1849 The composition and publication of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is the stuff of book trade legend. The parson’s daughter in Yorkshire had sent an unsolicited manuscript, under androgynous pseudonym (‘Currer Bell’) to the eminent London publisher, Smith, Elder & Co., in early 1847. The work (later published as The Professor) was judged unpublishable, but Smith, Elder asked if he/she might like to think about submitting a longer, three-volume work for the circulating library market. Brontë set to and produced Jane Eyre in a few weeks. Published late in 1847, it was one of the literary sensations of the year (a year that also saw the publication of Vanity Fair, Dombey and Son, and Wuthering Heights – by ‘Ellis Bell’).
A second edition was called for, and was published in February 1848. To it Brontë (still pseudonymous) attached an extraordinarily eulogistic preface (dated 27 December 1847) dedicating her novel to Thackeray, whom she had never met:
There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears: who, to my thinking, 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 – a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of Vanity Fair admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time – they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Rimoth-Gilead.
The ‘son of Imlah’ had, like the rest of literary London, devoured Jane Eyre in a single delighted sitting. Thackeray also perceived, as did everyone else, that the author must be a woman, and a remarkable one. As it happened, the dedication was profoundly embarrassing to him. Thackeray’s wife, Isabella, had lost her mind three years earlier and, after several suicide attempts, was currently in care. It was suspiciously like the situation of Rochester and Bertha Mason. Rumours swept around London, in the wake of Brontë’s preface, that ‘Currer Bell’ was a former governess (Thackeray had two young daughters) and lover of the author of Vanity Fair. It did not help that ‘Laura Bell’ (acoustically very similar) was the name of the most famous, and highly paid, courtesan in London (Thackeray mischievously used the name for the indomitably virtuous heroine of his next novel, Pendennis).
The two novelists did not meet in person until Brontë made a daring trip to London, at the invitation of Smith, Elder (who had recently recruited Thackeray to their list) in December 1849. Charlotte described the encounter with Thackeray, on the fourth of the month, to her father, in a letter:
As to being happy, I am under scenes and circumstances of excitement; but I suffer acute pain sometimes, – mental pain, I mean. At the moment Mr Thackeray presented himself, I was thoroughly faint from inanition, having eaten nothing since a very slight breakfast, and it was then seven o’clock in the evening. Excitement and exhaustion made savage work of me that evening. What he thought of me I cannot tell.
He found her tiny and amusing. Charlotte confided other details to her friend, and biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell. Thackeray, she quickly apprehended, was not the Old Testament, lightning-bolt-bearing prophet she had pictured in her preface: ‘She told me how difficult she found it, this first time of meeting Mr Thackeray, to decide whether he was speaking in jest or in earnest.’
A few days later the novelists met for a second time. Thackeray had written for ten years disguised under pseudonyms, such as ‘Michaelangelo Titmarsh’, before, with Vanity Fair, actually putting his name on a title page. He advised ‘Currer Bell’ to drop the pseudonymous mask, and appear to her readers in her own person. If nothing else it would inhibit gossip and nasty rumours.