TEN

But Gilbert’s domestic contentment is broken by visions of the rejected girl drowning, and when her ghost appears, dripping, at his door, he is filled with remorse for his heartlessness and commits suicide. As a form of wish-fulfilment for Charlotte, it was a bleak and vengeful one. “Frances” too indicates that her period of idealising Heger was over, and her former devotion was turning into anger. Frances has been the dupe of deferred hope as much as false love, as she realises at the end of the poem:

And we might meet—time may have changed him;

Chance may reveal the mystery,

The secret influence which estranged him;

Love may restore him yet to me.

False thought—false hope—in scorn be banished!

I am not loved—nor loved have been;

Recall not, then, the dreams scarce vanished,

Traitors! mislead me not again!

—

BY THE END of February, Charlotte felt it possible to take her first visit away from home in seven months, to Ellen at Birstall. Returning on the new train line to Keighley on 2 March, she walked the old road back to Haworth,^*2 thereby missing Emily and Anne, who had gone to meet her the other way. Perhaps they had wanted to prepare her for what she would find at home: Branwell silent and stupefied in bed. He had wheedled a sovereign out of their father in her absence on the pretense of needing to pay a debt and “employed it as was to be expected.” “[It] was very forced work to address him,” Charlotte wrote bitterly to Ellen later. “I might have spared myself the trouble as he took no notice & made no reply.” What a sad image this is of the siblings who were formerly so close, one coldly disapproving and the other locked in sullen defiant silence. When Emily and Anne got home, two hours later and soaked to the skin, Emily said she thought Branwell had become “a hopeless being,” a rare criticism from that quarter. Charlotte’s response was less sorrowful than disgusted: “In his present state,” she wrote to Ellen, “it is scarcely possible to stay in the room where he is—what the future has in store—I do not know.”

Given Branwell’s hopelessness, the question of what to do in the event of their father losing his sight was more pressing than ever, and while she was away Charlotte had been canvassing medical opinion among the Nusseys’ friends. She now tried to encourage him to submit to an eye operation, though Reverend Brontë was very fearful and glad to find excuses to defer any action as long as possible. His anxieties transmitted readily to his daughter, who told her cousin “we shall be most thankful when it is well over for there is something formidable in the idea.” Meanwhile, Patrick needed to be led to the pulpit to preach, a sight full of pathos to parishioners no doubt, many of whom knew all about the trouble their vicar was having at home and how withdrawn the Brontë family had become. Fortunately, Mr. Nicholls the curate was proving very kind and useful, took many of Reverend Brontë’s services for him and provided a discreet buffer between the parish and the Parsonage. He lodged at the house of John Brown the sexton, so must have been well aware of everything going on there, but he was loyally silent on all delicate matters.

Thrown back on their resources, emotional and artistic, and desperately alert to the question of income, the sisters had made a bold decision while their poems were in production: not to wait for the reception of the book, but to press on immediately with trying to get their fiction before the public too. Charlotte was again the interlocutor for all three: the “Bells” were prepared to shape their work, she told Aylott and Jones, “three distinct and unconnected tales,” in whatever format would be most likely to appeal. Charlotte was trying to guess what that might be: “a work of 3 vols. of the ordinary novel-size, or separately as single vols.” She stipulated that they did not wish to be published at their own expense this time, but at the publisher’s risk. Clearly, the Bells expected Aylott and Jones to have been sufficiently impressed by their poems to be interested in a work of fiction from the same pens.

The sisters got a discouraging answer about their proposed novel, but this was hardly surprising: Aylott and Jones were known for their theological works, not “light literature,” and, much more importantly, the novel that was being proposed must have sounded—and was—far too “unconnected” to be viable as a single publication. The three-volume model that was standard at the time was a substantial thing, typically of about 160,000 words. No one was likely to want to publish three much shorter books under one cover, nor publish them separately.

