingly novel on other levels too, showing the same confident “Postmodern” touches that Charlotte introduced into her work as early as 1830. The author draws attention to the fact that the action of the story shadows “real time,” pointing out that, far from being suspended in a narrative limbo, “standing for upwards of a quarter of a year with her foot on the carriage-step,” her heroine has got on very well without us in the space between chapters:
No, be assured the young person sighed over Hawkscliffe but once, wept two tears on parting with a groom & a pony she had been on friendly terms with, wondered thrice what her dear mama would do without any-body to scold, for four minutes had a childish feeling of pity that she should be left behind, sat a quarter of an hour after the start in a fit of speechless thought she did not account for, & all the rest of the way was as merry as a grig.
With this complex comic snapshot, Charlotte Brontë has one hand stretched backwards towards Lawrence Sterne and one forwards towards Nabokov (whose Pale Fire has a passage using a very similar idea). What pleasure this must have given Charlotte to read to her siblings, and what a sophisticated comic writer this minuscule manuscript shows Charlotte Brontë could have been had she chosen that route.
—
IN THE AUTUMN of 1839 Patrick Brontë secured a new curate, a keen 26-year-old fresh from Durham University, called William Weightman. Articulate and energetic, with views very much in harmony with the minister’s own, he endeared himself immediately at the Parsonage and did a great deal to win over opinion in the town to Brontë’s faction. Weightman became a good friend to Branwell too, and was a much better influence on him than John Brown, the sexton; he also managed what no outsider had yet with the girls, which was to break down their resistance to social charm. On hearing that none of the sisters had ever received a Valentine (aged twenty-three, twenty-one and twenty), he wrote them each some verses and walked ten miles to post them in a suitably incognito manner. Charlotte replied on behalf of them all in some deliberately plodding verses, reassuring the handsome curate that none of the girls read anything romantic into his gesture, a fairly sure sign that some of them did:
We think you’ve justly earned;
You sent us each a valentine,
Your gift is now returned.
We cannot write or talk like you;
We’re plain folks every one;
You’ve played a clever jest on us,
We thank you for your fun.
Believe us when we frankly say
(Our words, though blunt, are true),
At home, abroad, by night or day,
We all wish well to you.
They considered him “a pilgrim,” she insisted, whose destiny is to meet a worthier fate (and mate) than Haworth could offer.
When Ellen came to visit, Weightman seemed to be singling her out for special attention, and even Mary Taylor was moved to banter with him over a chessboard. Only Emily remained immune, and she took up the role of protector, reportedly thwarting Weightman’s attempts at lone walks on the moor with Ellen and earning the nickname “The Major” for a “swashing and martial” performance in mock (or not) aggression against him.
Weightman was a generous and thoughtful young man. When he gave a lecture at Keighley Mechanics’ Institute in April 1840, he took pains to make it possible for the Brontë girls to attend, arranging for a married clergyman friend to offer to escort them to and from the venue. The plan passed muster with Aunt Branwell and Patrick Brontë (no small triumph), and the sisters were able to enjoy a rare evening of ordinary youthful fun, walking the eight miles to Keighley and back in a high-spirited party that also included Ellen Nussey. They got home at midnight, to find Aunt Branwell waiting unsmilingly with some stewed coffee and very much put out by having two more guests than she had bargained for. This was a dampener, but not a total quelling, of “the great spirits of the walking party,” as Ellen recalled, and though Charlotte felt embarrassed about her aunt’s irritability, and guilty at having provoked it, Weightman seems to have understood all this and tried to make it into a joke, declaring himself “very thirsty” for as much coffee as he could have. Thus he kept the young people’s spirits up without malice—he does seem to have had an unusual capacity for doing the cheerful right thing.
Charlotte’s fine pencil drawing of Weightman survives as a memento of lively days at the Parsonage, but also of her own persistent interest in the young curate. The sittings “became alarming for length of time required,” which Weightman was obviously happy to give her. They also allowed short-sighted Charlotte the opportunity to get up close and gaze for hours on end at this handsome, good-natured youth, with his carefully curled hair, genial smile and fine figure. No wonder she strung out the sittings. It’s one of her best drawings.
