1846–8
Charlotte Brontë was not an artist who could command her muse at will. She was too much a prey to her feelings, to her state of body and mind, and to circumstances. She told Elizabeth Gaskell that she composed her books in fits and starts:
it was not every day that she could write. Sometimes weeks or months elapsed before she felt she had anything to add to that portion of her story which was already written. Then, some morning she would waken up, and the progress of her tale lay clear and bright before her, in distinct vision. When this was the case, all her care was to discharge her household and filial duties, so as to obtain leisure to sit down and write out the incidents and consequent thoughts, which were, in fact, more present to her mind at such times than her actual life itself.
When Charlotte returned home from Manchester with her father at the end of September 1846, her new novel advanced in just that way, “clear and bright before her.” Taking on board the lesson of The Professor’s rejection, she had decided on “something more imaginative and poetical—something more consonant with a highly wrought fancy, with a native taste for pathos—with sentiments more tender— elevated—unworldly.” She went to the best source of strong feeling—her own—and in her story of an orphaned and unprotected girl made a return to her own childhood and its tragic losses, tapping into a vein of extraordinary power. Charlotte Brontë was essentially a poet of suffering; she understood every corner of it, dwelt both on and in it. In life, this propensity was a chronic burden; in her art, she let it speak to and comfort millions of others.
Not that Jane Eyre is a melancholy book. Its predominant emotion is anger, rushing through Jane’s narrative of her life like the storm winds shaking the walls at Roe Head. It begins in the first pages, with Jane’s resolve “to go all lengths…like any other rebel slave,” continues through her defiance of the bullying teachers at Lowood School and propels her through her seemingly hopeless career with a belief that vengeance is due:
Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
Charlotte’s return to her childhood and its tragic losses—that of Maria depicted so minutely in the death of Helen Burns—was a sort of exorcism, powered by strong feelings. This gave a peculiar momentum to the first weeks of writing that left her in a fever, and compelled to pause. The astonishing vividness of Jane Eyre, not least its personal address and energy, derives a great deal from this articulation of long-pent-up sorrows, and the author’s identification with her unconventional heroine, a poor, plain, overlooked governess, licensed to speak for all underlings and trampled people. Jane was nothing like demure, correct, constrained Frances Henri in The Professor, with her meaningful silences and plan of gradual passive influence, but a girl pressed, like the author, into speaking her mind by ungovernable force: “it seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance: something spoke out of me over which I had no control.” Jane’s fear of transgressing is soon replaced by unbridled excitement, as she finds when she answers her manipulative and unloving aunt with a torrent of truth-telling:
Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty. Not without cause was this sentiment: Mrs. Reed looked frightened; her work had slipped from her knee; she was lifting up her hands, rocking herself to and fro, and even twisting her face as if she would cry.
This could not have been more insurrectionary if it tried.
The appearance of her heroine, as previously announced to Emily and Anne, was deliberately unbeautiful, to emphasise her absolute right to love. “[A]t eighteen most people wish to please,” Jane says, with significant understatement, “and the conviction that they have not an exterior likely to second that desire brings anything but gratification.” “I sometimes regretted that I was not handsomer: I sometimes wished to have rosy cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry mouth; I desired to be tall, stately, and finely developed in figure; I felt it a misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and so marked.”
Her hero was meant to be imperfectly attractive too, though it is hard to keep that in mind as Edward Rochester rears into view through the mist on his black charger, a remarkable creation, combining Byronic cynicism, eloquence and wit with Zamorna’s physical charisma, domineering nature and dark past. Rochester is passionate but never brutal, masterful but also vulnerable—helpless indeed at the end, when he is reduced to a blinded, maimed shadow of himself. He is the demon-lover domesticated and made humble, but not enfeebled: he never once in the book utters a piece of piety or cant.
With the massive literature of Angria and The Professor to her credit already, Charlotte had served as long and hard an apprenticeship as any writer could expect, but the perfection of Jane Eyre still takes one by surprise. The story itself is one of the most gripping ever written, and the telling of it effortlessly clever and assured: Adele’s childish prattle as she introduces herself to Mademoiselle guilelessly exposes Rochester’s chequered past; Mrs. Fairfax is both friendly and secretive; the mystery of Grace Poole, introduced as a social puzzle, diverts attention away from the careful placing of observations in what is essentially a detective novel avant la lettre. And, although the novel is thoroughly Gothic in its use of dark stairways, mad women, mysterious laughter, fire, exile, near-starvation—the whole glorious gamut, in other words—Jane’s resolute common sense, fatalism and instinct for the rational allow the enjoyment of all this “burning clime” material without degenerating into the incredible.
Charlotte’s ability to enter trance-like into her own imaginary world comes through in Jane Eyre’s intensely dramatic, filmic scenes, such as the preparation of Thornfield for the house party, the rescue of Rochester from his burning bed, the interrupted wedding ceremony, the revelation of Bertha, snarling in her attic corner. These superb visions come as from the author’s mind straight to the reader’s inner eye. She also slips into the present tense at moments, just for a half-page at a time, surreptitiously drawing us into the action, into Jane’s thoughts. One such passage is when Jane returns to Thornfield after a month’s absence, attending her dying aunt. The step-by-step approach to the house alerts us, as it dawns on Jane, that “I have but a field or two to traverse, and then I shall cross the road and reach the gates. How full the hedges are of roses! But I have no time to gather any; I want to be at the house.” It is only when she catches sight of Rochester, whom she did not expect to meet, and “every nerve I have is unstrung” that she begins to comprehend her own eagerness to be home.
There are other such strikingly modern touches, one as Proustian as Proust, when Jane re-enters the breakfast-room at Gateshead after ten years: “There was every article of furniture looking just as it did on the morning I was first introduced to Mr. Brocklehurst: the very rug he had stood upon still covered the hearth…The inanimate objects were not changed: but the living things had altered past recognition.” Elsewhere, Charlotte gives a brilliant description of a cognitive leap as Jane anticipates by a few seconds hearing the news that she and her beloved friends Diana and Mary Rivers (veiled portraits of Emily and Anne) are cousins:
I stopped: I could not trust myself to entertain, much less to express, the thought that rushed upon me—that embodied itself,—that, in a second, stood out a strong, solid probability. Circumstances knit themselves, fitted themselves, shot into order: the chain that had been lying hitherto a formless lump of links, was drawn out straight,—every ring was perfect, the connection complete. I knew, by instinct, how the matter stood, before St. John had said another word…
Not surprisingly, Monsieur Heger stalked the novel too, but obliquely. When Jane walks in the evening on the parterre, it is the scent of a cigar that announces the near presence of her dark-browed, choleric, volatile lover, and it is his wife (made over into an incarcerated fury, ready to kill for jealousy) who stands between Jane and her destined soul-mate. Rochester’s feelings of soul-unity with Jane are akin to Cathy’s with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, but much more gently expressed. His image of the communicating cord was indeed rather apposite in a decade when the first experimental telegraph cables were being laid under the English Channel:
I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.