If Aylott and Jones had asked to see the “three tales” they might well have been astonished, for volume one consisted of “The Master,” Charlotte’s novel about Brussels (retitled, at an unknown date, The Professor); volume two was Wuthering Heights; and volume three Agnes Grey. How Wuthering Heights as we know it could ever have been sandwiched comfortably between any two other stories is a moot question; it seems a strange arrangement on grounds of length alone, and the scholars Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham are surely right to guess that Emily expanded her story later, and that the version proposed in 1846 was much shorter, possibly ending with the death of the elder Cathy.^*3 The Professor and Agnes Grey are both about the same length, approximately 70,000 to 80,000 words.

How long Emily had been preparing Wuthering Heights, and whether it was connected to any of her Gondal chronicles, is not known. The opening chapters are some of the most gripping ever written in English romance, and it is amazing to think they came from the pen of a young woman whose gaze had been turned inward for so long and who seemed to have so little concern for popular taste. The novel is nothing like a love story in any ordinary sense. The bond between Cathy and Heathcliff comes from the mutual recognition of like souls, a psychic identification that has little to do with their circumstances, and makes it almost redundant for the hero and heroine (if those words apply) to be paired off in the novel. Catherine tells the old housekeeper Nelly Dean, in a speech which has become one of the most famous and quoted in nineteenth-century literature, that she loves Heathcliff “because he’s more myself than I am…my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but, as my own being.” The reclusive and misanthropic second daughter of the Parsonage turned out to have a romantic vision more extravagant than any novelist before her. It was primal, visceral and decidedly heretical: “heaven did not seem to be my home,” Cathy says after she has dreamt of going there; “and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”

In Charlotte’s tribute to, and defence of, the book later, it was clear that, while she admired many things about her sister’s novel, she also found it profoundly disturbing and difficult, as many other readers have too. Why was it so violent, so impious? Where had these brutish characters and coarse action come from? Charlotte discouraged the idea that Emily had had any personal experience similar to that in the book—Heathcliff’s beatings and incarcerations of his family, the long attritions played out against Hindley and Linton and the younger Catherine, the brutalising of Hareton—but it was almost as alarming to think that Emily had spun such things out of her own head. Emily seemed to have no idea how unconventional her resulting portraits were: “If the auditor of her work when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of natures so relentless and implacable, of spirits so lost and fallen; if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation.” Even before it was published, there was a great deal about Wuthering Heights that made Charlotte uncomfortable.

Anne Brontë’s contribution to the proposed three-decker made a jolting change of tone and style. Agnes Grey was a profoundly autobiographical account of the trials of a young governess, which she later claimed was “carefully copied from the life, with a most scrupulous avoidance of all exaggeration.” It is hard to see where Anne Brontë got her reputation for being “mild” and “quiet.” Her novels, as the next one was to show even more explicitly, are seething with irritation, and their trapped heroines find only the bleakest and bitterest comfort from their superior morals and sensibilities. Agnes Grey’s own impotence makes her a chilly and severe judge; her hope for her rival Rosalie’s dangerous beauty is that it will eventually lead her into such folly that she will be “incapacitated from deceiving and injuring others.” All Agnes’s virtues are expressed in the negative, and act out in peculiar forms, none more so than in the disgusting scene in which she crushes a nest of baby birds. Her collusion with Rosalie’s ruse to be alone with Mr. Hatfield is deeply cynical, as is her conclusion that beautiful but heartless women might have been created by an omniscient deity as a “useful” punishment for men, “as vain, as selfish, and as heartless.”

The novel must have come as something of a revelation to Charlotte, who clearly saw in Anne’s exposé of governess life potential for better use of her own autobiographical experiences. Agnes is at every sort of worldly disadvantage—impoverished, unbeautiful, insignificant—but insists on her essential worth and holds to the belief that she is at least the equal of “her betters.” The happy ending, with marriage to the virtuous and delightful curate Weston (often imagined to be a portrait of William Weightman), triumphs over the tyranny of being judged on appearances, but the problem lingers in the reader’s mind long after the happy ending has been arranged. Although Agnes knows that “it is foolish to wish for beauty,” nevertheless she can’t help wishing she had some, if only to avoid the isolation or, worse, “instinctive dislike” that unbeautiful women constantly encounter.