But, at the same time, Charlotte was keen to tease Ellen about the new curate as often as possible, and at a later date—when nothing ignited there—she nurtured the idea that Weightman was smitten with Anne (who had been away from home at Blake Hall on his arrival in the parish): “He sits opposite to Anne at Church sighing softly—& looking out of the corners of his eyes to win her attention…& Anne is so quiet, her look so downcast—they are a picture.” Anne certainly seems to have had tender feelings for Weightman, but can only have been made uncomfortable by Charlotte’s showy teasing of everyone but herself over his interest.
There’s another aspect to Weightman’s presence that can’t be overlooked, and that seems to have dawned on Charlotte gradually during 1840 and 1841. He was said to be attached to a girl back in Appleby, and carried on correspondences with a young woman in Swansea and another in Keighley, leading Charlotte to remark that “the evident wandering instability of his mind is no favourable symptom at all.” She came to the conclusion that he was a “thorough male-flirt,” “perfectly conscious of his irresistibleness & is as vain as a peacock on the subject.” The increasingly satirical edge to her remarks about Weightman indicate a developing theory, and Charlotte’s repetition of her joke name for him, “Miss Celia Amelia,” and her use of the feminine pronoun when reciting his deeds become more pointed all the time. “She thought you a fine-looking girl and a very good girl into the bargain,” Charlotte told Ellen, stoking Ellen’s interest while warning her that “Miss Celia Amelia” might be almost too good to be true. Her conclusion that he was a vain heartbreaker seems clouded here with other speculations or intuitions. When in the draft version of a letter Charlotte wrote the following winter, she joked about the modern confusability of gender—“Several young gentlemen curl their hair and wear corsets—and several young ladies are excellent whips and by no means despicable jockies”—she may well have had in mind the confusing signals sent out by unconventional types such as Anne Lister, William Weightman or even her own sister Emily.
—
EMILY’S VIOLENTLY SUPPRESSED FEELINGS and her strong personality were a source of awe to Charlotte, who later described her nature as “standing alone” from all others. Keeper, with his intimidating bulk and strength, was her devoted familiar, and Ellen Nussey remembered how Emily used to agitate the dog on purpose to show off his ferocity, “making him frantic in action and roaring with the voice of a lion”—a violent exhibition for a Victorian sitting room. Ellen passed the test of “unresisting endurance” of Keeper’s presence, was sat on and squashed by his considerable bulk on the sofa, and watched with interest as Emily and Anne ate their porridge with Keeper and Anne’s spaniel Flossy at their sides, the two dogs waiting for the moment when the young women would hand down the bowls to be finished off.
But the incident that Charlotte witnessed (at an unspecified date) of Emily disciplining Keeper is the one that reflects her character most strangely. The dog had incurred her wrath by going upstairs once too often and dirtying the beds’ clean counterpanes with his gigantic muddy footprints. When Tabby came in to report the crime, Emily’s face whitened and her mouth set. The story was told later by Mrs. Gaskell in her biography of Charlotte: “[Charlotte] dared not speak to interfere; no one dared when Emily’s eyes glowed in that manner out of the paleness of her face, and when her lips were so compressed into stone.” She dragged the dog downstairs, he “growling low and savagely all the time,” and, having no stick to hand, set about him with her fists, punching him in the eyes before he could spring at her, until he was “half-blind, stupefied”—at which point she took him off to his bed in the kitchen and bathed the injuries she had so brutally inflicted. Mrs. Gaskell tells this story—as it had been told to her—as an example of Emily’s noble strength of character. Its dreadful sadism is all that the modern reader sees—that, and the terror that Emily must have sometimes engendered in all members of the household.
