1848 The least successful governess of the three novel-writing Brontë sisters (but arguably the greatest novelist), Emily was the most attached to the Yorkshire moors where she was brought up, and largely educated, in her father Patrick Brontë’s Haworth parsonage. It was, ironically, the bitter weather of her beloved moors that killed her. On 1 October she left Haworth to attend her wayward brother Branwell’s funeral service. Drink, drugs (laudanum), and moral dissipation had doomed him, the only son and the great hope of the family.
Branwell’s self-destruction is pictured in the downfall of Hindley, Heathcliff’s predecessor as master of Wuthering Heights. None of the owners of that ominous property, in the three generations covered by the novel, comes to a happy end. The curious inscription over the door, which no one can read, may plausibly be a curse.
Branwell died, as did all of his siblings, of pulmonary weakness, principally. He was buried on 28 September 1848 in Haworth churchyard. His father (who would outlive all his children) was too upset to officiate. Three days later, at the funeral service, Emily developed the chill that exacerbated her consumption and killed her, on 19 December. Six months later, her sister Anne joined her in the Haworth vault.
Brontë’s one complete novel had been published, the year before, by the most dubious publisher in London, Thomas Cautley Newby. Newby (who the same year did his best to ruin the early career of Anthony Trollope by his shoddy and dishonest practices) printed Wuthering Heights as a three-decker (by ‘Ellis Bell’) along with Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (by ‘Acton Bell’). The reviews were few and indifferent. The general opinion was that Wuthering Heights was ‘coarse’. There was too much damning and blasting in Yorkshire for genteel metropolitan ears.
Charlotte Brontë, in a posthumous reissue of Wuthering Heights (which began that novel’s progress to its huge fame) was apologetic, but made a prophetic plea for frankness:
A large class of readers, likewise, will suffer greatly from the introduction into the pages of this work of words printed with all their letters, which it has become the custom to represent by the initial and final letter only – a blank line filling the interval. I may as well say at once that, for this circumstance, it is out of my power to apologise; deeming it, myself, a rational plan to write words at full length. The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent persons are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does – what feeling it spares – what horror it conceals.
It would, however, be a long time until the four-letter word – with Kenneth Tynan’s primal fuff-fuff-fuff-uck (see 13 November) and Lady Chatterley’s legalised ‘effing’ – would be reached.