That Anne had experienced “a passion of grief” was clear also from Agnes’s heartfelt recollection of her own, when she feels that her love for Weston will never be recognised or reciprocated, a passage that would have provoked Charlotte’s assent: “Yes! at least, they could not deprive me of that; I could think of him day and night; and I could feel that he was worthy to be thought of. Nobody knew him as I did; nobody could appreciate him as I did; nobody could love him as I…could, if I might; but there was the evil. What business had I to think so much of one that never thought of me? Was it not foolish?…was it not wrong?”

Here, and in Emily’s novel, was an emotional force that Charlotte had denied in her own first fiction in the effort to make it more acceptable, more “realistic.” But her sisters showed her how to move forward. Charlotte was always learning, watching, turning the lock to find the right combination. Putting together Anne’s autobiographical governess plot with her own story of Master and subordinate, and adding thrilling Gothic flights similar to those that made Wuthering Heights so electrifying, Charlotte began the process of creative amalgamation that would result in Jane Eyre.

—

ALL THREE NOVELS, The Professor, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, must have been well advanced by the date of Charlotte’s letter to Aylott and Jones of April 1846, enquiring about possible publication; her own manuscript was completed on 27 June. The Haworth bookseller, John Greenwood, had begun to stock stationery in his shop and later told Mrs. Gaskell how the demand for paper from the Brontë daughters at this time made him wonder what they were doing with so much of it. “I sometimes thought they contributed to the Magazines. When I was out of stock, I was always afraid of their coming; they seemed so distressed about it, if I had none.” Greenwood was so eager to oblige the Misses Brontë, whom he always found “much different to anybody else; so gentle and kind,” that he would rather walk the eight or ten miles to Halifax to fetch a half-ream than have nothing to sell them.

Unknown to him, the dining room of the Parsonage had been turned into something like a book factory, as the sisters paced round the table, reading, listening and discussing each other’s work, and sat bent over their portable desks for hours, writing. “The sisters retained the old habit…of putting away their work at nine o’clock, and beginning their steady pacing up and down the sitting room,” Mrs. Gaskell heard later from Charlotte. “At this time, they talked over the stories they were engaged upon, and discussed their plots. Once or twice a week, each read to the others what she had written, and heard what they had to say about it.” Patrick Brontë never thought to inquire what they were doing. He was used to his children spending the greater part of their time together, his self-sufficiency being equal to their own. “I never interfer’d with them at these times,” he told Mrs. Gaskell. “I judged it best to throw them upon their own responsibility.”

Charlotte admitted to Elizabeth Gaskell that she had rarely changed anything in her work because of her sisters’ opinions; indeed, her creation of Jane Eyre as a plain and insignificant-seeming heroine, she said, was in direct defiance of them, though this is hard to square with Anne’s characterisation of Agnes Grey, whom Jane resembles quite closely. Charlotte told fellow novelist Harriet Martineau that she had “once told her sisters that they were wrong—even morally wrong—in making their heroines beautiful as a matter of course. They replied that it was impossible to make a heroine interesting on any other terms. Her answer was, ‘I will prove to you that you are wrong; I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours.’ ” This sounds less like collaboration than invigorating competition. Emily had seen no reason for anyone to lose sleep over her depiction of Heathcliff, and had no intention of changing it accordingly. Charlotte was just as inflexible and “possessed…with the feeling that she had described reality.” Nevertheless, the nocturnal readings in the Parsonage dining room were “of great and stirring interest to all.”

—

ALL THAT YEAR, the sisters had been hoping for some improvement in Branwell’s situation, preferably his removal from the house: “how can we be more comfortable so long as Branwell stays at home and degenerates instead of improving?” Charlotte wrote to Ellen. He had been offered his old job back on the railway, a rather remarkable break, which Charlotte of course expected him to seize on with gratitude, but Branwell was in no state to respond. “He refuses to make an effort,” she wrote in disgust; “he will not work—and at home he is a drain on every resource—an impediment to all happiness—But there’s no use in complaining.”