Charlotte needed the comfort of her novel in hand to endure the difficulties of that winter. It’s hard to see how the household carried on, hunkered down with only one income to support six adults (counting Tabby, as they always did) and no prospect of any improvement. In December the appearance of a sheriff’s officer at the Parsonage, demanding payment of Branwell’s debts or “a trip to York,” i.e., gaol, shamed and mortified the whole family, apart from the miscreant, who let his sisters and father stump up again. “It is not agreeable to lose money time after time in this way,” Charlotte wrote grimly to Ellen, “but it is ten times worse—to witness the shabbiness of his behaviour on such occasions.” Visitors had to be kept away from the Parsonage because of Branwell’s volatility. On one occasion, it is said that he set his bed on fire, and was only rescued by Emily’s prompt action, a story that, if true, seems to have gone straight into Charlotte’s novel. In some remarks to J. A. Erskine Stuart many years later, Ellen Nussey implied that there was an unspoken point of no return that families recognised when dealing with their addict sons (hers had one, and so did the Taylors), and that she saw Branwell Brontë only once “after he became an inebriate,” “and then he was full of the most intense egotism and vanity.”
The tailor’s son, Benjamin Binns, remembered seeing Branwell around this time “dragging his way home” of a night after leaving his boon companions at the Black Bull. Most of Branwell’s time was spent in bed, writing poems about his misery and doodling bleak, black caricatures in his letters to Leyland and on the drafts of poems. One shows him lying like a figure on a tomb, draped classically in a robe; one is a Promethean figure in hell-fire, bound at the wrists with the word “Myself” written beneath; one is a self-portrait as the convicted murderer Patrick Reid with a noose around his neck, awaiting execution. His last sketch is called A Parody and shows him lying exhausted in bed, being summoned to a bout with a skeleton, who has readied his fists but also looks as if he is thumbing his nose while saying, “The half minute time is up, so Come to the scratch; won’t you?”*1
Branwell had ceased to consider his family at all. He dreaded his father’s death (which he presumed crassly would be fairly soon, due to age) because of the plunge into penury it would mean for himself, but he no longer felt capable of submitting to “a new lifes battle [sic],” as he put it, one more time. It is clear at this point that he had never seriously intended to submit to it, always secretly hoping and expecting to make his name, and a living, through art, literature or personal charm. His dreams of marrying the Lady of Thorp Green were in tatters, but his self-interest in that scheme now became fully exposed. As her husband, he told Leyland, he had hoped, “in more than competence” to “live at leisure to try to make myself a name in the world of posterity, without being pestered by the small but countless botherments, which like mosquitoes sting us in the world of work-day toil.” With massive egotism, he persisted in thinking that the only thing that prevented this convenient arrangement from going ahead was the intimidation of Lydia Robinson by her trustees and by terrific deathbed vows that Branwell imagined her late husband had extracted from her with his “ghastly dying eye.” The Robinson family doctor, on the other hand, was charged with returning Branwell’s unopened letters and advised him to give up soliciting Mrs. Robinson, “cost what it may.” Charlotte was fairly sure, from the gossip that came their way, that Mrs. Robinson now repented her “errors” vis-à-vis Branwell. All three sisters strove carefully to hide from him that the younger daughters were back in touch with Anne, and the news that in March 1847 Mrs. Robinson had moved away from Thorp Green to her cousin Lady Scott’s commodious home at Great Barr in Birmingham.
—
BY THE SUMMER of 1847 Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell’s queer three-part novel had been out to numerous publishers—and had come back with a refusal every time. To cheer themselves, and perhaps rouse the interest of a champion, the sisters reverted to their old tactic of aggressive solicitation and posted out some copies of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell to their most admired authors, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, J. G. Lockhart and the coming man, Alfred Tennyson. The same very amusing covering letter, with minor variations, was sent to them all. This is the one to De Quincey:
My Relatives, Ellis and Acton Bell and myself, heedless of the repeated warnings of various respectable publishers, have committed the rash act of printing a volume of poems.
The consequences predicted have, of course, overtaken us; our book is found to be a drug; no man needs it or heeds it; in the space of a year our publisher has disposed but of two copies, and by what painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of those two, himself only knows.
Before transferring the edition to the trunk-makers,*2 we have decided on distributing as presents a few copies of what we cannot sell—we beg to offer you one in acknowledgment of the pleasure and profit we have often and long derived from your works—
I am Sir
Yours very respectfully
Currer Bell.
Did they think to start at least a topic of conversation between the Lake Poets by sending out these packages simultaneously and making a virtue of their gad-fly status? And did Charlotte imagine that Hartley Coleridge had forgotten his former correspondence with “CT” of Haworth, whose handwriting was identical to Currer Bell’s, or with Patrick Branwell Brontë, who had hailed from the same village?
The sales of Poems crept with painful slowness from two copies in June 1846 to thirty-nine in September 1848, when the remaining stock (of 961 copies) was bought by Charlotte’s later publisher and reissued. It had more currency and influence than they ever knew, though. Among its early readers, unknown to the authors, was Richard Monckton Milnes, a well-connected amateur poet, bibliophile and MP for Pontefract, who took the book to Lea Hurst in Derbyshire in the autumn of 1846, and read some of it aloud to the young woman he was trying to woo, Florence Nightingale.*3 She was particularly struck by a poem she remembered as “The Captive” (“The Prisoner”):
He comes with western winds, with evening’s wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars.
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,
And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.
And, though the courtship of Milnes ended in a refusal of marriage, Florence Nightingale’s intense interest in the “Bells” and their clarion call to action and liberty had just begun.
And good news was on the way for Emily and Anne when they received a letter in July from Thomas Newby, of Cavendish Square, London, offering to publish Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey together as a three-volume novel. Whether or not Newby saw and rejected The Professor at the same time is unclear, as the books might have been going around separately before this, in response to their frequent rejections. He proposed that Wuthering Heights should take up the first two volumes and Agnes Grey the third, and that they should publish on a shared-risk basis, the authors putting down a £50 deposit towards the costs of production, repayable on sufficient sales. Though they had taken such a hit the previous year with Poems, Emily and Anne felt sufficiently optimistic to pay up this large sum. From what reserves it is hard to tell, as they had not sold or transferred any of the railway stock they inherited from Aunt Branwell, and in 1847, the year of Railway Panic, there could have been little or no profits from the investment. But they accepted the terms, and by early August the first proofs of their book were ready.
Charlotte had by this time almost finished copying out her second novel, Jane Eyre,*4 but had still not found a home for The Professor. She sent it out yet again, with a note she must by this stage have tired of writing:
Gentlemen
I beg to submit to your consideration the accompanying Manuscript—I should be glad to learn whether it be such as you approve and would undertake to publish—at as early a period as possible.
The publisher George Smith remembered the arrival of this package at his Cornhill office, because the author had gauchely used as a wrapper the same paper it had been out in many times before, so he could see the whole history of the manuscript’s rejection by fellow members of his trade. “This was not calculated to prepossess us in favour of the MS,” Smith recalled drily, but the package was handed to his colleague, William Smith Williams, who wrote back to Mr. Bell regretting that, though they didn’t want to publish The Professor, the manuscript “evinced great literary power,” which convinced him that “[the writer] could produce a book which would command success.” Looking back three years later, Charlotte recalled the thrill of receiving this letter, the first to respond to her novel with intelligent interest; “it declined, indeed, to publish that tale, for business reasons, but it discussed its merits and demerits so courteously, so considerately, in a spirit so rational, with a discrimination so enlightened, that this very refusal cheered the author better than a vulgarly expressed acceptance would have done.”