—
WEIGHTMAN’S DESCENT ON Haworth highlighted the difficulties in love that beset Charlotte, her friends and sisters—prime among which was a notable absence of suitable men and the undignified frenzy around the available stock. Already the veteran of two proposals, Charlotte felt moved to advise Ellen in mock-comic mode “as if it came from thy Grandmother” about how to conduct herself vis-à-vis Reverend Osman Parke Vincent, a friend of Henry Nussey, who seemed on the brink of proposing. His dithering, and his inappropriate discussions of his feelings with Henry rather than with Ellen, led Charlotte to suspect he was a fool, but she told her friend to weigh the case dispassionately and not “have the romantic folly to wait for the awakening of what the French call ‘Une grande passion.’ ” Brave words, and very surprising ones from the part-time resident of a fantasy land ruled by erotic forces and the creator (unknown to Ellen) of so many torrid love scenes.
“Did you not once say to me in all childlike simplicity,” she recollected, “ ‘I thought Charlotte—no young ladies should fall in love, till the offer was actually made.’ ”
I forget what answer I made at the time—but I now reply after due consideration—Right as a glove—the maxim is just—and I hope you will always attend to it—I will even extend and confirm it—no young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted—the marriage ceremony performed and the first half year of wedded life has passed away—a woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution—very coolly—very moderately—very rationally—If she ever loves so much that a harsh word or a cold look from her husband cuts her to the heart—she is a fool—if she ever loves so much that her husband’s will is her law—and that she has got into a habit of watching his looks in order that she may anticipate his wishes she will soon be a neglected fool.
“On one hand don’t accept if you are certain you cannot tolerate the man—on the other hand don’t refuse because you cannot adore him.”
Though Charlotte said she was “not quite in earnest” about parts of her letter, one wonders at the deep cynicism of her message here. Passion in women, the Grandmother concluded, renders them utterly vulnerable. Vividly in mind was a recent incident involving the most passionate female she knew, Mary Taylor, whose exceptional personality and high intelligence had roused Branwell’s interest on the Taylors’ visits to Haworth in 1839 and 1840. But as soon as Branwell had begun to realise that Mary might be just as interested in him as he was in her, he “instantly conceived a sort of contempt for her,” as Charlotte confided to Ellen. Charlotte was appalled and fascinated by Mary’s predicament, “the contempt, the remorse—the misconstruction which follow the development of feelings in themselves noble, warm—generous—devoted and profound—but which being too freely revealed—too frankly bestowed—are not estimated at their real value.” This tragic imbalance between what men and women could reveal of their feelings was to be one of Charlotte Brontë’s most striking themes, her anger at it a call to arms.
—
ONE REASON WHY Aunt Branwell might have been so put out about the midnight coffee episode, and all matters of household management, was that from the winter of 1839 the Brontës had to face the loss of Tabby. Her health had not recovered sufficiently after an accident in 1836, when she slipped on ice and dislocated her leg, and it was no longer possible for her to keep on working. Much to the sorrow of the family, it looked as if she would have to retire permanently to her sister’s house in the village, and, though the girls insisted on maintaining the closest care of their old friend, the household was left with only John Brown’s daughter Martha to serve it. Martha was strong, intelligent, able and loyal—as time amply showed—but she was only eleven years old. The Brontë sisters now had to perform the majority of the housework themselves.
Charlotte took over the cleaning and ironing, while Emily did the baking and managed the kitchen. Presumably, the family’s diet became as simple as possible in this period: they were all fond of porridge, fortunately. “We are such odd animals that we prefer this mode of contrivance to having a new face among us,” Charlotte told Ellen, and indeed it was rather peculiar for an ostensibly middle-class family to look after themselves so entirely. They didn’t want Tabby “supplanted by a stranger,” who would break up the sacred ease of home: “Human feelings are queer things,” Charlotte mused; “I am much happier—black-leading the stoves—making the beds and sweeping the floors at home, than I should be living like a fine lady anywhere else.” That said, her first attempts at doing the ironing were dangerously unsuccessful and “excited Aunt’s wrath very much.” What is noteworthy here is that they were her first attempts.