Branwell felt equally affronted at “the inability to make my family aware of the nature of most of my sufferings.” But while he lay in bed, planning an epic poem called “Morley Hall,” which kind Leyland had suggested and probably commissioned (it was to be based on a story in Leyland’s own family history ^*4), Charlotte continued as his secret scourge, punishing him for his own disabling vanity and pernicious addiction by keeping him entirely unaware of what his sisters were doing. He “never knew,” Charlotte said later, “what his sisters had done in literature—he was not aware that they had ever published a line.” It was a most peculiar revenge, and one that, in the years following his death, she had no desire to recall. But in these months, while she was finishing The Professor, her feelings could not be entirely contained, as this outburst, utterly unrelated to the action of the novel, indicates:

if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish…God, spirits, religion can have no place in our collapsed minds where linger only hideous and polluting recollections of vice; and Time brings us on to the brink of the grave and Dissolution flings us in—a rag eaten through and through with disease, wrung together with pain, stamped into the churchyard sod by the inexorable heel of Despair.

Patrick Brontë was also kept in the dark about the forthcoming book, but perhaps there were other people, in or around the Parsonage, who were suspicious of the sudden postal traffic between an address in London and “C. Brontë Esq.” The “Esquire” was an assumption on Aylott and Jones’s part that Charlotte did nothing to correct until the proof sheets of the poems arrived in March and were somehow diverted, perhaps just momentarily, into the wrong hands, “a little mistake,” as Charlotte described it, that obviously threatened, but didn’t break, their cover at home. Charlotte asked the publisher to address all further correspondence to “Miss Brontë”—a declaration of her sex that she had hitherto avoided—but the interference with the post continued, and on receipt of the finished books in May, she reported back to Aylott and Jones that their last three letters and the parcel itself “had all been opened—where or by whom, I cannot discover; the paper covering the parcel was torn in pieces and the books were brought in loose.” Was someone at the post office opening up her mail?

As production of the Poems progressed, Charlotte’s opinion of Aylott and Jones diminished. Their main interest seemed to be in selling more services to the hopeful authors, but, having spent so much already, the sisters baulked at finding more money for advertising, and kept it to a minimum, £2.00.^*5 If the review copies resulted in good notices, Charlotte was prepared to think again, but that moment never came. The little book arrived in May, bound in dark green cloth, with the words Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell 4/– embossed inside a geometrical design on the cover. The sisters’ pleasure at handling their published work can be imagined: the solidity of the production, the excellence of the poems, the authority conferred by print—and anonymity.

The book was available to the public by the end of May, but the public did not seem to notice. Though Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell got three hearteningly affirmative reviews some time later—two on the same day in July and one in October—the sales were absurdly, extravagantly low—two copies, Charlotte believed: worse than nothing.

It was certainly an odd introduction to the world of letters. The elaborate defences of the pseudonyms now seemed hardly necessary, in fact quite an unwelcome distraction, since the first reviewer, in the Critic, used much of his wordage puzzling over the lack of editorial or biographical information about the Bells instead of doing what the authors had clearly intended: judging the poems “upon their own merits alone, apart from all extraneous circumstances.” The Dublin University Magazine also wondered whether the Bells “be in truth but one master spirit,” and all three reviewers felt the compulsion to rank them, the Athenaeum placing Ellis firmly at the top, with this perceptive remark: “a fine quaint spirit has the latter, which may have things to speak that men will be glad to hear,—and an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted.” All three “brothers” were included in the Critic’s equally warm praise for the originality and sincerity of their poetry, and “the presence of more genius than it was supposed this utilitarian age had devoted to the loftier exercises of the intellect.”

The publication was a terrible anti-climax, though, and confirmed Emily in her belief that the whole thing had been a bad idea. She might well have taken secret pleasure in the fact that her contributions to the book garnered the most praise from the reviewers, but at home she referred to her work dismissively as “rhymes” and by 1848 “never alludes to them,” as Charlotte reported, “or when she does—it is with scorn.” Charlotte was determined to make the best of the experience, however: they could at least now present themselves as “published authors” to the publishers they hoped to interest in their novels. The strange package of stories went out in July to the publisher Henry Colburn, who refused it, but, undaunted, Charlotte sent it out again every time it came home.