She wrote back promptly, eager to express her gratitude and respond to the suggestion that a future work of suitable length—three volumes—“would meet with careful attention.” She had just such a work almost ready, which she told them could be sent in about a month (she actually managed to finish Jane Eyre in rather less time than that). But, even at this point, she couldn’t help putting in another word—two more words—for the rejected Brussels novel. Why not publish The Professor anyway, she suggested, to “accustom the public to the author’s name”? She still felt strongly that having The Professor in print would make subsequent success more probable. She even went as far as to suggest that she thought she might offer the books as a pair, a dangerous gamble to take at this juncture and one that Smith, Elder politely declined. Charlotte had no choice but to put aside her first novel and send off the second alone, walking to Keighley on 24 August to dispatch it by rail.
When Williams read Jane Eyre, he pressed it on Smith with an urgency that at first amused his employer, but that Smith understood when he settled down with the manuscript after breakfast on Sunday morning. He had been engaged to visit a friend at noon, but got so caught up in the story of the “plain, insignificant governess” that when it was time to leave, he scribbled a note of apology to the friend, sent it off by his groom, and carried on reading. “Presently the servant came to tell me that luncheon was ready; I asked him to bring me a sandwich and a glass of wine, and still went on with ‘Jane Eyre.’ Dinner came; for me the meal was a very hasty one, and before I went to bed that night I had finished reading the manuscript.”
The next day Smith wrote accepting the book for publication, although not without some “advice”—now lost—to the author. From Currer Bell’s response on 12 September it must have involved taming down the early chapters about Jane’s treatment at the hands of her aunt and at Lowood School, and the death of Helen Burns. Currer Bell told Smith that he had already considerably softened the truth on which these episodes were based and could do no more without damaging the book’s integrity: though they were strongly expressed, the harsher parts of Jane Eyre “may suit the public taste better than you anticipate.”*5 Here, the debut novelist proved right. However, she—he—accepted the firm’s other suggestion that the title could be changed, and “Jane Eyre: a novel in three vols. By Currer Bell” became “Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. Edited by Currer Bell.” Someone at Smith, Elder (and the manuscript had by this time been read by three of the staff, Williams, Smith and their young Scottish colleague James Taylor) had recognised the potential of making readers wonder—could this story actually be true? The tweak to the title created a fiction that made the heroine Jane less fictional, made her into an autobiographer, “edited”—at some distance in time (for, as not many people notice, the action of the book starts in the 1810s)—by Currer Bell.
Smith was offering £100 for the copyright—an infinitely better deal than Emily and Anne’s with Newby, which had amounted to little more than vanity publishing again. It was also considerably more than most women could ever dream of earning in a year, and one might have expected Charlotte to sound pleased when she wrote back to Smith, but she was in the character of Currer Bell, so made the dry observation that “one hundred pounds is a small sum for a year’s intellectual labour.” Part of the pleasure of being able “to walk invisible” behind her male pseudonym was this new-found licence to answer as a man would—even if Smith didn’t recognise it.
Charlotte also agreed to give Smith first refusal on her next two novels at the same rate, an astute move on the part of the publisher, whose hopes for Jane Eyre were high. Privately, though Currer Bell sniffed slightly at £100, Charlotte Brontë’s relief was considerable, knowing that she had sold one book and had an interested market for others. In fact, she was so willing to do whatever was necessary to keep the door open (except revise Jane Eyre) that she asked Smith for specific advice “as to choice of subject or style of treatment in my next effort—and if you can point out any works peculiarly remarkable for the qualities in which I am deficient, I would study them carefully and endeavour to remedy my errors.” Clearly, she did not want to lose Smith’s patronage by starting off on another unsaleable work.
The progress of Jane Eyre through the press showed what safe hands Charlotte had fallen into at Smith, Elder by comparison with her sisters, whose dealings with Thomas Newby completely stalled in the autumn of 1847. Proofs came and went for Currer with no news at all for Ellis and Acton, and by the end of October Jane Eyre had sailed into print while Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey still languished on Newby’s desk.
Six sets of Jane Eyre arrived at the Parsonage on publication day, 19 October 1847, presumably much to the interest of the postmaster, Mr. Hartley. Reviews began flooding in immediately, from the daily papers, religious journals, provincial gazettes, trade magazines, as well as from the expected literary organs such as the Athenaeum, Critic and Literary Gazette. Charlotte had been anxious about the critical reception of “a mere domestic novel,” hoping it would at least sell enough copies to justify her publisher’s investment—in the event, it triumphed on both fronts. The response was powerful and immediate. Reviewers praised the unusual force of the writing: “One of the freshest and most genuine books which we have read for a long time,” “far beyond the average,” “very clever and striking,” with images “like the Cartoons of Raphael…true, bold, well-defined.” “This is not merely a work of great promise,” the Atlas said, “it is one of absolute performance”; while the influential critic George Henry Lewes seemed spellbound by the book’s “psychological intuition”: “It reads like a page out of one’s own life.” It sold in thousands and was reprinted within ten weeks; eventually, even Queen Victoria was arrested by “that intensely interesting novel.” Only four days after publication, William Makepeace Thackeray, whose masterpiece Vanity Fair was unfolding before the public in serial form at exactly the same time, wrote to thank Williams for his complimentary copy of Jane Eyre. He had “lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it”; in fact it had engrossed him so much that his own printers were kept waiting for the next instalment of Becky Sharp’s adventures, and when the servant came in with the coals, he found Mr. Thackeray weeping over Currer Bell’s love scenes.
Who was Currer Bell? A man, obviously. This forthright tale of attempted bigamy and an unmarried woman’s passion could have been written only by a man, thought Albany Fonblanque, the reviewer in John Forster’s influential Examiner, who praised the book’s thought and morals as “true, sound, and original” and believed that “Whatever faults may be urged against the book, no one can assert that it is weak or vapid. It is anything but a fashionable novel…as an analysis of a single mind…it may claim comparison with any work of the same species.”
Charlotte could hardly keep up with responding to the cuttings that Williams was sending on by every post, and even received a letter from George Henry Lewes while he was writing his review for Fraser’s Magazine, wanting to engage in a detailed analysis of the book. “There are moments when I can hardly credit that anything I have done should be found worthy to give even transitory pleasure to such men as Mr. Thackeray, Sir John Herschel, Mr. Fonblanque, Leigh Hunt and Mr. Lewes,” Currer Bell told his publisher; “that my humble efforts should have had such a result is a noble reward.” It must have been difficult for Emily and Anne to be wholly delighted for their sister, with their own books apparently forgotten, though when Newby saw the success of Currer Bell he suddenly moved back into action with the production of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, hoping to cash in on the excitement.