On the first day of the new decade, Branwell went as a tutor to a family called Postlethwaite in Broughton-in-Furness. As his sisters busied themselves getting his linen ready for departure, making him shirts and collars, Charlotte contemplated how she would miss his enlivening presence, but was doubtful that his new position would suit, knowing his “variable nature” and “strong turn for active life.”
In the half-year he was in Broughton, Branwell lodged in a farmhouse outside town, the home of a surgeon called Fish. His charges at Broughton House were the eleven- and twelve-year-old sons of a local magistrate, but he spent most of his time in the Lake District working on his own poetry, walking, sketching and drinking. In a cheerful, bragging letter he wrote to his Haworth boon-companion John Brown, Branwell reported how he had taken part in a drunken brawl at an inn on his journey to the Lakes, but now in his post passed as “A most calm, sedate, sober, abstemious, patient, mild-hearted, virtuous, gentlemanly philosopher,—the picture of good works, and the treasure-house of righteous thoughts.” At his landlord’s house, they put away glasses and playing-cards when he entered the room, out of respect for his apparent temperance, and he was often to be found drinking tea with old ladies, a model of respectability. But “as to the young ones!” he boasted, “I have one sitting by me just now—fair-faced, blue-eyed, dark-haired, sweet eighteen—she little thinks the devil is so near her!”
Perhaps this young lady, or one like her, led to Branwell’s dismissal in June following some scandalous, unrecorded revelation about his conduct. He had certainly been found by the Postlethwaites to be negligent of his duties and “visibly the worst for drink” on more than one occasion, but Juliet Barker has made a strong case for Branwell having possibly fathered an illegitimate child during his Lancashire soujourn, based on Richard Monckton Milnes’s note after talking to John Brown’s family in 1859: “[Branwell] left Mr. Postlethwaites with a natural child by one of the daughters or servants—which died.”
Branwell was not at all committed to a career as a tutor, and while in Broughton had written more soliciting letters, one to Thomas De Quincey and another to Hartley Coleridge, well known to the Brontës from his 1833 volume of poems and through his appearances in Blackwood’s Magazine as “The Old Bachelor.” Branwell’s approach was much less brash and swaggering than in his letter to Wordsworth and paid off when Coleridge responded in a friendly manner, inviting Branwell to call on him in Rydal, just as Southey had invited Charlotte to Greta Bridge the previous year. Unlike Charlotte, it was easy and possible for Branwell to accept, and he set out from Broughton in the highest excitement on the first of May to meet the man he believed could be his conduit to “that formidable personage, a London bookseller.” Branwell had originally sent Coleridge a long poem, “At dead of midnight—drearily,” and some versions of Horace’s Odes. On the day they met, Coleridge encouraged him to continue with the latter, in which he found “merit enough to commend without flattery.”
Branwell’s dismissal in June cut short his chances to hob-nob with Coleridge again, but doesn’t seem to have bothered him a bit. His sights were set on higher things now, and he returned home wiser but not sad at all. Whatever it was that he was accused of in Broughton, he concealed the worst of it and no one at home believed him to have been in the wrong. He was still “my poor brother,” an underappreciated golden boy, in Charlotte’s eyes and in those of her sisters.
Branwell’s successful connection with Hartley Coleridge encouraged Charlotte to solicit the writer’s attention too, and she wrote to him sometime in late 1840, sending an early version of her attempted novel “Ashworth” under the initials “CT”—which fitted either her Angrian pseudonyms Captain Tree and Charles Townshend, or the persona of “Charles Thunder” that she pursued with Ellen—and which concealed, most importantly, her sex, the issue that had distracted Southey so much. Coleridge sent CT’s manuscript back with a note (now lost) that might have been brusquely candid, for Charlotte used the opportunity to reply in satirical vein, thanking him for having bothered to read her “demi-semi novelette” but also suggesting that he had dismissed it too quickly: “I do not think you would have hesitated to do the same to the immortal Sir Charles Grandison if Samuel Richardson Esqr. had sent you the first letters of Miss Harriet Byron—and Miss Lucy Selby for inspection.” His opinion left her little choice but to put the manuscript away “till I get sense to produce something which shall at least aim at an object of some kind and meantime bind myself apprentice to a chemist and druggist if I am a young gentleman or to a Milliner and Dressmaker if I am a young lady.” She felt she had earned the right to tease him, and, under cover of CT’s genderless initials, did so mercilessly. “It is very pleasant to have something in one’s power,” she wrote, refraining to divulge how she had got hold of his address (from Branwell, of course). To puzzle him further, she also seems to have introduced more special knowledge, not just of Hartley Coleridge’s close relation to Wordsworth (which any fan might have found out) but of the complex imaginary kingdom that Coleridge had created for himself and retreated to obsessively as a child, called Ejuxria, so similar in kind to Angria and Gondal.