And their book of poems was not entirely without readers: copy for copy, it had astonishing effect. A letter arrived at the Parsonage two months later from a nineteen-year-old called Frederick Enoch, of Warwick, who ought to go down in literary history as the John the Baptist of the Brontës’ fame. He had not only bought the Bells’ Poems, but was moved to write and praise them, and ask for the favour of the authors’ autographs. The signatures that were sent him have now, by various by-ways, come back to Haworth Parsonage and are on exhibition in the Museum, the only examples of the sisters’ writing together on one sheet. How novel it must have been for the girls to sign, for the first time, as their authorial alter egos—Currer Bell, Ellis Bell, Acton Bell—a lone but puissant contact with their tiny readership.

—

AT EXACTLY THE TIME between the arrival of the printed Poems and the first reviews, in early June 1846, a bombshell hit the Parsonage in the form of an unexpected visitor from Thorp Green, the Robinsons’ coachman, William Allison. What Branwell’s thoughts could have been—or Anne’s—at the sudden appearance of this former fellow employee, almost a year after their painful severance of communication with the family, can only be guessed. The very surprising news that Allison brought would certainly have given Branwell a momentary rush of almost unbearable hope—Edmund Robinson had died, aged forty-six, on 26 May, after a three-month illness. But in virtually the same breath, and clearly well rehearsed, Allison made it clear that this did not open the way to the new widow’s arms: in fact no sort of approach to Mrs. Robinson would be possible. She was in “a dreadful state of health,” Branwell related feelingly to Leyland the next day; “the account which [Allison] gave of her sufferings was enough to burst my heart.” Apparently, Mrs. Robinson was only able to kneel in her bedroom “in bitter tears and prayers,” following the final illness of her husband, “worn…out in attendance on him.” Whether the coachman had provided these details or whether they sprang from Branwell’s volatile imagination is hard to tell, but the message was clear: for the good of Lydia’s health and mental equilibrium, Branwell must stay away from Thorp Green.^*6

Branwell seems to have believed what he told Leyland, which was that Edmund Robinson had changed his will, leaving his wife “quite powerless” in the matter of further communication with her former lover. But Robinson’s actual will, altered in January 1846, mentions nothing of the sort,^*7 so the widow may well have planted this misinformation on purpose to work on Branwell’s feelings and keep him at bay. Unknown to Branwell, she had undergone a change of heart towards her husband now that he was dead, referring to him as “my angel Edmund” in her account book (a suitable place, perhaps). It seems that in the months following the traumatic discovery of her adultery in the summer of 1845, Lydia Robinson had ceased to want to give up everything—or indeed anything—for love of Branwell Brontë.

Without any direct communication allowed between them, Branwell’s delusions about his situation flourished. The new obstacles to his happiness gave him as much traction as had the old ones and he wrote to Leyland in a sort of wretched ecstasy, telling him that he was so much persona non grata at Thorp Green that one of Robinson’s trustees had threatened to shoot him on sight, a remarkable claim given that one of the trustees was an archdeacon and the other an MP. Branwell couldn’t eat or sleep but maintained a tortured watch over events. “What I shall do I know not,” he wrote. “I am too hard to die, and too wretched to live…my mind sees only a dreary future which I as little wish to enter on, as could a martyr to be bound to the stake”—an image he drew and sent to Leyland.

Branwell’s letters to his friends seem confident of their interest in the continuing melodrama of his circumstances, but at home he had overplayed his hand long before, and he knew it. Charlotte was the most steely of all, believing him to be using the news from Thorp Green merely as a “pretext to throw all about him into hubbub and confusion with his emotions—&c. &c.” His distress, drinking, even his threats of suicide she interpreted as signs of hopelessly weakened character: “[he] declares now that he neither can nor will do anything for himself—good situations have been offered more than once—for which by a fortnight’s work he might have qualified himself—but he will do nothing—except drink, and make us all wretched.”

The revulsion in Charlotte’s tone is hardly surprising from one who had striven so long to improve herself in the cause of earning an independence. The more hopeless Branwell became, the more stringently Charlotte went about doing her duty. When, in the summer of 1846, Ellen began to talk of having to earn a living herself (because of the pressures on her family from her brother Joseph’s dissipation and her brother George’s mental breakdown), Charlotte advised her categorically to do as she was doing: to put off thoughts of independence while there was a pressing need for her to be at home. “The right path is that which necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest,” Charlotte pronounced sternly, “which implies the greatest good to others—and this path steadily followed will lead I believe in time to prosperity and to happiness though it may seem at the outset to tend quite in a contrary direction.”