In the middle of this storm of gratification, Charlotte wrote to Ellen as if literally nothing of note was happening in Haworth—“heaven knows I have precious little to say”—but at home, the time had come to inform her father of the reason for the sudden flood of post from London, and his daughters’ animation. Patrick Brontë told Mrs. Gaskell later that he suspected all along that the girls were somehow trying to get published, “but his suspicions could take no exact form, as all he was certain of was, that his children were perpetually writing—and not writing letters.” Sometime in November or early December 1847, between the publication of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, Charlotte sought out her father in his study after his usual solitary dinner, with a copy of her novel to show him and two or three reviews, including one that was critical—a characteristic piece of scrupulousness. Mrs. Gaskell wrote down, in the week she heard it, Charlotte’s own report of the scene:
“Papa I’ve been writing a book.” “Have you my dear?” and he went on reading. “But Papa I want you to look at it.” “I can’t be troubled to read MS.” “But it is printed.” “I hope you have not been involving yourself in any such silly expense.” “I think I shall gain some money by it. May I read you some reviews.” So she read them; and then she asked him if he would read the book. He said she might leave it, and he would see.
When he came in to tea some hours later it was with the announcement, “Children, Charlotte has been writing a book—and I think it is a better one than I expected.” The scene made a pleasantly comical end to the secrecy that the girls had found obnoxious at home, however essential it seemed elsewhere, and Reverend Brontë’s pride in his daughter’s success became one of Charlotte’s deepest pleasures in the following years. The old man began to take an intense interest in the review coverage (more than in the work, perhaps) and kept a cuttings book of everything that came his way, meticulously arranged and dated. Quite when he heard about Emily’s and Anne’s novels is unclear—presumably soon after their books were published in December 1847—but he never esteemed their achievement as high as Charlotte’s, and said that their works “though clever in their kind, never reach’d the great celebrity of those works written by Charlotte, under the assum’d name of Currer Bell.” He seems to have been following exactly the drift of the critics, who heaped praise on Currer Bell’s book but were troubled or even disgusted by Ellis’s and not much impressed by Acton’s. How the world viewed such public performances mattered to Patrick Brontë very much.
Emily and Anne were not well served by their publisher, and the copies of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey that arrived just before Christmas proved to be cheaply produced and full of errors uncorrected from the proofs. Worse still, Newby had indulged in some chicanery in his advertising of the book, suggesting that it was by the author of Jane Eyre. The reception was mixed, and the coverage far less extensive than that of Currer Bell’s bestseller; reviewers seemed consternated by Wuthering Heights’s shocking violence and “abominable paganism”—even the multiple narrators unsettled them. Not all the judgements were negative, however. The force and originality of Ellis Bell’s book were indisputable, as was the mind behind it, “of limited experience, but of original energy, and of a singular and distinctive cast,” as the critic in Britannia said, while Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly recognised that the author “wants but the practised skill to make a great artist.” Emily was gratified by these few but potent marks of recognition and kept cuttings of five reviews in her writing desk, including one unidentified one, the best of all, which praised the novel’s vital force and truth to “all the emotions and passions which agitate the restless bosom of humanity” and “talent of no common order.”
Appearing as an adjunct to such a strange and powerful story, Agnes Grey never had a chance of being judged on its own merits. The Atlas, crushingly, said that, unlike Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey “left no painful impression on the mind—some may think it leaves no impression at all.” It also looked pallid in comparison with Currer Bell’s governess novel, which had in fact post-dated it.
But the appearance of two more novelists called Bell—one of whom was wickedly sensational—made a prime subject of gossip. Though none of the published works bore any biographical information about the authors, it became generally understood that the Bells were brothers, possibly through Charlotte’s reference to them as “relatives” in her correspondence with publishers, and with the writers to whom she had sent Poems. One of those writers, J. G. Lockhart, seemed much more interested in the gossip than in the work they had sent him and passed on to his friend Elizabeth Rigby the news that the Bells were “brothers of the weaving order in some Lancashire town.” Another school of thought, fuelled by Newby’s false advertising, favoured the idea that “the Bells” were all one person.
Meanwhile, Charlotte remained modest and cautious about her overnight success—and considerably better off, receiving a further cheque for £100 in February when the third edition was in preparation. For the second edition, she had decided to add a dedication: not to her “Master,” as formerly imagined, but to Thackeray, in homage to his effectiveness as a “social regenerator.” In a resounding preface, freighted with biblical allusions, she praised the dauntlessness and daring of the satirist who “comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital.” Thackeray was “the very master of that working corps [in which she clearly hoped to be counted herself] who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things.”
Thackeray was of course “a total stranger” to Currer Bell, as she was careful to make clear in her dedication, but that didn’t prevent people wondering, when they read this very extravagant homage, if some more interesting relation was being concealed. Unknown to Charlotte, but known to many London literary people, Thackeray’s wife had had a mental breakdown some years before, and was cared for in reclusion in Camberwell, having been previously in a French asylum. The similarity to the Rochester–Bertha plot was irresistible to rumour-mongers, who began to say that Currer Bell must once have been a governess in Thackeray’s household—with the implication that Currer Bell must also have been his “chère amie.”
When Charlotte heard of Thackeray’s circumstances, which she did from the man himself when he wrote to thank her for her dedication, she was completely mortified, and wrote to Williams of how “very, very sorry” she was for her “inadvertent blunder.” She had apologised to Thackeray, she told Williams, but with full awareness of how futile apologies were when such damage had been done. The incident illustrated for her how much she needed advice and guidance to deal with literary life at a distance.
Her growing friendship with George Smith’s second-in-command, William Smith Williams, was one of the great pleasures that came to Charlotte through publication, and for almost a year she conducted a very open and lively correspondence with him in the person of the androgynous “Currer Bell,” with no revelation of her real name, sex or circumstances. The freedom that this gave her was unique in her life: she wrote to Williams not as a man or a woman, but the free spirit, unsnared, that her heroine Jane had defined and defended. Williams was forty-seven at the time, married and the father of eight children, ranging in age from their early twenties to a toddler. He had had many friends in the literary world: in his youth he had known Keats and Hazlitt, and had nursed ambitions to be a poet; Leigh Hunt was a lifelong friend; and, since joining Smith, Elder as literary adviser in 1845, he had made friends with Thackeray, Lewes and Ruskin. Unlike his boss, Smith, Williams wasn’t a particularly confident man, but discerning and sensitive, and with the time and inclination to correspond with Currer Bell on a range of topics that included contemporary politics, London literary life, ethics, female education and employment, industrialisation, religion and of course, predominantly, literature.
From the frankness with which Currer Bell tackles the question in one letter of what Williams’s daughters might do to earn an independent living, it is clear that Williams had shared (in his missing side of the correspondence) many details of his family life and circumstances with his new correspondent, whoever “Currer Bell” was. He could hardly have been in serious doubt that the author of Jane Eyre and of these letters was a woman, but the fiction of her non-womanness was maintained scrupulously in their early correspondence. It was in many respects the sort of relationship that Charlotte felt she ought to have had with Monsieur Heger, but which sexual attraction had fatally compromised in that instance. Williams had unbent so far as to share with Currer Bell his sense of failure and disappointment in his career—he was, in fact, a depressed and needy man under the skin, having worked for thirty-five years “in a position where your tastes had no scope, and your faculties no exercise.” As Currer perceived, “I feel that your cup of life must often have been a most bitter one—and I would fain say something consolatory without knowing very well how to express myself.” The simple sincerity of this must have endeared the writer to Williams very much indeed.