It is very edifying and profitable to create a world out of one’s own brain and people it with inhabitants who are like so many Melchisedecs—“Without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life”…If you have ever been accustomed to such society Sir you will be aware how distinctly and vividly their forms and features fix themselves on the retina of that “inward eye” which is said to be “the bliss of solitude.”
Coleridge might well have told Branwell about Ejuxria at their friendly meeting in May; its importance to him, just like Angria and Gondal to the Brontës, was a source both of comfort and of anxiety. It must have been odd to have this stranger, “CT,” hit on something so close to his own heart, and one can sense Charlotte relishing the power she had over him here, playful and mischievous, but also punishing him for his mistake in dismissing her.
Narratives like “Ashworth,” “Caroline Vernon” and “Henry Hastings” (jointly authored with Branwell) show Charlotte’s strategic push away from the old Angrian tropes in the hope of breaking into the real world of letters with an acceptably realistic style of story. She made her intentions clear in a little manifesto, named by her later editors “Farewell to Angria,” the survival of which seems amazing, given its insignificant look. It is written in faint pencil on a scrap of paper in size and type like the ones she used at Roe Head to write on surreptitiously during lessons, and the tiny writing floats off-line occasionally, as do the other manuscripts that were written with her eyes shut. She is addressing a “Reader” who is familiar with the works she speaks of putting aside:
It is no easy thing to dismiss from my imagination the images which have filled it so long. They were my friends & my intimate acquaintance & I could with little labour describe to you the faces, the voices, the actions, of those who peopled my thoughts by day & not seldom stole strangely even into my dreams by night. When I depart from these I feel almost as if I stood on the threshold of a home & were bidding farewell to its inmates. When I but strive to conjure up new inmates, I feel as if I had got into a distant country where every face was unknown & the character of all the population an enigma which it would take much study to comprehend & much talent to expound. Still, I long to quit for a while that burning clime where we have sojourned too long.
But it would take a while longer to put the shadow-world behind her and forgo the heat and excitement of that “burning clime.”
—
CHARLOTTE FELT OBLIGED to look for another job, but did so with obvious reluctance. “I wish [the Misses Wooler] or somebody else would get me a Situation,” she complained to Ellen. “I have answered advertisements without number—but my applications have met with no success.” She was looking for jobs near home and in small families, to avoid the difficulties of Stonegappe, for, as she told Henry Nussey the following year, “it is indeed a hard thing for flesh and blood to leave home—especially a good home—not a wealthy or splendid one—my home is humble and unattractive to strangers but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world—[?the] profound, and intense affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other when their minds are cast in the same mould, their ideas drawn from the same source—when they have clung to each other from childhood and when family disputes have never sprung up to divide them.”
The post she went to in March 1841 was as governess to the White family of Upperwood House, Apperley Bridge. It was very near to Woodhouse Grove, where her mother Maria had been living with the Fennells in 1812 when she met Patrick Brontë, so the associations should have been comforting. Mr. White was a merchant, and Charlotte liked him well enough (she did always have a tendency to judge men less harshly than their wives); Mrs. White struck her as shallow and snobbish. Her charges were a girl of eight and a boy of six, but, again, it was the extra duties, and endless amounts of sewing, that annoyed the governess most, and that emphasised her servant status humiliatingly. Though she had hoped the Whites would be less condescending towards her than the Sidgwicks had been, she knew from the start she could not be comfortable under “the heavy duty of endeavouring to seem always easy, cheerful & conversible with those whose ideas and feelings are nearly as incomprehensible to me, as probably mine (if I shewed them unreservedly) would be to them.”