To the outside eye, it did look as if all three Brontë girls had given up the idea of work, just when the family needed money most. Ellen did not know about the Brontë sisters’ poems, or their hopes of making money from writing (rather than losing it). And none of them looked likely to marry, though Ellen had heard some juicy gossip—from whom? Charlotte demanded—that “Miss Brontë was…going to be married to her papa’s Curate.” The accusation earned a scornful reply, which, when she saw the letter in 1856, Mrs. Gaskell interpreted as Charlotte really not having noticed Nicholls’s growing devotion, “though others had.” But to a suspicious nature (and to anyone aware that Charlotte did eventually marry this man) Charlotte’s protests sound just a touch too much, rather like her denials of having any romantic connection in Brussels:

I scarcely need say that never was rumour more unfounded—it puzzles me to think how it could possibly have originated—A cold, far-away sort of civility are the only terms on which I have ever been with Mr. Nicholls—I could by no means think of mentioning such a rumour to him even as a joke—it would make me the laughing-stock of himself and his fellow-curates for half a year to come—They regard me as an old maid, and I regard them, one and all, as highly uninteresting, narrow and unattractive specimens of the “coarser sex.”

Nicholls’s feelings can be guessed from the fact that by June 1847, when he had been at Haworth for two years and was ready for promotion to a district, he stayed put—clearly from choice. He must have been aware of Patrick Brontë’s reliance on him, aware too of Charlotte’s anxiety on her father’s behalf at the prospect of losing his curate, as she expressed in a letter to Ellen that summer. Given the intensity of his expressions of love for Charlotte later, he almost certainly was passing over preferment in order to stay near Miss Brontë and display his usefulness.

But, as the vehemence of her denial suggests, Charlotte’s own feelings about Nicholls may not have been as cut and dried at this stage as she represented them to Ellen. A pencil drawing exists in the Bonnell Collection at the Pierpont Morgan Library ^*8 that was passed down in an envelope marked “Three One pencil sketches by Charlotte Brontë, Signed, & 1 sketch of Mr. Nicholls when he first went to Haworth.” The sketch is catalogued under “dubious attributions” in The Art of the Brontës, presumably because of the distinction made on the envelope between items “signed by Charlotte Brontë” and not. There is every reason to think that it is by Charlotte, though, signed or unsigned. It is very much in the style of her sketches and caricatures, and has been made on a corner of writing paper, probably surreptitiously—a rapid capturing of the new curate as he sits with his eyes cast downwards. It was bought by Bonnell from Mr. Nicholls’s niece and executrix, Violet Bolster, who had inherited it directly from Nicholls himself. Nicholls was not a vain man, and he is very unlikely to have agreed to sit to any sketcher willingly in his early days at the Parsonage. Nor would he have accepted or kept a drawing of himself unless he had strong reasons to do so. But he kept this one. I believe that either he found it in Charlotte’s papers after her death, or he was given it by her. Her taking of his likeness is the most telling thing of all, however. It shows that Charlotte found him interesting and was observing Nicholls long before he guessed, or she was prepared to admit.

—

IN THE SUMMER of 1846, and seemingly at their own instigation, Charlotte and Emily went to Manchester to “search out an operator,” that is, a surgeon, to treat their father’s failing sight. The highly respected oculist they found, William Wilson, was a Leeds man and an old friend of John Outhwaite of Bradford, so perhaps the discovery was not accidental; naturally, though, Wilson could not give any diagnosis or promise any relief until he had seen the patient in person, so three weeks later Charlotte came back with her father, leaving Emily and Anne with the equally difficult task of monitoring Branwell in their absence.