Of course, as the months passed after the publication of Jane Eyre (which went into its third edition in April 1848), Smith, Elder were keen to hear if Currer Bell had a new work in mind, but the reclusive author reported that none of the three attempts made so far (as early as December 1847) were any good. Showing something of the persistence that her father had displayed over his rejection by Mary Burder, Charlotte/Currer then proposed yet again to Smith that he might think of publishing The Professor, in an enlarged and “recast” version. Looking over the manuscript, Bell had come to the conclusion that, although the beginning was feeble and the plot rather uneventful, the Belgian episodes were “as good as I can write.”
Williams had to write back with the unenviable task of explaining once more to their new bestselling author that The Professor was not wanted, a judgement that puzzled Charlotte more and more, but that she had to accept. “It is my wish to do my best in the career on which I have entered,” she told her publisher, “so I shall study and strive, and by dint of time, thought and effort, I hope yet to deserve in part the encouragement you and others have so generously accorded me. But Time will be necessary: that I feel more than ever.”
A pencilled draft of her brief letter to Williams about The Professor has survived because on the reverse of the paper is the draft of a poem, never published in Charlotte’s lifetime, which shows what revisiting her Brussels novel had stirred up in her mind. It begins thus:
He saw my heart’s woe discovered my soul’s anguish
How in fever—in thirst, in atrophy it pined
Knew he could heal yet looked and let it languish
To its moans spirit-deaf, to its pangs spirit-blind
But once a year he heard a whisper low and dreary
Appealing for aid, entreating some reply
Only when sick soul-worn, and torture weary
Breathed I that prayer—heaved I that sigh
He was mute as is the grave—he stood stirless as a tower
At last I looked up and saw I prayed to stone
I asked help of that which to help had no power
I sought love where love was utterly unknown
By December 1847, this is where her thoughts of Heger had led her: to the image of him “stirless as a tower,” impenetrable, distant, cruelly unresponsive. Charlotte packed up copies of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey to send to Mary Taylor in Wellington; did she also send a copy to the rue d’Isabelle? It seems unlikely. Jane Eyre should have been the proof, spectacular and irrefutable, that she was worthy of her Master’s continued attention, his love, esteem and recognition; instead the moment of its publication parted them even further. Charlotte had finally realised the futility of her suffering, though she stopped short of admitting that the love of an idol was idolatrous. A merciful God could not possibly condemn such a love, she felt:
He gave our hearts to love, he will not love despise
E’en if the gift be lost as mine was long ago
He will forgive the fault—will bid the offender rise
Wash out with dews of bliss the fiery brand of woe.
By the time Agnes Grey was published, Anne Brontë was well ahead with her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the story of an abused wife seeking refuge from her marriage, whose situation and attempts to earn her own living as an artist excite suspicion and scorn among her new neighbours. Just as Charlotte had learnt from Wuthering Heights to add passion and excitement to the plot of Jane Eyre, so Anne noted the pace and skilful handling of both her sisters’ books, and brought those qualities to bear on her own, which has the feel of a mystery and thriller as much as of a morality tale. But the book obsessed the author in ways that worried her eldest sister, who saw Anne continually stooped over her work, writing for too many hours of each day. “[It] is with difficulty one can prevail on her to take a walk or induce her to converse,” Charlotte told Ellen. It was only later, when she understood that the new novel depicted with painful verisimilitude the stages of a long ruination through vice and drink, that Charlotte understood Anne’s grim determination over its composition. Much that was criticised (not least by Charlotte) as coarse and unpleasant in the book was an unvarnished account of some aspects of life at Haworth Parsonage in 1847–8: the daily ordeal of having to tolerate the violence and degraded behaviour of a drunkard. “The motives which dictated this choice were pure, but, I think, slightly morbid,” Charlotte wrote later in explanation of her sister’s subject. “She had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate, near at hand and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind; it did her harm.” But in many ways Anne Brontë showed considerable bravery in exposing the realities around her—not least because of the resistance from her older sister. Perhaps the only way she could cope with Branwell’s dissolution was to hold it up to others as a warning.
Emily was planning, and possibly writing, a second novel at the beginning of 1848, as one can deduce from a remark in a letter to her from Newby that he would have “great pleasure in making arrangements” for it, and advised, “I would not hurry its completion, for I think you are quite right not to let it go before the world until well satisfied with it.” She composed very little poetry at this time: the reception of Poems had not encouraged her at all. Charlotte was also thinking about what to write next, intimidating though it was to bear in mind, as Newby had told Emily, that “much depends on your next work if it be an improvement on your first you will have established yourself as a first rate novelist, but if it fall short the Critics will be too apt to say that you have expended your talent.” Forced to shelve The Professor, Charlotte turned to something quite different from both it and Jane Eyre, armed with her new knowledge of what real audiences, rather than her imagined audience, might like or demand. The new novel, called “Hollows Mill” at this early stage, and later called Shirley, was going to reflect life and society in her own corner of the world, the West Riding, a “condition of England” novel that would also attempt a light, satirical tone, possibly in emulation of Thackeray, whose work she admired even more now that she knew he admired hers.
The authorial voice she adopted for the purpose seemed nervously aware of the pressure on her to satisfy an audience of eager Jane Eyre fans; on the first page she warned that this was to be a story as “unromantic as Monday morning”—something “real, cool, and solid,” with very little “taste of the exciting.” Brontë baulked, though, at a realistic contemporary setting, placing the action thirty years earlier, in the 1810s.
That she originally considered setting her new novel in the 1840s, and against the background of Chartism, was suggested by a local Chartist sympathiser called Francis Butterfield, who in old age published an account of how Charlotte Brontë had visited him one afternoon (in the spring or summer of 1848) to consult “with respect to a proposed story on the Chartists’ agitations.” Miss Brontë had walked over from Haworth to Butterfield’s home in Wilsden, he said, accompanied by her dog Floss, and by the end of tea had been dissuaded from her plan, “which at that time would only have added a flame to the still smouldering embers of discontent,” as a chronicler of old Bingley retold the story. Though the meeting is not corroborated elsewhere, and seems socially strange (for example, in that Charlotte was unaccompanied, unless you count the spaniel), there are reasons to believe it. It shows the same concern with research and getting her facts right that Charlotte demonstrated later, when she had changed her subject from the Chartists to the Luddites and borrowed files from the archives of The Leeds Mercury to read contemporary accounts of the events of 1811–12. And she or one or both of her sisters were also admirers of another Chartist sympathiser, the Leeds poet Ebenezer Elliott, to whom they had sent a copy of the Bells’ Poems in 1847.*6
Her decision to avoid Chartism and the present day came from a rapid toning down of her enthusiasm for the revolutionary dramas being played out in Italy, Hungary, France and Germany in the spring and summer of 1848. Her feelings at the beginning of the year were empathetic and engaged, partly because some of the figures connected with unfolding events in France were ones she knew of from her discussions of politics and literature with Constantin Heger. Charlotte had written a well-informed and discursive letter to Williams (man to man, as it were, as “Currer Bell”) about the promotion to government of men like Lamartine and Thiers, wondering what it would be like in Britain under similar circumstances, if Carlyle, Sir John Herschel, Tennyson and Thackeray were suddenly made into national legislators: “do such men sway the public mind most effectually from their quiet studies or from a council-chamber?” This was in the same month—February—in which she had written her preface to the second edition of her genuinely inflammatory novel, Jane Eyre, with its praise of Thackeray as a leader who could “restore to rectitude the warped system of things.” At this point Currer Bell could have been easily mistaken for a revolutionary sympathiser. Perhaps at heart she was. By March, she regretted that the wording of her preface had been so warm, given the proclamation of a republican government in France that was sparking Chartist celebrations in London and elsewhere. Her remarks about Thackeray as leading “social regenerator” now seemed particularly impertinent. “I wish I had written it in a cool moment,” she told Williams; “I should have said the same things, but in a different manner.”