It is doubtful that Charlotte ever seemed “cheerful & conversible” in her governess work, for she knew that she lacked all the necessary qualities of temperament for it. Many years later, advising her friend W. S. Williams on careers for his daughters, she cautioned that a governess had to be “Of pleasing exterior (that is always an advantage—children like it—) good sense, obliging disposition, cheerful, healthy, possessing a good average capacity, but no prominent master talent to make her miserable by its cravings for exercise by its mutiny under restraint.” Given those rather bland excellences, a governess could indeed be happy and successful, but Charlotte knew herself to be disqualified on several grounds.
A Mrs. Slade recalled many years later (when Charlotte was dead, and famous as the author of Jane Eyre) that she had a vivid memory of the young governess “sitting apart from the rest of the family, in a corner of the room, poring, in her short-sighted way, over a book.” Her impression was of a person ill at ease, “who desired to escape notice and to avoid taking part in the general conversation”—exactly the character that Charlotte complained of being forced to assume, and that her heroine articulates so well. In the brief holiday she had at home, Charlotte planned avidly to get herself out of this obnoxious existence for good.
—
BRANWELL’S NEXT JOB after his dismissal from Broughton was in a totally new direction: he became a booking clerk at Sowerby Bridge Station on the new Leeds-to-Manchester railway in September 1840. It was not quite the sort of transport that his admired Lake poets wrote about, but Branwell seemed happy with the move, as it allowed him time to write and draw. His spirits were buoyant, in fact, and when his friend Leyland’s brother Francis met him for the first time, it was a young man on the way up, not the way down, who emerged from the office, laughing and talking, who “seemed to be qualified for a much better position than the one he had chosen.” Branwell was perfectly cast in the part of undiscovered genius—as long as the discovery didn’t take too long.
The recollections that Branwell’s acquaintances left of him at this time give some idea of the rushes of energy that frequently possessed him and made him valued company, especially at convivial, all-male drinking sessions. One friend recalled how when Branwell was stirred by “some topic that he was acquainted with, or some author he loved, he would rise from his seat, and, in beautiful language, describe the author’s character, with a zeal and fluency I had never heard equalled.” Francis Leyland witnessed similar vatic outpourings when art and literature were being discussed: “almost involuntarily, [he] would rise to his feet, and, with a beaming countenance, treat the subject with a vivid flow of imagination, displaying the rich stores of his information with wondrous and enthralling eloquence.” “Almost involuntarily” recalls Charlotte’s escapist removals into “the world below,” only here there was an audience, and alcohol. Branwell suffered none of the public shyness of his sisters, so his moments of imaginative flight in the company of others perhaps give us some idea of how the siblings all behaved, when they were together at home. Charlotte was known to have such capacities herself at school, and would very occasionally “dramatise when her spirits rose to the necessary pitch of excitement.” Mary and Martha Taylor’s brother Joe had heard such reports of Charlotte’s flights that on one occasion he determined to orchestrate a demonstration, declaring he was going “to stir Miss Brontë up to the exhibiting point”—but she was forewarned, and refused to oblige. It was exactly this potential to burst out of character that had provoked Mr. Pryce into his proposal.
Emily was formidable both in her character of “The Major” and socially, withering people with her silences and disapproval. Anne was perhaps the only true introvert in the family, having “a remarkably taciturn, still, thoughtful nature, reserved even with her nearest of kin,” as Charlotte described it. This might have been provoked, and certainly not helped, by her speech defect, which would have made it difficult to get a word in edgewise with her excitable siblings. Emily’s particular care of Anne, and sympathetic silence, shows a sensitivity to this issue.