After a consultation with Wilson, who told them that Patrick Brontë’s cataracts were in a suitable state to be removed, Charlotte and her father prepared for a long stay in Manchester—they were told it would be a week before the operation could take place and then about a month of convalescence must follow. They took lodgings about two miles out of the city centre, at 83 Mount Pleasant, Boundary Street, a not-pleasant-at-all small brick house facing a timber yard, in the town’s “numerous similar streets of small monotonous-looking houses,” as Mrs. Gaskell described them, the Victorian terraces that later became so characteristic of the city. The house was kept by a Mr. and Mrs. Ball, known to Mr. Wilson, but Mrs. Ball was not at home all the time of the Brontës’ residence, so they had to cater for themselves, a difficult task in a strange house, where the single servant was not at their command and a hired nurse had to be accommodated at the Brontës’ expense. Charlotte wrote to Ellen for “hints about how to manage”: “For ourselves I could contrive—papa’s diet is so very simple—but there will be a nurse coming in a day or two—and I am afraid of not having things good enough for her—Papa requires nothing you know but plain beef & mutton, tea and bread and butter but a nurse will probably expect to live much better.” The weeks ahead looked bothersome and dreary, and there was no chance of diversion—even short outings—with no one to escort her through the built-up streets. And Charlotte was unsurprisingly struck by a “feeling of strangeness…in this big town,” with its widespread bustle of traffic, mills, wharfs, canals, the ever-expanding railway and population of hard-pressed and sometimes desperate refugees from the famine in Ireland.^*9

Patrick Brontë’s nervous agitation increased as his operation loomed, and must have been difficult for Charlotte to witness. His description in a notebook of the procedure shows a nature inclined to dramatise his own dangers, especially dangers passed: “Belladonna, a virulent poison, prepared from deadly nightshade, was first applied, twice, to expand the pupil. This occasioned very acute pain for about five seconds.” But Wilson was an expert in his field and the procedure, on 25 August, a great success, eventually leading to a restoration of almost all Patrick Brontë’s sight. For several days afterwards, however, he had to be kept in a darkened room with bandages over his eyes, and for weeks more was allowed only to sit in the dark with a screen between him and the fire. “He is very patient but of course depressed and weary,” Charlotte reported. Charlotte, who was suffering terribly from tooth-ache all through the visit, was also tightly confined to the ugly little terrace on Boundary Street.

It was in these unpromising conditions that she began a new novel. On the very day of her father’s operation, Charlotte had received a package in the post: it contained The Professor, back from its latest sojourn in a publisher’s office, with a curt note of refusal. While not giving up her hopes that it would eventually find a home, Charlotte bravely put the parcel to one side, got out her pencil and little homemade paper notebooks, and in the dismal Manchester lodgings began something entirely different:

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

^*1 In her choice of name, Charlotte may have been remembering the “Miss Currer” who was a trustee of Cowan Bridge School. If Emily Brontë was an admirer of Madame d’Arblay’s innovative novel The Wanderer (1814), her choice of “Ellis” might recall the shape-shifting, gender-indeterminate, homeless heroine of that book.

^*2 Beatrice E. Stanley suggests this was via Hainworth Shay and Cradle Edge; see “Changes at Haworth,” BST, 10:5 (1944).

^*3 The latter two thirds of Wuthering Heights are notably reprise-like and cyclical, with their replaying of Heathcliff’s old antagonisms and old love in and through the next generation. The end of volume one is, interestingly, the point at which the most famous film version—William Wyler’s 1939 production starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon—concludes the story.

^*4 Ninety lines of the poem’s prologue have survived.

^*5 A typical outlay for book advertising at the time started at about ten times this much; see LCB 1, 474 n4.

^*6 Charlotte passed on to Ellen the news “from all hands” that “Mr. Robinson had altered his will before he died and effectually prevented all chance of a marriage between his widow and Branwell by stipulating that she should not have a shilling if she ever ventured to reopen any communication with him” (CB to EN, 17 June 1846, LCB 1, 477).

^*7 Though Robinson did disinherit his eldest daughter, Lydia Mary, who had run away to Gretna Green in October 1845 to marry an actor. The similarity of her name and her mother’s might have led to some confusion once the story became known.

^*8 Included in the photograph section.

^*9 Manchester’s streets were described at the time as “crowded with paupers, most of them Irish,” hoping for work or access to emergency soup-kitchens (The Times, 17 February 1847).