Though she sympathised with German states wanting constitutional reform in the wake of the French revolution—referring to “their rational and justifiable efforts for liberty”—Charlotte’s natural conservatism reasserted itself as soon as the contagion of revolt threatened her own shores. “[E]arthquakes roll lower than the ocean, and we know neither the day nor the hour when the tremor and heat, passing beneath our island, may unsettle and dissolve its foundations,” she told Williams. There had been a mass meeting of Chartists in Leeds on 10 March, and, though the group was keen to appear non-violent, and focused on the presentation of their “monster petition” of more than a million signatories to Parliament (planned for the following month), many of the men at the Lees Moor muster were armed, some crudely with sharpened staves, and the flag they hoisted was that of the French republic. Charlotte used the earthquake image again in a letter of 31 March to Margaret Wooler:
I have still no doubt that the shock of moral earthquakes wakens a vivid sense of life both in Nations and individuals; that the fear of dangers on a broad national scale diverts men’s minds momentarily from brooding over small private perils, and, for the time, gives them something like largeness of views; but—as little doubt have I that convulsive revolutions put back the world in all that is good, check civilisation, bring the dregs of society to its surface, in short, it appears to me that insurrections and battles are the acute diseases of nations, and that their tendency is to exhaust by their violence the vital energies of the countries where they occur. That England may be spared the spasms, cramps and frenzy-fits now contorting the Continent and threatening Ireland, I earnestly pray!
The transposition of her story back in time forty years was a way of writing about 1848 at one remove, identifying some of the early symptoms of the “disease,” but it created obvious difficulties. Charlotte had planned her story around local characters drawn from the life, but it was the life of the 1830s and 1840s, not the period just before her own birth. Emily Brontë was to be the model for Shirley herself, the Taylor family for the radical Yorkes, Hammond Roberson for Matthewson Helstone, Ellen may have contributed something to his niece Caroline, Miss Wooler to Mrs. Pryor, Mademoiselle Haussé of the Pensionnat Heger to Hortense Gérard Moore, and Monsieur Heger was plundered for aspects of both the Belgian brothers, Robert and Louis Moore. This gave a strange anachronism to the novel’s manners, though Charlotte managed (through careful research) to reconstruct the social moment skilfully.
Casting the issues of 1848 back on to this screen, Charlotte made some interesting observations about the impenetrability of class boundaries, which Will Farren, one of the mill-workers whose jobs are lost to Robert Moore’s new machinery, complains cannot be crossed: “I believe that ‘the people’ will never have any true friends but theirsel’n, and them two or three good folk i’ different stations, that is friends to all the world. Human natur’, taking it i’ th’ lump, is naught but selfishness.” The comparable predicaments of workers and women are linked all through the novel in a very interesting meld of the personal with the political. In the same passage where she thinks about the unattractiveness of neediness, Caroline comes to some stark conclusions: “old maids, like the houseless and the unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and rich: it disturbs parents.” But this underemployment of women makes them narrow-minded and fixated on capturing a husband, Caroline realises, and, since so many of them will never marry (it is an “overstocked market,” she says, using an appropriately commercial term), their futile coquetry only earns more male scorn, lowering the stock even further.
For all the explicit political argument in the book, Shirley is directed inwards more than outwards, and the most striking passages are to do with the private and for the most part silent interior battles of an apparently subsidiary character, Caroline. Her quietness is a marked recession from Jane Eyre’s urge to speak; nor is it used strategically like Frances Henri, but makes a study in impotence. When Robert Moore, the brusque, domineering, sexy, half-Belgian owner of Hollow’s Mill, withdraws the light of his favour from the young woman whose love he has carelessly engaged, Caroline realises that she cannot even seek an explanation for his behaviour without incurring shame, for “a lover feminine can say nothing.” “Take the matter as you find it,” the narrator steps in bitterly to remark:
ask no questions; utter no remonstrances: it is your best wisdom. You expected bread, and you have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don’t shriek because the nerves are martyrized…You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind: in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.
The violence of expression here is striking. Charlotte knew that this book would be published—and it was the first time she had been in such a position. This wasn’t, like The Professor or Jane Eyre, a shot in the dark. But instead of tempering her voice (as she claims to be about to do in the first chapter), she used this public space very personally and very vehemently.
The novel is full of such interjections, all extremely disorienting, as one supposes they were intended to be. The narrator addresses the reader, apologises, directs attention to the fictional nature of the story, glosses, jokes, but remains in an undeclared relation to the action she can’t resist interrupting. One such moment, part-way through the first scene at Briarmains (the house based on the Taylors’ Red House), takes a morbid detour into a vision of the family’s future, rather like a dark version of Emily’s and Anne’s Diary Papers: Jessy Yorke will die young and be buried in a foreign grave, we are cruelly informed; her sister Rose will be a lonely emigrant “in some region of the southern hemisphere.” One minute, we are being told about Shirley’s plans to help the poor of the parish, and informed that her smile is not like the usual female downcast look, a veiled look, in other words. Then comes this most arbitrary and violent digression:
I remember once seeing a pair of blue eyes, that were usually thought sleepy, secretly on the alert, and I knew by their expression—an expression which chilled my blood…that for years they had been accustomed to silent soul-reading. The world called the owner of these blue eyes “bonne petite femme” (she was not an Englishwoman): I learned her nature afterwards—got it off by heart—studied it in its farthest, most hidden recesses—she was the finest, deepest, subtlest schemer in Europe.
What is this viciously exaggerated attack on Madame Heger doing here? The narrator recovers the thread of the story immediately afterwards, but there it sits, unwarranted on any grounds, artistic or personal. Another bog burst from Charlotte’s seething substratum.
—
WHEN Jane Eyre went into its third edition, in April, Charlotte provided yet another preface, short and to the point this time, stating that it was Currer Bell’s sole work, and that “If…the authorship of other works of fiction has been attributed to me, an honour is awarded where it is not merited.” This was an attempt to quell the increasingly annoying speculation that Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were all by the same author (quite an author!) “insanely bent on severing himself into three,” as Currer joked with Williams. Her correspondent kept her abreast of some of the follies committed in her name in “your great world—your London,” the worst of which was a dramatisation of her novel (done without any need to seek permission at that date) only two months after the book was published, in January 1848. Charlotte had been intrigued to hear of such a production, and even considered going down to the capital to sneak in and watch it incognito. That being impossible, she encouraged Williams to go on her behalf, but his subsequent description of the play was a horrible shock, “a glimpse of what I might call loathsome, but which I prefer calling strange,” with the introduction of some low-comedy characters, an extra mad person and a lot of physical violence. If such a spectacle was the result of fame, Emily must have seemed right to shun it.