Charlotte and Branwell were therefore a natural pair, rivals for the world’s attention, though, as they grew up, Charlotte’s opportunities to be stirred “to the exhibiting point” shrank to almost none, while Branwell paraded a shabby version almost every night in the pub, a village Demosthenes presiding over homespun orations. But, underneath the bluster and egotism, Branwell was possibly more like his sisters than has been recognised and did not feel at home in his fate of having to go out into the world and make masculine noises. William Heaton saw a much quieter side to him: “I shall never forget his love for the sublime and beautiful works of Nature, nor how he would tell of the lovely flowers and rare plants he had observed by the mountain stream and woodland rill.”
Branwell transferred from Sowerby Bridge to Luddenden Foot in March 1841, a new but insignificant station on the Manchester-to-Leeds line, housed in a temporary wooden hut, with little to do all day but read or write alone in his office, or go to the inn for society.*4 Emily’s sardonic remark was that “it looks like getting on at any rate.” Branwell recalled his year at Luddenden Foot as a “nightmare” of “malignant yet cold debauchery,” and in a rare moment of self-knowledge said he had been “lost…to all I really liked.” He was to surprise everyone, though, just a few weeks into his new post, when he became the first of the siblings to achieve their joint dream—publication—with the appearance in The Halifax Guardian of a poem called “Heaven and Earth.” Branwell had used the pseudonym “Northangerland,” which must have been shocking for Charlotte to see in the local press, as if the personae of her imagination were advancing across the borders of her two worlds.*5
Branwell was sustained through his tedious work-days by this success and the promise of more to come (he placed another poem, this time a very topical one on the Afghan War, in The Leeds Intelligencer the next year). He had an indulgent circle of friends at Luddenden Foot, including Francis Grundy, a railway engineer working on the new lines in Yorkshire, through whom Branwell hoped for promotion. Grundy was one of few outsiders invited to visit the Parsonage, and he left a vividly unflattering description of its occupants: the father “distantly courteous, white-haired, tall” greeted him with ponderous politeness, whereas the daughters said nothing, possibly because they sensed Grundy’s judgement of their persons—“distant and distrait, large of nose, small of figure, red of hair, prominent of spectacles.” Even Branwell, reputedly the best-looking of the young Brontës, he found “the reverse of attractive at first sight.”
—
ON HER BIRTHDAY in July 1841, Emily Brontë sat at home, writing her four-yearly Diary Paper, to be kept for comparison with her lot in 1837 and in 1845. “A scheme is at present in agitation for setting us up in a school of our own,” she reported, with her characteristic tone of detached interest; “as yet nothing is determined but I hope and trust it may go on and prosper and answer our highest expectations. This day 4-years I wonder whether we shall still be dragging on in our present condition or established to our heart’s content Time will show—”
I guess that at the time appointed for the opening of this paper—we (i.e.) Charlotte, Anne and I shall be all merrily seated in our own sitting-room in some pleasant and flourishing seminary having just gathered in for the midsummer holydays our debts will be paid off and we shall have cash in hand to a considerable amount. papa Aunt and Branwell will either have been—or be coming—to visit us—it will be a fine warm summery evening. very different from this bleak look-out Anne and I will perchance slip out into the garden a [illeg.] minutes to peruse our papers. I hope either this [o]r something better will be the case—
Anne, writing her own Diary Paper on the same day, far away in Scarborough with the family called Robinson for whom she now worked, also mentioned the school plan, and how she hoped it would happen. She spoke as if it were not in her hands: “nothing definite is settled about it yet, and we do not know whether we shall be able to or not.”
Charlotte was the one sister pressing to make the scheme succeed, and she found an ally in Aunt Branwell, who thought it a very reasonable solution to the problem of both living and working for three poor, possibly unmarriageable spinsters. The example of the Misses Wooler was encouraging, and the Brontë girls were intellectually so far above the average that there was no question of their capability. Aunt Branwell generously spoke of lending them £150 to get started, as long as they could get enough pupils to start up and find “an eligible situation.” No one was thinking of siting the school in Haworth Parsonage at this point; Charlotte had a fancy to try Bridlington, where she had had such an enjoyable holiday with Ellen. Ellen herself featured in Charlotte’s hopes for the plan—she wondered if her friend might be persuaded to join her, Emily and Anne. The sentence containing this suggestion was heavily scored through by Ellen later, who for some reason did not want the offer remembered.