Meanwhile, as if he sensed that he was being put into “Hollow’s Mill,” Joe Taylor had turned up uninvited at the Parsonage one day in June with his cousin William Henry (whom Charlotte knew well from Brussels) and another cousin. Charlotte was suspicious of their motives for this “capricious” visit (no Brontë liked or encouraged informal socialising), guessing it was “prompted…by curiosity” and that Joe had indeed deduced the identity of “Currer Bell.” Charlotte fended off the Taylors, as she did Ellen, who was in London that summer and aware of “quite a fureur” about the Bells and the authorship of Jane Eyre. Ellen acquired the book, it seems, purely to test the theory of whether or not it had been written by her friend, and claimed many years later that, while reading it, it “was as though Charlotte Brontë herself was present in every word, her voice and spirit thrilling through and through.” Charlotte had been correcting proof sheets when she was at Brookroyd the previous autumn, without explaining what she was doing, so Ellen didn’t have much trouble putting two and two together. But when she wrote to Charlotte, coyly asking her opinion of the new bestseller, she got a sardonic answer: “we do not subscribe to a circulating library at Haworth and consequently ‘new novels’ rarely indeed come in our way, and consequently again we are not qualified to give opinions thereon.” That should have confirmed it pretty much beyond doubt.
—
FOR SOME TIME, Patrick Brontë had been keeping Branwell in his own room and sleeping on a cot at the foot of the bed, to have him under surveillance. The distraught father thus tried to absorb and contain some of the disturbance in the house, but, unlike the humble cottager in his own story, “The Cottage in the Wood,” whose fervent prayers reformed the dissolute young man found on the doorstep, he was unable to halt Branwell’s decline. Patrick’s faith in God’s strength, and his own, made him look continually for hopeful signs; Charlotte, on the other hand, seems to have given up on her brother. In this and the other trials she was about to face, her prayers tended to be for strength to bear what God’s inexorable will had in store for her; she had a Calvinistic aversion to the idea that personal intercession could change it.
Patrick Brontë was doling out only a shilling a day to his son, but that was no obstacle to Branwell, as a pathetic note attests, written to John Brown one Sunday when everyone else was in church, and sealed with wax for secrecy:
I shall feel very much obliged to you if can [sic] contrive to get me Five pence worth of Gin in a proper measure
Should it be speedily got I could perhaps take it from you or Billy at the lane top or what would be quite as well, sent out for, to you.
I anxiously ask the favour because I know the favour good it will do me.
Punctualy [sic] at Half past Nine in the morning you will be paid the 5d out of a shilling given me then.
Yours P. B. B.
Anne was not the only member of the household to have been affected “very deeply” by the spectacle of Branwell’s decline—the noise, the surges of energy, crazy determinations and unrestrainable force of the deteriorating addict. Patrick Brontë hardly slept. And, just as Branwell’s setting fire to his bed curtains seems to have found its way quickly into Jane Eyre, other aspects of his behaviour linger in Charlotte’s characterisation of Bertha in that novel, locked in the attic for fear of the havoc she might cause. The madwoman scenes had come in for some criticism when the book came out for being too “horrid,” but Charlotte defended herself by saying that such behaviour was “but too natural.” “There is a phase of insanity which may be called moral madness, in which all that is good or even human seems to disappear from the mind and a fiend-nature replaces it,” she told Williams. “The sole aim and desire of the being thus possessed is to exasperate, to molest, to destroy, and preternatural ingenuity and energy are often exercised to that dreadful end.”
Francis Grundy had a more sympathetic view of his old friend’s predicament (he didn’t have to live with him) and gave it tender expression: Branwell was “no domestic demon,” he said; “just a man moving in a mist, who lost his way.” Years later, he told a horrific story of Branwell’s state in the last weeks of his life, of going to visit him in Haworth after Branwell had failed to keep an appointment in Skipton. Grundy ordered a dinner for two at the Black Bull and sent to the Parsonage for his friend, only to have Reverend Brontë appear, formally but sorrowfully explaining that his son had been very ill but would be arriving shortly. When Branwell did turn up, he was in a shocking state: spectrally thin, unkempt, “the cheeks yellow and hollow, the mouth fallen…the sunken eyes, once small, now glaring with the light of madness”—all the marks of the hopeless opium-eater. Although he seemed to steady himself with brandy and some food, when Branwell was leaving he showed Grundy a carving-knife that he had been hiding in his sleeve all evening, having imagined that his summons to the inn had been from Satan, whom he was determined to stab. The familiarity of Grundy’s voice had shaken him from this terrible delusion, but the incident (even if heightened for dramatic effect) gives some idea of the danger, as well as the utter misery, that the Parsonage household was being made to endure day and night through the summer of 1848.
—
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published in late June 1848, stoking press interest in “all these Bells,” as one paper called them, who suddenly seemed to be flooding the market with sensational novels—four in nine months. It encouraged the worst in Thomas Newby, who suggested to an American publisher that the Bells’ works, including this new one, were all the product of a single pen, Currer’s, and when Tenant of Wildfell Hall was advertised in this way—“by the author of ‘Jane Eyre,’ ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Agnes Grey’ ”—the American firm Harper’s, which had an agreement with Smith, Elder to publish Currer Bell’s next book, was understandably offended. George Smith could only pass on his own sense of affront to his author in Haworth by post, and ask for an explanation.
This was a dreadful letter for Charlotte to receive, threatening to ruin her hitherto excellent relations with Smith, Elder and tainting her and her sisters with blame for what had been Newby’s casual double-dealing. She was so mortified that only direct action seemed appropriate, and instead of getting out her desk to write a letter of explanation, she set about packing a small box instead and had it sent down to Keighley Station by carrier. After a heated discussion with Emily and a hurried meal, she and Anne set off on foot for four miles in pouring rain, caught the train to Leeds and from there took the night train to London. Emily was having no part in this rash adventure, and Patrick Brontë does not seem to have been either consulted or informed.
Telling Mary Taylor about these eventful few days, in a wonderfully comic letter, Charlotte described how on arrival in the capital early the next morning she and Anne made for the Chapter Coffee House, not knowing where else to go:
We washed ourselves—had some breakfast—sat a few minutes and then set of[f] in queer, inward excitement, to 65. Cornhill. Neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Williams knew we were coming they had never seen us—they did not know whether we were men or women—but had always written to us as men.
No. 65 Cornhill, the magical address to which Charlotte had been writing for the past year, turned out to be a large bookseller’s shop “in a street almost as bustling as the Strand”:
—we went in—walked up to the counter—there were a great many young men and lads here and there—I said to the first I could accost—
“May I see Mr. Smith—?” he hesitated, looked a little surprised—but went to fetch him—We sat down and waited awhile—looking a[t] some books on the counter—publications of theirs well known to us—of many of which they had sent us copies as presents. At last somebody came up and said dubiously
“Do you wish to see me, Ma’am?”
“Is it Mr. Smith?” I said looking up through my spectacles at a young, tall, gentlemanly man
“It is.”
I then put his own letter into his hand directed to “Currer Bell.” He looked at it—then at me—again—yet again—I laughed at his queer perplexity—A recognition took place—. I gave my real name—“Miss Brontë—”
It is significant that Charlotte’s personal acquaintance with her publisher began with a laugh and a double-take. He never quite got over his amazement at the incongruity of it, that this strange little woman in glasses and old-fashioned travelling clothes was Currer Bell. And she, given the advantage of surprise, was able to make this first scrutiny of him without self-consciousness. What she saw was a tall, charming man of twenty-four, elegantly dressed and brimming with excitement at meeting her. He hurried his visitors into an office, where rapid explanations were gone into on both sides, accompanied by strong mutual condemnation of the “shuffling scamp,” Newby. At the first opportunity Smith called in his colleague Williams to share the revelation of their best-selling author’s identity, and now it was Charlotte’s turn to be surprised, for Williams, her confidential correspondent of the past year, appeared in the guise of “a pale, mild, stooping man of fifty,” stammering and shy. The shock to both of them must have been profound, having communicated so freely and equally, to meet at last and have to fit their epistolary personalities into these unlikely casings—one of them female. There was “a long, nervous shaking of hands—Then followed talk—talk—talk—Mr. Williams being silent—Mr. Smith loquacious.”
Smith was fully animated, and immediately had a dozen plans for the entertainment of the Misses Brontë and their introduction to London society. “[Y]ou must go to the Italian opera—you must see the Exhibition—Mr. Thackeray would be pleased to see you—If Mr. Lewes knew ‘Currer Bell’ was in town—he would have to be shut up,” et cetera, et cetera. Delightful though all these suggestions were, Charlotte cut him short with the warning that the sisters’ incognito had to be strictly preserved. She and Acton Bell had only revealed themselves to him to prove their innocence in the matter of Newby’s lies. “[T]o all the rest of the world we must be ‘gentlemen’ as heretofore,” she told him.
Nevertheless, Smith was determined to fête them, offered them the hospitality of his own home and, when that was refused, came up with the idea of introducing the sisters not as authors but as his “country cousins,” the Misses Brown. “The desire to see some of the personages whose names he mentioned—kindled in me very strongly,” Charlotte told Mary, “but when I found on further examination that he could not venture to ask such men as Thackeray &c. at a short notice, without giving them a hint as to whom they were to meet, I declined even this—I felt it would have ended in our being made a show of—a thing I have ever resolved to avoid.” The sisters retired to the Coffee House, exhausted, where Charlotte took smelling salts—the conventional if rather potent remedy of the time against headache and pains—to prepare herself for a promised call later in the day from Smith and his sisters. But when the Smiths turned up, young and lovely in full evening dress (right down to white gloves), it was with the expectation that the Misses Brown would accompany them to the Opera—which Charlotte and Anne had “by no means understood.” But, despite their unpreparedness, and the effects of the analgesic, Charlotte decided on the spur of the moment that it would be better to go along with the plan, so within minutes she and Anne were being helped into the Smiths’ carriage, where Williams was also in full fig. “They must have thought us queer, quizzical looking beings—especially me with my spectacles,” Charlotte related with deep amusement. “I smiled inwardly at the contrast which must have been apparent between me and Mr. Smith as I walked with him up the crimson carpeted staircase of the Opera House and stood amongst a brilliant throng at the box-door which was not yet open. Fine ladies & gentlemen glanced at us with a slight, graceful superciliousness quite warranted by the circumstances—Still I felt pleasurably excited—in spite of headache sickness & conscious clownishness; and I saw Anne was calm and gentle which she always is—”
Also in the audience that night, watching the Royal Italian Opera Company perform The Barber of Seville, were the Earl and Countess of Desart, Viscount Lascelles, the author Lady Morgan and the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, a glamorous glimpse of real High Life for the two Brontës after all their years of imagining it in their writings. Charlotte was so impressed by the splendour of the Opera House building and company that she pressed Williams’s arm and whispered, “You know I am not accustomed to this sort of thing.” Making such an aside to a man she had only just met would have been unthinkable at home, but Charlotte found herself so far outside her milieu that night that she could behave naturally without impunity. And her authorial persona protected her further. It was not Miss Brown on the arm of dashing young George Smith, nor even Miss Brontë, but Currer Bell.
The next day the sisters were taken to church by Williams, and dined by Smith at his home in Westbourne Place, Paddington, an elegantly designed, mid-sized terraced house in the new streets surrounding the railway station, which he shared with his siblings and their widowed mother, a sensible, handsome woman of fifty-one. Charlotte admired Mrs. Smith and her daughters’ good manners, not being consternated by picking up “a couple of odd-looking country-women” at a City tavern, though “to see their elegant, handsome son & brother treating with scrupulous politeness these insignificant spinsters—must have puzzled them thoroughly.” The next day the “Browns” were taken to the Royal Academy and the National Gallery, dined again at Smith’s and took tea at Mr. Williams’s house, where one of the daughters of the poet and critic Leigh Hunt was visiting and sang charmingly at the piano.
“A more jaded wretch than I looked when I returned, it would be difficult to conceive,” Charlotte told Mary, but the outing had been a most remarkable success. They got home laden with books that Smith had given them, and more to tell Emily than could ever be exhausted. One unpleasant task had had to be performed, though, before the sisters boarded the train north at Euston on Tuesday, 11 July: to confront Thomas Newby. It was a risky thing to do, as Newby had no discretion and might have tried to exploit this proof that Currer and Acton Bell were women (he discovered Charlotte’s real name, as she later lamented). No record of what was said has survived, but it seems reasonable to surmise that Charlotte and Anne gave him a piece of their minds. How the interview affected Emily’s and Anne’s future treatment by the firm is a moot point. Charlotte hoped that her sisters would move their business to Smith, and corresponded with him about it, but neither Emily nor Anne was willing to make the move. Neither liked to go back on an agreement, however badly it had been kept by the other party, and they probably also feared the loss of their £50 investment (with good reason). Smith’s arrangement with Charlotte was far from perfectly fair,*7 but she had at least earned £250 already from sales of Jane Eyre, and was on her way to earning more with Shirley.
*1 The picture is included in the photograph section.
*2 Trunk-makers were known to use waste paper as lining material.
*3 Another owner of a first edition Poems was Charles Dodgson (later known to the public as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland). His copy of the book is now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
*4 The first leaf of the fair copy (see the photograph section) bears the date 16 March [1847] and the copy was completed on 19 August.
*5 Charlotte also mentions in this letter that the novel had been revised twice already and that she was unwilling to make any further large adjustments for fear of damaging what had already been difficult enough to shape. It makes one wonder whether she did not, in fact, write Jane Eyre in one glorious swoop of inspiration between August 1846 and August 1847, as is assumed, but rather incorporated some older material too (as she had in The Professor). The Gateshead and Lowood episodes, for all their extraordinary power, certainly relate to the main narrative rather oddly, and the jump of eight years after Helen Burns’s death is very abrupt. And there was that paragraph in her 1843 notebook, beginning a story set in “Gateshead Hall.”
*6 His copy, in the BPM, is noticeably worn from much reading. Charlotte may well have had more than one reason to seek out Butterfield’s advice: he was a leading light in the local Temperance Society and the biographer of temperance hero Thomas Worsnop. She might have spoken to him about her brother.
*7 He had somewhat underpaid her for the copyright, with the understanding that he would supplement that sum with occasional extra payments, at discretion, if the book did well. He kept to this promise, but never paid her at a rate that accurately reflected the profits made by the firm on Jane Eyre, or the later titles.