The kind of establishment that Charlotte imagined might have been like the one her heroine Elizabeth envisions for herself in the story “Henry Hastings,” a school for older girls only (not the usual mix of all ages and abilities), “those who had already mastered the elements of education—reading, commenting, explaining, leaving it to them to listen—if they failed, comfortably conscious that the blame would rest on her pupils, not herself.” Like Emily imagining herself debt-free and on permanent holiday, Charlotte’s idea of running a school was not very realistic, but she saw it as the only way to secure a modicum of freedom. She understood by 1841 that she could not survive as a governess and she did not want to go back to teaching in someone else’s school, even though Miss Wooler that year asked her to take over the running of Heald’s House. The example that encouraged Charlotte most was that of Mary Taylor. For some years now, the well-travelled Taylors had been sharing their French newspapers with Charlotte and sending her “bales” of French books (one package contained about forty volumes—an education in itself). Mr. Taylor was especially keen to have his girls finish their schooling abroad and acquire languages. But when he died early in 1841, the family began to break up quickly. Mary did not get on well with her mother and, with her brother Waring, was already thinking of emigrating to the other side of the world—New Zealand. Her brothers Joe and John were going to live at the cottage attached to Hunsworth Mill, and the girls were off to school in Brussels, where Martha had already spent a year.
Back with the White family at Upperwood House, Charlotte read a letter from Mary describing her travels in Belgium and Holland that summer that seemed to light a fuse in her heart:
I hardly know what swelled to my throat as I read her letter—such a vehement impatience of restraint & steady work. such a strong wish for wings—wings such as wealth can furnish—such an urgent thirst to see—to know—to learn—something internal seemed to expand boldly for a minute—I was tantalized with the consciousness of faculties unexercised
The degradations she experienced as an employee and the stifling of potential that led to “estrangement from one’s real character,” as she expressed it poignantly to Ellen, did not, surely, have to be tolerated for ever. The only reasonable escape route was to set up their own school, and the essential qualification to attract pupils would be languages, culture, “finish.” An ardent correspondence with Mary and Martha followed, a careful appeal to Aunt Branwell for funds, an anxious wait before Aunt agreed to lend her two elder nieces the large sum, £150, necessary to cover their expenses for a year. Then, gloriously, Charlotte was able to hand in her notice to Mr. and Mrs. White and announce to them that she and her sister were going abroad, to study.
*1 A heavily annotated volume, now in the Brontë Parsonage Museum. It was Patrick Brontë’s health-advice bible.
*2 Ann Baer has brought to my attention her article in Book Collector ([Summer 2014], 281–2), “Stoning Charlotte Brontë,” in which she repeats her aunt Margie Sidgwick’s recollection of being visited in Oxford “at some unknown date, but probably in the 1920s,” by “a very old man” called Benson Sidgwick, who claimed cousinship and told Margie “that he had once thrown a stone at Charlotte Brontë and hit her.”
*3 As he does in “Ashworth” too, and most memorably in Jane Eyre, as Rochester’s Pilot.
*4 The depths of Branwell’s boredom might be suggested by a story John Brown told some visitors to Haworth in 1866: “on one occasion when he was station master, being hurried over some necessary letter writing, two important letters remained to be written before the next train came in. The train was in sight, so Branwell, taking two sheets of paper and two pens, sat down and wrote two letters at the same time on two entirely different subjects” (“A Visit to Haworth in 1866,” BST, 15:78 [1968]).
*5 The date of publication was 5 June 1841. I am assuming that his sisters did get to know of this feat, as Branwell would have been the least capable person on earth of keeping it to himself.